Science Fiction Studies

#67 = Volume 22, Part 3 = November 1995


Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.

Gregg Rickman and Others on Philip K. Dick

[Nota bene: Responses by Samuel J. Umland, and a reply by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. appear in SFS 68 (March 1996); with additional responses and replies in SFS 69 (July 1996) by R.D. Mullen, Gregg Rickman, and Carl Freedman, and in SFS 70 (November 1996) by Karl Wessel and R.D. Mullen.]

Samuel J. Umland, ed. Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 63. Greenwood Press, 1995. vii+228. $55.00.

This newest anthology of critical work on Philip K. Dick includes ten previously unpublished articles and two re-treads. As in the 1992 SFS collection, On Philip K. Dick,1 each of the contributors approaches a different aspect of Dick's oeuvre from a different critical perspective. The theoretical positions are not new; there is, for example, no focused feminist criticism, no queer theory, no post-cyberpunk literary history, so the book reads as if it were filling the niches that earlier critics had left empty.

Those niches needed filling. The contributors interpret, for the most part, texts that were neglected by earlier critics. Several take up stories of the 1950s, there are two articles on We Can Build You, and there is even a long essay on two of Dick's most thorough failures, The Crack in Space and Counter-Clock World. Many of the essays draw directly on recent biographies of Dick by Lawrence Sutin and Gregg Rickman, and refer to the social-historical milieu of the American '50s that Dick displaced in his fictions. And although feminist and race-theory readings are absent here as they were in the SFS volume, Umland's writers concentrate on Dick's women characters and Dick's notions of race much more carefully.

Of the eleven articles, three seem unnecessary. Carl Freedman's "Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick" appeared previously in SFS and in OnPKD, where it had an important place in the history of Marxist and psychoanalytic readings of Dick's corpus. In Umland it seems dated, recalling the heroic period of Dick's academic canonization. Even more out of place is Rebecca A. Umland's "Unrequited Love in We Can Build You," in which the author argues that Dick employed the literary model of courtly love in WCBY, and this places him in the Great Tradition of 20th century Americans who did the same: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Robinson. One might object that merely to employ a certain literary model does not guarantee one's entrance to a canon. The contribution most glaringly out of place in the volume is Merritt Abrash's "'Man Everywhere in Chains': Dick, Rousseau, and The Penultimate Truth," which originally appeared in a 1984 issue of Foundation. On the strength of the most tenuous associations, Abrash stretches out a crêpes-thin theory that Dick was significantly influenced by Rousseau's Social Contract. Using Abrash's logic, one could demonstrate the influence of Rousseau on any modern political fiction. The decision to include Abrash's essay is a puzzle, since it was thin and out of date when it first appeared more than ten years ago.

Most of the remaining eight essays share a focus on psychology and psychoanalysis. Psychological interests are noticeably in the forefront in Umland's own Jungian "To Flee from Dionysus: Enthousiasmos from 'Upon the Dull Earth' to VALIS," in Gregg Rickman's application of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) to We Can Build You and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and in Anthony Wolk's excellent piece on the influence of Existential psychoanalytic theory on Dick's career, "The Swiss Connection: Psychological Systems in the Novels of Philip K. Dick." Karl Wessel contributes a brief, but fascinating piece ("World of Chance and Counterfeit: Dick, Lem and the Preestablished Cacophany") comparing the similar (albeit inverse vis-à-vis each other) uses of game/decision theory in Dick's "Shell Game" and Lem's Solaris. Wessel's piece is perhaps more useful as a critique of Lem's novel than Dick's story, since this is the first extended analysis I have read of the logical fallacy in the experiment used by Lem's protagonist, Kris Kelvin, in proving the existence of an objective reality outside his projecting imagination.

That Dick was familiar with psychological discourse, to the point of fixation, is evident in almost everything he wrote. His protagonists are usually described as borderline cases of this or that neurosis or psychosis, and in a sense all of his novels are versions of Clans of the Alphane Moon, in which major characters are identified in terms of their respective mental illnesses. For Dick the connections among religious gnosis, ethical double-binds and mental disturbances were drawn ever tighter as his career progressed. In this he shared one of the cherished beliefs of his beloved German Romantics. But Dick's gods are not remote, magnificent aliens; they work on the most prosaic level conceivable. There is no sublime in Dick's fiction. Nature has all but disappeared. For Dick, banality is as much an aspect of our fallen state as death is.

