“But-” I shook my head. “I guess I’m stupid.”
“Aren’t we all? Tom, the human mind is not simple; it is very complex. Up at the top, the conscious mind has its own ideas and desires, some of them real, some of them impressed on it by propaganda and training and the necessity for putting up a good front and cutting a fine figure to other people. Down below is the unconscious mind, blind and deaf and stupid and sly, and with-usually-a different set of desires and very different motivations. It wants its own way … and when it doesn’t get it, it raises a stink until it is satisfied. The trick in easy living is to find out what your unconscious mind really wants and give it to it on the cheapest terms possible, before it sends you through emotional bankruptcy to get its own way. You know what a psychotic is, Tom?”
“Uh… a crazy person.”
“Crazy’ is a word we’re trying to get rid of, A psychotic is a poor wretch who has had to sell out the shop and go naked to the world to satisfy the demands of his unconscious mind. He’s made a settlement, but it has ruined him. My job is to help people make settlements that won’t ruin them-like a good lawyer, We never try to get them to evade the settlement, just arrange it on the best terms.
“What I’m getting at is this: your brother managed to make a settlement with his unconscious on fairly good terms, very good terms considering that he did it without professional help. His conscious mind signed a contract and his unconscious said flatly that he must not carry it out. The conflict was so deep that it would have destroyed some people. But not your brother. His unconscious mind elected to have an accident instead, one that could cause paralysis and sure enough it did-real paralysis, mind you; no fakery. So your brother was honorably excused from an obligation he could not carry out. Then, when it was no longer possible to go on this trip; be was operated on. The surgery merely corrected minor damage to the bones. But he was encouraged to think that his paralysis would go away-and so it did.” Devereaux shrugged.
I thought about it until I was confused. This conscious and unconscious stuff-I’d studied it and passed quizzes in it … but I didn’t take any stock in it. Doc Devereaux could talk figures of speech until he was blue in the face but it didn’t get around the fact that both Pat and I had wanted to go and the only reason Pat had to stay behind was because be had hurt himself in that accident. Maybe the paralysis was hysterical, maybe be had scared himself into thinking he was hurt worse than he was. But that didn’t make any difference.
But Doc Devereaux talked as if the accident wasn’t an accident. Well, what of it? Maybe Pat was scared green and had been too proud to show it-I still didn’t think he had taken a tumble on a mountainside on purpose.
In any case, Doc was dead wrong on one thing: I had wanted to go. Oh, maybe I had been a little scared and I knew I had been homesick at first-but that was only natural.
(“Then why are you so down in dumps, stupid?”)
That wasn’t Pat talking; that was me, talking to myself. Shucks, maybe it was my unconscious mind, talking out loud for once, “Doc?”
“Yes, Tom.”
“You say I didn’t really want to come along?”
“It looks that way.”
“But you said the unconscious mind always wins. You can’t have it both ways.”
He sighed. “That isn’t quite what I said. You were hurried into this. The unconscious is stupid and often slow; yours did not have time to work up anything as easy as a skiing accident. But it is stubborn. It’s demanding that you go home … which you can’t. But it won’t listen to reason. It just keeps on nagging you to give it the impossible, like a baby crying for the moon.”
I shrugged. “To hear you tell it, I’m in an impossible moss.”