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things.' And so I did. . . . Getting to know Mary was simple. I imagined where
she was at and then met her on that level. Our first encounter consisted of my
growling at her and she growling back at me” (Barnes and Berke 1971, 221).
Mary's voyage consisted in going back to her early childhood, and much of
Berke's engagement with her consisted in setting up such childlike physical
games (Mary was forty-two when she went to Kingsley Hall). Besides bears,
they also played together at being sharks and alligators. Mary would often
hit Joe, and on a couple of occasions Joe hit Mary and made her nose bleed.
He fed Mary, when necessary, with milk from a baby's bottle, and bathed her,
including one occasion when she had smeared herself with feces. He provided
her with drawing and painting materials and Mary responded avidly, produc-
ing a series of large paintings and later becoming a successful artist. And the
trial-and-error aspect of these experiments in engagement is evident in the
fact that not all of them worked (Barnes and Berke 1971, 224):
It became obvious that it wasn't words that mattered so much as deeds, and
even when the words and deeds coincided and were seemingly accepted by
her, the ensuing state of relaxation could revert to one of agony for the barest
of reasons. All I had to do was turn my head, or look inattentive, or blink an eye
while feeding her, and Mary began to pinch her skin, twist her hair, contort her
face, and moan and groan. Worse shrieks followed if I had to leave the room and
get involved in another matter at about the time she was due for a feed. Suffice
to say that if my acts and/or interpretations had been sufficient, such agonies
could have been averted. So I said to myself, “Berke, you had better stop trying
to tell Mary what you think she is wanting, and pay more attention to that with
which she is struggling.”
Berke's interactions with Barnes thus put more flesh on the earlier idea that
latching onto schizophrenics as exceedingly complex systems necessarily
entailed trial-and-error performative experimentation, and also the idea that
such experimentation might well entail an expansion of the therapist's vari-
ety—Berke was probably not in the habit of playing bears, sharks, and alliga-
tors with other adults. Here, then, we have another instance of ontological
theater: Berke's interactions with Barnes stage for us a more general image of
homeostat-like systems performatively interfering with each other's dynamics
without controlling them. And, from the other angle, those interactions again
exemplify how one might go in practice—here, in psychiatry—if one thinks
of the other on the model of the cybernetic ontology.
