Of Jungian Psychology

[NPC]

**September 2009, Los Angeles, California**

Dr. Penelope Tyler, sat at her chair listening to her patient as he continued to explain about his power. She kept on taking notes as he spoke.

"So when you... Make things explode... What happens? Does your anger go away for a while?" said the doctor to him. Ernest Bowers simply nodded.

"Making things explode is not healthy as a therapy method to release stress" said the Doctor.

"I don't want to, it just happens, when I think about it" said the man. "I get mad and it happens, my mind makes it happen"

"So your mind tells you to make them explode?" asked the doctor.

"No... you're not understanding me Doc... My mind explodes them..." said Ernest. "Like... boom..."

Penny showed herself skeptical to what she was hearing, she had heard stories like this many times before, all she had to do was make him realize that he was having a psychotic episode and then help him deal with it, perhaps some medications for delusions. It was weird when psychosis only presented itself as one symptom, it usually came with many, although his feelings of being watched by men in suits some times during the day border lined paranoia. Two symptoms indicated psychosis might follow but not just yet.

"Ernest, hallucinations are really common to people with your symptoms" said Penny. "I believe you are in the early stages of psychosis, but don't worry there are really good treatments and we caught it early"

"I'm not insane Doc" said Ernest getting increasingly irritated by this. "I'm not making this up, my girlfriend saw what I can do"

"She saw you setting something in fire, or did she spontaneous combustion?" said Penny. "You need to ask yourself that Ernest"

"She saw me doing what I just told you, damn it... She was the one that suggested therapy"

"Has anyone else besides her has witnessed the event?" said Penny trying to diagnose something other than superpowers, that was just insane. "A family member, a friend, someone in the street?"

"No... I mean, my mom always comes when everything is already burnt... but it has never happened like that with her..." said Ernest feeling a bit relieved that finally the doctor was taking him serious.

"Well, there is a rare psychological symptom, it doesn't happen often but it has happened, specially with couples after experiencing a trauma together, your house burning down obviously qualifies as a trauma... It's called Folie a deux. In english, it is a shared hallucination, like I said, it's extremely rare but..." she started explaining but was cut short by Ernest, who was now standing up and looking at her with rage. Many hallucinatory patients reacted like that, she needed to remain calm and approach the subject from another perspective.

"I'm not hallucinating damn it!" he yelled at the doctor. "I am not crazy!!"

"No one is calling you crazy Ernest, it's simply a symptom of a reversable condition" said Penny trying to calm him down.

"I'M NOT SICK, YOU MANIC BITCH!" yelled Ernie finally losing control after being told for an hour that he was hallucinating.

Suddenly, Ernie's rage manifested physically and the couch he had been sitting on caught on flames, the same as some of the books on the shelves and a table.

Penny looked in awe as her stuff started burning, this was something she had never seen before. It was the rupture of a paradigm bigger than her, something that the greater psychologists before her would have never dream possible.

"Ernest... you... this..." she said in a mixture of fear and amazement. "How are you doing it?"

"I told you!" he said still angry and screaming. "This is what happens when I get angry! Stuff burns!"

Penny's theories and everything she knew about psychosis, paranoia and schizophrenia would have to be looked through a different kind of glass.

[NPC]

**October 2009, Los Angeles, California**

She was not crazy. She had seen it with her own eyes, in fact she had felt it, the heat, the smoke. It hadn't been a hallucination, her office had been closed down by the fire department. Yet somehow she couldn't believe what had happened, it was a really weird experience, specially for a psychologist.

She wondered about all those cases of people that claimed to see the future and that were diagnosed as delusional, or people that claimed they were also other people and diagnosed as schizophrenia with multiple personality disorder. To think that some of them could have been actually telling the truth was something that had been preventing Penny Tyler from sleeping lately.

"I've got to say Penny, I've known you for years, we went to college together, you are one of the best psychologists I know, I don't know why you couldn't do a simple auto-psychoanalysis if something was troubling you" said Dr. Bruce Cain.

"Look at me Bruce, I haven't slept in five days, I've began to experience from sleep deprivation induced hallucinations, I need someone else to take a shot with me, someone I can trust" said Penny to him.

"Alright, I'll help you as much as I can, but I don't know how much good I'm going to be" said Bruce to her. "So lets start shall we, because you are honestly freaking me out a little bit here. Do you know why you haven't been sleeping lately?"

"Yes" said Penny not sure if she should say the words out loud, if diagnosed as delusional she could even loose her license for a while.

"Well, tell me, we both know the procedure here Penny" said Bruce not forgetting he was talking to someone just as able as he was in mental matters.

"You have to promise not to rush into any medical conclusions before I tell you though, I know how what I'm going to say to you sounds" said Penny as she laid back in her colleague's couch.

"Penny, you are scaring me here, does this have something to do with what happened to your office a week or two ago?" asked Bruce his tone obviously showing concern.

"Yes, but it has to do with everything else as well" said Penny. "What would you do Bruce, if one day everything that you think you knew about psychology changed?" asked Penny to him, her eye bags under her beautiful eyes increasing her apparent age exponentially.

"What do you mean? You somehow prove all of Jung's crazy ass theories about the collective unconscious right?" he joked around, forgetting for a moment he was supposed to be in the middle of psychoanalysis.

"No, dumbass" said Penny a bit irritated. "I mean, all the diagnoses we've made in our time in clinical psychology, they could all be wrong, Delusions of Grandeur, Folie a Deux, Schizophrenia, Psychosis, Paranoia, Multiple personality disorder, imagine what would implicate if we misdiagnosed, what if a percentage of the people we've even sent to institutions weren't even sick at all?"

"Where are you getting at Penny?" said Bruce a bit intrigued now, rather than scared.

"What if all those people, the ones that claimed to be prophets, or the ones that thought that were being watched, or even those who claimed they had the responsibility to save the world, what if they are right and psychology is wrong?" said Penny.

"You know Penny, I had one of those about a month ago, told me I needed to watch out that day in the night because something wrong might happen to me that day" started Bruce. "I went back home that day and I got mugged on my way from the office to the car, got a nasty cut on my arm"

"Really?" asked Penny seeing some hope on coming to her friend.

"Yes, really, but at the end of the day that's all it was, coincidence" said Bruce. "We are psychologists because we believe in analysis and that minds can be cured, I think I know where you are coming for, your patient with clear schizophrenia and possibly psychosis burnt your office down with you nearly getting caught in the fire, it is enough to make anyone suffer from post trauma stress, but you can't go thinking that you've made mistakes like this with all your patients"

Penny knew this was one of the possible outcomes of coming here and telling her friend that some people out there might indeed have super human abilities. "You don't understand Bruce, what if they are not sick?"

"But they are Penny, and it's not your fault, it's not anyone's fault, you're just trying your best to help them, we all are" said Bruce to her.

Penny had enough, she had hoped for the best, but the best was obviously not going to happen. "You know what? Never mind, I'm sorry to have wasted your time" she said standing up and fetching her purse.

"Come on Penny, you came to me for help, that's all I'm trying to do" said Bruce obviously not liking a patient leaving in the middle of therapy, even less his own friend.

"Thanks for trying" said Penny as she left the office for good and started thinking on how to redeem herself for all the people she had neglected throughout the years.