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Part Five. Essays and Speeches
This section contains the principal published essays by Dick on matters other than science fiction.
"Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality" was first published in Lighthouse (edited by Terry Carr), No. 11, November 1964.
"Schizophrenia & The Book of Changes" was first published in Niekas, No. 11, March 1965. It was reprinted in the PKDS Newsletter, No. 14, June 1987.
"The Android and the Human," delivered as a speech by Dick at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in February 1972, was first published in SF Commentary, No. 31, December 1972. It was most recently reprinted in the eclectic Dick anthology The Dark-Haired Girl (1988), published by Mark V. Ziesing. This essay is Dick's most extended nonfictional foray into social ethics. The rape-related humor has aged very badly, and the celebration of random ripoffs as the means of warding off centralized oppression may not convince readers who live in crime-ridden neighborhoods. But the central distinction between the android and the human remains a suggestive one.
"Man, Android, and Machine" first appeared in the British anthology Science Fiction at Large (Gollancz, 1976), edited by Peter Nicholls, and was reprinted in The Dark-Haired Girl.
"If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others" was delivered as a speech by Dick at the second Festival International de la Science-Fiction de Metz, France, in September 1977. It was first published in French translation in L'A
"How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" was written as a speech but was likely never delivered. It was first published in I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (1985).
"Cosmogony and Cosmology," dated January 23, 1978, was expressly intended by Dick as a summary of the key insights expressed in the Exegesis as of that time. It is included here as an essay because it was sent out in typed form by Dick to his agent, Russell Galen, although with no overt publishing intentions in mind. In this sense, it differs from the remainder of the Exegesis, which Dick kept to himself, but for occasional limited disclosures to friends. It was first published in a limited edition by Kerosina Books in 1987.
"The Tagore Letter" was first published in Niekas, No. 28, November 1981.
"Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality" (1964)
One long-past i
Well, I have pondered this over the dreary years, while meantime the drug industry, psychiatrists, and certain naughty persons of dubious repute have done much to validate -- and further explore -- this topic, so that now we are faced with a psychiatric establishment little related to the simple good old days (circa 1900) when mental patients fell into one of two rigid classes: the insane, which meant simply that they were too ill to function in society, to wash and wax their car, pay their utility bills, drink one martini and still utter pleasant conversation, and hence had to be institutionalized... and the neurotic, which included all those wise enough to seek out psychiatric help, and for merely "hysterical" complaints, such as feeling a compulsion to untie everybody's shoes or count the number of small boys on tricycles passing their houses or offices, or for "neurotic" disorders that boiled down to anxiety felt out of proportion to the "reality situation," in particular specialized phobias such as a morbid, senseless dread that an unma
This looked to be a good thing, until Jung showed up and proved:
1. That hospitalized, full psychotics responded to psychotherapy as rapidly as neurotics, once the psychotic's private language had been comprehended, communication thereby being established. And
2. Many "neurotics," who were ambulatory, who held jobs, raised families, brushed their teeth regularly, were not what he had designated as "introverted neurotics" but in fact psychotics -- specifically schizophrenics -- in an early stage of a lifelong illness career. And they responded less well to psychoanalysis than anyone else.
This meant something. (A) Perhaps all mental illness, no matter how severe, might be psychogenic in origin. (B) A neurosis might not be an illness at all or even an illness symptom, but a construct of the brain to achieve stasis and avoid a far more serious breakdown; hence it might well be risky to tinker with someone's neurosis because under it might lie a full-blown psychosis -- which would emerge at the point where the happy psychiatrist sits back and says, "See? You're no longer afraid of buses." Whereupon the patient then discovers that he is now afraid of everything, including life itself. And can no longer function at all.
So out went the whole great scheme of things, the subconscious, the repressed childhood sexual trauma -- like a medieval flat-world map it referred to nothing, and was, possibly, even harmful to what are now designated as "borderline psychotics," which is a way of saying, "Those who can't function in society but do. I guess." How cloudy can an issue become? All theories, one by one, broke down; there were "rational" psychotics, whom we in our amusing way call paranoids, and there were -- but enough. Because now we are at what I regard the crucial issue: that of the presence in the psychotic of not only delusions ("They're conspiring against me," etc.) but of hallucinations, which neurotics do not have. So perhaps in this regard we have a diagnostic basis, if not of the nature of the illness then at least of its severity. But one item crops up, here, that is rather u