Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

  “I see no need to let Dr. Rhinehart go on,” said Dr. Weinburger, suddenly standing up. “Although, as Dr. Ecstein has so helpfully observed, some of it makes sense, the idea that the destruction of the personality is the way to mental health may be rejected on a priori grounds. I need only remind you gentlemen of the first sentence of Dr. Mann’s brilliant text book on abnormal psychology: ‘If a person has a strong sense of his identity, of the permanency of things and of an integral selfhood, he will be secure.’ ” He smiled over at Dr. Mann. “I therefore move—”

  “Precisely,” said Dr. Rhinehart. “Or rather, precisely, sir. It is always rejected on a priori grounds and not on empirical grounds. We have never experimented with the possibility of a strong man being able to demolish his personality and become more various, happy and creative than he was before. The first sentence of our textbook will read: ‘If a person can attain a strong confidence in his inconsistency and unreliability, a strong yeasaying sense of the impermanency of things and of an unintegrated, nonpatterned chaos of selves, he will be fully at home in a multivalent society—he will be joyous… .’”

  “We have plenty of empirical evidence regarding the destruction of the personality,” said Dr. Cobblestone quietly. “Our mental hospitals are overflowing with people who have a sense of an unintegrated, nonpatterned chaos of selves.”

  “Yes, we do,” replied Dr. Rhinehart calmly. “But why are they there?” There was no answer to this question, and Dr. Rhinehart, after waiting while Dr. Weinburger sat down again, continued:

  “Your therapies tried to give them a sense of an integral self and failed. Isn’t it just possible that the desire not to be unified, not to be single, not to have one personality may be the natural and basic human desire in our multivalent societies?”

  Again there was a silence, except for Dr. Moon’s expiring breaths and an irritable throat-clearing by Dr. Weinburger.

  “Whenever I look at the Western psychotherapies of the last hundred years,” Dr. Rhinehart went on, “it seems to me incredible that no one acknowledges the almost total failure of these therapies to cure human unhappiness. As Dr. Raymond Felt has observed: ‘The rate of spontaneous remission of symptoms and the rate of supposed “cures” by the psychotherapies of the various schools has remained essentially the same throughout the twentieth century.’

  “Why have our efforts to cure neurosis been so uniformly unsuccessful? Why does civilization expand unhappiness faster thatn we can develop new theories about how it occurs and what we ought to do about it? Our mistake is becoming obvious. We have carried over from the simple, unified, stable societies of the past an image of the ideal norm for man which is totally wrong for our complex and multivalued civilizations of today. We assume that ‘honesty’ and ‘frankness’ are of primary importance in healthy human relations, and the lie and the act are, in the anachronistic ethics of our time, considered evil.”

  “Ah, but Dr. Rhinehart, you can’t—” said Dr. Cobblestone.

  “No, sir, I regret to say I’m serious. Every society is based upon lies. Our society is based on conflicting lies. The man who lived in a simple, stable, single-lie society absorbed the single-lie system into a unified self and spouted it for the rest of his life, uncontradicted by his friends and neighbors, and unaware that ninety-eight percent of his beliefs were illusions, his values artificial and arbitrary and most of his desires comically ill-aimed.

  “The man in our multi-lie society absorbs a chaos of conflicting lies and is reminded daily by his friends and neighbors and TV set that his beliefs are not universally held, that his values are personal and arbitrary and his desires often ill-aimed. We must realize that to ask this man to be honest and true to himself, when his contradictory selves have multiple contradictory answers to most questions, is a safe and economical method of driving him insane.

  “On the other hand, to free him from his unending conflict we must urge him to let go, to act, to pretend, to lie. We must give him the means to develop these abilities. He must become a diceperson.”

  “See! See!” Dr. Peerman interrupted. “He just confessed to advocating a therapy which encourages lying. Did you hear him?”

  “I believe we have been listening to Dr. Rhinehart, thank you, Dr. Peerman,” said Dr. Weinburger, again mangling the papers in front of him “Dr. Rhinehart, you may go on.”

  Dr. Rhinehart glanced at his watch and continued.

