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In this collection of four parabolic stories and two meditative essays, Allen Wheelis, writer and psychoanalyst, gives depth and clarity to an existential voice that is sounded without self-pity or underground indulgence. Clearly located in the post-Nietzschean world without meaning, he charts the experience of the search and failure of meaning with a sharp compass. He remains true to the icy dictums of the writer of fortune cookie messages in his black comedy, The Signal: “Herd animals may be identified by the tendency to carry bibles.”
The significant tension, veering towards dialectic and ambivalence in equal measure, in the stories and essays is the implicit, sometimes explicit (as in “To Be A God”), ideological antagonism between psychoanalysis and existentialism. Like Sartre and Victor Frankl, Wheelis is unable to stand aloof from the pressure of the age, is unable to regard certain ethical and epistemological issues as neurotic symptoms capable of analytic resolution. In this regard, the book should be of special interest to psychoanalysts of an orthodox caste who are here given a chance to weigh their hypotheses against a rival school of thought by an experienced psychoanalyst.
In “To Be A God,” Wheelis follows the threads of the problem of determinism to the last turn of the screw: if Freud's assertion—“that no event of inner life could be other than it is”—is true, then how can the patient choose, in the process of treatment, to be something other than what the psychoanalyst takes to be his determined condition? Yet without choice there is no creative act, no ennobling assertion of self. Wheelis is caught between the Romantic impulse towards the myth of the self (Byron forging the identity of Childe Harold) and the Freudian analysis of the inescapable determinants of the self.
As vexing as the dilemma of self is the implication of the analyst in the deterministic system. Reformulating Gödel and Bridgman, Wheelis says: “A system dealing with itself encounters