Missing from most earlier critics' readings of Dick, to my mind, is an exploration of his disturbing effect on readers as they try to put their reading into some comprehensive order. For Dick not only consciously wrote intelligent, grotesque, and witty stories about shifting realities, perceptual dislocations, and uncertainties of the heart; he was also unconsciously writing prose that is undisciplined, undependable, capable of moving from brilliance to bathos in a single paragraph. For Dick, prose is not a healer, or a domain of higher sanity; there's none of Ballard's control or Burroughs's assurance. I would argue that Dick is one of the most effective writers about uncertainty because he denies his readers even the security that most serious artists will provide unconditionally: that on the level of the work, everything will be part of an overriding artistic vision and under control.

Brooks Landon uses the term "aesthetics of ambivalence" to characterize sf film, in which, for example, contradictions between technological ecstasy and anti-technological humanistic values, or between ideas as spectacle and ideas as ethical "substance," are left necessarily unresolved.2 This double-vision is a characteristic postmodern attitude, exemplified in the pervasive cynicism of contemporary commercial and youth cultures. The reliance of sf film on this ambivalence makes it one of the exemplary post-modern art forms. In Dick's fiction there is yet another sf-related aesthetics of ambivalence. One could argue that Dick gravitated toward sf and wrote his best work within the confines of the genre because sf allowed him to express maximum ambivalence toward the world: toward received ideas about identity, history, necessity, natural laws, social institutions and power, and toward the genre itself. Dick was also able to stretch the limits of the genre by supplying his own version of technical ecstasy--brilliant revisions of sf topoi that were already emotionally powerful before he used them: aliens, pocket-universes, mind-altering drugs, alternate histories, androids, hypnotic delusions, and such. At the same time, Dick appeared to be using these ecstatic devices to solve real human dilemmas. The structural incongruity between his ethical realism and sf spectacles can conceal the ambivalence at the center of almost all his novels.

Three of the best essays in PKD deal with this ambivalence. Neal Easterbrook, in "Dianoia/Paranoia: Dick's Double 'Impostor,'" maps it through the theme of the double in Dick's writing, focusing on Dick's 1954 story, "Impostor." Citing Merleau-Ponty's notion of the body as the scene of the drama of cognition, Easterbrook considers Dick's method of concretely symbolizing the crisis of subject-identity through a double-problematization as his most important novelistic quality. On the one hand, Dick's fictions often draw a distinction between human and machine, a distinction based on differences of degrees of freedom; on the other, there is a distinction between the human and the homo sapiens, which for Dick is an ethical difference between the caring subject and the narcissistic one. For Easterbrook, this doubled-doubleness is the characteristic Dickian situation, stretching from the early stories through Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to VALIS. The Dickian hero--whether machine or human--is capable of sufficient self-understanding to recognize its own inexorably splintered self. Easterbrook demonstrates how this fundamentally paranoid double- bind evolves in Dick's work toward a "dianoia," through the recognition that monadic self-consistent identity does not, and cannot, exist. The ambivalence dramatized in the double-bind, chillingly played out in "Impostor," can only be resolved, in Easterbrook's reading, through a drastic, disruptive, and perhaps suicidal empathy.

Christopher Palmer's "Philip K. Dick and the Nuclear Family" traces Dick's ambivalence through his representation of the conventional American family in the stories of the '50s. For Dick, the family unit would be the basic unit of human affection and value if it were authentic, which it rarely is. Palmer's essay makes good use of Rosemary Jackson's notion that fantasy always involves a rupture in ideological conventionality.2 In Dick's case, Palmer locates the conventions in the Norman Rockwell-style All-American family that Dick relentlessly takes apart. Jackson's model almost compels Palmer to look for a political/critical rationale for the disruption of conventions. Like Suvin,3 Palmer identifies Dick as an advocate for liberal individualism versus the conformism and militarism of American corporate capitalism. But this is a deeply ambivalent position, perpetually replaying the collision between Dick's critique of the "hollowing out of reality by illusion" and what Palmer calls Dick's lack of "epistemological confidence" that would allow characters (and presumably readers) moral acts and political judgments (62).

