Endopsychic Allegories

Philip K. Dick's Valis trilogy staggers as seemingly separable phases the elements he metabolized all together in such works as Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. From the intersection crowded with science fiction, schizophrenia, and mysticism in Valis (the novel) we pass through the fantasy genre (in The Divine Invasion) as the temptation that science fiction must repeatedly overcome and end up inside the recent past of the scene of writing of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which we traverse via modern Spiritualist attempts to keep in touch with the departed. With the Valis trilogy's cross-sectioning of the psy-fi condition as illustration and inspiration, the essay revisits--as endopsychic allegory--the stations of Freud's and Benjamin's crossing with or through Schreber, and concludes with a reading of Dick's "first" science fiction novel, Time Out of Joint, in which the author deliberately seeks to engage or stage Schreber's narrative.--lar