I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

Let the Dead Be

399 Let the Dead Be “Goodbye, sweet Tulip,” I would say and, returning to her, raise the pretty disconsolate head that drooped so heavily in my hands, and kiss her on the forehead. Then I would slip out into the darkness of Witchball Lane. But the moment the door had closed behind me she would glide back into our bedroom, which was on the front of the bungalow, and rearing up on her hind legs at the window, push aside the curtains with her nose and watch me pass. This was the last I would see of her for five days, her gray face, like a ghost’s face, at the window, watching me pass. —j. r. ackerley, My Dog Tulip As Binswanger comes close to working through a phenomenology of the psychotherapeutic setting toward a social ontology based on Heidegger’s ontology—in 1945—he turns to von Uexküll’s animals. Mankind inhabits countless worlds while holding a world in common. But the psychotic, in forgoing the common world, fits the worlds within worlds von Uexküll claims for the animals. Psychiatry wasted time assessing the divergence between delusional systems and the common world. Instead we must follow Freud and focus on the private world of the psychotic on its own terms. Just as we would say that it is not possible to describe the psychosis of a person if one has not first thoroughly traversed his worlds, just so von Uexküll says: “It is not possible to describe the biology of an animal if one has not completely circumscribed the circles of its function.” And as we would say furthermore: therefore one is justi- fied to assume as many worlds as there are psychotics, von Uexküll says: “Therefore one is fully justified to assume as many surrounding worlds as there are animals.” (Binswanger, “Über die daseinsanalytische Forschungsrichtung,” 237) 400 Let the Dead Be To communicate with these radically singular worlds, those of psychotics as of animals, is already to be in a relationship of commemoration. In Rollo May’s edited collection, which included the case study of Ellen West, we also find this position paper on Dasein-analytical research. “The Attempted Murder of a Prostitute,” which is essentially a case study of aberrant mourning, also appears in this volume. Its author, Roland Kuhn, was referred to in The Simulacra by the novel’s identified psychotic Kongrosian as one of the existential analysts who would understand him (but not help him). First Kuhn sets up Freud as all about successful mourning and substitution without complications or consequences. We must, hereby, differentiate between the mourning affect which consists in the emotional experience in the bereaved touched off by that loss, and mourning in the sense of a profound and lasting transformation of existence which replaces the mournful affect, if the deceased has been loved in the full meaning of the word. Thereby, “mourning work” in the Freudian sense—namely a withdrawal of libidinal energy from the lost object and a turning to other objects—does not occur; but rather (as particularly shown by Binswanger) the mourner himself, by bidding farewell to the departed, gets into bidding farewell to his own earlier way of existence, and the bereaved takes over somehow the being of the deceased. (405–6) To demonstrate what actually occurs in mourning, Kuhn cites the passage from Being and Time that consigns the dead, ultimately, to forgettogether (though Kuhn like Binswanger draws “existential mourning” out from under Heidegger’s sentencing). To be together means to be together in the same world. The dead however are out of it. For a living being to be with the dead requires that he too depart from this world. Though he thus excludes relations with the dead (and with their interrelations) Heidegger still comes not to raise but to bury them. To care for the deceased in the time span of burial rites is to treat the deceased as more than “stuff at hand.” And yet the deceased is no longer there. There is a time limit to mourning precisely because joining the dead in being out of it has its limits. Mourners tend to play dead. Kuhn advises that a survivor assume forms of movement that he knew in the deceased. Once memory becomes movement the mourning affect can be overcome “and mourning in the existential sense commences” (407). The bottom line of relations with the dead would then be the borderline along which psychotic worlds...