Endopsychic Allegories

 
A belated discovery in my case, Philip K. Dick is nonetheless the poster boy of my 1991 The Case of California. He reads California as the tech-no-future within a lexicon heavily mediated by the foreign body of Germanicity. That the German intertexts or introjects remain largely untranslated and decontextualized in Dick’s narratives redoubles the whammy of their impact as spectral. My current project, “I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick,” provides the greater context for this essay. If I sign in, once again, with my Freud, a corpus that includes Freud’s influence on or in Frankfurt School thought and deconstruction, I do so at this juncture with special emphasis on Walter Benjamin (in the setting he shares, right down to the missing list of your average university repression, with Daniel Paul Schreber and Freud). Freud’s commitment to secularism and (or as) transference does not exclude him from consideration of religion in the ruins of its former functions or inside psychotic delusional systems. Indeed, Freud’s explicit withdrawal of “worldviews” from the upper regions into the underworld of psychoanalysis, like his focus on the shifting borderline with regard to the legibility of psychosis, both contributes to and reserves a place for the Benjaminian supplement, which is vital to my Freudian approach.
 
Through Dick I discovered what was already gathering momentum in my critical sensorium: the necessity of adding Benjamin’s rereading of allegory (and all that follows from it in his diverse work) to Freud’s frame for world reading, namely endopsychic perception. The links of this alliance are at the same time the limits Freud admits in his approach to psychosis, in which, bottom line, reality testing and transference are circumvented as condemned sites under reconstruction. Mourning (or unmourning) is the third term or the summation of the borderline restrictions thus placed on passage through psychosis. For this essay’s booked passage, reality testing will be left to the side, though still subsumable, on the inside, as loss–loss conceived, that is, as the test of the reality it itself is (like no other). Endopsychic perception, as the inside view (afforded through certain psychotic delusions) of the psyche at the intersection between technology and the unconscious, grounds Freud’s inside-out analysis of the social relation that, owing to the intrapsychic bottom line subtending relationality, cannot be reduced to the interpersonal setting. In the reception of Freud’s science, only the Freudian approach I have in mind revalorizes psychotic delusional formation as “recovery” that is full of itself in the endopsychic mode of discovery. Another way to put it is that Freud and Benjamin, because they are not technophobic, prove particularly flexible and expansive readers of psychotic worlds. To read the mass-media socius it is necessary, from this Freudian perspective, to occupy (or cathect) in the same thought experiment the border with psychosis as that margin where (psychic) reality begins.
 
Following a discontinuous case of California, from here to Germany, it proves possible to fold Philip K. Dick’s trilogy Valis inside a relay of texts–by Schreber, Freud, and Benjamin–which together promote a process of secularization in the details and among the effects of haunting, while at the same time addressing and maintaining, in the big picture, the religious frames of reference, but as abandoned ruins, lexicons still deposited in our range of reference, but deposits without redemption value. As illuminated by the German intertext or introject’s Californian supplement, the overlaps and gaps between the cluster of notions Benjamin bonded to allegory and the cluster bonding between Schreber and Freud, which Freud identified as endopsychic, reflect, back in their own time, the pull of what also made them draw sparks and draw together, namely, the subtle secularization that Spiritualism introduced into the congregation of discourses, even the properly disciplined ones.
 
I have elsewhere projected an occult atmosphere of influence binding Freud’s study of Schreber and Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play over the read corpus of Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.[1] My point of departure then as now is Benjamin’s short illustrated essay, “Books by the Insane: From My Collection,” which he published in 1928. Here Benjamin recalls his 1918 purchase in Bern of Schreber’s Memoirs :
 

 

Had I already heard about the book back then? Or did I only discover the study a few weeks later, which Freud published on this book in the third volume of his Short Writings on the Theory of Neurosis? (Leipzig, 1913). It’s all the same. I was immediately captivated.
 

(615-16)

 

What goes with the flow of these sentences is that his discovery of Schreber’s book and his knowledge of Freud’s study are all the same. When he next summarizes the highlights of Schreber’s delusional system, he opens up a pocket of resemblance between the psychotic’s order of the world and the stricken world of the melancholic allegorist:

 

The sense of destruction of the world, not uncommon in paranoia, governs the afflicted to such an extent that the existence of other human beings can be understood by him only as deception and simulation, and, in order to come to terms with them, he refers to “quickly made up men,” “wonder dolls,” “miraculated” people etc.
 

(616)

 

What Benjamin finally finds most compelling is the projection and consolidation of a world in the course of a kind of drama of stations, namely, in Benjamin’s words, “the stations this illness passed through all the way to this remarkably strict and happy encapsulation of the delusional world” (616-17).

 
In my own (still ongoing) reading of mad books, Schreber’s work is so far unique in its invocation of incommensurables, its combo of technoscience as well as pseudo-science with the shaken structures of religious belief over his own interminably finite corpus and its haunted sensorium. This ability of Schreber’s delusional order to contain itself in its ongoing internal juxtapositions and in cohabitation with the reality to which he by rights returns corresponds to what Benjamin refers to as the encapsulation of his delusional world. This encapsulation does not, however, like another Emperor’s new closure, refer to an allegedly completed process that, at least in the way it is maintained in the official record of the Schreber case, Freud simply sees through. Other accounts of severe mental illness are either secular psy-fi–for example Operators and Things–or religious Fantasy, whereby I mean specifically the bookstore-created genre of Fantasy, which however, at least according to Tolkien, bases its narratives of other worlds and happy ends on the one Fantasy story that is at the same time true: the New Testament. The Witnesses is a good example of this latter genre of psychotic autobiography. In either case the books tend to keep to a restricted economy of disintegration and reintegration, ending with a pervasive sense of loss of function–in other words of depletion of some form of vital energy. In both Perceval’s Narrative and A Mind That Found Itself, the recovered-mad authors take their former delusional systems with them into their restored sanity, but only as a special motivation or fervor in the pursuit of certain activities that in its proximity to the original spark of derangement leads the psychiatrist to recognize that it’s time for a booster stay in the hospital.
 
