Green Eyes

  My show of unruffled confidence bolstered staff morale, and, in effect, dismasted Brauer who continued his outraged sputterings, but to no avail. I explained to staff that our loss of control only added authenticity to the proceedings. Had we not, I asked them, reacted in the manner of concerned medical personnel, of doctors responsible for the welfare of patients making a difficult mental adjustment? We had shown them our humanity, our imperfect compassion. I admitted my own loss of control was, like theirs, a response to the possibility that the patients might understand their true natures; still, I felt that any damage caused by our actions or by Magnusson’s could be turned to our advantage if we did not attempt a cover-up, if we allowed Magnusson to remain at Shadows, and not - as Brauer suggested - hide him from the world in a cell at Tulane. Let him say what he will, I advised, and we will simply put on a sad face and express pity over his senility, his general deterioration. We will be believed.

  Of course, it did not prove necessary to debunk Magnusson; just as Ramsburgh had defended herself, so the patients - in defense of their threatened identities -arrived at this conclusion on their own, separate and unanimously.

  We had taken a vast step forward as a result of the group interaction. The patients began to speak openly of their fearful reaction to one another, and we analyzed their reports, gaining further insights into the extent of their perceptual abnormalities. For example, it was during the period immediately following the interaction that Harrison revealed the fact he was seeing bioenergy: ‘… Raw mists of a single color sheathing the upper body, showing patches and glints of secondary colors, all fading in a matter of seconds.’ His perceptions, in particular, gave me cause to ponder Magnusson’s pronouncement concerning my own illness, though at the time I assumed his diagnosis to be a vindictive rather than an accurate one. But while such insights provided clues to the developmental processes of these phenomenal strangers who were the BIAP patients, they shed no direct light upon the essential mystery of their existence; and the illumination of this mystery must be, I felt, the primary goal of the project. So, instead of pursuing a hands-off policy in the wake of Magnusson’s revelations to the group, I continued as planned to set up problematic situations which would, I hoped, stimulate the patients to more profound depths of self-discovery.

  Throughout the hullabaloo which eventuated after the media’s disclosure of the project, my detractors have labeled me a manipulator, and while I do not accept the term with its overtones of maleficence, I submit that all psychotherapy is manipulation; that as psychiatrists we do not heal people, but manipulate their neuroses into functional modes. Any psychiatrist worth his salt is at heart a sophist who understands he is lost in a great darkness and who utilizes theories not as doctrinal cant, but as guideposts to mark the places he has illumined in his dealings with specific patients. Thus, also, did ancient alchemists incise their alembics with arcane symbols representing the known elements. I have been accused of ruthlessly swaying the courses of lives to satisfy my academic whimsies. This charge I deny. I maneuvred both patients and therapists as would a man lost in a forest strike flint and steel together to make a light. And we were lost. Before my arrival the project had an unblemished record of failure in every area, especially as regards the unraveling of the patients’ intrinsic natures. This memoir is not the proper framework in which to detail all we did unravel after my arrival, but I must point out the various papers and monographs of my detractors as evidence of my successes (the more scholarly reader may wish to avail himself of my own soon-to-be-published The Second Death and its speculative companion, Departed Souls: A Psychoanalytic Reassessment of Animist Beliefs).