The future of an illusion 13 страница

Everyone who is familiar with the complicated transformation of meaning undergone by hysterical symptoms will understand that no attempt can be made here to follow out the meaning of Dostoevsky’s attacks beyond this beginning.¹ It is enough that we may assume that their original meaning remained unchanged behind all later accretions. We can safely say that Dostoevsky never got free from the feelings of guilt arising from his intention of murdering his father. They also determined his attitude in the two other spheres in which the father-relation is the decisive factor, his attitude towards the authority of the State and towards belief in God. In the first of these he ended up with complete submission to his Little Father, the Tsar, who had once performed with him in reality the comedy of killing which his attacks had so often represented in play. Here penitence gained the upper hand. In the religious sphere he retained more freedom: according to apparently trustworthy reports he wavered, up to the last moment of his life, between faith and atheism. His great intellect made it impossible for him to overlook any of the intellectual difficulties to which faith leads. By an individual recapitulation of a development in world-history he hoped to find a way out and a liberation from guilt in the Christ ideal, and even to make use of his sufferings as a claim to be playing a Christ-like role. If on the whole he did not achieve freedom and became a reactionary, that was because the filial guilt, which is present in human beings generally and on which religious feeling is built, had in him attained a super-individual intensity and remained insurmountable even to his great intelligence. In writing this we are laying ourselves open to the charge of having abandoned the impartiality of analysis and of subjecting Dostoevsky to judgements that can only be justified from the partisan standpoint of a particular Weltanschauung. A conservative would take the side of the Grand Inquisitor and would judge Dostoevsky differently. The objection is just; and one can only say in extenuation that Dostoevsky’s decision has every appearance of having been determined by an intellectual inhibition due to his neurosis.

¹ The best account of the meaning and content given by Dostoevsky himself, when he told his friend Strakhov that his irritability and depression after an epileptic attack were due to the fact that he seemed to himself a criminal and could not get rid of the feeling that he had a burden of unknown guilt upon him, that he had committed some great misdeed, which oppressed him. (Fülöp-Miller, 1924, 1188.) In self-accusations like these psycho-analysis sees signs of a recognition of ‘psychical reality’, and it endeavours to make the unknown guilt known to consciousness.

It can scarcely be owing to chance that three of the masterpieces of the literature of all time - the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Kamarazov - should all deal with the same subject, parricide. In all three, moreover, the motive for the deed, sexual rivalry for a woman, is laid bare.

The most straightforward is certainly the representation in the drama derived from the Greek legend. In this it is still the hero himself who commits the crime. But poetic treatment is impossible without softening and disguise. The naked admission of an intention to commit parricide, as we arrive at it in analysis, seems intolerable without analytic preparation. The Greek drama, while retaining the crime, introduces the indispensable toning-down in a masterly fashion by projecting the hero’s unconscious motive into reality in the form of a compulsion by a destiny which is alien to him. The hero commits the deed unintentionally and apparently uninfluenced by the woman; this latter element is however taken into account in the circumstance that the hero can only obtain possession of the queen mother after he has repeated his deed upon the monster who symbolizes the father. After his guilt has been revealed and made conscious, the hero makes no attempt to exculpate himself by appealing to the artificial expedient of the compulsion of destiny. His crime is acknowledged and punished as though it were a full and conscious one - which is bound to appear unjust to our reason, but which psychologically is perfectly correct.

In the English play the presentation is more indirect; the hero does not commit the crime himself; it is carried out by someone else, for whom it is not parricide. The forbidden motive of sexual rivalry for the woman does not need, therefore, to be disguised. Moreover, we see the hero’s Oedipus complex, as it were, in a reflected light, by learning the effect upon him of the other’s crime. He ought to avenge the crime, but finds himself, strangely enough, incapable of doing so. We know that it is his sense of guilt that is paralysing him; but, in a manner entirely in keeping with neurotic processes, the sense of guilt is displaced on to the perception of his inadequacy for fulfilling his task. There are signs that the hero feels this guilt as a super-individual one. He despises others no less than himself: ‘Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?’

