The Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart

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СКАЧАТЬ paid it. I’ve tentatively listed his case as a failure.

      Other cases didn’t work out too well either. With a woman plagued by compulsive promiscuity I tried the William James method number three for breaking habits: oversatiation. I convinced her to work at a busy Brooklyn brothel for a week, figuring that would be enough to drive anyone to chastity, but she stayed a month. With the money she earned she hired one of her male customers to accompany her on a vacation to Puerto Vallarta. I haven’t seen her since, but have tentatively listed her case as a failure also.

      My analytic sessions became role-playing sessions without the dice. But instead of restricting such role playing to drama and play as in Moreno-like drama therapy, I restricted it to real life. Everything had to be done with real people in real life.

      In most cases over the next five months I assigned my patients to quit their jobs, leave their spouses, give up their hobbies, habits and homes, alter their religions, upset their sleeping, eating, copulation, thinking habits: in brief, to rediscover their unexpressed desires; to achieve their unfulfilled potential. But all this without telling them about the dice.

      Without introducing the patients to the use of the dice as in my later dice therapy, the results, as you have begun to see, were generally disastrous. In addition to two lawsuits, one patient committed suicide (thirty-five dollars an hour out of the window), one was arrested for leading to the delinquency of a minor, and a last disappeared at sea in a sailing canoe on his way to Tahiti. On the other hand, I had a few distinct successes.

      One man, a highly paid advertising executive, gave up his job and family and joined the Peace Corps, spent two years in Peru, wrote a book on faking land reform in underdeveloped countries, a book highly praised by everyone except the governments of Peru and the United States, and is now living in a cabin in Tennessee writing a book on the effects of advertising on underdeveloped minds. Whenever he’s in New York he drops in to suggest I write a book about the underdeveloped psyches of psychiatrists.

      My other successes were less obvious and immediate.

      There was Linda Reichman, for example. She was a slender, young rich girl who had spent her last four years living in Greenwich Village doing all the things rich, emancipated girls think they’re expected to do in Greenwich Village. In four weeks of treatment prior to my own emancipation, I had learned that this was her third analysis, that she loved to talk about herself, particularly her promiscuity, with indifference to and cruelty toward men, and their stupid ineffectual efforts to hurt her. Her monologues were occasionally flooded by literary, philosophical and Freudian allusions and as abruptly empty of them. Each session she usually managed to say something intended to shock my bourgeois respectability.

      It was only three weeks after letting the dice dictate anarchy that I had a rather remarkable session with her. She’d come in even more keyed up than usual, swivel-hipped her rather swivelable hips across the room and flopped aggressively onto the couch. Much to my surprise she didn’t say a thing for three minutes; for her, an all-time record. Finally, with an edge to her voice, she said: ‘I get so sick and tired of this … shit. [Pause] I don’t know why I come here. [Pause] You’re about as much help as a chiropractor. Christ, what I’d give to meet a MAN someday. I meet nothing but … ball-less masturbators. [Pause] What a … stupid world it is. How do people get through their crumby lives? I’ve got money, brains, sex – I’m bored stiff. What keeps all those little clods without anything, what keeps all those little clods going? [Pause] I’d like to blast the whole thing … fucking city to pieces. [Long pause.]

      ‘I spent the weekend with Curt Rollins. For your info, he’s just published a novel that the Partisan Review calls – and I quote – “as stunningly poetic a piece of fiction as has appeared in years.” Unquote. [Pause] He’s got talent. His prose is like lightning: cutting, darting, brilliant; he’s a Joyce with the energy of Henry Miller. [Pause] He’s working on a new novel about fifteen minutes in the life of a young boy who’s just lost his father. Fifteen minutes – a whole novel. Curt’s cute, too. Most girls throw themselves at him. [Pause] He needs money. [Pause] It’s funny, he doesn’t seem to like sex much. Wham-bam, back to the old writing board. Wham-bam. [Pause] He liked the way I sucked him off though. But …

      ‘I’d like to chop his hands off. Chop, chop. Then he could dictate his novel to me. [Pause] Chop his hands off: I suppose that means I want to castrate him. Could be. I don’t think it would bother him much. I think he’d consider it gave him more time for his precious writing, his all-important fifteen minutes in the life of a little prick. [Pause] “Stunning novel” – Jesus, it had the grace of late Herman Melville and the power of a dying Emily Dickinson. You know what it was about? A sensitive young man who discovers that his mother is having an affair with the man that’s teaching him to love poetry. Sensitive young man despairs. “Oh Shelley, why has thou forsaken me?” [Pause] He’s another ball-less masturbator. [Pause]

      ‘You sure are quiet today. Can’t you even throw in a few uh-huhs or yesses? I’m paying you forty bucks an hour, remember? For that I should get at least two or three yesses a minute.’

      ‘I don’t feel like it today.’

      ‘You don’t feel like it today? Who cares? You think I feel like spilling out my garbage three days a week? Come on, Dr Rhinehart, you’ve gotta like it. The world is built on the principle that all humans must eat shit regardless of taste. Come on, speak up. Act like a psychiatrist. Let’s hear that faithful echo.’

      ‘Today I’d like to hear what you’d like to do if you could recreate the world to suit your own … highest dreams.’

      ‘Cut the crap. I’d turn it into a great big testicle, what else?’

      [Pause] [Longer pause]

      ‘I’d … I’d eliminate all the human beings first … except … eh … maybe for a few. I’d destroy everything man has ever made, EVERYTHING, and I’d put – all the animals would still be there – No. No, they wouldn’t. I’d eliminate all of them too. There’d be grass though, and flowers. [Pause]

      ‘I can’t picture the humans. [Pause] I can’t even picture me. I must have got wiped out. Ha! Woo. My highest dream is of an empty world. Boy, that’s something. The little lays at Remo’s would love that. But where are they in this world of mine? They’re gone too. An empty, empty, empty world.’

      ‘Can you imagine a human being that you would like?’

      ‘Look, Doctor, I detest humans. I know it. Swift detested them, Mark Twain detested them. I’m in good company. It takes clods to appreciate clods, herd to appreciate herd. Whatever I am, I’ve got enough on the ball to realize that the best of humans is either weak or a phoney. You too, obviously. In fact, you psychiatrists are the biggest phonies of all.’

      ‘Why do you say that?’

      ‘Your phoney code of ethics. You hide behind it. I’ve sat here for four weeks telling you about my stupid, cruel, promiscuous, senseless behavior and you sit back there nodding away like a puppet and agreeing with everything I say. I’ve twitched my butt at you, flashed a little thigh, and you pretend you don’t know what I’m doing. You acknowledge nothing except what I put into words. All right; I’d like to feel your prick. [Pause] And now the good doctor will say with his quiet asinine voice, “You say you’d like to feel my prick,” and I’ll say, “Yes, it all goes back to when I was three years old and my father …” and you’ll say, “You feel the desire to feel my prick goes back … ” and we’ll both go right on acting as if the words didn’t count.’

      Miss Reichman briefly paused and then raised herself on her elbows and without looking at me, spat, СКАЧАТЬ