Essay on Psychiatrists

I. Invocation It's crazy to think one could describe them— Calling on reason, fantasy, memory, eyes and ears— As though they were all alike any more Than sweeps, opticians, poets or masseurs. Moreover, they are for more than one reason Difficult to speak of seriously and freely, And I have never (even this is difficult to say Plainly, without foolishness or irony) Consulted one for professional help, though it happens Many or most of my friends have—and that, Perhaps, is why it seems urgent to try to speak Sensibly about them, about the psychiatrists. II. Some Terms “Shrink” is a misnomer. The religious Analogy is all wrong, too, and the old, Half-forgotten jokes about Viennese accents And beards hardly apply to the good-looking woman In boots and a knit dress, or the man Seen buying the Sunday Times in mutton-chop Whiskers and expensive running shoes. In a way I suspect that even the terms “doctor” And “therapist” are misnomers; the patient Is not necessarily “sick.” And one assumes That no small part of the psychiatrist’s Role is just that: to point out misnomers. III. Proposition These are the first citizens of contingency. Far from the doctrinaire past of the old ones, They think in their prudent meditations Not about ecstasy (the soul leaving the body) Nor enthusiasm (the god entering one’s person) Nor even about sanity (which means Health, an impossible perfection) But ponder instead relative truth and the warm Dusk of amelioration. The cautious Young augurs with their family-life, good books And records and foreign cars believe In amelioration—in that, and in suffering. IV. A Lakeside Identification Yes, crazy to suppose one could describe them— And yet, there was this incident: at the local beach Clouds of professors and the husbands of professors Swam, dabbled, or stood to talk with arms folded Gazing at the lake ... and one of the few townsfolk there, With no faculty status—a matter-of-fact, competent, Catholic woman of twenty-seven with five children And a first-rate body—pointed her finger At the back of one certain man and asked me, “Is that guy a psychiatrist?” and by god he was! “Yes,” She said, “He looks like a psychiatrist.” Grown quiet, I looked at his pink back, and thought. V. Physical Comparison With Professors And Others Pink and a bit soft-bodied, with a somewhat jazzy Middle-class bathing suit and sandy sideburns, to me He looked from the back like one more professor. And from the front, too—the boyish, unformed carriage Which foreigners always note in American men, combined As in a professor with that liberal, quizzical, Articulate gaze so unlike the more focused, more Tolerant expression worn by a man of action (surgeon, Salesman, athlete). On closer inspection was there, Perhaps, a self-satisfied benign air, a too studied Gentleness toward the child whose hand he held loosely? Absurd to speculate; but then—the woman saw something. VI. Their Seriousness, With Further Comparisons In a certain sense, they are not serious. That is, they are serious—useful, deeply helpful, Concerned—only in the way that the pilots of huge Planes, radiologists, and master mechanics can, At their best, be serious. But however profound The psychiatrists may be, they are not serious the way A painter may be serious beyond pictures, or a businessman May be serious beyond property and cash—or even The way scholars and surgeons are serious, each rapt In his work’s final cause, contingent upon nothing: Beyond work; persons; recoveries. And this is fitting: Who would want to fly with a pilot who was serious About getting to the destination safely? Terrifying idea— That a pilot could over-extend, perhaps try to fly Too well, or suffer from Pilot’s Block; of course, It may be that (just as they must not drink liquor Before a flight) they undergo regular, required check-ups With a psychiatrist, to prevent such things from happening. VII. Historical (The Bacchae) Madness itself, as an idea, leaves us confused— Incredulous that it exists, or cruelly facetious, Or stricken with a superstitious awe as if bound By the lost cults of Trebizond and Pergamum ... The most profound study of madness is found In the Bacchae of Euripides, so deeply disturbing That in Cambridge, Massachusetts the players Evaded some of the strongest unsettling material By portraying poor sincere, fuddled, decent Pentheus As a sort of fascistic bureaucrat—but it is Dionysus Who holds rallies, instills exaltations of