IX

Summary: April 3:

Two more long sessions with George...

(...it is interesting to inject here the reminder that Sergeant Outerbridge was still on the struggling staff of an overcrowded, under equipped military neuropsychiatric hospital, carrying a tremendous load, working impossible hours. The fact that he had found six of them for George, and the lack of complaint from Col. Williams, attest to his devotion and superhuman energy.)

...have brought us through motor coordination tests, the house drawing, the human figure drawing, and the Thematic Apperception.

The motor coordination was the first thing we tackled after the harrowing experience of the Rorschach. It consisted of his copying eight different geometric figures composed of circles, squares, wavy lines and dots. He did them precisely, with care and planning, making corrections to improve them. It appeared that despite a compulsively rigid manner of performing, his motor control was in good order and not overrun easily by his deeper, guarded (frightened?) feelings. Watching him do it, I felt I was watching a pencil-and-paper re-enactment of each new experience he had ever had in controlled circumstances--the orphanage, the Army bases. He sought the channels between fences; he eagerly searched for the areas in which he might, once they were known, run freely without having to think. It was easy to see how he had been able to hold down two years and more of Army motor mechanics, working much of the time alone, and free to use his hands.

Reassured somewhat, I ventured a little closer to the emotional edge, always uncertain where it might begin to crumble under our feet. I asked him to draw a house.

He drew a traditional house with a formal, landscaped garden, in the artistic style of an anxious six-year old. Each window was given twenty or more panes; the flower-beds and three trees were formed by forceful, tight, tiny scrawlings in contrast to the tenuous thin lines framing the larger structure of the house. Two things stood out as grotesque: the garden he placed in midair above the first story and sprawling out into the upper wall of the house, and the roof was simply cut out of his drawing by the top of the paper.

It was hardly a balanced picture. It showed poor perspective and poor planning. It suggested that he could not be counted upon for responsible handling of everyday adult reality. He ignored the fundamentals, preoccupied with his private details. He could manage in compulsive fashion if his life were kept simple, but he might otherwise go to pieces.

I drew a deep breath (silently) and told him to draw a human figure. I said a human figure, but he proceeded to draw a man and a woman, hurriedly, carelessly, as if, having made the outlines, he could not wait to blacken them in, which he did with a heavy hand: filled-in black legs, arms, torsos right up to the chin, then a round black hat on the woman, a square black hat on the man, close over their eyes. Cover up, cover up... anxiety.

He stopped and I said, "Is that all?"

To the best of my ability I said it casually and neutrally, but the heavy eaves of his eyes flicked up and he scanned my face, as avidly, for a second, as he had conned the ink-blots. There was a flicker of frown between his brows. "Can I do it over?"

"Sure."

He put his pencil to the paper, held it still, and flashed me that look again. If I believed in telepathy, which emphatically I do not, I would have testified to the receipt of an urgent, "Can I tell?" Then he set to work.

I thought, as I watched him, how the human psyche, especially the ill one, cries out for contact and communication. George's partial alexia--the inability to use the spoken word while he could write with such facility--was a phenomenon I had not seen before although I had heard of it. But I was thinking of all the other ways a sick soul reaches out... how the hand of a lonesome person remains outstretched after a handshake, deserted and seeking; how the eyes can express terror alone out of the almost sleeping face of a catatonic; how stern control of impending tears is betrayed by the puckering of the chin. I was convinced by now that George was unaware of anything unwell or odd about himself; yet I was conscious of a thing within him, alive and fully conscious of itself and of his affliction. In that momentary glance, like a separate, sentient being which had borrowed his eyes, it pleaded, "Can I tell? I know. I know. Let me tell. "

George was drawing a male and a female.

They were--pears? I would not lean closer, and divert him; I stayed where I was and peered.

Nude. Head and shoulders together, a single sharp narrow curve. A mere suggestion of arms, perhaps held behind them. Narrow chests, the breasts of the woman indicated with a mere W-shaped zigzag. Huge, pregnant-seeming bellies, and an indeterminate squiggle for legs and feet. Just like two pears with dot-dot faces on their high narrow top-ends, and all else concentrated into that full round bulge.

