Operators and Things:
The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic
Barbara O’Brien
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 1958 Barbara O’Brien
Contents
Introduction, by Michael Maccoby
Prefatory Note, by L. J. Reyna
Schizophrenia: The Demon in Control
PART ONE
The Operators Leave
Before the Operators Came
PART TWO
The Operators
PART THREE
The Dry Beach and the Waves
The Subterranean Craftsman
Something
Something Extends
My Unconscious Friend
The Freudian
Sparring Partners
The Pictures
PART FOUR
The Reasoning Machine
The Textbooks
The Bronco
The Psychiatrists and the Schizophrenics
The Guidance and the Planning
Hook Operating
The Doctors
That Something
Private Univac
Mutating Man
Hinton: Departmentalized Man
Memo on Mental Institutions
The Knife and the Hatchet
APPENDIX
Introduction
“Everything about this psychology is, in the deepest sense, experience;” C.G. Jung has written, “the entire theory, even when it puts on its most abstract airs, is the direct outcome of something experienced.” Jung also writes “To experience a dream and its interpretation is very different from having a tepid rehash set before you on paper.” [C.G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, New York: Meridian, 1956. Page 127. The essay, “General Remarks on the Therapeutic Approach to the Unconscious,” of which this quotation is a part, is particularly relevant to Barbara’s account of her hallucinations. Jung, much more so than Freud, is aware of the healing and creative as well as the destructive elements in the unconscious.]
This book is one person’s experience of living a dream which does not fit easily into abstract theory, even the author’s own. As she tells us, the dry beach of the conscious mind is a poor relation to the unconscious. Although we speak a common conscious language, socialized by our common culture, it is no easy thing for a man to communicate with even his own unconscious. For psychology, everyone’s experience must be relevant; the experts in this field depend on the experience of others. Theory is little more than an organizing myth, and myths become powerful theories only by remaining sensitive to experience.
Ideally, we would like to be able to apply the content of Barbara’s schizophrenic world to some myth or model, no matter how inadequate, of the unconscious processes. In this connection, two points made by Barbara are particularly interesting to me. The first is her feeling that the drama staged by her unconscious was an attempt to save her from the unbearable, an idea that supports Freud’s hypothesis that the hallucinatory (hysterical) mechanism is an attempt at recovery, not the disease itself. [Sigmund Freud, “On the Mechanism of Paranoia,” in Collected Papers Volume III, London: The Hogarth Press, 1925 Pages 444-470. In fact, Freud credits the idea of hallucinations as attempts at recovery to Jung’s observations that the flight of ideas and motor stereotypes occurring in this disorder (dementia praecox or paraphrenia) are the relics of former object-cathexes, clung to with convulsive energy. Barbara places herself in the diagnostic category of paranoia. It is probably more correct to call her illness paraphrenia, which, as Freud points out, is close to paranoia and can develop from it. The differences are described briefly in the above paper. This paper is worth reading from another angle, also. Barbara’s description of the “cure” offered by the psychoanalyst she saw is quite different from Freud’s theories about paraphrenia and its aeteosis, which he considers less sexual in the normal sense, more related to early infant problems which might better be called problems of trust and autonomy.] Barbara’s hallucinations are not, however, the gods and devils common to another age; they are horrors of Organization Man; they are reactions to forces blocking attempts at creativity in work and attempts to enjoy relationships of trust with others.
Those who are creative in Barbara’s world are impaled by the hook and those who trust are removed. For most of us, these problems of creativity and intimacy are the difference between a meaningful and satisfying life as opposed to a life of quiet: desperation. To Barbara, they are matters of staying alive, and this is perhaps as good a way as any to state simply the difference between the meaning of a problem to a normal person and to a schizophrenic. As Barbara admits honestly, her problems are not solved; she cannot claim a complete cure. The hallucinations are gone and her conscious mind can hold down a job; but the hook operators are still, unbearable, and there is no indication that she can trust enough to enjoy human contact.
In fact, she tells little of her feelings about the people who are and were significant in her life. The only interactions we witness (other than in her hallucinatory dramas) are her contacts with a busy, uncaring psychiatrist and with a caricature of an “orthodox” psychoanalyst, who seems alternately amazed at Barbara’s unconscious (understandably so) and intrigued by her femininity (a Frenchman, he suggests bed with an experienced European lover as a cure, an idea that Barbara wisely considers would create, for her, more problems than it would solve). For Barbara, the world remains hostile; survival is the central problem. The only optimistic elements in the story are Barbara’s considerable intelligence and the creative urge which led to her novel and to this book.
Psychology does not know much about creativity. Freud analyzes Dostoevsky as a neurotic, but he admits: “Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.” [Sigmund Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” in Collected Papers. Volume V, London: Hogarth Press, 1950.] In a similar way, one can explain William Blake’s hallucinations and his denunciations of the Royal Academy’s Hook Operators, but the music of Blake’s words, the form of their content, and the fact of creativity, rather than stagnation, remain an awesome mystery. Barbara writes and she writes well; creativity is a therapy by which Barbara transcends the psychiatrists’ work-a-day world of confessions and standardized inkblots. She imposes regularity and form over chaos, socializing the unconscious language in a way only the best therapies ever approach. Yet, as I have said, there is a great distance between bare survival and a satisfying life.
