ABSTRACT
Acting out in Lucian’s True Histories: using both Freud’s ‘disciple’ Tausk’s essay on ‘influential machines’ and Jung’s essay on flying saucers, I find multiple examples of ‘conjectural rhetoric’ that exemplifies a defensive posture which I propose to explore alongside Darko Suvin’s influential definition of science: that sci-fi engages in ‘cognitive estrangement’. Lying, projection and delusions are psychic events experienced widely. Both psychologists seek to normalise these manoeuvres as reaction to overwhelming experience. Associating sight of these machines to repression and guilt, a death wish, Tausk argues that such hallucinations come from such deep repressions: the acting out of those guilts impacts on psychic realities. Jung looks at collective trauma after the war to trace the features of the phenomenon of the multiple instances of sightings of alien objects in the sky. I attempt here an enquiry into the rhetoric of Lucian’s ‘acting out’ by way of his satiric science fiction.
