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tired of her and sent her packing. The ritual was monotonously invariable. Susan was expected to be pleasant to each woman and treat her as a potential stepmother. When the time came for departure, Susan’s father always contrived to be curiously absent, leaving an adolescent girl to deal with mature rejected women, to help them dry their tears, to help them pack their belongings, and to help them leave the flat with as much dignity as possible.
    One evening, Susan’s father came home drunk. Blind drunk. At least, that was the way Susan told it in session, under hypnosis and under truth drug. Ergo, that was the way it was.
    His mind being befuddled, he apparently thought that Susan was his latest conquest and that she was making difficulties. His only method of resolving difficulties with women was to take them to bed. He tried to make love to Susan. He was a strong man, and he was suffering from too much alcohol and too many delusions. Susan broke a gin bottle over his head without much effect. At least, that was the way she told it. And the telling was very convincing.
    He knocked her half silly and dragged her to the bedroom. According to Susan. There, while he was struggling with his clothes, she found another gin bottle and smashed that also over his head. Then she went berserk and sawed through his throat with a fragment of glass.
    Suchwas the story that could not be broken down by drugs, by hypnosis or by analysis.
    Dr. Badel came to the conclusion that there really was not a great deal of complexity in Susan’s case. He had found no signs of schizophrenia. She was a highly inhibited girl; and it was perfectly natural that she should be withdrawn, remote, listless, depressed after such a traumatic experience. She needed chiefly to unburden herself, to shed the load of guilt, to come to terms with the extreme provocation that had temporarily unbalanced her.
    The trouble was that Susan would not respond or co-operate unless she were drugged or hypnotised. But she needed to be in full possession of her faculties to go through the integration process. A simple but crude solution might have been found in lobotomy, a temporary solution in electroplexy. But Dr. Badel did not want to use such extreme measures. The girl was young; if she could be coaxed through the crisis, she might look forward to a long and creative life.
    He hit upon the oldest trick in the book to get her to respond. The rest of the staff were instructed to be deliberately hostile to Susan, to make life difficult for her, to quarrel with her, to deprive her of luxuries, to interrupt her sleep, even to tamper with her food. Only Badel would be sympathetic, ever ready to deal with real or imagined grievances. Thus he would gain her confidence.
    When the time was ripe, a careful little drama was staged. One of the attractive women psychologists, who had been instructed to be especially hostile, was to be discovered by Badel physically ill-treating Susan. There would then be a scene where he would shout at the woman, dismiss her from the case and eject her bodily from Susan’s room. The negative parallels that Dr. Badelsought to establish were obvious. This was what Susan would have liked her father to do to the women who invaded Susan’s world.
    The drama went off perfectly. It worked like a charm. In the cause of science, Dr. Badel’s pretty colleague allowed her face to be slapped as, struggling and protesting, she was thrust from Susan’s room.
    Dr. Badel promised that the hated woman would never return. After that incident, Susan began to respond, slowly. At first, during her daily sessions with Badel, she would only answer questions—chiefly yes or no answers. Later, she began to volunteer information. Eventually, she learned to talk freely about her childhood, her relations with her mother, even the traumatic sequence that led to the killing of her father.
    The daily sessions of analysis took place in Dr. Badel’s office. The dialogue was