The Russian novel goes a step further in the same direction. There also the murder is committed by someone else. This other person, however, stands to the murdered man in the same filial relation as the hero, Dmitri; in this other person’s case the motive of sexual rivalry is openly admitted; he is a brother of the hero’s, and it is a remarkable fact that Dostoevsky has attributed to him his own illness, the alleged epilepsy, as though he were seeking to confess that the epileptic, the neurotic, in himself was a parricide. Then, again, in the speech for the defence at the trial, there is the famous mockery of psychology - it is a ‘knife that cuts both ways’: a splendid piece of disguise, for we have only to reverse it in order to discover the deepest meaning of Dostoevsky’s view of things. It is not psychology that deserves the mockery, but the procedure of judicial enquiry. It is a matter of indifference who actually committed the crime; psychology is only concerned to know who desired it emotionally and who welcomed it when it was done. And for that reason all of the brothers, except the contrasted figure of Alyosha, are equally guilty - the impulsive sensualist, the sceptical cynic and the epileptic criminal. In The Brothers Karamazov there is one particularly revealing scene. In the course of his talk with Dmitri, Father Zossima recognizes that Dmitri is prepared to commit parricide, and he bows down at his feet. It is impossible that this can be meant as an expression of admiration; it must mean that the holy man is rejecting the temptation to despise or detest the murderer and for that reason humbles himself before him. Dostoevsky’s sympathy for the criminal is, in fact, boundless; it goes far beyond the pity which the unhappy wretch has a right to, and reminds us of the ‘holy awe’ with which epileptics and lunatics were regarded in the past. A criminal is to him almost a Redeemer, who has taken on himself the guilt which must else have been borne by others. There is no longer any need for one to murder, since he has already murdered; and one must be grateful to him, for, except for him, one would have been obliged oneself to murder. That is not kindly pity alone, it is identification on the basis of similar murderous impulses - in fact, a slightly displaced narcissism. (In saying this, we are not disputing the ethical value of this kindliness.) This may perhaps be quite generally the mechanism of kindly sympathy with other people, a mechanism which one can discern with especial ease in this extreme case of a guilt-ridden novelist. There is no doubt that this sympathy by identification was a decisive factor in determining Dostoevsky’s choice of material. He dealt first with the common criminal (whose motives are egotistical) and the political and religious criminal; and not until the end of his life did he come back to the primal criminal, the parricide, and use him, in a work of art, for making his confession.

6 The publication of Dostoevsky’s posthumous papers and of his wife’s diaries has thrown a glaring light on one episode in his life, namely the period in Germany when he was obsessed with a mania for gambling (cf. Fülöp-Miller and Eckstein, 1925), which no one could regard as anything but an unmistakable fit of pathological passion. There was no lack of rationalizations for this remarkable and unworthy behaviour. As often happens with neurotics, Dostoevsky’s sense of guilt had taken a tangible shape as a burden of debt, and he was able to take refuge behind the pretext that he was trying by his winnings at the tables to make it possible for him to return to Russia without being arrested by his creditors. But this was no more than a pretext and Dostoevsky was acute enough to recognize the fact and honest enough to admit it. He knew that the chief thing was gambling for its own sake - le jeu pour le jeu.¹ All the details of his impulsively irrational conduct show this and something more besides. He never rested until he had lost everything. For him gambling was a method of self-punishment as well. Time after time he gave his young wife his promise or his word of honour not to play any more or not to play any more on that particular day; and, as she says, he almost always broke it. When his losses had reduced himself and her to the direst need, he derived a second pathological satisfaction from that. He could then scold and humiliate himself before her, invite her to despise him and to feel sorry that she had married such an old sinner; and when he had thus unburdened his conscience, the whole business would begin again next day. His young wife accustomed herself to this cycle, for she had noticed that the one thing which offered any real hope of salvation - his literary production - never went better than when they had lost everything and pawned their last possessions. Naturally she did not understand the connection. When his sense of guilt was satisfied by the punishments he had inflicted on himself, the inhibition upon his work became less severe and he allowed himself to take a few steps along the road to success.²

¹ ‘The main thing is the play itself,’ he writes in one of his letters. ‘I swear that greed for money has nothing to do with it, although Heaven knows I am sorely in need of money.’

² ‘He always remained at the gaming tables till he had lost everything and was totally ruined. It was only when the damage was quite complete that the demon at last retired from his soul and made way for the creative genius.’ (Fülöp-Miller and Eckstein, 1925, lxxxvi.)

What part of a gambler’s long-buried childhood is it that forces its way to repetition in his obsession for play? The answer may be divined without difficulty from a story by one of our younger writers. Stefan Zweig, who has incidentally devoted a study to Dostoevsky himself (1920), has included in his collection of three stories Die Verwirrung der Gefühle (1927) one which he calls ‘Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau’. This little masterpiece ostensibly sets out only to show what an irresponsible creature woman is, and to what excesses, surprising even to herself, an unexpected experience may drive her. But the story tells far more than this. If it is subjected to an analytical interpretation, it will be found to represent (without any apologetic intent) something quite different, something universally human, or rather something masculine. And such an interpretation is so extremely obvious that it cannot be resisted. It is characteristic of the nature of artistic creation that the author, who is a personal friend of mine, was able to assure me, when I asked him, that the interpretation which I put to him had been completely strange to his knowledge and intention, although some of the details woven into the narrative seemed expressly designed to give a clue to the hidden secret.