Leaning very close, holding his pencil with great care, flaring his strong nostrils again and again, he drew meticulous nipples on the careless W of the breasts, a perfectly round, very black navel, an identical opening down at the bottom. Then he donated another perfect circle to the man for a navel.

He put down the pencil and shoved the paper across to me. He had forgotten altogether to draw sex organs for the male. I made no comment except to say that was fine, and my usual comment about how well he was doing. That young man was so starved for praise that it disappeared within him on contact, never to be heard from again.

"You can make all sorts of animals that way," he said suddenly, one of the few times he ever volunteered anything. He drew a whole row of the pear shapes, then on one he put long ears--rabbit--on another short spike ears and a stringy tail--possum--round ears and a thick ringed tail--racoon--sharp ears, whiskers and a thinner tail--cat--and so on, until he had eight different cartoon animals. "See?" he all but crowed. He even grinned for a second; I wished he would do that more often. A somber lad, altogether.

I began to rise, and then sat down again to watch him return to the drawing.

On each and every animal--they were all drawn in the same pose, sitting down, facing forward, with their round fat bellies thrust out--he was carefully drawing his small bold circular navels.

It was time to go. I collected the papers and hammered on the door for the guard.

April 9:

I have just returned from an hour and a half on Thematic Apperception. And if I found it possible to laugh at the ludicrous defenses a psyche can put up, I'd roar.

George's alexia, his difficulties with the spoken word, disappeared like magic for the Thematic Apperception, and when I reasoned out why, I marveled.

The test is simply a series of pictures, the kind of thing one sees in magazine illustrations, but carefully chosen to present a number of pivotal and interpersonal situations. For example, one might be a picture of a girl standing in the open door of a cabin. One patient says she is going out; one that she is going in; another that she has been standing there all day waiting for someone. On occasion a tremendous amount of contributory detail comes tumbling out: the girl's name, the presence or absence of persons in the cabin behind her, and their impending actions; sometimes the comb in her hair or her "new shoe" will be the central factor. Obviously these spur-of-the-moment stories and anecdotes relate to the patient. Frequently they serve as surrogate solutions to a patient's own problems, solutions the patient dare not face personally, as for example a girl who is in an agony of indecision about leaving home might react to the picture with a tale of a girl who left and was horribly murdered, or a girl who did not leave and got so mad she killed her father.

It came to me, listening to George incredibly chattering on and on over the pictures, that his verbal censor sat upon the subject of himself. As he remarked in his biography, there is always likely to be someone listening who doesn't hear right and will get you wrong. It would seem that he was afraid to be heard aright; that is, his mouth might give something away when he wasn't looking. And give away what? Possibly some anecdotes for which he feared he might get punished (though I am morally certain he feels no guilt) but much more likely he wished to conceal feelings and conclusions and observations which would attract the attention and derision of other people. Incapable of evaluating like other people, he was incapable of knowing before he spoke the effect his words might have.

But in the face of Thematic Apperception, his censor gave one relieved sigh and went to sleep. For it was--it must have been--convinced that as long as George talked within the four corners of a picture, he could not talk about himself!

He talked about himself--fluently, boldly, and never knew it. And the peak of the ludicrous (if one could laugh), came when amongst the pictures appeared a white blank card with a border around it--a picture for the patient to make up himself and talk about. And when George came to it his censor awoke and restored to him his soft growling slur: "A blank one?... nothing. It would probably be about myself. No story."

But the ones about other people?... these are verbatim.

A boy and a woman standing in a room: "The kid used to do a lot of stuff, he got sent away. He was away so long him and his mother don't hardly know what they look like. He just come back. In a minute she is going to put out her arms and he will run to her and she will squeeze him real hard but the front of her dress is not soft. It's full of rocks. And it isn't his mother but somebody dressed up in the mother's clothes is going to steal the money."

A boy standing by a window. A shotgun leaning against the wall. "Let's say a kid is in a shack. A window and shotgun there. He has been reading up on doctor books, operations and all. His father is going to get operated on. He is going to go to the hospital and stand there and tell that doctor if he makes a mistake he will blow his head off. But the gun goes off and kills the father."

