Introduction

For the purposes of this book, science fiction is defined broadly in the terms advanced by Darko Suvin, with a focus on the genre from the late nineteenth century onwards. Psychology is conceived as the modern Western discipline, running from the origins of experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century to the ascendance of neuroscience as a disciplinary rival in the late twentieth century. Five different functions for psychological discourses in science fiction are proposed. The didactic-futurological function educates the non-specialist through extrapolation of psychological technologies, teaching within the context of futurological forecasting. The utopian function anchors in historical possibility the imagining of a currently non-existent society, whether utopian or dystopian. The cognitive-estranging function defamiliarizes and denaturalizes social reality by extrapolating current social tendencies and/or construct unsettling fictional analogues of the reader’s world. The metafictional function self-consciously thematizes within narrative fiction the psychological origins, nature, and function of science fiction as a genre. The reflexive function addresses the construction of individuals and groups who have reflexively adopted the ‘truth’ of psychological knowledge.

Psychoanalytic psychology

This chapter begins with science fiction’s use of proto-psychoanalytic wisdom inspired by Nietzsche. Texts such as H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Croquet Player (1936), John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), and Alfred Bester’s ‘Oddy and Id’ (1950) present civilization as a fragile veneer concealing displaced instinctual gratification. Superficially, such conservatism continues in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). However, both these novels challenge Freudianism by thematizing Freud’s pessimistic model of the mind – a critique intensified in Barry N. Malzberg’s The Remaking of Sigmund Freud (1985). Dreams, moreover, are celebrated in Ursula Le Guin’s Jungian novel The Word for World is Forest (1972), which estranges the colonization of traditional societies, and counterposes rootedness in the collective unconscious (thereby developing an aesthetic pioneered by Frank Herbert’s The Dragon in the Sea (1956)). Generic re-evaluation of psychoanalysis continues in Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon (1966), which (like Bester’s The Demolished Man (1956)) endorses psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and the unreliable narrative of Frederik Pohl’s Gateway (1977), where the protagonist’s psychoanalytic psychotherapy reconciles him to a future reality of brutal capitalist exploitation.

Cognitive psychology

This chapter explores the entanglement of cognitive psychology with science fiction, but avoids familiar motifs from post-cyberpunk fiction. The beginnings of cognitive psychology are traced to the foundational work of figures such as George Miller and Noam Chomsky, subsequently codified into a self-conscious school by Ulrich Neisser. Jack Finney’s classic narrative, The Body Snatchers (1955), draws upon earlier proto-cognitivist discourses to contend, often quite didactically, that the human mind typically operates as a biased, limited capacity information processor. With this psychological and political thesis, the novel explores possible personal, political and aesthetic strategies that might free the human mind from its stereotypes and blind spots. The unsettling of everyday perception in The Body Snatchers is systematically generalized by the linguistic novums of Ian Watson’s The Embedding (1973), Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 (1966), and Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’ (1998), which imagine that language (and thought) is fundamentally constructive of perceived reality. These stories ask broader, cosmological questions about the nature and accessibility of ultimate reality – with Watson’s novel ultimately proposing a mystical riposte to cognitivism’s model of the mind.

Conclusion

The conclusion firstly draws out some broader theses from the preceding chapters. It then provisionally analyses the deployment of science fiction tropes within the body of official psychological literature, whether at a popular or more scholarly level. Although science fiction may be exploited in a very simple way within psychological theory and practice as a popularizing and didactic tool, there are other, more complex and often self-conscious ways that the genre is used. Psychologists as varied as Sandra and Daryl Bem, Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, and Steven Pinker, invoke different speculative narratives of the future as a way to legitimate their particular psychological claims. Perhaps surprisingly, psychology can also make use of science fiction motifs to offer cognitive estrangement of the present, be this consciously, in critical feminist psychology, or unwittingly, as in the famed obedience experiments of Stanley Milgram.

Existential-humanistic psychology

Existential-humanistic psychology recovers neglected philosophical and spiritual categories regarded as proper to human being, in contrast with animal life or inanimate systems. Existential-humanistic proto-discourses are important to Vincent McHugh’s I Am Thinking of My Darling (1943), in which an emerging ideal of personal authenticity queries the American Dream in 1940s’ New York. McHugh’s critical utopia contrasts with the ponderous extrapolations of Colin Wilson in The Mind Parasites (1967) and The Space Vampires (1976), and Doris Lessing in The Four-Gated City (1969). Both these authors – despite their widely differing positions in the literary canon – use science fiction as a didactic and futurological (even prophetic) medium in which existential psychology serves as the supposed rationale for spiritual apotheosis (including the cultivation of psi powers). A more fruitful post-war deployment of existential-humanistic psychology can be found in texts such as Theodore Sturgeon’s ‘And Now the News …’ (1956), Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), which critique the instrumental tendencies of mainstream psychology.

Behaviourism and social constructionism

This chapter explores science fiction’s deployment of behaviourism and social constructionism, which insist on the malleability of human psychology. B.F. Skinner’s near-future utopia. Walden Two (1948), authorizes the behaviourist model of the self by inscribing operant conditioning into long-standing progressivist discourses. But this is subverted by the novel itself, which persistently endorses historical, philosophical, and ethical discourses that have supposedly been rendered obsolete. Behaviourism is further undermined by Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971), and William Sleator’s House of Stairs (1974). These narratives juxtapose against behaviourism counter-discourses from different sources, including wisdom traditions such as world religions, and also antagonistic discourses such as psychoanalysis and existentialism. Social constructionism encourages science fiction to dissolve psychological and cultural givens of our time (such as heterosexuality or patriarchy) in a future or alternative social order. With enormously varying complexity and ethical sensitivity, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Edmund Cooper’s 1972 Who Needs Men? and Naomi Mitchison’s Solution Three (1974), explore the utopian and dystopian reconstruction of gender relations, but are troubled by issues of natural and cultural diversity.

Evolutionary psychology

This chapter explores the importation into science fiction of evolutionary psychology, including earlier schools such as Social Darwinism and sociobiology. Social Darwinism motivates an anti-utopian tendency to forecast a state of future decadence that can be arrested only by the re-activation of dormant evolutionary mechanisms. This pattern may be familiar enough from H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), but is less easily perceived in Octavia Butler’s sequence, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), which predicts a new evolutionary lineage for homo sapiens emerging from a future in which the USA is a failed state. The authority of evolutionary psychology is challenged in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985), which satirizes the sociobiological paradigm by taking to the point of absurdity evolutionary explanations for human aggression. Science fiction can, moreover, escape hackneyed Social Darwinist discourses by drawing upon alternative evolutionary psychologies. Naomi Mitchison’s future utopia in Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) draws upon attachment theory to offer a renewed feminist ethic of compassion and imaginative understanding, while also estranging our dominant ethical systems.