The Thanatos Syndrome

pains I got punched and elbowed, my glasses knocked across the room. “Somebody hit Doc!” one of them cries.
    They both set about taking care of me, the lawyer fetching my glasses, the dentist staunching my bleeding lip. I go limp to give them something to do, carry me to the infirmary.
    A discovery: A shrink accomplishes more these days by his fecklessness than by his lordliness in the great days of Freud.
    What, then, to make of my patients?
    Time was when I’d have tested their neurones with my lapsometer. But there’s more to it than neurones. There’s such a thing as the psyche, I discovered. I became a psyche-iatrist, as I’ve said, a doctor of the soul, an old-style Freudian analyst, plus a dose of Adler and Jung. I discovered that it is not sex that terrifies people. It is that they are stuck with themselves. It is not knowing who they are or what to do with themselves. They are frightened out of their wits that they are not doing what, according to experts, books, films, TV, they are supposed to be doing. They , the experts, know, don’t they?
    Then I became somewhat simpleminded. I developed a private classification of people, a not exactly scientific taxonomy which I find useful in working with people. It fits or fitted nearly all the people I knew, patients, neurotic people, so-called normal people.
    According to my private classification, people are either bluebirds or jaybirds. Most women, it turns out, are bluebirds. Most men, by no means all, are jaybirds.
    Mickey LaFaye, for example, is, or was, clearly a bluebird. She dreamed of being happy as a child in Vermont, of waiting for a visitor, a certain someone, of finding the bluebird of happiness.
    Enrique Busch was a jaybird if ever I saw one. He wanted to shoot everybody in El Salvador except the generals and the fourteen families.
    It is a question of being or doing. Most of the women patients I saw were unhappy and wanted to be happy. They never doubted there was such a creature as the bluebird of happiness. Most men wanted to do this or that, take this or that, beat So-and-so out of a promotion, seduce Miss Smith, beat the Steelers, meet their quota, win the trip to Oahu, win an argument—just like a noisy jaybird. The trouble is, once you’ve set out to be a jaybird, there’s nothing more pitiful than an unsuccessful jaybird. In my experience, that is, with patients who are not actually crazy (and even with some who are), people generally make themselves miserable for one of two reasons: They have either failed to find the bluebird of happiness or they’re failed jaybirds.
    It is not for me to say whether one should try to be happy—though it always struck me as an odd pursuit, like trying to be blue-eyed—or whether one should try to beat all the other jaybirds on the block. But it is my observation that neither pursuit succeeds very well. I only know that people who set their hearts on either usually end up seeing me or somebody like me, or having heart attacks, or climbing into a bottle.
    Take a woman—and some men—who think thus: If only I could be with that person, or away from this person, or be in another job, or be free, or be in the South of France or on the Outer Banks, or be an artist or God knows what—then I’ll be happy. Such a person is a bluebird in my book.
    Or consider this person: What am I going to do with my nogood son, who is driving me crazy—what I want to do is knock him in the head. Or, what is the best way to take on that son of a bitch who is my boss or to get even with that other son of a bitch who slighted me? Wasn’t it President Kennedy who said, Don’t get mad, get even?—now, there was a royal jaybird for you. Or, I’ve got to have that woman—how do I get her without getting caught? Or, I think I can make a hundred thousand almost legally, and so on. Jaybirds all. B. F. Skinner, the jaybird of psychologists, put it this way: The object of life is to gratify yourself without getting arrested. Not exactly the noblest sentiment expressed in two thousand years of Western civilization, but it has a certain elementary validity. True jaybird wisdom.
    But what has happened to all the bluebirds and jaybirds I knew so well?
    They’ve all turned into chickens.
    Here I am out of the clink and back in the normal law-abiding world, the Russians are coming, the war, if there’s a war, is going to make the Somme look like