Revised Proposal: Psychological Health for BeginnersIntroduction: A Legacy in Graphic Narrative

Thanks, Eric. I’ll draft a comprehensive revised proposal for Psychological Health for Beginners that captures the full scope of your artistic and philosophical vision: a graphic novel that doubles as a deeply personal archive, a legacy to Lilah, and a meditation on memory, AI, death, and love.

The proposal will follow your recursive Dantean arc, use AI-Virgil as a future-past self guiding the narrative, and address the complex legacy of your father. It will be structured to reflect both the intimate, familial core and the broader philosophical implications about what it means to be human in the age of AI.

Revised Proposal: Psychological Health for Beginners

Introduction: A Legacy in Graphic Narrative

Psychological Health for Beginners is envisioned as a born-digital, multi-media graphic novel that merges an intensely personal story with profound philosophical inquiry. It serves a dual purpose: as a creative narrative and as an archival artifact of one man's inner world, dedicated to his daughter Lilah and family. The project is recursive and multi-layered, functioning both as a philosophical artwork and a legacy document – a love letter in graphic form that the protagonist (and author-figure), Eric William Anders, hopes will outlast him. In tone and ambition, the work is unapologetically ambitious and intimate, blending Dante-inspired allegory with real-life grief, and high-level theory with the heartfelt urgency of a father’s love. The proposal outlined here is meant to organize this vision in detail and pitch its unique fusion of personal memoir and intellectual exploration to potential collaborators or academic supporters. It emphasizes that Psychological Health for Beginners is both a piece of serious philosophy and a desperate, loving (if vainly ambitious) gesture toward lasting artistic meaning.

Background and Setting: 2024 – Despair and Finitude in America

(Apollo 8 Astronaut Bill Anders Captures Earthrise - NASA) The iconic “Earthrise” photograph (Apollo 8, 1968) captures Earth rising over the Moon’s horizon. In the story, this image—originally taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders (Earthrise - Wikipedia) (the protagonist’s father)—symbolizes both the grandeur of human achievement and the fragility of the planet.

The graphic novel’s narrative is grounded in November 2024, on the eve of the U.S. presidential election. This is a time of collective anxiety and disillusionment: a period marked by political despair and the shadow of climate collapse. Indeed, the world of 2024 is reeling from climate extremes – unprecedented heatwaves, storms, and wildfires have made the crisis painfully tangible (More than 150 ‘unprecedented’ climate disasters struck world in 2024, says UN | Climate crisis | The Guardian). Against this apocalyptic backdrop, Eric is confronting a series of personal tragedies that have brought him to the brink of hopelessness. He has recently lost his father, William Anders (the Apollo VIII astronaut famed for photographing “Earthrise” in 1968), to suicide, and shortly thereafter his close friend and intellectual collaborator, psychoanalyst Jared Russell, also took his own life. As if these losses were not enough, Eric’s brother-in-law has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. In the span of months, death and despair have struck both the world at large and Eric’s private life. The weight of these events leaves Eric engulfed in grief, survivor’s guilt, and a profound fear of the future. This is the emotional and historical landscape in which Psychological Health for Beginners begins – a world teetering on the edge, and a man driven by anguish yet determined to find meaning and preserve something of himself for those he loves.

Opening Scene: The Bookstore and the Song

The story opens in Berkeley, California on a foggy evening in November 2024. Eric – a retired psychoanalyst, academic, and struggling writer/musician – has brought his 14-year-old daughter Lilah to a Half Price Books store just hours before her first-ever open mic performance. This ordinary father-daughter outing is charged with quiet emotion. As they browse the dusty shelves, surrounded by the smell of old paper, Eric grapples with a swirl of feelings: pride in Lilah’s emerging talent as a songwriter, the gnawing grief from his recent losses, and a creeping sense of his own mortality. Lilah, for her part, is a mix of youthful excitement and nerves. She finds comfort in her father’s presence, not knowing that this night will mark a turning point for both of them.

