Clinical Lessons on Life and Madness

Dostoevsky's Characters

Heitor O'Dwyer de Macedo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351014533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The author of Clinical Lessons on Life and Madness: Dostoevsky's Characters draws on Dostoevsky's universe to illuminate psychoanalytic theory and practice. Using Dostoevsky's characters as case studies, the author discusses the various psychoanalytic concepts they embody, and shows how these insights can be applied to therapeutic understanding.

By considering the people who populate Dostoevsky's world as personifying a whole spectrum of human possibilities and modes of relation, Heitor O'Dwyer de Macedo's discussion of the characters – including those from Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov – allows him to explore fundamental issues constitutive of clinical practice, such as trauma, fantasy, perversion and madness.

Clinical Lessons on Life and Madness will provide an important resource for psychoanalysts with an interest in literature, as well as students of literature seeking a psychoanalytic interpretation.

1

Notes from Underground

I encountered Dostoevsky several decades ago. I was 14. The first book was Crime and Punishment. All the others followed. Being Brazilian, I read these books in my native tongue. The books were very big, published in large print. Each volume was impressive because of its size and weight. It was a kind of big box that always filled me with emotion and respect. And pride. I was proud to feel this emotion, to be able to contain it and treasure it. Even now, the intact memory of this completely new, inaugural experience moves me and reassures me. I felt the reassurance even then. I do not believe it came first. I think it came after this discovery that changed my life. Forgive me for hesitating: we all know that it is impossible to speak with precision about such critical moments in our lives.

The size and weight of the books no doubt contributed to the feeling of reassurance. This physical aspect of the reading provided a setting for the hand-to-hand combat with the work, at once exhilarating and humanising. The physical presence of the volumes was also reassuring. It made concrete this presence I joyfully interiorised. The presence of another. Surrounded by these books – I had soon spread the volumes of the complete works of Dostoevsky all through my room – I felt very proud to have this intimate relation with someone’s thinking, a relation which allowed me to recognise my own intimate being, which separated me from everything that had weighed on me, and still did. This intimacy shaped my space of solitude, where it was good to be. Looking at these books, touched and grateful for the gift life was making me, I was absolutely certain that they had been written for me and first of all for me. They were not a secret, but they were my secret.

These books were not a secret, since my parents knew I was reading them – they even admired my perseverance in reading them (they were, in fact, my first passion, but my parents did not know that). But they were my secret because, displayed in plain view, these books concealed a treasure I alone knew about: they were the aliveness of life! And for my parents – especially my mother – to accept without question my deep connection to someone other than them was, in itself, a real novelty. As well as a liberation: for the first time, I could admit without guilt to having an experience all my own. This experience changed my life: I was learning from Dostoevsky that feelings could be named, that one could feel something other than anguish, and that anguish had a name. The first thing I learned from Dostoevsky was to identify feelings.

Psychoanalysts know this: when a child of 14 develops such a passion for an author, two things can explain it: either he is doing very, very well, or he is in very bad shape. And if the author is Dostoevsky, it may be that the child will become a criminal. Or a psychoanalyst.

When Freud was a child, he no doubt heard a phrase similar to this, which could certainly have been written by Dostoevsky. Surely, the narrator in Notes from Underground could have used the same thought to complete the first line in his journal: I am a sick man […] I am a spiteful man […] perhaps a criminal.

The Underground Man

Notes from Underground is the third novel Dostoevsky wrote after his return from Siberia, where he spent four years in exile, in a labour camp, after being accused of plotting against the tsarist regime. His arrest was followed by a mock execution, a horrifying experience which affected him profoundly.

The book tells a tale of secret delight, of voluptuous pleasure. But where exactly does pleasure lie, the narrator asks himself. Still, he tells us that he writes in order to explain this pleasure.¹

On a superficial level, we might say that he is talking about the pleasure of hating. Hating oneself, hating the other. A spiteful man, a sick man. An insect, a mouse, enjoying his degradation, his debasement, his despair, his nastiness. This is the impression produced by the sarcastic, mocking tone used by the author. The tone is in keeping with the contempt the narrator feels for himself, a contempt to be seen as the most spectacular effect of his abysmal solitude. All he has left is to take pleasure in his suffering.

Admittedly, the unpleasant tone is maintained throughout the novel, and solitude creates monstrous effects, but the reader must keep in mind that both – the tone and the solitude – should be seen as the symptoms of a subject who feels excluded from the world. Very quickly, it becomes clear that the narrator wants to focus on the reasons that explain his acceptance of this solitude. For instance, he is unable to resign himself to the reasonable laws of science that say “twice two makes four”. Better to take pleasure in a toothache or a crime than to accept such a limiting argument. This can be seen, not without reason, as a refusal of laws and an argument in favour of perversion. But only at a superficial level.

The reading remains at this level when we look at the diffuse guilt of the Underground Man, as well as his boredom, or what he calls the weight of inertia, and his inability to love or make decisions.

On the surface, the Underground Man is an excellent example of the successful outcome of a Lacanian-Millerian analysis: he has acquired the consciousness that fundamentally a human being is worthless trash, that any impression of well-being is only an illusion, and that the only accessible truth lies in the acceptance of one’s helplessness. The Underground Man takes pleasure in his non-being. I am not being sarcastic when I say this. I think a conclusion of this kind is dreadful. It is dreadful that psychoanalysts can say such idiotic things. In fact, this cynical vision of life was fashionable in a certain intellectual milieu in Dostoevsky’s Russia; he was revolted by it and denounced it.

From another perspective, Notes from Underground speaks of the conditions required for thinking to be possible: reflection always begins beyond self-love. It is impossible to think and to protect oneself from the consequences of thinking at the same time. The absence of self-esteem makes it possible to examine with finesse the subtlest attitudes of the other.

This is why self-hatred can sometimes generate powerful thinking – but limited by the subject’s inability to make use of it.

Hatred of others and of the world also generates reflection. Its destructive, murderous nature focuses on the most obscene, vile and frightening aspects of the real. Rooted in paranoid certainties, this reflection is just as sterile and deprived of usefulness for the subject.

What, then, does the Underground Man teach us? I am speaking of those of us whom Freud has taught to learn from psychopathology. He teaches that detachment from oneself, and the setting aside of self-love require a strong existential foundation – what psychoanalysts call well-structured primary narcissism. This is the prerequisite that will allow the subject to make use of his thinking and to take pleasure in his accomplishment. This existential foundation also renders reflection practical, enabling the subject to construct a new interpretation of his life story, and acquire a new place in the world. Freed of amour propre, thinking draws strength from its savage daring, from the ferocity of its combat with the density of the world, from the joy of reflecting the unknown.

Before accepting the pleasure, he could take in his vileness and vice, the Underground Man suffered greatly:

But at first, in the beginning, what agonies I endured in that struggle! I did not believe it was the same with other people, and all my life I hid this fact about myself as a secret. I was ashamed (even now, perhaps, I am ashamed).²

This means that now, when he is writing these lines, the Underground Man knows that others have had this experience as well. But let us examine the reasons for his torment. You will see that we will not be wasting our time.

The cause of suffering

Remember that before concluding that he is a nasty, vicious creature, the Underground Man asks himself: “whether other people feel such enjoyment”. He feels guilty, even the guiltiest of men, but a guilty man without blame. He is guilty of an excess of consciousness, of heightened consciousness. Indeed, he asks himself: “Can a man of [consciousness] respect himself at all?”³ And we ask: conscious of what?

The answer is obvious and applies to all the major characters of the book. Dostoevsky presents his characters engaged in a struggle with an unsettling discovery they are unable to name, but whose effects they admit courageously. Since Dostoevsky shares with them this experience of the unnamable, the reader is invited to join in this search rooted in speech – Dostoevsky’s characters speak all the time – a dizzying search for a parcel of unknown which, as we now know, is called the unconscious.

