The psychical disorders of male potency 16 страница

The phenomenon presented by the patient in cases like this deserves to be called a ‘fausse reconnaissance’, and is completely analogous to what occurs in certain other cases and has been described as a ‘déjà vu

’. In these other cases the subject has a spontaneous feeling such as ‘I’ve been in this situation before’, or ‘I’ve been through all this already’, without ever being in a position to confirm his conviction by discovering an actual recollection of the previous occasion. This latter phenomenon, as is well known, has provoked a large number of attempts at explanation, which can be divided roughly into two groups.¹ One class of explanation looks upon the feeling which constitutes the phenomenon as deserving of credence, and assumes that something really has been remembered - the only question being what. The second and far larger class of explanation includes those which maintain, on the contrary, that what we have to deal with is an illusory memory, and that the problem is to discover how this paramnesic error can have arisen. This latter group comprises many widely different hypotheses. There is, for instance, the ancient view, ascribed to Pythagoras, that the phenomenon of déjà vu is evidence of the subject having had a former life; again, there is the hypothesis based on anatomy (put forward by Wigan in 1860) to the effect that the phenomenon is based on an absence of simultaneity in the functioning of the two cerebral hemispheres; and finally there are the purely psychological theories, supported by the majority of more recent authorities, which regard the déjà vu as an indication of an apperceptive weakness, and assign the responsibility for its occurrence to such causes as fatigue, exhaustion and distraction.

¹ One of the most recent bibliographies of the subject is to be found in Havelock Ellis (1911).8

In 1904 Grasset put forward an explanation of the déjà vu which must be reckoned as one of the group which ‘believes’ in the phenomenon. He was of opinion that the phenomenon indicates that at some earlier time there has been an unconscious perception, which only now makes its way into consciousness under the influence of a new and similar impression. Several other authorities have agreed with this view, and have maintained that the basis of the phenomenon is the recollection of something that has been dreamed and then forgotten. In both cases it would be a question of the activation of an unconscious impression.

In 1907, in the second edition of my Psychopathology of Everyday Life, I proposed an exactly similar explanation for this form of apparent paramnesia without mentioning Grasset’s paper or knowing of its existence. By way of excuse I may remark that I arrived at my conclusion as the result of a psycho-analytic investigation which I was able to make of an example of déjà vu in a female patient; it was extremely clear, although it had taken place some 28 years earlier. I shall not reproduce the little analysis in this place. It showed that the situation in which the déjà vu occurred was really calculated to revive the memory of an earlier experience of the patient’s. The patient, who was at that time a twelve year-old child, was visiting a family in which there was a brother who was seriously ill and at the point of death; while her own brother had been in a similarly dangerous condition a few months earlier. But with the earlier of these two similar events there had been associated a phantasy that was incapable of entering consciousness - namely, a wish that her brother should die. Consequently, the analogy between the two cases could no become conscious. And the perception of it was replaced by the phenomenon of ‘having been through it all before’, the identity being displaced from the really common element on to the locality.

The name ‘déjà vu’ is, as we know, applied to a whole class of analogous phenomena, such as the ‘déjà entendu’, the ‘déjà éprouve’ and the ‘déjà senti’. The case which I am now about to report, as a single instance out of many similar ones, consists of a ‘déjà raconte’; and it could be traced back to an unconscious resolution which was never carried out.

A patient said to me in the course of his associations: ‘When I was playing in the garden with a knife (that was when I was five years old) and cut through my little finger - oh, I only thought it was cut through - but I’ve told you about that already.’

I assured him that I had no recollection of anything of the kind. He insisted with increasing conviction that it was impossible he could be mistaken. I finally put an end to the argument in the manner I have described above and asked him in any case to repeat the story. Then we should see where we were.

‘When I was five years old, I was playing in the garden near my nurse, and was carving with my pocket-knife in the bark of one of the walnut-trees that come into my dream as well.¹ Suddenly, to my unspeakable terror, I noticed that I had cut through the little finger of my (right or left?) hand, so that it was only hanging on by its skin. I felt no pain, but great fear. I did not venture to say anything to my nurse, who was only a few paces distant, but I sank down on the nearest seat and sat there incapable of casting another glance at my finger. At last I calmed down, took a look at the finger, and saw that it was entirely uninjured.’