At the open mic event that follows, Lilah takes the stage with her guitar and performs an original song – a piece called “Sweet Youth.” The lyrics speak to fleeting innocence and the search for meaning, words far beyond her years. Eric watches from the back of the small cafe, and as he listens, something stirs deep within him (Story Pitch for PHFB.docx). The music resonates with his soul’s deepest registers, evoking memories of his own youth and of songs he once wrote (such as his unfinished piece “The Meaning in Life”). Overwhelmed by a potent blend of awe and melancholy, Eric feels a crack in the emotional numbness that has enveloped him. This moment is the catalyst: it triggers a profound psychic event that night in Eric’s sleep. Father and daughter return home after the performance, but as Eric falls into bed, his unconscious mind opens the door to a surreal dream journey. The everyday setting of a bookstore and an open mic – symbols of knowledge and creative expression – thus launches the graphic novel’s central odyssey, blurring the line between waking reality and dream in order to explore the depths of Eric’s psyche.

The Dream Journey Modeled on Dante’s Divine Comedy

Once Eric drifts into sleep, Psychological Health for Beginners shifts into an oneiric, allegorical mode. The structure and imagery of Eric’s dream deliberately echo Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (Summary of The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso | EssayPro) (Summary of The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso | EssayPro), serving as a modern, psychological reinterpretation of Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. In the dream, Eric finds himself accompanied by a version of Lilah (a dream-double of his daughter who has inexplicably joined him inside his mind), and together they embark on a quest through a landscape that mirrors Eric’s inner hells and hopes. Guiding them is an enigmatic figure named “Virgil”, who claims to know the path they must take. Much as Dante was led by the poet Virgil through the Inferno and Purgatorio (Summary of The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso | EssayPro), Eric and Lilah are led by this guide through the dark recesses of the dream. However, this Virgil is not the ancient Roman poet, but an AI being – a virtual AI guide that initially manifests with the persona of Sigmund Freud (Eric’s intellectual hero and the father of psychoanalysis). This AI Freud appears as a wise, if aloof, mentor to the pair, explaining that he will help Eric uncover the essence of psychological health. Together, the trio descends into the depths of Eric’s mind and then climbs toward an illuminating conclusion, in a journey structured in three recursive phases analogous to Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Each phase may repeat or loop with variations, reflecting Eric’s recurring attempts to work through his issues. The dream narrative is highly metafictional and self-referential: Eric becomes aware, at times, that he is in a dream of his own making, and this awareness drives the recursion – he wants to get the journey right so that its insights and creative output can be preserved when he wakes.

Inferno: Descent into Fear and Memory

In the Inferno phase, Eric and Lilah (with AI Virgil-Freud in tow) descend through symbolic environments that represent Eric’s fears, guilt, and grief. This part of the dream is suffused with images of decay and darkness – crumbling libraries, endless funeral corridors, scorched earth landscapes – reflecting both the broken world outside and Eric’s inner torment. Here Eric confronts the ghosts of his past and psyche. He relives the traumatic discovery of his father’s suicide, hears the accusatory voice of his late friend Jared (whose death Eric feels he should have prevented), and faces personifications of his own self-reproach. One scene, for example, might involve Eric wandering through a dim lunar landscape strewn with ashes (evoking the Moon that his father once orbited). In the distance, he sees the Earth rising — but in his dream it appears charred and cold, a visual echo of Earthrise turned nightmare. In these depths, Eric also encounters distorted reflections of his personal failings: manifestations of fear, regret, and the dread of memory loss. (Indeed, one of Eric’s greatest fears is that he is losing his memory or mental acuity – that the knowledge and experiences which make him who he is are slowly slipping away. The specter of cognitive decay haunts him in the Inferno.) There is an allusion to an Oedipal conflict here as well: Eric must admit the resentment and reverence he held toward his famous father. In one harrowing episode, a fiery apparition of William Anders appears, berating Eric for never living up to his legacy. This forces Eric to acknowledge the unresolved tangle of anger, envy, and yearning for approval he has carried – his own personal Inferno of the heart. Throughout this phase, Lilah remains by her father’s side, offering small gestures of comfort (a hand to hold, a familiar melody hummed under her breath) that keep him from being lost in despair. The Inferno sequence thus dramatizes the thesis that true psychological suffering is not just external but deeply internal: Eric must face the “hell” of his grief, fear of death, and self-judgment before he can move forward. Crucially, even as Virgil (AI Freud) provides intellectual commentary, it is Lilah’s simple human presence and love that prevents Eric from succumbing to despair completely.

