The Call-Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

only a kind of camp-follower brought by Harriet.’
    â€˜Why do you dislike Kleinians?’ asked Tony. ‘Do you dislike them in particular or do you dislike all Freudians in general?’
    â€˜I wouldn’t know the distinction,’ said Burch, peering sharply over his gold-rimmed half-lenses, ‘any more than I am interested in the disputes between Jansenites and Jesuits. I happen to be a scientist and as such concerned with observable behaviour. Show me a slice of your super-ego under the microscope and I will believe in its existence.’
    â€˜I don’t care about the super-ego or the castration complex,’ said Tony, ‘you can have them both. But in your books you also deny the existence of the mind, don’t you?’
    â€˜I can look at a piece of brain tissue under the microscope. Show me a piece of mind under the microscope and I will believe in its existence. If you cannot do that I must regard the existence of a mind, as something distinct from the brain, as a gratuitous hypothesis which has to be eliminated.’
    â€˜But a brain is merely a lump of matter, and I am told that matter has been de-materialized by the physicists into little whirlpools of energy or whatnot.’
    â€˜You are repeating a favourite argument of the scientifically semi-literate.’
    Tony changed his tack. ‘Take hypnosis. Does it not show the power of mind over matter?’
    â€˜Hypnosis is a variant of a scientific technique called conditioning. It demonstrates observable changes in behaviour, due to the conditioning of the subject’s responses.’
    â€˜But I have seen a hypnotist make warts on an old woman’s face disappear in a week. Do you call a wart a behaviour?’
    â€˜I certainly don’t call a wart a behaviour, and I have no time for mumbo-jumbo. Can you cure this?’ he pointed to a leathery, lentil-shaped excrescence residing on his chin.
    â€˜I am not a hypnotist. But I think the chap I mentioned could…’
    â€˜I told you I have no time for hocus-pocus …’ Claire wondered how Tony, for all his cheerfulness, would take a second snub, when fortunately she saw Nikolai approaching – his big head with the thick, greying hair lowered like a charging bull’s, but in slow motion. Or was ‘fortunately’ the right word? She knew as a fact – however indignant Professor Burch would be at such a suggestion – that Niko infallibly sensed when she needed him, whether he was at the other end of a crowded room or at a conference on the other side of the Atlantic. ‘You are quarrelling already?’ he asked, putting a fatherly hand with a hard grip on Tony’s shoulder.
    â€˜Tony is trying to convert Professor Burch to Cartesian dualism.’
    â€˜I would rather believe in little green men from Venus, travelling in flying teapots, than in a mind or soul which is not located in space and time and has no measurable temperature, or weight.’ Burch spoke with some heat. To Tony he had been condescending; in Solovief’s presence he became aggressive.
    â€˜In our laboratories,’ Solovief said, pointing an accusing finger at Burch, ‘we deal with the elementary particles of matter, electrons, positrons, neutrinos and what-have-you, some of which possess no weight, nor mass, nor any precise location in space.’
    â€˜We have all heard about those wonders. There has been no lack of publicity. So what do they prove?’
    â€˜They prove that materialism is
vieux jeux,
a century out of date. Only you psychologists still believe in it. It is a very funny situation. We know that the behaviour of an electron is not completely determined by the laws of physics. You believe that the behaviour of a human being is completely determined by the laws of physics. Electrons are unpredictable, people are predictable. And you call this psychology.’
    He bent his head towards Burch as if hard of hearing