Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
'AND with one bound Jack was free.' Our hero (or, at least, my hero, that is to say, me) has temporarily escaped from the Face at the Window, the Ring in the Night, the Cracking Twig in the Shrubbery. The continuity of the column is assured for a
few more months and I am grateful to all those readers who wrote in to cheer me by detailing the much more horrible experiences they had suffered through unbalanced acquaintances.
After investigating a little more closely the clinical history of my enemy, I am not sure whether I should be reassured or not about his potential danger. According to one of the psychiatrists who has been treating him, such a patient is unlikely to cause any physical harm to anyone but himself. Then, almost as an after- thought, the expert added—'of course, it's possible that he might cause damage to property, such as burning down the house.' There I was worrying away about a punch on the nose or a half-brick in the kidneys when the worst that could happen would be to burn to a crisp in my bed. Journalists always exaggerate.
The more I see of psychiatry at close range the more I think it resembles a kind of mental acupuncture. Half pseudo - science and half bastard-religion, its practioners justify themselves by faith rather than works. Like cancer-quacks, faith-healers, wart-curers and fortune-tellers, they erect an improbable and unprovable super- structure of theory upon a practice which is only successful in some cases at some times. The libido, the id, the ego and the super-ego of today are hypothetical propositions just as much as the sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic humours of the Elizabethans. The acupuncturists achieve occasional miraculous results by sticking pins into the body and the psychiatrists have about equal success probing fingers into the mind. Neither group inspires me with much trust in an emergency when praotical and speedy first-aid is needed. All in all I think I should prefer the St. John's Ambulance Brigade to tie up an artery or to truss a madman.
Psychiatry is a luxury not because only the rich can afford it but because only the rich profit by it. The poor and the stupid are largely beyond its reach and beyond its power. Even a solipsist can hardly imagine that the relationship between a man and his environment will be altered if the man changes his mind. For many hundreds of thousands of people the psychiatrist's couch is the only comfortable piece of furniture they have ever known. The contrast between the warm, quiet, secureconsulting room and the cold, noisy, slum bedsitter is more likely to undermine than to bolster a disturbed personality. There is a world elsewhere—world full of violence, in- justice, hardship, callousness, hypocrisy and credulity. The really sick man is the man who is at home there, who accepts it and adjusts to a- like so many psychiatrists. Analysis, especially in America, is often simply training in con- forthity.
Freud was a rationalist. Many of his followers are just rationalisers. For him, religion was a col- lective neurosis. For them, socialism is an individual delusion. The rat-race is an unchange-
able, built-in feature of human existence like sex, or death, or excretion. The man who resents be- ing a pawn is as 'mentally ill as the man who yearns to be a woman.
The man who refuses to die in a war is as much in need of treatment as the woman who re- fuses to adjust to growing old. An obsession with poverty, starvation and the Bomb is on the same level as an obsession with sweat, saliva and urine. The rebel against authority is only acting out his unconscious rebellion against his father. It is a view of life perfectly suited to a class which sees all its troubles and triumphs in terms of personal relationships.
Analysis is the perfect hobby for the man who has everything. What psychiatrists find hard to conceive is that humanity has other eternal pre- occupations besides birth, copulation and death —the three pastimes of the prosperous. There is also work, food and shelter—the three necessities of the poor. Co-operation is equally a natural instinct of the animal as competition. Probably as many people suffer guilt' and .depression be- cause they are forced to trample their fellows on the way to the top as suffer despair and self- disgust because they cannot live with their wives. It is as important for a marriage guidance coun- sellor to interview the employer as it is for the personnel manager to interview the wife. In terms of human happiness it is more valuable to pull down a slum or export a boatload of wheat than to cure five millionaires of impotence—it may even be cheaper.
We are all much more alike than our vanity will let us believe. Diseases, .both of body and soul, tend to come in epidemics. If we are in- fected, it is because we have created for our- selves an infectious society. No individual can escape from his neurosis by his own treatment alone any more than he can escape in the plague by keeping his own house clean. Day by day, we poison ourselves in the mass—with radioactive fall-out, with petrol and coal fumes, with chemical food and drink, with cigarettes and alcohol, with incessant noise and propaganda. There is no hermitage or underground shelter which can protect the Robinson Crusoe now. The more we protest against the conditions we have created, the healthier and saner we will be- come—however neurotic and unbalanced our protests appear to those who cannot see that obsessions have any objective existence.
No doubt these opinions will seemexplicable- to some in psychological terms. Certainly they seem to have little to do with the programmes which divide our political parties. So many of the restrictions, the deprivations, the encroach- ments on our freedom, which form the basis of the talk of intelligent and concerned people in this country are non-political. Who stands for encouraging mothers to stay in hospitals with young children? Who is for protecting the countryside, for preserving the buildings of the j past, for opening pubs in the afternoon and restaurants at night, for early-hours films on television, for banning motor-cars from the centre' of cities, for building municipal theatres, fort banning deafening motor-bicycles and transistors, for cleaning up the railway stations? The list could be ten times as long and still 'not skim the surface of grievances. These are the sources of neurosis with millions of us. Yet they hardly. exist in the minds of . our planners and our leaders—or our psychiatrists.
Previous page
