Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

Diane’s shoulders slumped. Her arms uncrossed and drooped. She shut her eyes. “Sure we do.”

“We do?” I was encouraged. Her tired voice meant she was taking me seriously.

Diane leaned against her desk and rubbed her eyes. I whispered, “Are you going to tell me?”

She uncovered her eyes. They were red and she looked at me hopelessly. Despite the forceful words, her voice was enervated. “I’ll tell you, if you promise you won’t debate it. That after you hear what I think, whether you agree or not, you’ll get the fuck out of my office, you’ll get the fuck out of my clinic, and you’ll get the fuck out of my life.”

So that was the price. I didn’t understand her equation. And I didn’t care, as long as I got to hear its sum. “I promise.”

“This is really what I think. Ph.D. and all.”

“Okay.” I felt profoundly relieved. No matter what she said, I would have something, something I could take with me. Something to discard or accept — that didn’t matter — I would have something to anchor me again to the world.

Diane said, “We’ve had a word for it from the beginning of human history. What you’re describing — these self-serving, heartless, destructive and perfectly respectable people — they’re evil. And there’s not a goddamn thing we can do about them.”

STICK PROVIDED THE ANSWER. I DISAPPEARED FROM MINOTAUR FOR three days, leaving a message with Laura that I couldn’t make the tennis date, offering no explanation. I retreated to Baltimore. From there, I checked on Pete Kenny, who, according to David Cox, the child psychologist in Arizona, was doing better than expected.

“Perhaps he’s strong,” I said.

“Well, I guess that’s part of it …” Cox reacted to my comment doubtfully. “He’s getting a lot out of the sessions. He’s articulate about his feelings, about how much he misses his Mommy and Daddy. Also, his grandmother is very loving. Not smart, but loving.”

“He needs inner strength,” I insisted. “He needs your help, of course, and he’s fortunate his grandmother is doing her job, but, in the end, unless he’s strong that won’t be enough.” I told him I would pay Pete’s bills even if he doubled him to four sessions a week and that he should continue to tell Grandma the therapy was free.

For three days I focused on the new problem Diane’s remark had defined for me. She had used the word evil as a form of surrender: less a description than a pejorative; not a diagnosis, but a despairing judgment. She had been clever and helpful in not applying it to the obviously ill or sociopathic: serial killers, rapists, child abusers. She had been right to reserve evil for Stick and Halley, my sane, respectable and thoroughly legal twosome, as opposed to everybody’s favorite target for the appellation: monster tyrants of history. Hitler and Stalin are the prime examples of our century, although humanity has provided a constant supply, and our century has many more than merely that dynamic duo. But Hitler and Stalin, from all reports, were profoundly unhappy men. Only a willfully blind psychiatrist would declare them to have lived in homeostasis. There is a simple measurement that can be taken: Hitler and Stalin were less content and more paranoid as their power grew. Their appetites increased by what they fed on, craving more enemies and more killings to maintain the same level of comfort, rejecting opportunity after opportunity to preserve themselves and their power, destroying not only those who opposed them, but those who longed to help them. They were obviously ill. The question is, what do we call the hundreds, indeed hundreds of thousands of people, who obeyed fervently and worked passionately to help them? The Silent Majority? The Good Germans? Stalinists? Conformists? I don’t mean concentration camp guards or Bebe Rebozo. I don’t mean those who did wrong and looked the other way for the base purpose of gain or survival. I mean those who were happy to live in an unjust world, who function as well under Hitler as they do under Bill Clinton.

The presence of harmful function without anxiety or disorder, without stress on personality or mood — to call that psychological condition evil is not merely a judgment. It is a clear description and supplies the missing piece to a puzzle of psychology. Many practitioners have noted that it isn’t unusual for a patient to emerge from therapy as a less likable person. That’s a hint there is such a thing as too successful an adaptation to emotional conflict. Freud’s essential view of human beings (and this, more than anything, is what provokes so much hostility to him) is that we are savage animals who require at least sublimation, if not repression, to prevent our unconscious desires from having sway. In his view, social adaptation restrains us from our true desires: to rip food from the mouths of our starving companions, to rape our neighbors’ wives, to kill our fathers, to worship the moon with blood on our fangs, to live for the satiation of our animal appetites, relishing the moment-to-moment satisfaction of our mouths and genitalia. Sometimes the bondage of these unacceptable instincts causes neurotic conflict (and supplies Woody Allen with comedy): the wish to sleep with your mother appearing as a fear of elevators; the longing to eat your father’s flesh surfacing as a horror of clams on the half-shell. Freud’s many reinterpreters adopted a less harsh understanding of human nature, allowing for kinder and more altruistic ids. But they still posit emotional conflict as the cause of psychological dysfunction.

That view of humanity is supposed to catch everyone, from Gene Kenny to Adolf Hitler, in the net of psychology. Not Stick and Halley Copley, however. They don’t appear on our radar because we don’t recognize their outline. They are not in conflict. The equation is one-sided: they don’t need love and victory, only victory; they don’t need peace and pleasure, only pleasure. Truly, this makes labeling them evil a definition, not a swear word to vent our disapproval.

But how to treat them? They would not volunteer and society does not see them as ill. Indeed, their absence of conflict, their freedom from neurosis, makes them attractive, drawing nervous moths to immolation in their brilliant fire.

Frankly, I was stuck. I became desperate enough by the third day that, while idly going over the new chapters prepared by Amy Glickstein on Joseph’s experimental neuroleptic drugs, I considered spiking Halley’s Evian or Copley’s herbal tea (he had recently given up caffeine) with a psychotropic. Perhaps an antidepressant would heighten their unnaturally low levels of anxiety. Perhaps drugging this natural Prozac pair with Prozac would push their legal acts of self-preservation into a murderous mania. Unfortunately, then I would be a poisoner, not a healer. I wouldn’t have proved they suffered from a psychological condition susceptible to cure, any more than I believed Joseph had cured depression by chemical manipulation.

Edgar Levin broke through the barricade of the Prager Institute’s switchboard and also my reverie. I hadn’t included him on the list of those to be told I wasn’t there. I could have declined the call anyway, but I was curious.

“Well, Rafe,” Edgar said to my hello. “I’ve got to hand it to you. I didn’t think anybody could make Stick Copley nervous and confused but you’ve done it.”

“And how have I managed this miracle?”

“Apparently he doesn’t know where the hell you are or why you’ve disappeared. I called him this morning to find out if you’d agreed to manage his retreat sessions. First he tried to fake it, but when I asked him to transfer me to you, out came the truth. So I called my brother in Hollywood and he called your cousin Julie to get your number.”