The Manticore

– Oh, certainly. Analysis with a great analyst is an adventure in self-exploration. But how many analysts are great? Did I ever tell you I knew Freud slightly? A giant, and it would be apocalyptic to talk to such a giant about oneself. I never met Adler, whom everybody forgets, but he was certainly another giant. I once went to a seminar Jung gave in Zurich, and it was unforgettable. But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature; Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power; and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a super-professor. All men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character… Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too?

– I'm no hero, Liesl.

– Oh, how modest and rueful that sounds! And you expect me to think, isn't he splendid to accept his limitations so manfully. But I don't think that. All that personal modesty is part of the cop-out personality of our time. You don't know whether or not you are a hero, and you're bloody well determined not to find out, because you're scared of the burden if you are and scared of the certainty if you're not.

– Just a minute. Dr. von Haller, of whom you think so little, once suggested that I was rather inclined toward heroic measures in dealing with myself.

– Good for Jo! But she didn't encourage you in it, did she? Ramsay says you are very much the hero in court – voice of the mute, hope of the hopeless, last resort of those society has condemned. But of course that's a public personality. Why do you put yourself on this footing with a lot of riff-raff, by the way?

– I told Dr. von Haller that I liked living on the lip of a volcano.

– A good, romantic answer. But do you know the name of the volcano? That's what you have to find out.

– What are you suggesting? That I go home and take up my practice and Alpha and Castor and see what I can do to wriggle crooks like Matey Quelch off the hooks on which they have been caught? And at night, sit down quietly and try to think my way out of all my problems, and try to make some sort of sense of my life?

– Think your way out… Davey, what did Jo say was wrong with you? Obviously you have a screw loose somewhere; everybody has. What did she find at the root of most of your trouble?

– Why should I tell you?

– Because I've asked, and I truly want to know. I'm not just a gossip or a chatterer, and I like you very much. So tell me.

– It's nothing dreadful. She just kept coming back to the point that I am rather strongly developed in Thinking, and seem to be a bit weak in Feeling.

– I guessed that was it.

– But honestly I don't know what's wrong with thinking. Surely it's what everybody is trying to do?

– Oh yes; very fine work, thinking. But it is also the greatest bolt-hole and escape hatch of our time. It's supposed to excuse everything… "I think this… I thought that… You haven't really thought about it… Think, for God's sake… The thinking of the meeting (or the committee, or God help us, the symposium) was that…" But so much of this thinking is just mental masturbation, not intended, to beget anything… So you are weak in feeling, eh? I wonder why?

– Because of Dr. von Haller, I can tell you. In my life feeling has not been very handsomely rewarded. It has hurt like hell.

– Nothing unusual in that. It always does. But you could try. Do you remember the fairy-tale about the boy who couldn't shudder and was so proud of it? Nobody much likes shuddering, but it's better than existing without it, I can assure you.

– I seem to have a natural disposition to think rather than feel, and Dr. von Haller has helped me a good deal there. But I am not ambitious to be a great feeler. Wouldn't suit my style of life at all, Liesl.

– If you don't feel, how are you going to discover whether or not you are a hero?

– I don't want to be a hero.