Barbara gives us another idea which has to do with some of the most interesting research into the connection between mental illness and physiological imbalance. She feels that her unconscious presented her with a drama with at least one moral to it: get your adrenal working, get angry or you will destroy yourself. Recent research indicates that depressive psychotics and some schizophrenics (indeed some normal-neurotics) who react to stress with fear show a different physiological pattern to stress than do those who react with anger or cunning. For example, those who fear (the anger-in people as Funkenstein [D. H. Funkenstein, S. H. King and M. E. Drolette, Mastery of Stress, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.] calls them) secrete less noradrenalin. Perhaps the anger-in people fear the feeling of anger itself more than they fear retaliation by real others. Perhaps the reaction of fear is a physiological poison which threatens a person’s life. Perhaps only a psychological change, a willingness to be angry, can support a physiological reorganization. It is also possible that the fear of being angry spreads to become the fear of doing anything active which becomes the wish to crawl into a hole. Barbara’s mad dash across the country seems to me like a first step toward curative activity as well as the abandonment of an environment from which her mind has already fled.
If the reader shares my curiosity, he or she will have the wish to know more about Barbara. What does she look like? What was her childhood like? What is she doing now? What kind of people have been important to her, other than people in authority? All we know is that she is a creative and independent woman, with intelligence, a strong sense of morality, and a talent for playfulness. Her playfulness and humor is to me Barbara’s most impressive quality. Faced with a matter of life and death which lasted not for a moment but for months, her unconscious produced, along with Kafka-esque judges and Edward G. Robinson-type gangsters, characters like Nicky who are warm and playful. This book itself has an element of a Hollywood script, but a script which illustrates man’s most endearing quality, the ability to translate the dangers within him, the fears about good and evil, into an external drama with heroes and villains, with pathos and humor. [For a discussion of the value of man’s playfulness and his ability to “reflect fearlessly on the strange customs and institutions by which... (he) must find self-realization,” see Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1950, particularly the chapter “The Fear of Anxiety.” One of Erikson’s observations helps me to understand Barbara’s case in a way different from the approach taken by Barbara herself. Barbara reports that her greatest fear from the operators is that of being dummetized, being made empty. And she finally believes that this has happened. Erikson writes: “The fear of being left empty, and, more simply, that of being left, seems to be the most basic feminine fear, extending over the whole of a woman’s existence. It is normally intensified with every menstruation and takes its final toll during the menopause. No wonder, then, that the anxiety aroused by these fears can express itself either in complete subjugation to male thought, in desperate competition with it, or in efforts to catch the male and make him a mere tool.” Page 366.] Psychology, if it is to be science rather than dogma, must learn from people like Barbara that the unconscious is not at all like the mechanized models of human behavior upon which we depend all too much.
MICHAEL MACCOBY
Harvard University
Prefatory Note
In this book, an intelligent, observant, and talented woman returns from a world of hallucinatory characters to join therapists and researchers in their pursuit of the causes of schizophrenia.
In her attempt to understand how she suddenly entered this world and emerged after six months from it, the author presents a startlingly clear account of our present state of knowledge and ignorance about schizophrenia. Her detailed and systematic report and interpretation of her illness and recovery provide a valuable and rich source of data and hypotheses which will place researchers in mental illness in her debt.
I believe that not only will professionals regard this work as an outstanding contribution to studies on the etiology, treatment and sociology of mental illness, but that all readers will view this work as brilliant literature and see in it the emergence of an artist.
L. J. REYNA
Research Consultant, VA. Hospital, Bedford, Mass. Associate Professor of Psychology, Boston University
Schizophrenia: The Demon in Control
Let us say that when you awake tomorrow, you find standing at your bedside a man with purple scale-skin who tells you that he has just arrived from Mars, that he is studying the human species, and that he has selected your mind for the kind of on-the-spot examination he wants to make.
While you are catching your breath he walks casually to your best chair, drapes his tail over it, and informs you that he will be visible and audible only to you. Fixing his three eyes sternly upon you, he warns you not to reveal his presence; if you attempt to do so, he threatens, he will kill you instantly.
You may wonder, perhaps, if you are sane. But the Man From Mars is standing before you, clear and colorful, and his voice is loud and distinct. On the basis of what you can so clearly see and hear, you accept the fact, astounding as it is, that the stranger is what he says he is.
If your temperament were such that you would not be able to accept the fact that a Man From Mars might just pop into your room, the vision appearing before you would not be a Man From Mars. It might be, instead, the awesome figure of God. Or the terrifying figure of the devil. Or it might be a much less conventional figure. In all probability the figure, regardless of the form it took, would have three characteristics: it would represent authority; it would have superhuman powers; and its weirdness would, in some way, seem plausible and acceptable to you.
Let us say that you are faced with the Man From Mars and that prior unresolved speculations concerning flying saucers give the figure a certain plausibility. You are rattled but you attempt to go through your normal activities, keeping your tremendous secret to yourself. You converse with your friends, perform your job, and eat your meals, even while the figure stands at your side. The Man From Mars advises you that it is not necessary to answer his questions, that you need only to think your answers, for he will be able to read your mind. You find this is no idle boast; the Man proceeds to demonstrate his ability to do just that.
If you are sufficiently controlled you may carry your secret around with you for some time before anyone suspects that something unusual has happened to you. A friend may notice that you seem somewhat distraught and suggest that you unburden your troubles. You ignore his advice. Obviously, such an action would result only in the instant death of you and your confidant. Instead, you become more careful of your behavior, hold onto yourself with everything you’ve got, and pray desperately for the Man From Mars to complete his research and depart.
It is possible that the Man From Mars may actually disappear within a few days or a few weeks. There is about a .05 per cent chance of this happening. You are physically exhausted after the Man has gone back to Mars, and your mind, which had been racing like a jet plane while the Man was with you, slows down and almost refuses to function at all. But as the days pass, you gradually revert to normalcy. In time, you may discuss your experience with some one and you may even discover, at this point, what was really happening to you while the Man From Mars was with you.
