THE LILIES-AND-BLUEBIRD DELUSION
The young bridegroom who unexpectedly discovers that his wife has
been brought up in extreme unawareness of the true facts of life and
believes in some variant of the Birds and Flowers Delusion (that is,
that birds and flowers have something to do with the emotional life of
persons), is faced with a situation calling for the greatest tact and
tenderness. It won’t do any good for him to get mad, or to indulge in
self-pity, crying, “Oh, how sorry I am for me!” and only a coward would
go directly into a psycho-neurosis without first trying to win his wife
over to acceptance of things as they are.
[Illustration: _DR. WALTER TITHRIDGE_
(_after the etching by Veerbluergen_).]
I have in mind the case of a young lady whose silly mother had taught
her to believe that she would have a little son, three years old,
named Ronald, as soon as her husband brought a pair of bluebirds
into a room filled with lilies-of-the-valley. The young woman (to
say nothing of the young man) was thus made the victim of one of the
extremest cases of Birds and Flowers Fixation which has ever come to my
attention. I shall transcribe, from Dr. Tithridge’s notes, the first
dialogue on the subject that took place between the young couple. This
dialogue was carefully reconstructed by Tithridge from the account of
the incident as given by the young husband, who sought his advice and
counsel.
On the evening of the 25th of June, when the couple were married, the
young husband entered their hotel suite to find it literally a garden
of lilies-of-the-valley. He was profoundly touched, but baffled, and
asked his wife who was dead.
“Where are the bluebirds?” she replied, coyly.
“What bluebirds?” he demanded.
“_The_ bluebirds,” she said, blushing.
Unfortunately, but not unnaturally, the bridegroom did not know what
the bride was talking about. What was of the extremest importance
to her, was to her husband merely an idle whim, a shadowy fancy.
Obviously, the young couple should have talked such matters over long
before, but they hadn’t, and there they were. He strove to change the
subject, whistled, lighted cigarettes, for he was nervous enough the
way it was, but she kept recurring to the bluebirds. His bewilderment
became tinged with some alarm, for during their courtship he had put
forth no great effort to examine into her mental capacity, and he
was now assailed by the excusable suspicion that she was perhaps not
exactly bright. He talked rapidly, apprehensively, of many things.
Among the things he talked about were the St. Louis Cardinals (a
baseball club). From there it was but an easy associative step for his
wife to go back to the bluebirds again.
“Aren’t you going to _get_ any bluebirds?” she persisted.
“I don’t know where the hell I’d get any bluebirds tonight,” he said,
rather irritably, “me not being Bo-Peep.”
The nuclear complex was made right then and there. There was a long
tense silence, after which the bride burst into bitter tears.
“Now, dear,” said her husband, more reasonably, “let’s try to get this
thing straightened out. What are you talking about, anyway?”
“Sex—if you want to know!” she blurted out, and swooned.
Instead of getting her a glass of water, he excitedly phoned the room
clerk, but became embarrassed once he had got him, and merely asked
that a couple of blankets be sent up. It was, unfortunately, as I have
said, June—and warmish. Thus when the wife revived sufficiently to
become aware of her surroundings, the husband was standing above her
holding a pair of blankets, and looking pale and warm.
[Illustration: _“Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common
during the first year of any marriage.”_]
“What are those for?” she demanded, suspiciously, for the notion had
now formed in her own mind (Dr. Tithridge feels, and I agree) that she
very likely had married a dementia præcox case. These mutual suspicions
of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage,
but rarely are they aggravated by factors so clearly calculated to
upset the mental equilibrium as bluebirds at midnight and blankets in
June. This husband and wife were drifting farther and farther apart.
The solution to their problem was becoming more and more remote, what
with this setting up of involved artificial barriers, this almost
fantastical beclouding of the issue. Dr. Tithridge tells me that he
believes the young man’s reason would have been permanently dethroned
had he (Dr. Tithridge) tweeted or chirped like a bird[14] on the
occasion of the husband’s first visit to him.
