A dialogue at the psychiatrists

HUGO: Right, swell, eh, still a little chary of telling you that I hear voices coming through
the walls.

EUGENE: Don‟t worry about voices; we hear voices all the time. I hear the voices of Freud,
Klein, Adler, plus all the modern views. We are all bombarded by voices.

HUGO: Right, right, and the voices of commerce, how many a day is it? Three hundred per
day. Or, is that a thousand?

EUGENE: Yes, I know what you mean.

HUGO: The megaphone called culture is never turned off.


HUGO: Well obviously I am not going to shout this sort of thing from the rooftops. But for
instance in this conversation now, you are talking to someone who is performing a self called
'Hugo'. And I am talking to you, a psychiatrist performing a role called, „'Eugene‟. Isn‟t the
self an action, something that is performed?

EUGENE: Go on.

HUGO: We trot out, recite that we have a self, just like infants at school…and this citing we
have a self, is a process in accord with a given norm or set or norms.

EUGENE: Oh yes, and what are these norms?

HUGO: Culture, language. Within this frame, through continued performance, the idea of
self comes to stabilise itself.
Silence

EUGENE: So, you have been performing a self all these years.

HUGO: Yes, and so have you.

EUGENE: Really.

HUGO: Yeah. We are all duped by discourse‟s three card trick. Don‟t you think? All those
appeals to the inner self, your bloody conscience, your soul, your spirit, the character we call
ourselves is just a continuing performance?

HUGO: Yeah. We are all duped by discourse‟s three card trick. Don‟t you think? All those
appeals to the inner self, your bloody conscience, your soul, your spirit, the character we call
ourselves is just a continuing performance? Yes, we are appealing to a fiction. A fiction of a
fixed, inner, essential mind. So there

EUGENE: We don‟t have minds, is that what you are saying?

HUGO: Language and culture, have our minds, we don‟t. The brain belongs to the
individual, the mind does not. Look….I know I am on my soap box here, but the mind does not lie inside the head. The mind is not private, for the human mind is produced by language and language
is public. The problem is this… I just don‟t feel there is an essential little Hugo inside my
brain that I can refer to, because if there was, I think where would he have got his initial
information from? Another little Hugo and so and so on ad infinitum. I know that sounds…I
mean. Do you agree?

Source: from a play the Mysterious Ambssador by Peter P. Cheevers