On Kirk Allen, Subculture Media, And Disability Justice
24 9月 2024
This article is about the psychiatric pathologization of a science fiction fan. There is a brief mention of sexual abuse and a damn load of sanist language.
While procrastinating on writing an article about Cordwainer Smith and his Japanese fandom for Kansoulations, I've been reading about the politics of mental health and neurodiversity. I plan to write more about these topics later as they relate to conversations with my partner about autism and how I think about disability and capitalism in general (now available).
But juggling between the two projects has gotten me thinking about the one intersecting aspect they have in common. I know that if I ever want to talk about Smith, I have to write about it. It's something I've been thinking about for a while. At the same time, I don't think it's a subject I necessarily want to bring up while talking about what makes Smith such an interesting writer to me. Like, I'd be fine if I don't bring it up at all.
Rather than avoid the discussion altogether or find a way to hammer the topic into my essay, I'm going to preempt my article on the writer by discussing this one aspect by itself and how it orients my thoughts around disability: Kirk Allen.
Kirk Allen was the most famous patient of psychoanalyst Robert Lindner. His case study, "The Jet-Propelled Couch", captured the imagination of many people, especially in the science fiction community, because he thought he was the protagonist of the science fiction stories he'd read. It was originally published in Harper's as a two-parter before being collected and expanded in Lindner's The Fifty-Minute Hour.
Not long after, science fiction fans began to theorize about who Kirk Allen really was. While there are competing theories today, the main one is Cordwainer Smith.
You don't really need to know Smith to understand what I'm getting at in this article, except that he wrote many short stories in the same universe and he did work for the US state. Admittedly, part of his charm is that his stories read strangely -- I once described his work as "an alien trying to write science fiction for humans," and I still stand by that. There are also a few Cordwainer Smith scholars, including one who is writing a biography of him, who argue that Lindner must have appropriated some parts of Smith's life. But there are others, including Karen L. Hekkelson in The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith and Smith's daughter, who question this claim and have found no evidence linking Allen and Smith.
Whatever the truth is, I don't think it really matters to anyone but biographers because Kirk Allen is less a person than a psychiatric symbol. What people take away from reading this case study is not a deeper understanding of what makes his science fiction writing compelling, but a pathological understanding of subculture media and its fans.
Kirk Allen was first introduced to Robert Lindner via a referral from his previous doctor:
“This fellow is a man in his thirties,” he said, “a research physicist with us out here. As far as I can tell, he’s perfectly normal in every way except for a lot of crazy ideas about living part of the time in another world–on another planet. Washington sent him out to do a key job, and until a few weeks ago he was going great guns. But lately he’s out of contact with the work so much and for so long that something’s got to be done about it.”
Despite this preamble, the doctor believed Allen didn't need hospitalization. He saw Allen's fantasizing as a "perfectly innocuous business" that did not disrupt everyday life.
In short, Allen seemed to be doing just fine, even if he had unconventional ideas about his own identity. Indeed, when Lindner and Allen finally met, Lindner couldn't see him as the "mad scientist" he imagined: just an eloquent "junior executive" type who liked science fiction.
But Lindner claims that the neglect of his parents, living in Hawaii as a white child, and the sexual abuse by one of his caretakers left him with feelings of sin and guilt. Allen's turn to fiction and later to science fiction, especially when he encountered his name in these books, allowed him to dissociate from his traumatic childhood:
“As I read about the adventures of Kirk Allen in these books the conviction began to grow on me that the stories were not only true to the very last detail but that they were about me. In some weird and inexplicable way I knew that what I was reading was my biography. Nothing in these books was unfamiliar to me: I recognized everything–the scenes, the people, the furnishings of rooms, the events, even the words that were spoken. My everyday life began to recede at this point. In fact, it became fiction–and, as it did, the books became my reality.”
While the novels-turned-biographies had initially served to "refresh" his memory, he needed much more and began to recall new biographical facts of his life by worldbuilding:
Assisted by the maps, charts, diagrams, architectural layouts, genealogical schemes, and timetables he had painstakingly worked out while using the books for his guide, he filled in spaces between the volumes with fantasy “recollections” of his own; and when this was done, he began the task of his life: that of picking up where his “biographer” had left off and recording the subsequent history of the heroic Kirk Allen.