¹ Cf. ‘The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales’. In telling the story again on a later occasion he made the following correction: ‘I don’t believe I was cutting the tree. That was a confusion with another recollection, which must also have been hallucinatorily falsified, of having made a cut in a tree with my knife and of blood having come out of the tree.’ 0

We soon agreed that, in spite of what he had thought, he could not have told me the story of this vision or hallucination before. He was very well aware that I could not have failed to exploit such evidence as this of his having had a fear of castration at the age of five. The episode broke down his resistance to assuming the existence of a castration complex; but he raised the question: ‘Why did I feel so certain of having told you this recollection before?’

It then occurred to both of us that repeatedly and in various connections he had brought out the following trivial recollection, and each time without our deriving my profit from it:

‘Once when my uncle went away on a journey he asked me and my sister what we should like him to bring us back. My sister asked for a book, and I asked for a pocket-knife.’ We now understood that this association which had emerged months before had in reality been a screen memory for the repressed recollection, and had been an attempt (rendered abortive by resistance) at telling the story of his imagined loss of his little finger - an unmistakable equivalent for his penis. The knife which his uncle did in fact bring him back was, as he clearly remembered, the same one that made its appearance in the episode which had been suppressed for so long.

It seems unnecessary to add anything in the way of an interpretation of this little occurrence, so far as it throws light upon the phenomenon of ‘fausse reconnaissance’. As regards the subject-matter of the patient’s vision, I may remark that, particularly in relation to the castration complex, similar hallucinatory falsifications are of not infrequent occurrence, and that they can just as easily serve the purpose of correcting unwelcome perceptions.1

In 1911 a man of university education, residing in a university town in Germany, with whom I am unacquainted and whose age is unknown to me, put the following notes upon his childhood at my disposal.

‘In the course of reading your study on Leonardo da Vinci, I was moved to internal dissent by the observations near the beginning of Chapter III. Your assertion that male children are dominated by an interest in their own genitals provoked me to make a counter-assertion to the effect that "if that is the general rule, I at all events am an exception to it". I then went on to read the passage that follows with the utmost amazement, such amazement as one feels when one comes across a fact of an entirely novel character. In the midst of my amazement a recollection occurred to me which showed me, to my own surprise, that the fact could not be by any means so novel as it had seemed. For, at the time at which I was passing through the period of "infantile sexual researches", a lucky chance gave me an opportunity of inspecting the female genitals in a little girl of my own age, and in doing so I quite clearly observed a penis of the same kind as my own. Soon afterwards I was plunged into fresh confusion by the sight of some female statues and nudes; and in order to get over this "scientific" discrepancy I devised the following experiment. By pressing my thighs together I succeeded in making my genitals disappear between them; and I was glad to find that in that way all differences between my own appearance and that of a female nude could be got rid of. Evidently, I thought to myself, the genitals have been made to disappear in a similar way in female nudes.

‘At this point another recollection occurred to me, which has always been of the greatest importance to me, in so far as it is one of the three recollections which constitute all that I can remember of my mother, who died when I was very young. I remember seeing my mother standing in front of the washing-stand and cleaning the glasses and washing-basin, while I was playing in the same room and committing some misdemeanour. As a punishment my hand was soundly slapped. Then to my very great terror I saw my little finger fall off; and in fact it fell into the pail. Knowing that my mother was angry, I did not venture to say anything; but my terror grew still more intense when I saw the pail carried off soon afterwards by the servant girl. For a long time I was convinced that I had lost a finger - up to the time, I believe, at which I learnt to count.

‘I have often tried to interpret this recollection, which, as I have already mentioned, has always been of the greatest importance to me on account of its connection with my mother; but none of my interpretations has satisfied me. It is only now, after reading your book, that I begin to have a suspicion of a simple and satisfying answer to the conundrum.’ 2

There is another kind of fausse reconnaissance which not infrequently makes its appearance at the close of a treatment, much to the physician’s satisfaction. After he has succeeded in forcing the repressed event (whether it was of a real or of a psychical nature) upon the patient’s acceptance in the teeth of all resistances, and has succeeded, as it were, in rehabilitating it - the patient may say: ‘Now I feel as though I had known it all the time.’ With this the work of the analysis has been completed.

THE MOSES OF MICHELANGELO (1914)

I may say at once that I am no connoisseur in art, but simply a layman. I have often observed that the subject-matter of works of art has a stronger attraction for me than their formal and technical qualities, though to the artist their value lies first and foremost in these latter. I am unable rightly to appreciate many of the methods used and the effects obtained in art. I state this so as to secure the reader’s indulgence for the attempt I propose to make here.

Nevertheless, works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting. This has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such things, to spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.

