The following is an excerpt from The Path Not Taken: Reflections on Power and Fear, by Allen Wheelis (Norton, 1990, pp. 74-77; reprinted by permission of the publisher). The incident happened pretty much as described, except that the part ascribed to the fictional Jeff Monroe is condensed from comments by two or more of Allen Wheelis's fellow residents.
The Noon Lecture. It is 1946, Topeka, Kansas, the Winter Veterans Administration Hospital. We wait, one hundred psychiatric residents, all young doctors just home from the war. Disillusioned with politics, with medicine, we want to live in the realm of psychodynamics.
Dr. Knight is three minutes late. The room falls silent as he enters. He is our most admired teacher; we accord him a hushed respect and attention.
He proceeds to the front of the room, takes papers from his briefcase and places them on the table, faces the class. A large man, powerful shoulders, gray hair, ruddy complexion, pale blue eyes. He starts to speak, pauses, straightens his tie, tightens the knot, adjusts the handkerchief in his coat pocket, straightens his notes on the table, starts to speak, pauses. Again he straightens his notes, this time seeming intent on having them exactly in the center, each side of the notepaper parallel with the corresponding side of the table. The class watches with curiosity, then astonishment. At the first tittering he cuts the scene, sits behind the table. “Tell me what you have observed and what you can infer from it.”
Since the announced topic of his lecture is obsessive-compulsive mechanisms, this is easy; two or three hands go up immediately. The first speaker gives a description of the behavior in terms of measuring, balancing, making symmetrical. He is stuck at the surface, will never be an analyst. The next speaks of the ambivalence of obsessional states, unconscious hostility being opposed and balanced by a precisely equal counterforce. Another identifies the motivating impulse as anal, and says that this origin, at the source of all dirtiness, explains why the defense takes the form of excessive neatness. Dr. Knight listens without reaction, calls impassively on one person after another. Presently my friend, Jeff Monroe, begins to rock slightly in his chair, coughs, clears his throat, grins, shoots up his arm.
“The Menninger Clinic keeps you very busy,” he says. “You've probably seen four patients this morning, had a couple of hallway conferences, a dozen phone calls, and no time to think about this lecture or even to open your mail. You finish with your last patient at eleven-fifty and have just ten minutes to get across town. You drive fast, feel tense, resentful. Walking down the hall, you look at your watch, know you are late…so there's no time now even to stop and pee…and we must seem to you like a nest of hungry birds, mouths gaping, waiting to be fed. And just then the obsessional routine occurs to you. ‘Let them do some of the work for a change.’ And we have. We've given a quarter of your lecture. You seem now to have caught your breath, to be rested, and perhaps ready to take over the rest.”
There is general laughter; I scribble a note and pass it to Jeff: “Now he won't say anything!”
“Are there other comments?” Dr. Knight asks. When there is no response, he stands, moves to the lectern. “I had meant to say something about my behavior,” he says, “but I guess it has been pretty well covered. So, let's proceed—”
“Please excuse this interruption,” I say, without asking permission. Dr. Knight looks up disapprovingly. “My interpretation of your foreplay to this lecture had to wait until you began talking…because it included the prediction that you would not say anything about it.” There is a moment of apprehensive silence. The pale blue eyes settle intently on me; he is trying to remember my name. “You meant for your obsessional routine to be discussed at the level of the lecture you are about to give—a model of the sort of thing you're going to talk about. And that's where most of the comments have been pitched. Jeff's remarks went below that level, took you by surprise. You were amused—impressed, too, for they were accurate—but also uncomfortable, and hence annoyed. He was undressing you in public. So why did you not put him down? Because … the heart of analysis is to look elsewhere—to be presented with experience which the patient means to be understood at one level, but to see the significant motivation to lie at quite another level, in an area the patient does not want you to notice. And that's exactly what Jeff did with you. And for a student to do that to a professor is impertinent; but since you have presented us with a bit of clinical behavior and asked for an interpretation, you inadvertently gave him license to do just that, and so could not pull rank and put him in his place. But still it irks you; it was an invasion—particularly that part about no time to pee. So how can you punish him? Why, by not replying. By denying him the satisfaction of your admission that he was right. That is to say, by behaving exactly like a resistant patient who reacts to a correct but discomfiting interpretation with a brief silence, then changes the subject.”
“All this, of course, raises the question of how you will react now to these comments of mine—and I have some ideas about that, too, but won't tell you because the telling would enable you to react otherwise … to punish me!”
For a few moments there is a dreadful silence; then Dr. Knight smiles slightly, and a ripple of nervous laughter flutters across the room. “With your permission and indulgence, Dr. Monroe… and yours, Dr. Wheelis—and if the punishment does not seem too harsh—I would like to get on with my lecture; for whatever you may think to the contrary and however rushed I may have been, I do have something to say, even some notes.”