VIII

Here's a sheaf of therapy notes, transcribed from shorthand. Q=Therapist. A=Patient.

All notes refer to the case termed AX 544.

March 25: Morning: 3 hours.

Q: Morning, George.

A: Who--me? George? (Lying on cot. Sits.)

Q: (Shrug.) A good name. You picked it.

A: (Nods.) What I wrote... It work?

Q: Work?

A: To get me out of here.

Q: It works like a brick, George, building something. Part of a whole lot of things.

A: All that. A brick.

Q: That was two whole truckloads, George. That was a good job.

A: (Lies down. Seems angered. Watches Q, eyes slitted. Respiration slow.)

Q: (Turns back. Walks to window. Fills pipe slowly. Lights. Turns. A. now looking, off-focus, at ceiling.) It takes a lot of bricks. But it's the only way.

A: Okay.

Q: No in-and-out this time, George. I'm here till lunch time. (Pause.) If you want me.

A: (Shrugs slightly.)

Q: Want to get to work, then?

A: Doing what?

Q: What I have to do mostly is get to know you real well.

A: Asking questions.

Q: That's one way.

A: Goddam major sent me here... he ask too many questions.

Q: (Recognizing warning: don't pry.) Okay. Let's try this, George. (Starts to lay out Wechsler on table. Curious, George gets up.)

The Army Wechsler Mental scale consists of ten types of questions, some requiring good use of language, others, easy mathematical manipulation, still others solving simple picture puzzles. It is a standard intelligence test, not likely to stir up violent reactions.

Q: (More than an hour later, halfway through tests.) You don't talk much, do you, George? What happened: use up all your words writing?

A: (Slipping from passivity to surliness.) Never did talk much... Quit callin' me George.

Q: Okay... want me to use your real name? (It is Bela--a natural taunt for American juveniles.)

A: Hell no...

(On the Wechsler, he scored at a high average level when it came to understanding conventional meanings and ideas. That is, he knew what was expected of him by people around him. But when the test demanded intense concentration and abstract thinking he did less well. He could not apply his mind to a complex idea or situation. I judged that he was equipped to do it, but was unable--at the moment at least--to use the equipment. It seemed tied up in some other task. He was the figurative clam to the letter, the impenetrable valves open a crack, just sufficient to contact what was immediate, direct, simple, touchable.)

Q: (Looking at watch.) Man, you're movin'! You know we're all done with this and we have a whole hour left? You keep on at this rate...

A: Yeah? (Drops passivity for a quick look at Q. Searching for sincerity. Unused to praise.)

Q: Want to try more?

A: (Dully.) Okay. (Here one could sense, rather than hear or see, a difference in the dullness. This differed from the genuinely, unstirred phlegmaticism. This was almost identical, but an act to conceal an increased awareness.)

Q: This is called the Rorschach.

A: (Defensively) Shock?

The Rorschach is a set of ten standardized "inkblots." (You would make such a blot by putting a blob of ink on paper, folding it in two through the blot, pressing the folded paper flat and then opening it up. The blot would be irregular in shape but identical right and left.) To the ten standard Rorschach cards, most people react in certain conventional ways. They see humans or animals or insects or plant life. They see people in traditional poses or action, such as eating, talking, dancing, walking, laughing. These usual reactions are offered spontaneously at sight. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to see Rorschach blots. There is merely approach to or departure from statistical norms.

Q: (Chuckles.) Not "shock." Rorschach. Name of the guy invented them. Just look at 'em one by one and tell me what you see, or what they look like or remind you of.

A: (For the impact second, and for the first time, eyes wide and completely alert. Scansion swift, up, down, across. Then lids lower again to usual hooded attitude; subsequent gaze steady and dull. This particular card usually seen by men his age as two figures dancing around an overgrown tree.) This is like two guys mashing an animal, pulling on it or maybe choking it. It didn't bleed yet but it will. There's the animal's hole. (Pointing to a red spot on the card.)

Q: (Impulsively using a technique applicable to another test entirely.) Why are they doing that?

A: (Instantly withdrawing; concealing; secretive.) They just doing it.

Q: (Another card, oftenest seen as two animals crawling up a hill. ) How about this?

A: (Instant response.) That's a tit. Two dragons wanted it but they spoiled it, they tore it all up. Now they are mad, they are flying at it.

Q: Try this. (Usually seen as a large butterfly.)

A: It's like animals pulling apart somebody's body. Vicious animals. There's the girl's spine and her hole. She's cut in half. It's red inside. (Respiration deeper perhaps but slow; eyes hooded; nostrils repeatedly dilated.)

Q: This one?

A: Oh, that's somebody built a double deadfall, bam, it got two animals, chucks maybe or possum, both at once, mashed.

Q: And this?

A: A woman's belly bust open. It was a baby in it bust it. But the baby bust open too, see it there?

Q: (Gathers up the cards. A. watches absorbedly.)

A: (As if he had been thinking about it all this time.) Phil...?

Q: ?

A: You could call me George if you want.

