Mallet of Malice

-THE DISPOSSESSED (244 pp.)--Geoffrey Wagner--Devin-Adair ($3.50).

A novelist bent on discrediting a popular idea may choose to 1) give the reader an intellectual hotfoot, i.e., singe his brain with a better idea, 2) tickle his funnybone with satire, 3) clout him over the head with the blunt instrument of anger. British-born Novelist Geoffrey Wagner belongs to the blunt-instrument school. His mallet of malice falls on psychiatry and especially psychoanalysis, its high priests, practices and pretensions. With scarcely a smidgen of saving humor, but with much righteous wrath, The Dispossessed argues that Freud, Jung, Adler, et al. are bloodletters of the psyche whose theories will eventually seem just as barbaric and outmoded as actual bloodletting does today.

The novel's guinea pig hero is Richard Terrell, a peacetime chemical engineer and wartime captain in the British army. An Afrika Korps stick grenade sends him into amnesia for ten days and lands him at Duncanford, "the best-run nuthouse in England." There Dick runs the gantlet of tranquillizing drugs, insulin and electric shock treatments and doubletalk ("idealization of the phantasmal reorientation") from one of the "headshrinkers." After two years or so, Dick is released with a nervous tic behind his left ear, and the vaguely damning words "constitutional inferiority" stamped on his army discharge papers. His wife is loyal, but in the outside world his case record makes him as untouchable as an ex-jailbird. His old boss refuses to hire him back. Everywhere he meets "the look" which translates "can't take the risk." Then a chemical firm decides to take the risk and hires him. Dick discovers a new process for making nitric dust and seems to be usefully rehabilitated until Author Wagner's boobytrapped plot explodes under him.

By implying that Dick is really the victim of a Mafia-like web of malevolent psychoanalysts, Author Wagner makes his tragedy eerily implausible and weakens his legitimate point that the analyst, when judged by his somewhat dubious curative results, has been granted too much authority and credence at some levels of 20th century life. The book's occasional hemlock-bitter jibes at "Fraudism" may even tempt some blither-spirited novelist to give psychoanalysis what it often begs for, a full hypodermic of spoof juice.

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