[14] Experiments of this sort, calculated to determine the possible
effects of tweeting, or chirping, in the case of a Birds Fixation,
fall, of course, outside the province of the psycho-analyst, and not
only is the legality of their practice questionable, but the value of
the results obtained is highly doubtful.
When the wife beheld her husband standing there with the blankets, she
demanded, again, “What are you doing with those blankets?”
“I get cold,” he mumbled, and he proceeded to put the blankets on
the shelf of a closet which already held several extra pair. He
was, furthermore, decidedly warm, and kept patting his brow with a
handkerchief.
“Let’s go out and take a walk,” suggested his wife, apprehensively.
To this her husband very readily agreed. They were getting afraid to
stay in the same room with each other, than which there is no other
condition in the world more certain to break up a marriage. Out in the
street, among people, they both felt safer, and they wandered to a
bench in a fairly crowded park, and sat down.
“Where did you get the idea that birds have anything to do with us?”
demanded the bridegroom.
“My mumsy,”[15] she said.
[15] Young women who allude to their mothers as “mumsy” almost
invariably present difficult problems in adjustment. The word is a
sentimentalization of the more common “mamma” and indicates a greater
dependence upon maternal direction and supervision than may be expected
in the case of young women who use the more familiar term.
“Well,” he said, “she deceived you.”
“About what?”
“About what you’re talking about.”
“Sex?” she asked.
“That isn’t sex, honey,” he told her. “Birds and flowers are simply ...
they do not ... that is, we could live all our life without them.”
“I couldn’t,” she said, and, after a pause, “I always feared _you_
didn’t want children.”
“I do want children. I want you. You want me. Everything is going to be
all right.”
“How is it?” she demanded.
“In the first place,” he began, pulling at his collar, “it’s this way.
Now here’s the way it is. Now you take me ... or take you, say. In the
first place the girl, that is Woman ... why, Woman[16] ...” He lapsed
into a profound silence.
[16] Explanations of natural phenomena in terms of the collective noun,
particularly where the noun becomes capitalized in the mind of the
person striving to explain, are almost never successful.
“Well, go on,” she prompted.
“Well,” he said, “you know how women are, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, doubtfully.
“That’s fine,” he said, brightening, “Now women are that way, then——”
“What way?” she asked.
“Why, the way you are ... from me ... than I am, I mean.” He made a
vague gesture.
“I don’t see what you mean,” she said. Her husband gave a light laugh.
“Hell’s bells, it’s simple enough,” he cried, suddenly, giving the
light laugh again; “it’s certainly simple enough. Now, here. We’ll take
Adam and Eve. There they were, all alone, see?”
“There were two bluebirds,” said his wife.
“Not till after the flood, there weren’t,” he corrected her. “Well, he
found out that there were certain essential differences—what you might
call on purpose. I mean there must have been some reason. You can count
on it that things like that just don’t happen. Well, then, he simply
figured it out—figured out the reason.”
“For what?”
“For all this discrepancy. Obviously it just didn’t happen. It couldn’t
just have happened. It had to make some sense—nature is like that. So
he—so he finally—ah—what he did was tell her, see? I mean he asked her.”
“Asked her what?”
“He simply asked her,” said her husband in calm, almost cold tones,—“he
simply asked her why she thought this was. Is there anything wrong in
that? And so gradually they understood why it was. It’s as simple as
that!” He looked at her triumphantly.
“What _are_ you talking about?” she demanded.
“Listen,” he said at last, firmly. “Both of us speak a little French,
and we might try it that way. I think I could explain better in French.
Why, even little children, tiny girls, sing _Auprès de ma blonde_
in France, and think nothing of it. It’s just a nice, wholesome
idea—_auprès de ma blonde_—and it sounds like poetry—but take it in
English and what do you get?”