In this story, an elderly lady of distinction tells the author about an experience she has had more than twenty years earlier. She has been left a widow when still young and is the mother of two sons, who no longer need her. In her forty-second year, expecting nothing further of life, she happens, on one of her aimless journeyings, to visit the Rooms at Monte Carlo. There, among all the remarkable impressions which the place produces, she is soon fascinated by the sight of a pair of hands which seem to betray all the feelings of the unlucky gambler with terrifying sincerity and intensity. These hands belong to a handsome young man - the author, as though unintentionally, makes him of the same age as the narrator’s elder son - who, after losing everything, leaves the Rooms in the depth of despair, with the evident intention of ending his hopeless life in the Casino gardens. An inexplicable feeling of sympathy compels her to follow him and make every effort to save him. He takes her for one of the importunate women so common there and tries to shake her off; but she stays with him and finds herself obliged, in the most natural way possible, to join him in his apartment at the hotel, and finally to share his bed. After this improvised light of love, she exacts a most solemn vow from the young man, who has now apparently calmed down, that he will never play again, provides him with money for his journey home and promises to meet him at the station before the departure of his train. Now, however, she begins to feel a great tenderness for him, is ready to sacrifice all she has in order to keep him and makes up her mind to go with him instead of saying goodbye. Various mischances delay her, so that she misses the train. In her longing for the lost one she returns once more to the Rooms and there, to her horror, sees once more the hands which had first excited her sympathy: the faithless youth had gone back to his play. She reminds him of his promise, but, obsessed by his passion, he calls her a spoil-sport, tells her to go, and flings back the money with which she has tried to rescue him. She hurries away in deep mortification and learns later that she has not succeeded in saving him from suicide.

The brilliantly told, faultlessly motivated story is of course complete in itself and is certain to make a deep effect upon the reader. But analysis shows us that its invention is based fundamentally upon a wishful phantasy belonging to the period of puberty, which a number of people actually remember consciously. The phantasy embodies a boy’s wish that his mother should herself initiate him into sexual life in order to save him from the dreaded injuries caused by masturbation. (The numerous creative works that deal with the theme of redemption have the same origin.) The ‘vice’ of masturbation is replaced by the addiction to gambling; and the emphasis laid upon the passionate activity of the hands betrays this derivation. Indeed, the passion for play is an equivalent of the old compulsion to masturbate; ‘playing’ is the actual word used in the nursery to describe the activity of the hands upon the genitals. The irresistible nature of the temptation, the solemn resolutions, which are nevertheless invariably broken, never to do it again, the stupefying pleasure and the bad conscience which tells the subject that he is ruining himself (committing suicide) - all these elements remain unaltered in the process of substitution. It is true that Zweig’s story is told by the mother, not by the son. It must flatter the son to think: ‘if my mother only knew what dangers masturbation involves me in, she would certainly save me from them by allowing me to lavish all my tenderness on her own body’. The equation of the mother with a prostitute, which is made by the young man in the story, is linked up with the same phantasy. It brings the unattainable woman within easy reach. The bad conscience which accompanies the phantasy brings about the unhappy ending of the story. It is also interesting to notice how the façade given to the story by its author seeks to disguise its analytic meaning. For it is extremely questionable whether the erotic life of women is dominated by sudden and mysterious impulses. On the contrary, analysis reveals an adequate motivation for the surprising behaviour of this woman who had hitherto turned away from love. Faithful to the memory of her dead husband, she had armed herself against all similar attractions; but - and here the son’s phantasy is right - she did not, as a mother, escape her quite unconscious transference of love on to her son, and Fate was able to catch her at this undefended spot.

If the addiction to gambling, with the unsuccessful struggles to break the habit and the opportunities it affords for self-punishment, is a repetition of the compulsion to masturbate, we shall not be surprised to find that it occupied such a large space in Dostoevsky’s life. After all, we find no cases of severe neurosis in which the auto-erotic satisfaction of early childhood and of puberty has not played a part; and the relation between efforts to suppress it and fear of the father are too well known to need more than a mention.¹

¹ Most of the views which are here expressed are also contained in an excellent book by Jolan Neufeld (1923)9

APPENDIXA LETTER FROM FREUD TO THEODOR REIK

April 14, 1929... I have read your critical review of my Dostoevsky study with great pleasure. All your objections deserve consideration and must be recognized as in a sense apt. I can bring forward a little in my defence. But of course it will not be a question of who is right or who is wrong.

