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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Amazing Stories, September 1930
with "The Inferiority Complex"
WHAT is an "inferiority complex"? Everywhere you can hear about this complex and that complex and the other complex. But what precisely is it all about? Dr. Breuer, a high authority on psychopathy, apparently is particularly concerned with this feeling of inferiority as manifested in so many of us, and in many cases with no slight attack, needless to say. In this short story our author depicts in vivid pictures easily understood by any layman the intricacies of that branch of psychoanalysis which deals particularly with the inferiority complex. And with it all Dr. Breuer does not forget that he is writing a story and must keep it within the bounds of good literature.
MY PARTNER, Dr. Shell, had a mind that was focussed on the grossly physical. When I announced to him that I was preparing to spend the summer taking post-graduate work in psychology, he protested,
"It's ridiculous enough for a country doctor past middle-age," he said, "to go gallivanting around like a freshman student. But psychology! Why waste time at that? Study something that will help you take care of sick people!"
I smiled. Already I knew enough of psychology to interpret the fundamental reason behind his annoyed protest. For three months during the hot summer, he would have to scurrry around taking care of his patients and mine also. But, that was our agreement; I had relieved him when he went on his Hudson-Bay hunting expedition.
However, he himself wasn't even conscious of why he was so irritated at my fixed intention of studying psychology.
"I have previously suggested to you," I reminded him gently, "that you can't take care of people's bodies unless you know what is going on in their minds."
"Hifalutin' theorizing!" he muttered. "Fine-spun, abstract stuff for a lot of city guys who are too spiffy to get down to real work and to do some real, honest-to-God medical drudgery."
"You'll admit I'm not strong on rubbing it in," I said slyly; "but who can resist a chance like this? What about Henry Giesler's girl? A whole year you treated her for tuberculosis, until I pointed out to you that all she had was a fear-complex because her aunt had died of it. Just a little explaining one afternoon cured her tuberculosis."
"Aw!" said Dr. Shell.
"That's psychology! Or, remember Abe Slosser's sores? Six doctors treated them for four years and couldn't heal them. Until I dug into his mind, and found he was making them himself, faster than you could heal them; because he was depressed, melancholy. Had an inferiority complex; so disgusted with himself that he was punishing himself."
Dr. Shell made a sound like a snort.
"Or," I continued, "Maitland, the banker. You and Brown and Hayden all thought me a harmless crank, when I kept warning you about him. I noticed his 'delusions of grandeur' a year before the bank failed, but no one would listen. Until he got to buying gold mines and fleets of ships. He ruined a lot of people before they believed him insane. He was clever. Insane people are. He could explain everything so ingeniously that he fooled them all."
Dr. Shell preserved a fuming silence.
"Finally, when I caught Sam Wallow with a shotgun," I went on inexorably, "you listened, and people listened. He had been having 'delusions of persecution'; claimed his cousin was causing his downfall. Signs of an unbalanced mind, with a shotgun—"
Dr. Shell grunted and shifted his position until the chair creaked.
"Well," he said grumpily, "while you're up there, look up Twitchett. Twitchett and I were chums during our two academic years. He went on in biology and I went into medicine. Head professor of biology at Chicago now. We correspond—about a letter every five years."
"How kind of you," I said, "after my cruelty to you. I'll be only too glad to have some introductions and some means for making friends there. I don't know a soul,"
"Brilliant man, Twitchett," Shell mused. "Genius, even as a freshman. Has published some deuced good stuff already. A year or two ago I heard from him, and he hinted at some astonishing research of his, His hints roused my curiosity. I'll be glad if you can give me some news of what he's driving at, as well as some gossip about him personally. I'll give you a note to him."
THE University of Chicago is a strange and wonderful place. It is a demonstration of how money can make dreams come true. Wise men dreamed of ideals, of a huge university, the greatest seat of learning in the West, of beautiful buildings in which learned minds toiled at unheard-of research. Rockefeller donated the millions. Experienced educators studied and planned. Here it all stands today, just as they first dreamed it. Thousands of busy students swarm here like bees in a hive. It is an institution famous the world over.
