Alien Interventions: Psychedelia and Family Romance
An Extract from 'Suburban Spacemen and the Cults of Catastrophe'
An extract from my chapter on the development of British science fiction in the 1960s from The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, published by Bloomsbury in 2018.
Seldom recalled consciously, but nearly always demonstrable through psychoanalysis, is the next stage in the development in the incipient estrangement from the parents which may be described as the family romances of neurotics. […] At about this time, the child’s imagination is occupied with ridding himself of his parents, of whom he has a low opinion, and replacing them by others, usually of superior social standing […] which finds expression in a fantasy that replaces both parents by others who are grander. The technique used in developing such fantasies, which at this period are of course conscious, depends upon the child’s ingenuity and the material he has at hisdisposal. […] This stage is reached at a time when the child still lacks any knowledge of the sexual determinants of procreation’ –Sigmund Freud, ‘Family Romances’ (38).
In 1968, two narratives exerted a profound influence on science fiction as a literary genre, and the appearance of science fiction and Space Age technology as a speculative, comparative, to borrow from Ballard ‘archaeopsychic’ phenomena in even disinterested spectators. One was the collaboration between Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, developing two of Clarke’s short fictions, ‘The Sentinel’ (1951)1 and ‘Encounter in the Dawn’ (1953) into the simultaneous novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The other was Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? that posited alien intervention in humanity’s ancient development, evident Von Däniken proposed, in the Old Testament, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Incan Nazca lines, the resemblance of figures in Mayan reliefs to contemporary astronauts, and in hitherto unexplained anachronistic technologies like galvanic batteries, optical lenses, discovered by archaeologists. Setting aside the specifics of Von Däniken’s most absurd flights,2 one is left with the persistent ancient aliens theory that informs new age wish fulfillment and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012).
What in 1968 appealed about these narratives is equally relevant to contemporary readers: they are projections of millenarian anxiety, and work to absolve colonial guilt by presenting Earth as a colony itself, presenting an intergalactic sublime before which humanity is prostrate. They also appeal to the neuroses that Sigmund Freud described in ‘Family Romances’ (1909), the fantasy that our ‘parents’ are not our real parents, that real parents, our origins are elsewhere and grander. Consequently, they are pre-sexual, either bypassing procreation as Clarke does in the conception of the Star Child in its glittering womb, or by using alien technologies to recapitulate Old Testament holocausts against sex. Such thinking also has roots in Emanuel Swedenborg’s Life on Other Planets (1758) which conflates the alien and the angelic.
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