There is a 99.55 per cent chance, however, if something like the Man From Mars appears in your life, that he is still in your life after a few months. By that time it is very probable that you are in a mental institution, undergoing periodic electric or insulin shock treatment. There is a chance of the Man’s disappearing after a few shock treatments.
There is a much better chance that the Man is still with you after the hundredth dose of shock. By that time you may become so demoralized that you don’t care whether the Man kills you or not; or the doctors may inject drugs which induce you to talk. You find yourself eagerly telling the doctors and anyone else whose ear you can capture about your visitor and his purpose in haunting you.
They don’t believe you. This doesn’t altogether surprise you. After all, other people can’t see and hear the Man; he’s not tuned in on them. The Man may get nasty after your revelation of his presence and you may get angry enough to take a few punches at him— and feel jubilant about doing just this. While you are glorying in this first release of your months-old tension, you find that you are being fitted snugly into a restraining jacket and that strong tranquilizing drugs are being stuffed down your throat, or that the shock treatments have been increased to reduce your aggressiveness.
The tranquilizers or the shock therapy have the desired effect and your impulse to challenge the Man disappears. You review your situation despondently and finally resign yourself to the inevitable, realizing that there isn’t a thing any human being in the world can do for you. You wait wearily for the Man to go back to Mars. You might be in the institution for the rest of your life and the Man From Mars might be there with you.
You have a common variety of the mental disease, schizophrenia, a mental disorder more prevalent in America than it is anywhere else and one which is mounting in rate of increase with each year. Your mind is “split,” and a subconscious portion of it, no longer under your conscious control, is staging a private show for your benefit. The kind of show it stages will depend upon the kind of stuff that is in it and upon the relationship that existed between your conscious and unconscious while your mind was whole. It may, with each passing day, tear you to smaller and smaller pieces. It may, on the other hand, patiently stitch together the segments of you that have split apart.
One thing is certain: when you sit on your ward bench, staring at the wall, studying your apparition and despondently concluding that no other human being in the world can help you, your deduction will be a sane and reasonable one. If you develop schizophrenia which cannot be arrested by a few doses of shock therapy or tranquilizers, then there is no other human being in the world who can help you. The only thing that can help you at that point is the demon in control, your own unconscious mind.
According to statistics released by the National Association for Mental Health, your chance of being hospitalized for a severe mental illness during your lifetime is, in 1957, if you are an American, 1 in 12. In 1946, it was 1 in 16; in 1936, it was 1 in 20.
An 11 out of 12 chance of escaping insanity is not too bad. The odds are not as good as 19 out of 20. However, they are considerably better than the 4 out of 5 chance which seems to be looming on the horizon for 1976.
If you are the unlucky 1 in 12, there is a 60 per cent to 70 per cent chance that the mental disease you develop is a variety of schizophrenia. It is the mounting rate of increase in this one mental disorder which is crowding every mental institution in this country.
Just why schizophrenia should be the great insanity trap for the American emotional make-up is not certain. Nor is it by any means certain that schizophrenia is emotional in origin. It may, or it may not, be the result of unbearable environmental pressures. It may, or it may not, be the result of endocrine gland disorders. Or it may be the result of a diet lacking in sufficient amino acids or some other substance. All of these theories are being explored by the medium-sized garret of research psychiatrists who are trying to determine the cause of the disease.
There are only three facts which are really certain about schizophrenia at this time: no one knows what causes it; no one knows how to cure it; the number of research psychiatrists who are presently attempting to determine the cause and the cure of the disease is so small that the chance of their coming upon the solution in the near future is relatively poor.
At the rate at which schizophrenia is increasing, there is a reasonable chance that if the intercontinental missile doesn’t get you, schizophrenia will. Your chances of being hit by a flying missile haven’t yet been determined, although your chances of remaining intact, if hit, may be surmised. Your chances of being hit by schizophrenia in the immediate future are higher, and your chances of making a comeback, if hit, aren’t much better.
There is an amazing lack of accurate knowledge among laymen concerning the effects of schizophrenia upon its victims. The most prevalent current notion is that, when the mind is split in schizophrenia, the individual becomes two people, two distinct personalities, or even multiple personalities— that the subconscious mind, rebelling against the repressions imposed upon it, has declared civil war, deserted the conscious authority; and that in the resulting schism, the new personality which emerges periodically is composed of the parts of the personality which the individual has consciously, deliberately, persistently repressed.
In infrequent cases, this appears to be just what does happen. The unconscious has rebelled, assumed control, created the person it wishes to be, forced the conscious controller into a small, tightly closed box where it cannot even see what is going on, and then taken over the floor of the conscious mind.
In most cases of schizophrenia, however, the unconscious appears to prefer not the techniques of the actor, but those of the director. It does not create a new personality but, instead, stages a play. The major difference is that the conscious mind is permitted to remain, an audience of one sitting lonely in the theater, watching a drama. on which it cannot walk out.
Even though the circumstances which induce or permit the unconscious mind to rise and take over are still a mystery, the fact that in schizophrenia it rises to do just that is strikingly clear. As you sit watching your Martian, it is your unconscious mind which is flashing the picture before your eyes, sounding the Man’s voice in your ears. More than this, it is blowing a fog of hypnosis over your conscious mind so that consciously you are convinced that the hallucinations you see and hear and the delusions that accompany the hallucinations are real.