This has brought me to recognize the apparently paradoxical fact that precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unsolved riddles to our understanding. We admire them, we feel overawed by them, but we are unable to say what they represent to us. I am not sufficiently well-read to know whether this fact has already been remarked upon; possibly, indeed, some writer on aesthetics has discovered that this state of intellectual bewilderment is a necessary condition when a work of art is to achieve its greatest effects. It would be only with the greatest reluctance that I could bring myself to believe in any such necessity.

I do not mean that connoisseurs and lovers of art find no words with which to praise such objects to us. They are eloquent enough, it seems to me. But usually in the presence of a great work of art each says something different from the other; and none of them says anything that solves the problem for the unpretending admirer. In my opinion, what grips us so powerfully can only be the artist’s intention, in so far as he has succeeded in expressing it in his work and in getting us to understand it. I realize that this cannot be merely a matter of intellectual comprehension; what he aims at is to awaken in us the same, emotional attitude, the same mental constellation as that which in him produced the impetus to create. But why should the artist’s intention not be capable of being communicated and comprehended in words, like any other fact of mental life? Perhaps where great works of art are concerned this would never be possible without the application of psycho-analysis. The product itself after all must admit of such an analysis, if it really is an effective expression of the intentions and emotional activities of the artist. To discover his intention, though, I must first find out the meaning and content of what is represented in his work; I must, in other words, be able to interpret it. It is possible, therefore, that a work of art of this kind needs interpretation, and that until I have accomplished that interpretation I cannot come to know why I have been so powerfully affected. I even venture to hope that the effect of the work will undergo no diminution after we have succeeded in thus analysing it.

Let us consider Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Hamlet, a play, now over three centuries old.¹ I have followed the literature of psycho-analysis closely, and I accept its claim that it was not until the material of the tragedy had been traced back by psycho-analysis to the Oedipus theme that the mystery of its effect was at last explained. But before this was done, what a mass of differing and contradictory interpretative attempts, what a variety of opinions about the hero’s character and the dramatist’s intentions! Does Shakespeare claim our sympathies on behalf of a sick man, or of an ineffectual weakling, or of an idealist who is merely too good for the real world? And how many of these interpretations leave us cold! - so cold that they do nothing to explain the effect of the play and rather incline us to the view that its magical appeal rests solely upon the impressive thoughts in it and the splendour of its language. And yet, do not those very endeavours speak for the fact that we feel the need of discovering in it some source of power beyond them alone?

¹ Perhaps first performed in 1602.7

Another of these inscrutable and wonderful works of art is the marble statue of Moses, by Michelangelo, in the Church of S. Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. As we know, it was only a fragment of the gigantic tomb which the artist was to have erected for the powerful Pope Julius II.¹ It always delights me to read an appreciative sentence about this statue, such as that it is ‘the crown of modern sculpture’ (Grimm). For no piece of statuary has ever made a stronger impression on me than this. How often have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the deserted church stands, and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the hero’s glance! Sometimes I have crept cautiously out of the half-gloom of the interior as though I myself belonged to the mob upon whom his eye is turned - the mob which can hold fast no conviction, which has neither faith nor patience, and which rejoices when it has regained its illusory idols.

But why do I call this statue inscrutable? There is not the slightest doubt that it represents Moses, the Law-giver of the Jews, holding the Tables of the Ten Commandments. That much is certain, but that is all. As recently as 1912 an art critic, Max Sauerlandt, has said, ‘No other work of art in the world has been judged so diversely as the Moses with the head of Pan. The mere interpretation of the figure has given rise to completely opposed views....’ Basing myself on an essay published only five years ago,² I will first set out the doubts which are associated with this figure of Moses; and it will not be difficult to show that behind them lies concealed all that is most essential and valuable for the comprehension of this work of art.

¹ According to Henry Thode, the statue was made between the years 1512 and 1516.

² Thode (1908).8

I

The Moses of Michelangelo is represented as seated; his body faces forward, his head with its mighty beard looks to the left, his right foot rests on the ground and his left leg is raised so that only the toes touch the ground. His right arm links the Tables of the Law with a portion of his beard; his left arm lies in his lap. Were I to give a more detailed description of his attitude, I should have to anticipate what I want to say later on. The descriptions of the figure given by various writers are, by the way, curiously inapt. What has not been understood has been inaccurately perceived or reproduced. Grimm says that the right hand, ‘under whose arm the Tables rest, grasps his beard’. So also Lübke: ‘Profoundly shaken, he rasps with his right hand his magnificent, flowing beard...‘; and Springer: ‘Moses presses one (the left) hand against his body, and thrusts the other, as though unconsciously, into the mighty locks of his beard.’ Justi thinks that the fingers of his (right) hand are playing with his beard, ‘as an agitated man nowadays might play with his watch-chain.’ Müntz, too, lays stress on this playing with the beard. Thode speaks of the ‘calm, firm posture of the right hand upon the Tables resting against his side’. He does not recognize any sign of excitement even in the right hand, as Justi and also Boito do. ‘The hand remains grasping his beard, in the position it was in before the Titan turned his head to one side.’ Jakob Burckhardt complains that ‘the celebrated left arm has no other function in reality than to press his beard to his body’.

