The Diceman

by Luke Rheinhart

  And I will dwell in the house of Chance for ever.

  from The Book of the Die

  Chapter Forty-eight

  The meeting of the executive committee of the Psychoanalysts' Association of New York took place early on the

  afternoon of 30 June, 1969, in a large seminar room at Dr. Weinburger's Institute for the Study of Hypochondria in the

  Dying. Dr. Weinburger, a bushy-haired, thickset man in his late forties, sat impatiently behind a long table with

  Doctors Peerman and Cobblestone on one side of him and old Dr. Moon and Dr. Mann on the other. All the gentlemen

  looked serious and intent except for Dr. Moon, who was sleeping quietly between Chairman Weinburger and Dr.

  Mann, occasionally sliding slowly sideways to rest against the shoulder of the one, and then, like a pendulum that

  badly needs oiling, after a hesitation, sliding slowly back across the arc to rest against the shoulder of the other.

  The table at which the five sat was so long that they looked more like fugitives huddled together for mutual protection

  rather than judges. Dr. Rhinehart and Dr. Ecstein, who was present as friend and personal physician, sat on stiff

  wooden chairs in the middle of the room opposite them. Dr. Ecstein was slumped and squinting, but Dr. Rhinehart was

  erect and alert, looking extremely professional in a perfectly tailored gray suit and tie and shoes shined to such a luster

  that Dr. Ecstein wondered whether he hadn't cheated by using black Day-glo.

  `Yes, sir,' Dr. Rhinehart said before anyone else had said a word.

  `One moment, Dr. Rhinehart,' Dr. Weinburger said sharply. He looked down at the papers in front of him. `Does Dr. Rhinehart know the charges being brought against him?'

  'Yes,' said Doctors Mann and Ecstein at the same time.

  `What's all this about dice, young man?' Dr. Cobblestone asked. His cane lay on the table in front of him as if it were a piece of evidence relevant to the proceedings.

  `A new therapy I'm developing, sir,' Dr. Rhinehart replied promptly.

  `I understand that,' he said. `What we mean is that you should explain.'

  `Well, sir, in dice therapy we encourage our patients to reach decisions by casting dice. The purpose is to destroy the personality We wish to create in its place a multiple personality: an individual inconsistent, unreliable and progressively schizoid' Dr. Rhinehart spoke in a clear, firm and reasonable voice, but for some reason his answer was greeted by a silence, broken only by Dr. Moon's harsh, uneven breathing. Dr. Cobblestone's stern lower jaw became sterner.

  `Go on,' said Dr. Weinburger.

  `My theory is that we all have minority impulses which are stifled by the normal personality and rarely break free into action. The desire to hit one's wife is forbidden by the concept of dignity, femininity and covetousness of unbroken crockery. The desire to be religious is stopped by the knowledge that orgy "is" an atheist. Your desire, sir, to shout "stop this nonsense!" is stopped by your sense of yourself as a fair and rational man.

  The minority impulses are the Negroes of the personality. They have not enjoyed freedom since the personality was founded; they have become the invisible men. We refuse to recognize that a minority impulse is a potential full man, and that until he is granted the same opportunity for development as the major conventional selves, the personality in which he fines will be divided, subject to tensions which lead to periodic explosions and riots.'

  `Negroes must be kept in their place,' said Dr. Moon suddenly, his round, wrinkled face suddenly coming alive with the appearance of two fierce red eyes in its ravaged landscape. He was leaning forward intensely, his mouth, after he had finished his short sentence, dangling open.

  `Go on,' said Dr. Weinburger.

  Dr Rhinehart nodded gravely to Dr. Moon and resumed.

  'Every personality is the sum total of accumulated suppressions of minorities. Were a man to develop a consistent pattern of impulse control he would have no definable personality: ha would be unpredictable and anarchic, one might even say, free.'

  'He would be insane,' came Dr. Peerman's high-pitched voice from his end of the table. His thin, pale face was expressionless.

  `Let us hear the man out,' said Dr. Cobblestone.

  `Go on,' said Dr. Weinburger.

