The Wisdom Warehoused within Fantasies

SENIOR MEMBER: In this psy­chi­atric eval­u­a­tion of you, the clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist clearly indi­cated, at one point, that you had pre­sented no evi­dence of ever hav­ing had any delu­sions or loos­ened asso­ci­a­tions. Dur­ing the course of your inter­view then, did you not dis­cuss with him any of the very vivid visual and audi­tory fan­tasies you had pre­sented here ear­lier, in your tes­ti­mony before this board?

RESPONDENT: No Sir, I did not. It never occurred to me that he would be inter­ested in my fan­tasies. Only recently, as I’ve begun to unearth the enor­mous wealth of wis­dom ware­housed within these fan­tasies, have I, myself, taken a greater inter­est in them. And judg­ing from the con­tents of his eval­u­a­tion, I’d say the Navy had actu­ally been more inter­ested in see­ing that I was capa­ble of remain­ing on active duty than it had been in look­ing into any abil­ity I pos­sessed, at the time, for dis­cern­ing the direc­tion of my life.

Besides, I feared being mis­di­ag­nosed as a schiz­o­phrenic, like my real father. For I wasn’t crazy, I just didn’t fit into this way of life, which is exactly what these fan­tasies were try­ing to tell me. In fact, I had even been fore­warned by my soul that, until I under­stood them more clearly, I should not throw these pearls of wis­dom out to be tram­pled upon by swine, that is, by lit­eral inter­pre­ta­tions which sim­ply were not true. What I needed, but did not get, was help in unearthing the truth rather than in sup­press­ing it with misinformation.