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to eliminate our twilight bargainings, I think we should exercise dispassionate penetration and make appropriate allowances for what we discover."

  "Judas Priest!  I don't know what to do with my discoveries to

date! If you attack any more tails to that kite I won't be able to get off the ground. But I'm just kidding, and I guess I follow you perfectly."

   "And the signs aren't confined to such macabre visions and

tokens as you had. The gaining or losing of weight seems to be a common one. It isn't necessary for a voice to say, "Take him to the morgue!" All it has to do is to whisper, "Mouse, you've lost five pounds. One of the signs of cancer is weight loss. You smoked too many cigarettes. And don't forget that night you spent with that blonde babe in Los Angeles." So that patient goes to his doctor complaining of bursitis in his left shoulder. Sometimes the character of the complaint suggests that the evil power has not only instigated the disorder but actually entered the body; some people even have a good half and a bad, or suspect, one - their side and the posessed one - and they pass their solitary lives in mystic conjugation."

  "Hard for the doctor to diagnose."
  "Yes, and hard to see that that's very different from the

conventional paranoid who thinks that the airplane passing overhead is waiting to shadow them home when they leave the doctors office. At any rate, in my experience few questions put to a doctor in a consultation are trivial, regardless of how elaborate may be the triviality of the form and the approach, and the reply may do endless harm of which the consultant is completely unaware. A simple example is the person who is complaining of diarrhea and, after an office call to his doctor and possibly an x-ray study, goes home with the diagnosis of "spastic colitis." With these two impressive words, that person has lost forever the basic feeling that he is well, intact. From then on, even though he never hears any more about colitis, he is likely to feel that he should "be careful" because of "my colitis." He will