Free Quipu by Damien Broderick Page B

perhaps, and concern.
    And here we are at the most disagreeable point in what I have to tell you.
    My small knowledge of clinical and theoretical psychology (a mere smattering, true, as Mrs. Muir told me today; but twenty or thirty books’ worth more, I have now to insist, than the great well of wisdom open to most middle-aged housewives) left me with a dilemma:
    A strong materialist school of psychology maintains that mental disorder is a product of biochemical abnormalities and specific injurious learning experiences such as those Caroline suffered at times at school, say.
    The main alternative school of thought derives from Freud and is less impressed by studies on rats and pigeons. It may be represented by Dr. Laing, who is uncompromising in his belief that the collapse of the experience of a human being into madness cannot be understood outside that person’s crucial human context: her family, principally.
    If the first school was correct, Caroline was a machine that had broken down and needed a mechanic. If the second was right, she was a person trapped in a horrid unconscious tangle. My prejudice is clear enough. I could not bring any of this out while Caroline depended on my silence.
    Naturally, all these rules of thumb were abandoned at the moment Caroline broke down into psychosis. I immediately rang the psychiatrist she’d been to see on one occasion, and then I rang you. It was a ghastly situation, but I attempted to place you in possession of the facts as I saw them. You felt that I was accusing you, trying to make you feel guilt. No. I wasn’t. I’m still not.
    But if it has been difficult for you to pay any attention to me, an upstart youth without manners, who sponges off the government and writes for pretentious magazines, I hope you will see that I do not find it agreeable or easy to say and write things that can only reinforce your bad opinions of me.
    Perhaps also I have been living too long with this tragedy as an unfolding experience to grasp the shock it must have been for you—to understand that I could hardly begin a cool and involved analysis in the unprepared moment of that shock. In the meantime, unhappily, the opportunities for understanding each other have rather diminished.
    Does all this sound no better than an attempt to justify myself? It is less that than an oblique attempt to let you see in some detail through my eyes. In isolation you might consider that point of view to have little to recommend it; but we are not in isolation.
    Mrs. Muir assured me that the Ward psychiatrist says the family has nothing to do with Caroline’s condition, that such illnesses come utterly out of the blue. It is a tenable viewpoint, though our everyday practice denies that we believe it. I’ve always supposed that one of the fundamentals of our way of life is the parents’ right and duty to choose the pattern of their children’s education, upbringing, associates…Why, if not because these factors are deemed of critical importance in shaping the future character of the child? Can we abdicate from that realistic expectation if the results are not to our liking?
    I urge this line of thought, despite the fact that its implications in the present situation are far from happy, not from some absurd pretention to dispense blame and guilt. I do so because if it is true we can all do something for Caroline.
    If mental disorder appears in a flash from nowhere, or from the buried infantile past, then we are helpless; nothing can be done. But if it is a state of mind sustained by identifiable relationships in the present, if it is the outcome of patterns of action that have prevailed for years unnoticed and prevail still, then everything can be done, when we uncover and change those patterns.
    Can you truly believe you’re doing Caroline a service when you deftly steer conversations away from “depressing” topics? Or are you afraid to listen?
    Do you actually think everything is bright and well and promising