The Analysis of an “Outsider”1

Lewin, (10) in his treatise on elation, reminds us of the following: “Sensitive to stimuli from the id, the superego and the external world, the ego, to settle conflicting claims must often try to eliminate or avoid the demands made by one or the other conflicting party [italics mine].”

Colin Wilson, the first of England's “angry young men,” has also grappled with this problem in The Outsider, (13) defining the Outsider as “the man who has a perception of the unstable foundation that human life is built upon and feels that chaos and anarchy lie deeper than the order that most of his fellows believe in.

“The Outsider is not a freak; he is only more sensitive than the sanguine and ‘healthy minded’ type of man. He begins with certain inner tensions. How can they be resolved?” (13)

It seems to me more than a coincidence that the hero in Wilson's last novel is patterned after Aleister Crowley, a minister's son, who a generation ago founded a new religion, Crowleyanity, based on sex, sin, drugs and demonology. The patient whose partial analysis will be described in this paper attempted the same solution: the formation of a hallucinogenic drug cult, and I was attracted by the many similarities between him and a number of the Outsiders described by Wilson, among them, Dostoievski and his heroes: the Underground Man who cannot stand order and system, and Ivan Karamazov who says: “I don't want harmony … too high a price has been placed on harmony.” These are men who are looking desperately for meaning in life.

Typical of the modern day group is the hero of Camus' novel, L'Étranger, (2) (in translation, The Outsider) whose problem is boredom. In Wilson's (14) later writings the Outsider formulates his

problem in terms of boredom: “I sometimes wake up at midday, make tea, try to write, and fail, try to read, and lose interest, do the shopping and get a meal and feel totally exhausted b