Books: Guest at the Games

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SAVAGE SLEEP by Millen Brand. 465 pages. Crown. $6.95.

Millen Brand is like an English major who minored in psychology and never feels quite sure that it shouldn't have been the other way around. Author of The Outward Room and coauthor of the screenplay for The Snake Pit, he has served long enough as a psychiatric aide to become vocationally confused about his main role as a journeyman novelist. Brand's raw material— case histories detailing the unorthodox treatment of psychotics in the late 1940s— obsesses him at the expense of his craft. Anything approaching the tragic finally escapes him, but in this best-selling novel, by sheer plodding persistence, Brand compels the reader to bear witness with him to the involuted agonies of shipwrecked minds.

Brand's protagonist is Dr. John Marks, a fortyish general practitioner from Brooklyn, who becomes fascinated by psychotherapy while undergoing analysis. (A grandmother with a whip nearly gave him a castration complex.) Working in a state mental hospital and, later, at a psychiatric research center, Marks is disturbed to find shock treatments being rather callously applied with almost no recognition of the psychotic as a sensitive human being. To straighten things out, Marks sets himself up as a one-man's family — a substitute father and sometimes mother figure who talks to disturbed patients more or less like a loving Dutch uncle. He even goes so far as to bring one beautiful girl patient home to his good-sport wife.

Savage Sleep lets the reader sit in as a kind of guest analyst at the games the troubled mind plays. Is that ether cone a phallic symbol? What is the significance of those circular patterns that Marks' toughest patient keeps making in her vegetables? Eventually, Marks finds all the answers about his patients and himself. In fact, his only failures result from the meddling of those pompous reactionaries who, according to Brand, run our mental hospitals.

Besides plugging for a more direct, personalized approach to psychosis, Brand's book theorizes earnestly about the oral sources of anxiety. Mixing pseudo fact with pseudo fiction makes fairly lively reading. But fiction is a flimsy vehicle for advancing a medical thesis. You cannot prove a theory with a novel. Or rather—and this is what psychologist-novelists like Brand will never quite admit—you can pretend to prove just about any theory you like.