“‘Quite close to my blonde’ ...” answered his wife.
“... ‘_Qu’il fait bon dormir_,’” her husband hurried on.
“‘How good it is to sleep,’” she translated.
“Fine! Now you’re talking.”
“Go on,” she said, “_you’re_ talking.”
“Well, all right, but first I wanted you to see that there is no reason
to get embarrassed, because everything is lovely in French. So don’t
mind my frankness.”
“I don’t,” said the bride.
“All right,” he began again, “_Alors_, now, _il y a quelque chose que
vous avez que je n’en ai pas, n’est-ce pas?_”
“_Oui_,” she said.
“_Bon_,” he said. “_Alors, ça c’est naturel—ah—ça c’est bien
naturel...._”
“_Par exemple_,” put in his wife, a little illogically.
“_Dites_,” he said, and after a great pause, “_Dites donc—dites vous_——”
“You should really use ‘tu’ and ‘toi’ and not ‘vous,’” said his wife;
“it’s more intimate.”
“All right,” he responded. “Now, _tu as quelque chose, tu as ... toi_.”
“_Comment?_” she demanded.
“I just don’t know enough words,” said the bridegroom, wretchedly. The
bride put her hand on his arm.
“Let’s try ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ in English,” she suggested.
[Illustration: _DR. KARL ZANER._]
“That’s not a bad idea,” he said. “Well, all right. Now thee has——”
“Hath,” she corrected.
“Thee hath certain—ah——”
“Differences,” she supplied. “But isn’t it ‘thou hath’—or is it ‘thee
hath’?”
“To hell with it!” cried her husband. “In all thy life hast never been
around, for Pete’s sake?”
“Certainly, and thou—and you have no right to talk to me like that!”
“I’m _sorry_,” said the young man. “_I’m_ sorry.” He rose to his feet.
“Ye gods! to think this had to happen to me! Ah, well. Listen. I tell
you what, I’ll write it out for you. How about that? And if you don’t
like the idea, why, all right, I suppose.”
It was the next day that the young husband, who had sat up all night
in the hotel lobby, thinking and writing, visited Dr. Tithridge. I am
happy to report that, as not infrequently happens in such cases, a
solution was finally arrived at. However, in a great number of cases
the difficulty is never overcome. The home becomes a curious sort of
hybrid, with overtones of the botanical garden and the aviary. The
husband grows morose and snappish, the wife cross and pettish. Very
often she takes up lacrosse and he goes in for raising rabbits. If
allowed to go on, the situation can become so involved and intricate
that not all the analysts from the time of Joan of Arc down could
unravel it.
The problem is by no means any simpler where the wife is cognizant of
things as they are and the husband is ignorant. I know of one young man
who every night tenderly placed, with much strange clucking, a basket
near the hearth into which he had some expectation that a baby would
be deposited by a stork. (Plate I.) Another young husband constructed
at considerable expense a water-lily pond in his back yard and fondly
rowed about in it, twilight after twilight, searching for infants,
laying his finger to his lip, making “tchk, tchk” noises at his wife,
who watched him in profound amazement.
[Illustration: _EMOTIONAL CHARADES. PLATE I._
“_One young man every night tenderly placed, with much strange
clucking, a basket near the hearth into which he had some expectation
that a baby would be deposited by a stork._”]
In both these cases the wives were fine women of strong character, with
a background of sturdy pioneer stock, and they soon put a stop to such
charades, once they divined the curiously entangled Wish Motives behind
them. It may be said, indeed, that young wives are more candid and
direct in their explanations of natural phenomena than young husbands,
when they have to be.
The existence of such deplorable ignorance is a sad commentary on the
sentimentality of a nation which sets itself up to be frankly sexual.
There is much reason to be hopeful, however. The future parents of the
land will doubtless come straight to the point in matters of this sort,
when talking with their children. The children of today will be the
parents of tomorrow, and you know how the children of today are.