In sanity you would know, if the apparition of a Man From Mars appeared before you, that you were having a hallucination. An alcoholic in the throes of delirium tremens, watching tigers walking around his living room, knows that they are not tigers, knows that they are hallucinations, and knows also what has caused the hallucinations to appear. In schizophrenia, an important part of your reasoning mechanism has been fogged by something which normally is the most cooperative assistant your conscious mind could desire, your subconscious mental cellar, your unconscious— what an unsuitable name for it!— mind.
Your court of last resort, in schizophrenia, appears to be this unconscious mind of yours, the demon in control. However it manages to get its hands on the throttle, its behavior in the initial stages of control leaves no doubt about what it is up to. Without even stopping for a deep breath, it gets its Martian, or whatever, going. With speed and apparent purposefulness, it escorts the conscious mind to a box seat, makes it comfortable, and projects the shape or shapes it has created, and the voice or voices it has chosen. As it does so, it wafts a little suggestive breeze in the direction of the box seat. “Believe what you hear” says the little breeze; “believe what you see. These things are real, or else they could not be.”
The figure which is projected in front of your eyes may be wispy and ghostlike, or nontransparent, or even multicolored. Schizophrenics have reported all varieties. You may have a fair technician, or a good technician, or a technician-artist in your sub-cellar. The voice which accompanies the shape is always convincingly loud and distinct, the voice business being apparently a quite simple technical achievement for unconscious talents. Having bolstered itself with the props it needs, the unconscious then proceeds to do what it has apparently created the props to effect— it begins to give you directions.
Even in the last outposts of schizophrenia, your conscious mind retains certain prerogatives; behind all the props and trappings devised by the unconscious is the unconscious realization that the conscious mind must be induced, cajoled, threatened into line. Clearly your conscious mind has been devised to rule and command, and your unconscious is acutely aware of the fact. In charge, it draws upon every bit of business it can concoct to keep you bamboozled.
What sort of directions docs it give you? Well, that depends. The unconscious is, whatever else it is, the repository of whatever you have put into it during your lifetime. Statistics indicate that all sorts of people get schizophrenia. You may be male or female, young or old, brilliant or stupid, rich or poor, stable or unstable, a good guy or a bad guy, and still wake up some morning to find the Man From Mars at your bedside. This is one of the mysteries of schizophrenia. Your Man may be amazingly constructive in the advice he gives you. On the other hand, he may aim you, like an arrow, to destroy everything and anything, including yourself, Self-cures are not uncommon in schizophrenia. Neither are suicides and murders. There is a terrible kind of ironic justice in schizophrenia. Whatever it is you are, you are, possibly for the first time in your life, at the absolute mercy of.
What sort of people have become schizophrenics? The variety has been infinite. There is a good chance that Joan of Arc was a schizophrenic. The shrewd peasant perceptivity that looked out upon a broken, demoralized country and saw how it could be healed and revitalized might well have been unconscious. That it fooled conscious Joan as completely as it fooled a nation is undoubted. Joan saw and heard the conventional figures of saints and followed their directions. Behind her flying banner and her vision, a defeated people came to life. (Whether or not Joan was an instrument of God is beside the point. I would assume that Joan’s sainthood could run parallel to her schizophrenia. The hand of God is large and its lines are complex.)
On the other hand, the man who a few years ago murdered his mother-in-law at the direction of his “voices” was a schizophrenic. In a way, he is easier to understand than Joan. He did what a great many people have wished to do. Poor Joan looked out on a broken country and under the strain, her mind split. But what came from the rift was a whole thing, a desire to serve many people.
Between Joan and the mother-in-law murderer there have been a million shapes and shades. It is possible, even probable, many think, that Bridey Murphy was the concoction of an unconscious mind which gained a freedom in hypnosis similar to the freedom it gains in schizophrenia. At its best, it was displaying a desire to cooperate and please; at its worst, it was no more than impish as it plotted its story of Bridey and waited for the next moment to perform. Certainly, Mrs. Simmons had no more idea than Joan of what was going on in the sub-cellar.
I developed schizophrenia abruptly, in the way which is now considered most fortunate for an optimistic prognosis, I awoke one morning, during a time of great personal tension and self conflict, to find three grey and somewhat wispy figures standing at my bedside. I was, as might be imagined, completely taken up by them. Within a few minutes they had banished my own sordid problem from my mind and replaced it with another and more intriguing one. They were not Men From Mars, but the Operators, a group in some ways stranger than Martians could be. I listened to what the Operators had to say, weighed the facts which they presented to me, and decided that there was wisdom in following their directions. I packed some clothes and mounted a Greyhound bus, as they directed, and followed them. Riding off in the bus, I left safely behind me a mess of reality with which I was totally incapable of coping.
But what I could not face in sanity, I had to face in insanity. It became clear in time that the problem presented to me by the Operators was exactly the problem I had left behind me. Caught up in my new world, and with the world of sanity almost wiped from my mind, the resemblance between the two worlds was not apparent until afterward— six months afterward, when I walked into a psychoanalyst’s office at the advice of my voices, and gave him the message they had told me to give him. To his trained eye, the evidences of an approaching spontaneous recovery were apparent. He sweated out a four-day period waiting for it to occur. Just as he had almost given up hope, major symptoms— “the voices"— abruptly disappeared.
In sanity I had been a trained observer with an excellent memory, and in insanity my abilities had remained with me. Recovered and sane again, I was able to recall even the small motions, the whispers, of my demon while it had stood at the controls, I had sat placidly enough in my box seat during insanity, relaxed, and in a way enjoying the play. The play had seemed to have a purpose and after a fashion I had finally gotten the point. By the time I wandered into the analyst’s office I knew, and knew well, what the score was.
