Riven Rock by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Author:T. Coraghessan Boyle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Psychopathology, Psychological, Psychological fiction, Psychology, Schizophrenics, General, Literary, Schizophrenia, Historical, Fiction, Love stories
ISBN: 9780140271669
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1999-04-15T10:00:00+00:00

4.

ONE SLIT’S ENOUGH

As it turned out, Dr. Brush wasn’t a man to rock the boat, even if it was in his power to do so, which it wasn’t. O‘Kane liked him well enough—he was hearty, quick with a laugh, a big physical man who relished his food and drink and didn’t go around acting as if he was better than everybody else in the world who didn’t happen to be a millionaire or a psychiatrist—but he didn’t respect him in the way he’d respected Dr. Hamilton. For all his dallying with his monkeys and all his airs and the stiff formality of him, at least Hamilton was a first-rate psychiatrist, one of the best men in the country, and Mr. McCormick had improved under his care, even if it was by fits and starts. Not that Brush didn’t have top-notch credentials, in addition to being handpicked by Dr. Meyer, but he was just too, well, clownish to make anything of himself in the long run, and that boded ill for Mr. McCormick. Hamilton had gotten what he wanted out of Riven Rock and then made himself scarce; Brush seemed content to bob like a great quivering buoy on the ebbing tide of that particular psychological backwater.

Oh, he started out energetically enough, eager to make a good impression like any other man in a new position, especially one who knows he’s going to be held accountable to the Ice Queen on the one hand and to Dr. Meyer, the world’s most humorless man, on the other. Basically, he adhered to Dr. Hamilton’s regimen, which accorded strict hours for Mr. McCormick’s activities, from the time he woke to the length of his shower bath and the hour he retired in the evening, but, being the new man in charge, he couldn’t help tinkering with one or two small things here and there. In the beginning, that is. Only in the beginning.

The first thing he did, and to O‘Kane’s mind this was a mistake, most definitely a mistake, was to attempt to apply the talking cure to Mr. McCormick. In those days—and this was in the summer and fall of 1916—the talking cure was considered little more than a novelty, a sort of glorified parlor game for the rich and idle, like dream analysis or hypnosis, and few psychiatrists had taken the lead of Dr. Freud in applying it to their severely disturbed patients. Like most people, O’Kane was deeply skeptical—how could you talk a raving lunatic out of drinking his own urine or stabbing his invalid grandmother a hundred times with a cocktail fork?—and Dr. Hamilton, though he subscribed to Freud’s theories and was ready to lecture O‘Kane and the Thompsons at the drop of a hat on such absurdities as infantile sexuality and mother lust, never applied the talking cure to Mr. McCormick. Better he felt, to keep the patient to a strict regimen, with a good healthy diet and sufficient exercise and intellectual stimulation, and let nature take its course. But Brush was new to the job, and he wanted to assert himself.

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