(4 of 5)
BEAZLE: Now what kind of medical career do you want, physical or psychiatric?
STUDENT: I don't know. I never thought about it.
BEAZLE: That's a good start. Suppose we begin with plain everyday medicine. Was it not Herman Melville who wrote: "A man of true science uses but few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose; whereas the smatterer in science thinks that by mouthing hard words he proves that he understands hard things." Now you don't want to be an ordinary man of true science when you can be a full-fledged Smatterer, do you?
STUDENT: I guess not.
BEAZLE: Very well, remember never to let the patient be fully aware of what is wrong. Even tonsillitis can be described as a malign hypertrophied condition that affects nares and pharynx and may result in paraphonia clausa. It was I, you know, who wrote the sign seen in hospitals: "Illumination is required to be extinguished on these premises on the termination of daily activities."
STUDENT: Which means—
BEAZLE: Put out the lights when you leave.
STUDENT: Marvelous.
BEAZLE: It was nothing, really. We medical men have been confounding patients for years. As far back as 1699, the physician and poet Samuel Garth wrote: "The patient's ears remorseless he assails/Murders with jargon where his medicine fails." Still, physical medicine is nothing compared with psychiatry. There's where we Jargonists truly have our day. Suppose a man loses his wife and is unable to love anyone because he is sad. What do I tell him?
STUDENT: Cheer up, there are lots of fish in the—?
BEAZLE (interrupting): Of course not. I intone: You have suffered an object loss in which you had an over-cathesis of libido and have been unable to decathect the libido and invest it in a new object. Do you follow me?
STUDENT: I think so.
BEAZLE: Then be warned: the public is on our trail; they now have learned the meanings of the "oses" and the "itises." You had better replace them with "inadequacies," and "dependencies," tell the man who acts out fantasies that he is "role playing," speak of the creation of a child as "exclusive electivity of dynamic specificity."
STUDENT: And when the child is born?
BEAZLE: His development proceeds through "mutual synthesis carried on through a functional zone of mutuality."
STUDENT: In short, he grows up.
BEAZLE: In long, he proceeds in a continuous unidirectional ever-varying interplay of organism and environment.
STUDENT: If a patient is unhappy?
BEAZLE: He is having an identity crisis.
STUDENT: But suppose he's just unhappy?
BEAZLE: No one is just unhappy. Psych harder!
STUDENT: I'll start immediately. I will follow Lionel Trilling's dictum: no one will fall in love and get married as long as I'm present.
BEAZLE: What will they do?
STUDENT: Their libidinal impulses being reciprocal, they will integrate their individual erotic drives and bring them within the same frame of reference. How am I doing?
BEAZLE: Not badly, but I can still understand you.
STUDENT: Sorry. Day by day I will grow more obscure, until my patients and I completely fail to communicate.