SOURCE: Hendershot, Cyndy. “Paranoia and The Delusion of the Total System.” American Imago 54, no. 1 (spring 1997): 15-37.

[In the following essay, Hendershot discusses Schreber's Memoirs in an examination of late twentieth-century cultural paranoia and its connection to such scientific advancements as nuclear weaponry.]

Post-World-War-Two American society is popularly and frequently defined by the symptom of paranoia. The paranoia which pervades the McCarthyist witch hunts, the “duck and cover” policy of civil defense, and postwar representations of the alien invader characterize late twentieth century perceptions of 1950s America. Science fiction is the genre most commonly invoked now to represent 1950s paranoia and within 1950s culture it stood as a genre conducive to expressions of fear and paranoia. Los Alamos and the development of the atomic bomb gave rise to numerous cultural texts which attempted to represent what was frequently perceived as the unrepresentable—atomic power. The prehistoric monsters, giant ants, pod people, and other horrors which people 1950s science fiction films attest to what had already been a strong interpenetration between physics and science fiction. The fact that science fiction and paranoiac discourse have affinities becomes manifest in 1950s popular science fiction. Yet the links between the totalizing, systematic worlds of science fiction and the delusional systems constructed by the paranoiac have more subtle connections. Science fiction authors construct comprehensive worlds much as Daniel Paul Schreber creates a complete delusional world in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903).¹ Yet our very conception of paranoia emerges from a discourse located on the boundary between science and fiction—psychoanalysis. In fact Schreber's most famous interpreter, Sigmund Freud, notes the uncomfortable similarities between Schreber's theory and his own.² In this study I focus on a postwar American text in which issues of science (represented by the atomic physicist), science fiction, paranoia, and psychoanalysis converge: Robert Lindner's fictionalized account of his analytic sessions with a Los Alamos physicist, “The Jet-Propelled Couch,” contained in his collection of “true psychoanalytic tales,” The Fifty Minute Hour (1954).³ Lindner's science fiction coincides with postwar science fiction per se through its analysis of paranoia as a symptom of the atomic bomb project and ultimately through its replication of the very disease it seeks to diagnose. I argue that paranoia may be read as a symptom of a culture in which the totalizing scientific systems characteristic of Newtonian physics continue to haunt an increasingly multiplicitous and non-totalizing view of the world which is emerging in the twentieth century.

In Order Out of Chaos Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (1984) argue that classical Newtonian physics rests on a world view in which the scientist is conceived as “the potential holder of a universal key to all physical phenomena, thus endowed with a potentially omnipotent knowledge” (21). Classical science hence relies on a view that one totalizing system can explain the universe. Prigogine and Stengers trace developments in nineteenth and twentieth century science which point to the limits of classical science. The emergent world view as they see it allows for the replacement of the monolithic Reality of the Newtonian system with realities: “as randomness, complexity, and irreversibility enter into physics as objects of positive knowledge, we are moving away from this rather näive assumption of a direct connection between our description of the world and the world itself” (54-55). What I want to propose is that paranoia is a psychosis intertwined with the Newtonian world view and one which ultimately points to the limits of the totalizing classical system as the dream of the classical scientist emerges as delusion.

Lindner's tale focuses on a research physicist in his 30s working at Los Alamos—named “X reservation” in the text—in the 1950s. Kirk Allen, the pseudonymous name of the physicist in Lindner's account, was drafted into working at Los Alamos upon completion of his doctorate. At the end of the war he was discharged, studied abroad for a year, then returned to work at Los Alamos. Allen is referred to Lindner, who is practicing psychoanalysis in Baltimore, by a Los Alamos military official who tells Lindner over the phone that Allen is “perfectly normal in every way except for a lot of crazy ideas about living part of the time in another world—on another planet” (156). In the course of his analytic sessions with Allen, Lindner discovers that the physicist has constructed a delusional universe to which he periodically travels but in which he has recently been spending more and more time. Allen has compiled twelve thousand pages of typescript describing his adventures, research, and experiences in a universe in which he is “Kirk Allen, Lord of a planet in an interplanetary empire in a distant universe” (176). In addition to the manuscript, Allen has written a glossary of names and terms, eighty-two maps drawn to scale, one hundred and sixty one architectural sketches and elevations, twelve genealogical tables, a description of the galactic system, a two-hundred-page history of the empire over which Allen serves as Lord, and three hundred and six drawings of the planet (179-80). In the course of the analysis, Lindner adopts a belief in Allen's delusory world in order to, as he theorizes it, “pry him loose from the psychosis” from within (195). Lindner succeeds in eliminating Allen's belief in the delusory universe, but Lindner himself comes to believe in it, leading Lindner to conclude that “I know my chair and the couch are separated only by a thin line” (207).

