Ogden Whitney does an excellent job of drawing buildings in crazy positions, bending rubber-like, and threatening. It is one of the reasons I chose this story. That, and the main character, Edward Courtney, in order to understand dreams that frighten him, visits a psychiatrist.
Dr Farraday makes snap diagnoses: “Every dream has a meaning — it’s a manifestation of something in the subconscious which is trying to break through.” Sure, okay Doc...but what about the old man, with that straggly long hair who is in those dreams? Dr Farraday brings him up, “The old man might be the key to the whole affair!” Edward denies knowing the old man, and as far as I know, not shown, the doctor may have said, “Our session is over for today. Please give me a check for $100.” I imagine that because it happened to me several years ago when I sought professional counseling.
The tilting towers in “The House on Magnolia Street” are from Adventures Into the Unknown #73 (1956).
2 comments:
Well, on the one hand, Dr Farraday went the extra mile. On the other hand, he probably none-the-less owed Courtney a refund. Even adjusting prices and noting that therapists often offer sliding-scale fees, I do wonder where Courtney, unemployed, got the money in the first place.
The conviction that our psychologic problems will vanish once we reach some level of understanding of them used to be quite pervasive amongst therapists, and remains widely adopted in our culture. But it's never been well justified, and seems repeatedly to have been falsified. In the end, it seems to have resulted largely from magical thinking and been sustained by confirmation bias on the part of therapists, who wanted diagnosis itself to be cure.
ACG lasted well into my childhood; and, when I see scans of their comics from the mid-'50s, I am struck by how much they looked like those from the late mid-'60s.
My brother got the issues of Forbidden Worlds when we divided the comic books in the '70s; so I'm sadly sure that those copies no longer exist at all.
Daniel, having been on the couch myself, I remember what my first psychology visit taught me. The psychologist said, "There is no cure, but hopefully I can help you learn how to work through your problems." Damn! She wanted me to work at it. Visions I had of her hypnotizing me and making me into a new man dissolved.
I also have a brother, and he would not have wanted my old comic books. That's good. The bad thing is I have stacks of comic books I don't look at nor do I want to. Nowadays he is a big fan of the Marvel movies and I am not. "Comic book movies are not comic books," I once said (oh, my wisdom runs deep). What I meant was that what I liked about comic books were the feeling of them in my hands, and I also love the pictures on cheap paper, with crappy printing. Reading them online, as I now do with most of what I post this blog, is not holding them in my hands, but you get my meaning.
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