Dostoevsky

The Author as Psychoanalyst

George Santayana, Louis Breger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351521765
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Andre Gide once said that Feodor Dostoevsky "lost himself in the characters of his books, and, for this reason, it is in them that he can be found again." In "Dostoevsky: The Author as Psychoanalyst", Louis Breger approaches Dostoevsky psychoanalytically, not as a "patient" to be analyzed, but as a fellow psychoanalyst, someone whose life and fiction are intertwined in the process of literary self-exploration.Raskolnikov's dream of the suffering horse in "Crime and Punishment" has become one of the best known in all literature, its rich imagery expressing meaning on many levels. Using this as a starting point, Breger goes on to offer a detailed analysis of the novel, situating it at the pivotal point in Dostoevsky's life between the death of his first wife and his second marriage. Using insights from his psychological training, Breger also explores other works by Dostoevsky, among them his early novel, "The Double", which Breger relates to the nervous breakdown that Dostoevsky suffered in his twenties, as well as "Notes from Underground", "The Possessed", "The Idiot", "The Brothers Karamazov", and so forth. Additionally, details from Dostoevsky's own life - his compulsive gambling, his epilepsy, his philosophical, political, religious, and mystical beliefs, and the interpretations of them found in existing biographies - are analyzed in detail.

CHAPTER 1

The Author as Psychoanalyst

The true artist is never but half-conscious of himself when creating. He does not know exactly who he is. He learns to know himself only through his creation, in it, and after it. Dostoevsky never set out to find himself; he gave himself without stint in his works. He lost himself in each of the characters of his books, and, for this reason, it is in them that he can be found again.—ANDRÉ GIDE

Gide’s perceptive comments call attention to an important dimension of Dostoevsky’s work: its self-exploratory or self-analytic character. Many authors use their writing as a path to self-awareness, but they do so to very different degrees. Much popular literature—not to mention movies and television—is based on fantasies of fairly direct wish fulfillment. Soap operas, romance novels, sadistic thrillers, and family sagas, are vehicles in which an author—and his audience—achieve oversimplified solutions to life’s conflicts and difficulties. Good literature also has its beginning in the private world of memory, conflict and obsession but, in turning this material into a public communication, the author moves beyond wish fulfillment and explores the real dimensions of human experience. The novelist Iris Murdoch defines good novels as

“therapy which resists the all-too-easy life of consolation and fantasy” while bad novels . . . work out the author’s “personal conflicts” with no respect for things as they are rather than as the author might wish them to be.

How does the author of good literature do this? We can approach this question by considering dreams and how they are used, both in psychoanalysis and the creation of literature. Think of a continuum that has the dream as dreamt, but not remembered, at one end, and the dream recalled and subject to a thorough-going interpretation, at the other. The unremembered dream is unconscious fantasy in pure culture, it is an experience that is not shared with others, not even with the dreamer’s waking self: it remains unconnected with life, with consciousness. At the other extreme is the dream that is subjected to a thorough analysis. Here, unconscious material is made conscious, defenses are confronted and overcome, and discoveries are integrated into an understanding of oneself and one’s life. The writing of literature is clearly more like dreams analyzed than dreams dreamt. The author begins with his private fantasies and turns them into public communications. Bad novels just do not move vary far along the continuum. While the author draws on his imagination—while there is some awareness of dream and fantasy—it is a limited form of consciousness, hedged about with defenses, idealizations, and stereotypes. All good literature does more than this, and, in the works of a Shakespeare or a Dostoevsky, we find access to the widest array of memory, fantasy, and unconscious material, along with a creative working over of this material.¹

Freud was fond of saying that “the poets” discovered the unconscious before he did. One can find versions of almost all psychoanalytic phenomena in the world’s great novels, stories, dramas, and poems. The most profound authors do more than simply display unconscious material; they are engaged in something analogous to the process of psychoanalysis itself. Meredith Skura, in the most sophisticated book yet written on the interaction of psychoanalysis and literature (The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process), argues that the poets not only discovered the unconscious before Freud, they discovered psychoanalysis as well. As she puts it:

It is not the mere presence or expression of primitive and unconsciously apprehended elements but the attempt to come to terms with them and to work them into the texture of conscious experience that makes the poets the predecessors of Freud.

Great literature is analogous to dreams interpreted; this is what Skura means when she says the poets discovered psychoanalysis, that literature may be likened, not just to the display of unconscious contents, but to the psychoanalytic process in which these contents are analyzed and understood.

The attempt to apply psychoanalysis to literature has a long and troubled history. While many have sensed an affinity, (“the poets discovered the unconscious before I did”), in a number of instances the fields have not been brought together in ways that please psychoanalysts, writers, or critics. At its worst, psychoanalytic criticism reduces fiction to symptom and psychosexual category, author to patient. Even the more sophisticated psychoanalytic critics, on the literary side, tend to derive their interpretations from theory rather than a first-hand knowledge of psychoanalytic practice. At the other extreme are critics who are restricted to the categories of consciousness and rational philosophy, who ignore so much of what psychoanalysts know about character and human motivation. What is needed—and what we are beginning to see in the best current work of people with a solid background in both fields —is an approach that does justice to the complexities of literary texts, the creative process and the real lives of authors, on the one hand, and the accumulated wisdom of many years of psychoanalytic observation, on the other.²

The key is to take the psychoanalytic method—the way psychoanalysis is defined in practice—as our guiding model. Too often, applications to literature have relied on particular psychoanalytic observations —the Oedipus complex, the primal scene,—or some version of theory —orthodox Freudian, Lacanian. But observations and theory can only be guidelines in the application of the method—the particular way of listening, observing, and interpreting that constitutes the living process. Skura shows how the psychoanalytic process can serve as an encompassing model, one that includes many observations and theories, to use in reading literary texts. I would argue that it is also the best model for biographical literary studies, for approaching a great writer such as Dostoevsky. That is, we should think of him not as a “patient” to be analysed, but as a fellow psychoanalyst, someone who, in the creation of his novels, carried out an exploration of himself and his fellow man. His was not just any self-analysis of course; the insights to be found in his novels parallel those in Freud. Dostoevsky as psychoanalyst, the Freud of fiction—this defines an approach that will do justice to his achievements, an approach that will enable us both to understand him in new ways and to learn from him.

What is it about Dostoevsky’s work that qualifies him as the greatest of psychological—or psychoanalytic—novelists? While many great authors transform their personal dreams and fantasies in insightful and adaptive ways, he does so with greater scope. His novels contain a wider array of fully realized character types, a broader spectrum of conflicts and themes, drawn from different developmental levels, and more forms of conflict resolution. His uniqueness as a psychological novelist can be highlighted by comparing him with another great master whose fiction is rife with unconscious themes: Franz Kafka. Kafka’s work gives public expression to his personal nightmares. He took his almost unbearable emotional states—the residues of his family life—and expressed them in allegories and densely symbolic stories and novels. The process of writing, and the literature itself, allowed him to go on living; indeed, it was only in his fiction that his inner self really did live; to parents, friends, his fiancée, and others, he presented a mask of politeness and compliance (see the biographies by Brod, 1960, and Pawel, 1984). The transformation of his suffering into literature was his most meaningful connection with the world. In his writing he kept depression in check and warded off suicide, though he nurtured his tuberculosis and seemed eventually to welcome the death that it brought him. The fiction itself presents an unrelentingly horrible picture of human relationships; Kafka is the poet of alienated modern life.

When we read Kafka, we are confronted with his raw unconscious, a nightmare world, exposed to public view. There are parts of Dostoevsky’s novels that reveal his nightmares: scenes that are Kafkaesque, if I may use an anachronism. But the novels are filled with an abundance of other materials, pointing to a crucial difference between these two writers. Kafka’s fiction contains variations on a single theme—brilliantly realized variations, to be sure, but ones that are extremely narrow in scope. In addition, there is no development over time: the themes, relationships, and emotional tone are the same in such early stories as The Judgement and Metamorphosis as they are in late works like The Burrow and A Hunger Artist.