As point of comparison and inspiration, I rely, then, on Dick’s trilogy rather than on another mad book, even though the author was first diagnosed with schizophrenia during the year he attempted to attend college, and the trilogy itself can be seen as fictionalized “autobiography” relating to certain mystical or psychotic experiences that in February and March of 1974, as Dick writes in the non-fictional word outside the trilogy, “denied the reality, and the power, and authenticity of the world, saying, ‘This cannot exist; it cannot exist'” (qtd. in Sutin 214). In the trilogy, containment or consolidation of the “end of the world” resettles religious beliefs in the extended finitude of science fiction. In the first volume, also titled Valis, the protagonist, Horselover Fat, whose contact with God from outer space took the form of a “beam of pink light” fired directly at or into him (20), turns out to be the split-off double of Philip Dick, the translation into English words of his Greek/German proper name. Before the beam skewers his duo dynamic, Fat had been serving time as bystander at the deaths of a series of young women. “Tied to him,” these “corpses cried for rescue–cried even though they had died” (126). “Valis” is also the title and subject of a film flickering through the volumes of the trilogy. It is the acronym for a secret project spelled out as Vast Active Living Intelligence System and identifiably contained in and conveyed by an ancient satellite in the film and then apparently at large. Does this contradict the divine beaming, Fat wants to know. No: “that’s a sci-fi film device, a sci-fi way of explaining it” (154). But the sci-fi device also attends Christianity’s consequent immersion in finitude. Jesus was an extra-terrestrial. The original Apostolic Christians acquired immortality, the extended finitude variety, through Logos, a plasmate or living information that could be absorbed.
 
In The Divine Invasion, the second volume of Dick’s trilogy, the information conveyed by “Valis” (film, satellite, book, or trilogy) provides frame and background for the clandestine return of Yah or Yahweh to earth, a fortress Satan sealed tight against God’s influence a long time ago. At point of landing, however, the ship gets identified and blasted. The brain damage that keeps Yah from remembering that he is God is a plot point in a boy’s lifetime: the other story is that the Godhead has lost touch with part of itself. The boy’s playmate, Zina, steps into this missing place. Zina, whose name in Roumanian means “fairy,” rules a fantasy realm, the “Secret Commonwealth,” in which the real world is doubled but in which all political figures, for example, are displaced among the rank and file, their oppressive influence minimized. Zina’s fantasy genre challenges Yah to delay the day of reckoning that would scourge the world. But God will not affirm fantasy or, as He puts it precisely, wish fulfillment. According to God, the “power of evil” consists in a “ceasing of reality, the ceasing of existence itself. It is the slow slipping away of everything that is, until it becomes . . . a phantasm” (136).
 
The point of phantasmic comparison is Linda Fox, a mass music star and media image. God gives life or reality to the phantasm and to Herb Asher, the Fox’s nonstop consumer and biggest fan, He gives the outside chance of encountering her in the flesh. God thus means to prove to Zina, who had earlier miraculated up a live semblance of the singer for Asher’s sake, that what is real is always stronger than mere make believe. Asher indeed falls in love with the real Linda Fox. Zina’s fantasy alternative however succeeded in tricking God into standing by this world, an affirmation that He then cannot take back. Thus the Godhead is re-paired.
 
It turns out that Linda Fox was realized only as the ultimate medium, the medium as the message or the immedium, as the Advocate, the figure or placeholder of Jesus. This figure, as Zina earlier instructs Yah, originally performed services for the dead only, offering advocacy on their behalf against Satan’s prosecution. A bill of particulars that Satan submitted always weighed in as proof of sinfulness that could never be deducted or written off: the dead were condemned to pass through the apparatus of retribution, and ultimately pass into nothingness. But then, one day, way back in primal time, the Advocate appeared. If the soul agreed to his representation, then the Advocate would submit a blank bill of particulars and thus free the soul from an otherwise inevitable doom.
 
The doom of death, however, is never lowered in Dick’s novel, for which the secret commonwealth serves as its internal simulacrum. Yah challenges Zina: “‘You admit, then, that your world is not real?’ . . . Zina hesitated. ‘It branched off at crucial points, due to our interference with the past. Call it magic if you want or call it technology; in any case we can enter retrotime and overrule mistakes in history'” (162). The ability to go back to a time when the dead are still alive is not only an option for the characters in The Divine Invasion but is the determining momentum of a narrative in which, by doubling back again and again, death, as Goethe was given to proclaim, is everywhere swallowed up by life. However life opens wide only by recycling survivors back in time. “How many lives do we lead? Herb Asher asked himself. Are we on tape? Is this some kind of replay?” (166).
 
The last installment of the trilogy, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, doesn’t share the Fantasy: the challenge of death–or rather of the dead–returns, but this time not as the pathogenic impetus for the flight into Fantasy or Christianity as the redemption of what begins as a paranoid sci-fi delusional system. Framed by a survivorship that Angel, the narrator, is hard-pressed to dedicate to mourning, the bulk of the novel transpires in the recent past when her loved ones were still around. Inside the narrative, the first to die is soon believed by two out of three survivors to be getting back in touch with them from the other world. At the same time the same two are conducting research on the anokhi, yet another substance that initiates ate and drank on Jesus’s historical turf in order to extend finitude indefinitely. When they consult a medium in Santa Barbara to find out what the ghost wants, the same two receive the forecast that their deaths are coming soon. To them, then, it is the death wish that has returned. Angel, only along for the ride, diagnoses the belief in communication with the other side as a remarkably isolated, indeed encapsulated form of fixed idea or madness, which can cohabit with all other functions or systems (113). Back inside the frame, at the end, in the wake now of all three deaths, Angel runs into another survivor, Bill, the schizophrenic son of one of the deceased, who tells Angel that now another one of the three has come back, this time inside him. Whether as her last tie to the people she loved and lost or as the ghostly return of one of them, Angel takes Bill home. She brings home, then, as she recognizes in the transmissions going through Bill, belief systems that are, says Angel, “without a trace of anything redemptive” (237), but through which they have already passed and have not yet passed.
 
