Thought Experiment 2

Hypnosis Psychosis

I sat in his office, in front of his desk, in front of a clock that sat on his desk. I had just introduced myself and he sat in a large green leather chair with silver rivets along the edges. His desk was a collage of various colored papers. On his wall, the self-portrait of M.C. Escher stared back at me, his proportions warped through the reflection of the orb in his hand.
“Yes, well, before we begin there is just one problem.”
“Yes?” I said.
“Well,” he leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his desk. “You see, I’ve made it my policy that I require a co-pay on your part in advance, for the first session.” He cleared his throat, “There was… an incident before, and well,” he tilted the palms of his hands upward as he sat back, in a helpless defense. “Well I’d rather not get into it.” An airy whistle escaped him as he grinned a toothy grin.
“Right,” I said. He specified the amount and the transaction was made.
“Would you like a receipt?” His blue eyes peered over the tops of his spectacles. He had already begun filling out a small piece of paper.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“No?” He appeared pleased by this. He wadded up the slip of green paper and held it upward, suspended in his right hand.
“You mind?” He nodded to a small wastebasket to my left, motioning for me to pop the lid. He lobbed the paper ball and scowled as he watched it land on the floor. I picked it up and placed it in the basket beside some used tissues and a number of discarded blue pills. I forced a smile with my cheeks, but my eyes betrayed me, as he could clearly see I was not amused.
“Ok, well,” he hurriedly rustled through some papers on his desk. He pulled a blank sheet from the grip of an empty coffee mug, and placed it on a clipboard.
“Let’s begin, shall we?” The click of his pen echoed back on itself, sounding not too different from the start of a stopwatch.
“Right, well you see doctor—”
“Please, I prefer a layman’s title,” he said. “The title Doctor,” he played with the taste of the word in his mouth, “It just puts so much distance between us.”
“Right,” I said. Had he not introduced himself as Dr. Lapansky but a few moments earlier?
“Mr. Lapansky. The problem I have is concerning my wife.” I began, “She’s just, so needy, I—”
“Uh-huh.” He nodded his head, scribbling something down, as if he already knew the answer to my problem.
“It’s just,” I continued, “I can’t take all the demands sometimes. The constant ‘Honey, can you run to the store and pick me up some eggs?’, ‘Honey, have you payed the electric bill?’, ‘Honey, where did you put the mail?’ I just… It never ends!”
I took a breath.
“I see.” He extended his neck and scratched at the thick grey hairs that grew there.
“And I wanted to send my wife here instead, it’s just, she doesn’t seem to think she has a dependence problem at all. I thought, well, if I can’t get treatment for her, then I’ll get treatment for myself.”
“Yes,” he said a bit skeptically. “Well, how do you respond to your wife when she asks something of you?”
“It hasn’t been a problem until recently. She was never more dependent on me than I was on her. But now, whenever she asks something of me, I find myself very bothered, to the point where,” I didn’t know how to say it.
“Yes, well, there are many methods and techniques for solving this sort of thing.” He leaned back in his chair and waved his right hand in small circular loops through the air, as if sorting through loose sheets of paper in his head.
“And, well, my personal favorite method is hypnosis.” He tossed his clipboard on the desk. I tried to decipher what he had written so far, but the penmanship was so small and erratic that it looked like the readings of a seismograph.
“Fine,” I said, “Whatever you think will work best.”
“Excellent,” he chirped, “Just sit back and relax, arms and legs loose and comfortable.”
I did as he said and placed my arms across my lap, sat back in my chair, and took a deep breath.
He reached for the metronome on the side of his desk and pulled back the needle with his index finger. He released it and the needle bobbed, left, right, left, right, emitting a soft tick as it moved. I adjusted myself, and the metronome soon nodded in agreement with the rhythm of my breathing.
“Now then,” He began and his voice assumed a hushed demeanor, “Clear your mind and concentrate only on my voice. You hear nothing but the sound of my voice. Your arms and legs are heavy. They are heavy, heavy and warm. As I begin to countdown from ten, your relaxation will grow. When I’m finished, you will be in a state of complete relaxation.”
“Ten, you are calm and relaxed. Your breathing is deep and steady.”
“Nine, you are sinking to the bottom of a bottomless ocean.”
“Eight, deeper and deeper. Your relaxation is growing.”
“Seven, your arms and legs are heavy and warm.”
“Six, deeper still.”
“Five, your heart-rate is slow and calm.”
“Four, you sink deeper and deeper.”
“Three, deep relaxation.”
“Two, almost there.”
“One more lap now! You can do it, keep up the pace. Only—”
Breathe in, stadium lights, gold ripples span the floor,
Breathe out, waves, cheers, stroke,
Breathe in, blue tiles, yellow buoys,
Breathe out, left arm, right arm, left arm, right arm,
Time! Echoes of cheers bound off the water,
“Lapansky we won!”
Water slips between the fingers, slipping, deeper,
“Lapansky!”
Water rising, nothing to breathe in, nothing to breathe out,
“Mr. Lapansky?”
Waves of sound slow as they sink through the water,
“Hello? Mr. Lapansky?”
“Oh, what?”
“Mr. Lapansky, are you alright?”
The tick of the metronome cut the silence in the room.
“Oh, yes, well, excuse me, I must have dozed off.”
He stared at me for a few seconds with a deadpan expression. His lips parted as his face loosened.
“It’s quite alright,” he said, “It’s just, my problem,”
“Your problem,” I said.
“With my wife,” he raised his voice slightly.
“Yes, yes, your wife,” I said.
He frowned, fidgeting with his left hand a bit. The metronome was still ticking and I reached out and stopped it. He looked up from his hand.
“It’s just, I don’t think the hypnosis helped much—”
“Ah, yes, well, give it a day or two,” I assured him, “and you may find it did more than you think.”
His expression soured and he turned red. His left hand gripped the chair arm more tightly.
“It’s just, I don’t think you understand,” his breathing started to increase. “I don’t know how much more I can take. The demands! The constant needs!”
He squirmed in his seat like a worm on the end of a hook about to be cast. He continually wiped his perspiring hands on his pants, and a single drop of perspiration hung from the tip of his nose.
“Now, now,” I said, “Hold on now, deep breaths now, deep breaths. Breathe.” I found myself out of breath at just the sight of his emotional state.
He sat up straight and attempted to breathe. He looked like a fish just released back into water.
“Breathe in, breathe out,” I motioned in and out with my hands. The redness in his face started to fade and he sat back in his chair. The pits of his shirt were soaked with sweat, and his hands still shook a bit.
“Excellent,” I said. “Now. When can you see me next?”
I scheduled him an appointment in a week, and he reluctantly left with my card in hand. ‘This is exactly why I get them to pay up front’ I thought, ‘What a day.’
I opened the double doors of my office and walked down the hall. I reached the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. Bees outside the window hovered from flower to flower. The blue petals bobbed up and down as the bees did their job. ‘A bee knows a true day of work’ I laughed.
Satisfied, I walked back down the hall. I stopped at the entrance to the living room and saw my wife. Her long bangs couldn’t mask the puzzled look on her brow. She stood over the piano, a bundle of sheet music in her arms. She looked up and caught sight of me in the entranceway.
“Honey,” she asked, “Have you seen my metronome anywhere?”
She searched over the top of the piano, perched on the balls of her feet. One of her fingers hit a note as she strained to scan a hand over the piano top. A few sheets of music lay scattered across the hardwood floor.
His eyes made a wide arch from left to right as he sighed.
“You see my problem?” he said.
I nodded in agreement.







Sources

“Everything is overturned; he is the observer. The spectators are no longer on stage to enjoy, like us, the twin movements of the ogre and the truffle, the game of who will eat whom. Everything is overturned. Tartuffe observes, as do we through his eyes—the game of the collective and its metamorphoses. He is not a joker; he is Moliere’s emissary. He is perhaps Moliere himself. Masked, so as not to be seen. But what is the joker, if not a pile of masks?” -Serres, The Parasite, 210

“… in the relation of the hypnotized medium to the hypnotist, as in relation, say, of the group to the leader, it is the seemingly powerless partner, the hypnotized medium, for example, who does all the work. The hypnotist, like the vampire, is a kind of phantom projection produced by the medium’s desire to be possessed, controlled, vampirized. And in an aside Freud adds that we can recognize in this hypnotized medium the group of one, the portrait that really becomes us.” –Rickels, The Vampire Lectures, 19

“Freud signs on the dotted line: “The ‘double’ was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego”. But once the earliest dyadic, mirroring “stage has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect.” –Rickels, The Vampire Lectures, 64

“Soon, in order to make the collective clearer, I shall use the notion of quasi-object. It circulates, it passes among us. I give it; I receive it. Thank you; you’re welcome. Eucharist and Paraclete… The third appears; the third is included. Maybe he is each and every one of us.” –Serres, The Parasite, 47

“The imperative of purge. Thus the excluded third, the Demon, prosopopoeia of noise. If we want peace, if we want an agreement between object and subject, the object appearing at the moment of the agreement, at the Last Supper as well as in the laboratory, in the dialogue as on the blackboard, we have to get together, assembling, resembling, against whoever trouble our relations, the water of our channel… In order to succeed, the dialogue needs an excluded third…” –Serres, The Parasite, 56-57

“The parasite is the essence of relation. It is necessary for the relation and ineluctable by the overturning of the force that tries to exclude it. But this relation is nonrelation. The parasite is being and nonbeing at the same time. Not being and nonbeing that are names (or the nonnames) of stations; but arrow and nonarrow, relation and nonrelation. Hence its metamorphoses and the difficulty we have in defining it.” –Serres, The Parasite, 79

Serres, Michel. The Parasite: Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr.
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Rickels, Laurence A. The Vampire Lectures.
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.