Kafka and Dostoevsky share access to their inner world and the artistic talent to bring this dream landscape to life on the page; in this they are both poets who discovered the unconscious. But Dostoevsky’s work is “psychoanalytic” in ways that go beyond Kafka’s. Let me elaborate two of these features. First, there is a working-through process that moves across developmental levels. That is, when his novels are read in chronological order, one sees the sort of progress from early to late stages that can be observed in a successful personal analysis. Themes are introduced and experimented with in the early novels and then, in mideareer, taken to a deep level of regression in Crime and Punishment. The psychological structure of this novel, written in 1865, is the world of the infant and the needed-depriving mother; it is pervaded by images of oral deprivation, rage, and a splitting of the primary love object. Genital-sexual themes appear in the next work, The Idiot of 1868, and there is continued progression until the last novel, The Brothers Karamazov of 1880, which is centered on themes of oedipal rivalry. Splitting is more extreme and idealizations more unrealistic in the earlier novels; the treatment of these issues also shows developmental change; the evil figures become less demonic and the saintly types less angelic; in The Brothers, everyone is more human, more a mixture of realistic good and bad qualities.

The second feature that qualifies Dostoevsky as specially psychoanalytic is his awareness of the self-exploratory process. In terms more familiar to us, we might say that he is present as an observing ego, even in the midst of the deepest emotional chaos. Indeed, it is his ability both to experience powerful regressed states and to transform them into fiction that gives his novels their unique flavor. Dostoevsky’s self-awareness is revealed in several ways; one finds it to some degree in his own comments and his correspondence, for example. But, more than this, it is a feature intrinsic to the novels themselves. What is most characteristic of him is the presence of multiple points of view; he is never, as an author, completely identified with one character. Rather, he expresses different aspects of himself through several characters while also remaining—or moving to—a position of observation outside each of them. Again, this is a feature common to all literature to some degree, for however much an author embodies himself in a character, he remains the author, the person outside writing the story. Dostoevsky does more with this feature than almost any other novelist. The Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin sees this as the way in which Dostoevsky has carried the novel to its greatest heights. In Bakhtin’s words

Dostoevsky . . . creates not voiceless slaves but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him.

A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels.

Polyphony and dialogue, free from the author’s domination—-this could serve as a definition of the ideal state of free association during a psychoanalytic session, a state in which one attempts to give free reign to all sides of oneself while keeping an observing ego apart, in alliance with the analyst. Moving to another point of view about oneself is what psychoanalytic insight is, after all, breaking free from the grip of unconsciously driven perceptions and “seeing” oneself in new ways. Bakhtin believes that Dostoevsky’s ability to assume multiple points of view is matched only by Shakespeare’s.

Dostoevsky’s novels reveal unconscious material in the free-ranging manner of an ideal psychoanalytic session. This is the necessary first step in what can be called the writing-as-psychoanalysis process; that is, gaining awareness of the many different sides of oneself, of forbidden desires, unsavory fantasies, whole secret selves. The next step involves the “analysis” of this material, the full exploration of its origins, functions within the personality, and consequences. Dostoevsky carries out the literary version of this analysis by creating characters who embody different sides of his conflicts—who represent his different inner selves —and setting them free to live out their fates. To cite an important example, he harbored a fair amount of rage in his soul and this formed the basis for his attempts, in a number of novels, to create what he called the “Great Sinner” type. These were meant to be men who could live beyond ordinary moral rules, who could murder, rape, and commit every sort of outrage with impunity. Variations on this character type are a stock-in-trade of popular literature, of course: figures of implacable evil and their counterparts, heroes who are equally implacable in their goodness. But every time Dostoevsky sets one of these Great Sinners free on the page—Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment, Rogozhin in The Idiot, Stavrogin in The Possessed—they simply do not behave in a way to gratify his, or the reader’s, fantasies of wanton aggression or revenge. They start out that way but then reveal their human complexities. Their monstrous evil deeds are revealed as petty sexual perversions, they are overtaken by guilt and alienation: both Svidrigailov and Stavrogin end their lives in suicide.

This process, in which the figure of fantasied evil is humanized, is similar to what occurs in psychoanalysis when one acquires insight into destructive fantasies. One exposes them initially in their extreme wishful form, comes to see their childish underside and consequences (if I hate and attack everyone I am left with nothing but guilt and isolation), becomes aware of other motives that the fantasies are shielding—the need for love, in each of Dostoevsky’s characters—and, eventually, can arrive at a more tempered, a more realistic position. Dostoevsky worked and reworked this character type in his novels; it was much like the process of psychoanalytic working through of a deeply embedded unconscious conflict. By the end of his life, he had reached a more mature position; in The Brothers Karamazov there is no attempt at a figure of idealized evil. The Great Sinner has been decomposed into his human elements: Dmitri has the poorly controlled rage, but is more an unruly adolescent than a demonic being. The rest of the configuration is divided among Ivan, who has the cynicism and alienation, Smerdyakov, who is the actual murderer, and the father, who is much more a selfish child than a figure of evil. In sum, what appears in the earlier novels as a wishful expression of rage, free from guilt, is progressively analyzed, tempered, and understood in terms of its realistic features and consequences.