"It is a strange and wonderful place," was what I remarked to Dr. Twitchett, when I at last met him and after we had chattered awhile over Shell's letter. His doctorate was a philosophical, not a medical one. He was small, fine-featured, dark; with a suggestion of swiftness in his movements, and a genuine swiftness in his thoughts and conversation. I had met him by telephone appointment in the reading-room of the Faculty Club, under the square tower of Hutchinson Hall.
"Yes," he nodded swiftly. "Here one has opportunities."
I thought of the huge buildings of the Biological Laboratories, and I agreed that there were indeed opportunities for real work. The sight of microscopes through the windows, and of the little courtyard with fountains and pools for growing algae and raising frogs, roused old memories in my mind of a fascinating subject. In my student days I had found biology intensely interesting. I had always meant to learn more about it, to study living forms again; but I had never had time.
"There are some remarkable minds at work in this institution," he went on after a pause. He spoke in short sentences and his tiny black mustache bobbed as he talked.
He seemed to be glad to make my acquaintance, and I, on my side, appreciated the opportunity to make a personal friend in that strange and distant place. Nowhere can one be more lonely than among thousands of strangers. Besides, he had a fascinating personality. I saw him several times at the Faculty Club, lunched at the Commons with him, and once met him for a stroll in the park.
"I've got to show you what I'm working on, one of these days," he remarked, gazing out over the Lake. "I'm putting all my efforts on it, and it's taking all of my time."
He fell silent. Some hidden thought must have sidetracked his intention of talking further about it. In spite of my intense curiosity as to what this strange and brilliant man was doing for the glory of this magnificent institution, I forbore asking him directly. It did not seem that I had known him long enough to be entitled to pry impertinently into his affairs. Therefore, a long time passed before I really found out what it was, to which he was devoting his life.
SEVERAL days later we were in the Faculty Club reading-room, and he must have thought of the subject again. Without any introduction, as though we had been talking about it all along, he suddenly said:
"Laymen would not understand it. It isn't suitable material for a popular account. You are a physician. It does not strictly belong in the field of medicine, but nevertheless you will grasp more or less of its significance."
I waited till he should speak further of his research, his particular function at the University. He, however, mused on:
"I wish I were a physician. It is a vast field for research; much work to be done. My baby died of hydrocephalus. My cousin has epilepsy. I wish I could be a physician."
Suddenly I learned of the line which his research had taken. It was amazing enough. We were walking down the Midway Plaisance on a hot Sunday afternoon, speaking little. Our walk was not rhythmic, and annoyed me; his step was too short and quick for me. I was thinking of his special subject, biology. During this hot summer season, psychology classes were dry and boring. Biology would be much more attractive, it seems so cool and pleasant for biology students to be fishing up green things out of a shady pool and looking at them in a microscope. I hadn't seen protozoa swimming on a slide for many years, and the recollection of these old things threw a pleasant glamour over them.
"You work with living things?" I said rhetorically.
His eyes lighted up with sudden interest.
"I work with them," he answered breathlessly. "I control their life. I direct their growth. In my laboratory I have some strange creatures. You've never seen their like."
I do not know by what accident the wall of reticence that had previously guarded his speech was now broken down, He talked eagerly, rapidly; his swift gestures, his blazing eyes, the rapidity with which his tongue ricocheted over the polysyllabic names, lent a fiery, dramatic quality to the amazing things he told me.
"You know paramoecium, hydra, vorticella—?" he asked,
I nodded. They were familiar laboratory forms, and readily found in Nature. I had seen any numbers of them through my own microscope.
"Tiny, one-celled organisms," he jerked out. "So minute that even through a powerful microscope, they appear as mere specks?"
I nodded again.
"Fair representatives of the microscopic world?" he inquired eagerly.
"What's that?" I didn't know what he meant by that.
"I mean," he explained, "if I were selecting examples of the minute world, invisible to the naked eye, these would make a fair choice?"
I nodded in assent.
"I've got 'em big. Huge! A paramoecium as big as a dog! Can you imagine it at all? Other protozoa just as large. Hundreds of thousands of times increased in size. Just think for a moment how relatively tiny I must seem among them!"
