A Dunedin city troubled by repressed childhood pain and a collective lack of self-esteem was invaded by 210 plain-clothes psychiatrists this week. Hiding the dark recesses of our psyche from their relentless gaze was essential. Fortunately, David Loughrey was keeping an eye on the visitors, and uncovered a weakness.
In dreams, psychiatrists have beards, smoke pipes or cigars, and are born somewhere near Moravia, in the Austrian Empire, or perhaps in Switzerland.
In dreams, psychiatrists speak in comfortably alien European accents of the collective unconscious, or the religious nature of the human psyche.
Some have theories on the importance of releasing long-repressed childhood pain, while others theorise a death drive as a source of repetition, hate, aggression and neurotic guilt.
Some have theories about dreams.
But dreams and realities are different kettles of fish.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (its motto: out of truth comes health) held its conference in Dunedin this week.
There were 210 delegates, one third of whom were from Australia.
None wore little round glasses, a fob watch or any of the accoutrements one would recognise as clearly Freudian, or even Jungian.
Apart from the name tags they wore at the conference at the Otago Museum, and the odd Australian accent, they looked and sounded like anybody else.
The men could be seen in pants and casual shirts, and the women in dresses with spots or stripes, or even woolly jerseys.
That meant the slightly alarming prospect of a Dunedin with an unidentified psychiatrist lurking around every second corner, noting and analysing our behaviour, discussing the city's collective neuroses, and developing a treatment plan.
We weren't ready for the piercing glare of the industry, and had not come up with a strategy to hide our sadly unbalanced psyche.
They might have seen through our weak psychological defences, and realised we lack self-esteem; they would have seen us compulsively asking visitors if they like us, claiming the weather is not always like this, and demanding we show them the warehouse precinct - we're doing it up.
They may have noted the trauma the city received while very young, the result of our shock at the end of the gold rush.
They may have written off as grandiose delusions our claim to be an important city still.
The 210 psychiatrists could have taken notes about our binge drinking.
They could have looked through the thin facade of our frail egos, realised the depths of our disorder, and given each other knowing psychiatric looks.
We will never know, of course, but we can worry endlessly it is all true.
What the psychiatrists did not know was we were looking at them.
We watched them as they gathered in rooms at the museum to listen to sessions on personality disorders and hypersexuality observer-rated scoring scales.
We saw them concentrating hard on a talk that delved into the legal perspective on the interaction between medicine and psychiatry.
Rooms full of psychiatrists considered paradigm shifts and deep brain stimulation and defining elements and cognitive decline and pathologies.
Because the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists is very into psychiatry.
Its coat of arms features crossed bands and a central square, which refer to an intellect that has become disordered and has turned its strength against itself and the body; symbolised by the outer bodily circle, the disorganised inner components of the mind and the enclosed central spirit.
And that is pretty deep.
But the conference gave an observer the opportunity to see these men and women not battling with the psyche's war with the conscious and subconscious, nor the disorder of the intellect.
It gave the opportunity to see them at rest.
At afternoon tea, following a plenary session on treatment and classification of personality disorders, the psychiatrists gathered to drink tea and eat cake.
There were at least 100 in one place.
Some exhibited a nervous twitching of the hands, or a tendency to touch their ear lobe.
Most wore leather shoes or boots, but some mavericks among them opted, playfully, and with a knowing wink, for trainers.
These were the young, modern psychiatrists, keen to cock a snook at convention.
Some gesticulated expansively in their tweed suit coats and beige pants while explaining important points to their psychiatrist chums.
Others wore earrings and sported dyed hair.
And we could do a little analysis of their behaviour. There were displays around the room by groups like Pharmac, and other health industry providers. One of those groups knew psychiatrists could be attracted by toffees, which they displayed prominently in a little basket.
Next time they come we might spread those baskets around our city in places that don't contain gateways to the murky darkness of our unconscious mind.
We can hide behind heritage buildings and watch as they gather to feed.
It was just the snippet of information a paranoid city needs.