That I was one of the lucky ones who went through the processes of self-cure gives the story of the Operators certain values. Sharp, Hinton, the Hook Operators, even the Spider as he scalloped out the lattice-work, were busy at the job of healing a rift in the mental machinery. They were strange gangsters to have been engaged in a constructive enterprise, but the unconscious which devised them had several things in mind, not the least being a desire to hold the interest of the customer in the box seat.
The chapters in this book which deal with the Operators relate an authentic account of schizophrenia, shortened considerably, but unchanged. This is a sample of what goes on in a schizophrenic mind. The chapters which deal with the period immediately following my recovery from major symptoms contain material which is, in some ways, even stranger than the conversations of the Operators. Some of these incidents, considered separately, are strange indeed. But considered as a group, they are apparent for what they are. The mental machinery was still mending, and the conscious mind was still incapable of taking over the total direction of the whole machine. Until it was ready, the unconscious stepped in, as was necessary, to guide, direct, and ease the way. Possibly because its wilder talents were easier to use when emergencies arose, it occasionally used such talents. When the machine was healed and the conscious mind was at the controls again, the weird incidents ceased. The conscious mind had never welcomed them, had frequently been disturbed by them, and was considerably relieved when they stopped.
The chapters which have to do with the two business firms in which I was employed have been camouflaged, to the best of my ability, without destroying in any way the essence of the emotional environment with which both were permeated. I have no desire to embarrass the individuals with whom I worked or the companies which employed me. There is, as a matter of fact, nothing startling or unusual about the environment in either office, Both are typical of the present-day scene.
And so is schizophrenia.
Part One
The Operators Leave
The Operators left me at the door of the analyst’s office just as they had on my prior visits.
Dr. Donner was standing in the middle of his office waiting for me. Uneasiness hung around the room like a thick mist. He’s been walking up and down, I thought, spraying worry around. The room is filled with worry.
He smiled and motioned me to the couch. I sat and waited for him to explain about the worry.
“I’ve been discussing your case with an associate.” He waved an arm vaguely and looked away at one of the walls, and the fixed, amiable expression on his face collapsed. His face suddenly looked worn and tired, and somewhat fearful. Something has him scared, I thought, and leaned forward to study his face.
“Schizophrenia rarely clears up after this length of time without shock therapy.” He walked to his desk and looked at a little notebook that lay open, “You’re sure of the date when it started?”
Yes, I was quite sure.
“It’s been six months.” He brooded at the wall. “I don’t like shock treatment. It isn’t effective in most cases, and sometimes the results are— are not desirable.” The fear on his face was quite clear now.
Then I realized why I was studying his face so closely. Hinton was tuned in on my mind and was studying the analyst’s face through my eyes.
“I’m afraid it will have to be a hospital.” The doctor seemed to remember something. He stopped brooding at the wall and turned around and looked at me carefully. “I was really hoping— there were such sharp indications...” He seemed to be waiting for me to say something.
Plunge right in, the Operators had taught me. Plunge right in and tackle it, whatever it is, “When do I go?” I asked.
Dr. Donner sighed. Then he turned a page of his notebook and asked me for the names and addresses of close relatives. Yes, they all were thousands of miles away. No, I didn’t know anybody at all in this city. He wrote carefully in his notebook. I was to come back to his office the next day at the same time and he would come with me to the hospital.
I left and waited outside the building. I waited a full five minutes but neither Hinton nor Hazel came. There hadn’t been much point in telling Dr. Donner that Hinton and Hazel would really make the decision about my going to the hospital. They had been arguing all night about how my head should be repaired. Their voices had still been snapping at each other when I had fallen asleep.
Hazel wanted me to get my head repaired but she recommended only one method: covering my head with stone. Stone, she said, would prevent Operators from tuning in on my mind. Hinton was opposed to stone.
“What’s wrong with stone,” Hazel had asked him. “A good thick coat of stone will mean safety. The latticework will grow in fine and there won’t be any danger that some busybody Operator will fiddle around with the latticework while it is growing in.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Hinton had shot back at her. “I want to get at the latticework when it’s growing in. I want to make certain that it grows in right. No stone. It’s got to be board and peephole.”
Personally, I was in favor of stone. I knew what latticework was. It was the Operators’ term for habit patterns. My habit patterns had been scalloped out and they had to grow back again. And I didn’t want a screwball like Hinton supervising the growth of my habit patterns.
I looked at my wrist watch. They always had picked me up as soon as I left the doctor’s office. I went back to the hotel, opened the door to my room and listened. Nothing. I went in and sat down and waited. Finally, I went to bed. As soon as I awoke and saw the clock, I knew they weren’t around. The Operators never allowed me to sleep more than six hours. I had slept fifteen hours.
Dr. Donner was in his office looking much the same as he had the day before. He doesn’t know, I thought. His Operator may know but he doesn’t know. “They’re gone,” I told him. “The voices. They went away and they didn’t come back.”
The doctor’s mouth sagged and then snapped suddenly and stretched into a wide smile, He took a deep breath and then smiled again and asked me to sit down and to tell him all about it. His head nodded happily as I talked.
“Will they be back?” I asked.
He threw a knife-sharp look at me as if he thought I might be trying to warn him of something. Then he stepped in and took charge. He hadn’t been in charge until then. He just had been sitting around the same way I had been, waiting to see what the Operators would do. He stood up very tall and looked very confident. “No. No. They won’t be back. You won’t have to go to a hospital. We won’t have to use shock therapy. You’re going to be all right.” He threw another sharp look at me to see if I were observing how confident he was. He went back to his desk and shoved papers around and looked as if he were decidedly in charge of everything.