After growing up, he began working for the US and spent his free time outside of his scientific duties sketching out his science fiction world. We're talking documents and maps, the kind of worldbuilding that epic fantasy writers are stereotyped to do. He also believed he was someone in another world while working his day job:
One moment I was just a scientist on X Reservation bending over a drawing board in a clapboard BOQ 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, garbed in the robes of his exalted office, rising from the carved desk he had been sitting at, walking toward a secret room in his palace, going over to a filing cabinet in a recess in the wall, extracting an envelope of photographs, and studying the pictures with intense concentration.
And he would then claim that he could recreate the photographs of the universe from scratch. This activity and more was regarded by Allen as something very ordinary; sure, his experiences were "extraordinary," but he was simply endowed with some "psychic quality or ability". Why this should cause confusion and interest in anyone else is beyond him.
I also agree with Allen. Why the fuss?
Of course, I don't intend to minimize the connection between trauma and escapism. I just don't see this "escapism" as harmful. Assuming Lindner's account is accurate, there is nothing in his actions that harms him or others. Even Lindner admits this: Allen is portrayed as a confident and charming person who works well with his colleagues.
Instead, the conflict comes from Lindner's struggle to see Allen as just another guy. Lindner boiled down his first impressions of Allen into two things:
Unlike other "psychotics" who might acknowledge that something had gone wrong with them, Allen was unable to "comprehend his mental abnormality". He was one of the rare cases who understood that "his madness was a private one" that originated in childhood, and that his public "psychosis" only disturbed his supervisor and doctor. Lindner wrote that at first he felt completely helpless "against the wall of Kirk's absolute conviction of his own sanity."
Allen's "psychosis" ultimately preserved his well-being. While Lindner conceded that "every psychosis represents a life-saving maneuver on the part of the individual – is in other words his way of solving the conflict between the world and himself", he believed that there must be another method found in "some area of life - through therapy or otherwise" that could "yield satisfactions comparable to those available to the person through his madness". Lindner could find nothing that could "compete with the unending gratifications of his fantasy." Allen could not be without his imagination. "How, then," Lindner writes, "could he be restored to sanity and yet remain alive?"
Sanity is a recurring word in Lindner's impressions of Allen. Allen believed he was sane while Lindner did not. Instead, Lindner wanted to make Allen conform to his version of a sane person: someone who didn't need to rely on "psychosis" to live. And yet, there is no reason given why "psychosis" is negatively valued while "sanity" is positively valued in the case study; they just are.
This section fascinates me because Lindner seemed unaware that he was making value judgments. He, like the doctor and the supervisor, reacted viscerally to Allen's articulate self-description. If anything, Allen made it clear that he didn't subscribe to their pathologizing view of him and that he could function well in society. The fact that he regularly attended Lindner's therapy sessions isn't commented on much in the article; it seems as if Allen was just following his superior's orders like a proper member of the state. The one unconventional activity he did was not at all detrimental to his work. It was just pathologized as somehow making him disabled and needing help.
I find this part to be a clear description of what disability justice and neurodiversity activists mean when they distinguish between the medical and social models of disability.
The medical model locates disabilities as problems in our bodies that can (and should) be fixed. On the other hand, the social model shows that society disables people by erecting physical and social barriers that make it difficult for people to go about their lives (the classic example: people who use wheelchairs can't go up stairs, but they can use ramps -- yet there are many buildings that still don't do this). As Micha Frazer-Caroll writes in Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health, "this shift in emphasis, from blame to barriers, has historically empowered activists to focus on removing social obstacles facing disabled people."
The social model of disability is by no means a complete or authoritative understanding of the many dimensions of disability, but it is a profound way of looking at how society ignores and exacerbates the problems of disabled people through medicalization. It recognizes that suffering extends far beyond the contours of psychiatry.
So in the case of Kirk Allen, what are we to make of his fantasies of being some kind of John Carter, rescuing princesses on distant planets? It's definitely "weird" -- there's no denying that. But even if we assume that we're working in some kind of pathology paradigm, he hasn't suffered or encountered discrimination. He's just "weird", and it's hard for me to read him as a disabled person from this case study.