A paramoecium as big as a dog! So this was his research, that for several years had been occupying all his time and energy, and making a thin, nervous man out of him! Normally a paramoecium is not at all visible to the naked eye; and here I had to picture it as huge and visible; a great, gelatinous mass, which one could carry in one's arms; and in it a nucleus, and over it, cilia. The reader who is not accustomed to seeing these things under a microscope cannot grasp the difficulty I had in imagining this creature large enough to be visible.
"But how—how did you get them to grow that big?"
"Oh," he said nonchalantly, "chiefly by stimulation with endocrines and selective reproduction,"
He did not seem to be very willing to talk about that part of it. Distinctly he gave the impression that he was holding the essential portion of it back. I attributed it to his unwillingness to divulge the details of his work until they were formally published. However, I was just a little nettled because he was not willing to trust me with the knowledge. I certainly would be the last man to steal it from him.
A FEW days later I passed him on the campus. I could not conceal my interest in his work and in his personality.
"You'd like to see them?" he asked, as though the conversation had never been interrupted. He seemed very much gratified in my interest in himself and his research. "They are in my laboratory. As soon as I can arrange it so that it is safe—it is necessary to safeguard visitors from these animals—then I shall show them to you."
"You don't mean—?"
"Oh, yes. They are dangerous. One blow from the poisonous tentacle of the hydra—But I know how to handle them. And the things grow bigger and bigger every day. Some day they're going to get me,"
"They can't be that dangerous."
"Well. Consider. The hydra is taller than I am, with tentacles six feet long. You know how it acts. When it notices its prey, it shoots out a poisoned whip from a trichocyst on the tentacle and knocks the victim unconscious, whereupon the tentacles drag the prey into its mouth. I am among them constantly. All day their huge, slimy forms tower about me. Can you imagine how insignificant it would make you feel? Those microscopic forms looming around you all day long! Day and night in fact. The tentacles reach out after me. They would like to seize me and drag me into that mouth. Yes, I know they are after me and I'm careful."
It seemed indeed as though he lived in fear of the creatures his own hand had fashioned. I could not get it off my mind. That night I dreamed of slimy hydrae, as tall as a man. It was hideous. Our talk must have been on his mind also, for the next day he, brought two photographs to show me. I gasped at them.
I peered at them closely; I turned them about; I examined them at an angle. Obviously, they were photographs. The glossy surface and the smooth and minute blended rendering of detail could be produced by no other process than photography. There on one of them was Twitchett, with an ugly, eight-foot hydra reaching out at him, with a couple of vorticellae in the background; the scene was laid in the botanical garden. The other picture was of a laboratory, with huge protozoa scattered about, and Twitchett standing among them. If I had any doubt about the hugeness of the protozoa, here were the proofs.
"Made with one of the Eastman self-timers," he explained. "Simple matter: you set the camera and the timer, and then step into the picture; in a few seconds the camera snaps itself."
His readiness to explain this detail confirmed my suspicion of the previous day that he was unwilling to explain his method for growing the huge protozoa, because he wished to keep it secret from me.
"I'm sorry that I can't take you in there and show you the things," he apologized. "My own life may pay for it some day; but I don't want to be responsible for any accident to someone else. See, how small I look. Just imagine what a microscopic creature I am beside those ugly beasts. See how that hydra would like to seize me. And see how many of them I have in the laboratory. All my days belong to these creatures."
For a long time I stared at the photographs without comment. I did not know what to say. Had I seen the photograph of a ghost, I could not have been more amazed. These forms, that I had seen so frequently in the microscope, that, enlarged 500 times looked as large as the head of a pin, here on the photograph looked so large that beside them the man looked tiny. And still I could not picture to myself how they could possibly look in actuality, those gelatinous masses as huge as the photographs showed them.
"Nothing is impossible to science," I finally said, breathlessly.
"I don't know what it may not cost me—perhaps my life," he said thoughtfully.
"Would you think I had a lot of nerve," I asked rather hesitantly, "if I asked you to give me one of these pictures ?"
A bright light leaped into his eyes. My interest in his work gratified him beyond measure. Such is the humility of a scientific man. He gave me both of the photographs, and I am attaching them to this written account of the case.
"Suppose," he suggested, "that these creatures escaped? Suppose they got out of my laboratory and multiplied over the face of the earth? They multiply with unbelievable rapidity. A creature such as this would eat men as a frog eats flies. Do you see what a responsibility I carry? I am in constant fear lest these things get away from me."
