The Magus, A Revised Version (92 page)

‘
Well, so, Mr Urfe, you will have guessed our secret by now. We are an international group of psychologists, which I have the honour, by reason of seniority simply
’
–
two or three shook their heads in disagreement
–
‘
to lead. For various reasons the path of research in which we are all especially interested requires us to have subjects that are not volunteers, that are not even aware that they are subjects of an experiment. We are by no means united in our theories of behaviour, in our different schools, but we are united in considering the nature of the experiment is such that it is better that the subject should not, even at its conclusion, be informed of its purpose. Though I am sure that you will
–
when you can recollect in tranquillity
–
find yourself able to deduce at least part of our causes from our effects.
’
There were smiles all round.
‘
N
ow. We have had you, these last
three days, under deep narcosis and the material we have obtained from you has proved most valuable, most valuable indeed, and we therefore wish first of all to show our appreciation of the normality you have shown in all the peculiar mazes through which we have made you run.
’

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 round and gave them a double V-sign. It evidently bewildered the old man, because he turned and bent 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, Doctor 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.
‘
Pedica
b
o ego vos et irrumabo, Aureli patheci
et cinaedi Furi?
’

Lily:
‘
Precisely.
’

Wimmel-Jorgcnsen 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 com
e without warning. Or had it? I
thought fast. They had needed my gesture to cue their dialogue; and it happened to be one that 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 clapped, 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 Doctor 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 explained, that the requirements of good clinical practice forbid us to make such an excuse. I now 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 greying 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 lifestyle is negative: its lack of social content.

‘
The motives for this attitude springs 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 havebetrayed him, and therefore merit his revenge and counter-betrayal.

‘
Time has not allowed us to investigate the subject
’
s specific womb and breast separation traumas, but the compensatory mechanisms he had 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 Doctor 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 Doctor 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 have 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,
Zwiemann
’
s
technohourgeoisie,
is of course marked by an ob
sessional adherence to such regimes. In a remark to Doctor
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 para-schizophrenia
–
“
madness as lubricant
”
, in Karen Horney
’
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 relation
ship with his colleagues and students poor.

‘
To sum up, he is behaviourally 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 non-con-formers in conflict with frequent and depressive and persecutory phases in personal and work relationships.

‘
As Doctor Conchis has observed in his
The Midcentury Pre
dicament:
“
The rebel with no specific gift for rebellion is destined to become the drone; and even this metaphor is inexact, since the drone has at least a small chance of fecundating the queen, whereas the human rebel-drone is deprived even of that small chance and may finally see himself as totally sterile, lacking not only the brilliant life-success of the queens but even
the humble satisfactions of the workers in the human hive. Such a personality is reduced to mere wax, a mere receiver of impressions ; and this condition is the very negation of the basic drive in him
–
to rebel. It is no wonder that in middle age many such failed rebels, rebels turned selfconscious drones, aware of their susceptibility to intellectual vogues, adopt a mask of cynicism that cannot hide their more or less paranoiac sense of having been betrayed by life.
”
’

While she had been speaking the others at the table listened in their various ways, some looking at her, others sunk in contemplation of the table. Lily was one of the most attentive. The
‘
students
’
scribbled notes. I spent all my time staring at the woman, who read, and never once looked at me. I felt full of spleen, of hatred of all of them. There was some truth in what she was saying. But I knew nothing could justify such a public analysis, even if it were true; just as nothing could justify Lily
’
s behaviour
–
because most of the
‘
material
’
this analysis was based on must have come from her. I stared at her, but she would not look up. I knew who had written the report. There were too many echoes of Conchis. I was not misled by the new mask. He was still the master of ceremonies, the man behind it all; at web-centre.

The American woman sipped water from a glass. There was silence; evidently the report was not finished. She began to read on.

‘
There are two appendices, or footnotes. One comes from Professor Ciardi, and is as follows:

‘
I dissent from the view that the subject is without significance outside the matter of our experiment. In my view one may anticipate in twenty years
’
time a period of considerable and today almost unimaginable prosperity in the West. I repeat my assertion that the threat of a nuclear catastrophe will have a healthy effect on Western Europe and America. It will firstly stimulate economic production; it will secondly ensure that there is peace; it will thirdly provide a constant sense of real danger behind every moment of living, which was in my opinion missing before the last war and so contributed to it. Although this threat of war
may do something to counteract
the otherwise dominating role that the female sex must play in a peacetime society dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure, I predict that breast-fixated men like the subject will become the norm. We are entering an amoral and permissive era in which self-gratification in the form of high wages and a wide range of consumer goods obtained and obtainable against a background of apparently imminent universal doom will be available, if not to all, then to an increasingly large majority. In such an age the characteristic personality type must inevitably become auto-erotic and, clinically, autopsychotic. Such a person will be for economic reasons isolated, as for personal ones the subject is today, from direct contact with the evils of human life, such as starvation, poverty, inadequate living conditions, and the rest.
Western
homo sapiens
will become
homo solitarius.
Though I
have little sympathy as a fellow human being for the subject, his predicament interests me as a social psychologist, since he has developed precisely as I would expect a man of moderate intelligence but little analytical power, and virtually no science, to develop in our age. If nothing else he proves the total inadequacy of the confused value judgments and pseudo-statements of art to equip modern man for his evolutionary role.
’