I think you are applying too high a standard to this triviality. It was written as a favour to someone and written reluctantly. I always write reluctantly nowadays. No doubt you noticed this about it. This is not meant, of course, to excuse hasty or false judgements, but merely the careless architecture of the essay as a whole. I cannot dispute the unharmonious effect produced by the addition of the Zweig analysis; but deeper examination will perhaps show some justification for it. If I had not been hampered by considerations of the place where my essay was to appear, I should certainly have written: ‘We may expect that in the history of a neurosis accompanied by such a severe sense of guilt a special part will be played by the struggle against masturbation. This expectation is completely fulfilled by Dostoevsky’s pathological addiction to gambling. For, as we can see from a short story of Zweig’s... etc.’ That is to say, the amount of space given to the short story corresponds not to the relation: Zweig-Dostoevsky, but to the other one: masturbation-neurosis. All the same, the outcome was clumsy.

I hold firmly to a scientifically objective social assessment of ethics, and for that reason I should not wish to deny the excellent Philistine a certificate of good ethical conduct, even though it has cost him little self-discipline. But alongside of this I grant the validity of the subjective psychological view of ethics which you support. Though I agree with your judgement of the world and mankind as they are to-day, I cannot, as you know, regard your pessimistic dismissal of a better future as justified.

As you suggest, I included Dostoevsky the psychologist under the creative artist. Another objection I might have raised against him was that his insight was so much restricted to abnormal mental life. Consider his astonishing helplessness in face of the phenomena of love. All he really knew were crude, instinctual desire, masochistic subjection and loving out of pity. You are right, too, in suspecting that, in spite of all my admiration for Dostoevsky’s intensity and pre-eminence, I do not really like him. That is because my patience with pathological natures is exhausted in analysis. In art and life I am intolerant of them. Those are character traits personal to me and not binding on others.

Where are you going to publish your essay? I rate it very highly. It is only scientific research that must be without presumptions. In every other kind of thinking the choice of a point of view cannot be avoided; and there are, of course, several of these...1

‘SOME DREAMS OF DESCARTES’ A LETTER TO MAXIME LEROY (1929)

On considering your letter asking me to examine ‘some dreams of Descartes’, my first feeling was an impression of dismay, since working on dreams without being able to obtain from the dreamer himself any indications on the relations which might link them to one another or attach them to the external world - and this is clearly the case when it is a question of the dreams of a historical figure - gives, as a general rule, only a meagre result. In the event my task turned out to be easier than I had anticipated; nevertheless, the fruit of my investigations will no doubt seem to you much less important than you had a right to expect.

Our philosopher’s dreams are what are known as ‘dreams from above’ (‘Träume von oben’). That is to say, they are formulations of ideas which could have been created just as well in a waking state as during the state of sleep, and which have derived their content only in certain parts from mental states at a comparatively deep level. That is why these dreams offer for the most part a content which has an abstract, poetic or symbolic form.

The analysis of dreams of this kind usually leads us to the following position: we cannot understand the dream, but the dreamer - or the patient - can translate it immediately and without difficulty, given that the content of the dream is very close to his conscious thoughts. There then remain certain parts of the dream about which the dreamer does not know what to say: and these are precisely the parts which belong to the unconscious and which are in many respects the most interesting.

In the most favourable cases we explain this unconscious with the help of the ideas which the dreamer has added to it.

This way of judging ‘dreams from above’ - and this term must be understood in a psychological, not in a mystical, sense - is the one to be followed in the case of Descartes’ dreams.4

The philosopher interprets them himself and, in accordance with all the rules for the interpretation of dreams, we must accept his explanation, but it should be added that we have no path open to us which will take us any further.

In confirmation of his explanation we can say that the hindrances which prevented him from moving freely are perfectly well known to us: they are a representation by the dream of an internal conflict. The left side represents evil and sin, and the wind the ‘evil genius’ (animus).

The different figures who appear in the dream cannot of course be identified by us, although Descartes, if he were questioned, would not have failed to identify them. The bizarre elements, of which, incidentally, there are few, and which are almost absurd - such as ‘the melon from a foreign land’, and the little portraits - remain unexplained.

As regards the melon, the dreamer has had the - original - idea of seeing in it ‘the charms of solitude, but presented by purely human inducements’. This is certainly not correct, but it might provide an association of ideas which would lead to a correct explanation. If it is correlated with his state of sin, this association might stand for a sexual picture which occupied the lonely young man’s imagination.