Despite having all the tools for a critique of militarism, technology, and capitalism, Dick, according to Palmer, wanted to ground value in private affections and loyalties; yet even this salvation is obstructed by Dick's distress and hostility vis à vis women, because of their putative withdrawal from nurture, a view strongly supported by evidence from Rickmann's biography. From this perspective the carnivals of sterility, entropy, gubble, kipple, the weakening of reality (and the complementary central importance of repair) is linked to Dick's conviction that women will not do the nurturing work that the family, the cell of humanity, requires of them. Hence the instability of the domestic all-American settings, which are deficient in being, and thus easily invaded and de-stabilized. Palmer supports his points by tracing structural oppositions between many of Dick's stories of domestic disruption. It was Dick's practice to depict contrary value-position in different stories, as if he were trying out opposite valuations of his fictional situations. Palmer compares Dick's contrary treatments of the theme of the father's ability/inability to protect the family from consumer technology (in "Foster, You're Dead" versus "Sales Pitch"); the positive/negative value of alienation from the nuclear family's father-role (in "The Father Thing" versus "Human Is"); the positive/negative value of accepting delusion and simulation instead of "reality" (in "Small Town" versus "Exhibit Piece"). Palmer had set out to find a dialectical point of view for Dick, i.e., that the contrary value-positions suggest a meta-position, a critical transcendence from which Dick views the whole. In the end, Palmer claims there is no dialectic, only "instability." Which we might also call ambivalence.

Michael Feehan, in "Chinese Finger-Traps, or 'A Perturbation in the Reality Field': Paradox as Conversion in Philip K. Dick's Fiction," applies Kenneth Burke's notions of ambiguity and incongruity as constitutive dynamics of interpretation to demonstrate that Dick is a "connoisseur" of paradoxes (or "finger-traps"), rather than a seeker after dialectical transcendence. Burke's rich concept of "circumference"--i.e., the interplay between the limiting frame of any scene/description, the choice of dominant elements within the frame, and the implicit potential within the frame's language to enable the reader to change foci and view other elements as dominant--lets Feehan speak of Dick's domains of ambivalence in clear rhetorical and aesthetic terms, damping the historical- ideological implications of Easterbrook and Palmer. Feehan consequently comes close to defining the special rhetorical seasickness one feels reading many of Dick's works.

VALIS is Feehan's main concern. He shows how, in this fully self-conscious fiction, Dick inscribed paradoxes on several levels of the text's "circumference." There is the paradox/undecideability within the story with regard to how the reader should treat the relation between Horselover Fat and Phil Dick. Since the ontological status of each voice is in question, the reader cannot come to a secure decision about their authority. On another level of circumference, between writer and story, Feehan describes the ambivalence resulting from the undecideability of the status of the different kinds of information enframing each other-- theophany, fiction, delusion, rational thought. The circumference encompassing the relationship between the world of the reader and the novel is rendered paradoxical by our insecurity about how we are to interpret the validity of the meaning in the novel: is VALIS the fictional displacement of a true experience, an elaboration of a delusion, or a lie? Further, we cannot know our own relation to the text because we cannot be sure of Dick's: even the biographical record shows Dick's constantly shifting accounts of where things came from in the novel.

One of the most interesting and provocative of PKD's essays is Gregg Rickman's "What Is This Sickness?: 'Schizophrenia' and We Can Build You," which appears to be a chapter or an appendix-to-be of Firebright, the forthcoming second volume of Rickman's biography of Dick. It is a consistent elaboration of Rickman's thesis in the first volume, To the High Castle,4 that Dick's works can be understood as expressions of Dick's mental problems resulting from the early death of his twin sister, and a putative sexual molestation that occurred in his childhood. Without the as yet unfinished second volume it is hard to say whether Rickman believes We Can Build You is a particularly vivid example of Dick's psychopathological displacements, or whether all the post-Man in the High Castle novels wear their displacements on their sleeves. Rickman's reading of WCBY is considerably more reductive to a model of traumatic cause-and-effect than his readings of Dick's pre-1963 works in To the High Castle.

It should be clear to any reader of To the High Castle that Rickman is writing a psychobiography; psychologistic vocabulary, the narration of psychologically significant episodes and behaviors, and careful accounting of Dick's own quite evident fascination with psychoanalytic diagnoses occupy most of the analytical exposition. Rickman treats Dick as biographers treat other spectacularly neurotic writers like Kafka and Lewis Carroll, as a culturally significant case-study. In a brief review of To the High Castle in SFS #53, Carl Freedman criticizes Rickman for undertaking psychobiography without the expertise of a professional like Erik Erikson.5 I would agree with Freedman if we substituted the name of Alice Miller for Erikson.

In my introduction to OnPKD, I criticized Rickman for reducing Dick's fiction to a body of effects from an alleged individual psychological trauma.6 Reacting to Rickman's critical letter of response in SFS #59, I recanted, essentially suspending judgment about the ultimate purport of Rickman's project until the biography is completed.7 More than two years have passed since that exchange, and six years since the publication of To the High Castle. With the appearance of an essay in PKD that hints at some of the direction Rickman might be taking in his second volume, I think I can venture some tentative remarks about his project, without, I hope, relinquishing an open mind.

In the introduction to To the High Castle, Rickman appears to take up a position against unnamed critics who would dismiss Dick as "crazy." (Other than Eric Rabkin,8 I don't recall any critics arguing for this view.)

I do not think Phil Dick was mad, or crazy, or any of those lovely labels some are anxious to apply. Anxious to apply as then he would be explained away: and then the power of his visions, the piercing clarity of his writing, at its finest, the way his best work demonstrates that it is our time which is out of joint: then he will be dismissable. (xxiii)

Protesting against the critical goal of "decontaminating" literature from the mad author, Rickman implies that he can demonstrate the sanity of Dick's work by demonstrating the man's sanity-- since for Rickman "the man and the work are one and the same" (vii). He does this not by making Dick seem "normal," but by demonstrating the accessibility of his writing and his conscious, near-heroic struggle against traumatic memories.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Rickman's entire biography depends on the thesis that Dick was sexually molested as a small child, and that the trauma this caused generated his personal behaviors and his imaginative play. But this is one of Rickman's most dramatic claims, and it recurs often, in association with the even earlier trauma Dick suffered of losing his twin sister as an infant, evidently as a result of their parents' incompetence.

As I wrote in my reply to Rickman, my reservations are less about the specific attribution of sexual molestation to Dick and the Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) that Rickman believes emanated from it (though I do have reservations I will mention below), as to the usefulness of reductive psychoanalytic interpretations of culture and creative work. I have to confess here that my feelings have undergone some changes since I began to research Rickman's thesis and his sources. In particular, I have been impressed by the work of Alice Miller, an analyst of child abuse's connection with creativity whom Rickman cites often, who has written compelling interpretations of Picasso, Soutine, Nietzsche, and Käthe Kollwitz from the same premises.9 Miller's approach differs appreciably from Rickman's in the fine balance she keeps between passionate advocacy for abused children and erudite, acutely sensitive understanding of Western high culture. Miller characteristically links aesthetic qualities of language or art with evidence of the hyper-disciplining or battering of creative men and women in their childhoods. Miller is clearly sensitive to aesthetic qualities which she then links with her psychoanalytic data. When she links Nietzsche's philosophy with the cruel emotional restraints forced on him in his childhood by his parents and kin, Miller does not reduce Nietzsche's radical critical vision to the mere displacement of childhood frustrations; she verifies and supports Nietzsche's insights, adding a dimension to his criticism, by interpreting it as the articulations of a brilliant child's concrete resistance to the hypocrisy of 19th-century European bourgeois culture. In Miller's hands, the question of truth is re-grounded from the abstractions of metaphysics to the fundamental instructions children are given about the world. Nietzsche's discourse is, from Miller's point of view, the abstract, poetic, socially permissible displacement of the real problem of truth and authenticity: the disparity between parents' ideological formulations and the wise child's insight into the way things really, truly are in the world.

Miller's writing strikes me as liberating psychoanalysis. Her artists and philosophers remain powerful and noble, perhaps even gaining in power by becoming the suffering, unconscious advocates of honesty and the authentic expression of human affections. Rather than being reductive, Miller's analyses restore some of the passion to the original works of art that have faded because of commercial co-optation and academic over-interpretation. If Rickman were able to do the same with Dick, he would add to Dick's stature. But Rickman's biography does not touch on aesthetic qualities; his analyses of Dick's fiction do not go beyond the identification of motifs and characters with their putative generating models in Dick's inferred psychic experience. He expects the reader already to be a true believer in Dick's greatness, an assumption that I do not believe is justified or useful. Consequently, it is not clear how we should value the revelations about Dick's experience of abuse and his various phobic behaviors. Often it seems that we must simply compassionate with the troubled writer. Consider the following passage:

None of this has been easy or pleasant to write. Who weeps for Philip? The cold computer screen takes down these words with equanimity; the flat white page you're reading passes them on to you. They cannot convey the horror of what happened, the terror of a little boy. Some may resent this news. It is indeed a grim report, not one I wanted to write, but one that insists on being known as its magnitude becomes known and the facts are followed back to their source. In a very real sense Philip Dick remained a prisoner of his own psyche, and of the abuse he suffered, all the days of his life. (61)

At the risk of seeming a cad, I cannot see the purpose of this sentimental commentary. Rickman here appears to act as the self-designated mourner, the good parent that Philip Dick never had, informing us of the emotions it would be appropriate for us to have when we survey the life of the writer. But it is not self-evident to me that I should feel deep empathy with the person of an artist. Some readers may seek out art for such emotional identification; some may seek it out precisely to escape it. It may be perfectly acceptable not to weep for little Philip, to read his life-work with all its humor, visionary dynamism, aesthetic and ethical chaos as a something other than a displacement of childhood traumatic pain. Unless we wish to see Dick as the bard of Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA)-induced DID, and this as a disease of the Age, with global implications, then Dick allows his readers the freedom to flip him over like the electric toad in Do Androids Dream, to open the hatch, and to wonder about the mechanism. Who put the toad there? What made Dick the tragic and antic visionary that he was?

I believe the problem lies in the fact that Rickman, in To the High Castle and his essay in PKD, does not get past a certain fascination with the fact that Dick may have suffered from child abuse. There is a striking difference between Miller's detective-work and Rickman's. Miller, who is herself a painter, finds hard evidence to back up her connections between experienced abuse and artistic vision. When the links are speculative--as for instance her linking of Picasso's painting with childhood experiences of an earthquake in Malaga (3-18)--she argues her point with an elegance that allows readers to ruminate on the point and make their own judgments. In the case of Nietzsche, Kollwitz and Soutine, she finds sufficient records to justify her links, never losing a sense of respect for the artists' aesthetic transformations. (This is made easy, of course, by her choices of canonical figures in the modern Western tradition of high culture.)

Rickman adduces sufficient evidence that Dick experienced more than his share of loss and grief, and especially that he was treated with considerable coldness (although not hostility) by his mother. But Rickman wants more. Rickman's claim that Dick was sexually molested is based on much thinner evidence. He infers it from a catalogue of symptoms of victims of sexual abuse he detects in Dick's behavior, and a statement by Dick (whose tendency to mythomania Rickman elsewhere notes) to one of his wives that he had been molested. Rickman's claim cannot be disproved (since both the victim, and the alleged perpetrator, whom Rickman is convinced was Dick's grandfather, E.G. Kindred, are dead) and it cannot be dismissed. I do not find Rickman's claim compelling (even though he claims that the evidence for it is "overwhelming" [47]), although it is very intriguing, and seems to illuminate many aspects of Dick's life and art. The very fact that we cannot be certain that Rickman's claim holds water, and that with each repetition we wonder how a biographer can be so positive about a mere possibility, weakens the power of the hypothesis.

I need to stress once again that a great deal of the information that Rickman provides about Dick's life is not dependent on this speculation. But since the alleged sexual abuse occupies such an important place in Rickman's model, the adjunct data sometimes seems empty, void of significance, without the charge of abuse. Rickman's first volume leaves open the question for skeptics, and raises it for admirers, what does knowledge of Dick's life add to the pleasure of reading his work? If the point is to show that "our civilization is based on power--power and fear--and child-abuse is an unseen engine of history" (70), a thesis well worth developing, then Rickman never approaches the global, theoretical perspective necessary to place Dick in this context.

