A Psychiatric Report On Number Six

      He is still there, even after these past 48 years, still there. He’s one of the most complete examples of duel identity in the history of medical science. Meaning that half the time the Prisoner is Number 6 and the other half he is his doppelganger Number 1. And there is that episode when he’s supposed to be Curtis, going about The Village in a cream blazer impersonating himself! But Number 6 doesn’t wear a cream blazer, and even if he did take to wearing one, he never wears his numbered badge!
   With Number 6 having a duel personality, one might ask how Number 6 could be in two places at the same time? Apart from the confrontation between Number 6 and Number 1 in ‘Fall Out,’ although he could be Curtis, but then seeing as Number 6 is Curtis we’re talking about the one person again. But in any case we only ever see Number 6. Number 1 is rather a non entity, just a voice on the end of the telephone. There was one occasion towards the end of ‘Hammer Into Anvil’ when Number 2 gets on the hot-line to Number 1, as he reports himself as being a breakdown in control. This happens in the presence of Number 6. So how are we to account for that? How are we to account for the physical fight between Number 6 and himself as ‘The Schizoid man?’ Perhaps we need to look towards Harold Pelham, ‘The Man Who Haunted Himself.’ His other self was released during an operation after Pelham had crashed his car. They both existed at the same time, two entities of the same man. So perhaps Number 6 was suffering from the same problem, and as for Curtis, he might have been Number 1! But Curtis died, suffocated to death by Rover, but we’ve only Number 6’s word for that. If he had, Curtis could have been resuscitated like Number 2 was in ‘Fall Out.’
   Patrick McGoohan said that Number 6 is the alter ego of Number 1 who he was trying to beat. Perhaps the physical confrontation between Number 6 and Number 1 in ‘Fall Out’ is a physical manifestation of what was taking place in his subconscious.
   Number 14, the doctor in ‘A B and C,’ once having transferred Number 6’s thoughts into pictures, observed on the wall screen the Prisoner going through the action of handing in his letter of resignation over and over again repeatedly in his subconscious. She prescribed that Number 6 was suffering from an anguish pattern.
    It is possible that the Prisoner’s act of having resigned from his previous employment, could have caused him to suffer some agonizing mental distress. In turn this might cause him to project himself as being this all consuming power that is Number 1, his alter ego, who he must beat, but at the very least, from whom he must protect the good people of The Village.

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