ethics forbid your telling anything I say, right?'
'Yes.'
[Pause]
'I find the raping and killing' of girls helps relieve the tension quite a bit and makes me feel better again.'
`I see.'
`My problem is that I'm beginning to get a little nervous ..about getting caught. I sort of hoped maybe analysis might help me find a little more normal way to reduce my tensions.'
`You'd like to find a different way to reduce tensions other than raping and killing girls.'
`Yeah. Either that or help me to stop worrying about getting caught ....'
The alert reader may now be feeling that this stuff is slightly too sensational for a typical day at the office, but Mr. Osterflood really exists. Or rather existed - more of that later on. The fact is that I was writing a book entitled The Sado-Masochistic Personality in Transition, a work which was to describe cases in which the sadistic personality developed into a masochistic one and vice versa. For this reason my colleagues always sent me patients with a markedly strong sadistic or masochistic bent. Osterflood was admittedly the most professionally active sadist I'd treated, but the wards of mental hospitals have many like him.
What is remarkable, I suppose, is Osterflood's walking around loose. Although after his confession I urged him to enter an institution, he refused and I couldn't order his being committed without breaking professional confidence; moreover no one else apparently suspected that he was an `enemy of society.'
All I could do was warn my friends to keep their little girls away from Harlem playgrounds (where Osterflood obtained his victims) and try hard for a cure. Since my friends all kept their children out of Harlem playgrounds because of the danger of Negro rapists even my warnings were unnecessary.
After Osterflood left that morning I brooded a little on my helplessness with him, made a few notes, and then decided I ought to work on my book.
I dragged myself to it with the enthusiasm of a man with diarrhea moving toward the toilet: I had a compulsive need to get it out but had some months earlier come to the conclusion that all I was producing was shit.
My book had become a bore: it was a pretentious failure. I had tried a few months before to get Random House to agree to publish it when it was finished, imagining that with extensive advertising the book would achieve national and then international fame, driving lake Ecstein to fury, women and reckless losses in the stock market. Random House had hedged, hawed, - considered and reconsidered . . . Random House wasn't interested. This morning, as on most recent mornings, neither was I.
The flaw in the book was small but significant: it had nothing to say. The bulk of it was to be empirical descriptions of patients who had, changed from primarily sadistic behavior patterns to masochistic ones. My dream had been to discover a technique to lock the behavior of the patient at that precise point when he had passed away from sadism but had not become masochistic. If there were such a point. I had much dramatic evidence of complete crossovers; none of `frozen freedom,' a phrase describing the ideal mean state that came to me in an explosion of enlightenment one morning while echoing Mr. Jenkins.
The problem was that Jake Ecstein, car-salesman front and all, had written two of the most rational and honest books about psychoanalytic therapy that I'd ever read, and their import essentially demonstrated that none of us knew or had any likelihood of knowing what we were doing. Jake cured patients as well as the next fellow and then published clear, brilliant accounts demonstrating that the key to his success was accident, that frequently it was his failure to follow his own theoretical structure which led to a `breakthrough' and the patient's improvement. When I ended my early-morning dialogue with Miss Reingold joking that Jake's reading the 1967, get record sheets might lead to a breakthrough I was partly serious. Jake