A man bestowing a kiss on the forehead of a silverhaired lady. "A guy is kissing his mother on the forehead. Likes her a lot. Thought about her a lot and did everything she wanted and give her a kiss like that every night or so. I could go on further but--she died. The guy went all to pieces. He wanted to go to the grave and fix it all up with flowers. He always felt better if he was around her grave. That's why I would like to get out of here. No one takes care of my mother's grave and father's grave too. I always did."

(Interesting wish(guilt?)-fantasy; he has never seen his father's grave.)

A man lying asleep on a grassy bank. "I'd say probably somebody beat this guy up. Killed him. He's going to drag his body out of the way so no one would see. Behind some tanks or something. He probably killed to get his money. He cut him too. Then he went off in the woods and I guess he will do it again sometime in some other place."

Boys swimming in an "ole s'wimmin' hole." "Oh, well one of those kids got a bad leg and it starts to bleed, and so one of the other kids comes up to see and the kid that is hurt starts to scream and the other kid can't stand that so he pushes him under and that ends that. Then the other kid comes out of the water. He was lost before but now he knows where he is."

Bland and unemphasized, cheerful and inventive, George talked on and on: theft, murder, mayhem, mother-death, father-death, father-murder; drownings, stabbings, operations. No seduction, rape, adultery. No (in in the conventional sense) happiness, though George, in most instances, seemed far from sad. The dying mothers sobered him a little.

Cackle College O-R

Thalamus, Ore. April 9

Dear Phil:

You sent your report on your Man in the Iron Mask with your usual deft timing, just when I was about to utter a long-range howl about it.

I will concede that it is all very fascinating, and that you were right in intuiting--if it was intuition--that there was a good deal more to that young man than met the eye. But Phil--I have to tell you, word got back to me about that little occasion you had on your third floor. A violent case should not have been put there where he had to double up with another patient. Even a potentially violent one. Yet you put him there because you had no free solitaries on the fourth floor, right?

Right.

And you were away at the time. Sick leave! Phil--are you all right?... but all the same, you weren't there.

Nothing came of it this time but there can be others; there will. Now I'm way on your side about your George, and you've dredged up a whole mess of internal garbage, and he's sicker than I thought he was. But--get him out of there.

To end on a different note, thanks for sending George's drawings along with the report. Very interesting, as my dear old mother used to say. (She used to say it at art galleries, every time. It's something to say, and it hurts no one's feeling no matter what.) But what interested me even more, my head-shrinking friend, is your identification of all those succulent shapes as pears.

Granted we all have our preoccupations... but to me the little animal on the end is nothing in the world but a titmouse.

Pears indeed. You want the name of a good doctor? Or are you becoming a vegetarian?

Al

Manor Depressive, O-R

Dementia, Cal. April 11

Dear Al:

It might seem small of me to pull rank on you, and it's damn rude, I know, to quote a guy's compliment back at him; but you yourself once said that professionally I outrank you six ways from Sunday, or some such. And, Al, it is my considered opinion that our George is potentially more dangerous than anything else in the place.

I'll forestall your demand: can I prove it? by conceding that I can't. I just know, that's all. Nobody could boil off the stuff he does without being loaded and armed, and if he goes bang, I want it to be in top security.

Now it could be that what he's got is dangerous like a sword and not like a gun or a bomb. Thing is, I don't know yet what kind of thing it might be. I will, and I think soon; but until I do I'd as soon turn a Bengal tiger loose in the halls.

Leave me commit the further enormity of reminding you that I have been right so far.

They are so pears. But I admit it is subject to spelling changes.

You could be right.

Phil.

P. S. No, damn you, I wasn't sick. I confess I went to the Big Town and credentialed myself into the cell under the library where they keep the really sensatonal doity books. Just to irritate you, I enclose my notes.

P. O.

A Sheaf of handwritten notes on yellow paper.

von Krafft-Ebing, the old peeper... walking around the hind end of the nineteenth century, tattling. Had no use for Freud. By him, everything "hereditary taint." "Bore out his fixed idea that there are certain things nice people don't do. But indefatigable researcher all the same so shaddup keep yr prejudices to yrsif.

