I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

Endopsychic Allegories

19 Endopsychic Allegories That is a logic which Freud attacks, by the way, the two-proposition self-cancelling structure. Freud considered this structure a revelation of rationalization. . . . The second statement does not reinforce the first. It only looks like it does. In terms of our perpetual theological disputations—brought on by Fat’s supposed encounter with the divine—the two-proposition self-cancelling structure would appear like this: 1) God does not exist. 2) And anyhow he’s stupid. —philip k. dick, Valis Following a discontinuous case of California, from here to Germany, it proves possible to fold P. K. Dick’s Valis trilogy inside a relay of texts—by Daniel Paul Schreber, Freud, and Walter Benjamin—which together promote in the details and among the effects of haunting a process of secularization 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 already projected an occult atmosphere of influence binding Freud’s study of Schreber and Benjamin’s Origin of the German 20 Endopsychic Allegories Mourning Play over the read corpus of Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.1 In his short illustrated essay, “Books by the Insane: From My Collection ,” which he published in 1928, Benjamin recalls his purchase in 1918 of Schreber’s Memoirs. “Had I already heard about the book back then? Or did I only discover the study a few weeks later, the one by Freud in the third volume of his Short Writings on the Theory of Neurosis? (Leipzig, 1913). It’s all the same. The book immediately grabbed me” (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 then 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.” By explication, exclusion, and implication, the main skewer passing through these three works is Goethe’s Faust, which they reintroduce to the setting of the paranoid or melancholic world, where one world’s destruction is another world’s reprojection or allegorical resurrection out of a libido of self-absorption. Schreber’s delusional system, so recognizable to the allegorical reader of the melancholic state, represents an act of recovery . Freud’s guess is already another man’s ghost: at the time Schreber was writing his memoirs, his older brother was already deceased; he had skipped the class of delusional patients and gone down the one-way street of suicide. Not only suicide, however, but recovery, too, is already equally carried over through Faust to the world that empties out in the mode of catastrophe. As Freud underscores in “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)”: “The delusion-formation, which we take to be a pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction. Such a reconstruction after the catastrophe is more or less successful, but never wholly so” (Standard Edition 12:71). This surprising turn away from the downbeat of psychotic shutdown and fadeout to the positive thinking that’s delusion was introduced with Freud’s quotation from Faust. A chorus mourns...