Q: Anything you say... we came a long way today. You're doing real good now. You want to try some more; more kinds, sometime soon? Not now, it's lunch already.

A: (Dully.) Okay.

Q: (Raps for guard.)

End session.

Comments: George has a strange quality about him I call inaccurately non-guilt. It is inaccurate because he is completely aware of good and evil as other people judge them, but he seems burdened not at all by that sense of punishment earned which afflicts most people in a Judo-Christian matrix like ours. An extreme example is the character described from Biblical times right up to the present, who when injured or thrust into misery concludes instantly that this is punishment for a transgression, known or unknown. The cry, "What have I done to deserve this?" seems to mean, "I have done nothing to deserve this!"; actually it means, in many or most cases, "For which of my sins am I being punished?"

In George's case I feel--almost intuitively--that there is in him no conviction of quid pro quo, punishment for crime. Punishment he understands, other people's attitudes toward crime he understands. But he simply seems not to share the attitude. A trivial analogy would be two persons, one dedicated to and transported by music, one completely tone-deaf and arhythmic. The latter would recognize that the former was experiencing something, but could not know what it was nor how it felt. George seems in that sense to be "tone-deaf" to a whole spectrum of commonly-shared feelings--empathy for a dying animal, squeamishness in regard to pain, blood, injury, or injustice: a protective coating built up over the years and penetrated apparently only when he saw the casualties. Certainly a great deal of this could be explained by his execrable childhood, where punishment descended without rhyme or reason, while childish breaches of conduct like absence at meals or at night, stealing, impertinence, and disobedience were as often as not overlooked. Punishment did not necessarily follow crime in George's cosmos, yet punishment inevitably came, crime or no.

I have seen a great many prisoners who, for all their griping about a raw deal, actually felt that they were fairly caught and justly punished. A great many felt, or said they felt, that the punishment was too great; few indeed felt that they should not be punished at all. Even some innocent prisoners--innocent, that is, of the crime for which they are convicted--have a notion that they are paying off for something. But George's feeling about the long imprisonment which followed his attack on the major was essentially what mine would be if, in crossing a field, my body broke through and fell into an immense labyrinthine cave. I don't think I would feel I deserved it. I would want to find a way out, and if I could not, but met a man there who convinced me he knew the way, I would follow. And if I discovered, as we went along, that it would be not hours nor days, but weeks and even months before we emerged, I think I would feel about the whole thing as George was feeling now.

How could such a creature as George exist for any appreciable time in a modern society? How, if he has so little concept of law and of property, of reciprocity and consequence, could he stay out of trouble for even a day?

It becomes less of a mystery as one thinks it through. George had drifted to either of two environmental poles--the complete license of the outdoors, where laws are impartial and clearly understood, be they laws of gravity or the amount of whip yielded by a birch sapling; or the other pole, the world of the orphanage and the Army, where rigid legalisms guided one's way to and fro with the fixity of a corral and chutes. A cow may travel parallel with the fence; she may not travel at right angles and into the fence. George had taken to heart the army adage, "Do what you're told and never volunteer." And the runways were painless to travel and impalpable to the obedient, who without question or conscious decision slept here, washed there, ate yonder, and waited.

The area which as yet completely baffles me is the sexual one. Al Williams referred to George's sexual attitude as "wholesome"; I denied it and still can't say why. Al said that because, as George so lucidly explains it in his extraordinary manuscript, George is without shame, false modesty, insecurity or hypocrisy. He has plodded along a path of unassailable logic and satisfied himself with certain truths that mankind, categorically, is unable to accept subjectively: that erection, orgasm and ejaculation are as possible to a rabbit as a man and in man, no more noble; that these phenomena need not be nurtured because they are (given a chance) automatic and unstoppable; and if it is senseless to nurture them, it is even more so to suppress them. This Al calls wholesome; well, to use George's own simile, it is precisely as wholesome as a rabbit's. The great complications of sex, which run in tides and stain man's thoughts, speech and works, are incomprehensible to George and, until he turns to look, out of Al's field of view.

The conclusion that the extraordinary bestiality of George's Rorschach reactions is sexual in nature seems at first a foregone conclusion. Extraordinary is hardly the word for it; I have conducted over a thousand Rorschachs and have read everything I could find on the technique and interpretation of the device, and never have I heard of anything like George's consistent, bloody, murderous pictorializations. Not in Rorschachs--but yes, yes indeed in deep psychoanalysis. But it is invariably found profoundly hidden, and emerges slowly and almost never directly, but symbolically.

According to George's biography, Anna is the only woman he ever knew--and I believe it. What little he says about their relationship is unclear. She apparently was the instigator; George says more than once that he did what she wanted. He then makes obscure reference to his doing what he wanted; that she tried to stop him and then permitted it, feeling safe with him.

Safe with him!

What is safe with him? Who?

Me?

Well... we'll have to work some more, learn some more. Fantasies of violence sometimes symbolize sex; sexual symbols (and sexual acts) often symbolize and express violence. Somewhere in this area may be theoretical room for the incredibly violent, often genital, yet virtually asexual fantasies of George's Rorschach.