If mere descriptions do not agree we shall not be surprised to find a divergence of view as to the meaning of various features of the statue. In my opinion we cannot better characterize the facial expression of Moses than in the words of Thode, who reads in it ‘a mixture of wrath, pain and contempt’, - ‘wrath in his threatening contracted brows, pain in his glance, and contempt in his protruded under-lip and in the down-drawn corners of his mouth’. But other admirers must have seen with other eyes. Thus Dupaty says, ‘His august brow seems to be but a transparent veil only half concealing his great mind’.¹ Lübke, on the other hand, declares that ‘one would look in vain in that head for an expression of higher intelligence; his down-drawn brow speaks of nothing but a capacity for infinite wrath and an all-compelling energy’. Guillaume (1876) differs still more widely in his interpretation of the expression of the face. He finds no emotion in it ‘only a proud simplicity, an inspired dignity, a living faith. The eye of Moses looks into the future, he foresees the lasting survival of his people, the immutability of his law.’ Similarly, to Müntz, ‘the eyes of Moses rove far beyond the race of men. They are turned towards those mysteries which he alone has descried.’ To Steinmann, indeed, this Moses is ‘no longer the stern Lawgiver, no longer the terrible enemy of sin, armed with the wrath of Jehovah, but the royal priest, whom age may not approach, beneficent and prophetic, with the reflection of eternity upon his brow, taking his last farewell of his people’.

¹ Quoted by Thode, ibid., 197.9

There have even been some for whom the Moses of Michelangelo had nothing at all to say, and who are honest enough to admit it. Thus a critic in the Quarterly Revue of 1858: ‘There is an absence of meaning in the general conception, which precludes the idea of a self-sufficing whole....’ And we are astonished to learn that there are yet others who find nothing to admire in the Moses, but who revolt against it and complain of the brutality of the figure and the animal cast of the head.

Has then the master-hand indeed traced such a vague or ambiguous script in the stone, that so many different readings of it are possible?

Another question, however, arises, which covers the first one. Did Michelangelo intend to create a ‘timeless study of character and mood’ in this Moses, or did he portray him at a particular moment of his life and, if so, at a highly significant one? The majority of judges have decided in the latter sense and are able to tell us what episode in his life it is which the artist has immortalized in stone. It is the descent from Mount Sinai, where Moses has received the Tables from God, and it is the moment when he perceives that the people have meanwhile made themselves a Golden Calf and are dancing around it and rejoicing. This is the scene upon which his eyes are turned, this is the spectacle which calls out the feelings depicted in his countenance - feelings which in the next instant will launch his great frame into violent action. Michelangelo has chosen this last moment of hesitation, of calm before the storm, for his representation. In the next instant Moses will spring to his feet - his left foot is already raised from the ground - dash the Tables to the earth, and let loose his rage upon his faithless people.

Once more many individual differences of opinion exist among those who support this interpretation.

Burckhardt writes: ‘Moses seems to be shown at that moment at which he catches sight of the worship of the Golden Calf, and is springing to his feet. His form is animated by the inception of a mighty movement and the physical strength with which he is endowed causes us to await it with fear and trembling.’

Lübke says: ‘It is as if at this moment his flashing eye were perceiving the sin of the worship of the Golden Calf and a mighty inward movement were running through his whole frame. Profoundly shaken, he grasps with his right hand his magnificent, flowing beard, as though to master his actions for one instant longer, only for the explosion of his wrath to burst out with more shattering force the next.’

Springer agrees with this view, but not without mentioning one misgiving, which will engage our attention later in this paper. He says, ‘Burning with energy and zeal, it is with difficulty that the hero subdues his inward emotion.... We are thus involuntarily reminded of a dramatic situation and are brought to believe that Moses is represented at the moment at which he sees the people of Israel worshipping the Golden Calf and is about to start up in wrath. Such an impression, it is true, is not easy to reconcile with the artist’s real intention, since the figure of Moses, like the other five seated figures on the upper part of the Papal tomb, is meant primarily to have a decorative effect. But it testifies very convincingly to the vitality and individuality portrayed in the figure of Moses.’