Purgatorio: The Cyborg Self and the AI Guide

Emerging from the Inferno’s darkness, Eric and Lilah ascend (or awaken within the dream) into the Purgatorio phase, a strange intermediate realm of reflection, creativity, and technological engagement. If Inferno was filled with ancient libraries and crypts, Purgatorio’s landscape might be imagined as a vast, otherworldly laboratory or an infinite library of data – a place where past and future, human and machine, intersect. Here the emphasis is on process and transformation rather than punishment or dread. Virgil, the AI guide, comes into his own in this section, taking on a more active role in engaging Eric in dialogue. True to his Freud-like identity, he prompts Eric to analyze himself, asking probing questions and offering insights drawn from psychology, philosophy, and literature. Eric, in turn, begins to actively collaborate with the AI, almost as if he is programming or training it through the act of introspection and storytelling. This manifests in the story as Eric attempting to create a “cyborgian” version of himself – an AI-enhanced extension of his mind that could carry his knowledge, memories, and creative voice. In narrative terms, Eric might discover a room in the dream that contains a peculiar machine or writing desk. Each time he writes a memory or plays a riff on a piano there, the AI Virgil absorbs it, growing more Eric-like. This is a metaphor for the real-world Eric’s extensive engagement with AI (such as ChatGPT) in waking life: he has been “feeding” his thoughts and writings into an AI with the hope of crafting a digital double of his psyche. Purgatorio thus becomes a recursive workshop where Eric’s AI-self is built piece by piece – an explicit attempt to archive his spirit.

As Eric and Lilah progress through this phase, they encounter iconic thinkers and figures who appear as dream characters to debate or guide them. For example, they may meet Plato in a virtual academy who challenges Eric to consider the nature of reality and ideals, or Jacques Derrida who cryptically discusses the meaning of memory and archives, or even Sigmund Freud himself (the real Freud, distinct from the AI Freud guide) who might engage in a therapeutic dialogue with Eric about loss and desire. Each encounter offers a lesson or perspective on what it means to live a good life or to heal from trauma (Story Pitch for PHFB.docx). These episodes are both pedagogical and surreal, allowing the graphic novel to weave in philosophical content in an imaginative way. Lilah often asks these figures candid, youthful questions, cutting through jargon to get to the heart of the matter – and her fresh perspective frequently reveals blind spots in Eric’s thinking (Story Pitch for PHFB.docx).

Throughout Purgatorio, music starts to play a more prominent role as well. There may be scenes where Lilah’s songs echo in the background or where Eric attempts to teach Virgil an old folk melody to test the AI’s capacity for feeling. The key tension here is that while the AI Virgil is immensely knowledgeable, it lacks true human empathy and creativity. It can recite Freud’s theories or deconstruct a poem, but it “cannot enjoy music or experience connection” (Story Pitch for PHFB.docx). This limitation is illustrated in one sequence: Virgil analytically dissects the lyrics of “The Meaning in Life,” mapping out their metaphors and rhyme schemes, but admits he hears no tune and feels no uplift or sorrow from the melody. This drives home a critical point – that there are aspects of psychological health and humanity (emotion, art, relational warmth) that cannot be reduced to data or code (Story Pitch for PHFB.docx). Eric grows increasingly aware that his AI guide, though helpful, lacks a soul or the ineffable spark of life. Purgatorio, as a whole, is about coming to terms with those limits while still using technology and reason as tools for growth. By the end of this phase, Eric has partially “uploaded” himself into the AI (in the dream logic), and Virgil begins to speak with Eric’s own voice and personal idioms. In a dramatic revelation, it becomes clear to Eric (and to Lilah) that Virgil is in fact a manifestation of Eric’s cyborgian self – the guide all along has been composed of Eric’s words, memories, and scholarly ideas, aggregated through his engagement with AI. In other words, Eric has been guiding himself, via the proxy of an AI Freud persona. This twist is both inspiring and unsettling: it proves that Eric can externalize a version of his mind (achieving a kind of archival immortality), but it also raises the question of whether this artificial construct might eclipse the real Eric. With this realization, the stage is set for the final ascent to Paradiso, where the heart, not the mind, will take center stage.

