Free The Mind of Mr Soames by Charles Eric Maine Page B

handicap for a start, Conway decided—not that he favoured corporal punishment for misdemeanours, but because Mr Soames’s infantile mind might not prove amenable to any subtler form of correction. The schedule was being inconsistent again in the same arbitrary way. Train Mr Soames as you would a baby, it said in effect, but don’t treat him as you would a baby. It was a complete abandonment of the old-established pleasure-pain principle with which the vast majority instinctively taught their children the difference between right and wrong.
    On the subject of sex the schedule reiterated the viewpoints expressed some weeks earlier by Dr Mortimer and Dr Breuer. Mr Soames was a mature male with, presumably, a normal if undirected sexual appetite. In order to keep this rather inconvenient instinct quiescent and avoid relating it specifically to the female (an association which might act as a stimulus and prove to be a distracting influence), it was proposed initially to segregate the patient from the opposite sex by employing male nurses, and at the same time his educational instruction would inculcate the simple notion of gender. Later, when the patient’s educational level and acquisition of self-control justified it, the function of sex in human society could be quietly explained, and Mr Soames might even be allowed to associate with women (in a purely platonic way, of course, and under careful supervision). In such a manner, it was thought, the pattern of his mental development could follow that of a normal child, and sex would take its natural place in the scheme of things, when his mind was ready to accept it.
    Conway put the document aside with some misgivings and lit a cigarette. I suppose, he thought, they know what they’re up to, Breuer and Mortimer. After all, they’re men of experience—much more experience than I possess. Come to the point, I’m no authority on sex, anyway, or human relationships in general. I made a hash of my own marriage. Correction—Penelope made a hash of it for me. But in a way it was my fault. The signs of instability were there all the time and I couldn’t read them, and even when the evidence was cut and dried and handed to me on a plate I was still reluctant to believe it. In the long run one tends to believe only what one wants to believe, and consequently one frequently acts on false information and wrong premises.
    Supposing I were Mr Soames, he said to himself, and supposing I awoke one day to find myself in a strange incomprehensible world. What would be my reaction? Fear, perhaps. Wonder. Amazement at simple things—glittering beads and bright colours. But, after a while there would come a sense of insecurity. It would happen when I began to notice that the strange people coming and going in my small room were of the same shape and form as me, and that I was one of them. And I would realise that they possessed much more than I did: qualities of behaviour that implied premeditated purpose; power to please or hurt, to supply food and drink or remove it, to switch on lights or switch them off. Superior beings, perhaps, acting with a common aim in view—to deprive me of my life of indolent leisure and force me to do difficult and unaccustomed things so that, presumably, I might eventually do as they do.
    Conway reflected on the theme for a while, genuinely trying to put himself in the place of his patient and interpret the world through the medium of an empty mind, but the effort in psychological extrapolation proved too difficult and he gave it up. Instead he lifted the internal telephone and buzzed Ann Henderson.
    ‘By sheer coincidence,’ he said when she answered the phone, ‘I happen to have a few cans of beer in the cupboard, and as it’s a warm, dry evening I was wondering if you would care to accept my hospitality.’
    ‘I’d rather you accepted mine. I’m fresh out of a bath and too deshabille to go wandering round the corridors.’
    ‘In that case I’ll be