Allen's system corresponds to the paranoiac's totalizing system and bears many striking similarities to Schreber's delusional theology. One phenomenon which characterizes paranoia is the creation of a totalizing system. Micheline Enriquez (1988) notes that “we cannot stress enough the importance for the paranoiac of this system, a system which always refers him to an order, to a higher instance” (126). The systemization and theorizing which characterize the paranoiac have led many commentators to associate paranoia with knowledge and knowledge-producing systems per se.⁴ For Lacan the formation of the ego is a paranoiac process: hence, taking one's place in the Symbolic Order means living in a paranoiac system which is culturally sanctioned.⁵ For my purposes I want to focus on how both Schreber's and Kirk Allen's delusional systems invoke a convergence of theology and science which forms part of their historical worlds. In his preface to the Memoirs, Schreber (1955 [1903]) makes just such a connection stating, “I believe that expert examination of my body and observation of my personal fate during my lifetime would be of value for both science and the knowledge of religious truths” (31). Thus Schreber tells us that he sacrifices his privacy in order to further knowledge. Schreber addresses his former doctor Flechsig, asking him to verify his delusional experiences because this verification would result in his thesis being regarded “as a serious scientific problem to be investigated in every possible way” (35).⁶ Later Schreber comments that his manuscript “seems to be growing to the size of a scientific work” and again emphasizes his purpose to provide empirical evidence for his delusional system (123n). Schreber pleads for medical examination of his body which he believes will verify that he is being transformed into a woman: this verification will serve as clenching evidence that his theology is correct. Schreber is convinced that x-raying his body will demonstrate the change in his skeletal structure from male to female and also verify the destruction wrought on his internal organs by the rays which have been penetrating him (248). Schreber closes his Memoirs by stating, “I can do no more than offer my person as object of scientific observation for the judgment of experts. My main motive in publishing this book is to invite this” (251, emphasis original).

Schreber's conjoining of empirical scientific data and theological theory is typical of fin-de-siècle European intellectuals. Schreber desires to use science to verify the existence of God. Schreber uses physiological data concerning human nerves to construct a cosmological view of the universe based on the human body. Further, he attempts to situate his narrative within the late nineteenth-century theories of evolution and entropy. Discussing his theory of creation, Schreber comments that “I assume that the whole work of creation on a celestial body consisted in a succession of single acts of creation, in general advancing from lower to higher forms of organic life. The idea is of course not new, indeed is common knowledge among those who have lately occupied themselves with the history of evolution” (192). Schreber attempts to resolve the conflict between Darwinian theory and Christian belief which he sees himself as a victim of—“I had occupied myself too much with the natural sciences, particularly with works based on the so-called modern doctrine of evolution, not to have begun to doubt, to say the least, the literal truth of all Christian religious teachings” (80)—by turning to a typical Victorian “solution” to the dilemma. Schreber, like many Victorians, as Alvar Ellegard (1990 [1958]) points out, adopts the view of Absolute Creation which argues that “each species arose as a distinct and instantaneous creation” (30). Further, Schreber's apocalyptic vision of the destruction of the earth in which he is the sole survivor partakes of entropic images prevalent in the late nineteenth century. Schreber comments that on the day of the destruction of the earth “there was talk of ‘clocks of the world’ running out and at the same time a continuous rich stream of rays toward my body” (93-94). The moving upward of human life seen as characteristic of Darwinian theory and the apocalyptic dying of the sun which characterized Lord Kelvin's Second Law of Thermodynamics are negotiated in Schreber's delusional system. The crux is that Lord Kelvin's attempt to preserve theology within a scientific theory which Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (1984) describe involving “a dizzy leap from engine technology to cosmology” (116) made him an influential and renowned scientist whereas Schreber's system which extends human physiology to the cosmological level in order to preserve a divine creator kept him incarcerated in an asylum.

Schreber's need and ability to create a self-contained system points to cultural ideals which plague late nineteenth-century European society and 1950s America alike. Why does Schreber's delusional system frame itself within the discourses of science and theology? Why does paranoia became a vital area of study in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? My tentative suggestion is that paranoia has an observable connection to the increasing prevalence of scientific discourse throughout all social discourse and to the sense of inferiority experienced by non-scientists saturated with scientific terminology. As Prigogine and Stengers relate, the early nineteenth century represents the beginning of the popularization of science. As scientific discourse seeps into everyday language, other disciplinary discourses, and popular culture science becomes “a matter of professional consensus and magistral authority” (67). In order for his delusional system to be valid, Schreber must frame it within the context of empirical science. He offers his transformed body as proof that his theory is valid, even suggesting that his body be dissected after his death to verify his suppositions (251). Schreber's elaborate system, which he believes is scientifically verifiable, is partly predicated on a sense of inferiority in the face of scientific professions which he, as a man of law, cannot compete with in a public world in which science is increasingly valorized and glamorized. One goal of the conspiracy which he perceives existing between Flechsig and the elements of the anterior realms of God is to deny the Schreber race “choice of those professions which would lead to closer relations with God, such as that of nerve specialist” (57-58).⁷ Schreber's ability to understand the workings of the whole universe grants him a Newtonian scientific power which is denied in his role as Senatspräsident.