In this trilogy Dick staggers as seemingly separable phases the elements he metabolizes all together now in such works as Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. In Valis science fiction, psychosis, mysticism, and metaphysics occupy interchangeable places. In The Divine Invasion, Dick gives the Fantasy genre a final reckoning as the ongoing temptation he could only overcome by turning, as he does in this novel over the spectral issue of the dead, to science fiction. The final novel, which occupies the recent past of the scene of writing, is organized around the modern Spiritualist pursuit of communication with the other side, which is identified as stable formulation or even constitutive dimension of psychotic delusion–in other words, as endopsychic perception. The trilogy concludes with unmourning or melancholia, not so much as one of the psychoses (for example, in accordance with Freud’s initial theorization of narcissistic versus transference neuroses), but more importantly as the portal to and foundation of all the psychotic variations on its basic theme, that of the reality (or realities) of loss. With the Valis cross-sectioning of the psy-fi condition as illustration and inspiration, we will revisit as endopsychic allegory the stations of Freud’s and Benjamin’s crossing with or through Schreber, and conclude by considering another Dick novel that can be identified as his own Schreber narrative and reading.
 
Benjamin’s article about his collection of books by the insane concludes with a reference to another mad book that has come to his attention, which is the equal of Schreber’s Memoirs, but which remains hard to sell to a reputable press. Does Benjamin thus summon his Origin book in a setting of exchange or interchange with Schreber’s Memoirs and Freud’s study–and down the transferential corridors of dis-appointment in a former world of legitimation through which both books first had to pass before they could reach a public, published forum? What would then also be encapsulated here, at this turn of identification, is Freud’s highly reflexive performance in his Schreber case study of the staggered interchangeability of his theory, the workings of the psyche this theory uncovers and illustrates, and the delusions Schreber records in his Memoirs. The inside-out view of the inner workings of the psyche projected outwards as the delusional representation or mass mediatization of our funereal identifications is termed by Freud endopsychic perception. For Freud, this notion begins in connection with myth in a letter to Fliess dated 12 December 1897, but first makes it into his work, on an update, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life:
 

A large part of the mythological view of the world, which extends a long way into the most modern religions, is nothing but psychology projected into the external world. The obscure recognition (the endopsychic perception, as it were) of psychical factors and relations in the unconscious is mirrored–it is difficult to express it in other terms, and here the analogy with paranoia must come to our aid–in the construction of a supernatural reality, which is destined to be changed back once more by science into the psychology of the unconscious.
 

(287-88)

 
When Freud enters a paranoid system he encounters analogies internal to it that are doubly endopsychic:
 

these and many other details of Schreber’s delusional formation sound almost like endopsychic perceptions of the processes whose existence I have assumed in these pages as the basis of our explanation of paranoia. I can nevertheless call a friend and fellow-specialist to witness that I had developed my theory of paranoia before I became acquainted with the contents of Schreber’s book. It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber’s delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe.
 

(315)

 

Freud’s proprietary frenzy at this juncture, a paranoia of sorts, out of sorts, refers in the first place to the source of the Schreber book: it was one of Jung’s transference gifts. Freud was wary of its unconscious itinerary and purpose. Another stopover in Freud’s contemplation of such inside viewing, Jensen’s Gradiva, was also one of Jung’s gifts. If we keep in mind that the endopsychic perception first emerges in the correspondence with Fliess, it proves possible to assign this perception to a field of reference through which the transference has passed and has not yet passed. Or, in other words, endopsychic perceptions supply the gap of noncorrespondence or unfulfillment between the ruinous materiality of the transference (whether in session or in action) and the theory that would contain or caption it. Endopsychic perception drives or meets halfway Freud’s work of analogy in the latter mentioned theorization, a work commensurate with that of mourning through which, moreover, the psyche builds up to or through our ongoing technologization.

 
Once Freud sees it coming–namely, the recurring dissolution of all his same-sex friendships–he addresses the transference both as a medium of haunting whereby, in his case, each new friend is really a returning spook, and, in its reproducibility, as an effect of the printing press: each new phase of the transference is but a reprinting of the same old cliché. Where he draws the line with regard to the homosexual component, Freud identifies an early libidinal bonding with John Freud, his playmate in early childhood, which got around while encrypting the relationship to his dead brother Julius. The psychoanalytic theory of ghosts first arises to account for Leonardo da Vinci’s homoerotic disposition in the context or contest of a speed race between repression and sublimation that subtends his techno-inventiveness, and then returns in the study of Schreber’s paranoia to address the delusional order of technical media and ghosts in terms of a recovery from sublimation breakdown.[2]
 
Freud emphasizes that Schreber repeatedly reproaches God for the limits of His self-awareness. When it comes to human life, God only takes cognizance of its corpse state, at which endpoint God reclaims the rays, souls, nerves that he originally deposited when he created the life form that he apparently immediately represses. Only the afterlife of his creations (when he gets his nerves back) concerns Him. Schreber inadvertently challenges or entraps God when, passing for dead–while, perhaps, melancholically playing dead–he is beset by the deity, who starts harvesting the presumed corpse; but when the inert body comes alive, God is caught in an act contrary to the order of the world. The living nerves grab God and prove to be the kind of turn-on that God can’t readily let go. The dead cannot enter the state of bliss as long as the greater part of the rays of God are attracted to and absorbed in Schreber’s voluptuousness. Because there is such a close relationship between human voluptuousness and the state of bliss enjoyed by the spirits of the deceased, Schreber looks forward to future reconciliation with God. But Schreber holds up the afterlife above while bringing the bliss down to earth. As Freud underscores, Schreber sexualizes the heavenly state of bliss and thus, we can add, irrevocably secularizes the afterlife while allegorizing its Heavenly trappings as to be already dead for.
 
