psychoneurosis we are concerned with here, rather than the forms in which it is
manifested. In plain language, psychoneurosis situational simply refers to the
common fact that, if you put a man in a situation that worries him more than he can
stand, in time he blows up, one way or another.
“That is precisely the situation here. You take sensitive, intelligent young
men, impress them with the fact that a single slip on their part, or even some
fortuitous circumstance beyond their control, will result in the death of God knows
how many other people, and then expect them to remain sane. It’s
ridiculous-impossible!”
“But good heavens, doctor!-there must be some answer- There must!” He got up
and paced around the room. Lentz noted, with pity, that King himself was riding the
ragged edge of the very condition they were discussing.
“No,” he said slowly. “No … let me explain. You don’t dare entrust control
to less sensitive, less socially conscious men. You might as well turn the controls
over to a mindless idiot. And to psychoneurosis situational there are but two cures.
The first obtains when the psychosis results from a misevaluation of environment.
That cure calls for semantic readjustment. One assists the patient to evaluate
correctly his environment. The worry disappears because there never was a real
reason for worry in the situation itself, but simply in the wrong meaning the
patient’s mind had assigned to it.
“The second case is when the patient has correctly evaluated the situation,
and rightly finds in it cause for extreme worry. His worry is perfectly sane and
proper, but he cannot stand up under it indefinitely; it drives him crazy. The only
possible cure is to change the situation. I have stayed here long enough to assure
myself that such is the condition here. You engineers have correctly evaluated the
public danger of this thing, and it will, with dreadful certainty, drive all of you
crazy!
“The only possible solution is to dump the pile-and leave it dumped.”
King had continued his nervous pacing of the floor, as if the walls of the
room itself were the cage of his dilemma. Now he stopped and appealed once more to
the psychiatrist. “Isn’t there anything I can do?”
“Nothing to cure. To alleviate-well, possibly.”
“How?”
“Situational psychosis results from adrenalin exhaustion. When a man is
placed under a nervous strain, his adrenal glands increase their secretion to help
compensate for the strain. If the strain is too great and lasts too long, the
adrenals aren’t equal to the task, and he cracks. That is what you have here.
Adrenalin therapy might stave of a mental breakdown, but it most assuredly would
hasten a physical breakdown. But that would be safer from a viewpoint of public
welfare-even though it assumes that physicists are expendable!
“Another thing occurs to me: If you selected any new watch engineers from
the membership of churches that practice the confessional, it would increase the
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length of their usefulness.”
King was plainly surprised. “I don’t follow you.”
“The patient unloads most of his worry on his confessor, who is not himself
actually confronted by the situation, and can stand it. That is simply an
ameliorative, however. I am convinced that in this situation, eventual insanity is
inevitable. But there is a lot of good sense in the confessional,” he mused. “It
fills a basic human heed. I think that is why the early psychoanalysts were so
surprisingly successful, for all their limited knowledge.” He fell silent for a
while, then added, “If you will be so kind as to order a stratocab for me-”
“You’ve nothing more to suggest?’
“No. You had better turn your psychological staff loose on means of
alleviation; they’re able men, all of them.”
King pressed a switch, and spoke briefly to Steinke. Turning back to Lentz,
he said, “You’ll wait here until your car is ready?”
Lentz judged correctly that King desired it, and agreed.
Presently the tube delivery on King’s desk went “Ping!”
The superintendent removed a small white pasteboard, a calling card. He
studied it with surprise and passed it over to Lentz. “I can’t imagine why he should
be calling on me,” he observed, and added, “Would you like to meet him?”