Project Mk Ultra was a CIA program into the manipulation of human behavior through a variety of methods for the purposes of controlling individuals and extracting information from unwilling interviewees. Several methods were experimented with at a huge assortment of civilian institutions including prisons, hospitals, and colleges. The methods utilized involved psychotropic drugs, verbal and sexual abuse, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation. This was all done without the knowledge of the President, Gerald Ford, and he even launched an investigation into these programs with chilling results.
I had asked Henry to describe to me the most difficult part of his condition was. He was lax to call it a condition. Though he had seen a psychologist many years ago who diagnosed him with this condition, he felt that it was more a way of life or a philosophy. Still, Henry describes a frustrating element of his life. From his viewpoint, people are inherently unknowable. Their behavior is confusing to him to the point that it seems alien. They are emotional and interconnected. People define themselves by the relationships they have and it is a concept that is difficult to for him to identify with, being a largely solitary person.
It is an issue for people who try to get close to him, too. I am not the first. Many people have reached out to him over the years, thinking that he was merely shy or reserved. What they found was an emotional coldness and a profound lack of interest in developing personal relationships. Most painful would be those individuals who sought romantic relationships with Henry and who would struggle against his isolation and emotional coldness in a futile attempt to connect with him.
He described a relationship he had with a woman, once, a beautiful, patient woman that he thought possessed the long-suffering virtue required to cope with his emotional distance. He described, as if relating a story from one of his books, in cool, calm, unaffected tone, of a sexual encounter with this woman, where he sought to give her what she desired. She had given so much of herself to him and he appreciated it, he wanted to give back to her. Feeling that she valued a sexual relationship with her, he submitted to her advances.
He was there, he said, physically, but the intimacy she sought was not. His mind, the real part of him, had withdrawn into his interior space. He could perceive that things were happening to him, potentially wonderful things, but his reaction to her intense emotional vulnerability caused him to recoil from her and escape into his own mind.
In the end, these clumsy, passionless encounters would fail to satisfy. She would tell him that she could look into his eyes and see that he was not with her anymore and it frustrated her that she could not follow after him when he retreated like that. He could recognize the pain in her, but to him is was nothing more than the confusing, alien behavior of people he could not understand. What he felt was relief from the anxiety of constantly trying to be for her what he could not. He would staunchly refuse the advances of any woman for the rest of his life. He was in his late twenties at the time.
Henry described a story he once read that used Project Mk Ultra as a plot element. The Project in this book removed the emotional capabilities from the subjects they experimented on in an effort to make them cold, calculating killers. The book explored the lives of these pitiable subjects and the relationships that fell apart around them when they were unable to emotionally connect with the people in their lives.
Henry identified with these fictional characters and joked about the same, that he had had his emotions destroyed and lays in wait as a sleeper agent for the government to activate his hypnotically implanted assassin training.
It wasn't a very good joke, but I laughed.
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