Putting the Questions Differently. Doris Lessing
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in the newspaper the next day.
Terkel: Coming back to Lynda and Martha, the protagonist in The Four-Gated City, we see that Martha, the sane woman, the secretary, the arranger, suddenly comes to lean toward Lynda’s way of thinking, doesn’t she?
Lessing: Yes, what happens is that Martha lives in this house with Lynda who has this label slapped on her: Lynda’s the nutty one, she’s mad. But Martha, by being with Lynda, begins to understand that what Lynda is doing is experiencing things in a different way. I try to explore what certain kinds of madness are. I’m inclined to think that schizophrenia is not madness at all. We’ve been dogmatic about this. I don’t want to say that schizophrenia is just this; I don’t like this business of saying something is only that.
Terkel: I’m fascinated by this character Lynda.
Lessing: One of the ideas that helped create Lynda was a woman I knew in London who was fifteen before she realized that everybody didn’t know who was at the other end of the telephone and didn’t hear what other people were thinking. She knew what other people were thinking, and in short she discovered that far from everyone being like this she was very much by herself and she learned to shut out the world. Lynda is a girl who has a very solitary childhood, and through a series of circumstances she comes under pressure, cracks up emotionally as God knows how many people do in adolescence – because everybody’s a bit crazy in adolescence – and is classed as a schizophrenic and a variety of other things, has a lot of treatment such as shock treatment, insulin treatment, the whole gamut, and is so damaged that she spends the rest of her life in and out of mental hospitals. At the same time, she has these powers, increasingly, the capacity to hear what people are thinking and to see.
Now I would like to define this, because a lot of people have this capacity. They have labels stuck on them by doctors and psychiatrists, and they don’t know in fact what they have. A great many people overhear what other people are thinking. It’s a capacity that can be developed if you are patient, are prepared to make mistakes, and you’re not bulldozed by the scientific way of thinking, which hasn’t learnt to put its questions right. They have to learn how to put the questions differently. The way they are putting the questions now means that they’re not able to learn.
The other capacity that a lot of people have is they see pictures inside their eyelids; a great many people see them when they’re ill, tired, under great strain, or before they go to sleep. There’s a word for that – “hypnagogic.” The doctor will say, “Oh yes, that’s a hypnagogic thingamajig – dismissed!” This capacity is what they refer to in the Bible as the seer’s visions, something which in our culture is not supposed to happen at all, and therefore it’s just ignored. Now this too can be developed, and it’s got nothing to do with time.
I’m really well aware that this is going to sound nutty: this particular thing can be, not always, out of time. It’s on a different time length, wavelength. It can take different forms: it can be in black-and-white, it can be in technicolor, it can be in a series of stills, like shots from a movie, frozen shots, it can be like a movie running – a lot of different things. I saw in Scientific American, just before I left, an article on research done on children. I’ve completely forgotten – is it eidetic children? – that is, children who, if you project an image, maintain this image. They’ve done a lot of research on that, you see.
Terkel: It’s funny that you mention that because the other night on TV Jacob Bronowski said that William Blake had this particular attribute that you just described.
Lessing: He also had a lot of others, quite clearly.
Terkel: But this matter of image, “Blake could see,” this is Bronowski talking, “Blake could see clearly, wholly, in absolutely all dimensions” that which you just talked about.
Lessing: It’s the “eidetic” – the capacity to hold an image in front of your eyes as if it were a photograph. That’s not what I was talking about when I spoke of seeing the pictures moving or the stills; that’s something else.
Why I was talking about that was to describe how the scientist dealt with it: the test as to whether the child was telling the truth or not was the amount of detail he could come up with from this picture. You see, now if he was able to remember the exact number of buttons on a coat or the hairs on the pussycat’s tail, he was telling the truth, and, if not, he didn’t have this capacity. This is a scientific mind working, you see. If I meet you on the street tomorrow morning, we have a chat, and we go away; and if you were in an observant mood and I was, you couldn’t say what I’d been wearing and I couldn’t say what you’d been wearing. If someone had said, “How’s he looking?” I would say, “I don’t know; he looked much as usual.” But we’d have absolutely no doubt at all that we’d met each other, even if we couldn’t remember a single detail. Right? We’d go to the stake that we’d met each other, even though we could say no more than that. The scientists are not yet able to measure what happens when you and I meet on the street, or what meets on the street. What meets, when we meet on the street?
Terkel: Is it two bodies, two pairs of eyes, two pairs of legs, or is it something in addition to that?
Lessing: Right, something in addition to that, which everybody responds to, but which we can’t yet measure. What is it?
Terkel: You’re saying the questions are wrong questions. And the questions are asked wrong because there’s a cynicism or skepticism involved, talking about the child who sees this in his mind, so they’re really not so much curious about what the child saw but questioning the veracity of the child.
Lessing: I think they have an unconscious, or perhaps not so unconscious, bias to prove that these things don’t exist. This is their problem. I met a girl in New York who said she read this book [The Four-Gated City] and she had a great burden taken off her because she was like Lynda. She suddenly realized she’d never been ill. Now this made me so happy.
Terkel: The passage you read at the very beginning dealt with that specific point that she’d been told she was crazy but she wasn’t really.
Lessing: There are hundreds of thousands of people who have been tortured by doctors and psychiatrists in a way which they regard as so barbarous. The whole range of treatments used in mental hospitals are savage and cruel and terrible and destroy people.
Terkel: It’s as though we’re in Neanderthal times at this moment in treatment.
Lessing: Yes. Why is it that we have allowed to come about the state of affairs where a human being sits behind a desk and says, “Such-and-such is wrong with you,” and we believe him? Why do we allow this kind of thing to be done to us? Now that’s a much more interesting question, because the history of medicine is not one that encourages us to believe that they are likely to be right. Putting it at its mildest, they are extremely conservative and inflexible and unimaginative and continually damning new ideas; but in spite of the fact that psychiatry is a new and very feared thing, we will take their word, we allow them to slap a label on this – why do we?
Terkel: Do you know R. D. Laing?
Lessing: Yes, I do, and his work. I think he hasn’t gone far enough. I admire him because he has battled with the English medical establishment and changed the plan so as to make it possible to ask questions in a way it simply wasn’t possible before.
Terkel: You mention the psychiatrist who is detached, who has this patient on the couch, whereas Laing is saying he must also adhere to his own vulnerability. I think he uses the phrase “fellow passengers.”
Lessing: I once saw on television Laing and some other doctors of his school who have had a great influence, contrasted with the old-fashioned kind, and what came out was the marvelous compassion