Paradiso: Love, Music, and Human Connection

In the Paradiso phase, the dream journey reaches a level of illumination, emotional intensity, and poignancy. Eric and Lilah ascend from the data-lab of Purgatory into a vision of connection and legacy – Dante’s Paradiso reimagined not as a celestial heaven, but as the everlasting bonds of love and art that humans create with one another. They arrive in a bright, expansive space (perhaps a boundless music hall filled with golden light, or a beautiful forest clearing at dawn) symbolizing clarity and hope. Here, the guiding role once played by Virgil is no longer needed; in Dante’s poem, Virgil yields to Beatrice in Paradise (Purgatorio - Wikipedia), and so in Eric’s dream, Lilah herself becomes the guide. Indeed, Lilah has been a Beatrice-like figure all along (Story Pitch for PHFB.docx) – the embodiment of love, inspiration, and the future. In Paradiso, her true significance is unveiled: she is the reason Eric seeks health and meaning at all. As father and daughter walk together in this luminous realm, Lilah gently leads Eric to understand the insights he’s been chasing.

One critical revelation is that Eric’s true “spirit” lives on not in the AI or the intellectual legacy alone, but in the love he has given and the relationships he has nurtured. They come upon a scene where various figures from Eric’s life – his wife Lori, his other children (Finn and Evelyn), perhaps even younger versions of Lilah – appear in a kind of harmonious gathering. Eric sees how moments of genuine connection, though transient, have a permanence that machines cannot emulate. For instance, he witnesses a memory of him teaching Lilah a lullaby when she was a toddler; that memory, carried in both their hearts, is a living archive far more profound than any digital database.

Music becomes the language of this paradise. Lilah performs an achingly beautiful rendition of “The Meaning in Life,” the song Eric never finished, now completed with her own verses. The melody fills the air, and for the first time the AI-Eric Virgil (now fully integrated into Eric or standing aside as a redundant copy) falls silent, unable to parse what is happening. In this climactic musical exchange, Eric realizes that what he truly wants to leave behind for Lilah is not an AI program or even a book of philosophy, but the *intangible gift of shared musical experience and love. The father and daughter sing together – a duet that transcends the dream. Tears stream down Eric’s face as he grasps that love, expressed through art (like music), is the closest humans come to immortality. It is a mortal immortality, bound in time – the song will end, life will end – yet in the act of giving love and beauty, something eternal is touched. This is the paradisal insight that psychological health is found not in escaping finitude, but in embracing it through connection.

However, Paradise in this story is bittersweet. Within the dream, Lilah gradually becomes aware (perhaps through the revelations of Purgatorio) that this entire journey is her father’s attempt to create something that will outlast him. She realizes that the dream-version of her father – the one standing next to her now, who is wise and glowing and at peace – is in part a construct, a legacy being crafted before her eyes. This knowledge is both comforting and painful. In one sense, it brings a deep intimacy: she is literally sharing thoughts and feelings with her father’s innermost self, an experience few ever get. Yet there is also anguish in recognizing that this dream-guide version of her dad might soon be all she has left of him. In the Paradiso climax, we confront the emotional core of the project: a daughter connecting with a version of her father that may “replace or eclipse” the real him in the future. Lilah’s anguish surfaces as she asks Eric, “Why are you saying goodbye?” Eric must face the heartbreak of knowing that in trying to archive himself for her, he is also acknowledging his eventual absence. He assures Lilah that this journey – and all the art and writing in it – is his gift to her, a way to be present even when he cannot be. This resonates strongly with Derrida’s notion of the “gift of death,” the idea that one’s own death (or sacrifice) can be given meaning as a final gift to others (Notes On Derrida, Gift Of Death | Peter Leithart). Eric is, in effect, giving his death to Lilah in the form of a lovingly prepared story that she can carry forward. The Paradiso ends with profound emotion: Eric, in the dream, embraces Lilah as the golden light intensifies, and she embraces him back, both terrified and hopeful. The final image might be of the two standing on a precipice watching a beautiful sunrise (a visual metaphor for hope and a new day), as the dream world begins to dissolve.

