Luke Rheinhart - The Diceman

`For Christ's sake, Luke, don't laugh,' he said loudly. `You're wasting your life these days, throwing it away.'

`Aren't we all?'

`No, we're not. Jake isn't. I'm not. Good men in every profession aren't. You weren't, until a year ago.'

`When I was a child, I spoke like a child -'

`Luke, Luke, listen to me.'

He was an agitated old man.

`Well -?'

`Come back to analysis with me.'

I rubbed the die against the back of my hand and, thinking nothing clearly, answered `No.'

`What's the matter with you?' he said sharply. `Why have you lost faith in the significance of your work? Will you

please try to explain?'

Without premeditation I surged up from my chair like a defensive tackle at the sight of a shot at the quarterback. I strode across the room in front of Dr. Mann to the big window looking along the street toward Central Park.

`I'm bored. I'm bored. I'm sorry but that's about it. I'm sick of lifting unhappy patients up to normal boredom, sick of trivial experiments, empty articles `These are symptoms, not analysis.'

`To experience something for the first time: a first balloon, a visit to a foreign land. A fine fierce fornication with a new woman. The first paycheck, or the surprise of first winning big at the poker table or the racetrack. The exciting isolation of leaning against the wind on the highway hitchhiking, waiting for someone to stop and offer me a lift, perhaps to a town three miles down the road, perhaps to new friendship, perhaps to death. The rich glow I felt when I knew I'd finally written a good paper, made a brilliant analysis or hit a good backhand lob. The excitement of a new philosophy of life. Or a new home. Or my first child. These are what we want from life and now … they seem gone, and both Zen and psychoanalysis seem incapable of bringing them back.'

`You sound like a disillusioned sophomore.'

`The same old new lands, the same old fornication, the same getting and spending, the same drugged, desperate, repetitious faces appearing in the office for analysis, the same effective, meaningless lobs. The same old new philosophies. And the thing I'd really pinned my ego to, psychoanalysis, doesn't seem to be a bit relevant to the problem.'

`It's totally relevant.'

`Because analysis, were it really an the right track, should be able to change me, to change anything and anybody, to eliminate all undesired neurotic symptoms and to do it much more quickly than the two years necessary to produce most measurable changes in people.'

`You're dreaming, Luke. It can't be done. In both theory and practice it's impossible to rid an individual of all his undesired habits, tensions, compulsions, inhibitions, what-have-you.'

`Then maybe the theory and practice are wrong.'

`Undoubtedly.'

`We can perfect plants, alter machines, train animals, why not men?'

`For God's sake!' Dr. Mann tapped his pipe vigorously against a bronze ashtray and glared up at me irritably. `You're dreaming. There are no Utopias: There can be no perfect man. Each of our lives is a finite series of errors, which tend to become rigid and repetitious and necessary. Every man's personal proverb about himself is: "Whatever is, is right, in the best of all possible people."

The whole tendency is … the whole tendency of the human personality is to solidify into the corpse. You don't change corpses. Corpses aren't bubbling with enthusiasm. You spruce them up a bit and make them fit to be looked at.'

`I absolutely agree: psychoanalysis rarely breaks this solidifying flow of personality, it has nothing to offer the man who is bored.'

Dr. Mann harumphed or snorted or something and I moved away from the window to look up at Freud. Freud stared down seriously; he didn't look pleased.

'There must be some other.. other secret [blasphemy!] some other . .. magic potion which would permit certain men to radically alter their lives,' I went on.

`Try astrology, the I Ching, LSD.'

`Freud gave me a taste for finding some philosophical equivalent of LSD, but the effect of Freud's own potion seems

to be wearing off.'

`You're dreaming. You expect too much. A human being, a human personality is the total pattern of the accumulated

limitations and potentials of an individual. You take away all his habits, compulsions and channeled drives, and you

take away him.'

`Then perhaps, perhaps, we ought to do away with "him".'

He paused as if trying to absorb what I'd said and when I turned to face him, he surprised me by booming two quick

cannon shots of smoke out of the side of his mouth.

`Oh Luke you're nibbling on that Goddamn Eastern mysticism again. If I weren't a consistent self, a glutton at the

table, sloppy in dress, bland in speech and rigidly devoted to psychoanalysis, to success, to publication - and all of

these things consistently - I'd never get anything done, and what would I be?'

I didn't answer.

`If I sometimes smoked one way,' he went on, `sometimes another, sometimes not at all, varied the way I dressed, was

nervous, serene, ambitious, lazy, lecherous, gluttonous, ascetic - where would my "self" be? What would I achieve?

It's the way a man chooses to limit himself that determines his character. A man without habits, consistency,

redundancy - and hence boredom - is not human. He's insane.'

With a satisfied and relaxed grunt he placed his pipe down again and smiled pleasantly at me. For some reason I hated

him.

`And accepting these self-defeating limitations is mental health?' I said.

`Mmmmm.'

I stood facing him and felt a strange rush of rage surge through me. I wanted to crush Dr. Mann with a ten-ton block

of concrete. I spat out my next words `We must be wrong. All psychotherapy is a tedious disaster. We must be making

some fundamental, rock-bottom error that poisons all our thinking. Years from now men will look upon our

therapeutic theories and our techniques as we do upon nineteenth-century bloodletting.'

`You're sick, Luke,' he said quietly.

`You and Jake are among the best and as humans you're both nothing.'

He was sitting erect in his chair.

`You're sick,' he said. `And don't feed me any more bull about Zen. I've been watching you for months now. You're not

relaxed. Half the time you seem like 'a giggly schoolboy and the other half like a pompous ass.'

`I'm a therapist and it's clear I, as a human, am a disaster. Physician heal thyself.'

'You've lost faith in the most important profession in the world because of an idealized expectation which even Zen

says is unrealistic. You've gotten bored with the day-to-day miracles of making people slightly better. I don't see

where letting them get slightly worse is much to be proud of.'

'I'm not proud of-'

`Yes you are. You think you've got absolute truth or at least that you alone are seeking it. You're a classic case of

Horney's: the man who comforts himself not with what he achieves but with what he dreams of achieving.'

`I am.'

I stated it flatly: it happened to be true. `But you, Tim, are a classic case of the normal human being, and I'm not impressed.'

He stared at me not puffing, his face Rushed, and then abruptly, like a big balloon bouncing, arose from his chair with a grunt.

`I'm sorry you feel that way,' he said and chugged toward the door.

`There must be a method to change men more radically than we've discovered-'

`Let me know when you find it,' he said.

He stopped at the door and we looked at each other, two alien worlds. His face showed bitter contempt.

`I will,' I said.

`When you find it, just give me a ring. Oxford 4-0300.'

We stood facing each other.

`Goodnight,' I said.

`Goodnight,' he said, turning. `Give my best to Lil in the morning. And Luke,' turning back to me, `try finishing Jake's book. It's always better to criticize a book after you've read it.'