The anxiety and helplessness experienced by those in non-scientific professions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is expressed by Henry Adams in his “A Letter to American Teachers of History” (1910), in which he bitterly recounts the pressure on the history profession to conform to current scientific theories, commenting “the violent contradiction between Kelvin's Degradation and Darwin's Elevation was so profound,—so flagrant—so vital to mankind, that the historian of human society must be supposed to have watched with agonized interest the direction which science should take; since the decision of palaeontologists would fatally decide his own” (162-63). Adams laments the inferiority and helplessness the humanities must assume in relation to scientific theory. Adams fears that the meeting of the humanities and science prevalent in early twentieth century society is “converting metaphysics into a branch of physics” (196). Adams views the scientism which dominates his historical period as benefiting scientific discourse alone.⁸

Paranoia as a response to the increase in scientific popularization and the prevalence and technological development is a suggestive idea. In addition to the creation of a theoretical system, paranoia is characterized by a preservation of intellectual acumen in the paranoiac. J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis (1973) define paranoia as “chronic psychosis characterised by more or less systematised delusion, with a predominance of ideas of reference but with no weakening of the intellect, and, generally speaking, no tendency towards deterioration” (296). William G. Niederland (1974) notes apropos of Schreber that paranoia “requires superior intelligence” (31). Freud (1911) agrees with Schreber's pronouncement of himself as “a man of superior mental gifts and endowed with an unusual keenness alike of intellect and of observation” (84), and Schreber himself offers “the indestructibility of my reason” as proof for the validity of his theoretical system (123n). The intellectual ability of Schreber troubles Freud; the intellectual capabilities of Kirk Allen trouble Robert Lindner; the figure of the paranoiac haunts psychoanalysis with his or her ability to construct theoretical systems in a manner similar to the scientist and similar to that employed by the intellectual in general.⁹

Paranoiacs, however, are haunted by scientific and technological discourse. In addition to Schreber's scientism, which makes neurology a cosmological theory, other examples appear in early twentieth-century discourse. In “A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Disease” (1915), Freud discusses a female paranoiac who believes her lover has hired someone to photograph their lovemaking sessions. As she leaves her lover's apartment, she sees two men on the stairs whispering, one “carrying something which was wrapped up and looked like a small box,” an object the woman takes to be a camera (264). While Freud is concerned with discussing the case within his theory of paranoia as the product of repressed homosexuality, I am concerned with the technological basis of the woman's paranoia. The woman constructs a theory in which the photographer hides in the room and photographs her while she is in “a particularly compromising position” (264-65). Anxiety concerning technological development seems to be a factor in this case.

Similarly, in Victor Tausk's “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia” (1919) what characterizes his paranoiacs' delusional systems is the presence of a mysterious machine.¹⁰ Tausk's patients vaguely describe machines which control them physically and mentally, using technical language, a phenomenon which Tausk attributes to “the progressive popularization of the sciences,” but the patients' “knowledge of physics is inadequate to explain” the machine (521). The machine cannot be fully understood through the framework of known science: “all of the discoveries of mankind, however, are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvelous powers of this machine” (521). Thus the patient possesses the ability to divine the machine's existence, an ability which elevates the patient above the scientist. Although Tausk concludes that the machines are projections of the patients' genitalia, he also concludes that “the machines produced by man's ingenuity and created in the image of man are unconscious projections of man's bodily structure. Man's ingenuity seems to be unable to free itself from its relation to the unconscious” (556n). Tausk outlines a situation similar to Schreber's: why are Tausk's patients paranoiacs if their projections of the surface of the body are identical to the processes inventors undergo to create machines? The answer is the same as in the case of Schreber: they are not professional scientists, yet they are aware enough of scientific discourse to emulate it in their delusions. What are they creating if not valid scientific theory? They are creating science fiction in which they live on a daily basis.

Schreber's delusional system partakes heavily of the language of science fiction. His belief in “fleeting-improvised men” peopling the world after its destruction and his survival of the destruction relates to science-fiction discourse prevalent in the late nineteenth century and through the twentieth century. Schreber's “miraculously created puppets” (42-43n) relate to the nineteenth-century popularity of the golem which becomes the robot due to the popularity of Karel Capek's R.U.R. (1920) and which becomes the replicant in 1950s science-fiction films such as Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) and Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (1951). Schreber's belief in the human who is not really human and his intense belief in his continuing human essence in the face of human replicants is a science-fiction staple. Further, Tausk discusses a female patient who believes a replicant of her body influences her and believes further that “her mother, likewise the patient's male and female friends, are also under the influence of this machine or similar machines” (529). The fascinating figure of the replicant which characterizes contemporary science-fiction works such as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and Star Trek: The Next Generation is a common feature of the delusional worlds of paranoiacs.