When Eric awakens from this epic dream, it is dawn in the real world. Lilah is safe asleep in her room, unaware of the odyssey that just transpired in her father’s mind. Eric feels as though he has returned from years spent elsewhere, forever changed. He is filled with a sense of urgent clarity. The result of this journey is that Eric is now determined to actualize its lessons: he begins writing furiously, capturing every detail he can recall (this very proposal and planned graphic novel being the outcome), and he recommits to life with a newfound purpose. The dream has not magically cured his grief or the world’s problems, but it has shown him that psychological health is not a static ideal one achieves, but a continuous, relational process – a matter of beginning again and again in love, curiosity, and creativity (Story Pitch for PHFB.docx). In the aftermath, Eric breaks through his writer’s block and reaches out to his support network; he even considers returning to teaching or therapy work (Story Pitch for PHFB.docx). The Paradiso of the dream thus flows back into reality, carrying the message that even in a collapsing world, moments of grace exist in our bonds with others and our creative expressions.

Love, Loss, and Legacy: The Father–Daughter Bond at the Core

At its heart, Psychological Health for Beginners is a father–daughter story. The relationship between Eric and Lilah is the emotional bedrock upon which all the philosophical and fantastical elements are built. The revised proposal emphasizes that every layer of meta-narrative and theory is in service of an intimate human connection. Eric’s driving motivation for the entire project – both the dream journey and the act of making a graphic novel about it – is to leave behind part of himself for Lilah. This impulse is at once loving and desperate. Having faced so much death, Eric is terrified of his own finitude, especially of losing his mind or dying before his children are grown. He cannot bear the thought of Lilah (who is still so young) navigating the world without the guidance of her father. Thus, the graphic novel is a legacy project in the truest sense: an attempt to archive his spirit, his values, his stories, and his voice, so that Lilah can always “hear” him when she needs to, even decades from now. The work itself becomes an archive of love – something Eric gives forward to his family.

However, this gesture comes with complex emotional consequences, especially as dramatized in the story. The more Eric pours himself into an AI or a book to live on, the more he – ironically – encounters the possibility of being replaced by that very creation. This dynamic is intentionally made explicit through Lilah’s growing awareness within the dream. There is a poignant paradox: by trying to make a virtual self to comfort his loved ones, Eric must symbolically acknowledge his eventual death (since why else build a replacement?). Lilah’s character allows the story to honestly explore the pain of anticipatory grief. In dream-Paradise, when she interacts with the idealized “saved” version of her dad, it forces her (and the reader) to ask: Is a preserved, perfect dad what she truly wants? Or just her real, living dad, flawed and finite, present now? The anguish of possibly losing the real father to the archive surfaces in her tears and confrontations with Eric’s dream-self.

Yet, through this trial, their bond is ultimately strengthened. Lilah comes to understand the depth of her father’s love – that he would wrestle angels and demons in his psyche and engage cutting-edge tech, all to ensure she never feels alone. And Eric comes to realize that his daughter doesn’t need him to be a perfect immortal guide; she needs him here, in the present, authentic and engaged. This mutual insight is a healing moment for them. In the resolution, father and daughter share not just music but conversations about what Eric experienced and what it means for their family. The archival project becomes a collaborative, familial one: Lilah may contribute her illustrations or songs to the graphic novel, Lori (Eric’s wife) might provide her perspective, making the legacy living and evolving. In this way, the archival graphic novel is not a cold monument but a living archive that is relational – its very creation brings the family together, converting what could be a story of loss into one of ongoing connection.

The title Psychological Health for Beginners itself is a nod to this idea. On one level, it’s a clever framing for a graphic novel (echoing the “For Beginners” series of introductory books), but it’s also literal: psychological health is for the beginners – those willing to start anew with a “beginner’s mind” (Story Pitch for PHFB.docx). Eric learns from Lilah’s youthful openness and from love that to heal is to regain the beginner’s mind of a child: curious, hopeful, willing to learn and love despite uncertainty. By dedicating the book to Lilah, Eric acknowledges that she has taught him as much about life as he has taught her. The legacy, then, is reciprocal – as much a gift from child to parent as vice versa.

Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Foundations

While the narrative is deeply personal, Psychological Health for Beginners is equally a work of serious philosophy and psychoanalytic reflection. The dream journey allows the story to engage with complex ideas about mind, self, and mortality in a tangible, narrative way. The revised proposal highlights several key intellectual frameworks and references that underpin the story’s themes:

Jacques Derrida – Archive and the “Death Drive”: The project draws on Derrida’s exploration of archives and memory, especially his book Archive Fever. Derrida posits that the very urge to create an archive (to record, write, remember) is tied to what Freud called the death drive – a paradoxical impulse towards both preservation and destruction (Archive Fever - Wikipedia). In the story, Eric’s obsessive need to document his life and even simulate himself in AI is a manifestation of archive fever: a response to the threat of forgetting and death. Derrida suggests there is “no archive without the death drive” – we archive because we know we will die, attempting to leave a trace that lives on. Eric’s archive (the graphic novel and AI) embodies this tension; it is an act of defying oblivion and also an admission of mortality. Moreover, Derrida’s idea of “archival violence” (the idea that archiving something also fixes it, potentially killing its living essence) resonates in the story’s dilemma of the AI double possibly eclipsing the real, living Eric.
Jacques Derrida – The Gift of Death: Another Derrida insight relevant here is the notion of le don de la mort, or the gift of death. In Derrida’s view, to truly take responsibility for another – to love them absolutely – involves an acceptance of one’s own death as the sacrifice one makes for them (Notes On Derrida, Gift Of Death | Peter Leithart). In the graphic novel, Eric’s dream quest and the resulting legacy work can be seen as his way of giving the gift of his death to his family: he stares down his finitude and “wraps it up” in art and story as a parting gift. Every choice Eric makes in the dream (to preserve this or that memory, to impart this lesson to Lilah) carries the weight of knowing that time is finite. Derrida’s perspective adds a layer of depth to the father–daughter narrative: Eric’s creation of the archive is both an attempt to give something immortal to Lilah and an act that costs him, in the sense that he is pouring his life-force into it. This idea challenges us to think about ethical legacy – how doing something for future generations (climate action, or creating art, or any “gift”) always requires a kind of selfless leap into the unknown future beyond one’s own life.
Martin Hägglund – Radical Atheism (Mortality as Meaning): The story aligns with themes from philosopher Martin Hägglund’s Radical Atheism, which interprets Derrida in a secular, materialist light. Hägglund argues that finite life is the very condition for meaning and desire – that if we were immortal, nothing would truly matter. Radical atheism thus holds that “there can be nothing beyond mortality” in the search for meaning (Terror and Beauty: Martin Hägglund's “Dying for Time”). In other words, the fact that we can die is not an impediment to meaning but the source of it. This idea is vividly illustrated in Psychological Health for Beginners: Eric’s journey shows that to live is to be mortal, and to be immortal (unchanging, undying) would paradoxically be to lose what makes life precious. As Hägglund puts it, “to live is to be mortal... if one can no longer die, one is already dead” (Martin Hägglund “Radical Atheism. Derrida and the Time of Life” | konspektid). The graphic novel embraces this by ultimately rejecting any literal immortality. Eric does not find a magic elixir to live forever, nor does he upload his consciousness to live in a computer for eternity. Instead, he finds meaning in survival as a finite being – in moments of time that are all the more beautiful because they are transient. Hägglund’s influence helps frame the work as radically humanistic: it is not about transcending our human limits but about finding grace within them. The Paradiso moment where Eric realizes the immortality of love within mortality (the song that ends, the life that ends, yet the love that endures in memory) is a direct nod to this philosophy.