The outside chance of renewal at this crisis point that, in the eternity Schreber contemplates, happens because it recurs, will always be performed in the medium of a ghost seer: “‘a seer of spirits’ . . . must under certain circumstances be ‘unmanned’ (transformed into a woman) once he has entered into indissoluble contact with divine nerves (rays)” (45). Schreber counts himself one of the greatest ghost seers, at the head of a line drawn through the Wandering Jew, the Maid of Orleans, the Crusaders in search of the holy lance, the Emperor Constantine, and, in his own day, “so-called Spiritualist mediums” (78-80).
 
In Radio Schreber, Wolfgang Hagen carefully reconstructs the Spiritualist context of Schreber’s Memoirs, beginning with its cornerstone, footnote number 36, which drops from Schreber’s declared interest in scientific work based on the theory of evolution as evidence of his basically nonreligious sensibility which, he submits, really should give credence to his new-found relations with God. Hagen shows, however, that “evolution” in Du Prel’s cited work, for example, is linked to a basic sensibility or soul at the atomic level that causes the chaotic atomic mass to develop ordered structures on its own. Hagen’s study is filled with the details of the works Schreber explicitly includes and the inevitable intertexts he doesn’t name, like works by Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner and Gustav Theodor Fechner. The complex, situated in the overlaps between science and Spiritualism, keeps returning to two basic assumptions: that of the atomic soul already mentioned and that of a fourth dimension that makes as much possible as it openly declares unprovable. Du Prel, again, turns in the work Schreber claims to have read repeatedly to the theory of a fourth spatial dimension according to which the world we perceive is just the “projection picture of a four-dimensional world in a three-dimensional cognition apparatus.” Fechner, one of the first to formulate the theory of a fourth dimension, argues, as Hagen cites for compatibility with Schreber’s system, that because we are rolling in our three-dimensional ball through the fourth dimension, as are all the balls within the big 3-D ball, everything that we will experience is already there and everything that we have already experienced is still there. Our three-dimensional surface exists only through the fourth dimension, has already passed through it and hasn’t yet passed through it. “I dare not decide,” Schreber pauses to reflect in his Memoirs,
 

whether one can simply say that God and the heavenly bodies are one and the same, or whether one has to think of the totality of God’s nerves as being above and behind the stars, so that the stars themselves and particularly our sun would only represent stations, through which God’s miraculous creative power travels to our earth (and perhaps to other inhabited planets). Equally I dare not say whether the celestial bodies themselves (fixed stars, planets, etc.) were created by God, or whether divine creation is limited to the organic world; in which case there would be room for the Nebular Hypothesis of Kant-Laplace side by side with the existence of a living God whose existence has become absolute certainty for me. Perhaps the full truth lies (by way of a fourth dimension) in a diagonal combination or resultant of both trends of thought impossible for man to grasp.
 

(8)

 
The discourse of or on Spiritualism, pro or contra, relies regularly on analogies with media technologization. Among the scientists and theorists gathered together in Schreber’s note 36 we find immediate recourse to telegraphy and the telephone, invoked to describe the manner of communication with ghosts or to evoke the absurdity of the belief in spirits or even to signify its redundancy in our mediatized setting (with the telephone in place, for example, there is no need for telepathy, which is, in quality, a less direct connection). The conjunction of both analogies that Freud identifies as endopsychic when they are developed into a system of thought or order of the world, can be found in Schreber’s footnote underworld where, ever since the breach of overstimulation destroyed his world, Schreber consigns as introjects in flotation the very batteries running the rewired transference in the new world order of recovery. In note 58, then, Schreber gives the following two analogies as the derisive translations of the basic language by the soul of Flechsig, Schreber’s treating physician and, according to Freud, the brother of all transferences. This soul’s expression for being among fleeting improvised men is “amongst the fossils . . . following its tendency . . . to replace the basic language by some modern-sounding and therefore almost ridiculous terms. Thus it also likes to speak of a ‘principle of light-telegraphy,’ to indicate the mutual attraction of rays and nerves” (118).
 
As shorthand for my inability to follow Hagen beyond the point of contact with this Spiritualist context into his far-reaching new history of the emergence of a psychotic discourse of analogization with occult and technical media (out of the delay in the scientific understanding of the same electricity that could be more readily harnessed and made to transmit), I note that he overlooks his one colleague and precursor in the basic matter of locating the place of publication of Schreber’s Memoirs.[3] In “Books by the Insane: From My Collection,” Benjamin indeed identifies the publishing house standing behind Schreber’s Memoirs as a well-known gathering place for Spiritist or Spiritualist studies, and recognizes in Schreber’s “theological” system (with its God Who can approach only corpses without danger to Himself, Who is familiar with the concept of railways, and Whose basic language unfolds as an antiquated but powerful German) its Spiritualist provenance. But, and this Hagen indeed demonstrates, it takes one immersed in Spiritualism to see through Schreber’s discourse to the bare bones of its ghost communications.
 