“No hospital,” he said very confidently.
No stone, I thought, no stone.
“We’re going to use psychoanalysis,” Dr. Donner said.
The board and peephole, I thought, and I realized that Hinton had won.
Dr. Donner surprised me. I had always imagined that psychoanalysts presented a calm, serene facade to their patients, a bulwark against which all emotions could break without leaving a dent. Dr. Donner was impatient, sensitive, jumpy. I observed but did not absorb his impatience. Since the voices of the Operators had disappeared, I had been empty and dry, an automaton without emotion, almost without thought. Peace had finally come to me after months of the bedlam of the Operators, a gabby crowd if ever there were one, and the quiet beach of my mind was at rest.
“Did you read fantasy fiction?” Dr. Donner asked. “The Operators sound like characters created by a writer of fantasies.”
My memories of the Operators were sharp as icicles but searching through the past of sanity was like picking up rocks, every effort devastating. I said, finally, “I used to read Time. I tried to read the Evening Times every night but I didn’t always have the time. I didn’t have the time, even, to always read Time.” The repetition of the word delighted me. I wanted more of it, “You might say,” I added, “that I didn’t have the time to take advantage of the time.”
He tried again. “You exercised remarkable self-control, traveling around the country the way you did for six months— considering the condition you were in.”
I stifled the impulse to tell him that his statement was absurd. I hadn’t been in control. I had been controlled. I said, because I wondered if he had doubts about it, “I want you to understand that all the flukey-lukey has stopped. I’m perfectly all right now.” Except that my head was so dry and so empty.
“You’ve gotten rid of major symptoms. You realize that you had schizophrenic hallucinations and that the Operators did not exist. By the way, why do you refer to your delusions as ‘flukey-lukey’?”
I stared blankly. Why did I?
“Think about it a moment,” he said irritably. “Don’t say there is nothing going on in your mind. You say that very often. But there is always mental action going on somewhere in the mind.”
I tried to think but the effort hurt and I rested. A gentle wave broke on the dry beach of my mind: my mind is resting because it needs rest more than it needs an analyst at this point. I was about to put the gentle wave into words when another wave flooded softly over the shore: it would not be wise to say this. I stared and was silent.
The analyst looked at his clock, took out his notebook, scheduled me for another appointment, and waited while I laboriously copied the time and date on a piece of paper.
I went directly to the park where I was now spending most of my time. The park was large and peaceful. In its center was a lake on whose waters ducks, gulls, mud fowl and one large swan went about their daily routine of living. I had always liked birds but had never found much time to watch them. Time was all about me now.
The swan glided across the lake and on its back was a long, black rod. The woman sitting on the bench beside me leaned forward. “Will you look at that swan,” she said. “There’s some kind of stick on its back.”
I looked carefully at the swan. Another wave broke on the sand. I absorbed it and translated it, “It’s his leg,” I said. “Maybe it’s sore and the water is irritating it, or else the swan is just resting it.”
She peered over the water. “Oh, yes, I see now,” she said.
I was delighted with the waves. They were soft and gentle and they brought useful information into the dry empty cavern of my head. I should never have known about the long black stick being a swan’s leg. I had never seen a swan before. I walked to the lake for a closer look.
The swan’s leg still looked like a black stick. I was a bit dubious about its being his leg, but I trusted the waves. The waves were far more clever than the dry beach.
I watched the birds for hours. They help keep the Operators away, I thought, A wave cascaded gently on the beach: I must remember, not flukey-lukey, but schizophrenia; not Operators, but my unconscious mind; everything the Operators had said to me, my unconscious had said to my conscious mind. I watched the birds and something that wasn’t a wave stirred on the dry beach. How very odd, I mused, that my unconscious mind should call itself an Operator and call my conscious mind a Thing.
Before the Operators Came
Whenever I think of the Hook Operators now, I see a picture of a man with a hook stuck in his back. The hook is attached to a rope and the rope hangs from a ceiling. At the end of the rope, unable to get his feet on solid ground, the man dangles in the air, his face distorted in agony, his arms and legs thrashing about violently.
Behind him stands the Hook Operator. Having operated his hook successfully, the Hook Operator stands by with his other instruments, the knife and the hatchet. He watches the thrashing man, speculating, considering, If necessary, he will move in and cut the victim’s throat, or with his hatchet cleave through the victim’s head.
The Hook Operator is a maker of tools and if he is an expert tool-maker, the hook alone will serve his purpose. The victim, in his thrashing to be free of the hook, will most likely cut into his back the crippling gorge the Hook Operator seeks. The Hook Operator waits and watches. What a man will do, once he is caught on the hook, is always a gamble. There is the chance, of course, that the man may squirm off the hook, in which case the Hook Operator will move in with his other weapons.
There is, too, the chance that the victim may accomplish more than the Hook Operator strives for and crack his backbone or, giving an unexpected twist to his thrashing, tear himself completely in two. Should break or schism occur, the Hook Operator as much as anyone may pause in distress, surveying a wreckage he did not seek and for which he feels no guilt. When he hooks, cuts, or cleaves, his object is not to destroy but to impede and remove. Not personal animosity but competition has impelled him to use his weapons. The man on the hook was not an enemy but an obstacle. Even had the Hook Operator cut his competitor’s throat he would have cut it sufficiently but no more; had he cleaved his skull, he would have cleaved it just enough. Of his weapons, the hook is considered the least barbaric, the one which requires the most skill and the one for which he will receive the least censure.
