Reprinted from U.S. MAGAZINE, August 1980

The Great Revolution in Psychology
by Thomas Robbins

The womb-planet Earth, in two and one half billion years, produced less than one hundred activated nervous systems capable of transmitting mass-mutational signals by means of laryngeal-manual inscriptions -- i.e., books.

Four of these Evolutionary Script Writers were American.

Thomas Robbins, author of Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, is one of this fabled guild.

During the first month of graduate training, Agent Leri placed the University of California psychology faculty under intense surveillance. He read their papers and books, dropped in on lectures, observed their behavior. He reluctantly came to the conclusion that these decent, sincere men with corporate smiles were hive-custodians whose function was to prevent change, discourage intelligence-increase (1²), and protect the gene-pool system which protected them.

He spent almost no time on the campus during his four years of graduate training and, thus aloof, received straight "A" grades and was given the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa award.

During this time he studied how graduate schools brainwash students and was not surprised, at the time of graduation. that, of a class of some 25 doctoral students, everyone (except himself and one other flamboyant Irish preterite named Frank Barron) was interested. not in raising intelligence of self or others, but in finding jobs with easy tenure, profitable outside consulting, mild climate, and good pension plans.

Avoiding university faculties like the plague, he started his own research project, and for seven years, received funds from the hive- central bureaucracy to support his investigations in group therapy and interpersonal diagnosis. The work was highly praised. Each year, a soviet-like official would visit his projects, inspect his data and raise his funding. Very interesting.

He was amused one time when a purchase order came from the CIA to obtain copies of tests he had developed.

The funding stopped around the time that he found it therapeutic to teach patients (my God did he say patients) how personality tests were used. And trained patients to diagnose self and others -- including therapists. The bureaucracy seemed uninterested in the finding that patients' diagnoses of doctors were more reliable than therapists' diagnoses of patients.

And then there was the group therapy controversy. At that time medical psychiatrists were resisting the attempts of Ph.D. psychologists to diagnose and treat patients. But both hive-bureaucracies forgot their differences and closed ranks to oppose group therapy -- a dangerous method in which the fragile, delicate, easily-destroyed personalities of patients were being tampered with by other patients. (Patients, later to be called clients, were preterite, non-elect persons, non-bureaucrats, non-salaried- non-experts.)

"But wait a minute," you say! "There's a contradiction here. If Freudian academicians claimed that personality cannot be changed, then why was it dangerous for non-medical or non-expertise people to participate in the therapeutic-process? If personality was unchanging, what harm could be done?"

The old Judeo-Christian dogma had the answer. Personality, they taught, could disintegrate, i.e., change for the worse, but it could not change for the better, grow, develop. Why? Because the unconscious was bad. Because, as Freud pointed out, society and ego were frail paper-clip-rubber-band structures flimsily holding off the basic wickedness of humanity. Original sin. The dutiful stoic mythos of System-People, the managers, who shoulder the burden of gene-pool maintenance, is always the same. Keep the lid on. Discourage change. Encourage Social Adjustment and Hive Conformity.

COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE AGENCY REPORT

Date: February, 1972
Country: Imminsee on Lake Zug, Switzerland
Subject:  A PROBLEM OF ASTRONAUTICS
Classification:  TOP SECRET

(Conversation videotaped.)

At this point Maria comes down with word that dinner is ready. She has prepared trout in a white wine sauce and stands by the kitchen door, Ava. Gardner circa. 1960, watching the cowboys in the saloon. She is a bit drunk. The Philosopher, the Prince, and the slim- ipped Gambler escort her to the head of the table. She eats little, keeps drinking wine, then says she wants to rest. She retires to the fireplace room. We have assigned her the job of breaking up the acid scene, (SEE NOTE PAGE BOTTOM) but the presence of Alexis, the uncertainty of her role in the new script, the English dialogue without sub-titles overload her circuits.

Aiter dinner She sends word that She wants to see the Professor. She is lying on cushions near the fire gasping for breath, just able to whisper that She needs medicine from her bag. Brian and the Professor search the house diligently. The bottle is missing. (very mysterious!)

Maria seems to be getting weaker. The Professor phones a medical friend in Basel who has no specific advice to give. Maria refuses to have a doctor called, or to go to the hospital, shaking her classic head and rolling her dark eyes, implying that she understands the  course of the malaise. She looks into the Philosopher's eyes and whispers solemnly, "Je vais mourir."

The men look at each other helplessly and shrug.

Maria lays back and dies. The Professor kneels at her right and Alexis on her left. Brian Barritt's eyes are bulging. Everyone in the room senses her spirit leave her body. Alexis feels her pulse. It has stopped.

From the control tower the Philosopher talks to her somewhere in sky-time calling her to come back. Alexis massages her heart. Like a plane circling for landing, her spirit touches down in her body and everyone breathes in relief.

''This time-traveling is demanding," sighs Alexis. "Death-bed scenes are so Victorian. That's why we couldn't allow it."

Maria is now lying in the Doctor's arms, her black hair on his chest, her eyes closed, drifting in contented repose.

"What do you mean?" asks Brian.

''The death-bed scene was the climax of the classic Victorian drama. There the truth emerged. The achievements of medical science have changed all that today. We aren't interested in listening to last words. We are concerned only that the patient live. So Maria, we apologize. We brutes would not allow you to die a heroine. We treat you, alas, like a patient."

"It seemed more like a problem in astronautics to me," Bays Brian thoughtfully. "Who is this Maria anyway?"

(End of tape.)

(SHE OBVIOUSLY SHOULD NOT BE ASSIGNED TO POST-TERRESTRIAL OR MULTI-LINGUAL INFILTRATIONS)

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