Before closing Origin of the German Mourning Play, Benjamin returns to a contrast between the Baroque German mourning plays and the mourning plays of Calderón (whose successful mourning plays Benjamin associates with the exceptional case of Goethe):
 

The inadequacy of the German mourning play is rooted in the deficient development of the intrigue, which seldom even remotely approaches that of the Spanish dramatist. The intrigue alone would have been able to bring about that allegorical totality of scenic organization, thanks to which one of the images of the sequence stands out, in the image of the apotheosis, as different in kind, and gives mourning at one and the same time the cue for its entry and its exit. The powerful design of this form should be thought through to its conclusion; only under this condition is it possible to discuss the idea of the German mourning play.
 

(409)

 

This thinking-through requirement gives interminable mourning the last word. Benjamin conjures successful mourning, the kind that’s only passing through, as limit concept of the German Baroque mourning play, right after floating a Devil pageant past us, according to which allegory cannot but fall for the Satanic perspective that introduces and subsumes it, and thus in the end “faithlessly leap” (in Benjamin’s words) toward God. Benjamin describes allegory’s act of suicitation, a return to Devil and God that allegory otherwise interminably postpones: everything unique to allegory, Benjamin underscores, would otherwise be lost.

 
In his 1925 essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Benjamin attempts to generate a reading of the novel out of itself. He ends up identifying Ottilie’s withdrawal from speech and life as, verbatim, a death drive. Benjamin concluded that this is a work dedicated to adolescence, to the bottom line of the Teen Age: namely, preparedness for death. A proper death thus emerges out of the duration of young life. The only candidate for ghost of the departed in Goethe’s uncanny novel, in which haunting, however, is strictly circumscribed, is Ottilie’s ghost appearance in her handmaiden’s eyes only: in a vision she sits up in the coffin and blesses the girl, whose self-recriminations are forgiven, whose shattering fall just moments before, a momentum that is associated (even in the history of the words involved) with Trauer (mourning), is miraculously reversed. Thus in this Christian niche death captions the ghost: but then this spirit of the departed is forgotten or forgiven in a comfort zone only for those who fall for resurrection. Otherwise, the apparitions in Elective Affinities are telepathic videophone connections, two-way dreams that keep physically separated lovers in meta-touch. To borrow a term from Benjamin’s mentor, Paul Häberlin, a term cited in fact by Freud in Totem and Taboo, they are “sexual ghosts.” Häberlin, who introduced Benjamin to psychoanalysis in 1916 in a course of study at the University in Bern which settled Freud’s thought within range of occult analogies and phenomena, unpacked a couple of case studies to show that certain ghosts, even in households that count a recent death, refer only to desired but prohibited contact with living sexual objects.
 
Ottilie’s undecaying corpse is ensconced within a certain psychoanalytic reception of the endopsychic doubling between Schreber and Freud. Down this receiving line, Hanns Sachs[4] derived from Freud on Schreber and Victor Tausk’s follow-up treatment, in light of the Schreber study, of the delusional system of Natalija A., a genealogical scheduling of narcissism’s shift from body-based self-loving to the self-esteem of power surges and other strivings to the beat of self criticism. In Antiquity this shift could be deferred: the restriction of technical developments or difficulties to the invention of playthings only subtends this deferral. But the crisis point must always also be reached as the uncanniness of zomboid dependency on the dead or undead body that does not go or let go. According to Sachs, the invention of machines that undermine bodily proportions and limits skips the uncanny beat of the body by projecting its missing place way outside itself as the techno-reassembly of parts and partings. The psychotic thus projects techno delusions to get out from under the uncanny body.
 
The mill on the grounds of Eduard and Charlotte’s estate that, through its grinding, its Mahlen, doubles, says Benjamin, as emblem of death (139), offers a supplemental scenario for Ottilie’s preservation. Because as she lies there undecaying, she is in the most vulnerable spot imaginable, especially in a novel given to earmark the ambivalence toward commemoration that underlies, for example, the architect’s plans for funerary monuments based on his study of the relics he has collected by desecrating graves. Grinding, like cremation, represents then a removal of the site specific to desecration of all the contents of a complete and untouched tomb. Other than the mill, we encounter in Goethe’s novel only optical instruments and playthings, like the portable camera obscura the British traveler uses to record his landscape souvenirs. Benjamin registers a certain pervasiveness of these placeholders of a missing technologization when he notes that the pictorial elements in Goethe’s narrative are more in line with the perspective of a stereoscope.
 
The assistant comments on the way the plans of Eduard’s father, which are only now achieving fruition, are ignored by Eduard and Charlotte as they make their improvements in other parts of the estate: “Few people are capable of concerning themselves with the most recent past. Either the present holds us violently captive, or we lose ourselves in the distant past and strive with might and main to recall and restore what is irrevocably lost” (278). Charlotte is quick to understand, she says, but only up to a point of displacement, whereby she shunts to the side the direct impact of this span of attention or tension dedicated to mourning, and wonders instead whether the present tense doesn’t serve to mislead us into thinking that we are the authors of our actions while we are in fact merely cooperating with the tendencies of the times. Thus the funerary implications are lined up on the side, out of site, like the monuments she uproots from their proper places and sidelines in the cemetery she hopes to turn into the friendliest place on earth.
 