violence, With his leopards and atavistic troops above law, Reason and the good sense and reflective dignity Of Pentheus—Pentheus, humiliated, addled, made to suffer Atrocity as a minor jest of the smirking God. When Bacchus’s Chorus (who call him “most gentle”!) observe: “Ten thousand men have ten thousand hopes; some fail, Some come to fruit, but the happiest man is he Who gathers the good of life day by day”—as though Life itself were enough—does that mean, to leave ambition? And is it a kind of therapy, or truth? Or both? VIII. A Question On the subject of madness the Bacchae seems, On the whole, more pro than contra. The Chorus Says of wine, “There is no other medicine for misery”; When the Queen in her ecstasy—or her enthusiasm?— Tears her terrified son’s arm from his body, or bears His head on her spear, she remains happy so long As she remains crazy; the God himself (who bound fawnskin To the women’s flesh, armed them with ivy arrows And his orgies’ livery) debases poor Pentheus first, Then leads him to mince capering towards female Death And dismemberment: flushed, grinning, the grave young King of Thebes pulls at a slipping bra-strap, simpers Down at his turned ankle.Pentheus:“Should I lift up Mount Cithæron—Bacchae, mother and all?” Dionysus: “Do what you want to do. Your mind Was unstable once, but now you sound more sane, You are on your way to great things.” The question is, Which is the psychiatrist: Pentheus, or Dionysus? IX. Pentheus As Psychiatrist With his reasonable questions Pentheus tries To throw light on the old customs of savagery. Like a brave doctor, he asks about it all, He hears everything, “Weird, fantastic things” The Messenger calls them: with their breasts Swollen, their new babies abandoned, mothers Among the Bacchantes nestled gazelles And young wolves in their arms, and suckled them; You might see a single one of them tear a fat calf In two, still bellowing with fright, while others Clawed heifers to pieces; ribs and hooves Were strewn everywhere; blood-smeared scraps Hung from the fir trees; furious bulls Charged and then fell stumbling, pulled down To be stripped of skin and flesh by screaming women ... And Pentheus listened. Flames burned in their hair, Unnoticed; thick honey spurted from their wands; And the snakes they wore like ribbons licked Hot blood from their flushed necks: Pentheus Was the man the people told ... “weird things,” like A middle-class fantasy of release; and when even The old men—bent Cadmus and Tiresias—dress up In fawnskin and ivy, beating their wands on the ground, Trying to carouse, it is Pentheus—down-to-earth, Sober—who raises his voice in the name of dignity. Being a psychiatrist, how could he attend to the Chorus’s warning Against “those who aspire” and “a tongue without reins”? X. Dionysus As Psychiatrist In a more hostile view, the psychiatrists Are like Bacchus—the knowing smirk of his mask, His patients, his confident guidance of passion, And even his little jokes, as when the great palace Is hit by lightning which blazes and stays, Bouncing among the crumpled stone walls ... And through the burning rubble he comes, With his soft ways picking along lightly With a calm smile for the trembling Chorus Who have fallen to the ground, bowing In the un-Greek, Eastern way—What, Asian women, He asks, Were you disturbed just now when Bacchus Jostled the palace? He warns Pentheus to adjust, To learn the ordinary man’s humble sense of limits, Violent limits, to the rational world. He cures Pentheus of the grand delusion that the dark Urgencies can be governed simply by the mind, And the mind’s will. He teaches Queen Agave to look Up from her loom, up at the light, at her tall Son’s head impaled on the stiff spear clutched In her own hand soiled with dirt and blood. XI. Their Philistinism Considered “Greek Tragedy” of course is the sort of thing They like and like the idea of ... though not “tragedy” In the sense of newspapers. When a patient shot one of them, People phoned in, many upset as though a deep, Special rule had been abrogated, someone had gone too far. The poor doctor, as described by the evening Globe, Turned out to be a decent, conventional man (Doctors For Peace, B’Nai Brith, numerous articles), almost Carefully so, like Paul Valéry—or like Rex Morgan, M.D., who, In the same Globe, attends a concert with a longjawed woman. First Panel:“We’re a little early for the concert! There’s an art museum we can stroll through!” “I’d like