PKD’s science fiction - its unconventionality, its idiosyncrasies, and ultimately its innovation and originality - is reduced to a shadow of his real-life derangement and trauma. There’s no doubt that PKD had serious problems, but Arnold is hell-bent on pathologizing him, trying to expose the root causes of those problems by reading his work, as if the literature holds the skeleton key to the “real” man. On the whole, though, Arnold comes off as a stereotypical clinician who has little artistic sensibility or experience with the creative process. Dick is dead, alas … Arnold diagnoses PKD’s well-known paranoid delusions by looking at his vast body of fiction and nonfiction, and he concludes that his life and literature are byproducts of excessive drug use and traumatic events that occurred during his formative years. Dick, Kyle Arnold has followed in Freud’s footsteps, psychoanalyzing a similarly pathological subject on a grander scale under the same pretenses.
In “Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” Freud includes a disclaimer explaining why he didn’t need to meet Schreber: “Since paranoiacs cannot be compelled to overcome their internal resistances, and since in any case they only say what they choose to say, it follows that this is precisely a disorder in which a written report or a printed case history can take the place of personal acquaintance with the patient.” Hence Freud produces what is essentially a work of literary criticism. Instead, he read Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Schreber’s account of his psychotic breakdowns, and drew conclusions from it. There is, however, one surefire way to avoid it: never meet the patient.įreud famously diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic Daniel Paul Schreber without ever encountering him in person.
Transference is a slippery, subjective phenomenon - like love, it evades concrete definition and fluctuates in intensity. Ideally the analyst and analysand will cultivate an awareness of this veritable elephant in the room and address the matter if either party feels inhibited, deflected, suppressed, or otherwise influenced. In Studies on Hysteria, Freud explains that it happens “f the patient is frightened at finding that she is transferring on to the figure of the physician the distressing ideas which arise from the content of the analysis.” This can be detrimental to the psychoanalytic procedure, even if such transference is inevitable. THE CONCEPT OF TRANSFERENCE in psychoanalysis refers to an anomaly in the relationship between the analyst and analysand that develops over the course of treatment.
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