He sighed.
"When do you plan on publishing this? In which journal will it appear?" I asked eagerly.
"I don't know," he mused, in deep thought. "I really don't know. Would it be believed? I wonder?"
That seemed queer to me.
"Haven't you the photographs?" I urged. "And you've published enough first-class stuff to have a good reputation already."
He did not answer, but appeared to be pondering it deeply.
THE evening after this meeting, I spent a couple of hours gazing at the pictures he gave me. I saw him a time or two after that, and then an entire week passed without Professor Twitchett's having shown himself in the reading-room of the Faculty Club. As I rarely met him anywhere else, I did not see him during this entire time.
Finally, I grew impatient, or worried, I don't know which, and went over to the Biological Laboratories. He was not in the building. I went through one laboratory after another and found no trace of him.
"I saw him day before yesterday," his assistant said, with a worried look on his face. "This morning we had to dismiss his third-year lecture class because he didn't show up; and this afternoon I am planning on conducting the elementary laboratory section myself. Are you a friend of his—do you know him very well?"
"I know him well enough to be considerably concerned about him," I replied. "Where is his private office—his private laboratory?"
The assistant led me upstairs. He waved his arm into a room.
"This has bothered me a lot lately," he told me.
It was the most disorderly office I have ever seen. How anyone could make head or tail out of those dusty stacks of books, journals, papers, and specimen jars, was a mystery to me. It had a vague suggestion about it that there must be something wrong with the man who belonged there.
"What about this private research of his, these gigantic protozoa?" I asked.
The assistant shook his head.
"He has mentioned it," he said. "But my job is purely a teaching position. I do not get time for research. But he has been rather queer lately."
I told the assistant all I knew about it. He gazed at me, his face paralyzed into amazement.
"Now where is this private laboratory of his?" I concluded.
He motioned to a door at the farther end. I got up and seized the knob. It was locked. I shook it till the glass rattled in the bookcases. But it was a firm, heavy door.
"We've got to get in there!" I exclaimed, looking about for something to smash down the door with. "The wonder is that he lasted as long as he did!"
"You think they got him?" he gasped. He was a young man.
"You've seen amoebae engulf blood corpuscles?" I reminded him.
He nodded. I seized a chair. He took hold of my arm.
"Wait!" he urged. "The curator has duplicate keys."
He dashed out in search of the curator. For fifteen minutes I paced back and forth, listened with my ear to the door, sniffed at the keyhole, but not a hint of anything penetrated to me; fifteen minutes that seemed like a century. I walked out into the hall, and looked up and down; then I went back in and grabbed the chair and swung it tentatively at the door, but checked myself and waited. Then the assistant hurried in with the curator, a whiskered, breathless, astonished man.
"I have no key to this door," he protested. "Dr. Twitchett wanted it to be strictly private. No one is admitted. I have no duplicate key."
An assistant professor came in, attracted by the commotion, a couple of laboratory assistants, and some students. The story got to them in rapid whispers. The group stood astonished, puzzled, restless.
"We've got to get in there!" I said determinedly, through my gritted teeth. Silent heads nodded in assent.
I swung my chair, but the pieces of it clattered to the floor and the door held. Another chair was wasted in a vain repetition of the attempt. Chair rungs littered the floor. Two students came in carrying a paint-spattered ladder between them. Books and journals were unceremoniously raked aside to clear a way for the battering ram.
"Crash! crash!" the ladder swung against the door, in the hands of a half dozen people. A crack showed in the door; in another moment half of it crashed to the floor far in the other room, and half of it swung around on the hinges. The crowd poured into the room.
It was a laboratory, with a queer, musty smell. But a quick glance showed that it was empty of living things. Long tables, shelves of glassware, preserved specimens everywhere; but not a sign of Professor Twitchett. Not a sign of huge protozoa. As a matter of fact, the dust on everything, the stuffy, musty smell, indicated the suggestion that the room had not been used nor occupied for a long time. I hastened out of there sheepishly, and many queer looks were directed at me.