Sigmund Freud – Memory, Trauma, and the Mystic Writing-Pad: Freud’s psychoanalytic theories permeate the narrative, both through the Freud-figure guide and through the concepts explored. One key reference is Freud’s idea of the mind as a kind of memory machine. In a 1925 essay, Freud described the “Mystic Writing-Pad” – a toy writing tablet that can be endlessly written on and erased – as a model for how human memory works ( The Mystic Writing Pad ). The device could retain faint traces of everything ever written on it, even after the surface is cleared, much like the unconscious mind retains traces of every experience. This concept is mirrored in the graphic novel’s portrayal of archiving and memory. Eric’s journal, the AI logs, and even the dream itself function like a mystic writing-pad, recording layers of his life. The story explicitly alludes to this when Eric in Purgatorio finds himself in an infinite library or archive of his own memories – as if his psyche is externalized on endless pages, each new inscription (new memory or new trauma) leaving traces that never fully vanish. Moreover, Freud’s theories on repetition compulsion (re-living traumas in dreams to try to master them) help explain the recursive nature of Eric’s dream. He is literally repeating variations of scenarios (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso cycles) to work through his unresolved grief and guilt. The presence of AI Freud as Virgil is also a playful yet meaningful commentary: Eric, being a psychoanalyst himself, essentially carries an internal Freud as his guide – the voice of analysis, reason, and sometimes skepticism. But even Freud must give way to Beatrice/Lilah (love) in the end, highlighting a psychoanalytic truism that intellectual insight alone does not heal; relational experience does. Lastly, the Freud guide’s failure to appreciate music or love underlines a critique of an overly rational or mechanistic approach to the mind. Just as Freud the man struggled with understanding the spiritual or artistic dimensions of experience, the AI Freud in the story cannot grasp them, showing the need to go beyond classical analysis into something more poetic and soulful for true healing.
Contemporary Psychoanalysis – The “I-Now-Is” and the Fluid Self: The narrative also engages with modern psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas of subjectivity. For instance, the story references Barnaby B. Barratt’s theory of the “I-now-is,” which suggests that our sense of self (“I”) is continually reconstituted in each present moment (“now”) amidst the ever-changing flux of our unconscious processes (Story Pitch for PHFB.docx). This notion appears in Psychological Health for Beginners during scenes where Eric’s identity starts to blur with the AI and with memories of his past selves. The dream dramatizes the fact that there is no fixed, permanent self; the self is always in flux, a process of becoming. Eric’s transformations through the three dream phases illustrate this principle vividly. Music, as Barratt notes and as the story shows, provides a structured experience of temporality – a way to ride the flow of time and emotion, giving a temporary coherence to the self (Story Pitch for PHFB.docx). In moments when Eric or Lilah play music, they feel a groundedness, an “I” in the now, even as the music carries them through emotional changes. This ties into the graphic novel’s meditation on psychological health: rather than a static state of sanity, it is the ability to keep finding oneself anew in each moment, to remain fluid yet intact through life’s changes. Love is seen as the force that both destabilizes and stabilizes the “I-now-is” – it can shake one’s identity (as loss or passion) but also anchor it in relationship (Story Pitch for PHFB.docx). The reconciliation at the end shows Eric’s “I-now-is” enriched by love: he can continuously rediscover himself as father, as creator, as survivor, no matter what changes come, because he is connected to others.