But I think that appearance of normalcy was what drove Lindner to pursue Allen as a patient. He saw Allen's behavior in society as abnormal, as a deviation from a norm, because he had these fantasies. The fact that Allen could adapt so well to the demands of capitalist society while living with these fantasies was, to use academic language, too fucked up.
I just find it fascinating that the psychiatric gaze in this case study is so dehumanizing that it sees even socially appropriate behavior as pathological. The idea of someone posing as a "normal" person is just too much, man.
In the introduction to The Fifty-Minute Hour, Jonathan Lear writes,
This book is written in the heroic age of American psychoanalysis. The author, Robert Lindner, blazes his way through neurosis and psychosis the way John Wayne blazed his way through Indian territory; he tracks his way through the hidden nooks of the inner world the way that Philip Marlowe tracked his way through low-life Los Angeles. The comparison is apt, because Dr. Lindner is a self-styled American individualist: he trusts his intuitions, he is willing to bend the rules to follow a hunch, he will flout convention in response to an out cry of human suffering. Let us be clear: in the five reported cases, the author comes close to getting himself killed on one occasion, and severely attacked on another. There are professions -- baseball, for instance -- in which batting two for five is pretty damn good, but psychoanalysis is not one of them. Still, like every Fifties American hero, the author lives to tell the tale.
Lear views Lindner as something of a mythical figure, a cowboy-hero who says "This psychosis isn't big enough for the both us [sic]". While he doesn't consider his case studies to be proper psychoanalysis and recognizes instead that Lindner and his patients live in "a [fictional] world where one can be cured of communism and impotence, of fascism and homosexuality, at the same time", he claims there is some truth to this "swashbuckling adventure with psychosis".
The real value of Lindner's spectacular case studies comes from the way he puts "psychotic fantasy" into thought-provoking words. If the therapist ignores this aspect, they may
deprive psychotic patients of the opportunity to come to some sort of thoughtful control of their inner lives , and we deprive ourselves of a broad-scale understanding of the nature and power of fantasy. For in psychosis, if one will only look, fantasy stands out in bold relief.
I enjoyed reading this introduction for so many reasons. It's funny how much the introduction talks about how dated the book is while discussing homosexuality and communism as pathologies. I also liked how Lindner was just compared to cowboys embarking on the colonization of Indigenous lands. Imagine all the yeehaws critical theory scholars could get from reading this book as an example of medicalization and colonization.
But I'd also like to point out how American individualism characterizes Lindner's psychoanalysis, but the same cannot be said of his patients. Kirk Allen, although he worked for the U.S. state, could not be described in this language as an American individualist.
There is no mention of his nonconformity or ability to navigate social norms in this introduction, even though it was the case that made Lindner famous. He was only one of five patients in Lindner's casebook. Yet, he was also the individual who most challenged Lindner's psychoanalysis because he could speak his own mind against Lindner.
The whole case study is a battle between two people's views on what is and isn't a pathological tendency. Lindner himself describes Allen as "a noble opponent who courteously permits his antagonist to choose the time, the place, even the weapons of their encounter." Not a word is said about it in the introduction.
No, the story is and has always been about Robert Lindner the cowboy therapist who takes "psychotic fantasies" seriously. His metholodogical individualism is the story.
And therefore, his myth-making must continue: we return to the psychoanalyst couch and discuss the so-called psychotic fantasies of Kirk Allen. We read about Allen's impressive 12,000-paged "biography", which "read like fiction" to Lindner. More numbers are thrown: 200 chapters, 2,000 more notes, "a glossary of names and terms that ran to more than 100 pages", and so much more. Lindner wondered how he could "treat" him, and "the authorities" who sent him for his sake "feared that in his disturbed condition he was a poor security risk who could neither be kept on the job nor discharged." The US Empire of Normality demanded that Lindner "cure" Allen of his "psychosis" at all costs.
