The Winston Affair (9 page)

Now he studied Kaufman in terms of two men, Lieutenant Winston and Colonel Burton. He deliberately attempted to see Kaufman as a Jew, but his frame of reference was insufficient. He could not make any reliable connection between Kaufman and the Jews in his company, nor could he reliably separate Kaufman from other army doctors he had been in contact with.

Kaufman was of medium height. He was dark, with gray eyes. He had a round face that was badly scarred from a youthful acne, a flat nose, full lips, and a New York City inflection in his speech. He was somewhere in his middle forties. He was neither friendly nor unfriendly, and he was on his guard. He also impressed Barney Adams with the fact that he was a very busy man.

Of the Winston case, he observed briefly, “That's over and done with, so far as I am concerned. It's been taken out of my hands, Captain. I am not interested, and I have no desire to discuss it.” As he spoke, he was glancing through the papers on his desk. He signed two documents and put them into a box labeled
Outgoing
.

Then, pointing his pen at Adams, he said, “There's small virtue in thoroughness, Captain. No one will commend you for it. You tell me that you have to defend Winston. Good. That's your job. I have finished with mine, so far as Winston is concerned. I have over a hundred patients to see today. I don't know what you have to do.”

“Very little,” Adams replied softly, “and I am afraid nothing of the importance of having to see sick people and help them.”

Back at his papers, Kaufman looked up sharply. He studied the ribbons Barney Adams wore and asked about his wounds.

“I was very lucky. A grenade exploded behind me, and I got five pieces in my shoulders.”

“There's all kinds of luck. Why did you come here?” he asked bluntly.

“That's too long a story to tell now.”

“And how do you think I can help you?”

“Well—I suppose the core of it is this. I want to know whether Charles Winston is insane.” Then he told Kaufman about the incident in the prison the day before. “I'm asking you because it seems to me that you are in the best position to know. You admitted Winston to your ward. You examined him. You treated him.”

Kaufman did not reply at once. He watched Adams thoughtfully for a long moment before he said, “Do you think he was shamming?”

“I don't know. I felt it was too much like a literary notion of how an insane man would act.”

“You can put your mind to rest, Captain. Winston is an incurable psychopath. In other words, he's insane. Not only that, but his condition is progressive, with very little hope for even a temporary remission.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that as a personality, Winston is disintegrating. He is very quickly losing touch with all reality. How can I put that to you? His consciousness—his soul, if you will have it that way and admit to a soul in such a man—is turning in upon itself, shortening its lines of defense in a desperate search for survival. But in that search he will be destroyed.”

“Physically?”

“No—he won't die. Not yet. Unless he kills himself—which is not unlikely. But as an inhabitant of our world, he will die.”

“I'm afraid I don't follow you,” Adams said.

“Do you know much about insanity, Captain?”

“Almost nothing.”

“That's honest, and if most physicians were equally honest, they would admit to the same thing. The science of the mind is very young, very new, very uncertain of its conclusions. Even our terminology is awkward and unspecific. Winston is suffering from what we classify as dementia paranoides. One might think of this particular case as a formal or almost classical paranoides. Paranoia is a generic term for a whole group of mental disease, but Winston's case is specific and unmistakable.”

“And is this organic? Was Winston born with this?” Adams asked.

Kaufman shrugged. “That's something we can't answer with certainty yet. My own opinion is no. My belief is that what we call the ‘paranoid personality' comes into being in very early childhood, as a result of the child's environment. Of course, such a thing is not a psychosis—or, insanity, as you might say. It's a neurotic personality pattern which establishes the groundwork for later development. Nor does it by any means always lead to a psychotic, state or insanity, with consequent personality disintegration. The paranoid personality is all too common in every walk of life, and the grief and heartache it brings to mankind is almost beyond calculation. But by far the greatest number of such personalities live out their entire lives without ever being committed to an institution.”

Adams was intrigued, wholly captivated. “Could you describe such a personality to me?” he asked. “I mean in general terms.”

Kaufman smiled and leaned back in his chair. “Only if you accept what I say without argument and accept what you don't understand without explanation.”

“I'll try, sir.”

“All right. We'll begin with a hypothetical norm. I specify hypothetical because we have no real notion of the normal man as an abstraction. We can only establish a norm out of our own torn and distorted world, and in a general sense we hold that a man who can live in this world, face its realities and cope with them sensibly is a normal human being. That's a loose and amorphous definition, but it's the best we have at the moment. Now, within this situation, a man defends himself against real dangers because he is afraid of real dangers. If he is to survive, he must take care of himself. Do you follow me?”

Adams nodded. “So far—yes. No arguments.”

“Now—on the question of the neurotic, a hell of a damn lot has been written. But the simplest approach is to think of the neurotic as a person who compulsively defends himself against unreal dangers—that is, against dangers that do not exist. The mechanism of defense is a natural mechanism; it is the perception of danger that has gone awry. The most frequent, timeworn example is that of the old maid who looks under the bed for a man each night before going to sleep. The old saw is that she hopes to find a man there, but actually she doesn't. She has a great fear of men—one of the reasons why she is a spinster. And since this fear is based on no reality—she would live a more fruitful life with a man than without one—it is part of a neurotic pattern. Her looking under the bed is compulsive. She knows by reason and experience that she won't find a man there, but she cannot resist the force of her unreal fear.

“Of course this is a vulgar simplification of a profound and complex pattern of mental organization.”

“But she isn't insane?” Adams asked.

“By no means. She is still in touch with reality. All neurotics are. She knows there is no one under the bed. She recalls experiences. And she is still able to function, in spite of her fears. She simply goes through a compulsive neurotic pattern, and is even able to be somewhat amused at her own nonsensical behavior. But if she should become hysterical upon entering the room, if she should be unable to look under the bed because she knows the man is actually there, and if she sees the man where he is not—well, at that point her ability to deal with the nonexistent danger is collapsing; her neurotic organization of defenses is breaking down, and she is passing into the psychotic state. Of course, this is not a case we are discussing, but a bit of folklore, and therefore it has no clinical validity.”