Schreber's cosmological system further bears resemblances to science fiction discourse through its theorizing of inhabited planets in the universe. God, Schreber theorizes, through the light “emanating from the sun and other stars” can “perceive” everything occurring on earth and, Schreber adds, “possibly on other inhabited planets” (47). Schreber hints that the transmigration of souls after human death which occurs through God entering the corpse and absorbing the nerves, which, in Schreber's view, make up the soul, may be one technique God uses to populate other planets (51). Schreber argues that humans may have vague recollections of their earlier existences on other planets. He cites one of the fleeting-improvised men as having led “a second life as the ‘Insurance Agent Marx’ on some other planet during the process of transmigration of souls” (51). Within the framework of this theory, Schreber explores a concept dear to science fiction, parallel worlds.¹¹ Discussing a name given to him by one of the voices he hears, he comments that this man is said to be from Poland, but “one need not necessarily associate with the Polish nation of our earth, but has to bear in mind the possibility that this Polish nation may lead a second existence on some other star through the transmigration of souls” (74n).¹² Further, Schreber uses the comparison of earth to other planets as a way to minimizing “the moral decay” (73n) of earth, arguing that “the inhabitants of earth [are] in comparison distinguished by greater moral purity” (73n). The use of parallel worlds to define the earth as less corrupt is a technique common to science fiction as H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898), Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1946-58), Invaders From Mars (1953), and others attest.

For my purposes I want to focus on one more specific aspect of Schreber's Memoirs which connects it to science fiction discourse and to the increasing science-fact/science-fiction mythology which lies behind the atomic bomb project. Schreber's emphasis on rays as powerful, divine forces and as destructive, evil forces characterizes his theory. God as nerve, in Schreber's system, transforms himself into rays in order to make “all things of the created world” (46). The rays have not only incredible creative potential, but also curative value. Schreber comments that God has “the power to remove from the human body any germ of illness by sending forth a few pure rays” (48n). While the rays have curative and creative capabilities, they are also potentially destructive. Thus Schreber believes that “permanent contact with rays” is unmanning him (72). Although he eventually sees a positive goal in this transformation, as he will be the mother of a new race of humans, his first perception is that the unmanning is being enacted to transform him into a whore. The hostile rays also destroy Schreber's internal organs and he perceives a battle occurring within him between “pure” rays and “impure” rays (132).

Tausk's paranoiac patients are also obsessed with rays. Tausk discusses the fact that the “influencing machines” discussed by his patients use “rays or mysterious forces” to remove and produce “thoughts and feelings” (521). Tausk details how the machine is perceived by many male patients as producing seminal emissions which “deprive the patient of his male potency and weaken him” (521). Thus Tausk's patients' rays, like Schreber's, threaten to unman the paranoiac.

For people familiar with postwar reaction to gamma rays and the mythologizing of them as both curative and destructive, and as possessing the potential to deplete male potency, these associations are suggestive. What Schreber and Tausk's patients are suggesting is an increasing interpenetration between physics and science fiction in twentieth-century discourse, an interpenetration which found one expression in the popular conception of rays. Spencer R. Weart's study of mythology, physics, and science fiction prior to and during the Atomic Age discusses ways in which x-rays served in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a site where mythologized views of science were expressed. Weart (1988) relates that after Roentgen's discovery of x-rays in 1895—a discovery to which Schreber directly alludes (248)—“some people wrote to him [Roentgen] to express fear of his ‘death's rays’” (46). Similarly, William L. Laurence (1953 [1946]), official press commentator for the Manhattan Project, related that many civilians living in the Los Alamos area believed the secret project was “engaged in the manufacture of a ‘death ray’” (129). One central fear was the fear of male sterility due to excessive x-raying: this fear re-emerges as the central anxiety expressed by postwar men vis-à-vis radiation, which they fear will damage their sexual drive and reproductive capability.¹³ Likewise, as Weart relates, x-rays were perceived as a cure-all to medical problems. Weart relates that in early twentieth-century American and European society “doctors experimented by poking x-ray projectors and radioactive substances into every part of their patients' bodies” (48). Schreber and Tausk's patients are living both the reality of scientific discovery and the fiction which inextricably was wedded to these discoveries in the popular mind. For the non-scientist, paranoiac discourse may serve as a means of validating existence. What happens when the scientist himself is paranoiac?

Kirk Allen's delusional system exists in the context of one of the most mythologized areas of modern physics—the atomic bomb project. Whereas Schreber's perceived messianic purpose is a personal delusion, Kirk Allen's real life as a member of the Manhattan Project is steeped in messianic discourse. Atomic physicists were popularly viewed as mystics and gods in the prewar and postwar periods. In his account of his involvement in the Manhattan Project, physicist Richard P. Feynman (1980) discusses his explanation of the project to the Oak Ridge Plant, commenting “I was a god coming down from the sky! Here were all of these phenomena that were not understood and never heard of before—but I knew all about it; I could give them facts and numbers and everything else” (122). Truman's speech announcing the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima emphasizes the atomic physicists as a “chosen people” given the knowledge of atomic physics by God: “We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies” (quoted in Boyer 1985, 6). The atomic physicists were routinely portrayed as mystics emerging from the New Mexico desert with divine knowledge. The Enola Gay was given divine blessing before take-off (Boyer, 211). The holy “secret” supposedly behind the project fostered heightened security measures in the United States and was a central issue behind the Rosenberg Trial in the 1950s as Stanley Goldburg (1995) has recently argued (51-52). In his account of the Bikini Atoll tests of 1946, Bradley displays a typical theological mythologizing of the Manhattan project after encountering a blackboard used by physicists: “Here, as there, enshrouded in darkness and barbed wire, the unknown scientists had come to work on their unmentionable discoveries, communicated in their strange language and hieroglyphics, set up and conducted their experiments and then vanished, leaving only a scribbled note, ‘The Manhattan District was here’” (142).

The view of atomic scientists as religious mystics comes forth most strongly in William Laurence's Dawn Over Zero (1946) which recounts his experiences with the Manhattan Project at Trinity and in a plane over Nagasaki. Laurence describes the Trinity test in theological terms: “it was as though the earth had opened up and the skies had split. One felt as though one were present at the moment of creation when God said, ‘Let there be light’” (10-11). The creation of the atomic bomb is an event Laurence believes “has not happened since Genesis” (163). In a plane over Nagasaki, Laurence accepts his potential death: “I found myself unperturbed by the thought. If this was to be my last [story], could anyone wish for a better?” (238). Citing Father Siemes, Christian Missionary in Hiroshima, Laurence callously remarks that the use of the bomb on Hiroshima “was a great boost for Christianity” because he has heard that it fostered more conversions than those brought about “during the preceding long years” (248). Laurence's enthusiasm for the Atomic Age relies on a vision of a new world created by god-like physicists.

Manhattan Project physicists also participated in the cultural mythologizing of their discoveries. The choice of Los Alamos for the Trinity Site deliberately situated the scientists in the site of the mystic—the desert—and gave rise to views of the secret city as a mythical place. Ferenc Morton Szaz (1984) notes that local New Mexicans termed the site “‘the Magic Mountain’ or ‘Shangri-La’” (17).¹⁴ The scientists largely conceived of themselves as saviors who would end the war and usher in a new world of peace, a role, as Gar Alperovitz argues in his recent book on the creation of the atomic bomb, they were carefully presented with by U.S. military and government officials. Stealing their plot from H. G. Wells's 1914 novel The World Set Free, many Manhattan Project physicists believed they could create a situation in which war would become so horrific that world peace would ensue.¹⁵ Joseph O. Hirshfelder (1980), a scientist at Los Alamos, argues that “the recruiting slogan of the Manhattan Project was ‘Help win the war to end all wars’, and we felt that this was true. We thought that once World War II had been finished, wars would be much too horrible—there could never be another war, particularly if fearsome atomic energy was made available” (67-68). The primary instigator of this messianic purpose among the physicists was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the civilian coordinator of the Los Alamos site. The publication of One World or None in 1946, a collection of essays by scientists, journalists, and military officials, was the manifesto of the physicists' messianic political movement which lasted approximately from 1945-1950. The collection argues in favor of world government as the only means of preventing catastrophic nuclear war. In his contribution to the volume, which is representative, Albert Einstein argues that only if atomic bombs are placed under international jurisdiction and a world government is formed “can we have some assurance that we shall not vanish into the atmosphere, dissolved into atoms, one of these days” (76).

In Lindner's account of physicist Kirk Allen, he mythologizes Allen's messianic purpose in his work at Los Alamos. Discussing Allen's professional life, Lindner (1954) says he rejects lobotomy and electro-shock “therapy,” because Allen is “one of those valuable persons on whom the future of our civilization depends” (189). Further, Allen's brain houses information “on which both the individual's and the species' welfare depends” (189). Lindner's valorization of Allen, who presumably is working on the H-bomb project at the time of the analysis, as savior creates a problematic in which he is supposed to cure Allen of a messianic role in his delusional system while still affording him that role in 1950s society.

Allen's system in which he is lord of a planet is pervaded with the self-aggrandizement typical of the paranoiac. Allen's delusional system begins to be constructed when as a child he reads a work of fiction in which his own name coincides with the protagonist's name. Allen concludes that “what I was reading was my own biography” (171, emphasis original). Allen then begins to read most science fiction and fantasy works he encounters as part of his biography. Eventually, his creation of an elaborate alternative world allows him to live the adventures of an interplanetary savior who courts princesses, governs provinces, and battles “strange enemies” (172). Lindner speculates that Allen's attraction to atomic physics is due to the manner in which “his fantasy and his research interests (and assignments) coincided in certain ways” (173). Certainly the Manhattan Project is viewed popularly as a science-fiction project by many. Discussing the history of the project, Lawrence Badash (1980) observes that “more than once it appeared that nuclear efforts should be curtailed and the scientists' talents employed on less ‘science fiction’ type war projects” (xiv). Describing the experience of watching the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Laurence comments that “what we saw made us feel that we were Buck Rogers twenty-fifth-century warriors” (219). A Buck Rogers-like character is what Allen becomes in his delusional system.

Allen the physicist, much like Schreber the would-be nerve doctor, is at pains to describe his system in scientific terms. The mass of physical evidence he creates to verify his system attests to this. Further, he attempts to theorize his journeys as produced by teleportation, “special physic equipment,” a “unique organ,” or “wild talent” (176). Like Tausk's patients' mysterious machines, and Schreber's transforming body, the clenching physical evidence cannot be discovered by Allen. The secret of the paranoiac system remains mysterious much as the “secret” of the atomic bomb is shrouded in mystery for non-physicists in postwar American society.

The question remains as to why Allen, a research physicist afforded respect and fame, should fall victim to a paranoia. While I am not proposing to answer this question in any definitive manner, I want to suggest as a possibility Allen's need to construct an alternative world in which he is responsible for saving human lives in response to a reality in which he is responsible for working on a project which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of lives and by implication threatened to destroy the entire earth. Allen seeks to replace the scientific system which posits him as a god-destroyer with one in which he serves as a god-savior. While by no means is guilt an across-the-boards reaction on the part of the Manhattan Project scientists, it does characterize many scientists' reactions, Oppenheimer's being the most vocal of these. As Boyer (1985) summarizes, contemporary accounts and later reminiscences of Manhattan Project scientists suggest “that for many scientists involvement in the Manhattan Project was a traumatic experience that turned their lives inside-out” (49). Oppenheimer's statement to Truman that he believed he had blood on his hands and his view that the atomic scientists had known sin are responses, as Weart (1988) argues, to “the news from Hiroshima” (113). The personal accounts in Reminiscences of Los Alamos (1980) point to the varying levels of guilt and trauma experienced by those at Los Alamos. Elsie McMillan (1980), wife of Los Alamos physicist Edwin M. McMillan, discusses the excessive drinking at Los Alamos parties, explaining “because you had to let off steam, you had to let off this feeling eating your soul, oh God are we doing right?” (43). McMillan was one of the few wives at Los Alamos who knew what work the physicists were doing at this secret city.¹⁶ Richard Feynman (1980) discusses the trauma he experiences after returning to New York. Sitting at a restaurant in New York City he is overcome by a vision of the city in ruins like Hiroshima. The repression of Hiroshima results in Feynman thinking “I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making these new things? It's so useless” (132, emphasis original). Like trauma victims, some Manhattan Project scientists could not assimilate the unthinkable of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and hence relived it, like Feynman, in traumatic scenes.¹⁷

The most horrific aspect of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the most repressed aspect both culturally and individually—suffering bodies. Feynman's fear involves roads and bridges. Representations of the destruction of the two cities in the postwar period focused on ruins of building, scenes devoid of human bodies. Even John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946) which attempted to bring to the American public's attention the suffering involved in the destruction of this city focused on the survivors. The United States government confiscated and banned showing of actual footage shot in Hiroshima by Akira Iwasaki until 1968 (Taylor 1978, 128). An Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett, who photographed the aftermath in Hiroshima was detailed by the U.S. military and had his film and dispatch confiscated (Boyer 1985, 187). Even in one of the most popularized imagining of nuclear war occurring in the U.S., Life Magazine's “The 36-Hour War” (1945) shows nuclear holocaust occurring in the U.S. only in terms of destroyed buildings. New York's Fifth Avenue is sketched in ruins, but the survivors tower over rubble, not human bodies (35). As Ellen Schrecker (1995) argues concerning postwar America, “just as the logic of the Cold War demanded a demonized and stereotyped enemy, so too it required an idealized American state, one that, by definition, could not possibly kill innocent people” (137). Today at the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, N.M., the film shown to visitors, “Ten Seconds That Shook the World” (1963), sanitizes the horror of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by showing only ruined buildings in Hiroshima and ignoring the issue of Nagasaki altogether. In his discussion of Reminiscences of Los Alamos, Bryan C. Taylor (1980) argues that the work atmosphere at Los Alamos created “atomized workers” who through their commitment to “technological innovation” were encouraged to withdraw psychically from the world (433). Taylor further notes that what characterizes many accounts in the collection is “a hegemonic conception of the bomb which was rhetorically derived from a structure that excluded the representation of human victims” (437).

The withdrawal from the immediate suffering world demanded of Los Alamos scientists and of the larger American public in the postwar years also describes one of the first symptoms of paranoia. As Freud's (1911) commentary on Schreber indicates, the first step toward paranoia is the withdrawal from the world on the part of the paranoiac: “the end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe; for his subjective world has come to an end since he has withdrawn his love from it” (146). The delusional world of the paranoiac is an attempt “at recovery, a process of reconstruction” (147, emphasis original). In Freud's theory, the paranoiac withdraws from the world (decathexis), directs his or her cathectic energy to the ego resulting in self-aggrandizement, and then attempts to reestablish a cathectic relationship with the world in the form of a delusional system. As Micheline Enriquez (1988) notes, “the paranoiac's ‘insane’ responses are always attempts at a cure, and attempt to situate themselves in relation to an order in which their identity would be assured” (106, emphasis original).

Lacan makes the connection between trauma and paranoia more clear as he discusses the paranoiac's delusions as representing that which is foreclosed by the Symbolic returning in the guise of the imaginary, i.e., as hallucinations. The Real which traumatizes the subject returns in the paranoiac's system composed of delusions. The paranoiac, like the trauma victim, is attempting to represent the unrepresentable. Micheline Enriquez observes that the paranoiac, unlike the traumatized person, does not merely repeat the Real (the unrepresentable) but interprets it, and thus attempts to “graft sense upon non-sense, or to represent the un-representable” (111, emphasis original). Thus the unrepresentable pain of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of the larger unrepresentability of atomic power returns in postwar American society in various guises both culturally and individually. Thus the giant ants, sea creatures, and other monsters in 1950s science-fiction films, the communist demonic system of McCarythism, and Kirk Allen's delusional universe all represent attempts to interpret the trauma of nuclear bombs.

While Lindner (1954) traces Allen's withdrawal from the world to his adolescent seduction by a governess, Allen's frequent tripping to his paranoiac universe occurs only while he is working at Los Alamos. Thus Allen relates that “one moment I was just a scientist on X Reservation bending over a drawing board in a clapboard B.Q. in the middle of an American desert;—the next moment I was Kirk Allen, Lord of a planet in an interplanetary empire in a distant universe” (176). Allen's need for his alternative world heightens as he works on the atomic and hydrogen bomb projects. Further, when Lindner invades Allen's delusional world, feigning a belief in it which becomes real, he attempts to puncture the reality of the system by pointing to flaws in Allen's maps, flaws which lead Allen to speculate that his miscalculations have caused deaths. To Lindner's retort that the flaws are not serious, Allen responds, “not serious! why, man, these maps are used by my pilots. No wonder I've lost so many ships!” (191). Lindner reassures Allen that perhaps the maps they are examining are outdated but the pilots “are using corrected charts” (192). Allen is reassured. What this episode illustrates is that like the myth of the necessity of the use of the atomic bombs on Japan which effaced suffering bodies in the postwar period, Allen's paranoiac system, when intact, effaces suffering and reassures him through its totality that he is a superhero, not a careless scientist who is responsible for human deaths.

The twist in Lindner's narrative lies in his conversion to Allen's system, a conversion which frees Allen from his delusional world. Lindner's increasing belief in Allen's system points to the contagious nature of paranoia evident in Freud's account in which Schreber's system impinges on Freud's, and Freud can no longer clarify which system is delusional and which is valid. Lindner “catches” Allen's paranoia, commenting that “with Kirk's puzzled assistance I was taking part in cosmic adventures, sharing the exhilaration of the sweeping extravaganza he had plotted” (201). Lindner traces his attraction to Allen's system back to his interest in science fiction (197) and to his interest in popularizations of cybernetics, higher mathematics, and astrophysics (198). Lindner, like Allen, like Schreber, and like Freud, is attracted to paranoia because it becomes a means of creating a perfect Newtonian system.

The doubts, trauma, and gaps which plague actual scientific systems, and do so increasingly in the twentieth century, are effaced by the perfection of the paranoiac's system. Paranoia stands as a symptom of a culture which seeks complete answers in its scientific discourse and in its technological capabilities. Mental patient, psychoanalyst, and physicist alike feel the powerful lure of paranoiac systems. As Lindner (1954) states apropos of Allen's system, “I had been attracted by the stupendous fantasy and felt, in myself, its magnetic pull …” (206). Perhaps as long as the siren song of Newtonian totalization is still heard, paranoia will continue to lure humans into its seductive, complete answers to complex issues.

Notes

1. Carl Freedman (1984) notes that Schreber “with his estranging, self-consistent, paranoid world-vision is himself very nearly an SF author” (20). Freedman, however, does not develop this point at much length.

2. In “Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)” (1911), Freud notes the similarities between his theory of libidinal cathexes and Schreber's theory of rays, concluding that “it remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber's delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe” (154).

3. Robert Lindner is best known as the author of Rebel Without a Cause (1944), a work in which he pathologizes the delinquent teenager.

4. Elizabeth Auchincloss and Robert W. Weiss (1994) argue that paranoia illustrates “how as individuals we hunger for knowledge, demand control, struggle with passions, and above all, insist on feeling connected with other members of the human mass” (27). Carl Freedman (1984) views the paranoiac as having “an abnormally high investment in the hermeneutic practice” (16). Patrick O'Donnell (1992) views paranoia as the knowledge produced by a nation or community which allows the individual to gain “visible identity as historically unified subjects” (184). Marvin Goldwert (1993) associates paranoia with a search for teleological meaning. Edward Jayne (1978) analyzes all successful fictional worlds as paranoiac worlds.

