McMURPHY AS A METAPHOR FOR THE TERRORIST SUSPECT: A REVIEW

As I have recently begun research toward a book on the use of ECT against political prisoners, I naturally felt that the first thing I should do was acquaint myself with the work which contains the most famous depiction of ECT in literature: Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (unfortunately, the fact that ECT is also depicted in Orwell's even more famous 1984 is usually overlooked). I have now, for the first time, both seen the film (directed by Milos Forman and starring Jack Nicholson) and read the book. They are not all that different in the message they convey, but the book is more, well, verbal about that message. And the message is extremely relevant to what is perhaps the greatest outrage of our era, the treatment of suspects in the so-called "War on Terror". The hero, McMurphy, is the perfect metaphor for the terrorist suspect. Note that all members of the staff of the insane asylum are afraid of him, except for Nurse Ratched, who, as Chief Bromden says, is "just an official of the Combine" (p. 192, Signet edition). The doctors conclude that he is dangerous: as one says, "imagine what will happen to one of us when we're alone in Individual Therapy with Mr. McMurphy. Imagine you are approaching a particularly painful breakthrough and he decides he's had all he can take... and here he comes, all two hundred and ten redheaded Irishman pounds of him, right across the interview table at you." (p. 155) Nurse Ratched responds, "I don't agree that he is some sort of extraordinary being-- some sort of 'super' psychopath... If he were sent to Disturbed now it would be exactly what the patients would expect. He would be a martyr to them. They would never be given the opportunity to see that this man is not an-- as you put it, Mr. Gideon-- 'extraordinary person'" (p. 157). One thinks of Zacarious Moussaoui, the wanna-be terrorist, boasting of his impossible involvement in 9/11 in the hope that the jury would give him a glorious death, and the jury's vindictive condemnation of him to a no doubt more agonizing life imprisonment. Like that jury, Nurse Ratched knows that McMurphy is not sick, and she does not want to "cure" him-- she wants to break him.

That process is made more easy by the fact that McMurphy, as a convict, has been committed to the insane asylum. As another inmate who is committed explains to him, his choice to pretend that he's crazy so that he could leave the work farm for the "comparative luxury" of the asylum was a mistake: "being committed ain't like being sentenced. You're sentenced in a jail, and you got a date ahead of you when you know you're gonna be turned loose." Not so in the asylum: one leaves when the doctors and nurses decide that one is "ready", and that may be never. (pp. 170-171) Note that all terrorist suspects, with the exception of the three who were given highly unjust trials-- José Padilla, David Hicks and Zacarious Moussaoui-- have been similarly committed-- not to an insane asylum but to prisons not subject to any law, which make ample use of psychiatric techniques to "break" them, just as Nurse Ratched does with McMurphy. One of the techniques Ratched uses is ECT, or electroconvulsive treatment (which when the book was written was called electroshock treatment, or EST). ECT is described to McMurphy by a fellow patient, Harding, in a largely realistic manner. At first he says jokingly, "You pay for the service with brain cells, and everyone has simply billions of brain cells on deposit. You won't miss a few." But then, more seriously, "You... change. You forget things." But Harding is wrong about one thing. As he says, "We are witnessing the sunset of EST... it's almost out of vogue and only used in extreme cases that nothing else seems to reach, like lobotomy." (pp. 180-191) Unfortunately he's wrong. ECT has made a comeback. It is being actively promoted by the American Psychiatric Association and by others such as the sadistic Dr. Gary Aden's Association for Convulsive Therapy (ACT). Already in 1979, when ECT was just coming back into fashion, some 100,000 people a year were given the treatment. Today the number is undoubtedly far higher (see Peter Breggin, M.D., Toxic Psychiatry, p. 194)This is of course only to speak of bona fide mental patients: who knows about the thousands of unfortunates who have "disappeared" into the gulag-like network of CIA prisons?

When Nurse Ratched threatens McMurphy with ECT for his rebellious behavior ("just admit you were wrong"), he responds as if he is being asked to give a phony confession, as many terrorist suspects have indeed been: "You got a paper I can sign? And why don't you add some other things while you're at it and get them out of the way-- things like, oh, me being part of a plot to overthrow the government and how I think life on your ward is the sweetest goddamned life this side of Hawaii-- you know, that sort of crap... Then, after I sign, bring me a blanket and a package of Red Cross cigarettes. Hooee, those Chinese Commies could have learned a few things from you, lady." (p. 280-281). How timely, when the New York Times has just reported that the interrogation techniques in use at Guantánamo were drawn directly from a Chinese Communist manual designed to elicit false confessions. (Scott Shane, July 2). There is however a problem with Keseys' depiction of ECT. Nurse Ratched says that it is having no effect on McMurphy, and although there are hints that it has (pp. 291, 307, 318), the point that ECT causes permanent brain damage is not driven home hard enough. There is one spot in the film which might be considered suggestive of memory loss: at the crucial moment McMurphy, who has brought two prostitutes into the ward at night to celebrate his imminent escape to Canada, suddenly looks disturbed and turns away from the action, as if he has forgotten his planned escape route. This leads to a fatal delay in his plans, so that Nurse Ratched ultimately discovers the drunken inmates and poor young Billy, whom she so humiliates for sleeping with a prostitute that the boy slits his own throat, leading directly to McMurphy's avenging assault on her and thus to his lobotomy. In fact, if Nurse Ratched had known all that ECT was capable of doing, whe would never have stopped shocking McMurphy. She would have followed the example of Ewen Cameron, who was doing experiments with ECT on human guinea pigs at about the time that Kesey's book was written. Those experiments, supported by the CIA, showed that ECT is indeed the best means of breaking a person-- not so as to elicit intelligence (how indeed can a procedure that causes amnesia do that?) but to make them into exactly the person one wants them to be.

For unlike the victim of lobotomy, who is permanently infantilized or robbed of the ability to feel, the ECT victim can be re-programmed to be a docile and obedient adult, as a number of husbands have had ECT administered to their wives in order to make them more tractable (Breggin, pp. 200-201) Furthermore, while brain surgery has always been an expensive, long and difficult procedure, even in the nineteen-sixties, when ECT was in decline, one doctor told the CIA that "the standard electroshock machine is a very common machine in medical offices and in the major cities there must be several hundred of them in use at all times." (Colin Ross, the CIA Doctors, p. 53) It is so common that brain surgeon Walter Freeman rcommended that state mental hospitals which do not have the funds to be able to put a patient under total anaesthesia for a lobotomy first use ECT to knock him out (Wikipedia entry under lobotomy). Best of all, unlike brain surgery, it leaves no visible traces, and hence the victim can be trotted out to testify in a show trial, admitting to all kinds of crimes that he didn't commit, and no one will be the wiser. Wouldn't Nurse Ratched have preferred to have a re-programmed McMurphy grovelling before her to someone who looks-- to quote Chief Bromden-- like a "store dummy" (p. 321)? Leaving aside the issue of gender, which pales in importance alongside the threat posed by ECT, how many "Nurse Ratcheds" must there be in the secret prisons? And are they administering ECT to terrorist suspects? A possible answer may be found in the words of patient Harding to McMurphy when he compares ECT quite aptly to electrocution and wonders out loud why the public doesn't "raise Cain" about it. Harding responds: "I don't think you fully understand the [American] public, my friend: in this country, when something is out of order, the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way." (p. 190, italics mine)