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walk directly to my office on Post Street, where as usual I will give psychotherapy to my first patient of the day. Despite the law, the so-called McPhearson Act.’ He drank his coffee.
Superb said. In fact he had talked to the executive council of the International Association of Practising Psychoanalysts just ten minutes ago. ‘I don’t know why you picked me out to interview. Every member of the IAPP will be in his office this morning.’ And there were over ten thousand members, scattered throughout the USEA, both in North America and in Europe.
The powerful German cartel had sold the world on the notion of drug-therapy for mental illness; there was a fortune to be made, there. And by corollary, psychoanalysts were quacks, on a par with orgone box and health food healers.
a banned text by the twentieth-century sociologist C. Wright Mills.
‘I think,’ Emil Stark said, ‘that if the Third Reich is given the weapons it needs it will survive its victory by perhaps five years – and very possibly not even that long. It’s doomed by its very nature; there’s absolutely no mechanism in the Nazi Party by which a successor to der Führer can be produced. Germany will fragment, become a collection of small, nasty, quarrelling states as it was before Bismark. My government is convinced of this, Mrs Thibodeaux.
At this moment he did not dare get close to any other human being; he had to remain ten feet away so that they would not become aware of the odour. No full-breasted blonde girls for him. And at the same time he knew that the odour was a delusion, that it did not really exist; it was an obsessive idea only. However, that realization did not help him.
‘Thanks for your loyalty,’ Kongrosian said gloomily, ‘but you just don’t understand. This is no ordinary physical odour. This is an idea type odour. Some day I’ll mail you a text on the subject, perhaps by Bingswanger or some of the other existential psychologists. They really understood me and my problem, even though they lived a hundred years ago. Obviously they were precogs. The tragedy is that although Minkowski, Kuhn, and Binswanger understood me, there’s nothing they can do to help me.’
‘Good grief – don’t you understand Janet? At this point I’m thoroughly delusional. I’m as mentally ill as it’s possible to be. It’s incredible that I can communicate with you at all. It’s a credit to my ego-strength that I’m not at this point totally autistic. Anyone else in my situation would be.’
Didn’t the Nazis dote on Wagner? Yes, she was sure of that. She had been studying history books about the period of the Third Reich; Dr Goebbels, in his diaries, had mentioned the reverence felt by high Nazi officials at a performance of The Ring. Or perhaps it was Meistersinger. We could have the brass band play arrangements of themes from Parsifal, she decided with a secret spasm of amusement. In march tempo, of course. A sort of proctological version, just right for the Ubermenschen of the Third Reich.
‘In my opinion, if I may say so,’ Pembroke said, ‘release of this information will topple the entire structure of our society.’
‘The only solution,’ Nicole said thoughtfully, half to herself, ‘would be to assassinate those officers of the Werke who attended the policy meeting. In other words, all the Ges of the cartel, no matter how many there are. Even if the numbers ran up into the hundreds.’ In other words, she said to herself, a purge. Such as one generally only witnessed in times of revolution.
‘Nacht und Nebel,’ Pembroke murmured. ‘What?’ Nicole said. ‘The Nazi term for the invisible agents of the government who deal in murder.’ He faced Nicole calmly. ‘Night and fog. They were the Einsatzgruppen. Monsters. Of course our police, the NP has nothing like that.
We’re too modern, too civilized, for massacres now.’
as you pointed out, in our era no such professionals exist. I doubt if it would mean the destruction of scores or hundreds of individuals. I’d guess it could be limited to the board of directors, the executive vice-presidents of the Werke. Possibly as few as eight men.’
‘Do you know what the true basis of political power is? Not guns or troops but the ability to get others to do what you want them to do. By whatever means are appropriate.
They’ll believe, she decided, if they want to believe. Despite the news being hawked by the news machines. Those cold, impersonal agencies of ‘truth.’ Of absolute reality, without human subjectivity.
