I handed him his coat and hat, and started for the door to let him out.
«You’re not rushing me off, are you?» he said. «Can’t we have a bit of a chat first?»
«You’d like to discuss the situation, is that it?» I said, marching him to the door against his will. «That’s out, Dr. Kronski. No discussions. I’ll look for you to-morrow at the same hour.»
«But aren’t you coming over to the house tonight?»
«NO, that’s out too. Until you finish your analysis we will have no relation but that of doctor and patient. It’s much better, you’ll see.» I took his hand, which was hanging limp, raised it and shook him a vigorous goodbye. He backed out of the door as if dazed.
He came every other day for the first few weeks, then he begged for a stagger schedule, complaining that his money was giving out. I knew of course that it was a drain on him, because since he had given up his practice his only income was from the insurance company. He had probably salted a tidy sum away— before the accident. And his wife, to be sure, was working as a school-teacher—I couldn’t overlook that. The problem, however, was to rout him out of his state of dependency, drain him of every penny he owned, and restore the desire to earn a living again. One would hardly have believed it possible that a man of his energies, talents, powers could deliberately castrate himself in order to get the better of an insurance company. Undoubtedly the injuries he had sustained in the automobile accident had impaired his health. For one thing he had become quite a monster. Deep down I was convinced that the accident had merely accelerated the weird metamorphosis. When he popped the idea of becoming an analyst I realized that there was still a spark of hope in him. I accepted the proposition at face value, knowing that his pride would never permit him to confess that he had become «a case». I used the word «illness» deliberately always—to give him a jolt, to make him admit that he needed help. I also knew that, if he gave himself half a chance, he would eventually break down and put himself in my hands completely.
It was taking a big gamble, however, to presume that I could break down his pride. There were layers of pride in him, just as there were layers of fat around his girdle. He was one vast defense system, and his energies were constantly being consumed in repairing the leaks which sprang up everywhere. With pride went suspicion. Above all, the suspicion that he may have misjudged my ability to handle the «case». He had always flattered himself that he knew his friends’ weak spots. Undoubtedly he did— it’s not such a difficult thing to do. He kept alive the weaknesses of his friends in order to bolster the sense of his own superiority. Any, improvement, any development, on the part of a friend he looked upon as a betrayal. It brought out the envious side of his nature…. In short, it was a vicious treadmill, his whole attitude towards others.
The accident had not essentially changed him. It had merely altered his appearance, exaggerated what was already there latent in his being. The monster which he had always been potentially was now a flesh and blood fact. He could look at himself every day in the mirror and see with his own eyes what he had made of himself. He could see in his wife’s eyes the revulsion he created in others. Soon his children would begin to look at him strangely—that would be the last straw.
By attributing everything to the accident he had succeeded in gathering a few crumbs of comfort from the unwary. He also succeeded in concentrating attention upon his physique and not his psyche. But alone with himself he knew that it was a game which would soon peter out. He couldn’t go on forever making a smoke screen of his enormous bundle of flesh.
When he lay on the couch unburdening himself it was curious that no matter from what point in the past he started out he always saw himself as strange and monstrous. Doomed was more precisely the way he felt about himself. Doomed from the very beginning. A complete lack of confidence as to his private destiny. Naturally and inevitably he had imparted this feeling to others; in some way or other he would manage to so maneuver that his friend or sweetheart would fail him or betray him. He picked them with the same foreknowledge the Christ displayed in choosing Judas.
What kind of drama do you want to stage?
Kronski wanted a brilliant failure, a failure so brilliant that it would outshine success. He seemed to want to prove to the world that he could know as much and be as much as anybody, and at the same time prove that it was pointless—to be anything or to know anything. He seemed congenitally incapable of realizing that there is an inherent significance in everything. He wasted himself in an effort to prove that there could never be any final proofs, never for a moment conscious of the absurdity of defeating logic with logic. It reminded me, his attitude, of the youthful Celine saying with furious disgust: «She could go right ahead and be even lovelier, a hundred thousand times more luscious, she wouldn’t get any change out of me—not a sigh, not a sausage. She could try every trick and wile imaginable, she could striptease for all she was worth to please me, rupture herself, or cut off three fingers of her hand, she could sprinkle her short hairs with stars—but never would I talk, never! Not the smallest whisper. I should say not! That’s all there was about it….
The variety of defense works with which the human being hedges himself in is just as astounding as the visible defense mechanisms in the animal and insect worlds. There is a texture and substance even to the psychic fortifications, as you discover when you begin to penetrate the forbidden precincts of the ego. The most difficult ones are not necessarily those who hide behind a plate of armor, be it of iron, steel, tin or zinc. Neither are they so difficult, though they offer greater resistance, who encase themselves in rubber and who, mirabile dictu, appear to have acquired the art of vulcanizing the perforated barriers of the soul. The most difficult ones are what I would call the «Piscean malingerers». These are the fluid, solvent egos who lie still as a fetus in the uterine marshes of their stagnant self. When you puncture the sac, when you think Ah! I’ve got you at last! you find nothing but clots of mucus in your hand. These are the baffling ones, in my opinion. They are like the «soluble fish» of Surrealist metem-psychology. They grow without a backbone; they dissolve at will. All you can ever lay hold of are the indissoluble, indestructible nuclei—the disease germs, so to say. About such individuals one feels that in body, mind and soul they are nothing but disease. They were born to illustrate the pages of text-books. In the realm of the psyche they are the gynaecological monsters whose only life is that of the pickled specimen which adorns the laboratory shelf.
Their most successful disguise is compassion. How tender they can become! How considerate! How touchingly sympathetic! But if you could ever get a look at them—just one fluorescent glance!—what a pretty egomaniac you would see. They bleed with «very bleeding soul in the universe—but they never fall apart. At the crucifixion they hold your hand and slake your thirst, weep like drunken cows. They are the professional mourners from time immemorial; they were so even in the Golden Age, when there was nothing to weep about. Misery and suffering is their habitat, and at the equinox they bring the whole kaleidoscopic pattern of life to a glaucous glue….
There is something about analysis which reminds one of the operating room. By the time one is ready to be analyzed it is usually too late. Confronted with a battered psyche the only recourse open to the analyst is to do a plastic job. The good analyst prefers to give his psychic cripple artificial limbs rather than crutches, that’s about the long and short of it.
But sometimes the analyst is given no choice, as happens now and then to the surgeon on the battlefield. Sometimes the surgeon has to amputate arms and legs, concoct a new face out of an unrecognizable piece of pulp, clip the balls off, devise an ingenious rectum and God only knows what—if he has the time for it. It would be kinder to kill such a wreck off, but that’s one of the ironies of the civilized way of life—you try to preserve the remnants. Now and then, in the horrible annals of surgery, you come across astonishing specimens of vitality who are truncated and pared down to an uncouth torso, a sort of human pear which a Brancusi might refine into an objet d’art. You read that this human what-not supports his aged mother and father from the earnings of his incredible craft, a craft in which the only tool is the artificial mouth which the surgeon’s knife carved out of a once unrecognizable face.
There are psychical specimens of this order who walk out of the analyst’s office to take their place in