What links and separates Benjamin’s “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” and his Origin book is contained in a translation Benjamin summons in his study of the Baroque mourning play: Gryphius deliberately replaces deus ex machina with spirit from the grave (313). The stricken world of allegory is the turf of what recently was. Signification begins once life lapses into lifelessness. It is, as in its visitation by ghosts, a world of mourners or unmourners. When they enter the stage they left ghosts shock. It is part of the nature of allegories to shock. That is how they become dated (359), how they leave a date mark. When Tolkien altogether rejects the claim that there are allegories in The Lord of the Rings, he takes issue, specifically, with the timely or tendentious reach of allegories that cannot but inscribe onward into the work’s real-time setting or context (“Forward”). The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien emphasizes, is in no wise shaped by the events of World War II otherwise surrounding his scene of writing. Allegorization thus looks forward to the gadget connection, the spin of a dial or flick of the switch that, according to Benjamin (in his essay “Some Motifs in Baudelaire”), mediates and buffers the incapacitating shock of technologization. The pushbutton control release of shock, its administration as inoculative shots, preserves or internalizes a body-proportional comfort zone inside technologization. The gadget controls also stamp moments with date marks, marking them as dated memories, emptied out but secured, and which are, as far as their determining force goes, forgettable. Thus in the forgettogether of moviegoers doubling over with sadistic laughter over Mickey Mouse’s destructive character, the realization of sadistic fantasies and masochistic delusions is prevented, just as psychotic disintegration under techno mass conditions is forestalled on the shock or shot installment plan (“Kunstwerk”).
 
Like the allegorist, the paranoid takes enigmatic pleasure, in other words a sadist’s delight, in watching the world end. The death drive is unrepresentable in all its purity. But when it mixes with eros you can recognize it striking a pose in sadism. According to Benjamin, sadism (or sadomasochism) attends allegory, the only pleasure, but a powerful one, allowed the melancholic. “It is indeed characteristic of the sadist that he humiliates his object and then–or thereby–satisfies it” (Ursprung 360). In the same way the allegorist secures an object melancholically as dead but preserved and thus as “unconditionally in his power” (359).
 
Schreber squeezed transcendence down inside finitude, but on the upbeat, by deferring the processes of completion at work upon him. Benjamin shows where the world begins for the Baroque allegorist and melancholic: with the recent passing of the narcissistically loved other–and thus inside and during the afterlife of Ottilie. In becoming a woman whose voluptuousness is derived from all things feminine, Schreber looks at narcissism from both sides now while deferring and pursuing Ottilie’s other end, the one reserved for the allegorist’s enigmatic pleasure. Being in transit still means he has to endure vivisection by the God of corpses. However, even when he’s all messed up, just like Mickey Mouse he gets reanimated, restored so he can bounce back for more.
 
When the mythic pagan world gets secularized (witness the example of Socrates), Christianity picks up the slacker as martyr, but the allegory doesn’t stop there, doesn’t stop its own process of secularization. “If the church had been able quite simply to banish the gods from the memory of the faithful, allegorical language would never have come into being. For it is not an epigonal victory monument; but rather the word which is intended to exorcise a surviving remnant of antique life” (396). While allegory thus seeks to contain and reformat the return of paganism, its ultimate issue is the secularization that thus indwells even “Christian” allegory. In Christianity’s postulation of an other world that is, by definition, too good for this world, and of the death of death (or in the Devil’s offer of uninterrupted quality time until the certain deadline) as also in the pagan or neo-pagan overcoming of death within the eternally recurring finitude of life, it is the prospect of the recent past, the era of loss and mourning, that is being shunted to the side, but thereby to the inside, as defective cornerstone of all of the above.
 
Goethe, as Schreber notes and as Freud is moved to record, is one of the longest lasting personalized souls, with a memory that can still come down to earth from the beyond for one hundred years or so. Like his Faust, Goethe receives just one more lifetime in which to be able to affirm life. After their personalized or ghostly phase ceases, a generic phase takes over whereby the former souls are absorbed within greater bodies of rays. For the most part Schreber encounters a double disappearing act of the souls of persons he has known in his lifetime and on his own person. While single nights could also always acquire the duration of centuries, growing numbers of these departed souls attracted to or through Schreber’s growing nervousness soon dissolve on his head or in his body. Many of the souls lead a brief existence on his head as little men before they too exit. While contact with ghosts led many of Spiritualism’s initiates to renew their vows with religion, faithlessly I would add, the opening up of the recent past that not only religion must repress is constitutively secular and in Benjamin’s sense allegorical. The outside chance that there are more times than a lifetime does not add up to the immortality of the soul or to reunion with God. As Schreber advises, souls otherwise still recognizable as specific individuals (in other words, ghosts) sometimes pretend to be “God’s omnipotence itself” (51).
 
In his study of Philip K. Dick, titled I Am Alive and You Are Dead, Emmanuel Carrère catches up with his subject in the act of reading Freud’s study of Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. According to Carrère, Dick immediately fantasized writing up the Schreber delusional system as a science fiction novel, in other words as an event in an alternative future universe. Dick’s working title: “The Man Whom God Wanted to Change into a Woman and Penetrate with Larvae in Order to Save the World.” Carrère reconstructs thoughts crossing Dick’s mind: “What if Schreber was right? What if his supposed delusions were in fact an accurate description of reality? What if Freud was just . . . pathologizing a man who understood better what was really going on?” (39). What did come out of his encounter with Freud on Schreber was his 1959 novel Time Out of Joint, which turns on the defensive functioning of a psychotic delusional system in its encapsulated form. Dick borrows from Schreber this form of the encapsulation of his system, the unique stability of Schreber’s world and word view in or according to his Memoirs, which is precisely the quality Benjamin underscores in his reflections on Schreber’s Memoirs in “Books by the Insane: From My Collection.” Time Out of Joint, however, records and performs the doomed efforts of sustaining this encapsulated delusional world as fantastic system.
 
Since we can take Freud’s Schreber study as Dick’s point of departure, the world of 1959, the year in which the novel was published, a world that comes complete with the fraying edges and margins through which one can glimpse figures of control, manipulation, or even persecution, is Gumm’s new delusional order. It turns out that the world he lost in his psychotic break is that of the late 1990s, a world at civil war with the men and women on the moon. In the meantime “One Happy World,” a movement against outer space exploration and colonization, prevails on earth, while the “expansionists,” who at first oppose the isolationist movement on earth as in the heavens, settle on the far side of the moon so that, from the other side, they can fire missiles at earth without fear of retaliation. Gumm, world-famous for the success of his business ventures or gambles, is pressed into predicting where the next missiles from the moon would strike. Under these pressures to perform, heightened furthermore by a mounting conflict of conscience motivating him to side with the expansionists, Gumm develops what is called a “withdrawal psychosis.”
 
