Psychoanalytic psychology

Abstract

This chapter begins with science fiction’s use of proto-psychoanalytic wisdom inspired by Nietzsche. Texts such as H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Croquet Player (1936), John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), and Alfred Bester’s ‘Oddy and Id’ (1950) present civilization as a fragile veneer concealing displaced instinctual gratification. Superficially, such conservatism continues in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). However, both these novels challenge Freudianism by thematizing Freud’s pessimistic model of the mind – a critique intensified in Barry N. Malzberg’s The Remaking of Sigmund Freud (1985). Dreams, moreover, are celebrated in Ursula Le Guin’s Jungian novel The Word for World is Forest (1972), which estranges the colonization of traditional societies, and counterposes rootedness in the collective unconscious (thereby developing an aesthetic pioneered by Frank Herbert’s The Dragon in the Sea (1956)). Generic re-evaluation of psychoanalysis continues in Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon (1966), which (like Bester’s The Demolished Man (1956)) endorses psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and the unreliable narrative of Frederik Pohl’s Gateway (1977), where the protagonist’s psychoanalytic psychotherapy reconciles him to a future reality of brutal capitalist exploitation.