Physician, Heal Thyself

THE SANITY INSPECTORS (275 pp.)--Friedrlch Deich--Rinehart ($3.75).

The literature of every decade offers a classic confrontation which is both symbol and caricature of the prevailing conflict of ideas. In the books of the '20s the disenchanted and emancipated young confronted their hypocritical elders. In the '30s the worker at the barricades shook his fist at the bloated capitalist. In the '40s the man of freedom locked wills with the totalitarian zealot. In the '50s the basic confrontation -- which all along has preoccupied writers, including W. H. Auden, Graham Greene. T. S. Eliot--may well be that of the psychiatrist and the man of God. Germany's Friedrich Deich. 49, is not professionally up to the literary company his idea keeps, but his loose-jointed, didactic first novel does trace the conflict back to its origins--the war of Science v. God.

Beyond Reason. The man of science, Psychiatrist Robert Vossmenge, and the man of God, Pastor Kurt Degenbrueck, are both attached to a mental clinic in pre-Hitler Germany. Their cases have the garish intimacy of tabloid headlines--an old woman who believes her son is being tortured in the basement, a teen-age boy who shoots and kills his brother "just to see what it felt like." These vignettes, complete and unrelated stories in themselves, are used much like algebraic problems by Novelist Deich to set the doctor and the pastor puzzling over the cube roots of free will, normality, responsibility and guilt. To the pastor, psychiatry is an abomination of the spirit; to the psychiatrist, Christianity is an insult to the intelligence.

Argues Dr. Vossmenge: "In order to triumph over the world--this vulgar, gay, impulsive creature that is the world--you Christians have first to damn it." Retorts Pastor Degenbruck: "What do you know of the soul? The Greeks called this thing which has given you your professional label: psyche or anemos. Anemos means breath or wind . . . They wanted to express that there was something in man which was both intangible and beyond the grasp of reason--like the wind."

Beyond the War. The howling wind of Hitler and Hitler's war blows the friendly enemies apart. When the two men meet just before war's end, both are less doctrinaire, though the pastor has been clapped into prison for calling Hitler the Antichrist. Convinced that postwar Germany will most need men like the pastor, the psychiatrist lays down his life so that the pastor may live. In humility, the pastor tacitly acknowledges this sacrifice as the act of a greater Christian than himself.

A doctor with the Luftwaffe in World War II, Novelist Deich is almost alone among postwar German writers in suggesting that Germany's false god was science and scientific absolutes--more specifically, the notion that the human soul can be measured with calipers. In assuming that the contemporary psychiatrist follows the same false god, Author Deich pointedly ignores whole five-yard shelves of recent literature lessening the gap between psychiatry and religion. However, the most popular apostles of this rapprochement, the Joshua Loth Liebmans and Norman Vincent Peales, have come close to replacing a specific religious belief with a tranquilizing happiness cult. In his old-fashioned way, Author Deich seems to believe that man is on earth to glorify God, and not to please or mentally ease himself.

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