  “When all men lie by their very being in a multi-lie society, only the sick try to be honest, and only the very sick ask for honesty in others. Psychologists, of course, urge the patient to be authentic and honest. Such methods—”

  “If our methods are so bad,” asked Dr. Weinburger harshly, “then why do any of our patients improve at all?”

  “Because we’ve encouraged them to play new roles,” Dr. Rhinehart answered promptly. “Primarily the role of ‘being honest,’ but also the roles of feeling guilty, having sinned, being oppressed, discovering insights, being sexually liberated and so on. Of course, the patient and therapist are under the illusion that they are getting at true desires, when in fact they are only releasing and developing new and different selves.

  “Good point, Luke,” said Dr. Ecstein.

  “The limitations placed on this new role playing are catastrophic. The patient is being pressed to get at his ‘true’ feelings and thus to be single and unitary. In discovering unlived roles in his search for a ‘true self’ he may experience brief periods of liberation, but as soon as he is urged to enthrone some new self as the true one, he will again feel locked up and divided. Dice therapy alone acknowledges what we all know and choose to forget: man is multiple.”

  “Sure, man is multiple,” Dr. Weinburger said, banging his fist abruptly on the table. “But the whole point of civilization is to keep the rapist, the killer, the liar and the cheat locked up, suppressed. You seem to be saying we should unlock the cage and let all our minority murderers roam free.” Dr. Weinburger gave an irritable shrug of his left shoulder, sending the inert body of Dr. Moon on its slow journey through its orbit to come to rest against the softer but no less irritable shoulder of Dr. Mann.

  “That’s right, Luke,” said Dr. Mann, looking coldly across the table at Dr. Rhinehart. “Just because we have a fool within us is no reason to feel he ought to be expressed.”

  Dr. Rhinehart glanced at his watch, sighed, took out a die, dropped it from his right hand into the palm of his left and looked at it.

  “Fuck it,” he said.

  “Beg pardon?” asked Dr. Cobblestone.

  “The idea of freeing the rapist, the murderer and the fool seems nutty,” continued Dr. Rhinehart, “to the jailer called the normal, rational personality. So does the idea of freeing the pacifist seem nutty to the jailer personality of a murderer. But the normal personality is today a study in frustration, boredom and despair. Dice therapy is the only theory which offers to blow up the whole works.”

  “But the social consequences—” began Dr. Cobblestone.

  “The social consequences of a nation of dicepeople are, by definition, unpredictable. The social consequences of a nation of normal personalities are obvious: misery, conflict, violence, war and a universal joylessness.”

  “But I still don’t see what you’ve got against honesty,” Dr. Cobblestone said.

  “Honesty and frankness?” Dr. Rhinehart said. “Jesus! They’re the worst possible things in normal human relations. ‘Do you really love me?’: this absurd question, so typical of our diseased minds, should always be answered ‘My God No’ or ‘More than mere reality is my love; it is imaginary.’ The more someone tries to be honest and authentic, the more he’s going to be blocked and inhibited. The question ‘How do you really feel about me?’ ought always to be answered with a belt in the teeth. But if someone were asked: ‘Tell me fantastically and imaginatively how you feel about me,’ he’d be free from that neurotic demand for unity and truth. He could express any of his conflicting selves—one at a time of cou
rse. He’d be able to play each role to the hilt. He’d be at one with his schizophrenia.”

  Dr. Rhinehart stood up.

  “Mind if I pace about a bit?” he asked.

  “Go ahead,” said Weinburger. Dr. Rhinehart began striding back and forth in front of the long table, for a while his pace just matching the shorter roll of Dr. Moon between the shoulders of his two colleagues.

  “Now, about how all this works in practice,” he began again. “It’s tough starting dice therapy with a patient. His resistance to chance is as great today as was his resistance to Freud’s sexual mythology seventy years ago. When we ask a typical miserable American to let the dice make a decision he goes along only if he think it’s a temporary game. When he sees I seriously expect him to make important decisions by chance, he inevitably pees in his pants.

