John Fowles - The Magus

The whole lot of them stood and applauded me. I could not keep control any longer. I saw Lily and Conchis clapping, and the students. I cocked my wrists around and gave them a double V-sign. It evidently bewildered the old man, because he turned to ask Conchis what it meant. The clapping died down. Conchis turned to the supposed woman doctor from Edinburgh. She spoke in a strong American voice.

“The sign is a visual equivalent of some verbalization like 'Bugger you' or 'Up your arse.'”

This seemed to interest the old man. He repeated the gesture, watching his own hand. “But did not Mr. Churchill…”

Lily spoke, leaning forward. “It is the upward movement that carries the signal, Dr. Kretschmer. Mr. Churchill’s victory sign was with the hand reversed and static. I mentioned it in connection with my paper on ’direct Anal-Erotic Metaphor in Classical Literature.”

“Ah. Yes. I recall. Ja, ja .”

Conchis spoke to Lily. “ Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, Aureli pathici et cinaedi Furi? ”

Lily: “Precisely.”

Wimmel-Jorgensen leant forward; a strong accent. “Is there no doubt a connection with the cuckold gesture?” He put finger horns on his head.

“I did suggest,” said Lily, “that we may suppose a castration motive in the insult, a desire to degrade and humiliate the male rival which would of course be finally identifiable with the relevant stage of infantile fixation and the accompanying phobias.”

I flexed muscles, rubbed my legs together, forced myself to stay sane, to deduce what reason I could get out of all this unreason. I did not, could not believe that they were psychologists; they would never risk giving me their names.

On the other hand they must be brilliant at improvising the right jargon, since my gesture had come without warning. Or had it? I thought fast. They had needed my gesture to cue their dialogue; and it happened to be one I hadn’t used for years. But I remembered having heard that one could make people do things after hypnosis, on a pre-suggested signal. It would have been easy. When I was applauded, I felt forced to give the sign. I must be on my guard; do nothing without thinking.

The old man quietened further discussion. “Mr. Urfe, your significant gesture brings me to our purpose in all meeting you here. We are naturally aware that you are filled with deep feelings of anger and hatred towards at least some of us. Some of the repressed material we have discovered reveals a different state of affairs, but as my colleague Dr. Harrison would say, 'It is what we believe we live with that chiefly concerns us.' We have therefore gathered here today to allow you to judge us in your turn. This is why we have placed you in the judge’s seat. We have silenced you because justice should be mute until the time for sentencing comes. But before we hear your judgment on us, you must permit us to give some additional evidence against ourselves. Our real justification is scientific, but we are all agreed, as I have explained, that the requirements of good clinical practice forbid us to make such an excuse. Now I call on Dr. Marcus to read out that part of our report on you which deals with you not as a subject for experiment, but as an ordinary human being. Dr. Marcus.”

The woman from Edinburgh got up. She was about fifty, with graying hair cut boyishly short; no lipstick, a hard, intelligent quasi-lesbian face that looked as if it had singularly little patience with fools. She began to read in a belligerent transatlantic monotone.

The subject of our 1953 experiment belongs to a familiar category of semi-intellectual introversion. Although excellent for our purposes his personality pattern is without subsidiary interest. The most significant feature of his life style is negative: its lack of social content.

The motives for this attitude spring from an only partly resolved Oedipal complex. The subject shows characteristic symptoms of mingled fear and resentment of authority, especially male authority and the usual accompanying basic syndrome: an ambivalent attitude towards women, in which they are seen both as desired objects and as objects which have betrayed him, and therefore merit his revenge and counterbetrayal.

Time has not allowed us to investigate the subject’s specific womb and breast separation traumas, but the compensatory mechanisms he has evolved are so frequent among so-called intellectuals that we may posit with certainty a troubled period of separation from the maternal breast, possibly due to the exigences of the military career of the subject’s father, and a very early identification of the father, or male, as separator—a role which Dr. Conchis adopted in our experiment. The subject has then never been able to accept the initial loss of oral gratification and maternal protection and this has given him his auto-erotic approach to emotional problems and life in general. The subject also conforms to the Adlerian descriptions of siblingless personality traits.

The subject has preyed sexually and emotionally on a number of young women. His method, according to Dr. Maxwell, is to stress and exhibit his loneliness and unhappiness—in short, to play the little boy in search of the lost mother. He thereby arouses repressed maternal instincts in his victims which he then proceeds to exploit with the semi-incestuous ruthlessness of this type.

In the usual way the subject identifies God with the father figure, aggressively rejecting any belief in him.

He has careerwise continually placed himself in situations of isolation. His solution of his fundamental separation anxiety requires him to cast himself as the rebel and outsider. His unconscious intention in seeking this isolation is to find a justification for his preying on women and also for his withdrawal from any community orientated in directions hostile to his fundamental needs of self-gratification.

The subject’s family, caste and national background has not helped in the resolution of his problems. He comes of a military family, in which there were a large number of taboos resulting from a strongly authoritarian paternal regime. His caste in his own country, that of the professional middle class, Zwiemarm’s technobourgeoisie , is of course marked by an obsessional adherence to such regimes. In a remark to Dr. Maxwell the subject reported that “All through my adolescence I had to lead two lives.” This is a good layman’s description of environment-motivated and finally consciously induced paraschizophrenia—"madness as lubricant,” in Karen Homey’s famous phrase.

On leaving university the subject put himself in the one environment he would not be able to tolerate—that of an expensive private school, the social transmitter of all those paternalistic and authoritarian traits the subject hates. Predictably he then felt himself forced both out of the school and out of his country, and adopted the role of expatriate, though he insured himself against any valid adjustment by once again choosing an environment—the school on Phraxos—which was certain to provide him with the required elements of hostility. His work there is academically barely adequate and his relationship with his colleagues and students poor.

To sum up, he is behaviorally the victim of a repetition compulsion that he has failed to understand. In every environment he looks for those elements that allow him to feel isolated, that allow him to justify his withdrawal from meaningful social responsibilities and relationships and his consequent regression into the infantile state of frustrated self-gratification. At present this autistic regression takes the form mentioned above, of affaires with young women. Although previous attempts at an artistic resolution have apparently failed, we may predict that further such attempts will be made and that there will be the normal cultural life-pattern of the type: excessive respect for iconoclastic avant-garde art, contempt for tradition, paranosic sympathy with fellow rebels and nonconformers in conflict with frequent depressive and persecutory phases in personal and work relationships.