One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
After recovery, the heroes improve their communication skills, play role-playing games, choose colors and paint hybrids from the alternative book "The Origin of Species".
The ability to put yourself in the other person’s place, the psychological reactions of sympathy and empathy, as well as control over them under the rules of social behavior are important for people who are used to inject before any social stroking. Simple psychological training - to introduce themselves and answer questions from the name of another person - showed that even in a comfortable situation, the Doctor Life participants mostly behave like school children. Andrey Kroshanov had a problem to speak from the girl’s name - his personal identity is based on the drug abuse and the prison experience. This makes him a jellybean who cannot adjust to the rules of the game, which can easily move from one level of communication to another. Instead, he follows dogmas of the narrow and declassed population.
In another situation – during the reception at psychologist - Andrey draws an elephant-horse, "like a centaur". This animal befriends with a giraffe, and doesn’t have enemies. Psychologist in turn offers a different interpretation of drawings. On one of them, as described by Andrey, a man at the age of thirty going back home after picking apples. “Maybe we need to get used to the fact that it can be good" - concludes the psychologist, while studying the art. But the stressful situation happens immediately. Back at the room, Andrey, in response to the news of the positive results of psychological tests hears unpleasant words: "Maybe you're lying? You lied to me and my mother to get money". This leads to the thought that does not have a continuation - that confidence quotas of the close ones needed to be restored not less than arousing a psychology of peaceful and law-abiding citizens in yesterday's addicts.
Luscher color test and the images of imaginary animals help to determine the current state of patient's mind. Gleb draws a flying snake that eats mice. It can be patted, but she is afraid of mongoose and fire, friendly with other flying snakes. Whatever they say, but there is a progress – when Gleb arrived, he has drawn a flower devouring Gleb’s close ones. It is difficult to weigh how conscious are the actions and maneuvers of thought in these sketches. But this is what the assisting persons want to hear. This time Victor sketches a cow with a human face, but on arrival, he sketched a dog with wings. "She looked in the past - interprets psychologist - and this cow has moved to the future". "The time has come of understanding that you can do something". You can trust hardly clumsy drawings the same as dreams. In Victor’s dream he had to make a choice – to go to a "blockade" in the clinic or pass the entrance exams to college. "The blockade" seems more essential and urgent to Victor. “Ten days later you will pick an Institute", - psychologist assured. "You just blurted out something, but for her it means something", - bewildered Victor states.
In one of the scenes, we saw how the Italian is going to give his "hundred-ruble" debt in the bar – even while staying in the clinic for two weeks, he managed to run up a bill. Then he was called to a meeting with a professor Nazaraliev. The first thought - the talk is going to be about the withdrawal from the project. In a reality, the professor reached the most controversial and psychologically complex participant to discover him. "I visited him as a friend – the Italian shares his impressions after speaking to the professor. - He reads me, if I'm lying or not. He doesn’t hypnotize, he just looks". During the session, the Italian confessed that he had been treated 50 times, most of which ended with a tramal injection. A sorrowful story of his relationship with his girlfriend also revealed: after becoming pregnant, she wanted to give birth, but he insisted that the child should be healthy, and to do that he must first clean up, meanwhile, it is necessary to have an abortion. "I would have never left a child, just as my family never leaves me, - he said about the possibly sick baby. - My girlfriend got pregnant, became birthless after an abortion, and I have HIV".
That said, it is very difficult to empathize the Italians. Professor encourages him to focus on himself and not fall into a state of high excitement at the thought that "if we are healed, then someone will recover on our example". Of course, all the participants would like to say: "At least I tried" - the words of McMurphy in one of Ken Kesey's novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". But first you need to carefully work on yourself. For the first time wide horizons of future are open to the participants. The addiction is leaving them. They feel sick a little. But if in the active phase of treatment they still dream of the dependence "blockade", it is a good sign.
Leave a comment:
