ABSTRACT
This chapter explains Philip K. Dick's fiction alongside a number of his peers, from Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, and from William Burroughs to Ken Kesey and Thomas Pynchon. It considers central documents of the Sixties imagination: the Port Huron Statement, written by members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and Theodore Roszak's The Making of A Counter Culture, the study that coined the term. Almost all of Dick's novels over a thirty-year period concern themselves with madness, a dialogue sustained by a lifelong reading in psychology. At first sight, a definition of Dick's writings as antipsychiatric might seem questionable. Dick's appropriations of psychopathology had given form to a perceived dismantling of individual subjectivity. With conspiracy theories receding into the background, the new reliance on neurology comes to shape the structure of A Scanner Darkly. Dick's science fiction must be understood against the rise of the social sciences, and psychology in particular, in Cold War America.
