Pemulis catches Avril and Wayne (pp. 550–551)
‘—nical assessment, after our work together on your fear of weights, would be that your presenting maladjustment, Ortho, like many males and athletes, is that you’re suffering from counterphobia.’ ‘Fear of linoleum?’ It was unmistakably the flat twang of The Darkness in there through the door’s wood. ‘On the level of objects and a projective infantile omnipotence where you experience magical thinking about your thoughts and the behavior of objects’ relation to your narcissistic wishes, the counterphobia presents as the delusion of some special agency or control to compensate for some repressed wounded inner trauma having to do with absence of control.’ ‘Over linoleum?’
Context
Pemulis, prowling the dark Comm.-Ad. building at 2100h on 9 November, pauses at Dr. Dolores Rusk's lit door mid-session. The arc's institutional-psychology node: Stice's bed has actually been moving, and Rusk pathologizes the haunting as "magical thinking about… the behavior of objects" — comically wrong in exactly the right vocabulary, since the objects' behavior is the one thing Stice isn't imagining. (The clipped "—nical assessment" is authorial — Pemulis arrives mid-sentence; the 108 raw's page markers are low-confidence, so trust the scene range pp. 550-553.)