Philip Dick - We Can Build You

Leaning back in his chair Doctor Nisea studied me reflectively. "And this you want to change."

"I want to achieve satisfaction, the real kind."

"Have you nothing at all in common with other people?"

"Nothing. My reality lies entirely outside the world that others experience. You, for instance; to you it would be a fantasy, if I told you about it. About her, I mean."

"Who is she?"

"Pris," I said.

He waited, but I did not go on.

"Doctor Horstowski talked to me briefly on the phone about you," he said presently. "You apparently have the dynamism of difficulty which we call the Magna Mater type of schizophrenia. However, by law, I must administer first the James Benjamin Proverb Test to you and then the Soviet Vigotsky-Luria Block Test." He nodded and from behind me a nurse appeared with note pad and pencil. "Now, I will give you several proverbs and you are to tell me what they mean. Are you ready?"

"Yes," I said.

"'When the cat's away the mice will play.'"

I pondered and then said, "In the absence of authority there will be wrong-doing."

In this manner we continued, and I did all right until Doctor Nisea got to what turned out for me to be the fatal number six.

"'A rolling stone gathers no moss.'"

Try as I might I could not remember the meaning. At last I hazarded, "Well, it means a person who's always active and never pauses to reflect--" No, that didn't sound right. I tried again. "That means a man who is always active and keeps growing in mental and moral stature won't grow stale." He was looking at me more intently, so I added by way of clarification, "I mean, a man who's active and doesn't let grass grow under his feet, he'll get ahead in life."

Doctor Nisea said, "I see." And I knew that I had revealed, for the purposes of legal diagnosis, a schizophrenic thinking disorder.

"What does it mean?" I asked. "Did I get it backward?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so. The generally-accepted meaning of the proverb is the opposite of what you've given; it is generally taken to mean that a person who--"

"You don't have to tell me," I broke in. "I remember--I really knew it. A person who's unstable will never acquire anything of value."

Doctor Nisea nodded and went on to the next proverb. But the stipulation of the statute had been met; I showed a formal thinking impairment.

After the proverbs I made a stab at classifying the blocks, but without success. Both Doctor Nisea and I were relieved when I gave up and pushed the blocks away.

"That's about it, then," Nisea said. He nodded to the nurse to leave. "We can go ahead and fill out the forms. Do you have a preference clinic-wise? In my opinion, the best of the lot is the Los Angeles one; although perhaps it's because I know that better than the others. The Kasanin Clinic at Kansas City--"

"Send me there," I said eagerly.

"Any special reason?"

"I've had a number of close friends come out of there," I said evasively.

He looked at me as if he suspected there was a deeper reason.

"And it has a good reputation. Almost everyone I know who's been genuinely helped in their mental illness has been at Kasanin. Not that the other clinics aren't good, but that's the best. My aunt Gretchen, who's at the Harry Stack Sullivan Clinic at San Diego; she was the first mentally ill person I knew, and there've been a lot since, naturally, because such a large part of the public has it, as we're told every day on TV. There was my cousin Leo Roggis. He's still in one of the clinics somewhere. My English teacher in high school, Mr. Haskins; he died in a clinic. There was an old Italian down the street from me who was on a pension, George Oliveri; he had catatonic excitements and they carted him off. I remember a buddy of mine in the Service, Art Boles; he had 'phrenia and went to the Fromm-Reichmann Clinic at Rochester, New York. There was Alys Johnson, a girl I went with in college; she's at Samuel Anderson Clinic in Area Three; that's at Baton Rouge, La. And a man I worked for, Ed Yeats; he contracted 'phrenia and that turned into acute paranoia. Waldo Dangerfield, another buddy of mine. Gloria Milstein, a girl I knew; she's god knows where, but she was spotted by means of a psych test when she was applying for a typing job. The Federal people picked her up... she was short, dark-haired, very attractive, and no one ever guessed until that test showed up. And John Franklin Mann, a used car salesman I knew; he tested out as a dilapidated 'phrenic and was carted off, I think to Kasanin, because he's got relatives in Missouri. And Marge Morrison, another girl I knew. She's out again; I'm sure she was cured at Kasanin. All of them who went to Kasanin seemed as good as new, to me, if not better; Kasanin didn't merely meet the requirements of the McHeston Act; it genuinely healed. Or so it seemed to me."

Doctor Nisea wrote down _Kasanin Clinic at K. C._ on the Government forms and I breathed a sigh of relief. "Yes," he murmured, "Kansas City is said to be good. The President spent two months there, you know."

"I did hear that," I admitted. Everyone knew the heroic story of the President's bout with mental illness in his midteens, with his subsequent triumph during his twenties.

"And now, before we separate," Doctor Nisea said, "I'd like to tell you a little about the Magna Mater type of schizophrenia."

"Good," I said. "I'd be anxious to hear."

"As a matter of fact it has been my special interest," Doctor Nisea said. "I did several monographs on it. You know the Anderson theory which identifies each subform of schizophrenia with a subform of religion."

I nodded. The Anderson view of 'phrenia had been popularized in almost every slick magazine in America; it was the current fashion.

"The primary form which 'phrenia takes is the heliocentric form, the sun-worship form where the sun is deified, is seen in fact as the patient's father. You have not experienced that. The heliocentric form is the most primitive and fits with the earliest known religion, solar worship, including the great heliocentric cult of the Roman period, Mithraism. Also the earlier Persian solar cult, the worship of Mazda."

"Yes," I said, nodding.

"Now, the Magma Mater, the form you have, was the great female deity cult of the Mediterranean at the time of the Mycenaean Civilization. Ishtar, Cybele, Attis, then later Athene herself... finally the Virgin Mary. What has happened to you is that your anima, that is, the embodiment of your unconsciousness, its archetype, has been projected outward, onto the cosmos, and there it is perceived and worshiped."

"I see," I said.

"There, it is experienced as a dangerous, hostile, and incredibly powerful yet attractive being. The embodiment of all the pairs of opposites: it possesses the totality of life, yet is dead; all love, yet is cold; all intelligence, yet is given to a destructive analytical trend which is not creative; yet it is seen as the source of creativity itself. These are the opposites which slumber in the unconscious, which are transcended by gestalts in consciousness. When the opposites are experienced directly, as you are experiencing them, they cannot be fathomed or dealt with; they will eventually disrupt your ego and annihilate it, for as you know, in their original form they are archetypes and cannot be assimilated by the ego."

"I see," I said.

"So this battle is the great struggle of the conscious mind to come to an understanding with its own collective aspects, its unconsciousness, and is doomed to fail. The archetypes of the unconscious must be experienced indirectly, through the anima, and in a benign form free of their bipolar qualities. For this to come about, you must hold an utterly different relationship to your unconscious; as it stands, you are passive and it possesses all the powers of decision."