"But Dr. Twitchett is missing," I reminded them. They dispersed, talking among themselves. I walked toward my room, very much puzzled. Outdoors, walking down the street, I could not get the idea out of my mind that the huge things had eaten Twitchett and then escaped to wreck havoc outside. I wished I could be sure that the queer, musty, organic odor was a natural thing in such a laboratory.
When I reached my room I found on the table a letter addressed to me in Professor Twitchett's handwriting. I tore it open hurriedly.
"Dear Dr. Kane," it read:
"As you have evinced a very kind interest in my work, I feel that you might also care to be present at a demonstration of some of my ideas, which will be given before a group of distinguished scientific men. Come then, Tuesday at ten, to the dark brick building on the corner of Polk and Wood streets.
"Twitchett."
I breathed a sigh of relief. Polk and Wood streets were a long distance from here. I searched for the place on a map of Chicago; it was on the West Side in a section where one can find the greatest concentration of hospitals and medical colleges in the space of a square mile in the whole world. I had thought that Professor Twitchett was doing his work here on the South Side, on the campus of the University.
"Well, anyway," I thought, "at least the world will now hear of this remarkable thing."
I FOUND the corner of Polk and Wood streets and the dark brick building. How I dread to go on with the account of this melancholy case! A sad blow awaited me in that building. It was the southeast corner of the Cook County Hospital grounds, and bore the sign "Detention Hospital." I asked an attendant at the door where I could find Dr. Twitchett. He swelled up pompously and jerked his thumb toward a double door at the end of the corridor. There another guard barred my way; when I showed him the letter from Dr. Twitchett, he stared blankly at me for a while, thought it over, and then opened the door and let me through.
Within I found a group of men about a table littered with papers. Among them I recognized Dr. Kuh, the eminent psychiatrist, under whom I had already done some studying. Nowhere any gigantic protozoa. Professor Twitchett, energetic, fiery, sat in a chair some six feet from the table, with a dull-looking man on each side of him.
I don't know how soon or in what way the truth dawned on me that this was a commitment hearing. My heart sank as soon as I stepped in, and kept on sinking during the entire time. Papers rustled, grave men pursed their lips, and a group of students in a tiny amphitheater stared. Not until Dr. Kuh made his little talk to his students, was I thoroughly clear as to the status of affairs. Dr. Twitchett was adjudged insane and committed to the care of the Psychopathic Hospital.
"This is not an uncommon type of case," Dr. Kuh said to his students. "Micromania, a condition in which the patient believes himself to be very small in size, is quite as common a condition as the more popularly known variety in which the patient thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte.
"But this case is unusual because of the form assumed by the patient's attempts at explaining his fixed idea to himself. The mechanism of explanation is also well known in psychiatry. The patient cannot rid himself of his fixed idea; therefore he proceeds to build up a structure of other ideas to support it, and to make it appear plausible and reasonable. The ingenuity of the structure of ideas constructed to bolster up the false idea has no limits and is often astonishing. It depends on the native cleverness and intelligence of the patient. I confess that this particular variation has never before come under my observation.
"This patient is obsessed with the idea that he is microscopically small. Thus far he is no different from many of the other cases I have shown you. But, to justify himself in his own eyes and before those who knew him, who would never have believed the claim of his microscopic size, he evolved the idea that he had around him huge protozoa; he could not shake off the idea that he was a microscopic being, therefore he built up a world of microscopic beings around himself, That gave the proper reasonableness to his micromania, and at the same time compensated for his self-deprecation; for thus his friends would feel that he had accomplished a marvelous scientific feat."
"But!" I interrupted, digging into my inside pocket, regardless of how ridiculous I must have looked, interrupting the proceedings; "the photographs!"
"Ah!" said Dr. Kuh. He was glad to see the photographs, and passed them around. "Very ingenious. Merely shows to what lengths a trained and educated mind will go, when its functions become dissociated. This is one of the most ingenious efforts I have ever seen to make a delusion seem plausible. Of course," turning to me, "any photographer can explain to you how to fake a picture like these you have handed me.
"Micromania," he went on to the students, "is merely one of the forms assumed by the depressive psychosis. The mild form of it is popularly well comprehended under the colloquial name of 'inferiority complex.' You have before you an extreme case of that innocent failing."
"Poor Twitchett!" I thought. I went back to my country practice some weeks later, an humbler, as well as a wiser man
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.