The hook’s purpose is to catch and upset, and it was designed for no other purpose. If the man on the hook receives more injury than was intended, he obviously received it by trying too obstinately to regain his balance on ground he should have forsaken, or by losing inner balance in falling into a frenzy he should have had the strength to avoid. Nor will the spectators watching on the outskirts of the circle be inclined to condemn the Hook Operator if tragedy, instead of upset, occurs. The hook is the commonly accepted instrument of the circle where the Hook Operator works, a state of affairs which should have been clear to the victim as soon as he walked into the circle.
Considering the amount of hook operating that goes on in business organizations, it is surprising how little understanding of it exists among young people before they enter business. My own education for business was thorough enough, but I never had a course on “How to Recognize Hook Operating When You See It.” Even a short lecture would have been helpful: it would have brought into focus a picture for my memory to store away. As it was, I had to attempt to fit pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together without any guide and without much notion of what the picture was going to be when it was completed.
I went to work for the Knox Company for the same reason that a great many other people did. Knox was mushrooming overnight into a big company, profits were high, and the rich, oily smell of money hung over the plant.
I was new to business and I was concerned, as are a considerable number of young women when they start to work, in discovering the answer to “How do I get into the big salary class?” With all that money around, and with the technical background I had, there seemed to be a reasonable chance that I might latch on to some of it. Almost immediately an answer of sorts developed right in front of me.
I had been working only a few days when the company announced that a new design department would be opened within a month, and that a young fellow named Ken Ryers, a pleasant, soft-spoken chap who sat a few desks away from me and who had been working for Knox less than a year, would be promoted to the position of manager of the new department.
The thing I recall most vividly about Ken was that his head was always buried in his blotter, and that if you wanted to get his attention, you had to stand almost on top of him and speak very loudly. “It’s just that he concentrates hard,” his girl used to say of him. “He actually forgets everything except what he’s doing. Maybe that’s why he turns out so much work.”
I remember that I looked at the dark head that was always buried in a desk blotter and thought, “That’s how it’s done. It’s simple and sweet. You sit at your desk and keep turning it out. If you’re just a little better and if you turn it out for eight hours a day instead of the six hours a day that most people are willing to give, you’re made.”
The picture of hard working Ken getting a big promotion after only a short time with Knox had the kind of clear illustrative quality you see in the graphs in junior high school books, drawn in clear broad lines, and painted in bright lollipop colors. The picture was easy to understand and, I decided, not at all difficult to follow through on. I could see myself, within a few years, with a big fat salary, vacationing in Europe and writing postcards from Paris.
I found myself looking up frequently at Ken’s dark head and feeling grateful to him for getting me started so early on the right track. Perhaps it was because I looked at Ken so often that I became aware that someone else was doing the same thing, a little pasty-faced fellow who sat on the other side of the room. His name was Gordon and he smoked a great deal, not nervously, but deliberately and slowly, as if he were testing and evaluating each cigarette.
Some thirty days later, when the new design department was opened and Gordon was installed as department manager, I was one of many who walked around with blank faces and raised eyebrows. One of the girls, in a hurried whisper, gave me as clear an answer as I was able to get for some time.
“Ken said something terrible about Knox Senior, It must have been really awful because nobody can find out what he said. Knox called Ken in and had it out with him and Ken got mad and said Knox was crazy for believing such trash. One word led to another and Ken really let loose. He’s all washed up now.”
I wondered, because of a subconscious irritation rather than any objective reason, how much Gordon knew about the story that had reached Knox Senior and started the explosion, No one was going to learn much from Ken. He kept his head buried in his blotter and kept his business to himself. No one was going to learn much from Gordon, either. He sat at the manager’s desk in the new design department, smoking his slow cigarettes, and if he caught you looking at him his eyes would fix on your face in a cold, spiderish stare.
I’ve made some sharp revisions in my ideas of how people get ahead fast in business since the day I looked at Ken and saw how clear it all was. The thing you need is a special kind of skill that Ken didn’t have and could never have developed. It’s the technique of the Hook Operator.
Many people are horrified when they come upon hook operating, and their first reaction is, “That’s something I could never stoop to doing.” But, actually, the reason that a great many people don’t become Hook Operators is because it’s not at all easy to be one. They’re clever, the Hook Operators, and ingenious and resourceful, and they give every bit: of their talent and energy to the business of hook operating. To understand a Hook Operator, it is best to study him from the first clay that he sets his nimble, cloven foot inside the door of an organization.
A Hook Operator has a nose for power, and as soon as he enters an organization, he follows his nose until he comes upon the individual who is giving off the strongest odor. Having spotted him, the Hook Operator feels out the Powerman for his soft spot until he knows the exact location of the spot and its degree of softness.
There is value in taking a sharp look at this soft spot, for its nature is the one element that makes the career of the Hook Operator possible. If the Powerman doesn’t have this kind of soft spot, the Hook Operator will get nowhere, but generally the Hook Operator has little to worry about on this score. Where there is power there is usually the kind of soft spot the Hook Operator is seeking. The soft spot is a simple thing, a hidden sense of insecurity. Its owner is so sharply aware of this soft spot that he keeps it hidden in a little box where he doesn’t have to look at it and be aware of it. About this soft spot, however, the owner is so touchy that the slightest indication that someone suspects its existence will drive him crazy. The Hook Operator usually locates the soft spot very quickly, for this is part of his business; not giving any indication that he sees it is part of his technique.
As soon as he has gotten the soft spot in focus, the Hook Operator visualizes it as a target and shapes a weapon which will pierce that feeling of insecurity so that it will bleed for days. He then looks about to locate the guy-on-the-way-up, since this fellow will hold or will be credited with holding the weapon, and will throw or be credited with throwing it at the target.
