If Hurst represented the therapeutic corruption of Quantity Theory, Sikorski had done his best to effect a political corruption. Sikorski’s first published paper in the wake of our work together had contained a lively refutation of the idea of sanity quotients being measurable within the context of social groupings. For him the very idea of ‘society’ was a fallacy. ‘Society’ could not be quantified, but a physical area could. Sikorski proposed, therefore, what he called ‘psychic fields’ — not really a difficult concept to grasp, he simply meant ‘areas’. Within each of these psychic fields there was, of course, a given sanity quotient. It was in the interests of the establishment, he went on to say, to create a complex and sustainable pattern of such fields, which would ensure that the principal burdens of depression, schizophrenia, alcoholism, mania and depression, fell primarily on the disadvantaged: the working class, the ethnic minorities and so forth.
Clearly this fascism of the very animus had to be counteracted. Sikorski, scion of a wealthy East Anglian landowning family, at one time a brilliant clinician with a promising career in orthodox medicine ahead of him, took the plunge and followed the path dictated by his own convictions. After the initial Quantity Theory multi-disciplinary team broke up Sikorski disappeared. Later, there were rumours that he had had himself sectioned; that he had undergone more than twenty ECT treatments, that he had been overdosed with Halperidol. And later still that he had been partially leucotomised … privately … by a friend.
He emerged two years later on the fringes of the metropolis. By now he was at the head of a ragged band, which styled itself as ‘the Radical Psychic Field Disruptionists’. The aim of this collection of university dropouts, druggies, actors and other assorted social deviants was to act as a kind of emergency oil rig capping team in the context of mental health.
Like a method acting workshop they refined and perfected their assumption of symptoms of mental illness. (Occasionally members of the troupe would appear on one of the regional news-feature programmes to give the folks at home a demo.) Then, they would descend to picket day-care centres, long-term asylums, secure wards for the criminally insane and of course analysts’ and therapists’ offices. Lounging, squirming, ranting, collectively deluding, over a two- or three-year period the Radical Psychic Field Disruptionists became a familiar sight around Britain. They had the same sort of cachet — as a bizarre diversion threading their way through the conformist crowd — as the Hare Krishnas had had some ten or so years before.
I had always had a kind of a weakness for Sikorski. He was such an attractive man, and so enthusiastic, given to large passions. Very Slav. He was really the Bakunin of psychology, asexual and subject to borrowing large amounts of money that he couldn’t possibly hope to repay.
Now he stands. And then struts back and forth on the sward. Arms outstretched, he clutches up divots and presses them to his brow. His mouth opens and closes, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. Apparently he has been invited to Denver as a gift to the municipality from the conference organisers. The Radical Psychic Field Disruptionists are going to practise their strange arts in the vicinity of the state mental hospital and ameliorate the conditions of the inhabitants … that’s the idea at any rate.
Plenty of people, some of them quite respectable thinkers, believe implicitly in the efficacy of Radical Psychic Field Disruption. What a joke! These people haven’t a clue what Quantity Theory is really about. Quantity Theory is not concerned with total physical cause, it operates at the level of the signifier. People are willing to come forward in droves and claim that they have been helped by the actions of Sikorski and his followers. And it is considered slightly hip by the intelligentsia to piggyback on a field disrupting trip in order to obtain relief from some trying neurosis or other — to shuck off a co-dependant relationship, or ‘deal’ with some emotion or other. I have been told that nowadays it’s virtually impossible to pass a mental institution of any kind at all, without seeing a little ersatz ship of fools moored by the main door and in the shadows, lurking, a pasty-faced scion of the Sunday Review benefiting obscurely from the local field disruption.
As soon as my address is over and the ovation has been tidied away I stride out of the auditorium. Walking across the concourse I turn to Dagglebert, outraged.
‘What the hell are these people doing here? Why have the conference organisers allowed them into the precincts of the university?’
‘Oh, them,’ says Dagglebert — and as he speaks I see once again the utter stupidity of employing a research assistant who drools — ‘They’re here by invitation of the conference, as a gift to the municipality of Denver …’
‘I know that, I know that!’ I turn away from Dagglebert and head towards the cafeteria, which lies on the far side of the precinct. Dagglebert, undeterred, follows me, drooling the while.
Safely ensconced behind a chest-high arras of plastic bamboo shoots I watch the ebb and flow of conferees as the swarm coming from the auditorium runs into the traffic on the precinct and the Radical Psychic Field Disruptionists enter from the outside. Rocking and dribbling they stand here and there talking to former colleagues, half-remembered through a fog of tranquillisers.
I see my own former colleagues there as well. Zack Busner stands with a tall, shrouded girl, nervously rolling and unrolling the end of his mohair tie. Phillip Hurst has his briefcase propped open on one knee, foot up on the rim of a concrete shrubbery container as he riffles through notes for the benefit of a stocky individual, who flexes and reflexes his muscular arms. I see Adam Harley deep in conversation with Janner, the anthropologist, who I know vaguely. Janner is wearing what looks like a second-hand Burton overcoat and carries a plastic bag emblazoned with the logo of a popular chain of South London convenience stores. Janner is a repellent individual, with something of Alkan about him — the way he tilts his head back in order to slurp the catarrh down his throat is especially striking. I have no idea why he has chosen to be in Denver.
And here and there dotted around this space are other familiar figures. Faces from the past that split and reform with speech. A manic, Jewish type who looks like an accountant clutches a sheaf of marketing brochures under his arm, and stands engrossed, while Stein, that millenarian charlatan, lays down his new law. Sikorski is moving among the throng. There’s something hilarious about the way his false penis quests ahead of him. Especially if you know, as I do, that he’s completely impotent. He stops to shake hands and chat with well-wishers. However, he hasn’t knocked off work altogether. A slowly rotating strand of spittle still threads through his tangled, fair beard, twisting this way and that, catching and refracting the sunlight streaming through the skylights above.
And as I observe Sikorski and his cohorts the nervous irritation that has gripped me since I arrived in Denver starts to fade away. I am left with a sense that this conference, this scene, is a watershed for Quantity Theory. A heaven-sent second opportunity for me to re-establish the school of thought at the correct level with the correct emphasis. Where has Quantity Theory gone wrong? In its application? In its development as a therapy? As a method of social control? As a tool of radical psychiatric policy? In all and yet none of these areas. The truth, as ever, comes to me purely, in one flash of instant realisation. I knock over the styrofoam beaker full of tepid coffee that Dagglebert has placed at my elbow as I fumble through my pockets for pencil and notebook. I start to jot down a first attempt to express the realisation in some form of notation: