LINDNER, Robert (Mitchell)

(1914-1956)

   US psychoanalyst and prison psychologist who reported on his work in the latter capacity in Rebel Without a Cause (1944). "The Jet-Propelled Couch", a long narrative essay which appears in TheFifty-Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales (coll 1955; vt The Jet-Propelled Couch UK), absorbingly examines and analyses the sf-based fantasies of one of his patients, who retreated from an intolerable childhood, adolescence and adulthood through progressive immersion in an elaborate SPACE-OPERA universe, to which he believed he was regularly transported and in which he was the ruler of a planet. His rationalization of his role in this universe was impeccably couched in sf terms, with alternate time-streams playing a considerable role, and provides an explanation in extremis for sf's imaginative power over adolescents. Also of interest is one effect of RL's curative strategy: he pretended to enter into his patient's universe with him, and eventually was himself fascinated and almost ensnared by it. Roger ZELAZNY's THE DREAM MASTER (1966) develops the implications of RL's experience inbravura fashion.

   JC

   See also: PARANOIA; PSYCHOLOGY.