Books: Schizophrenic SF?

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Is science fiction off its rocket? Definitely, says Cleveland's Robert Plank, a psychiatric social worker, in a current medical journal. Argues Plank (in International Record of Medicine and General Practice Clinics): many science-fiction plots betray "schizophrenic manifestations" in the minds of their authors, who work out their fantasies by literary catharsis. Similarly, he concludes, readers release the steam from their own unconscious by reading the fantasies.

"Episodes of space travel are by no means rare in the imaginings of the mentally ill," says Plank. Equally symptomatic is the "last man" motif, in which all mankind has been annihilated save for one individual—or, more productively, a fertile couple, "Far from being a byproduct of atomic fission," Plank contends, this theme goes back to Greek mythology and "grows from the fertile soil of unconscious drives." Such standard schizophrenic symptoms as delusions of grandeur, of persecution, and of superhuman influence are science-fiction staples.

Psychologist Plank would not go so far as to say that science-fiction writers are "crazy" because they reflect schizophrenic trends. Rather, he argues, these signs are becoming more conspicuous in a mechanized civilization. Science fiction may be bad science and worse fiction, but to a good wig-picker it "is a sensitive barometer of our changing mental climate."