“Surely that is a moral rather than a legal matter?”
“Not entirely. And anyhow, the law is, among other things, a codification of a very large part of public morality. It expresses the moral opinion of society on a great number of subjects. And in Mr Justice Staunton’s court, morality carries great weight. It’s obvious.”
“Truly? What makes it obvious?”
“Oh, just a difference in the Royal Arms.”
“The Royal Arms?”
“Yes. Over the judge’s head, where they are always displayed.”
“And what is the difference?… Another of your pauses, Mr Staunton. This must mean a great deal to you. Please describe the difference.”
“It’s nothing very much. Only that the animals are complete.”
“The animals?”
“The supporters, they are called. The Lion and the Unicorn.”
“And are they sometimes incomplete?”
“Almost always in Canada. They are shown without their privy parts. To be heraldically correct they should have distinct, rather saucy pizzles. But in Canada we geld everything, if we can, and dozens of times I have sat in court and looked at those pitifully deprived animals and thought how they exemplified our attitude toward justice. Everything that spoke of passion—and when you talk of passion you talk of morality in one way or another—was ruled out of order or disguised as something else. Only Reason was welcome. But in Mr Justice Staunton’s court the Lion and the Unicorn are complete, because morality and passion get their due there.”
“I see. Well, how did the case go?”
“It hung, in the end, on the McNaghten Rule.”
“You must tell me what that is.”
“It is a formula for determining responsibility. It takes its name from a nineteenth-century murderer called McNaghten whose defence was insanity. He said he did it when he was not himself. This was the defence put forward for Staunton. The prosecution kept hammering away at Staunton to find out whether, when he shouted in the theatre, he fully understood the nature and quality of his act, and if he did, did he know it was wrong? The defence lawyer—Mr David Staunton, a very eminent Q.C.—urged every possible extenuating circumstance: that the prisoner Staunton had been under severe stress for several days; that he had lost his father in a most grievous fashion, and that he had undergone severe psychological harassment because of that loss; that unusual responsibilities and burdens had been placed upon him; that his last hope of regaining the trust and approval of his late father had been crushed. But the prosecutor—Mr David Staunton, Q.C., on behalf of the Crown—would not recognize any of that as exculpatory, and in the end he put the question that defence had been dreading all along. ‘If a policeman had been standing at your elbow, would you have acted as you did? If a policeman had been in the seat next to you, would you have shouted your scandalous question at the stage?’ And of course the prisoner Staunton broke down and wept and had to say, ‘No,’ and then, to all intents, the case was over. The Judge—Mr Justice Staunton, known for his fairness but also for his sternness—didn’t even leave the Bench. He found the prisoner Staunton guilty, and the sentence was that he should seek psychiatric help at once.”
“Then what did you do?”
“It was seven o’clock on Sunday morning. I called the airport, booked a passage to Zürich, and twenty-four hours later I was here. Three hours after arrival I was sitting in Dr Tschudi’s office.”
“Was the prisoner Staunton very much depressed by the outcome of the case?”
“It could hardly have been worse for him, because he has a very poor opinion of psychiatry.”
“But he yielded?”
“Doctor von Haller, if a wounded soldier in the eighteenth century had been told he must have a battlefield amputation, he would know that his chances of recovery were slim, but he would have no choice. It would be: die of gangrene or die of the surgeon’s knife. My choice in this instance was to go mad unattended or to go mad under the best obtainable auspices.”
“Very frank. We are getting on much better already. You have begun to insult me. I think I may be able to do something for you, Prisoner Staunton.”
“Do you thrive on insult?”
“No. I mean only that you have begun to feel enough about me to want to strike some fire out of me. That is not bad, that comparison between eighteenth-century battlefield surgery and modern psychiatry; this sort of curative work is still fairly young and in the way it is sometimes practised it can be brutal. But there were recoveries, even from eighteenth-century surgery, and as you point out, the alternative was an ugly one.
“Now let us get down to work. The decisions must be entirely yours. What do you expect of me? A cure for your drunkenness? You have told me that it is not your disease, but your symptom; symptoms cannot be cured—only alleviated. Illnesses can be cured when we know what they are and if circumstances are favourable. Then the symptoms abate. You have an illness. You have talked of nothing else. It seems very complicated, but all descriptions of symptoms are complicated. What did you expect when you came to Zürich?”
“I expected nothing at all. I have told you that I have seen many psychiatrists in court, and they are not impressive.”
“That’s nonsense. You wouldn’t have come if you hadn’t had some hope, however reluctant you were to admit it. If we are to achieve anything you must give up the luxury of easy despair. You are too old for that, though in certain ways you seem young for your age. You are forty. That is a critical age. Between thirty-five and forty-five everybody has to turn a corner in his life, or smash into a brick wall. If you are ever going to gain a measure of maturity, now is the time. And I must ask you not to judge psychiatrists on what you see in court. Legal evidence and psychological evidence are quite different things, and when you are on your native ground in court, with your gown on and everything going your way, you can make anybody look stupid, and you do—”
“And I suppose the converse is that when you have a lawyer in your consulting-room, and you are the doctor, you can make him look stupid and you do?”
