Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

I went down to London. Busner had helpfully sent me a tube map with a cross on it marking Willesden Junction. The Concept House was on Chapter Road, one of those long north-west London avenues that in winter are flanked by receding rows of what appear to be the amputated, arthritic, decomposing limbs of giants. Snow had been falling all day and Chapter Road was a dirty bath mat of cold, grey flakes. It was dark as I plodded along, cursing the slippery PVC soles of the shoes I’d just bought. Ahead of me in the centre of the road two children of about five or six walked hand in hand.

The whole atmosphere depressed me. The feeling it gave me, walking down that endless road, was of being in a dirty, cold room, a room where no one had bothered to vacuum between the tattered edge of the beige carpet and the scuffed, chipped paintwork of the skirting board for a very long time. I wished that I had driven there instead of leaving my car at Tolworth services and hitching the rest of the way.

The Concept House was no different to any of the other large Edwardian residences which lined the road. If anything it looked a little more like a home and a little less like an institution than the rest. The garden was littered with discarded children’s toys, and in an upstairs window I could see the back of finger-paintings which had been stuck to the windows with masking tape. Busner himself opened the door to me; had he not been wearing an aggressively loud jumper with ‘Zack’ appliquéd across its breast in red cartoon lettering I don’t think I would have recognised him.

Busner’s cheeks had sunk, his face was thin and hollow. The rest of him was just as plump as ever, but he had the countenance of a driven ascetic. His eyes glowed with an ill-suppressed fanaticism. In that instant I nearly turned on my heel and abandoned the interview. I had been prepared for Busner the Buffoon, but Busner the Revolutionary was something I hadn’t bargained for.

We goggled at one another. Then quick as a flash he had drawn me into the vestibule, persuaded me to abandon my sodden mac and dripping briefcase and led me on, into a large, warm kitchen where he proceeded to make me a cup of cocoa, talking all the while.

‘I hadn’t imagined you as such a dapper little thing, my dear. Your suit is marvellous.’ In truth the cheap compressed nap of the material was beginning to bunch into an elephant’s hide of wrinkles under the onslaught of quick drying. ‘Really, I wouldn’t have recognised you if I hadn’t known you were coming. I was expecting the timorous little beastie we had at Chelmsford.’

With amazing rapidity Busner outlined for me the philosophy of the Concept House, what he was trying to do and how he needed my help. In essence the house was an autonomous community of therapists and patients, except that instead of these roles being concretely divided among the residents, all were free to take on either mantle at any time.

Over our cocoa Busner set out for me his vision of the Concept House and of the future of psychotherapy. Disgusted by his experience of hospital psychology — and the narrow drive to reduce mental illness to a chemical formula — Busner had rebelled:

‘I sat up for night after night, reading Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky and Sartre. I began to systematically doubt the principles on which I had based my career to date. I deconstructed the entire world that I had been inhabiting for the past thirty years.

‘It was dawning on me that the whole way in which people have hitherto viewed mental illness has been philosophically suspect. The division between doctor and patient has corresponded to an unwarranted epistemological assumption. Here at the Concept House we are dedicated to redefining this key relationship.

‘We’re really finding out the extent to which all the categories of psychopathology are just that: dry, empty categories, devoid of real content, representing only the taxonomic, psychic fascism of a gang of twisted old men.’

It was a long speech and Busner spoke eloquently, punctuating his remarks by moving oven gloves around on his chest. I think, in retrospect, they must have been adhering to his woolly by strips of Velcro that I couldn’t see, but at the time I was tremendously impressed by the trick.

Busner went on to explain that within the Concept House everything was ordered democratically. At the house meetings, which were held every morning, rotas and agendas were drawn up and jobs distributed. The house was Busner’s own, or rather Busner’s parents’. He had persuaded them to donate it to what he styled his ‘League for Psychic Liberation’. In the weeks that followed I occasionally saw the older Busners wandering around the upper storeys of the house like fitful ghosts, sheepishly reading the Sunday Telegraph Magazine in reproduction Queen Anne armchairs, while feverish psychotics, charged with some unearthly energy, toyed with their ornaments.

Having set out his theories, and explained the philosophy of this novel institution to which he had given birth, Busner picked up the drained cocoa mugs and put them on the draining board. He turned to me with a quizzical expression.

‘You’re wondering why I wrote to you, aren’t you?’

‘Well, yes. I suppose I am.’

‘After all, we were never exactly sympatico , were we?’

‘Yes, yes. I think I’d agree with you there.’

‘Well, here it is. The fact is that I’m attracting a good deal of publicity with what I’m trying to do here. Some of it is distinctly favourable, but that fact only seems to persuade those who are seeking to discredit me to redouble their efforts. I know that you have never programmatically defined yourself as belonging to any avant-garde movement. But on the other hand I know that you have allied yourself with some pretty weird courses of study during your career, isn’t that so?

‘What I want you to do here is what you do best: research. There is one way that I can really kick over the hornet’s nest of the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic establishment and get them all buzzing furiously. And that is to prove not that my methods of helping people who suffer from so-called “mental illnesses” are more effective than conventional ones, but that they are more cost effective; that would really upset people. If I could prove that Concept Houses the length and breadth of the country would reduce public expenditure, I might well become unstoppable.’

‘And me?’

‘I want you to construct and manage the trials and to collate the results, to be published in the form of an article co-authored by the two of us in the BJE 1.’

And so it was. I became a member of the Concept House team and abandoned my suits and shiny shoes in favour of uncomfortable overalls which rode up my cleft and shoes that appeared half-baked. Why? Well, because whatever the extent of Busner’s rampant egoism, whatever the dubious nature of his ideas, there was a sense of human warmth at the Concept House that I found lacking, either at Aston or at the Institute of Job Reductivism. I craved some of that warmth. You have to remember that since the age of seventeen, I had lived an almost exclusively institutionalised life. Nonetheless, ever prudent, I didn’t give up my academic positions, I merely secured a leave of absence to work on Busner’s study. Of course there were mutterings about what I was getting involved with, but I paid them no mind.

The trial I evolved for Busner was complex in the extreme. There were two aspects to the problem: how much diagnosed mental patients spent themselves and what was spent on them. It was to be a double-blind trial, which operated itself in the context of a double-blind. There were to be three trial groups: the inmates of the Concept House, a group of patients diagnosed as afflicted with major psychoses at Friern Barnet, and fourteen Beth Din approved butchers living in the Temple Fortune area. That the latter group was chosen was to bedevil the validity of our results for years to come. I would like to state here, once and for all, that the fact was that the people who applied for the trial, and who fulfilled the necessary criteria, all happened to be kosher butchers domiciled in that area.