The Dice Man Read Online Free Page A

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 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 know 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 s 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 half-heartedly about his inability to concentrate on anything. He