5. See Lacan (1977), “On a Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” and Joan Copjec's (1982) discussion of the Lacanian subject as the paranoiac subject.

6. Paul Emil Flechsig was a neurologist who treated Schreber at his nerve clinic first in 1884, when Schreber spent six months there and left apparently cured of hypochondria. After being named Senatspräsident in 1893 Schreber was readmitted to Flechsig's clinic for seven months, after which he was transferred to the Sonnestein Asylum under the care of Dr. G. Weber for nine years. He completed the memoirs in 1901 and they were published in 1903. He drafted an appeal which led to his release from Sonnestein in 1903. He lived in retirement until 1907, when he suffered another breakdown and was sent to the mental hospital at Leipzig-Dosen. he died there in 1911, physically weak and mad.

7. Schreber divides God into anterior and posterior realms. He uses Ormuzd and Ariman, Persian deities, to represent these realms. Schreber's other view of the goal of the conspiracy is that it denies the Schreber race offspring. Schreber and his wife had unsuccessfully attempted to have children prior to his breakdown. For commentaries concerning the significance of Schreber's childlessness to his illness see Freud (1911), Robert White (1961), M. Katan (1953), and W. Niederland (1974).

8. This use of “scientism” is derived from David Knight (1986). The term points to culture's tendency to extend scientific terms and ideas to various areas of life due to the prestige and glamour afforded scientific discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am indebted to Bruce Clarke for drawing my attention to this term.

9. Some commentators point out the truth value in paranoiac discourse despite its delusional character. Enriquez (1988) notes that “paranoiac discourse, and this is not its least fascinating aspect, very often presents this double aspect of being at once a mad delusional discourse outside reason, and at the same time, a passionate and often pertinent denunciation of disorders and evils ‘glaring within reality’” (119). Harold P. Blum (1994) comes to a similar conclusion about paranoia's ability to reveal social injustices (98). David Porush argues that paranoia is a symptom related “to the fear of technology” (106). While I agree that fear of technology and scientific discourse may be a factor in paranoia, it seems to me that paranoia is more characterized by a desire to participate in technological and scientific discourse rather than by a rejection of this discourse.

10. Victor Tausk was a psychoanalyst and contemporary of Freud's. This essay was read before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1918 and published in German in 1919. An English translation of it was published in 1933 in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly.

11. For example, the following science-fiction works deal with parallel worlds: Larry Niven's All The Myriad Ways (1971), Poul Anderson's The High Crusade (1960), Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror” (1967), and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes “Crossover” (1994) and “Through the Looking Glass” (1995).

12. The name Schreber cites is Count Czartorisky, a man he is told by the voices is one of the Eternal Jews. One vital recent area of criticism of the Schreber case has focused on questions of Jewish identity which haunt Schreber's Memoirs and Freud's commentary on the work. See, for example, Daniel Boyarin (1995), Jay Geller (1994), and Harrison L. Gruman (1994).

13. Paul Boyer (1985) cites “mass sterility” as central concern of post-atomic war scenarios (69). As Jack G. Shaneen and Richard Taylor relate (1978), Hollywood's first representation of the atomic bomb project, The Beginning or the End, contains a scene cut from the final version in which a crew member asks “Is it true that if you fool around with this stuff (atomic equipment) long enough you don't like girls anymore?” (7-8). David Bradley (1983 [1948]), in his account of his role as “Geiger man” at the Bikini Atoll tests of 1946, relates that the primary fear on the part of the navy crewman at the test concerning radiation centered around sexual potency and reproductive capability after being exposed to it (111; 152).

14. Szaz (1984) mythologizes the project as well, portraying the use of the atomic bombs on Japan as occurring because “the furies of history, wrapped in the garb of the Manhattan Project, had assumed a momentum of their own” (156).

15. In The World Set Free, Wells (1914), predicts the development of the atomic bomb and its use in the next world war. The horror of the weapon leads to peace and world government in Wells's scenario. The novel was widely read by members of the project. At the Chicago laboratory someone placed a copy of the novel in the laboratory's library (Weart 1988, 97).

16. Oppenheimer's wife also knew of the work being done and possibly informed McMillan. As Rachel L. Holloway (1993) argues, Oppenheimer's informing of his wife and other family members of his work on the project loomed large in the 1953 hearing which resulted in Oppenheimer losing his security clearance.

17. See Cathy Caruth's Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), with special reference to George Bataille's “Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima” (1995).

I want to thank Antony Oldknow of Eastern New Mexico University for his helpful comments on drafts of this essay. I am also indebted to Bruce Clarke of Texas Tech University who allowed me to sit in on his Literature and Science seminar which helped clarify many of the points pursued here.

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