Rebel Without a Cause (46 page)

L: ‘Harold, as you said; you now feel sorry for your father because you are beginning to understand these things. The question now is, are you
going to be able to pass the stage of mere understanding and go on to real action? What are your relations with your father going to be after this?

O, I’ll never hurt him. I’ll be good to him and treat him decently. I won’t avoid him or anything—because I know—I should have known a long time ago these things. My life, my whole life, is changing. Yes. I put aside a lot of plans about stealing. That Dobriski and I, we made a lot of plans what we were going to do when we got outside, stealing mostly. But since a couple weeks ago I put everything like that aside. I honestly did think I stole to get away from home, get away from my father. My father I guess is a hard man to get along with. Now I know what it was, why I couldn’t get along with him. Sometimes he used to talk to me decently and when I think back on that I’m sorry about the whole thing, really sorry.

L: ‘Do you know what’s wrong with your father?’

He fractured his leg …

L: ‘Have you written about it?’

No. I have never said a word about him in my letters home. I only got this letter yesterday. In all of the letters I’ve written home I never said a word about him. When my mother mentioned him I never liked to read about it. He’s getting older now. He worked hard for us. I remember when I was at my aunt’s place I used to think that my two sisters, my mother and myself, we could have a nice little farm out there some day. I never included my father in these plans. I know now why I didn’t …

L: ‘Harold; have you been thinking about the things we’ve been discussing?’

Yes. I’ve been thinking about it, and I was also thinking how it really does connect. I know they do connect because sometimes I can’t think of anything right in this room and when I am four or five hours by myself sometimes it will just come to me and I can refer to it, associate it with something we said here. Everything we said is true. I know something has happened to my eyes. I don’t know what it is but they never looked before like they look now. The lenses are contracted and I can read small print now and they wink about half as much as they did before. But the most important thing
is what’s happened to me. Now that I know all these things I feel like a different person. I get along better with people now and I understand why I do things and I don’t anymore act without thinking. There’s lots of chance to get messed up in here, and now that I know why I want to do something I can keep myself from doing it. Before I would just do it and not think of why or what was going to happen. But about my eyes … A lot of specialists, doctors who treat nothing except diseases of the eye, they all said that the nerves are all good, that there is no reason my eyes were like that. My mother always thought it was due to the measles. Will measles have that effect on people’s eyes?

L: ‘Yes; measles can have an effect on the eyes; it may make them more sensitive to light. But it is very doubtful that such was the complete situation in your case. As a matter of fact, we know that your eyes were winking before you had the measles: therefore your winking certainly could not have been due to it. The measles, though, might well have re-enforced the original condition. You had this traumatic, that is, shocklike, incident in your early life, and that appears to be the original cause of your winking. Now when you got the measles, this condition was undoubtedly aggravated. You see, physicians tell us that many diseases follow this process: the disease effects what is called the ‘area of least resistance’ in your body. Suppose, for instance, that a germ enters your body, and there already is a weakness
(
let us say
)
in your kidneys. It’s quite likely, then, that this germ will settle in your kidney because its natural powers of resistance are already weakened. Now in your case it’s perfectly possible that the measles may have affected your eyes, because your eyes were already weakened.’

But now, within the last few months and especially the last few weeks, they wink much less. Before I could never keep them open at all for more than a second or so. They wink much less and I can see a lot better …

Doc, I wonder if you would please go through the whole thing, like a summary of the whole business?

L: ‘If you wish.

‘It all goes back to that morning. Now the night before; I think we can say with assurance that the night before was a Saturday night, and that evening you went to the moving pictures with your mother and your father. You were between six and eight months old. You were in your
mother’s arm, half-sitting, half-lying, and your father was sitting on the other side. You were looking across your mother and saw your father. The theatre was dark except for the lights coming from the projecting booth. Now on the screen you saw the face and figure of a dog or a wolf
(
probably a dog, probably Rin-tin-tin who was popular around that time
),
so that the face of the dog became closely associated with the light from the projecting room. You could see the light shining, as it were, directly on the dog. You were frightened by the dog, by what you saw, and you may or may not have been crying—whether you were or were not is unimportant: you were afraid.

‘Now the following morning you awaken early. Your mother is lying on the right side of her bed; your cradle is near her. You look across—the same way as you looked across from your mother’s arms the evening before—and you see your father. You see him, and it looks as if he is hurting your mother. As a matter of fact he is lying on her. His face is hard; his eyes are hard; but your mother’s eyes are tender and she looks as if she is being hurt. As your father withdraws, you see his penis. It looks to you like a strange, vicious animal. It looks like an instrument that can hurt, for you immediately apprehend that it is this which is hurting your mother. And you were afraid of it because you dimly knew that seeing your father and mother in that position was something you weren’t supposed to see: and the reason you knew you weren’t supposed to see it was because your mother pushed your father off and pointed to you, and he stopped what he was doing and removed himself. And then you were afraid of it because you thought it was going to hurt you.

‘Now your mother gets out of bed. She comes over to your cradle and takes you out and into the other room, to the breakfast table. Your father comes in. At the breakfast table you look at your father; and immediately the shock of what just happened and the shock of the events of the night before, become associated directly with him. You look at him and you are afraid of him, of him and of his penis. Everything he does reminds you of these things that have happened. There is an awful amount of fear there. As a child, you feel it, and you start to cry. And as you start to cry it seems to you as if the whole room is getting black. All these events have served to remind you
(
since with a child so young all time is condensed and there are no sharp lines to divide time
)
of the night before, at the moving picture, where the blackness was pierced by the light
from the projecting room. Now you seem to see it coming from your father’s eyes. His face seems all ‘cut-up’ just like the face of the dog you saw in the movie.

