Dialogue: Not love you need, but trifluoperazine

By JOE BENNET

Today I had lunch with a psychiatrist. This is not a behavioural pattern that I have previously exhibited, partly because I have known no psychiatrists but also because I have not thought well of their trade.

In 20 years of teaching I saw a number of disturbed children packed off to the couch. It rarely seemed to do them much good. In general, I found that if anything mended the children, it was time. And if nothing did, it was the legal system.

My impression has always been that the brain is a dark, mysterious ocean and a large one, and that psychiatry is a blind fisherman in a very small boat.

Nevertheless, this particular psychiatrist proved lively company at a party and we agreed to meet in one of the more fashionable bits of downtown Christchurch. As I waited for her, I sipped my beer and watched the crowd shuffling past in the winter sunshine. Perhaps it was the effect of my lunch-to-come but rather a lot of them looked mad.

The psychiatrist arrived 15 minutes late, smiled like the sun, sat and did not apologise. I silently admired the ploy. We ordered gewurztraminer and a dish of bits of fish.

The conversation soared. We discussed meditation, Sanskrit vowels, chaos theory, 16th-century philosophy, 20th-century philosophy, the growing prevalence of depression, the nature of joy, the popularity and value of Prozac and whether bacteria could be happy - all with a formidable sweep of lightly held knowledge to which I contributed several ums. I also refilled her glass twice.

Then we got on to love. Now I know a bit about love, and I said so.

On the inside of my locker at school I had a photograph of Geoff Boycott. There was something about the way he held his bat, something about the sweet stretch of flannel over thigh pad that sang to my 14-year-old soul.

The psychiatrist looked quizzically at me over a slice of blackened monkfish but I persevered.

And then, I said, over the horizon came puberty, marching strongly and letting nothing obstruct it. And with it came love.

She asked me to describe the symptoms of love.

Moping, I said, featured prominently, along with self-pity, grinding despair, sulking, moonlit vigils and a curious addiction to reading and writing poetry. Would she like to hear some?

Despite the monkfish, she shook her head with some vigour, reached for a prawn and asked if I still suffered these symptoms.

With a tolerant smile I explained that I had grown beyond such emotional intensity and had, indeed, been free of the effects of love for at least two years.

The prawn went south, pursued by a swig of gewurtz.

"And you call this love?" she asked.

I asked her what she would call it. She told me. There were several phrases.

The least offensive was "preoccupational emotive attachment."

Oh, I said, and I meant it to sting, but she swept on.

She acknowledged that to some extent psychiatrists were, indeed, fishing blind in a dark ocean, but there were some well-lit bits. You could, for example, dose people up with something mildly radioactive in the bloodstream, then get them to think certain types of thoughts and with the help of a machine study the bits of the head that were being used to think these thoughts.

Every sense impression, she said, every feeling, every thought in the end is just a chemical reaction in the head, an influx of serotonin across the synaptic cavity or whatever. Now, she said, it was a curious coincidence but a colleague of hers was studying the sort of infatuation I had described.

And her colleague had found a drug which seemed to cure it. The stuff was called - and I wrote this down to get it right - trifluoperazine.

She paused for effect and a morsel of snapper.

I said that I thought they should put trifluoperazine in the water supply.

It would have spared us, for example, Donny Osmond or Boyzone.

With trifluoperazine the Beatles today would be dodgy mechanics in a Liverpool backstreet.

Tom Jones would be buying his own underwear.

Winston Peters wouldn't get a single blue-rinse vote.

Lady Chatterley could have got some knitting done.

Death in Venice would have had a happy ending.

Someone would have punched Leonardo DiCaprio.

And Lolita could have got School Cert.

"Yes, indeed," said the psychiatrist, and left me with the bill. It was $60.