“It is not my profession to make anyone look stupid. If we are to do any good here, we must be on terms that are much better than that; our relationship must go far beyond merely professional wrangling for trivial advantages.”
“Do you mean that we must be friends?”
“Not at all. We must be on doctor-and-patient terms, with respect on both sides. You are free to dispute and argue anything I say if you must, but we shall not go far if you play the defence lawyer every minute of our time. If we go on, we shall be all kinds of things to each other, and I shall probably be your stepmother and your sister and your housekeeper and all sorts of people in the attitude you take toward me before we are through. But if your chief concern is to maintain your image of yourself as the brilliant, drunken counsel with a well-founded grudge against life, we shall take twice as long to do our work because that will have to be changed before anything else can be done. It will cost you much more money, and I don’t think you like wasting money.”
“True. But how did you know?”
“Call it a trade secret. No, that won’t do. We must not deal with one another in that vein. Just recognize that I have had rich patients before, and some of them are great counters of their pennies…. Would you like a few days to consider what you are going to do?”
“No. I’ve already decided. I want to go ahead with the treatment.”
“Why?”
“But surely you know why.”
“Yes, but I must find out if you know why.”
“You agree with me that the drinking business is a symptom, and not my disease?”
“Let us not speak of disease. A disease in your case would be a psychosis, which is what you fear and what of course is always possible. Though the rich are rarely mad. Did you know that? They may be neurotic and frequently they are. Psychotic rarely. Let us say that you are in an unsatisfactory state of mind and you want to get out of i
t. Will that do?”
“It seems a little mild, for what has been happening to me.”
“You mean, like your Netty, nobody knows what you are going through? I assure you that very large numbers of people go through much worse things.”
“Aha, I see where we are going. This is to destroy my sense of uniqueness. I’ve had lots of that in life, I assure you.”
“No, no. We do not work on the reductive plan, we of the Zürich School. Nobody wants to bring your life’s troubles down to having been slapped because you did not do your business on the pot. Even though that might be quite important, it is not the mainspring of a life. You are certainly unique. Everyone is unique. Nobody has ever suffered quite like you before because nobody has ever been you before. But we are members of the human race, as well, and our unique quality has limits. Now—about treatment. There are a few simple things to begin with. You had better leave your hotel and take rooms somewhere. There are quite good pensions where you can be quiet, and that is important. You must have quiet and retirement, because you will have to do a good deal of work yourself between appointments with me, and you will find that tiring.”
“I hate pensions. The food is usually awful.”
“Yes, but they have no bars, and they are not pleased if guests drink very much in their rooms. It would be best if it were inconvenient, but not impossible, for you to drink very much. I think you should try to ration yourself. Don’t stop. Just take it gently. Our Swiss wines are very nice.”
“Oh God! Don’t talk about nice wine.”
“As you please. But be prudent. Much of your present attitude toward things comes from the exacerbations of heavy drinking. You say it doesn’t affect you, but of course it does.”
“I know people who drink just as much as I do and are none the worse.”
“Yes. Everybody knows such people. But you are not one of them. After all, you would not be in that chair if you were.”
“If we are not going to talk about my toilet-training, what is the process of your treatment? Bullying and lectures?”
“If necessary. But it isn’t usually necessary, and when it is, that is only a small part of the treatment.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“I am not going to do anything to you. I am going to try to help you in the process of becoming yourself.”
“My best self, I expected you to say. A good little boy.”
“Your real self may not be a good little boy. It would be very unfortunate if that were so. Your real self may be something very disagreeable and unpleasant. This is not a game we are playing, Mr Staunton. It can be dangerous. Part of my work is to see the dangers as they come and help you to get through them. But if the dangers are inescapable and possibly destructive, don’t think I can help you fly over them. There will be lions in the way. I cannot pull their teeth or tell them to make paddy-paws; I can only give you some useful tips about lion-taming.”
“Now you’re trying to scare me.”
“I am warning you.”
“What do we do to get to the lions?”
“We can start almost anywhere. But from what you have told me I think we would be best to stick to the usual course and begin at the beginning.”
“Childhood recollections?”
“Yes, and recollections of your life up to now. Important things. Formative experiences. People who have meant much to you, whether good or bad.”
“That sounds like the Freudians.”