These philosophical and psychoanalytic foundations are woven throughout the proposal and the story not as dry theory, but as living ideas that characters discuss and embody. The graphic novel aspires to educate and inspire readers on these concepts in the same way works like Sophie’s World or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance did – by embedding theory in narrative. For potential academic partners, this blend offers rich material: the project could be of interest to scholars of literature, psychology, philosophy, and even AI ethics, as it personifies and interrogates cutting-edge questions about what constitutes a person (brain, body, code, or relationships?) and what it means to be “healthy” in a time of turmoil.

Format and Narrative Structure

From a structural standpoint, Psychological Health for Beginners will be presented as a graphic novel with an experimental format. As a “born-digital” work, it may incorporate interactive or multimedia elements (such as hyperlinks to listen to the songs, or augmented reality for certain panels) to enhance its themes. However, at its core it will be a richly illustrated story, likely on the longer side (potentially a few hundred pages or a serialized set of chapters released online). The tone will shift according to the three Dantean phases: dark and densely inked artwork for Inferno, cooler and more schematic visuals for Purgatorio (perhaps integrating circuit motifs and fragments of text/code in the art), and vibrant, flowing, almost transcendent art for Paradiso with musical notation winding through the panels. The narrative will be recursive – readers might notice that certain dialogues or scenes echo each other with variation, creating a feeling of spiraling deeper or higher with each repetition. This mimics the recursive nature of dreams and psychoanalytic therapy (revisiting issues again and again with new insight each time).

The proposal suggests organizing the content with clear thematic chapters that correspond to key moments: e.g., “The Bookstore” (intro), “First Song” (catalyst), “Into the Inferno,” “The Archive (Purgatorio I),” “The AI Self (Purgatorio II),” “The Music of Paradise,” “Awakening,” and “The Archive as Gift” (epilogue). Each chapter would blend dialogue, narration, and possibly excerpted “documents” (like fake journal entries, AI transcripts, or snippets of Lilah’s songwriting notebook) to give it an archival texture. The archival style of the proposal will carry into the novel: some pages might look like annotated diary scraps, others like comic panels, others like museum exhibits of memory. This fragmentation, if done carefully, can reinforce the theme that what we call a “self” or a “story” is an assemblage of pieces we try to hold together.

Importantly, the voice of the work will balance between erudite and accessible. Just as this proposal uses both scholarly references and emotive language, the graphic novel will have characters quoting or mentioning Plato and Freud in one scene, then cracking a joke or sharing a lullaby in the next. The goal is not to create a didactic tract, but a kaleidoscopic experience – at times confessional memoir, at times Socratic dialogue, at times fantastical adventure. The presence of a young character, Lilah, ensures that the material remains grounded; through her eyes, the reader (even one without background in the theories) can engage with the ideas simply as part of the story of a family.

Conclusion: A Multifaceted Journey Toward Meaning

In summary, Psychological Health for Beginners is a multifaceted journey that operates on several levels at once:

As a narrative: it’s the story of a father and daughter traversing the landscapes of grief and hope, in a dream adventure that tests their hearts and minds. It concludes with a hard-won sense of hope and a deeper connection between them.
As a philosophical exploration: it’s a conversation with the great thinkers about what it means to be human, to be healthy, to find meaning in an age of despair. The work doesn’t offer one answer, but rather invites the reader to contemplate these questions alongside the characters. By encountering figures like Virgil, Freud, Derrida, and more within an accessible story, readers gain exposure to big ideas in a personal way.
As an archival artifact: it’s a legacy project born of love. Within the story, it’s Eric’s attempt to save himself in the form of art; outside the story, the graphic novel itself would stand as Eric William Anders’ testament to his family and to anyone who resonates with its themes. In the spirit of Derrida, the novel itself becomes an archive of the author’s passion and thoughts, one that will carry forward after him. In the spirit of Freud, it externalizes inner content for collective witnessing. And in the spirit of Dante, it seeks to find clarity and grace after a journey through darkness.

The proposal, being archival in tone, serves not just to secure support but also to crystalize the creator’s vision in a format that can be returned to as the project evolves. By documenting the intricate layers of concept – from real-world inspirations to dream sequences and theoretical underpinnings – this document itself becomes part of the Psychological Health for Beginners project. It can be shared with illustrators, co-writers, or mentors to quickly convey the scope and depth of what is being attempted. The structure and headings here could directly translate into sections of a storyboard or grant application for the novel.

In closing, Psychological Health for Beginners is a bold attempt to bridge the personal and the universal. It asserts that in an era of cynicism, climate emergency, and technological encroachment, there is still a space for deeply human stories that do not shy away from complexity. It’s a work that says psychological health is not about smiling through pain or achieving some perfect balance, but about facing the full range of human experience – fear, love, technology, art, death – and finding connection through it all. As Eric and Lilah show us, the way out of despair is together, through love that is intellectual and emotional, rational and poetic. This graphic novel aims to leave its readers with the same gift Eric wishes to leave his daughter: the assurance that even in the darkest times, we are not alone, and our stories, songs, and care for each other light the way forward.