This tall order could only be accomplished by "enlist[ing] his active participation in the treatment. The radical solution that Lear writes so much about in the introduction is to accept the premises of the fantasy with a twist: he's going to poke world-building holes in his theory of his future self. He was ready to start again his "new assault on [Allen's] psychosis":
One morning when Kirk came into my office for his regular appointment, I was sitting at the desk studying his two astronomical charts and nine star maps, and the section of his “records” dealing with astronomical research. Since we were not using the couch in this phase of our work, he drew up a chair. My silent concentration on the materials before me eventually produced–as I knew it would–sufficient tension to cause him to break the quiet.“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Plenty,” I replied. “These distances are all fouled up. Either your astronomical projection from Srom Norbra X is wrong or the star maps are way off. They just don’t make sense. Look here…"
What follows is a long conversation about the unit of measurement Allen used to chart his maps and the error in converting ecapalim to miles. This planted the seed of doubt in his mind. As Lindner writes,
I had the almost telepathic impression that Kirk’s mind was a turmoil of questions about me. Heretofore, he had merely accepted my acceptance of his fantasy. Now, with his own faith in it slightly shaken and mine apparently unruffled, he was perplexed.
In Lindner's eyes, this session and many others like it "contributed a little more leverage for prying my patient out of his madness". He conceived Allen's "delusions" as having room for only one person, so that "when another person invades the delusion, the original occupant finds himself literally forced to give way." Lindner considered his intervention effective because it forced Allen to reevaluate himself.
Allen was going to get cured. Hip-hip hooray.
But the case study continues: Allen ceases to be the focus while Lindner philosophizes about psychosis, the "immobility" of his psychiatric work, his reluctant admiration for fantasy and science fiction work, and what he calls "his disorder".
This psychoanalyzing of himself was foreshadowed at the very beginning of the article:
The chair behind the psychoanalyst’s couch is not the stationary object it seems. I have traveled all over the world on it, and back and forth in time. But it remained for Kirk Allen to take me out of this world when he transformed the couch in my consulting room into a space ship.
The boredom Lindner faced in his line of work made him indulge in the very "psychosis" from which Allen supposedly suffered:
Sometimes a problem about the “records” could not be settled in discussions with Kirk, and I seemed to be compelled by rising anxiety to work out a solution on my own. When I managed such a solution the relief it afforded me was intense–so was the pleasure I took in Kirk’s liberal congratulations. Often, too, when neither discussion with Kirk nor the efforts I made on my own sufficed to clarify some point, I found it “necessary” for him to obtain the required information by “journeying” to the place where it could be discovered.On occasions of this kind, I actually ordered Kirk to make these excursions into the fantasy, then discovered myself awaiting his “return” with extraordinary eagerness.
Lindner assured the reader he did not become "psychotic" and insisted that his condition "was that of enchantment developing toward obsession." He loved the "wonderful details [that] were made available to me". His "symptoms" intruded into his daily life outside of his sessions with Allen. He realized he "fell into a trap that awaits all unwary therapists of the mind" when his activities began to resemble his patient. Daydreams had turned into "psychic distress" for him. He had to use his "accustomed tool" of psychoanalysis to "allay the more acute symptoms and to initiate those insightful processes that lead to recovery".
But something remarkable happened that "not only broke what remained of my spell but marked the successful conclusion of Kirk's treatment": Kirk Allen finally admitted that his fantasies were all make-believe. He realized he was "crazy" during his sessions and had been "deluding" himself for years, but he couldn't stop telling Lindner these "lies":
“Because I felt I had to,” he said. “Because I felt you wanted me to!”
"The Jet-Propelled Couch" is a riveting essay. Without a doubt, it's the most fun I've had researching a writer outside of reading their published works. I can see why it has captured the imagination of science fiction fans, especially Cordwainer Smith's, as it seems to "ring true" about our psyche (as Lear puts it).
The twist at the end is a neat literary touch. Like an Agatha Christie rugpull, it emphasizes that the investigator is as vulnerable as the people they're supposed to save. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls the last sentence of Lindner's essay "a touchstone of the Sense of Wonder" for many readers:
And sometimes, as I gaze above, I smile to myself and whisper: “How goes it with the Crystopeds? How are things in Seraneb?”
When I first read it, I was also convinced that this case study was about Cordwainer Smith. Not only did this essay show another side of the writer I was researching, but it made me believe that I was peering into some truths about our unconscious. Regardless of my skepticism of Freudian theories, his literary qualities were so dazzling that I was more than happy to accept this as fact.
But now I realized it was a red herring, but I also could not ignore the sanist implications found in this essay.
