Philip Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

"If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others" was delivered as a speech by Dick at the second Festival International de la Science-Fiction de Metz, France, in September 1977. It was first published in French translation in L'Annee 1977-78 de la S.-F. et du Fantastique (Juilliard, 1978), edited by Jacques Goimard. Its first English publication came in the PKDS Newsletter , No. 27, August 1991.

"How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" was written as a speech but was likely never delivered. It was first published in I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (1985).

"Cosmogony and Cosmology," dated January 23, 1978, was expressly intended by Dick as a summary of the key insights expressed in the Exegesis as of that time. It is included here as an essay because it was sent out in typed form by Dick to his agent, Russell Galen, although with no overt publishing intentions in mind. In this sense, it differs from the remainder of the Exegesis , which Dick kept to himself, but for occasional limited disclosures to friends. It was first published in a limited edition by Kerosina Books in 1987.

"The Tagore Letter" was first published in Niekas , No. 28, November 1981.

One long-past innocent day, in my prefolly youth, I came upon a statement in an undistinguished textbook on psychiatry that, as when Kant read Hume, woke me forever from my garden-of-eden slumber. "The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient acts in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis."

Well, I have pondered this over the dreary years, while meantime the drug industry, psychiatrists, and certain naughty persons of dubious repute have done much to validate -- and further explore -- this topic, so that now we are faced with a psychiatric establishment little related to the simple good old days (circa 1900) when mental patients fell into one of two rigid classes: the insane, which meant simply that they were too ill to function in society, to wash and wax their car, pay their utility bills, drink one martini and still utter pleasant conversation, and hence had to be institutionalized... and the neurotic, which included all those wise enough to seek out psychiatric help, and for merely "hysterical" complaints, such as feeling a compulsion to untie everybody's shoes or count the number of small boys on tricycles passing their houses or offices, or for "neurotic" disorders that boiled down to anxiety felt out of proportion to the "reality situation," in particular specialized phobias such as a morbid, senseless dread that an unmanned space missile supposed to land in the Atlantic would instead strike dead-center in the patio on Sunday afternoon while the person in question was fixing charcoal-broiled hamburgers. No real relationship was seen between the "insane" who were -- or should have been -- in institutions and "neurotics" or "hysterical" individuals showing up for one hour of free-association a week; in fact, the belief that the insane (or as we would say now, the psychotic) had an ailment of a physical, rather than psychogenic, origin and the neurotic felt unnatural fears because of a traumatic event in his early childhood was so established that Freud's initial discovery had to do with creating a diagnostic basis upon which the doctor could decide into which group the ill person fell. If he proved psychotic, then depth psychology, psychoanalysis, was not for him -- if neurotic, all that was needed was to bring the long-forgotten repressed traumatic sexual material out of the subconscious and into the light of day... whereupon the phobias and compulsions would vanish.

This looked to be a good thing, until Jung showed up and proved:

1. That hospitalized, full psychotics responded to psychotherapy as rapidly as neurotics, once the psychotic's private language had been comprehended, communication thereby being established. And

2. Many "neurotics," who were ambulatory, who held jobs, raised families, brushed their teeth regularly, were not what he had designated as "introverted neurotics" but in fact psychotics -- specifically schizophrenics -- in an early stage of a lifelong illness career. And they responded less well to psychoanalysis than anyone else.

This meant something. (A) Perhaps all mental illness, no matter how severe, might be psychogenic in origin. (B) A neurosis might not be an illness at all or even an illness symptom, but a construct of the brain to achieve stasis and avoid a far more serious breakdown; hence it might well be risky to tinker with someone's neurosis because under it might lie a full-blown psychosis -- which would emerge at the point where the happy psychiatrist sits back and says, "See? You're no longer afraid of buses." Whereupon the patient then discovers that he is now afraid of everything, including life itself. And can no longer function at all.

So out went the whole great scheme of things, the subconscious, the repressed childhood sexual trauma -- like a medieval flat-world map it referred to nothing, and was, possibly, even harmful to what are now designated as "borderline psychotics," which is a way of saying, "Those who can't function in society but do. I guess." How cloudy can an issue become? All theories, one by one, broke down; there were "rational" psychotics, whom we in our amusing way call paranoids, and there were -- but enough. Because now we are at what I regard the crucial issue: that of the presence in the psychotic of not only delusions ("They're conspiring against me," etc.) but of hallucinations, which neurotics do not have. So perhaps in this regard we have a diagnostic basis, if not of the nature of the illness then at least of its severity. But one item crops up, here, that is rather unnerving. There is such a thing as negative hallucination -- that is, instead of seeing what is not there, the patient cannot see what is. (Jung gives, I think, the most extraordinary example of this: a patient who saw people minus their heads -- he saw them up to the neck only, and then nothing.) But what is even more scary is that this patient was not psychotic; he was absolutely for sure merely hysterical -- as any stage hypnotist can testify, since such malperception can be induced in distinctly nonill people... as well as a good deal more, including that which when it occurs without the influence of the hypnotist is considered the sine qua non of psychosis, the positive hallucination.

We are now getting somewhere, and it is a frightening where. Because we have entered the landscape depicted by Richard Condon in his terrific novel The Manchurian Candidate : Not only can delusions and hallucinations be induced in virtually any person, but the added horror of "posthypnotic suggestion" gets thrown in for good measure... and, by the Pavlov Institute, all this for clearly worked-out political purposes. I don't think I'm wandering into fantasy here, because recall: Freud originally became involved in a form of psychotherapy that utilized hypnosis as its cardinal tool. In other words, all modern depth psychology -- that which postulates some region of the mind unavailable to the person's conscious self, and which, on many an occasion, can preempt the self -- grows from the observation of individuals acting out of complete convictions and perceptions and motivations implanted by "suggestion" during the hypnotic state. Suggestion? How weak a word; how little it conveys, compared to the experience itself. (I've undergone it and it is, beyond doubt, the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me.) What the body of "suggestions" add up to for the hypnotized subject is nothing less than a new worldview superimposed on the subject's customary one; there is no limit to the extent of this induced new view or gestalt of data perceptions and organizing ideas within the mentational processes of the brain -- no limit to its extent, its duration, or its departure not only from what we quaintly call "reality." And -- this simply can't be, logically, but it is so -- the subject can be altered physically, in terms of what he is able to do; he can lie rigid between two chairs and be stood on, so even the somatic portion of him is new... sometimes even to the point of contradicting what we know to be anatomically possible, as relating to the circulatory system, etc. (e.g., holding his arm extended for a considerable time); the time limit is imposed by purely physiological factors, and there simply can be no psychogenic explanation as to such a phenomenon, unless we wish to posit yoga or Psionic or -- let's face it -- magical powers. But powers of this sort by whom? The patient? The hypnotist? It makes no sense either way, unless we restore the seventeenth-century notion of wizards and those who are victims of wizardly spells... and where does this take us? I doubt if even John W. Campbell, Jr. [influential SF editor of Astounding magazine, whose rigid approach to SF plotting was disapproved of by Dick] would want to venture along this path.