When Worlds Collude

Back in the mid-1950's there was a rather popular book about psychoanalysis called The Fifty-Minute Hour by Robert Lindner. It's still an interesting read of several case studies.

The most famous one is that in the chapter "The Jet-Propelled Couch". It is the tale of a physicist who is having trouble with daydreaming about other worlds, so much so it becomes a delusion and he can't stop writing intricate maps, drawings, and textbooks about his imaginary galaxy. It is affecting his life and work, thus he enters into analysis.

Lindner discovers that the physicist, amid a lengthy childhood recollection of probable trumped-up sexual experiences, was sexually abused by a nanny, and this occurred after the tragic loss of a previous, well-loved nanny. The guilt and isolation this caused him found solace in the fantasy novels and pulp comics of the time. In psychoanalytic speak, he began to dissociate from reality into some perfect Edgar Rice Burroughs-type world where he had control. As mentioned, over time this fantasy world grew into an enormous amount of writings and drawings, and exactly like John Carter of Mars, the physicist felt at times that he was instantly 'transported' to these other worlds.

So far, so psychoanalytically good. The case is psychoanalytically perfect, in fact. Lindner predictably tries to 'get into' the physicist's fantasy world to try and find something, some 'key' to help explain its psychological purpose. He reads the volumes of texts the physicist has written, he studies the maps he has intricately drawn, and they spend hours discussing the details of the fantastic galaxy.

I tried to avoid... giving in any way the impression that I was entering the lists with him to prove that he was psychotic, that this was to be a tug of war over the question of his sanity. Instead, because it was obvious that both his temperament and training were scientific, I set myself to capitalize on the one quality he had demonstrated throughout his life, the quality that had inspired his first attempts to deal with his loneliness, the quality that urged him toward a scientific career: his curiosity.

After a year of intense submergence in the physicist's extravagant fantasies, Lindner becomes a little too wrapped-up in them.

The early signs that I had fallen under the spell of Kirk's Utopian vision and was succumbing to it were innocuous enough and hardly such as to cause concern. They consisted, by and large, of an increased interest in the details of the fantasy and a mild but persistent anxiousness about them. Unlike before, however, this interest and anxiety were not for the sake of the therapy so much as in the service of the fantasy itself. I continued my intense pursuit of error and inconsistency in the "records," but now with the obsessive aim of "setting them straight," of "getting the facts."

In the end Lindner is so obsessed he doesn't notice that the patient has finally given the delusions up! "When, as in this case, another person invades the delusion, the original occupant finds himself literally forced to give way."

This semi-catharsis is nicely written into a 'surprise ending' to the case.

The case is fascinating, but is is more about Lindner than it is about the patient. He doesn't go into the details of working through the physicist's original childhood trauma, if he ever did.

The book is obviously steeped in the hubris and grandiosity of the 20th Century's Freudian peak. Could the physicist have been treated quicker and without all the dramatic hubbub? Sure. But it's a much better yarn when the fantasy world of psychoanalysis and the fantasy world of a patient collide.


An interesting note to "The Jet-Propelled Couch" is the speculation that the patient was really Cordwainer Smith, a sci-fi author.







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