`We have plenty of empirical evidence regarding the destruction of the personality,' said Dr. Cobblestone quietly. `Our mental hospitals are overflowing with people who have a sense of an un-integrated, non-patterned chaos of selves.'
`Yes, we do,' replied Dr. Rhinehart calmly. `But why are they there?'
There was no answer to this question, and Dr. Rhinehart, after waiting while Dr. Weinburger sat down again, continued, `Your therapies tried to give them a sense of an integral self and failed. Isn't it just possible that the desire not to be unified, not to be single, not to have one personality may be the natural and basic human desire in our multivalent societies?'
Again there was a silence, except for Dr. Moon's expiring breaths and an irritable throat-clearing by Dr. Weinburger.
`Whenever I look at the Western psychotherapies of the last hundred years,' Dr. Rhinehart went on, `it seems to me incredible that no one acknowledges the almost total failure of these therapies to cure human unhappiness. As Dr. Raymond Felt has observed: "The ratio of spontaneous remission of symptoms and the rate of supposed `cures' by the psychotherapies of the various schools has remained essentially the same throughout the twentieth century."
`Why have our efforts to cure neurosis been so uniformly unsuccessful? Why does civilization expand unhappiness faster than we can develop new theories about how it occurs and what we ought to do about it? Our mistake is booming obvious. We have carried over from the simple, unified, stable societies of the past an image of the ideal norm for man which is totally wrong for our complex, chaotic, unstable and mufti-' valued urban civilizations of today. We assume that "honesty" and "frankness" are of primary importance in healthy human relations, and the lie and the act are, in the anachronistic ethics of our time, considered evil.'
'Ah, but Dr: Rhinehart, you can't-' said Dr. Cobblestone.
'No, sir. I regret to say I'm serious. Every society is based upon lies. Our society of today is based on conflicting lies. The man who lived in a simple, stable, single-lie society absorbed the single-lie system into a unified self and spouted it for the rest of his life, un-contradicted by his friends and neighbors, and unaware that ninety-eight percent of his beliefs were illusions, his values artificial and arbitrary and most of his desires comically ill-aimed.
`The man in our multi-lie society absorbs a chaos of conflicting lies and is reminded daily by his friends and neighbors that his beliefs arc not universally held, that his values are personal and arbitrary and his desires often ill-aimed. We must realize that to ask this man to be honest and true to himself, when his contradictory selves have multiple contradictory answers to most questions, is a safe and economical method of driving -him insane.
`On the other hand, to free him from his unending conflict we must urge him to let go, to act, to pretend, to lie. We must give him the means to develop these abilities. He must become a diceperson.'
`See! See!' Dr. Peerman interrupted. `He just confessed to advocating a therapy which encourages lying. Did you hear him?'
`I believe we have been listening to Dr. Rhinehart, thank you, Dr. Peerman,' said Dr. Weinburger, again mangling the papers in front of him. `Dr. Rhinehart, you may go on.'
Dr. Rhinehart glanced at his watch and continued.
`When all men lie by their very being in a multi-lie society, only the sick try to be honest, and only the very sick ask for honesty in others. Psychologists, of course, urge the patient to be authentic and honest. Such methods '
`If our methods are so bad,' asked Dr. Weinburger harshly, `then why do any of our patients improve at all?'
`Because we've encouraged them to play new roles,' Dr. Rhinehart answered promptly. `Primarily the role of "being honest", but also the roles of feeling guilty, having sinned, being oppressed, discovering insights, being sexually liberated and so on. Of course, the patient and therapist are under the illusion that they are getting at true desires, when in fact they are only releasing and developing new and different selves.`
'Good point, Luke,' said Dr. Ecstein.
'The limitations placed on this new role-playing are catastrophic. The patient is being pressed to get at his "true" feelings and thus to be single and unitary. In discovering unlived roles in his search for a "true self" he may experience brief periods of liberation, but as soon as he is urged to enthrone some new self as the true one, he will again feel locked up and divided. Dice therapy alone acknowledges what we all know and choose to forget: man is multiple.'
`Sure, man is multiple,' Dr. Weinburger said, banging his fist abruptly on the table. `But the whole point of civilization is to keep the rapist, the killer, the liar and the cheat locked up, suppressed. You seem to be saying we should unlock the cage and let all our minority murderers roam free.'
Dr. Weinburger gave an irritable shrug of his left shoulder, sending the inert body of Dr. Moon on its slow journey through its orbit to come to rest against the softer but no less irritable shoulder of Dr. Mann.
`That's right, Luke,' said Dr. Mann, looking coldly across the table at Dr. Rhinehart. `Just because we have a fool within us is no reason to feel he ought to be expressed.'
Dr. Rhinehart glanced at his watch, sighed, took out a die, dropped it from his right hand into the palm of his left and looked at it.
`Fuck it,' he said.
`Beg pardon?' asked Dr. Cobblestone.
'The idea of freeing the rapist, the murderer and the fool seems nutty,' continued Dr. Rhinehart, `to the jailer called the normal, rational personality. So does the idea of freeing the pacifist seem nutty to the jailer personality of a murderer. But the normal personality is today a study in frustration, boredom and despair. Dice therapy is the only theory which offers to blow up the whole works.'
`But the social consequences-' began Dr. -Cobblestone.
`The social consequences of a nation of dicepeople are, by definition, unpredictable. The social consequences of a nation. of normal personalities are obvious: misery, conflict, violence, war and a universal joylessness.'
`But I still don't see what you've got against honesty,' Dr. Cobblestone said.
`Honesty and frankness?' Dr. Rhinehart said. `Jesus! They're the worst possible things in normal human relations. "Do you really love me?" this absurd question, so typical of our diseased minds, should always be answered "My God NO!" or "More than mere reality is my love; it is imaginary."
'The more someone tries to be honest and authentic, the more he's going to be blocked and inhibited. The question "How do you realty feel about me?" ought always to be answered with a belt in the teeth. But if someone were asked: "Tell me fantastically and imaginatively how you feel about me," he'd be free from that neurotic demand for unity and truth. He could express any of his conflicting selves - one at a time of course. He'd be able to play each role to the hilt. He'd be at one with his schizophrenia.'
Dr. Rhinehart stood up. `Mind if I pace about a bit?' he asked.
`Go ahead,' said Dr. Weinburger. Dr. Rhinehart began striding back and forth in front of the long table, for a while his pace just matching the shorter roll of Dr. Moon between the shoulders of his two colleagues.
`Now, about how all this works in practice,' he began again.
`It's tough starting dice therapy with a patient. His resistance to chance is as great today as was his resistance to Freud's sexual mythology seventy years ago. When we ask a typical miserable American to let the dice make a decision he goes along only if he thinks it's a temporary game. When he sees I seriously expect him to make important decisions by chance, he inevitably pees in his pants. - `Figuratively speaking. In most cases this initial resistance pants peeing, we call it - is overcome and the therapy begins.
`We have to begin in the most trivial ways. The psychotic has no areas free to be spontaneous and original. The neurotic has few normal, "healthy" persons like yourselves have only a small handful. All other areas are controlled by the dictatorship of personality. It's the job of dice therapy, like the job of revolution in the world as a whole, to enlarge free territory.