DeConick A.D

K
CHAPTER
SIX
Gnostic Altered States
Eddie Jessup
Before us stands a metal tank, tall and cylindrical, with a window up top.
Through the window we can see water and the face of a man sleeping
afloat (figure 6.1). Electrodes are fastened to his head. The camera angle
changes and we are inside the tank, looking up at the bottom of his two
feet. Except for his face, he is entirely submerged in water. So begins
Paddy Chayefsky’s psychedelic 1980 film Altered States .
We are in the research lab of Professor Eddie Jessup of Harvard Medical
School, research specialist in drug therapy for schizophrenics. He is
unorthodox, convinced that schizophrenia is not a disease but an altered
state of consciousness. He works with this particular population because
he is obsessed with what he calls “interior experiences,” especially religious
ones. Religious experiences, he tells Emily, his wife-to-be, are so
significant in schizophrenia that he decided to switch gears from primate
work to humans, to get inside the human mind. He wants to develop a
way to do this, to strip life down to its minimal, to its origins. He thinks
the isolation tank will do the trick.
Eddie is weird. He is one of those people who can’t seem to connect
to anyone, although he does agree to marry Emily because she loves him.
He knows he will make an awful husband, and tells her so. It is not that
he is cold or uncaring. It is that he is obsessed with discovering the truth
of human existence. Nothing else matters to him.