This discussion of the novelist-as-psychoanalyst may make the creative process seem too conscious, rational, and planned. Dostoevsky had a variety of things in mind when he set out to write a novel, most of them having to do with its surface structure: the plot, characters, and moral-political messages he was concerned with. Both the opening up of unconscious material and its “analysis” occurred during the process of writing and rewriting. An actual psychoanalysis is not so conscious or rational either, of course. As Gide, himself a novelist of some skill, notes in the passage with which I began this chapter, writers acquire insight through the dynamic process of creation. This was certainly the case with Dostoevsky, whose life and writing were closely intertwined. Typically, he would allow himself to fall into an extreme situation which heightened his emotions and intensified his conflicts. For example, he was prone to intense feelings of guilt and hated borrowing, yet his “carelessness” with money, not to mention his compulsive gambling, repeatedly put him in positions of humiliating indebtedness. He would then write his way out of these unpleasant situations with novels that worked through the issue of impulse expression and guilt.

Let me describe this in other terms. Dostoevsky had within him a variety of different selves (what others call “introjects,” “internal objects,” or, more precisely, self-other schemes or scenarios).³ These rattled around in a free, if somewhat chaotic manner. His overriding identity was that of writer: this is what held everything together, what prevented complete disorder. He had some awareness of this. Here, he refers to it in a letter written from prison in 1849:

My nervous irritability has notably increased, especially in the evening hours; at night I have long hideous dreams, and latterly I have often felt as if the ground were rocking under me, so that my room seems like the cabin of a steamer. From all this I conclude that my nerves are increasingly shattered. Whenever formerly I had such nervous disturbances, I made use of them for writing; in such a state I could write much more and much better than usual.

Dostoevsky had the unique ability—as a person and a writer—to give himself over to one or another of his self-other scenarios; he would let one of his inner selves play itself out in his life. This is the living version of what Bakhtin, referring to the novels, calls “polyphony” and “dialogue”: The creation of “free people, capable of standing alongside their creator.” He would bring his inner actors on the stage of his life as he fell into one of his extreme situations. Once there, with emotions aroused and the scenario exposed to view, the writer-self could come on the scene and begin to control things by transforming the experience into literature.⁴ To make a comparison with the process of psychoanalysis, once again, it is analogous to a patient’s experiencing some aspect of himself in an intense form in the transference relationship and then stepping back, with the analyst, and looking at this experience from a different point of view. In a personal analysis, this stepping back is the work of interpretation and insight; for Dostoevsky it was the work of self-exploration via the writing of novels. To quote Gide again, “he learns to know himself only through his creation, in it and after it.”

In the next three chapters I will examine Dostoevsky’s literature as a form of self-exploration in the creation of what is, for me, the most focused and coherent of his major novels, Crime and Punishment.

CHAPTER 2

Crime and Punishment: The Author’s L...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• PROLOGUE: The Horse, the Courier
• CHAPTER 1 The Author as Psychoanalyst
• CHAPTER 2 Crime and Punishment: The Author’s Life
• CHAPTER 3 Crime and Punishment: The Novel
• CHAPTER 4 Associations to the Novel and the “Scene”
• CHAPTER 5 The Dostoevsky Family
• CHAPTER 6 The Engineering Academy: Poor Folk
• CHAPTER 7 Nervous Crisis: The Double
• CHAPTER 8 Political Conspiracy: The Possessed
• CHAPTER 9 Prison, Exile, the Second Maria
• CHAPTER 10 Return to Petersburg: Journalism, Women, Gambling
• CHAPTER 11 The Death of Maria: Notes from Underground
• CHAPTER 12 Death and Rebirth
• APPENDIX Epilepsy
• Note on Sources and Evidence
• Notes and Sources for Quotations
• Bibliography
• Index