The Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart

glad to hear it, Jake. You seem to be hitting the jackpot with this one.’

      ‘People are seeing the light –’

      ‘Er … Dr Ecstein,’ Miss Reingold said.

      ‘They’ll like it – I may convert a few analysts.’

      ‘Are you going to be able to make lunch today?’ I asked. ‘When are you leaving for Philadelphia?’

      ‘Damn right. Want to show Mann my review. Plane leaves at two. I’ll miss your poker party tonight.’

      ‘Er … Dr Ecstein.’

      ‘You read any more of my book?’ Jake went on and gave me one of his piercing, squinting glances, which, had I been a patient, would have led me to repress for a decade all that was on my mind at that instant.

      ‘No. No, I haven’t. I must still have a psychological block: professional jealousy and all that.’

      ‘Er … Dr Ecstein?’

      ‘Hmmm. Yeah. In Philly I’m gonna see that anal optometrist I’ve been telling you about. Think we’re about at a breakthrough. Cured of his voyeurism, but still has visual blackouts. It’s only been three months though. I’ll bust him. Bust him right back to twenty-twenty.’ He grinned.

      ‘Dr Ecstein, sir,’ said Miss Reingold, now standing.

      ‘Seeya, Luke. Send in Mr Klopper, Miss R.’

      As Jake, still carrying a handful of forms, exited briskly into his inner office, I asked Miss Reingold to check with Queensborough State Hospital about my afternoon appointments.

      ‘Yes, Dr Rhinehart,’ she said.

      ‘And what did you wish to communicate to Dr Ecstein?’

      ‘Oh, Doctor,’ she smiled doubtfully. ‘Dr Ecstein asked for the case notes on Miss Riffe and Mr Klopper and I gave him by mistake the record sheets of our last year’s budget.’

      ‘Don’t worry, Miss Reingold,’ I replied firmly. ‘This may mean another breakthrough.’

      It was 9.07 when I finally settled into my chair behind the outstretched form of Reginald Jenkins on my couch. Normally nothing upsets a patient more than a late analyst, but Jenkins was a masochist: I could count on him assuming that he deserved it.

      ‘I’m sorry about being here,’ he said, ‘but your secretary insisted I come in and lie down.’

      ‘That’s quite all right, Mr Jenkins. I’m sorry I’m late. Let’s both relax and you can go right ahead.’

      Now the curious reader will want to know what kind of an analyst I was. It so happens that I practiced non-directive therapy. For those not familiar with it, the analyst is passive, compassionate, non-interpretive, non-directing. More precisely, he resembles a redundant moron. For example, a session with a patient like Jenkins might go like this:

      JENKINS: ‘I feel that no matter how hard I try I’m always going to fail; that some kind of internal mechanism always acts to screw up what I’m trying to do.’

      [Pause]

      ANALYST: ‘You feel that some part of you always forces you to fail.’

      JENKINS: ‘Yes. For example, that time when I had that date with that nice woman, really attractive – the librarian, you remember – and all I talked about at dinner and all evening was the New York Jets and what a great defensive secondary they have. I knew I should be talking books or asking her questions but I couldn’t stop myself.’

      ANALYST: ‘You feel that some part of you consciously ruined the potential relationship with that girl.’

      JENKINS: ‘And that job with Wessen, Wessen and Woof. I could have had it. But I took a month’s vacation in Jamaica when I knew they’d be wanting an interview.’

      ‘I see.’

      ‘What do you make of it all, Doctor? I suppose it’s masochistic.’

      ‘You think it might be masochistic.’

      ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

      ‘You aren’t certain if it’s masochistic but you do know that you often do things which are self-destructive.’

      ‘That’s right. That’s right. And yet I don’t have any suicidal tendencies. Except in those dreams. Throwing myself under a herd of hippopotamuses. Or’potami. Setting myself on fire in front of Wessen, Wessen and Woof. But I keep goofing up real opportunities.’

      ‘Although you never consciously think of suicide you have dreamed about it.’

      ‘Yes. But that’s normal. Everybody does crazy things in dreams.’

      ‘You feel that your dreaming of self-destructive acts is normal because …’

      The intelligent reader gets the picture. The effect of non-directive therapy is to encourage the patient to speak more and more frankly, to gain total confidence in the non-threatening, totally accepting clod who’s curing him, and eventually to diagnose and resolve his own conflicts, with old thirty-five-dollars-an-hour echoing away through it all behind the couch.

      And it works. It works precisely as well as every other tested form of psychotherapy. It works sometimes and fails at others, and its success and failures are identical with other analysts’ successes and failures. Of course at times the dialogue resembles a comedy routine. My patient the second hour that morning was a hulking heir to a small fortune who had the build of a professional wrestler and the mentality of a professional wrestler.

      Frank Osterflood was the most depressing case I’d had in five years of practice. In the first two months of analysis he had seemed a rather nice empty socialite, worried halfheartedly about his inability to concentrate on anything. He tended to drift from job to job averaging two or three a year. He talked a great deal about his jobs and about a mousy father and two disgusting brothers with families, but all with such cocktail-party patter that I knew we must be a long way from what was really bothering him. If anything was bothering him. The only clue I had to indicate that he was anything but a vacuous muscle was his occasional spitting hissing remarks – usually of a general nature – about women. When I asked one morning about his relations with women he hesitated and then said he found them boring. When I asked him how he found fulfillment for his sexual needs, he answered neutrally, ‘Prostitutes.’

      Two or three times in later sessions he described in detail how he liked to humiliate the call girls he hired, but he would never make any effort to analyze his behavior; he seemed to feel in his casual man-of-the-world way that humiliating women was good, normal, all-American behavior. He found it more interesting to analyze why he left his last job; the office he worked in ‘smelled funny.’

      About halfway through the session that August day he interrupted his seemingly pleasant recollections of having single-handedly destroyed an East Side bar by sitting up on the couch and looking intensely but, in my professional opinion, dumbly, at the floor. Even his face seemed bulging with muscles. He sat there in the same position for several minutes, grunting quietly to himself with a sound like a noisy refrigerator. Finally he said:

      ‘I get so tied up inside I just have to … to do something or I’ll explode,’ he said.

      ‘I understand.’

      [Pause]

      ‘Do something … sexually or I’ll explode.’

      ‘You get so tense you feel you must express yourself sexually.’

      ‘Yes.’

      [Pause]

      ‘Don’t you want to know how?’ he asked.

      ‘If you’d like to tell me.’

      ‘Do you want to know? Don’t you need to know to help me?’

      ‘I