  “Figuratively speaking. In most cases this initial resistance—pantspeeing, we call it—is overcome and the therapy begins. We work first in areas where there’s not much threat to the normal personality. Once a patient’s got the ground rules and got into the spirit of playfulness, we expand the dice decisions into other areas.”

  “Exactly what do your patients do with the dice?” Dr. Cobblestone asked.

  “Well, first we let the dice make decisions for the patient where he’s in conflict. ‘Two roads diverged within a wood, and I, I took the one directed by the Die, and that has made all the difference.’ So Little Red Riding Hood wrote, and so we must all do. The patients groove to this use of the dice right away.

  “We also show them how to use the die as a veto. Every time they do something we ask them to shake a die and if it comes up a six they can’t do it; have to ask the die to choose something else for them. Veto’s a great method but hard. Most of us go through our lives from one thing to the next mechanically, without thought. We study, write, eat, flirt, fornicate, fuck as the result of habitual patterns. ‘Pop’ comes a dice veto: it wakes us up. In theory, we’re working toward the purely random man, one without habit or pattern, eating from zero to six or seven times a day, sleeping haphazardly, responding sexually randomly to men, women, dogs, elephants, trees, watermelons, snails and so on. In practice, of course, we don’t shoot so high.

  “Instead we let the patient judge at first how he uses the dice. Of course, sooner or later he sticks himself in some small slot of diceliving where he’s willing to let the dice play. Unless he’s pushed he’ll stay clogged up there forever.”

  “How do you overcome the patient’s reluctance to expand his use of the dice?” Dr. Cobblestone asked. He seemed interested.

  Dr. Rhinehart stopped in front of him and smiled.

  “To overcome this secondary resistance—constipation, we call it—we use mostly the method of scare. We tell the patient to cast the dice concerning his biggest problem: ‘Give the dice the option of your getting into bed with your mother and feeling her up.’ ‘Let the dice decide whether you say: “Up yours, Dad.”’ ‘Cast a die to see whether you’re going to destroy your diaries.’”

  “What happens?”

  “The patient generally craps or faints,” said Dr. Rhinehart, beginning to pace again while scowling at the floor. “But when he revives we suggest something a little less threatening but still outside his previous diceliving area. In utter gratefulness he goes along.” Dr. Rhinehart’s face brightened, and he smiled at each of the doctors as he passed them in his pacing.

  “Then he’s on his way. Within a month we hope he’ll have achieved either ecstatic liberation, abandonment of dice therapy, or a psychosis. The psychotic break is caused by his need to avoid admitting that he can act, and he can change, that he can do something about his problems. He can’t face the fact that he’s free, and not the helpless, pitiable object he’s under the illusion he is.

  “He feels liberated when he realizes that his horrible problems are not his to worry about any longer: they’ve been shifted to the square shoulders of the dice. He becomes ecstatic. He experiences the transfer of control from an illusory self to the dice as a conversion or as salvation. It’s something like newly born Christians giving up their souls to Christ or God, or the Zen student or Taoist surrendering to the Tao. In all these cases the ego-control game is abandoned and the student surrenders to a force which is experienced as being outside himself.

  “Let me quote to you what one of our dicestudents has written about his experience.” Dr. Rhinehart returned to his chair, extracted some papers from his briefcase and began to read from one.

  It was great. It was a real religious feeling, a spiritual thing. Suddenly I was free of all my hangups about raping little girls and buggering boys. I gave up the struggle and put the whole mess into the hands of the dice. When they ordered rape, I raped. When they ordered abstention, I abstained. No problem. When they say fly to Peru, I fly to Peru. It’s like being in the middle of a movie I’ve never seen before. It’s tremendously interesting and I’m the star. In the last couple of months I haven’t even bothered to give the dice any little-girl or little-boy options. I don’t know, everything else is so fascinating I just don’t seem to have the old get-up-and-go anymore.

  Dr. Rhinehart placed the paper back on his chair and resumed his pacing.

  “Of course, it takes a while for our students to reach this level of freedom and they don’t always retain it. At first they often cast the dice and think: ‘Now I must have the willpower to do it.’ That’s bad. The illusion that an ego controls or has ‘willpower’ must be abandoned. The student’s got to see his relation to the dice first as that of a baby in a rubber raft on a flooded river: each motion of the river is pleasant; he doesn’t need to know where he’s going or when, if ever, he’ll arrive. Motion is all.”