There is a choice of techniques at this point. If the Hook Operator can manage it, the most effective method is to get the guy-on-the-way-up to actually throw the weapon. First, the Hook Operator studies the guy-on-the-way-up to locate his soft spot. If it exists, it will show itself under the Hook Operator’s careful probing. Brought under the microscope, it is a rather soft, small, flabby thing, a feeling in the guy-on-the-way-up that he is not sufficiently appreciated by management.
Once he has brought this soft spot into focus, the Hook Operator pokes at it until it has grown to maximum size. When the Hook Operator has achieved this, a change becomes apparent in the guy-on-the-way-up. His fellow employees notice it and management notices it and they say, especially the members of management, that so-and-so’s personal morale is not what it used to be. This is true enough. So-and-so has been worked on by an expert until his small sense of grievance has grown to a large sense of grievance.
At this point, the Hook Operator directs this sense of grievance at the Powerman. If the guy-on-the-way-up is susceptible, he begins to think that the Powerman is deliberately holding him back. The Hook Operator then carefully directs the victim’s attention to the Powerman’s soft spot, his hidden insecurity, until the victim understands why the Powerman has this sense of inferiority and understands exactly the real inferiority which lies under this touchy sense of inferiority. This Powerman who doesn’t appreciate him, the victim finally realizes, is just a dope.
When the Hook Operator gets the victim to this point, he picks up the weapon of words which he has so carefully fashioned and dangles it in front of the victim’s eyes. This is what would puncture the ego of the Powerman, says, in essence, the Hook Operator. It may take days of not exactly saying this to say it exactly enough for the guy-on-the-way-up to get the point. But eventually the victim realizes that the Powerman, that unappreciative individual who thinks so little of him, can be reduced to ashes by a few words. When he has become sufficiently aggrieved and angry and has been convinced by the Hook Operator that he is well justified in feeling aggrieved and angry, the victim throws his weapon at the target. And the moment he does, he is finished, he is one less guy-on-the-way-up.
Frequently, this technique is not effective because the victim’s personal morale is too high, or because his sense of balance is too good, or because he is too shrewd to be taken in by the Hook Operator. In such cases, the Hook Operator merely pretends that the guy-on-the-way-up has thrown the weapon at the Powerman’s soft spot and convinces the Powerman of this.
The Hook Operator, in this case, spends his time working on the Powerman rather than on the guy-on-the-way-up. To convince the Powerman that the victim has actually thrown the weapon at the Powerman’s soft spot, the Hook Operator may have to do a considerable amount of work.
First, he mentions a small needle of comment and claims that he heard the victim throw it at the Powerman and he follows this with another small needle. He words these little needle statements carefully so that they sound as if they just might have been said by the victim. The Hook Operator watches their effect carefully, revising the shape and length of the needles as necessary, until he notices little things which tell him that the needles are doing their work: the Powerman’s tightening of the mouth when he hears them, his growing irritability with the victim, his sudden careful quiet studying of the victim.
When enough needles have been thrown and the proper effect has been achieved, the Hook Operator throws the big weapon. This may be a small knife, or a large knife, or a broad-ax. Once it has been thrown and it sticks and the Powerman’s soft spot bleeds, the victim is done for. The guy-on-the-way-up may be an excellent and invaluable employee but so far as the Powerman is concerned, he is now only a man who threw a weapon at the soft spot the Powerman doesn’t dare to look at himself, but which he can feel bleeding.
If the victim has been hooked by this second technique, he gropes and blunders about, trying to discover why the wind has suddenly changed. Occasionally a Powerman, stung into fury, lashes out at the supposed weapon-thrower and repeats what the Hook Operator has told him. But, usually, when the touchy soft spot is punctured, the Powerman cannot bring himself to do this. He cannot talk at all about the soft spot but, instead, swallows a cup of acid every time he looks at the victim. Inevitably, if the Powerman is hooked, he gets rid of the victim or he uses him as a whipping boy to console himself for his punctured ego.
It was this second technique which Gordon had used to break Ken. When Knox, outraged by the stories he heard, accused Ken of disloyalty, Ken was amazed, then annoyed, then angered. Ken was not a smooth talker and he was a man who kept hidden, under his surface impassiveness, a hundred small irritations. Within minutes two angry men were yelling at each other and nobody, anywhere, could have undone the damage. Ken, I suppose, was easy to break, and Gordon probably had little difficulty in planning exactly the right moves while he smoked his slow cigarettes.
The great difficulty with being a Hook Operator, if you have tendencies that way, is that being one is not easy. The techniques require skill, considerable acting talent, perceptivity, careful planning, a devious type of mentality, and a complete ability to rationalize your actions to yourself. The really clever Hook Operators are quite expert. They have to be. It is their livelihood. Somewhere early in the game, they became aware that they would never get anywhere with such business abilities as they possessed and they had totaled their resources and discovered that they had talents which might be substituted for the ones their jobs required, and then perfected those talents by long practice.
Of course, even the cleverest Hook Operators cannot get far if the Powermen don’t have touchy ego soft spots. I suppose that the Knox organization presented a setup that was milk pudding for a Hook Operator. The Knox Company was a family organization, run by Knox Senior, an extraordinarily able and shrewd, if uneducated man, and by his six sons who were, all of them, thoroughly educated, remarkably dull, and quite aware that they wouldn’t have risen higher than mail clerk in any other organization. Their awareness of their lack of ability was the main soft spot in each of the Knox boys, and the knowledge of the accumulative dullness of his six progeny was the old man’s soft spot.
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