On the question of the portraits Descartes throws no light.5

THE GOETHE PRIZE (1930)

LETTER TO DR. ALFONS PAQUET

Grundlsee, 3.8.1930

My dear Dr. Paquet,

I have not been spoilt by public marks of honour and I have so adapted myself to this state of things that I have been able to do without them. I should not like to deny, however, that the award of the Goethe Prize of the City of Frankfurt has given me great pleasure. There is something about it that especially fires the imagination and one of its stipulations dispels the feeling of humiliation which in other cases is a concomitant of such distinctions.

I must particularly thank you for your letter; it moved and astonished me. Apart from your sympathetic penetration into the nature of my work, I have never before found the secret, personal intentions behind it recognized with such clarity as by you, and I should very much like to ask you how you come by such knowledge.

I am sorry to learn from your letter to my daughter that I am not to see you in the near future, and postponement is always a chancy affair at my time of life. Of course I shall be most ready to receive the gentleman (Dr. Michel) whose visit you announce.

Unfortunately I shall not be able to attend the ceremony in Frankfurt; I am too frail for such an undertaking. The company there will lose nothing by that: my daughter Anna is certainly pleasanter to look at and to listen to than I am. We propose that she shall read out a few sentences of mine which deal with Goethe’s connections with psycho-analysis and defend the analysts themselves against the reproach of having offended against the respect due to the great man by the analytic attempts they have made on him. I hope it will be acceptable if I thus adapt the theme that has been proposed to me - my ‘inner relations as a man and a scientist to Goethe’ - or else that you will be kind enough to let me know.

Yours very sincerely,

Freud 8

ADDRESS DELIVERED IN THE GOETHE HOUSE AT FRANKFURT

My life’s work has been directed to a single aim. I have observed the more subtle disturbances of mental function in healthy and sick people and have sought to infer - or, if you prefer it, to guess - from signs of this kind how the apparatus which serves these functions is constructed and what concurrent and mutually opposing forces are at work in it. What we - I, my friends and collaborators - have managed to learn in following this path has seemed to us of importance for the construction of a mental science which makes it possible to understand both normal and pathological processes as parts of the same natural course of events.

I was recalled from such narrow considerations by the astonishing honour which you do me. By evoking the figure of the great universal personality who was born in this house and who spent his childhood in these rooms, your distinction prompts one as it were to justify oneself before him and raises the question of how he would have reacted if his glance, attentive to every innovation in science, had fallen on psycho-analysis. Goethe can be compared in versatility to Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance master, who like him was both artist and scientific investigator. But human images can never be repeated, and profound differences between the two great men are not lacking. In Leonardo’s nature the scientist did not harmonize with the artist, he interfered with him and perhaps in the end stifled him. In Goethe’s life both personalities found room side by side: at different times each allowed the other to predominate. In Leonardo it is plausible to associate his disturbance with that inhibition in his development which withdrew everything erotic, and hence psychology too, from his sphere of interest. In this respect Goethe’s character was able to develop more freely.

I think that Goethe would not have rejected psycho-analysis in an unfriendly spirit, as so many of our contemporaries have done. He himself approached it at a number of points, recognized much through his own insight that we have since been able to confirm, and some views, which have brought criticism and mockery down upon us, were expounded by him as self-evident. Thus he was familiar with the incomparable strength of the first affective ties of human creatures. He celebrated them in the Dedication to his Faust poem, in words which we could repeat for each of our analyses:

Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten,

Die früh sich einst dem trüben Blick gezeigt,

Versuch’ ich wohl, euch diesmal festzuhalten?

........

Gleich einer alten, halbverklungenen Sage

Kommt erste Lieb’ und Freundschaft mit herauf

He explained to himself the strongest impulse of love that he experienced as a mature man by apostrophizing his beloved: ‘Ach, du warst in abgelebten Zeiten meine Schwester oder meine Frau.’

Thus he does not deny that these perennial first inclinations take figures from one’s own family circle as their object.

Goethe paraphrases the content of dream-life in the evocative words:

Was von Menschen nicht gewusst

Oder nicht bedacht,

Durch das Labyrinth der Brust

Wandelt in der Nacht.

Behind this magic we recognize the ancient, venerable and incontestably correct pronouncement of Aristotle - that dreaming is the continuation of our mental activity into the state of sleep - combined with the recognition of the unconscious which psycho-analysis first added to it. Only the riddle of dream-distortion finds no solution here.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23