He smirked interest in himself. "I'm a sort of cross between a Freudian
and a semanticist, Wylie. What do you think of semantics?"
"The poets understood it before Korzybski."
"Very good! Very! Still--"
"--a means. A useful insight." I felt a bead of sweat roll from my
armpit down my corrugated ribs. "The basic assumption is mistaken,
though. It omits instinct. No cortical rearrangement will accomplish
much, even with semantics, until it admits instinct--"
"I always wondered whether you understood the subject. Guess you do.
But I still don't see Jung's slant."
How cleverly the thumb and finger de-wing the caught fly! And how
the fly beats its legs in satisfactory protest! If I had injured his
composure in some book or other, some essay, he would avenge it now. I
stared at the flaring spectacles of this penny-ante sadist and swore
to myself that he could sweat me--and all his full waiting room--till
Gabriel put his brass horn to his lips before I'd twitch my foot.
And in this outlandish, familiar crisis of our everyday relations, I
brought forth with the energies of wrath another formulation.
I blew smoke at the fat little hamster. "You can put it this way. Jung
sees the source of the superego as unconscious, too--just as Freud
sees the id. To Jung--both are continuums of instinct. That's all.
Any culture--even the culture of you physical scientists, which is
mostly yet to come--rises from instinct, not from the frontal lobes.
If you think of superego as subconscious in source and merely the
opposite of id, you can understand Toynbee--and Toynbee's error about a
churchly salvation for this day and age. You might actually understand
Jesus--and what Christianity was intended to be to people. You can
understand a great deal that even most psychologists don't know about."
"Interesting," he said, and he gave up. There were papers on his
desk. "Like to mull it over with you someday." He discarded two or
three sheets. "I've got a report on you here somewhere." He found
it, finally. "Negative." He glanced at me and chuckled. "Cobb, my
associate, was fooled. Told me he was all but sure of carcinoma. The
thing--" he read to himself--"is a rather rare lymphatic growth. But
two or three mild doses of X-ray will obliterate it. You'll never be
able to see the site. Cobb will give you the first treatment straight
off. Only take a few minutes. Just hold your mouth open--and shed your
troubles." He chuckled again. "Mighty glad to meet you, Wylie. Maybe,
someday, you'd come up to Westchester and talk to a little group I'm a
member of--"