Psychology and Other Stories (38 page)

“Oops—head-on collision!”

The phone rang. Melanie ran to get it.

“It's … the
police
,” she whispered.

They both looked at the box in his hands. On top was the VCR that Mike had given him.

“Joy ride,” the cop explained. “Probably dumped it hours after they grabbed it. Drove it halfway into an aqueduct, otherwise somebody'd've spotted it sooner.”

Strickland looked at the car. “And this—you're sure it's mine?”

The cop handed him the registration. “Glovebox,” he said.

On the little stage, Ben said, “In the skirts of Norway, here and there, sharked up a list, of lawless res-o-lutes …”

Beryl stood at the back of the room, squeezing her hands.

Later, alone with Strickland, she cried.

“They were terrible.
So
terrible! I always thought bad acting was bad directing, but those children … They're not even believable when they're being themselves!”

Strickland told his class, “Don't ask them how they are. Don't ask them how they feel. Though their problems come from inside, they don't feel it that way. Ask them how
life
is. Ask them how the
world
is treating them.”

The girl in the black turtleneck wrote everything down.

Strickland sat at his new desk in his new office, thinking.

He wrote something down, sighed, and rubbed his neck.

“Despite its appearance,” he muttered, “it is actually a reaction to distressing feelings of weakness, Ms. Lattimann …”

There was a tap at the door.

“Mind if I come in?”

Martie sat on his couch and said, “Such an unbearably tedious woman. Her only contact with the outside world is the six-o'clock news, and she only watches that so she can have something to be afraid of. The other night—this is good, you'll love this—she heard some pundit say that the only reason there's a recession is because everyone says so. You know: everyone is told there is a recession, so they don't spend anything, and so there is a recession. Oh, she puzzled over this for nearly the entire hour. She couldn't understand why we didn't just call it something else, use a different word— something ‘upbeat,' she said. As if, instead of a recession, we could all agree that what we were in the middle of was actually a
carnival
, and if everyone just said it and believed it, it would come true …”

They chuckled. She sighed and said, “It's actually quite endearing, though, if you think about it.”

*

Strickland was about to ring the doorbell again when at last he heard footsteps coming from inside the house. The chain was eventually unlatched, the locks unlocked, and the door opened.

“Oh!” said the little old woman. “It's Danny!”

“Hello, mother.”

Strickland said into his tape recorder, “We tell ourselves we're not going to be like our parents.”

“I'll make tea,” she said. “Aren't you cold in only that? Oh, but you shouldn't have come all this way, not just for a visit.”

“I was in the neighborhood. How are you feeling?”

“Oh, bosh.”

“But when the time comes, you find your primary concern is not what a robot you're turning your kid into, but how to keep them alive long enough to someday hate your guts.”

“Sit down. You always look flushed after that drive. Let me make you something to eat. No, sit down. And turn that nasty thing off. It's nothing but bad news. Did you hear about this young man who tried to shoot the president? Maybe he did shoot the president, I don't know, they don't tell you anything. It's beyond me why anyone would go and do a thing like that. Why, the man was only inaugurated last month. He hasn't had a chance to do anything to deserve it yet. Not that I think shooting anyone is the answer to anything, but you would think you could at least wait and see what he actually
does.
Shooting a man like that a month after his inauguration! It doesn't make any sense. Why would someone go and do a thing like that?”

Strickland frowned and shook his head.

And we, all of us, are interpreters
, ‘hermeneuts'—
creatures who pan for sense in the muddy waters of human transaction, and who, if we are interested in people, collect this sense into the bundles of remembered event, belief, and fantasy that constitute the human biography.

The psychologist's musings may eventually take on a formal shape—in flow charts and formulae—and may be checked systematically against the evidence; conversely plain men may achieve an intuitive depth of insight that professional psychologists lack. But both are hermeneuts, and their efforts to achieve understanding are essentially of the same sort.

Liam Hudson

THERE ARE TWO REASONS
to cite one's sources: to parade one's erudition, and to escape accusations of plagiarism. Psychologists, no doubt inspired by both motives, usually cite; fiction writers, whose pride and identity are so tied to notions of their creativity and originality, usually don't.

I hope to escape accusations of plagiarism.

In almost every case, I have modified the original author's original words— sometimes slightly, sometimes radically. Assume that every quotation in this book is inaccurate and wrong. Consult the original before requoting.

Where a number of editions are in existence, possibly with different paginations, I have included the total page count in parentheses. This should permit you to track down the quotation in any edition without too much trouble. Simply divide the cited page number by the total, and multiply the result (a fraction) by the number of pages in your copy. This will at least give you some idea where to look.

Frontispiece: Freud, “Schematic diagram of sexuality,” in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess. (Translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Belknap, 1985.) p. 100.

5
      Epigraph: William James, “The Consciousness of Lost Limbs,” in
Essays in Psychology.
(Harvard University Press, 1983.) p. 214.

Reaction-Formation

11
    Epigraph: Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams
, in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
(Translated and edited by James Strachey. Hogarth, 1953.) vol. 4, p. 113.

