Puritan lovers who had given birth to a monstrous fantasy child

My own devils – those which, prior to my commitment to Avalon Valley, had already sent me to a private hospital the preceding spring – were not particularly disturbing, at least not to me, and at least not at that time. During one of my three stays in funny farms, I once saw written on one of my records “paranoiac-schizophrenic” or “schizophrenic-paranoiac” (I was obviously one type with overtones of the other), and the term had struck me so impressively that I had made a mental note of it, promising myself to reread Freud, with whom I had made only a desultory and uninspired effort at college. I never bothered to reread him. Before getting to him, I read the pre-Freudians, Hawthorne and Dostoevski, and because they seemed to me to grasp the human psyche better than all the post-Freudian writers lumped into one glibly analytical and monstrous bulk, I decided I had best remember the details of my particular illness truly and precisely: I was certain that understanding was contained in the very detail.
But I did not know this then; and without having read Herr Doktor closely, surmising only from what I could remember of him, I supposed that I was more typically paranoiac: I was much given to fantasy. I was never incapacitated by fantasy. America had gone wrong for me, or me for America; I had held up my hand, said “Whoah there: this has gone far enough!” and had gone home to Mummy, where I lay on the davenport for many months. I had incapacitated myself; the fantasy had followed to consume the endlessly idle hours. There was nothing grossly unusual in the fantasy: it was a projected compendium of all that was most truly vulgar in America: I was rich, famous, and powerful, so incredibly handsome that within moments of my entrance stunning women went spread-eagle before me. But I never for a second “lived” this fantasy. There was always one I, aloof and ironical, watching the other me play out “his” tawdry dream. We were like illicit and Puritan lovers who had given birth to a monstrous fantasy child; as happens in all unions coupled in guilt, we as lovers would come to loathe both each other and the monster child. By the time we did so, I had been on the davenport much too long, my mother’s eyes had gone from sympathy to the myopic squint of pain; and when she suggested I enter an expensive private hospital downstate, I quite readily acceded.

uit: A fan’s notes : a fictional memoir - Frederick Exley

____