Alexander McCall Smith - The Dog Who Came In From The Cold

“Well, I can tell you all about morphic resonance, as it happens,” said Terence. “It’s the idea that living things have a morphic field around them that determines how they will develop.”

Berthea rolled her eyes. Terence was always looking for something, and as a result seized upon any theory he encountered. Morphic fields. “Have I got one?” she asked. “Have I got a morphic field?”

Terence smiled. “Of course you have, Berthy. Your morphic field is part of the human morphic field. All the experiences of mankind are …” He waved a hand in the air, in the direction of Cheltenham. “All our experiences are out there in the vast morphic field made up of all our memories. You’re part of that.”

“Sounds somewhat Jungian to me.”

Terence’s eyes shone with enthusiasm. “But of course it is! That’s exactly what it is. Jung talked about the collective unconscious. That’s the same thing, really, as what Rupert Sheldrake talks about.”

“Rupert Sheldrake?”

Terence paged through the magazine. Coming to a photograph, he showed it to Berthea. “That’s him. That’s Rupert Sheldrake. He wrote a jolly clever book, you know. A New Science of Life. He says that each species has a collective memory, and this collective memory influences how we behave.”

Berthea stared at her brother. She had often wondered at how little he was able to remember other than this sort of thing. “Can you give me an example?” she asked.

“Yes, I can,” said Terence. “And it’s a really exciting example. You know that during the war—”

“Which war?” interrupted Berthea. “We’ve had so many.”

“The big one,” said Terence. “The Second World War. During the war, there was no aluminium for the tops of milk bottles. So they had to use a different system, and that was jolly bad news for the sparrows, who had got used to pecking off the tops of the bottles and having a sip at the cream on the milk.”

“Can’t have made themselves very popular,” said Berthea.

Terence ignored this. “Well, for six years or however long it was there were no foil caps like that. So all sparrows forgot how to do it because the sparrows that would have remembered those foil bottle tops were dead. There was a whole new generation of sparrows that knew nothing about how to get cream by pecking at the tops.”

Berthea’s eyes glazed over.

“And then,” Terence continued, “when the war was over, they brought back those foil bottle tops. And you know what, Berthy? You know what?”

She forced herself to concentrate. “No. What?”

Terence paused for dramatic effect. Then, with the air of one revealing a resounding truth, he said, “The sparrows immediately knew what to do! They pecked at the bottle tops straight away!”

“Their collective memory?”

“Of course,” said Terence. “What else could it have been?”

“Smell,” suggested Berthea. “They smelled the cream.”

“No,” said Terence abruptly. “Impossible. It was morphic resonance. They picked it up from their collective morphic field. It’s in Rupert Sheldrake’s book. You read it for yourself.”

Berthea stared up at the ceiling. “But if it’s part of our collective memory,” she said, “why would I have to look it up? I’d know it.”

Terence frowned. “You’re being very unhelpful, Berthy. You’re just trying to wind me up. You’re a naughty old psychologist!”

“Psychiatrist,” said Berthea.

“Same difference,” said Terence, pouting.

“No,” said Berthea, “it isn’t. The difference is MB, ChB, MRCPsych. That’s the difference.”

Terence left Berthea with a strict instruction to be in the drawing room by a quarter to seven at the latest, when he would serve pre-prandial martinis. The mention of martinis gave rise to an exchange of warning glances, but nothing was said; both remembered the last time that Terence had mixed the cocktails, when the conversation had gone perhaps a little further than was wise, with fantasies on the theme of how best to dispose of Oedipus Snark. That would not recur, or at least not in the company of others, who might not understand the length and depth and breadth of the provocation offered by Oedipus over the years.

At about twenty to seven, Berthea left her room. She wanted to be punctual because she knew that Terence, who was otherwise vague in the extreme, nonetheless took punctuality very seriously, just as Auden had. Martinis, in Auden’s household, were served on the dot of six, and woe betide any guests who were late. Berthea had often wondered about this: Auden was messy – his study filled with piles of paper, unwashed glasses, cigarette stubs – and yet out of such chaos came order, of thought, of metre and of cocktails. Perhaps it was something to do with notions of outer and inner cleanliness; Berthea had read that some travelling people – gypsies, as they used fondly to be known – liked the inside of their caravans to be spotless while the surrounds, the grass upon which they camped, would often be … well, less than spotless, bless them. And it was frequently the case, she knew from professional experience, that people whose lives were disordered in some respect had one or two areas of their existence where they were punctilious and highly observant. Such people might expect high standards from others and were capable of flying into a rage over some petty lapse by an official or a friend. Yet they could not see that they themselves were guilty of exactly the same lapses, and much worse.

Terence was not like that. As far as Berthea could tell, he had no passive–aggressive traits at all: he was not afraid of intimacy, he never lied, he was not given to sulking. Terence was a bit of an enigma for Berthea; he was certainly not normal, in the way in which most of us were normal – a very fuzzy concept, of course – but he was not abnormal, in the way Oedipus was. Oedipus was psychopathic simpliciter, or, in plain English, bad, and it was indicative of his condition that he had no insight at all into how bad he was. Which should not surprise us, thought Berthea – those most in need of help simply cannot see that need.

Plain English was useful, and she defended it, but had to accept that when it came to the human personality in all its complexity one had to resort to technical terms. Plain English terms did not allow for nuance: talk of “madness” was very unhelpful, not because it disparaged those unfortunates who were afflicted by it, but because its brush was far too broad. One could not lump the psychotic together with the mildly neurotic; one could not put the mildly depressed alongside those suffering from vivid delusions. And yet Berthea sometimes felt that the ordinary, vulgar terms for mental disorder expressed an essential truth, and were cathartic, too, for those who worked in the field. She had heard a colleague refer quite affectionately to a patient as “completely bananas”. One would not find the term “bananas” in that diagnostic vade mecum, the DSM-IV, but the psychiatrist who used it felt momentarily less oppressed by his calling simply because the word defused the tension and the sadness. Similarly, the term “doolally”, which people used for those who lost their place, seemed less clinical, less frightening than the conventional diagnostic sentence.

That same colleague, irreverent as he was – and therefore level-headed and popular – had once remarked, as he and Berthea drove together past a psychiatric clinic, “I think I should put a sign outside the place saying May contain nuts.” Berthea had laughed, and had woken up that night and laughed again at the recollection of his wonderful remark. Laughter, so rarely prescribed by any clinician, was surely the most therapeutic thing in the world. And now, she had read, there were studies to prove it – something the drug companies would not be happy about, since laughter was free, could be administered by anybody, and had no negative side-effects.