LUST-MURDER

Lust potentiated as cruelty, murderous lust extending to anthropophagy. Boy what a litry style von K-E had... lookit:

"1827. Leger, vine-dresser, aged twenty-four. From youth moody, silent, shy of people. He started out in search of a situation. Wandering about eight days in the forest he there caught a girl twelve years old, violated her, mutilated her genitals, tore out her heart, ate of it, drank the blood, and buried the remains. Arrested, at first he lied, but finally confessed his crime with cynical cold-bloodedness. He listened to his sentence of death with indifference and was executed. At the post mortem examination, Esquirol [who he? Famous nineteenth century psychiatrist--ed.] found morbid adhesions' between the cerebral membranes and the brain.

"Vincenz Verzeni, born in 1849 in Spain; since Jan. 11, 1872, in prison; was accused

(1) of an attempt to strangle his nurse Marianne, four years ago, while she lay sick in bed;

(2) of a similar attempt on a married woman, Arsuffi, aged twenty-seven; (3) of an attempt to strangle a married woman, Gala, by grasping her throat while kneeling on her abdomen; (4) on suspicion of the following murders:...

[Well, most of these don't matter, but here's one:]

"In December a fourteen-year-old girl, Johanna Motta, set out for a neighboring village between seven and eight o'clock in the morning. As she did not return, her master set out to find her, and discovered her body near the village, lying in a path in the fields. The corpse was frightfully mutilated with numerous wounds... The nakedness of the body and erosions on the thighs made it seem probable that there had been an attempt at rape; the mouth filled with earth, pointed to suffocation. In the neighborhood of the body, under a pile of straw were found a portion of flesh torn from the right calf and pieces of clothing. The perpetrator of the deed remained undiscovered.

"When caught, Verzeni confessed to this and many other murders. He was then twenty-two years old, bullnecked... [Oh-oh. Here we go on the Krafft-Ebing hobby-horse]... as seemed probable, Verzeni had a bad ancestry--two uncles were cretins, a third, microcephalic... The father showed traces of pellagrous degeneration... his family was bigoted and low-minded [!]... there was nothing in his past that pointed to mental disease, but his character was peculiar."

[He'd probably describe the Marquis de Sade as downright odd.] "...Verzeni was silent and inclined to be solitary... admitted the murders gave him an indescribably pleasant (lustful) feeling, which was accompanied by erection and ejaculation. As soon as he had grasped his victim by the neck, sexual sensations were experienced. It was entirely the same to him, with reference to these sensations, whether the women were old, young, ugly, or beautiful. Usually simply choking them had satisfied him.

"But in the case of the girl, Johanna Motta, and, it was discovered later, other women, he had done more. The abrasions of the skin on Johanna's thigh were caused by his teeth whilst sucking her blood in most intense, lustful pleasure.

"These statements of this modern [to Krafft-Ebing, modern, that is] vampire seem to rest on truth. Normal sexual impulses seem to have remained foreign to him. Two sweethearts that he had, he was satisfied to look at; it was very strange to him that he had no inclination to strangle them or press their hands, but he had not had the same pleasure with them as with his victims.

"Verzeni stated in his confession, 'I had an unspeakable delight in strangling women... It was even a pleasure only to smell female clothing... I took great delight in drinking Motta's blood. It also gave me the greatest pleasure to pull the hairpins out of the hair of my victims... after the commission of the deeds I was satisfied and felt well. It never occurred to me to touch or look at the genitals or such things. It satisfied me to seize the women by the neck and suck their blood. To this very day I am ignorant of how a woman is formed. During the strangling and after it, I pressed myself on the entire body without thinking of one part more than another.' "

[Backing off from the sheer horror of it, it strikes one how Verzeni's indifference to his genitals, his failure to think of a woman's body as having parts and the sucking of blood--all child-like, infantile, like a wildly hungry baby.]

And a response:

Base Hospital HQ

Office of the Administrator O-R

Portland, Ore. April 12

Phil:

All right, I'll stand by my compliment since I meant it, at least at the time. I'll give you an indefinite but short extension in the matter; so whatever you plan to do about it you'd better do. Because the next time I mention it there will be no arguments.

A. W.

P. S. Your library notes range all the way from distasteful to disgusting, and fail to make your case.