Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

“It seems to me that you’re the one who’s overcertain. You’re explaining a man’s life on the basis of very few facts, and even those facts are doubtful.”

“All facts are doubtful. But consider my advantage. I have an actual witness, other than the patient, of the traumatic event, and that is rare in my work. I admit that my conclusions are hypothetical, subject to verification. But the immediate test of a hypothetical explanation is its power to explain, its impact on the imagination. I will state my hypothesis in more detail. The violence in the house, followed by his mother’s disappearance and his father’s silence, would be enough to convince the little boy that a great wrong had been done. It is easy for a child to suppose that he has committed a wrong. The line between wish and responsibility, between intention and guilt, is very thinly drawn in a child’s mind. I do not insist that he believed he killed his mother. The possibility would be enough.

“No child could face such a horrible imagining for long. The mind protects itself in any way it can. A memory, or an imagined memory, which is too terrible to face must be pressed back into forgetfulness, covered up, and smoothed over. The boy’s mind took refuge in the illusion that his mother had been dead when he entered her room. The violence was denied and forgotten. It was a harmless illusion, harmless except to him. While it enabled him to live and grow, free of conscience guilt, it planted the seed of guilt deep in his unconscious. It set the pattern also for his adult reaction to shock. Evasion at any price, at the price of memory itself. Does such an explanation explain nothing? Has it no impact of reality?”

“Yes, it does. It’s dreadfully convincing. But does it mean, this pattern of evasion, that there is no hope for his memory?”

“On the contrary. It means that he must be told the truth. A man’s life cannot be sustained on illusion doubly compounded.”

“He must be told the truth?” she echoed. The question went on echoing in her mind until it embraced her whole life and threatened its foundations.

“I have thought so from the beginning. Now I am certain of it.”

The lines of the conversation, spoken and unspoken, converged in a bright point of fear before her eyes. The point expanded into a vision of Bret, senseless and lost forever, slain by an arrow of truth. And where was he now? Wandering somewhere in the city, utterly vulnerable to evil. Entering a dark alley where a gunman was waiting?

She rose so quickly and awkwardly that her cup and saucer fell to the floor and shattered.

“It doesn’t matter in the least,” the doctor said before she could apologize. But he didn’t rise to take the hand she extended. “Do not go just yet. Sit down again, please.”

“I don’t know where he is. I have to find him.”

“Don’t be afraid. There is no reason to be afraid. Circumstances struck at his Achilles heel, but he will recover.”

“You don’t understand. I’m afraid something may happen tonight. I’m afraid he’ll get into trouble.”

“I doubt it. I doubt that he will do anything wrong.” His eyes seemed to have become brighter and smaller behind his spectacles. “It is true that the guilt-ridden are often predisposed to violence. Guilt is normally thought of as the result of sin, but it may also be its cause. A man who feels guilty may with unconscious deliberation commit an act which is sinful in his own eyes. Such an act may serve to rationalize his guilt, to justify it, one might say. Many criminals have performed senseless crimes, which could not fail to be discovered, in order to receive punishment for their guilt.”

“It’s ridiculous to talk about him as if he were a criminal.” She was still standing in the middle of the floor. Tension and indecision had drawn her body off center and made her seem ungainly.

“Do please sit down, Miss West. Conversation is a sedentary art.”

“I haven’t time for conversation.”

“But you must listen to what I have to say. And you must listen more carefully. I was speaking analogically and made no moral judgment on your Bret. I do not approach a case with moral preconceptions. I have argued with Stekel on occasions that an analyst should enter the patient’s mind with no preconceptions at all. This case of Taylor tends to prove my point.”

“How?” She sat on the edge of the chair, her feet among the shards of broken china.

“My preconceptions led me into error. I supposed almost from the beginning that Taylor was a clear case of infantile regression to the Oedipus pattern fixated by the mother’s death. Now you tell me that the mother’s death never occurred. That does not mean, of course, that the Oedipus element is not present. Taylor’s relations with women will always be influenced, I had almost said determined, by his early relations with his mother. His sexual life will always be difficult because his mother betrayed him, so to speak.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

“No. You are perceptive about these things. You must be aware also that in spite of his revolt against his father, he will always tend to see himself through his father’s eyes. He cannot escape from the moral judgments which his father bequeathed to him. And with a part of his mind, the part which sits in judgment, he does not wish to escape.”

“But wasn’t his loss of memory an escape? You called it an evasion–”

“I know it. Perhaps there is a deeper explanation, however. The loss of memory may have been a punishment inflicted on him by his own mind. A kind of death, a capital punishment.”

“He said that,” Paula whispered. “He said it was like death.”

“Really?” He leaned toward her, his body a bundle of sharp angles loosely clothed in tweed. “Then the possibility is decidedly worth exploring. It raises a further question. What guilt, real or imagined, would require the self-infliction of such a punishment?”

Leaving the question hanging unanswered in the air, he leaned back against the arm of the chesterfield. Paula watched him intently, unable to relax. Without a cup to hold on to, her hands were playful in her lap.

He went on in his gentle, slightly thickened voice. “I have sometimes thought that we of the Viennese school have paid too little attention to problems of moral guilt. Freud himself was a child of his century. He never quite outgrew the physiological laboratory and its atmosphere of materialistic determinism. It is curious, is it not, that the subtlest introspectionist since Augustine should have under-valued the moral and religious life and seen the human mind in terms of blind forces working in Newtonian space?”

“You’re talking like a Jungian,” she said. “I can’t listen to a lecture now.”

He ignored her protest. “I am far from being a Jungian. I am an analyst first and always. Jung has reverted to type and abandoned analysis for theology. I think that explains his popularity in the United States, which has its own Calvinistic tradition. Nevertheless I must admit that the products of this moralistic tradition, men like your Bret, cannot be studied in a moral vacuum. They must be interpreted, partly at least, in their own moralistic terms. The guilt of such men cannot be taken for granted or explained away on general grounds. It must be traced to its source.”

“But you explained Bret’s guilt. You said that childhood experience was the crucial one.” She rummaged in her bag for a cigarette, which broke in her fingers when she tried to light it.

He brought her an ash tray and remained standing over her. “The strains and shocks of the adult life are equally crucial in a case like this. You questioned my wisdom in telling him of the murder, but I maintain I was right. He must be told everything. To a mind which has been starved of truth, you cannot dole out truth in fragments. I do not know what you know. I do not need to. But he does. He is groping in the darkness of the external world for a truth his own mind has refused him. You tell me that he thinks he has found the murderer of his wife. Do you believe that he has?”