I must stress this again: Kirk Allen didn't hurt anyone when he thought he was a science fiction superhero. He was a productive worker until his superiors decided he was too "weird" and therefore a "security threat" whatever that means.
We might even consider his behavior "normal" these days. He's just someone who kinnies a character. I'm sure some people would still consider kinning to be "weird" behavior, but weirdness is practically a deviation from the norm. Anytime you do something that's a little different, you're just going to be seen as "not normal".
I can only read this essay as someone who has been forced to suppress his neurodivergent thinking in order to fit into what the psychiatrist deems normal. That's just neuronormativity. This is the violence that people talk about when they write about psychiatric control.
And besides, what's the problem of having fantasies that "intrude" into your daily life? Arguably, I think people have too much "reality" these days. When Lindner writes that "slowly the whole amazing defense collapsed or better, decayed, to be replaced, item for item, by reality", it reads to me like the decaying of dreams and utopian fantasies. It allows the reassertion of capitalist realism: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
I think the obsession with "reality" as a principle allows people to become so cynical that they become nihilistic. Think of realpolitik thinkers: they cannot imagine world peace, so we must always take up arms; they chastise naivety by saying, "This is the way the world is. Grow up."
Thus, I agree with Peter Sedgwick when he writes in Psychopolitics that "the radical who is only a radical nihilist is for all practical purposes the most adamant of conservatives." I see "reality" as a policing concept to stamp out utopian visions for a better world and force people to give up and conform to capitalist society.
It sickens me to read how Kirk Allen was forced to pathologize himself into a patient of Robert Lindner. And it doesn't make the sanist narrative about Kirk Allen palatable when people say that the "cured" Allen went on to write some of the best science fiction ever written. It meant that what I was reading and analyzing had repression painted all over it.
I do not want to see Cordwainer Smith's stories as proof that he has overcome his neurodivergence. It's too pathologizing and reductive for me. Everything about the treatment of Kirk Allen is revolting.
While reading about mental health had certainly radicalized me, my disgust with the pathologizing of people like Kirk Allen came from my studies of Japanese socioeconomics. To explain the growing population of dissident youth in the 70s and alienated adults from the 80s to the present, academics of all stripes (especially psychologists) blamed the rise of hikikomori and NEETs for the Lost Decades.
In a 2003 Psychology Today article titled "Total Eclipse of the Son: Why are millions of Japanese youths hiding from friends and family", the hikikomori phenomenon has been "likened to Asperger's syndrome, a mild variant of autism" by Western psychologists. However, the hikikomori "disorder" was "considered culturally unique and is linked to violence". One Japanese psychologist thought it was caused by "neglectful parenting," which sounds a lot like the debunked refrigerator mother theory.
But there are many arguments why Japanese youth might be alienated and unemployed: the so-called Japanese miracle was a bubble, the privatization of public services initiated by prime ministers like Koizumi Junichiro caused a lot of economic chaos, and so on. While not perfect, Anne Allison's Precarious Japan analyzes Welcome to the NHK as a truthful exploration of what it means to be a hikikomori: alienated from capitalist Japan, people look to otaku culture for something.
Instead, we continue to see the pathologization of the otaku media both inside and outside Japan. Robert Lindner's neuronormativity is still on full display in discourses about what to do with Japanese youth. If you like subculture media a little too much, the essay's medical model implies, you need to be fixed by therapy because you're not being productive enough.
I see subculture media as a breathing space for alienated people. While not everyone in these spaces is marginalized, I see these works as potential places to explore our own alienation. If the mainstream isn't making work that resonates with us, then we have to make our own.
That means airing our dirty laundry. It's going to be read as "weird," as deviations from an implicit norm. Contra Lear, fantasies are not cathartic but struggles to conceive something more beautiful and acceptable than we currently live in.
Not everyone is going to like what we're doing, but that's okay: let's celebrate our recognition of our alienation when we talk about what excites and saddens us. In fact, we should double down when societies try to paper over our alienation and call it a non-issue. We should be proud that we are "wrong" because that's what we are.
I write for the Kirk Allen in all of us who wish we were something more than what capitalism has made us. He represents the subculture: unacceptable by societal standards, yet proud. And he shall have the final word to Robert Lindner: "Crystopeds and Seraneb are in fact doing fine, thank you. How about you?"