“But even as folklore,” Adams said, “are you describing a paranoid personality?”

“Oh, no—far from it. Just from what you have read or heard, Captain, how would you describe a paranoiac?”

“Well—I suppose the way anyone else would, delusions of grandeur, a persecution complex—”

“Yes. That underlines the fact, but it tells us too little. As in all neuroses, your paranoid personality is motivated by fear. He is afraid of people—all people. Somehow or other, the circumstances of his childhood combine to set up a very deep belief that humanity is committed to his destruction.”

“Does he know this?”

“Of course that question is basic, isn't it? And the answer is that he does not know it; it is buried too deep in his consciousness. It compels him, directs him, guides him, but for every neurotic action he takes, he must devise some sort of rationalization in terms of reality. Such people are suspicious. They calculate and inhibit every action because they are always afraid of placing themselves in the power of another. They are not capable of love in any full sense; love is dangerous; they fear it. They can make relationships with superiors, out of fear, or with inferiors, out of the security of power, but they can form no deep friendships in the full sense of the word. They are lonely men. For them, war is always. It never ends. And very often, indeed most often, they organize their defense against these neurotic fears of nonexistent dangers in two patterns: total and degrading submissiveness or a compulsive, terrible drive for power. Curiously, these two seemingly opposite patterns of defense are often found in the same person—as, for example, the sergeant who cringes and crawls before his platoon commander but becomes a monster of a tyrant over his own men. You've met that type?”

Adams nodded.

“They mix in the same man. Hitler and Mussolini are the two most notorious paranoiacs of our time—but before he had power, Hitler was a pleader and a whiner.”

“Would you call them insane?”

Kaufman thought about this for a moment, then shook his head. “No—not in the sense that Winston is insane. You could say that Hitler and Mussolini are insane in a social sense not in a clinical sense. In Winston's case, there is a qualitative change that has taken place. From what Winston was able to tell me, there were no memories that did not suggest paranoia. I say suggest, because there was less than a week in which I could examine him. He had an unhappy, lonely childhood. He married a woman who terrified him, a woman he hates and fears, and with whom he has not had intercourse for sixteen years. His three sons apparently treat him with a mixture of contempt and pity. He feared them and envied them, and tried to prove himself and defend himself with this commission. In the warehouse where he worked, he was a petty tyrant—but he lived in day-to-day fear of being fired. After Pearl Harbor, he began to create a daydream, a fantasy of winning the war singlehanded, through his own talent and personality. At first, it was only a fantasy.”

“In other words, at this point he was not insane.”

“By no means insane. He was a neurotic, an intensely disturbed man with a paranoid personality, but he was not psychotic.”

“Could you have recognized the possibility of insanity if you had examined him then, Major?”

“I don't know. I would like to think that I could have, but I don't know.”

“Was the insanity inevitable?” Adams asked.

“I don't know that either. In Winston's case, I would think so, but I can't be sure.”

“Major Kensington, the British medical officer at Bachree, told me that there was no doubt in his mind but that Winston was insane before the murder.”

“If I may ask, Captain, where did you see Kensington?”

“I went to Bachree yesterday.”

“Oh?”

“Would you agree with Major Kensington?”

“Of course. It is not the act of murder that precipitates the psychotic state. It is the psychotic condition—in Winston's case—that precipitates the murder.”

“Would you have any opinion on when Winston actually became insane?”

“Only a guess—and in a case like this, there is no actual moment that you can point to and say, It happened then. The process is gradual, slow at first, and then increasingly rapid to its conclusion. In Winston's case, I would guess that his fantasy of winning the war, or at least being a person of very great importance in the army, absorbed him increasingly. When it ceased to be fantasy—as Winston saw it—I cannot possibly say. At any rate, from what he told me, he schemed, connived, lied and exercised a remarkable amount of shrewdness to get his commission. After that, he began increasingly to think of himself as put upon, plotted against, and deliberately thwarted. He began to erect in his own mind the delusional structure of a vast plot, with himself as the central object. At Bachree, a pattern of latent homosexuality—by no means unusual in paranoiacs—focused on Quinn, who was a homosexual, without any question. But Quinn was not entranced by this skinny, half-mad, middle-aged man, and he used him opportunistically and sadistically. Sooner or later, the numberless amorphous persecutions that Winston believed in had to become symbolized in Quinn. At the same time, Quinn had begun to destroy Winston's defenses. When that happened, Winston killed Quinn. It was cheap, tawdry and brutal. Yet it was inevitable.”

There were a few moments of silence now. Kaufman looked at his watch.

Adams was absorbed in his own thoughts; as from a distance, he asked, “Where does the notion of God come into it?”

“God? Oh yes—you told me. As a matter of fact, it frequently appears in the pathological stage. The paranoiac believes that God is in some part of his body, God is with him, literally—a sense of burning, severe pain sometimes. It's a symptom of the rapid personality decay.”

“How rapid, Major?”

“In Winston's case? Two or three months perhaps. He is already in deep depression. In the outside world, he would kill himself. In his cell, I doubt it—it would require too much energy and imagination, and I think he is past the stage where he could summon that. His depression will deepen, however; he will lose all will to eat or sleep or see or react. He will retreat into himself, and in not too long a time, he will die. These are speculations, of course—no more.” He looked at his watch again. “I'm afraid I must go on my rounds, Captain. If you want to wait here until noon, we can have lunch together.”

“I'll gladly wait. Do you have something I can read meanwhile—a text of some sort?”