“We have no quarrel with the Freudians, but we do not put the same stress on sexual matters as they do. Sex is very important, but if it were the single most important thing in life it would all be much simpler, and I doubt if mankind would have worked so hard to live far beyond the age when sex is the greatest joy. It is a popular delusion, you know, that people who live very close to nature are great ones for sex. Not a bit. You live with primitives—I did it for three years, when I was younger and very interested in anthropology—and you find out the truth. People wander around naked and nobody cares—not even an erection or a wiggle of the hips. That is because their society does not give them the brandy of Romance, which is the great drug of our world. When sex is on the program they sometimes have to work themselves up with dances and ceremonies to get into the mood for it, and then of course they are very active. But their important daily concern is with food. You know, you can go for a lifetime without sex and come to no special harm. Hundreds of people do so. But you go for a day without food and the matter becomes imperative. In our society food is just a start for our craving. We want all kinds of things—money, a big place in the world, objects of beauty, learning, sainthood, oh, a very long list. So here in Zürich we try to give proper attention to these other things, as well.
“We generally begin with what we call anamnesis. Are you a classicist? Do you know any Greek? We look at your history, and meet some people there whom you may know or perhaps you don’t, but who are portions of yourself. We take a look at what you remember, and at some things you thought you had forgotten. As that goes on we find we are going much deeper. And when that is satisfactorily explored, we decide whether to go deeper still, to that part of you which is beyond the unique, to the common heritage of mankind.”
“How long does it take?”
“It varies. Sometimes long, sometimes surprisingly short, especially if you decide not to go beyond the personal realm. And though of course I give advice about that, the decision, like all the decisions in this sort of work, must be your own.”
“So I should begin getting a few recollections together? I don’t want to be North American about this, but I haven’t unlimited time. I mean, three years or anything of that sort is out of the question. I’m the executor of my father’s will. I can do quite a lot from here by telephone or by post but I can’t be away forever. And there is the problem of Castor to be faced.”
“I have always understood that it takes about three years to settle an estate. In civilized countries, that is; there are countries here in Europe where it can go on for ten if there is enough money to pay the costs. Does it impress you as interesting that to settle a dead man’s affairs takes about the same length of time as settling a life’s complications in a man of forty? Still, I see your difficulty. And that makes me wonder if a scheme I have been considering for you might not be worth a trial.”
“What are you thinking of?”
“We do many things to start the stream of recollection flowing in a patient, and to bring forth and give clues to what is important for him. Some patients draw pictures, or paint, or model things in clay. There have even been patients who have danced and devised ceremonies that seemed relevant to their situation. It must be whatever is most congenial to the nature of the analysand.”
“Analysand? Am I an analysand?”
“Horrid word, isn’t it? I promise I shall never call you that. We shall stick to the Plain Style, shall we, in what we say to one another?”
“Ramsay always insisted that there was nothing that could not be expressed in the Plain Style if you knew what you were talking about. Everything else was Baroque Style, which he said was not for most people, or Jargon, which was the Devil’s work.”
“Very good. Though you must be patient, because English is not my cradle-tongue, and my work creates a lot of Jargon. But about you, and what you may do; I think you might create something, but not pictures or models. You are a lawyer, and you seem to be a great man for words: what would you say to writing a brief of your case?”
“I’ve digested hundreds of briefs in my time.”
“Yes, and some of them were for cases pleaded before Mr Justice Staunton.”
“This would be for the case pleaded in the court of Mr Justice von Haller.”
“No, no; Mr Justice Staunton still. You cannot get away from him, you know.”
“I haven’t often pleaded very successfully for the defendant Staunton in that court. The victories have usually gone to the prosecution. Are yo
u sure we need to do it this way?”
“I think there is good reason to try. It is the heroic way, and you have found it without help from anyone else. That suggests that heroic measures appeal to you, and that you are not really afraid of them.”
“But that was just a game.”
“You played it with great seriousness. And it is not such an uncommon game. Do you know Ibsen’s poem—
To live is to battle with trolls
in the vaults of heart and brain.
To write: that is to sit
in judgement over one’s self.
I suggest that you make a beginning. Let it be a brief for the defence; you will inevitably prepare a brief for the prosecution as you do so, for that is the kind of court you are to appear in—the court of self-judgement. And Mr Justice Staunton will hear all, and render judgement, perhaps more often than is usual.”
“I see. And what are you in all this?”
“Oh, I am several things; an interested spectator, for one, and for another, I shall be a figure that appears only in military courts, called Prisoner’s Friend. And I shall be an authority on precedents, and germane judgements, and I shall keep both the prosecutor and the defence counsel in check. I shall be custodian of that constant and perpetual wish to render to everyone his due. And if Mr Justice Staunton should doze, as judges sometimes do—”
“Not Mr Justice Staunton. He slumbers not, nor sleeps.”
“We shall see if he is as implacable as you suppose. Even Mr Justice Staunton might learn something. A judge is not supposed to be an enemy of the prisoner, and I think Mr Justice Staunton sounds a little too eighteenth century in his outlook to be really good at his work. Perhaps we can lure him into modern times, and get him to see the law in a modern light…. And now—until Monday, isn’t it?”
2
David Against the Trolls
(This is my Zürich Notebook, containing notes and summaries used by me in presenting my case to Dr von Haller; also memoranda of her opinions and interpretations as I made them after my hours with her. Without being a verbatim report, this is the essence of what passed between us.)