  Dr. Rhinehart stopped pacing for the moment and looked intently at his listeners. He had become increasingly excited by what he was saying and the five doctors behind the table had begun staring at him with increasing awe, except for Dr. Moon, who was still settled in openmouthed sleep against Dr. Mann.

  “Actually, I may be going too fast for you,” Dr. Rhinehart began again. “Maybe I should tell you about some of our dice exercises, Emotional roulette, for example. The student lists six possible emotions, lets a die choose one and then expresses that emotion as dramatically as he can for at least two minutes. It’s probably the most useful of the dice exercises, letting the student express all kinds of long-suppressed emotions which he usually doesn’t even know he has. Roger Meters reports that a dicestudent of his found after ten minutes of a dice-dictated love for a specific person that he remained in love; in fact, the student has since married her.”

  Dr. Rhinehart paused in his pacing to smile benevolently at Dr. Weinburger.

  “Then there’s Russian roulette. We’ve got two versions. In one the student creates from three to six unpleasant options and casts a die to see which if any he has to do. In the second, he creates one extremely challenging option—say, quitting a job, insulting a mother or husband, robbing a bank, murder—and gives it a long-shot chance of being chosen.

  “This second form of Russian roulette is one of our best dice exercises. Dr. Reinholt Budweir cured what seemed to be a hopeless case of death anxiety by every morning taking out a revolver loaded with one live cartridge and five blanks, spinning the cylinder, placing the barrel at his temple and casting two dice. If they came up snake eyes, he pulled the trigger. The odds each morning were thus two hundred and sixteen to one against his death.

  “From the moment he discovered this dice exercise Dr. Budweir’s death anxiety disappeared; he felt a lightness such as he hadn’t experienced since his earliest childhood. His sudden death last week at the age of twenty-nine is a tragic loss.”

  As he looked from one doctor to another, Dr. Rhinehart’s eyes glittered behind his glasses. He continued.

  “Then there’s Exercise K—named in honor of the eminent German-American researcher, Dr. Abraham Krum.” Dr. Rhinehart smiled at Dr. Mann. “The student lists six optional roles
or selves he might adopt for periods varying from a few minutes to a week or more. Exercise K is the key to a successful dicelife. The student who practices this daily for an hour or two, or each week for a whole day, is on his way to becoming a full-fledged diceperson.”

  “Dr. Rhinehart, I …”

  “Families and friends assume, of course, that the student is on the road to insanity and that his therapist is already there, but ignoring doubt and ridicule is a necessary part of becoming a diceperson. Dr. Fumm tells me that a student of his has expanded Exercise K hour by hour until he has gone from an hour a day to twenty-three hours a day, varying who he is every day of the week—except Sunday, which he reserves for rest. At first his friends and family were hysterical with fear and rage, but once he’d explained to them what he was doing they began to adjust. At the end of a few months his wife and children would simply ask him at breakfast each morning who he was and make the necessary accommodations. Since among his many roles he was Saint Simeon Stylites, Greta Garbo, a three-year-old child and Jack the Ripper, the members of his family deserve a lot of credit for their psychological maturity. May they rest in peace.” Dr. Rhinehart stopped pacing and looked, solemn and sincere, directly at Dr. Mann.

  Dr. Mann stared back blankly; then his face flushed. Scowling at the floor briefly, Dr. Rhinehart resumed his pacing.

  “As you can see,” he said, “like all potent medications dice therapy has certain not-so-hot side effects.

  “For example, the student usually gets the idea that the dice ought to determine whether he stays in therapy or not. Since he gives this option a lot of chances, the dice sooner or later order him to leave therapy. Sometimes they tell him to return. And then leave again. Sometimes they tell him to pay his therapy bill, sometimes not. It must be admitted that dicestudents are, as patients, a little unreliable. You’ll be happy to know, however, that the more unreliable a patient becomes, the closer he probably is to total cure.