In the course of his withdrawal, he refers one day to his intercept predictions as “today’s puzzle.” Thus those who work with and depend on Gumm follow him into the safer world of his boyhood where the local paper runs a contest or puzzle, “Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next,” to engage his talent. His daily entry predicting the Green Man’s next appearance intercepts another missile strike. “One Happy Worlders,” who volunteer to be, in effect, test subjects, are reprogrammed to share Gumm’s fantasy as his friends and family in it together in the simulated town and time they call home. But that’s why other members of his household, who only think they are related to one another, can also share Gumm’s growing sense that their environment may be a false front concealing another world in which they in fact live, but without knowing it.
 
The daily newspaper contest is accompanied by a series of clues that engage Gumm in free association: “The clues did not give any help, but he assumed that in some peripheral fashion they contained data, and he memorized them as a matter of habit, hoping that their message would reach him subliminally–since it never did literally” (37). The associations that come to mind–“he let the crypticism lie about in his mind, sinking down layer by layer. To trip reflexes or whatever”–include sex, California, food, and homosexuality. Is this where Freud’s study and Schreber’s Memoirs part company or are part family? Are the associations Freud’s words to the vise keeping Gumm or Schreber inside the enlisted or institutionalized delusion? Gumm’s 1959 world seems suffused with a certain Freudian fluency that keeps everyone in check. “Evil suspicions” that “only reflect projections of your own warped psyche . . . [as] Freud showed” (79) and “anxiety” as “a transformation of repressed hostility” leading to one’s “domestic problems” being “projected outward onto a world screen” (183) are two examples in lieu of any number of similar exchanges in Freud’s name. One more example that brings us back to the starting point of the Freudian association: When Gumm makes up a name to fill in a blank, his sister knows that his slip is showing.
 

“There’s no random,” Margo said. “Freud has shown that there’s always a psychological reason. Think about the name ‘Selkirk.’ What does it suggest to you?” . . . These damn associations, he thought. As in the puzzle clues. No matter how hard a person tried, he never got them under control. They continued to run him. “I have it,” he said finally. “The man that the book Robinson Crusoe was based on.” . . . “I wonder why you thought of that,” Margo said. “A man living alone on a tiny island, creating his own society around him, his own world.” . . . “Because,” Ragle said, “I spent a couple of years on such an island during World War Two.”
 

(85)

 

Ragle Gumm withdraws back to the era of his own childhood but, at the same time, as his father. The father is history. His father’s war stories become Gumm’s personal history, which is also grounded in World War II. The Freudian associations that maintain Gumm’s 1959 world through the control release and recycling of tensions nevertheless will not stop short of holding Gumm’s simulated world under the sway of his internal world.

 
Gumm’s return to sanity and crossover to the side of the expansionists on the moon, also referred to as lunatics, closes the novel on the upbeat. It is an observation made in psychoanalysis, however, that the turn to politics in a setting of deep regression, no matter how commendable or rational the objective and sentiment, is always a strong sign of degeneration toward or along the narcissistic bottom line or borderline of the psyche. Sane again or just another lunatic, Gumm now recognizes, under the guidance of one of the lunatics who infiltrated his simulated world in order to trigger anamnesis, that his world of 1959 is his childhood fantasy of adulthood. He doesn’t flash on the most recent Book-of-the-Month club selection, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as continuity error because it is precisely the transitional object pulling him through his childhood:
 

Again he felt the weight of the thing in his hands, the dusty, rough pressure of the fabric and paper. Himself, off in the quiet and shadows of the yard, nose down, eyes fixed on the text. Keeping it with him in his room, rereading it because it was a stable element; it did not change.
 

(250)

 

Inside the childhood into which Ragle Gumm psychotically withdraws we find secretly etched the spot of withdrawal he was already and still is in.

 
While the anachronistic book was included, radios had to be edited out of this version of 1959 because the long-distance transmissions going through would undermine the controlled environment, the small world after all of 1959. And yet Gumm’s memories via his father include manning a radio transmitter during World War II. Thus radios in the revision of 1959 have been replaced by television sets, which are considered the same as radios only more so, with video portion added on. That the radio, constructed fantastically as superfluous in the TV era, belongs in the paternal past doesn’t stop it from serving ultimately, as it served Freud by analogy, as superego.
 
Via his nephew’s crystal set, which his uncle’s war stories inspired the boy to build, Gumm listens in on the pilot conversations transmitting from planes flying overhead. When he hears the voices above referring to “Ragle Gumm” while pointing out that he lives down there right below, he is convinced that he is breaking up along with the static on the line.
 

I’m . . . psychotic. Hallucinations. . . . Insane. Infantile and lunatic. . . . Daydreams, at best. Fantasies about rocket ships shooting by overhead, armies and conspiracies. Paranoia. A paranoiac psychosis. Imagining that I’m the center of a vast effort by millions of men and women, involving billions of dollars and infinite work . . . a universe revolving around me.
 

(119)

 

He decides he needs the break you get. But he can’t get there without running up against evidence that it’s not all in his head. Looking back upon the 1959 he leaves behind, he analyzes how the operators in charge of maintaining his withdrawal psychosis had to construct the delusion as a daydream-like fantasy, a strategy that also lowered the doom on their enterprise.

