example of the latter. He might be cured with shock technique, but it would
hardly be a kindness, as he has achieved a stable adjustment which puts him
beyond the reach of the strain he could not stand.
“That other young fellow, Harper, whose blowup was the immediate cause of
your sending for me, is an anxiety case. When the cause of the anxiety was
eliminated from his matrix, he at once regained full sanity. But keep a
close watch on his friend, Erickson —
“However, it is the cause, and prevention, of situational 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 intrust the bomb
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 can not 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. Your
engineers have correctly evaluated the public danger of this bomb, and it
will, with dreadful certainty, drive all of you crazy!
“The only possible solution is to dump the bomb — 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 adrenaline 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. Adrenaline therapy might stave off 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 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 added. “It fills a basic human need. 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