Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Looking at me now, you would think that I was an ordinary Anteater.  But of course you’d be wrong.  Actually, I’m a psychiatrist - perhaps the only Anteater Psychiatrist in the world. Certainly I’m the only one in this zoo, and in the city which lies around it.  For that reason I am regarded by the other Anteaters here as being rather peculiar.  To them my answer has always been - each to his own vocation; tolerate me and I’ll tolerate you. Let them think I’m much too sentimental, let them spend their time entertaining tourists with tongue acrobatics - if they’re so insensitive to the suffering, the real mental suffering, of our world, then that is their problem - not mine.  Being, I might say, more aware than the others, my task is to alleviate this suffering.  That is why I became a psychiatrist.

I hold my clinic here in the zoo, in the cage in which I am sitting. Every morning a bigger crowd gathers at the bars to look and point as I take my daily psychotherapeutic session.  Word has obviously got round to them already what a competent psychiatrist I am.  The sessions begin about eight o’clock when the keeper brings in the first of my patients.  They are let into the cage through a tiny gate in the wire.  Generally there are several thousand of them.  At first they are naturally confused; some are hysterical, while others are quiet or catatonic.  I let them get a bit used to me before I settle down to the serious business of diagnosis and treatment.  First I must seperate off the psychotics from the simple anxiety neuroses.  This isn’t very difficult to do.  The psychotics are easily diagnosed by their complete refusal to face up to reality, and to adjust to their situation. For example, very soon after they are put into my cage - into my clinic - they try to escape!  Also, they refuse to acknowledge that I’m only there to help them, and often become quite frantic in trying to get away from me.  All my research has shown that there is nothing I can do for these patients; they are without any hope of cure, neither psychotherapy nor all the drugs in my repertoire can do anything to help them.  Having lost Reality they live entirely in their own darknesses.  And therefore their therapy, which takes place once I have rounded them all up, must be more drastic.

Usually this part of my session is very popular with the crowd; people clap and cheer and press their faces to the bars.  Sometimes at this stage I can even be persuaded to take a little bow, but in general I try to maintain an air of professional distance.

When I have finished this, I turn my attention back to the neurotics. Now the really skillful part of the therapy begins; for I must get their confidence, break the hold of their fears and inhibitions, and gradually lead them back to an acceptance of Reality.  They must learn to adjust to the realities of their situation.  There are certain technical problems in doing this - not the language problem, you understand, - but the fact that my patients are so small, with such fragile voices (which in any case are often distored by fear) that it is sometimes difficult to get a proper case-history out of them.  Still, I am patient and try to do my best.  Firstly, I lay my long nose down among them and they swarm curiously between the bristles on my face.  Then we begin talking frankly to one another.  I tell them my problems, they tell me theirs.  Eventually I enquire, in some detail, as to their early relationships with their parents, any traumatic happenings in their childhoods, and so on.

Sometimes we discuss their hidden hopes and phobias, what they are secretly afraid of, and try to analyse what prevents them adjusting to reality.  With time they begin to feel easier with me, and to realise that my only concern is to diminish their suffering; in short, they learn to regard me as a friend.  When they are feeling more relaxed, and the group therapy is well under way, and when despite all the inhibitions in their psyches, my little patients and I are nearer to a mutual understanding, and to an acceptance of the situation in which they find themselves - then they are ready for the final act of my therapy.  Gently I ask them to line up in long rows. This they quickly do; line upon line of by now well-adjusted patients, all cheerful and relaxed, their phobias long forgotten.  Then I slide the long pinkness of my tongue across the cage’s floor, and with some even singing they step smartly onto it.  Soon they have formed themselves into ordered ranks, blackening the surface of my tongue. Now the crowd applauds wildly - I draw my tongue up slowly into my mouth - my lips meet - and then there is silence; the clinic is ended and the big crowd wanders away. My psychotherapy for the day is over.