What I’m Reading: The Mad Professor… Physicist? Space/Time Traveler?

An old Harper’s magazine article found it’s way to the BoingBoing blog.  Enticed by the headline “The Jet-Propelled Couch,” this scifi fan clicked the link.  I can only hope that my words here will do the same for you.

Let’s take a step back for a moment.  Some of my favorite books/films are pieces of a series in which the fantasy or science fiction world is so fully realized that it’s almost believable:  Alien, Blade Runner, The Song of Ice and Fire, The Lord of the Rings, The Foundation Series, The Robot Series, 2001, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, etc.

For example, the world of Isaac Asimov’s robot series was one that I explored when I was in middle school.  By writing so many novels and short stories about man’s first positronic brained robots and man’s first foray’s into deep space, Asimov created a fantasy world where morality tales about human nature, ethics, and morality could be explored.  That world seemed so fully realized: Earth, Solaria, the Spacer worlds, the Three Laws of Robotics.  Of course, there where inconsistencies from novel to novel, but the over-arching themes stayed consistent across each work.

As an adult, I sometimes wonder about Asimov.  The man was prolific: 515 books in his lifetime.  And these weren’t fluff books, either: fiction series, books about science, math, and history, social criticism.  They run the gambit.  What a deliciously active mind, and thank goodness that he saw fit to share it on paper.  I shudder to imagine a childhood without Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw.

Imagine, though, if Asimov’s had created that alternate robot/space travel universe all for himself.  Imagine, too, that Asimov believed he could travel to other galaxies where he played an important part in the history of this alternative galaxy.  The shift from beloved science fiction author to psychotic seems simple: the world created and shared with others means he’s a gifted author… the world created only for him means he’s psychotic.

Meet Kirk Allen.  (Pseudonym, by the way.)

In an old (1955) Harper’s Magazine article, “The Jet Propelled Couch,” psychoanalyst Robert Mitchell Lindner shares the case history of his patient Kirk Allen.  Kirk is a physicist working on a government project in the Southwest (I read it as nuclear somethingorother).  Kirk is getting into trouble because, though he’s brilliant, he sort of wanders away from his mind sometimes, and further, he believes that he is exploring other planets and ruling over another section of the universe.  His wanderings affect the quality of his work, and so Kirk was referred to Linder under the assumption that Kirk would either be “cured” or find new employ.

Lindner’s article is the narrative Kirk’s treatment.  It runs the gambit.  We learn about Kirk painful childhood, we read about Kirk’s brilliance, and we read how Kirk’s pyschosis started in childhood and carried him through adulthood.

It started when, as a child, he read a science fiction author whose main character shared his name.  Here’s the patient:

As I read about the adventures of Kirk Allen in these books the conviction began to grow on me that the stories were not only true to the very last detail but that they were about me. In some weird and inexplicable way I knew that what I was reading was my biography. Nothing in these books was unfamiliar to me: I recognized everything–the scenes, the people, the furnishings of rooms, the events, even the words that were spoken. My everyday life began to recede at this point. In fact, it became fiction–and, as it did, the books became my reality.

Kirk read the numerous volumes of his “biography” over and over again. Soon he no longer needed the books “to refresh my memory,” but was able to recapitulate them entirely in his mind. While his corporeal body was living the life of a mundane boy, the vital part of him was far off on another planet, courting beautiful princesses, governing provinces, warring with strange enemies. Now, using his “biographer’s” material as a base, he took off on his own. Assisted by the maps, charts, diagrams, architectural layouts, genealogical schemes, and timetables he had painstakingly worked out while using the books for his guide, he filled in spaces between the volumes with fantasy “recollections” of his own; and when this was done, he began the task of his life: that of picking up where his “biographer” had left off and recording the subsequent history of the heroic Kirk Allen.

The article is two very long pieces: “The Jet-Propelled Couch, Part I” and “Part II.”  Read it!

I was struck by Lindner’s descriptions of the women from Kirk’s youth.  There was a tinge of exactly what Gilbert and Gubar criticized in The Madwomen in the Attic.  Namely, from Linder’s descriptions, women where either angels or monsters.  That was interesting.

I was also struck by the way the Lindner understood mind. Most psychology wants to reduce man to elements and chemicals in order to determine behavior: if you have X (gene, chemical, imbalance), then you do Y.  Linder, though, see the mind as almost Burkian: it’s a series of symbols.  Lindner, like any good psychoanalyst, tries to understand how and why Kirk formed the “wrong” symbols or how Kirk’s psychosis was informed and fed by the symbols that Kirk formed in early childhood.

Finally, the article examines more than just Kirk’s alternate universe.  I don’t want to spoil it for you… But we learn how far into Kirk’s world Lindner had to voyage.

Don’t let me keep you!  Read it!  Come back, and tell me if you wish you could look over Kirk’s maps, schematics, and drawings, too.