I notice that Wallace constantly (in my interpretation) shows the medical (specifically psychiatric) field as relatively useless and foolish. I find it highly amusing, even on a personal level, but at the same time I silently ask the author “why do you dislike counselors so much?” Not only are tons of characters addicted, they also can’t seem to get any decent professional mental help. I’ll list the things that make me think of this as a theme:

-Hal’s father had that whole “professional conversationalist” stunt that sort of set up a lack of faith in the title “professional”.

I've been noticing that Pynchon has been increasingly using the term "dialectics" throughout Gravity's Rainbow. The OED online dictionary has these definitions to offer:

a. The art of critical examination into the truth of an opinion; the investigation of truth by discussion: in earlier English use, a synonym of LOGIC as applied to formal rhetorical reasoning; logical argumentation or disputation.

As I learned this concept, it had to do with the pendulum like motion between two extreme points, and where these ideas merge, something along the lines of OED's second definition:

In modern Philosophy: Specifically applied by Kant to the criticism which shows the mutually contradictory character of the principles of science, when they are employed to determine objects beyond the limits of experience (i.e. the soul, the world, God); by Hegel (who denies that such contradictions are ultimately irreconcilable) the term is applied (a) to the process of thought by which such contradictions are seen to merge themselves in a higher truth that comprehends them; and (b) to the world-process, which, being in his view but the thought-process on its objective side, develops similarly by a continuous unification of opposites.