The Dice Man Read Online Free PDF

had shown again and again the significance of chance in therapeutic development, perhaps best dramatized in his famous `pencil-sharpening cure.'
    A female patient he'd had under treatment for fifteen months with so little success in changing her neurotic aplomb that even Jake was bored, achieved total and complete transformation when Jake, absentmindedly confusing her with his secretary, ordered her to sharpen his pencils. The patient, a wealthy housewife, went into the outer office to obey and suddenly, when about to insert a pencil into the sharpener, began to shriek, tear her hair and defecate.
    Three weeks later, `Mrs. P.' (Jake's choice of pseudonyms is only one of his unerring talents) was cured.
    I then, was coming to feel that my elaborate writing efforts were only idle, pretentious playing with words for publication.
    I thus spent the hour before lunch: (a) reading the financial section of The New York Times; (b) writing a page-and-ahalf case report on Mr. Osterflood in the form of a financial and budget report (`bearish outlook for prostitutes'; `bull market in Harlem playground girls'), and (c) drawing a picture on my 'book manuscript of an elaborate Victorian house being bombed by motorcycle planes piloted by Hell's Angels.

Chapter Four
    I lunched that day with my three closest colleagues: Dr. Ecstein, whom I mock because he's so intelligent and successful; Dr. Renata Felloni, the only female Italian-born practicing analyst in recent New York history; and Dr. Timothy Mann, the short, fat, disheveled father figure who had psychoanalyzed me four years before and been mentoring me ever since.
    When Jake and I arrived, Dr. Mann was hunched over the table chewing heavily on a roll and blinking benevolently at Dr. Felloni seated opposite him. Dr. Mann was a big wheel: one of the directors at Queensborough State Hospital, where I worked twice a week; a member of the executive committee of PANY (Psychiatrists Association of New York), and the author of seventeen articles and three books, one of them the most frequently used text-on existentialist therapy in existence. It had been considered an extraordinary honor to be psychoanalyzed by Dr. Mann and I had appreciated it greatly until my increasing boredom and unhappiness had deluded me into believing that analysis had done me no good. Dr. Mann was concentrating on his eating and may or may not have been listening to the dignified discourse of Dr. Felloni.
    Renata Felloni resembles a spinsterish dean of women at a Presbyterian all-girls college: she has gray hair always neatly coiffured, spectacles and a slow, dignified, Italian-cum-New England twang that makes her discussions of penises, orgasms, sodomy and fellatio seem like a discussion of credit hours and home economics. Moreover, she had, as far as anyone knew, never been married and, with less certainty, had never in the seven years we had known her given any indication of ever having known a man (biblical `know'). Her dignity acted to prevent any of us from either direct or indirect investigations into her past. All we felt free to talk with her about were weather, stocks, penises, orgasms, sodomy and fellatio.
    The restaurant was noisy and expensive, and, except for Dr. Mann, who loved every trough he had ever fed in, we all hated it and went there because every other restaurant we had tried in the convenient area was also crowded, noisy and expensive. I usually spent so much nervous energy trying to hear what my friends were saying over the clattering of voices, dishes and 'soft' music and trying to avoid watching Dr. Mann eating that I never remember whether the food was good or not. At any rate I rarely got sick on it.
    'Only ten percent of our subjects believe that masturbation is "punished by God eternally",' Dr. Felloni was saying as Jake I sat down opposite each other at the tiny table. She was apparently talking about a research project she and I were jointly directing and she smiled formally and equally to