25
    
‘The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag.
'Walt Whitman, “A Song of Myself,” §2.

30
    
‘what is unclean and disturbing and should not be part of the body':
Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism,” in
Standard Edition
, vol. 9, p. 172.

34
    “
Respiration becomes shallow and rapid … involuntary rhythmic contractions
…” This jumble is actually taken from Havelock Ellis,
Psychology of Sex: A Manual for Students.
(Emerson Books, 1936.) pp. 19-28 (of 377).

48
    Alfred Adler.
The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology.
(Translated by P. Radin. Harcourt, Brace, 1929.) pp. 187-190 (of 352).

57
    
Perhaps if I could have lain with Bunny … I wanted to lie with him now
! Lytton Strachey, “Monday June 26th, 1916,” in
Lytton Strachey by Himself.
(Edited by Michael Holroyd. Heinemann, 1971.) p. 140.

57-58
“
I imagined myself reading … what would happen in the end
.” Ibid., p. 150.

58
    
And then the vision of that young postman … really might, if I had the nerve, come off.
Ibid., pp. 140-141.

Eat the Rich and Shit the Poor

59
    Epigraph: H. K. Nixon,
Psychology For the Writer.
(Harper & Brothers, 1928.) p. 1.

80
    
“And bring us some bread,” said Mr. Custard.
In Hervey Cleckley's excellent
The Mask of Sanity
(C. V. Mosby, 1950), there appears on page 61-62 the following scene:

“Boastfully he told me that he was, in addition to all his other parts, an artist of remarkable ability. He asked to be given a loaf of bread, stating that he would mold from it creations of great beauty and worth. On getting the bread he broke off a large chunk, placed it in his mouth, and began to chew it assiduously, apparently relishing the confusion of his observers. After proceeding for a length of time and with thoroughness that once would have met with favor from advocates of Fletcherism, he at last disgorged the mess from his mouth and with considerable dexterity set about modeling it into the figure of a cross. Soon a human form was added in the customary representation. Rosettes, intertwining leaves, garlands, and an elaborate pedestal followed. The mixture of saliva and chewed bread rapidly hardened. By the next day, it had become as hard as baked clay. It was indeed an uncommon production. The whole piece was very skillfully and ingeniously shaped, dry, firm, and as neatly finished as if done by a machine. It was, furthermore, one of the most extravagant, florid, and unprepossessing articles that has ever met my glance. Max presented it with an air of triumph and expectancy that seemed to demand expressions of wonder and gratitude beyond reach of the ordinary man.”

I wanted very much to use this scene, but found that I could not get Custard to sit still long enough.

Paddling an Iceberg

99
    Epigraph: Jim Bird,
Self-Help? Self-Harm! The Seven Myths of Self-Help.
(Chapman Loebb, 1999.) p. 50.

102
  ”
You will become what you are
.” Nietzsche,
The Joyful Wisdom
, §270.

103
  
The individual is … adding to the first act of stupidity a second.
This is a jumble of four separate quotations from Nietzsche: (1)
Twilight of the Idols
, “Morality as Anti-Nature,” §6; (2)
Human, All Too Human
, §39; (3) and (4)
The Wanderer and His Shadow
, §38 and §323.

103-104
“Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” Beyond Good and Evil
, §78.

104
  
… gloriously, angelically wronged.
Cf. Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human
, §62: “Coarse people who feel themselves offended tend to take as great a degree of offense as possible and to relate the cause in greatly exaggerated terms, simply in order to be able to revel thoroughly in the feeling of hate and vengeance that has been aroused.”

104
  
Whoever respects himself must still despise himself as one who respects.
Perhaps this is the meaning behind another of Nietzsche's beautiful little parables: A sage asked a fool the way to happiness. The fool answered without delay, like one who'd been asked the way to the next town: “Admire yourself, and live on the street!” “Hold on,” cried the sage, “you require too much; surely it suffices to admire oneself?” The fool replied: “But how can one constantly admire without constantly despising?”
Joyful Wisdom
, §213.

105
  
… he
enjoys himself
in Paris.
Schopenhauer,
The Wisdom of Life.
(Translated by T. Bailey Saunders. Willey Books, no date.) Chapter II, p. 14 (of 124). This observation also finds an echo in Nietzsche: “‘Taking joy in a thing' is what we say, but in truth we are taking joy in ourselves by means of the thing.'” (
Human, All Too Human
, §501.)

107
  
… a philosophy fit only for slaves, for it taught men to embrace the status quo.
Henry James, cited in Robert D. Richardson,
William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism.
(Houghton Mifflin, 2006.) p. 53.

107-108
“It is important … affects digestion adversely.
Peale,
The Power of Positive Thinking.
(Prentice-Hall, 1952.) pp. 27-28 (of 276).

108
  “
Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so
.” John Stuart Mill,
The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill
, p. 78 (of 170). Here is the quotation in context:

“I never wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the goal of life. But I now thought that this goal was only to be attained by not
making it the
direct
goal. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat not happiness, but some goal external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination or putting it to flight by fatal questioning.”