For about five years I led a quiet but productive life. After a while I transferred to the institute, although I continued to take an undergraduate course at Aston under the aegis of the sociology faculty. I finished my thesis on grant application and started making some preliminary notes towards tackling the whole question of job reductivism from a theoretical perspective. I suppose with the benefit of hindsight I can see clearly what was going on here, but believe me, at the time I was oblivious. I had no thoughts of disturbing the pattern of life that I had cautiously built up for myself. I had acquired some slight professional standing; I had rented a flat — granted, it was furnished and I hardly spent any time there, but nonetheless these trappings of what is laughably called ‘social acceptability’ had begun to matter to me. After all, even the most conceited bore is often considered a social asset, if he has clean hands and a clean suit. All in all, for a virtual indigent, I had come a long way.
Into this Midlands arcadia fell a letter from Zack Busner:
Dear Harold,
It is possible that this isn’t a letter you wouldn’t want to receive, but I will have to accept that at the outset. You may not remember me, but I was a contemporary of yours at Chelmsford and also one of Alkan’s analysand/students. I can barely remember you but, be that as it may, your work has come to my attention and I am in need of assistance — urgently in need of assistance, at my Concept House in Willesden. I cannot adequately describe the work involved in a letter, nor can I do justice to the new framework within which we are ‘practising’. Perhaps you would be good enough to come and see me and we can discuss it?
Busner was the student/analysand of Alkan’s I had most disliked. He had been a rounded ham of a young man, irrepressibly jolly, and, of the five, the most given to practical jokes. It was he, I recalled, who had had all Adam Harley’s suits adjusted overnight to fit a midget. He had wandered around the campus at Chelmsford clapping people around the shoulders and greeting them effusively with a phoney hail-fellow-well-met manner, which set my teeth on edge. However, no one, least of all me, had failed to notice that despite his endless appetite for high jinks, or perhaps because of it, Busner was becoming a formidable researcher. I knew that his doctoral thesis had received very favourable attention. And that, a medical doctor by training, he had gone on to qualify as a psychiatrist and take up work as a respected clinician.
I went down to London. Busner had helpfully sent me a tube map with a cross on it marking Willesden Junction. The Concept House was on Chapter Road, one of those long north-west London avenues that in winter are flanked by receding rows of what appear to be the amputated, arthritic, decomposing limbs of giants. Snow had been falling all day and Chapter Road was a dirty bath mat of cold, grey flakes. It was dark as I plodded along, cursing the slippery PVC soles of the shoes I’d just bought. Ahead of me in the centre of the road two children of about five or six walked hand in hand.
The whole atmosphere depressed me. The feeling it gave me, walking down that endless road, was of being in a dirty, cold room, a room where no one had bothered to vacuum between the tattered edge of the beige carpet and the scuffed, chipped paintwork of the skirting board for a very long time. I wished that I had driven there instead of leaving my car at Tolworth services and hitching the rest of the way.
The Concept House was no different to any of the other large Edwardian residences which lined the road. If anything it looked a little more like a home and a little less like an institution than the rest. The garden was littered with discarded children’s toys, and in an upstairs window I could see the back of finger-paintings which had been stuck to the windows with masking tape. Busner himself opened the door to me; had he not been wearing an aggressively loud jumper with ‘Zack’ appliquéd across its breast in red cartoon lettering I don’t think I would have recognised him.
Busner’s cheeks had sunk, his face was thin and hollow. The rest of him was just as plump as ever, but he had the countenance of a driven ascetic. His eyes glowed with an ill-suppressed fanaticism. In that instant I nearly turned on my heel and abandoned the interview. I had been prepared for Busner the Buffoon, but Busner the Revolutionary was something I hadn’t bargained for.
We goggled at one another. Then quick as a flash he had drawn me into the vestibule, persuaded me to abandon my sodden mac and dripping briefcase and led me on, into a large, warm kitchen where he proceeded to make me a cup of cocoa, talking all the while.
‘I hadn’t imagined you as such a dapper little thing, my dear. Your suit is marvellous.’ In truth the cheap compressed nap of the material was beginning to bunch into an elephant’s hide of wrinkles under the onslaught of quick drying. ‘Really, I wouldn’t have recognised you if I hadn’t known you were coming. I was expecting the timorous little beastie we had at Chelmsford.’
With amazing rapidity Busner outlined for me the philosophy of the Concept House, what he was trying to do and how he needed my help. In essence the house was an autonomous community of therapists and patients, except that instead of these roles being concretely divided among the residents, all were free to take on either mantle at any time.
Over our cocoa Busner set out for me his vision of the Concept House and of the future of psychotherapy. Disgusted by his experience of hospital psychology — and the narrow drive to reduce mental illness to a chemical formula — Busner had rebelled:
‘I sat up for night after night, reading Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky and Sartre. I began to systematically doubt the principles on which I had based my career to date. I deconstructed the entire world that I had been inhabiting for the past thirty years.
‘It was dawning on me that the whole way in which people have hitherto viewed mental illness has been philosophically suspect. The division between doctor and patient has corresponded to an unwarranted epistemological assumption. Here at the Concept House we are dedicated to redefining this key relationship.
‘We’re really finding out the extent to which all the categories of psychopathology are just that: dry, empty categories, devoid of real content, representing only the taxonomic, psychic fascism of a gang of twisted old men.’
It was a long speech and Busner spoke eloquently, punctuating his remarks by moving oven gloves around on his chest. I think, in retrospect, they must have been adhering to his woolly by strips of Velcro that I couldn’t see, but at the time I was tremendously impressed by the trick.
Busner went on to explain that within the Concept House everything was ordered democratically. At the house meetings, which were held every morning, rotas and agendas were drawn up and jobs distributed. The house was Busner’s own, or rather Busner’s parents’. He had persuaded them to donate it to what he styled his ‘League for Psychic Liberation’. In the weeks that followed I occasionally saw the older Busners wandering around the upper storeys of the house like fitful ghosts, sheepishly reading the Sunday Telegraph Magazine in reproduction Queen Anne armchairs, while feverish psychotics, charged with some unearthly energy, toyed with their ornaments.
Having set out his theories, and explained the philosophy of this novel institution to which he had given birth, Busner picked up the drained cocoa mugs and put them on the draining board. He turned to me with a quizzical expression.