  `In stable, unified, consistent societies the narrow personality had value; men could fulfill themselves with only one self. Not today. In a multivalent society, the multiple personality is the only one which can fulfill. Each of us has a hundred suppressed potential selves which never let us forget that no matter how mightily we step along the narrow single path of our personality, our deepest desire it to be multiple: to play many roles.

  `If you will permit me, gentlemen, I would like to quote to you what a dice-patient of mine said in a recent therapy session which I taped.'

  Dr. Rhinehart reached into his briefcase beside his chair and drew out some sheets of paper. After leafing through them, he looked up and continued: `What Professor O. B. says here seems to me to dramatize the crux of the problem for all men. I quote "`I feel I ought to write a great novel, write numerous letters, be friendly with more of the interesting people in my community, give more parties, dedicate more time to my intellectual pursuits, play with my children, make love to my wife, go hiking more often, go to the Congo, be a radical trying to revolutionize society, write fairy tales, buy a bigger boat, do more sailing, sunning and swimming, write a book on the American picaresque novel, educate my children at home, be a better teacher at the University, be a faithful friend, be more generous with my money, economize more, live a fuller life in the world outside me, live like Thoreau and not be taken in by material values, play more tennis, practice yoga, meditate, do those damn RCAF exercises every day, help my wife with the housework, make money in real estate, and … and so on.

  "And do all these things seriously, playfully, dramatically, stoically, joyfully, serenely, morally, indifferently do them like D. H. Lawrence, Paul Newman, Socrates, Charlie Brown, Superman, and Pogo.

  "But it's ridiculous. When I do any one of these things, play any one of these roles, the other selves are not satisfied. You've got to help me satisfy one self in such a way that the others will feel that they are somehow being considered too. Make them shut up. You've got to help me pull myself together and stop spilling all over the goddamn universe without actually doing anything."

  'Dr. Rhinehart looked up and smiled. `Our Western psychologies try to solve O. B.'s problem by urging him to form some single integrated personality, to suppress his natural multiplicity and build a single dominant self to control the others. This totalitarian solution means that a large standing army of energy must be maintained to crush the efforts of the minority selves to take power. The normal personality exists in a state of continual insurrection.'

  `Some of this makes sense,' added Dr. Ecstein helpfully.

  `In dice theory we attempt to overthrow the totalitarian personality and -'

  `The masses need a strong leader,' interrupted Dr. Moon.

  The silence which followed was broken only by his uneven breathing.

  `Go on,' said Dr. Weinburger.

  `All I've got to say for now,' replied Dr. Moon, closing the shutters on the red furnaces of his eyes and beginning to swing in a slow arc toward the shoulder of Dr. Mann.

  `Go on, Dr. Rhinehart,' said Dr. Weinburger, his face expressionless but his hands crumpling up the papers in front of him like octopi demolishing squid.

  Dr. Rhinehart glanced at his wristwatch and went on.

  Thank you. In our metaphor - which has that same admirable degree of scientific precision and rigor as Freud's famous parable of the superego, the ego, and the id - in our metaphor, the anarchic chance - led person is governed in fact by a benevolent despot: the Die. In the early stages of therapy only a few selves are able to offer themselves as options to the Die. But as the student progresses, more and more selves, desires, value and role
s are raised into the possibility of existence; the human being grows, expands, becomes more flexible, more various. The ability of major selves to overthrow the Die declines, disappears. The personality is destroyed. The man is free. He-' `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 textbook 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 yea-saying sense of the impermanence of things and of an un-integrated, non-patterned 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 un-integrated, non-patterned 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 ratio 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 than we can develop new theories about how it occurs and what we ought to do about it? Our mistake is booming 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, chaotic, unstable and mufti-' valued urban 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 of today 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, un-contradicted 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 that his beliefs arc 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 realty 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 course. 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 Dr. 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 thinks 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 pants peeing, we call it - is overcome and the therapy begins.

  `We have to begin in the most trivial ways. The psychotic has no areas free to be spontaneous and original. The neurotic has few normal, "healthy" persons like yourselves have only a small handful. All other areas are controlled by the dictatorship of personality. It's the job of dice therapy, like the job of revolution in the world as a whole, to enlarge free territory.

  `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.