During the meeting, Ratched exerts control over the patients by her autocratic demeanor. Because Harding is the group’s most intelligent and educated member, she begins the meeting by reminding him that his wife’s physical attractiveness makes him feel insecure. The meeting concludes with Chief’s observation that McMurphy is learning quickly about the group in order to make a gambler’s move at a later time.
McMurphy tells Harding that Big Nurse set up Harding to take the pecks of his fellow patients whom McMurphy calls “bastards.” Harding argues that the session was for his benefit, to which McMurphy responds that Big Nurse wasn’t pecking at his eyes, she was pecking lower, referring to his masculinity. McMurphy tells Harding that the session weakened Harding because everyone attacked him where it hurt worse, in his “vitals,” which is where people who want to make someone weak rather than make themselves stronger prefer to strike.
He tells McMurphy that the patients are the victims of a matriarchy established by a female supervisor who condones Big Nurse’s methods. Doctor Spivey is ineffectual because, as Harding says, Big Nurse can report him for writing large requisitions for Demerol. This last fact can be interpreted that Doctor Spivey is addicted to the morphine that is Demerol’s active pain-killing ingredient. Harding calls the patients and Doctor Spivey rabbits and Nurse Ratched a wolf. Worse, Harding says that they are rabbits without sexual potency. The conversation leads to a bet that McMurphy can get Nurse Ratched’s goat within a week. Harding allows McMurphy to hold the bets, because, as he says to McMurphy, “You won’t be going any place for a while.”
