Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

I must explain at this juncture that at this time Alkan was nearing the height of his celebrity. Predictably, I eschewed attending his seminars which he held regularly in the squat, twenty-two-storey psychology faculty building. These were clearly for sychopants and groupies — besides which Alkan himself, although he had trained first as a medical doctor and then as a psychiatrist, was nonetheless sympathetic to the psychotherapeutic movement. I, on the other hand, made empirical testability the benchmark of all theory and could not abide the woolly fantasising that seemed to dominate couch-pushing.

Alkan was an imposing figure. In appearance somewhat like Le Corbusier, but much taller and thinner. Entirely bald, he affected a manner of almost complete naturalness, which was difficult to fault. Undoubtedly it was this that had given him his tremendous reputation as a clinician. When Alkan said, ‘How are you?’ the question had total nuance: he really wanted to know how you were, although at the same time he was asking the question purely for the sake of social form. Yet he managed simultaneously to acknowledge both of these conflicting messages and still reformulated the question so that it incorporated them and yet was devoid of all assumptions. Furthermore none of the above seemed to be implied .

Alkan, then. Striding across the concrete agora at Chelmsford, his form complementing the anthropomorphic brutalism of the campus architecture. Shoulders twisted — arbitrarily, like the sprigs of steel that protrude from reinforced concrete. And I, wholly anonymous, at that time consciously cultivating a social apathy and lack of character which was beginning to border on the pathological. We collided in the very centre of the agora, because I was not looking at where I was going. The impact knocked the loose bundle of nasoscopes from under my arm and they fell about us, lapping the paving slabs. The two of us then ducked and dove, until they were all gathered up again, smiling all the while.

Before handing them back to me Alkan paused and examined one of the nasoscopes. I was impressed, he clearly knew what it was. He was following its shape to see if it conformed with the ‘character equation’ Gruton had inked in below.

‘Fascinating, a nasoscope. I haven’t seen one for years. I did some work on Gruton once …’

‘Oh, er … Oh. I didn’t know, at least I haven’t read it.’ I felt absolutely at a loss. I was meant to have the licence to hate the playboy Alkan and here he was professing detailed knowledge of the obscure corner of the field to which I had staked my own claim.

‘No reason why you should have. It was never published.’ He fell to examining the plasticised sheet again. As he scanned the meticulously shaded areas that formed the character map, he pursed his lips and blew through them, making an odd whiffling noise. This was just one of Alkan’s numerous idiosyncrasies which I later made my own.

‘D’you see there.’ He pointed at a long, lacy blob, not dissimilar to the north island of New Zealand. ‘Gruton would have said that that indicated heimic tendencies.’

‘Sorry?’

‘ Heimic tendencies. Gruton believed that masturbation could not only cause moral degeneration in terms of the individual psyche, he also thought that it could influence people politically. He developed a whole vocabulary of terms to describe these different forms of degeneration, one of which was heimic . If you care to come to my rooms I’ll show you a little dictionary of these terms that Gruton put together and had printed at his own expense.’

Alkan’s rooms were in the Monoplex, the tower built in 1951 for the Festival of Britain, which dominated the Chelmsford campus. A weird, cantilevered construction shaped like a cigar, it zoomed up into the flat Essex sky. The lift, as ever, was out of order and Alkan attacked the staircase with great gusto. I remember that he seemed entirely unaffected by the climb when I staggered into a seat in his rooms some five minutes later, a hundred and fifty feet higher up.

We spent the rest of that morning together. Alkan was an amazing teacher and as we looked at his cache of Gruton papers and then moved on to broader subjects he amazed me by the way he illuminated grey area after grey area. His dialectical method was bizarre to say the least. It took the form of antithesis succeeding antithesis. Alkan would guide the student into acknowledging that he found a theory, or even a body of fact, untenable but that he could not supply an alternative; and then he would admit that he couldn’t either. His favourite expression was ‘I don’t know’. Area after area of the most complex thought was illuminated for me by those ‘I don’t knows’.

At that time Alkan was still practising as an analyst and it was his contention that no educative relationship could proceed without a simultaneous therapeutic relationship. Alkan’s student/analysands were a raucous bunch. Zack Busner, Simon Gurney, Adam Sikorski, Phillip Hurst and the other Adam, Adam Harley. Now of course these are virtually household names, but at that time they were like any other group of young bloods — doing their doctoral work, affecting a particular dress style and swaggering about the campus as if they owned it.

Alkan’s bloods delighted in playing elaborate psychological tricks on one another — the aim of which was to convince the victim that he was psychotic. They went to great lengths to perpetrate these. Spiking each others’ breakfast cereals with peyote, constructing elaborate trompe l’oeil effects — false landscapes glued to the outside of the window — and insinuating bugging equipment into rooms so that they could then ‘unconsciously’ voice their comrades’ private ejaculations. These high jinks were looked down on benignly by Alkan, who viewed them as the necessary flexing of the muscles of the psyche. As for other members of the faculty, academics and students alike viewed Alkan’s bloods with undisguised suspicion, bordering on loathing.

I was totally disarmed by the interest that Alkan had taken in my Gruton work. He seemed genuinely impressed by the research that I had done — and he put my lack of conviction easily on a par with his own. I would say that that morning in his eyrie-office I was as near to knowing the real Alkan as I ever would be. His subsequent behaviour ran back into his early work after he was dead and formed a composite view of a man who was much more than the sum of his parts — and I suppose there is a certain justice in the judgement of posterity — he had, after all, incorporated parts of other people as well as his own.

Nonetheless, I was genuinely astonished when I realised the next month that Alkan had, without in any way consulting or warning me, arranged to take over the role of my supervisor Dr Katell. The first I knew of this was a handwritten list on a noticeboard which stated quite clearly that I was due to see Dr Alkan for my monthly meeting. I hurried along to see Dr Katell. He was sitting in his blond wood office by the rectangular lily pond. The place stank of furniture polish, a bright bunch of dahlias stood squeaking in a cut-glass vase.

‘My dear boy …’ he said, squeaking forward his little ovoid body on the synthetic leather seat of his synthetic leather armchair. I made my goodbyes and left.

When I appeared for my first supervisory session Alkan was all smiles. He took the bundle of manuscript and nasoscopes out from under my arm and ushered me to a seat.

‘My dear boy,’ he said, hunching his lanky body in the leather sling that stretched between the two stainless steel handlebars which constituted the arms of his chair. ‘My dear boy. You realise of course that as your thesis supervisor I feel it my duty, my obligation, to undertake an analysis with you …’