My comments so far have been based on the first volume of Rickman's projected two-volume biography. It is exciting to wait, to see whether the second volume, dealing with Dick's mature work and his determining experiences as an adult, will develop the psychoanalytic thesis. It is unlikely that more proof will be adduced for the sexual abuse theory, but Rickman may describe both a more mature artist and a nuanced theory of the relationship between Dick's aesthetic creations and childhood traumas. If the essay in PKD is an indication of the line of future development, then the biography may not escape being exactly the sort of reductive picture that Rickman wished in his introduction to save Dick from in the hands of others.

WCBY is an unusual text even for Dick, a veritable minefield of psychological motifs and cries for help. It is Dick's first extended experiment with the collision between the "human essence" and the homo sapiens. For Rickman it is one of Dick's most significant works, despite the opinion of some readers that it is aesthetically "broken-backed" and of interest primarily as a document of displacement. Rickman argues convincingly that Dick conceived of WCBY first as a mainstream fiction, a synthesis of his two threads, sf and realism.

But from Rickman's perspective this has no aesthetic significance, only that readers can observe as in a laboratory how Dick links the excruciatingly direct displacements of his realist novels with the more playful and imaginative displacements of his sf. For Rickman, this means that what Miller calls the "encoded story of childhood traumas" (73) is of all Dick's sf most evident in WCBY. Accordingly, his reading is insistently allegorical of the psychology of child abuse.

In his essay, Rickman writes as if his readers were all familiar with, and respectful of, the culture of post-traumatic therapy. He refers to "alters" (alternate personalities within DID), he makes much of apparent sexual double- entendres: "a rigid Pris"="a rigid prick" (150), talk of "insects" is code for incest (referring back to Dick's complex feelings about his dead twin sister, his mother, and his alleged victimization at the hands of an older man). The supremely self-contradictory, clearly pathological character of Pris Frauenzimmer Rickman analyzes as a manifestation of DID; as he does Louis's character. Thus WCBY becomes, like Eye in the Sky (and, I expect, Maze of Death) an instance of Dick producing fiction out of his own multiple personality syndrome. When Pris becomes, in Louis/Dick's eyes, the all-absorbing Mother, in Rickman's analysis she has become the fictional avatar of Dick's own mother; Dick's Jungian explanation here Rickman specifically states "merely serve[s] to give a mythic gloss to the states of clinical dissociation" (153). Rickman quite openly favors a materialist, behaviorist analysis of pathology (claiming that Dick provides evidence for it), while dismissing the more mysterious one as a "mythic gloss" (despite Dick's own preference for it).

Rickman's essay complements Palmer's claims about Dick's trouble with the family romance. Further, there is an interesting comparison of WCBY with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which Rickman refers to as a "sequel" of the former. Rickman analyzes DADOES? not as a sequel, however, since it does not develop the themes of the earlier novel, but rather as another example of the characteristic Dickian value-collisions discussed by Palmer in his essay. Certain motifs are taken up in both novels: androids, women as androids, the Rosen name and implicate Jewishness, and DADOES? appears to invert them vis à vis WCBY.

Rickman's essay thus leaves us anticipating the conclusion to his biography in suspense whether it will offer a way of reading Dick not only as a man, who also happened to be an artist, who overcame the traumas of child abuse by displacing its memories, but also simply as an artist.

NOTES

1. Brooks Landon, The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Rethinking Science Fiction Film in the Age of Electronic (Re)Production. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992), 19-20.

2. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, (London: Methuen, 1981).

3. Darko Suvin, "The Opus: Artifice as Refuge and World View," On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science-Fiction Studies, ed. R.D. Mullen et al. (Terre Haute: SF-TH, 1992), 2-15.

4. Carl Freedman, "In Search of Dick's Boswell," On Philip K. Dick (see Note 2), 257-61.

5. "Pilgrims in Pandemonium: Philip K. Dick and the Critics," On Philip K. Dick (see Note 2), xvi-xvii.

6. Rickman's letter and my response are published under "On Our Philip K. Dick Collection," SFS 20:139-41, #59, March 1993.

7. Eric S. Rabkin, "Irrational Expectations: or, How Economics and the Post-Industrial World Failed Philip K. Dick," On Philip K. Dick (see Note 2), 178-87.

8. Alice Miller. The Untouched Key. Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness. Virago: 1990 [German original: 1988].

 


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