`One moment, Dr. Rhinehart,' Dr. Weinburger said sharply. He looked down at the papers in front of him. `Does Dr. Rhinehart know the charges being brought against him?'
'Yes,' said Doctors Mann and Ecstein at the same time.
`What's all this about dice, young man?' Dr. Cobblestone asked. His cane lay on the table in front of him as if it were a piece of evidence relevant to the proceedings.
`A new therapy I'm developing, sir,' Dr. Rhinehart replied promptly.
`I understand that,' he said. `What we mean is that you should explain.'
`Well, sir, in dice therapy we encourage our patients to reach decisions by casting dice. The purpose is to destroy the personality We wish to create in its place a multiple personality: an individual inconsistent, unreliable and progressively schizoid' Dr. Rhinehart spoke in a clear, firm and reasonable voice, but for some reason his answer was greeted by a silence, broken only by Dr. Moon's harsh, uneven breathing. Dr. Cobblestone's stern lower jaw became sterner.
`Go on,' said Dr. Weinburger.
`My theory is that we all have minority impulses which are stifled by the normal personality and rarely break free into action. The desire to hit one's wife is forbidden by the concept of dignity, femininity and covetousness of unbroken crockery. The desire to be religious is stopped by the knowledge that orgy 'is' an atheist. Your desire, sir, to shout 'stop this nonsense!' is stopped by your sense of yourself as a fair and rational man.
The minority impulses are the Negroes of the personality. They have not enjoyed freedom since the personality was founded; they have become the invisible men. We refuse to recognize that a minority impulse is a potential full man, and that until he is granted the same opportunity for development as the major conventional selves, the personality in which he fines will be divided, subject to tensions which lead to periodic explosions and riots.'
`Negroes must be kept in their place,' said Dr. Moon suddenly, his round, wrinkled face suddenly coming alive with the appearance of two fierce red eyes in its ravaged landscape. He was leaning forward intensely, his mouth, after he had finished his short sentence, dangling open.
`Go on,' said Dr. Weinburger.
Dr Rhinehart nodded gravely to Dr. Moon and resumed.
'Every personality is the sum total of accumulated suppressions of minorities. Were a man to develop a consistent pattern of impulse control he would have no definable personality: ha would be unpredictable and anarchic, one might even say, free.'
'He would be insane,' came Dr. Peerman's high-pitched voice from his end of the table. His thin, pale face was expressionless.
`Let us hear the man out,' said Dr. Cobblestone.
`Go on,' said Dr. Weinburger.
`In stable, unified, consistent societies the narrow personality had value; men could fulfill themselves with only one self. Not today. In a multivalent society, the multiple personality is the only one which can fulfill. Each of us has a hundred suppressed potential selves which never let us forget that no matter how mightily we step along the narrow single path of our personality, our deepest desire it to be multiple: to play many roles.
`If you will permit me, gentlemen, I would like to quote to you what a dice-patient of mine said in a recent therapy session which I taped.'
Dr. Rhinehart reached into his briefcase beside his chair and drew out some sheets of paper. After leafing through them, he looked up and continued: `What Professor O. B. says here seems to me to dramatize the crux of the problem for all men. I quote '`I feel I ought to write a great novel, write numerous letters, be friendly with more of the interesting people in my community, give more parties, dedicate more time to my intellectual pursuits, play with my children, make love to my wife, go hiking more often, go to the Congo, be a radical trying to revolutionize society, write fairy tales, buy a bigger boat, do more sailing, sunning and swimming, write a book on the American picaresque novel, educate my children at home, be a better teacher at the University, be a faithful friend, be more generous with my money, economize more, live a fuller life in the world outside me, live like Thoreau and not be taken in by material values, play more tennis, practice yoga, meditate, do those damn RCAF exercises every day, help my wife with the housework, make money in real estate, and … and so on.
'And do all these things seriously, playfully, dramatically, stoically, joyfully, serenely, morally, indifferently do them like D. H. Lawrence, Paul Newman, Socrates, Charlie Brown, Superman, and Pogo.
'But it's ridiculous. When I do any one of these things, play any one of these roles, the other selves are not satisfied. You've got to help me satisfy one self in such a way that the others will feel that they are somehow being considered too. Make them shut up. You've got to help me pull myself together and stop spilling all over the goddamn universe without actually doing anything.'
'Dr. Rhinehart looked up and smiled. `Our Western psychologies try to solve O. B.'s problem by urging him to form some single integrated personality, to suppress his natural multiplicity and build a single dominant self to control the others. This totalitarian solution means that a large standing army of energy must be maintained to crush the efforts of the minority selves to take power. The normal personality exists in a state of continual insurrection.'
`Some of this makes sense,' added Dr. Ecstein helpfully.
`In dice theory we attempt to overthrow the totalitarian personality and -'
`The masses need a strong leader,' interrupted Dr. Moon.
The silence which followed was broken only by his uneven breathing.
`Go on,' said Dr. Weinburger.
`All I've got to say for now,' replied Dr. Moon, closing the shutters on the red furnaces of his eyes and beginning to swing in a slow arc toward the shoulder of Dr. Mann.
`Go on, Dr. Rhinehart,' said Dr. Weinburger, his face expressionless but his hands crumpling up the papers in front of him like octopi demolishing squid.
Dr. Rhinehart glanced at his wristwatch and went on.
Thank you. In our metaphor - which has that same admirable degree of scientific precision and rigor as Freud's famous parable of the superego, the ego, and the id - in our metaphor, the anarchic chance - led person is governed in fact by a benevolent despot: the Die. In the early stages of therapy only a few selves are able to offer themselves as options to the Die. But as the student progresses, more and more selves, desires, value and roles are raised into the possibility of existence; the human being grows, expands, becomes more flexible, more various. The ability of major selves to overthrow the Die declines, disappears. The personality is destroyed. The man is free. He-' `I see no need to let Dr. Rhinehart go on,' said Dr. Weinburger, suddenly standing up. `Although, as Dr. Ecstein has so helpfully observed, some of it makes sense, the idea that the destruction of the personality is the way to mental health may be rejected on a priori grounds. I need only remind you gentlemen of the first sentence of Dr. Mann's brilliant textbook on abnormal psychology: 'If a person has a strong sense of his identity, of the permanency of things and of an integral selfhood, he will be secure.'
He smiled over at Dr. Mann. `I therefore move-'
`Precisely,' said Dr. Rhinehart. `Or rather, precisely, sir. It is always rejected on a priori grounds and not on empirical grounds. We have never experimented with the possibility of a strong man being able to demolish his personality and become more various, happy and creative than he was before. The first sentence of our textbook will read: 'If a person can attain a strong confidence in his inconsistency and unreliability, a strong yea-saying sense of the impermanence of things and of an un-integrated, non-patterned chaos of selves, he will be fully at home in a multivalent society - he will be joyous ….
`We have plenty of empirical evidence regarding the destruction of the personality,' said Dr. Cobblestone quietly. `Our mental hospitals are overflowing with people who have a sense of an un-integrated, non-patterned chaos of selves.'
`Yes, we do,' replied Dr. Rhinehart calmly. `But why are they there?'
There was no answer to this question, and Dr. Rhinehart, after waiting while Dr. Weinburger sat down again, continued, `Your therapies tried to give them a sense of an integral self and failed. Isn't it just possible that the desire not to be unified, not to be single, not to have one personality may be the natural and basic human desire in our multivalent societies?'
Again there was a silence, except for Dr. Moon's expiring breaths and an irritable throat-clearing by Dr. Weinburger.
