Quite aside from the difficulties of such diagnosis, there is the further concern that diagnostics per se are useful when applied to a living patient under treatment but are singularly reductive when employed as a simplistic categorizing label for a substantial body of writings by a deceased author. There is, in truth, no psychiatric term yet devised that does justice to the vividness and cornplexity of his writings -- and their impact on the psyches of his readers. To read Dick with attention is to participate -- startlingly -- in his unique vision, which frequently violates consensus assumptions about the nature of "reality," but retains nonetheless a brilliant coherence and emotional depth that signal anything but the workings of a madman, howsoever the facts of his life may be thrashed over and diagnosed by amateur analysts. Critic Alexander Star has aptly delineated the boundary between the man and the impact of his work: "Dick's sanity was open to question. But throughout his career he wrote with qualities that are rare in a science fiction writer, or in any writer at all. These included a sure feel for the detritus and debris, the obsolescent object-world, of postwar suburbia; a sharp historical wit; and a searching moral subtlety and concern."*

* Alexander Star, "The God in the Trash," The New Republic (December 6, 1993), p. 34.

To focus on a rigid binary definition of sane or insane constitutes, in the case of Dick and his work, a puerile simplification. The further the combined bodies of knowledge of psychology, anthropology, and history of religions progress, the less clear it seems that bright-line divisions among "religious," "shamanic," and "psychotic" states is possible or even useful in the absence of a careful appreciation of the cultural and personal contexts of the experiencer. This is not to argue that Dick even remotely resembles an "enlightened" mystic; it is well to remember that Dick's forte was questions, not answers; those who would see his ideas as fodder for a "cult" merely reflect their own hunger for conditioned thought.