“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

“I thought it was the same thing.”

“Just what do you think insanity is?” he says, angrily.

“It’s a strange and peculiar disease in human beings,” I say honestly.

“There’s nothing any more strange or peculiar about it than appendicitis!” he retorts.

“I don’t think so. In appendicitis we understand the causes better, and something about the mechanism of it, whereas with insanity it’s much more complicated and mysterious.” I won’t go through the whole debate; the point is that I meant insanity is physiologically peculiar, and he thought I meant it was socially peculiar.

Up until this time, although I had been unfriendly to the psychiatrist, I had nevertheless been honest in everything I said. But when he asked me to put out my hands, I couldn’t resist pulling a trick a guy in the “bloodsucking line” had told me about. I figured nobody was ever going to get a chance to do this, and as long as I was halfway under water, I would do it. So I put out my hands with one palm up and the other one down.

The psychiatrist doesn’t notice. He says, “Turn them over.”

I turn them over. The one that was up goes down, and the one that was down goes up, and he still doesn’t notice, because he’s always looking very closely at one hand to see if it is shaking. So the trick had no effect.

Finally, at the end of all these questions, he becomes friendly again. He lights up and says, “I see you have a Ph.D., Dick. Where did you study?”

“MIT and Princeton. And where did you study!”

“Yale and London. And what did you study, Dick?”

“Physics. And what did you study?”

“Medicine.”

“And this is medicine?”

“Well, yes. What do you think it is? You go and sit down over there and wait a few minutes!”

So I sit on the bench again, and one of the other guys waiting sidles up to me and says, “Gee! You were in there twenty-five minutes! The other guys were in there only five minutes!”

“Yeah.”

“Hey,” he says. “You wanna know how to fool the psychiatrist? All you have to do is pick your nails, like this.”

“Then why don’t you pick your nails like that?”

“Oh,” he says, “I wanna get in the army!”

“You wanna fool the psychiatrist?” I say. “You just tell him that!”

After a while I was called over to a different desk to see another psychiatrist. While the first psychiatrist had been rather young and innocent-looking, this one was gray-haired and distinguished-looking—obviously the superior psychiatrist. I figure all of this is now going to get straightened out, but no matter what happens, I’m not going to become friendly.

The new psychiatrist looks at my papers, puts a big smile on his face, and says, “Hello, Dick. I see you worked at Los Alamos during the war.”

“Yeah.”

“There used to be a boys’ school there, didn’t there?”

“That’s right.”

“Were there a lot of buildings in the school?”

“Only a few.”

Three questions—same technique-and the next question is completely different. “You said you hear voices in your head. Describe that, please.”

“It happens very rarely, when I’ve been paying attention to a person with a foreign accent. As I’m falling asleep I can hear his voice very clearly. The first time it happened was while I was a student at MIT. I could hear old Professor Vallarta say, ‘Dee-a dee-a electric field-a.’ And the other time was in Chicago during the war, when Professor Teller was explaining to me how the bomb worked. Since I’m interested in all kinds of phenomena, I wondered how I could hear these voices with accents so precisely, when I couldn’t imitate them that well … Doesn’t everybody have something like that happen once in a while?”

The psychiatrist put his hand over his face, and I could see through his fingers a little smile (he wouldn’t answer the question).

Then the psychiatrist checked into something else. “You said that you talk to your deceased wife. What do you say to her?”

I got angry. I figure it’s none of his damn business, and I say, “I tell her I love her, if it’s all right with you!”

After some more bitter exchanges he says, “Do you believe in the supernormal?”

I say, “I don’t know what the ‘supernormal’ is.”

“What? You, a Ph.D. in physics, don’t know what the supernormal is?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s what Sir Oliver Lodge and his school believe in.”

That’s not much of a clue, but I knew it. “You mean the supernatural.”

“You can call it that if you want.”

“All right, I will.”

“Do you believe in mental telepathy?”

“No. Do you?”

“Well, I’m keeping an open mind.”

“What? You, a psychiatrist, keeping an open mind? Ha!” It went on like this for quite a while.

Then at some point near the end he says, “How much do you value life?”

“Sixty-four.”

“Why did you say ‘sixty-four’?”

“How are you supposed to measure the value of life?”

“No! I mean, why did you say ‘sixty-four,’ and not ‘seventy-three,’ for instance?”

“If I had said ‘seventy-three,’ you would have asked me the same question!”