‘Your mother placates you and calms you. But immediately you are completely alienated from your father, afraid of him. He reminds you of the things that caused you discomfort, fear, terror. And the fear of his penis, which seemed to you to be a threatening, dangerous and brutal weapon, thrusts you even more upon your mother, whom you believed it had hurt.

‘So you closed your eyes. You ran away from it. The winking has come from the association of all this fear with the event you had witnessed. As we have seen, one way of running away from something is to close your eyes to it. Because for you the whole thing centered in your eyes. The eyes were the guilty organs. They were guilty of having seen that which they were forbidden to see. Now the fear of your father’s penis—and all it meant—followed you through all your life. You have always felt afraid and inadequate and aggressive toward your father because your weapon was not as big or as powerful as your father’s. So you later played with knives and guns: you stole money to buy guns. You were trying to convince yourself that you had a penis; trying to prove yourself as good as your father. And all the while the original dependence upon your mother became re-enforced as it became increasingly evident that you could never accept your father’s relations with your mother, or reconcile yourself to him in view of your fear of him.

‘Now every male child—or at any rate most male children—go through a period of such ‘castration fears’, fears of losing the penis. You were afraid your father would steal this thing from you, would take it away. Your father actually threatened to have his dog bite it off.’

Yes; it was my father’s dog. It would only listen to him …

L: ‘And remember: when you saw your father that morning, he reminded you of the dog in the show the night before.

‘All your life you have been haunted by these castration fears and anxieties. That’s one reason why you masturbated frequently. It was a very good way of convincing yourself from time to time that you were still manly, you still had a penis. And always it was closely associated with your eyes. It always has been. You even thought later on that when people looked at your eyes they could tell that you had been masturbating. So that’s really why you closed your eyes: to shut out that first sight, that first knowledge. You had a deep feeling of guilt and you were afraid … so
you hid your eyes. All through your life this relationship—your father’s eyes and his penis to your eyes and your fear of his penis—has been following you.’

Yes—yes. I can see it all. I can see it all now. That’s why I took those knives and that pen knife from him.

I always thought I couldn’t get along with my father, talk to him in a sensible way. When I’d say anything to him he’d always be right and I’d always be wrong. I always thought that was one way to keep apart, one reason we didn’t talk together much; but I see now I had reasons to show him that I was as good as he was. He was stronger than me, so I was afraid of him. He’d tell me I was wrong so I wouldn’t say anything to him.

L: ‘And you were always afraid he’d have you castrated.’

O, yes. Maybe two years ago they were going to sterilize all convicts, people said. I laughed it off in front of everybody but I thought about it and thought about it. I never told anyone but I was afraid, so afraid. As a matter of fact, that idea has been in the back of my head for as long as I can remember …

My mother was always good to me. I always could talk to my mother. When my father threatened to sic the dog on me to bite my penis off my mother comforted me and said the dog wouldn’t do it. She called the dog over, and when the dog had its paws on my lap I was afraid of him. Later on I started petting him myself …

L: ‘To a child, things of that sort are very serious, crucial. It had, in your case, plenty of background as well. The soil was well prepared. First there was that very traumatic incident accompanied by the fear of your father’s organ; then the deep fixation on your mother; then the castration fears. As a result, all your life you’ve felt inadequate, castrated. You could never do anything, never get anywhere.’

Even when I was growing up, from the time I was fourteen, I remember I always used to think in the back of my mind that the other fellows were better than me at driving a car, or swimming, or making some pretty girls, or in school. I was really a bright kid in school though, the best of all the boys in most of my classes. And swimming—I could swim and drive a car pretty well but … As a matter of fact, when I had intercourse with a girl I never liked to look at or touch her genitals, because they made me think of a castrated man, or made me think about not having genitals myself …

And then that—accident … I see I did it to get rid of my father
somehow without really having to get rid of
him.
The whole thing fits. I’m sorry about that. I wish …

L: ‘And the stealing?’

The stealing? It—I—it was because I—wanted my mother and that was … I wasn’t allowed to have her. So I stole things. I went into houses alone because I—didn’t—want anybody else to—have her …

Yes. It’s all right now. I even
feel
it now.

L: ‘Now that you understand these things, Harold, we shall have to have a period of re-education before we are finished. We want to accomplish a complete change in your attitude toward yourself and the rest of the world. The eyes will take care of themselves. They are unimportant compared with the complete overhauling of your personality and life. There is nothing more to fear now.’

I can see everything as it went by … All the years. All the things changed, the symbols changed and that’s all; but what they stood for was still there. I used to be so afraid of his big arms and hands, afraid he’d beat me with them, so I went through many things. I can see now how it—all—made steps, all along, all the ways up …

Some months after the case had been closed, and after painstaking investigation, it was discovered that—significantly enough—the stabbing incident ended not in the death but in the complete and rather uneventful recovery of the victim. This, of course, resolved the writer’s conflict as expressed on
this page
. Harold, however, was allowed for some weeks to remain convinced that he had “killed” his antagonist; and only after the parricidal motive had again been fully discussed with him was this disclosure made.