One or two writers, without actually accepting the Golden Calf theory, do nevertheless agree on its main point, namely, that Moses is just about to spring to his feet and take action.

According to Grimm, ‘The form’ (of Moses) ‘is filled with a majesty, a self-assurance, a feeling that all the thunders of heaven are at his command, and that yet he is holding himself in check before loosing them, waiting to see whether the foes whom he means to annihilate will dare to attack him. He sits there as if on the point of starting to his feet, his proud head carried high on his shoulders; the hand under whose arm the Tables rest grasps his beard, which falls in heavy waves over his breast, his nostrils distended and his lips shaped as though words were trembling upon them.’

Heath Wilson declares that Moses’ attention has been excited, and he is about to leap to his feet, but is still hesitating; and that his glance of mingled scorn and indignation is still capable of changing into one of compassion.

Wölfflin speaks of ‘inhibited movement’. The cause of this inhibition, he says, lies in the will of the man himself; it is the last moment of self-control before he lets himself go and leaps to his feet.

Justi has gone the furthest of all in his interpretation of the statue as Moses in the act of perceiving the Golden Calf, and he has pointed out details hitherto unobserved in it and worked them into his hypothesis. He directs our attention to the position of the two Tables - an unusual one, for they are about to slip down on to the stone seat. ‘He’ (Moses) ‘might therefore be looking in the direction from which the clamour was coming with an expression of evil foreboding, or it might be the actual sight of the abomination which has dealt him a stunning blow. Quivering with horror and pain he has sunk down.¹ He has sojourned on the mountain forty days and nights and he is weary. A horror, a great turn of fortune, a crime, even happiness itself, can be perceived in a single moment, but not grasped in its essence, its depths or its consequences. For an instant it seems to Moses that his work is destroyed and he despairs utterly of his people. In such moments the inner emotions betray themselves involuntarily in small movements. He lets the Tables slip from his right hand on to the stone seat; they have come to rest on their corner there and are pressed by his forearm against the side of his body. His hand, however, comes in contact with his breast and beard and thus, by the turning of the head to the spectator’s right, it draws the beard to the left and breaks the symmetry of that masculine adornment. It looks as though his fingers were playing with his beard as an agitated man nowadays might play with his watch-chain. His left hand is buried in his garment over the lower part of his body - in the Old Testament the viscera are the seat of the emotions - but the left leg is already drawn back and the right put forward; in the next instant he will leap up, his mental energy will be transposed from feeling into action, his right arm will move, the Tables will fall to the ground, and the shameful trespass will be expiated in torrents of blood....’ ‘This is not yet the moment of tension of an act. Pain of mind still dominates him and almost paralyses him.’

¹ It should be remarked that the careful arrangement of the mantle over the knees of the sitting figure invalidates this first part of Justi’s view. On the contrary, this would lead us to suppose that Moses is represented as sitting there in calm repose until he is startled by some sudden perception.1

Knapp takes the same view, except that he does not introduce the doubtful point at the beginning of the description, and carries the idea of the slipping Tables further. ‘He who just now was alone with his God is distracted by earthly sounds. He hears a noise; the noise of singing and dancing wakes him from his dream; he turns his eyes and his head in the direction of the clamour. In one instant fear, rage and unbridled passion traverse his huge frame. The Tables begin to slip down, and will fall to the ground and break when he leaps to his feet and hurls the angry thunder of his words into the midst of his backsliding people.... This is the moment of highest tension which is chosen....’ Knapp, therefore, emphasizes the element of preparation for action, and disagrees with the view that what is being represented is an initial inhibition due to an overmastering agitation.

It cannot be denied that there is something extraordinarily attractive about attempts at an interpretation of the kind made by Justi and Knapp. This is because they do not stop short at the general effect of the figure, but are based on separate features in it; these we usually fail to notice, being overcome by the total impression of the statue and as it were paralysed by it. The marked turn of the head and eyes to the left, whereas the body faces forwards, supports the view that the resting Moses has suddenly seen something on that side to rivet his attention. His lifted foot can hardly mean anything else but that he is preparing to spring up;¹ and the very unusual way in which the Tables are held (for they are most sacred objects and are not to be brought into the composition like any ordinary accessory) is fully accounted for if we suppose they have slipped down as a result of the agitation of their bearer and will fall to the ground. According to this view we should believe that the statue represents a special and important moment in the life of Moses, and we should be left in no doubt of what that moment is.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23