In the novel, the Underground Man, his brothers and some of his sisters accept, with courage and generosity, the effects of their relation with this component of the unknown. (It is generosity that renders the major Dostoevskian characters excessive.) This component of the unknown fascinates them and increases their self-worth: they are proud of their absolute singularity. At the same time, this element originating in the unknown appals and oppresses them: thrown into abysmal solitude, they are afflicted by an impression of exclusion from the world of their contemporaries. This contradictory position, this back-and-forth between passion and distress, accompanies the inability of a heightened consciousness to name the unknown it recognises. The heightened consciousness has an unalterable conviction: the personality (which we now call the “subject”), goes beyond the conscious (which we now call the “ego”). And when this awareness of the subject calls “unconscious” that which comes from the realm of the unknown – examples abound, as we shall see – this realm is considered a source rather than a place.

Designating the unconscious as a place was going to be Freud’s work. But, through his characters, Dostoevsky gives us a glimpse of what Freud might have experienced in his self-analysis, and more specifically of the hellish universe in which he was immersed before discovering fantasy.

Before this discovery, Freud felt as miserable as the Underground Man because he could not consider all his thoughts, and all the desires he recognised in himself, as illustrating simply the field of possibilities of a human subject. Outside of this perspective, each thought and each recognised desire becomes the essential truth of the being. Within this perspective, if the subject has a perverse thought, he is a pervert; if he imagines a crime, he is a criminal, and so on. This being so, there is immense anguish to be contained, and its effects are devastating. Freud’s complete, uncensured correspondence with Fliess⁴, regarded as the springboard of psychoanalysis, testifies amply to this torment – which overwhelms Dostoevsky’s characters.

In today’s Western world, the unconscious is recognised as a self-evident fact by many people, like running water and electricity. Now that it has become commonplace, this notion no longer produces the shocking effect related to its origins in infantile sexuality. But for the man who was the first to recognise his sexual desire for his mother and his desire to kill his father, the emotional pain and the shame of this discovery must have been hard to bear.

Dostoevsky’s characters are familiar with this pain and with this shame, but contrary to Freud, they will never be able to recognise the links between the scenarios constructed by their desire and fantasy life. As a result, they have only three options: they are immediately stunned by the field of possibilities they discover; or they rush into the reality of an action that will force them to live with a horrible image of themselves; or else they become saints, mystics showing infinite tolerance for the inhuman hiding in everyone. Dostoevsky’s characters are spinning in circles, as Freud did during his self-analysis, because they mistake that which is only fantasy for essential being. And because they are generous and courageous in their encounters with fantasies they don’t recognise as such, they admit that they are plural beings, but can no longer tell who they are. And who are they, really? They are reservoirs of dreams and reality, capable of suffering and of being serene, of feeling passion and shame, love and hate, rising to the sublime and sinking to crime; in short, they are like other people. In fact, the Underground Man, the paradigm of the dilemmas encountered by Dostoevsky’s characters, sometimes admits that he is not the only one of his kind.

Encounter with the unconscious

Psychoanalysts are familiar with all the means of avoiding the pain and the shame associated with recognising unconscious fantasies. While they underwent their own analysis, they felt the strength of the resistance set up to avoid recognising as part of their internal world that which they identified as external reality. They are also familiar with the difficulty of containing the anguish of their emotional conflict instead of projecting its content onto the external world. They also know how much time it takes to stop using pain, as the Underground Man does, as a narcissistic symbol, and consider it instead simply a component of what constitutes our humanity.

Thus, psychoanalysts can understand the torment of Dostoevsky’s characters. They know from personal or clinical experience, or both, how much energy is expended to prevent freeing the afflicted child from the shame of having had murderers for parents. To divest oneself of this shame means to leave behind once and for all the reality of a scene of destruction by transforming it into an object of reflection. To choose memory instead of the real scene of an affect is to accept a psychic wound and (perhaps) a scar, a scar marking the passage, the transporting of the real experience to a place in the unconscious. To have a perspective on the world – a point of view, requires abandoning infantile megalomania – which haunts and inhabits the Underground Man, the same megalomania to which he had recourse as a child to survive disaster.

If we take a look at Dostoevsky’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preamble
• 1. Notes from Underground
• 2. Crime and Punishment
• 3. The Double
• 4. The Idiot
• 5. Demons
• 6. The Brothers Karamazov
• 7. Women in Dostoevsky’s fiction
• 8. The Grand Inquisitor
• References
• Index