 

Like a daydream, he thought. Keeping in the good. Excluding the undesirable. But such a natural thing, he realized. They overlooked a radio every now and then. They kept forgetting that in the illusion the radio did not exist; they kept slipping up in just such trifles. Typical difficulty in maintaining daydreams . . . they failed to be consistent.

 

To stay back in time, the daydream-like fantasy must be wish-fulfilled, as always, in or as the future, but this future is also in the past. The present tense (or tension) is what must be bracketed out for the fantasy to continue to play. Thus the double lunacy of the novel’s happy ending pulls the emergency brake on the degenerative in-between-ness of Ragle Gumm’s Schreber-like worlds of intrigue, the ongoing present tension (or tense) transmitting since Gumm’s childhood.

 
Dick’s fictions therefore never include recollections of past lives. His focus is always on memories of some alternate present. Whatever else the present tense may be, it is where the dead are, which is why it is elided in day dreams, the Fantasy genre, and Christianity. The Fantasy genre is not only Dick’s first contact with and choice of fiction, it also engages him and his delegates throughout his work as fateful temptation, which, however, even Jahveh in The Divine Invasion must reject. In an interview Dick turns up the contrast between Fantasy and science fiction within their respective spans of retention:
 

In Fantasy, you never go back to believing there are trolls, unicorns . . . and so on. But in science fiction, you read it, and it’s not true now but there are things which are not true now which are going to be someday. . . . It’s like all science fiction occurs in alternate future universes, so it could actually happen someday.
 

(Cover)

 

In this life we pass in and out of Fantasy. When we die, however, we enter Fantasy, the other world, for keeps. The basis of Fantasy’s appeal, at least according to Tolkien, is Christianity: the Fantasy that is also true. The happy ending may be escapist in everyday life, but in the end (of life) it becomes the Great Escape, the overcoming of death that Christianity advertises (“On Fairy-Stories”). Although a declared Christian, Dick is also paranoid, and wary therefore of unambivalence. Even though in Ubik the interchangeable essence of consumer goods that promote perfectibility announces itself in the last commercial spot as the Christian God, nowhere does the novel admit truth in advertising, which would be the Fantasy moment in this doubly mass culture.

 
But it’s not just any history that is alternate. Time Out of Joint forecasts that, in the late 1990s, One Happy World–which consists, however, only of U.S. coordinates–will see the first phase of a struggle on earth whose winning and losing sides resemble those of the 2004 U.S. electoral map. A withdrawal psychosis must be retrofitted to keep this narrative transferentially grounded in World War II. While Dick is careful to show that the cultivation of psychosis, because it would fix its focus as fantasy, would necessarily lose control upon the return of internal objects, subsequent novels suggest that he was revising his sense of a happy ending outside delusion–in other words, outside the alterations along for the ride of alternate realities. The Man in the High Castle, Dick’s first novel explicitly employing the device of alternate history, therefore re-metabolizes the outcome of World War II across at least two post-war decades-long histories. By 1977 Dick is convinced that this novel is not only fiction. “But there was an alternate world, a previous present, in which that particular time track actualized–actualized and then was abolished due to intervention at some prior date” (“If You Find” 245). Variables undergo reprogramming “along the linear time axis of our universe, thereby generating branched-off lateral worlds” (“If You Find” 241). In writing for over twenty years about counterfeit or semi-real worlds and deranged private worlds-of-one into which, however, others too can be drawn, Dick was sensing, as he only now realizes, “the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one, the one that the majority of us, by general consent, agree on” (“If You Find” 240). Rather than the black hole of loss, the present is in Dick’s view the neutral gear through which alternate realities shift into actualization or pass out of existence, but at the same time not in linear time. Finitude is therefore not so much foreclosed or redeemed as given all the times in the world to pass on.
 
Dick includes Christianity among all the frames of reference he traverses, sunken ruins mired in the so-called tomb world. Although Dick confounds the flat line of this underworld–in Ubik, for example, through such countermeasures as half-life, the sci-fi bio-technological recasting of haunting as the halving of any full-life that could assert that it was at last at rest–still every deposit in the frame or name of reference is without redemption value. Compatible with the overlap between allegory as conceived by Benjamin and endopsychic perception according to Freud, the notion of alternate realities (or histories or universes) fundamental to Dick’s narratives maintains all the frames of reference as throwbacks that survive in the present tense of an indefinite number of parallel settings. Alternate history suspends the dotting of the vanishing point between the recent past and the near future and thus, for the time being, forestalls the repression that otherwise scrubs down and detonates this realm of the dead, the undead, and the living.
 
Ragle Gumm is restored to a world at civil war, a war between siblings, we are told, which thus only counts victims. Dick maintained a primal sibling bond at his own origin as the break with reality constitutive of his corpus. As he also found occasion daily, by all accounts, to reveal in conversation–it was the exchange that never varied–he was born prematurely together with his twin sister who didn’t survive their head start. Dick felt throughout his life the determining influence of his survival of his twin sister. From this mythic or psychotic origin onward, Dick speculated, he had inhabited a realm of undecidability specific to mourning over the other’s death conceived as double loss: both parties to the death lose the other. Indeed Dick claimed he could not decide who had died: he could be the memory crossing his surviving twin’s mind. Dick’s signal investment in alternative present worlds derives from this unique specialization within the work of mourning or unmourning.
 
Dick’s introduction of at least two realities that occupy interchangeable places in his fiction, which he subsequently refines as alternate history in The Man in the High Castle, for example, or as half-life in Ubik, originally or primally draws its inspiration from the twin’s death that to his mind could, alternatively, have all along been his own. In losing each other, either twin could be dead or alive. Hence Carrère’s title: “I am alive and you are dead.” The span of the “and” embraces the recent past and the near future as the period of uncertainty about the reality of one’s world that both parties to one death must face.