Wanting to teach experimental psychology, he sees working in the hospital as a season in hell.
He is challenged in various ways. His cynical training psychologist, Ted Lawrence, defines himself as burned out. Carlo is assigned two patients. One is Edward Mitchell, a schizophrenic poet. The second patient is Pazia Carter, nicknamed the Jungle Girl. She suffers from the delusion that she is Jane, Tarzan’s mate. The head of the hospital, Somerset Blair, favors electroshock therapy and drug therapy over psychotherapy.
On the home front, Carlo lives with his Italian father and uncle. Carlo’s father, in the wholesale produce business, tells his son, “You gotta be crazy yourself to want to work with crazy people.”
Carlos is confronted with a tangle of obstacles and encounters involving Nina Moreau, a seductive psychologist, Paul Carter, Pazia’s pathological father, Dwayne Glover, a lobotomized patient known as the Zombie, and Eleanora Lippucci, a “good” Italian girl. She has had an affair with a married man, an abortion, and feels unworthy of Carlo.
