Freud - Complete Works (739 page)

4551

DOSTOEVSKY AND PARRICIDE

(1928)

4552

Intentionally left blank

4553

DOSTOEVSKY AND PARRICIDE

Four facets may be distinguished in the rich
personality of Dostoevsky: the creative artist, the neurotic, the
moralist and the sinner. How is one to find one’s way in this
bewildering complexity?

   The creative artist is the least
doubtful: Dostoevsky’s place is not far behind Shakespeare.
The Brothers Kamarazov
is the most magnificent novel ever
written; the episode of the Grand Inquisitor, one of the peaks in
the literature of the world, can hardly be valued too highly.
Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay
down its arms.

   The moralist in Dostoevsky is the
most readily assailable. If we seek to rank him high as a moralist
on the plea that only a man who has gone through the depths of sin
can reach the highest summit of morality, we are neglecting a doubt
that arises. A moral man is one who reacts to temptation as soon as
he feels it in his heart, without yielding to it. A man who
alternately sins and then in his remorse erects high moral
standards lays himself open to the reproach that he has made things
too easy for himself. He has not achieved the essence of morality,
renunciation, for the moral conduct of life is a practical human
interest. He reminds one of the barbarians of the great migrations,
who murdered and did penance for it, till penance became an actual
technique for enabling murder to be done. Ivan the Terrible behaved
in exactly this way; indeed this compromise with morality is a
characteristic Russian trait. Nor was the final outcome of
Dostoevsky’s moral strivings anything very glorious. After
the most violent struggles to reconcile the instinctual demands of
the individual with the claims of the community, he landed in the
retrograde position of submission both to temporal and spiritual
authority, of veneration both for the Tsar and for the God of the
Christians, and of a narrow Russian nationalism - a position which
lesser minds have reached with smaller effort. This is the weak
point in that great personality. Dostoevsky threw away the chance
of becoming a teacher and liberator of humanity and made himself
one with their gaolers. The future of human civilization will have
little to thank him for. It seems probable that he was condemned to
this failure by his neurosis. The greatness of his intelligence and
the strength of his love for humanity might have opened to him
another, an apostolic, way of life.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4554

   To consider Dostoevsky as a
sinner or a criminal rouses violent opposition, which need not be
based upon a philistine assessment of criminals. The real motive
for this opposition soon becomes apparent. Two traits are essential
in a criminal: boundless egoism and a strong destructive urge.
Common to both of these, and a necessary condition for their
expression, is absence of love, lack of an emotional appreciation
of (human) objects. One at once recalls the contrast to this
presented by Dostoevsky - his great need of love and his enormous
capacity for love, which is to be seen in manifestations of
exaggerated kindness and caused him to love and to help where he
had a right to hate and to be revengeful, as, for example, in his
relations with his first wife and her lover. That being so, it must
be asked why there is any temptation to reckon Dostoevsky among the
criminals. The answer is that it comes from his choice of material,
which singles out from all others violent, murderous and egoistic
characters, thus pointing to the existence of similar tendencies
within himself, and also from certain facts in his life, like his
passion for gambling and his possible confession to a sexual
assault upon a young girl.¹ The contradiction is resolved by
the realization that Dostoevsky’s very strong destructive
instinct, which might easily have made him a criminal, was in his
actual life directed mainly against his own person (inward instead
of outward) and thus found expression as masochism and a sense of
guilt. Nevertheless, his personality retained sadistic traits in
plenty, which show themselves in his irritability, his love of
tormenting and his intolerance even towards people he loved, and
which appear also in the way in which, as an author, he treats his
readers. Thus in little things he was a sadist towards others, and
in bigger things a sadist towards himself, in fact a masochist -
that is to say the mildest, kindliest, most helpful person
possible.

  
¹
See the discussion of this in
Fülöp-Miller and Eckstein (1926). Stefan Zweig (1920)
writes: ‘He was not halted by the barriers of bourgeois
morality; and no one can say exactly how far he transgressed the
bounds of law in his own life or how much of the criminal instincts
of his heroes was realized in himself.’ For the intimate
connection between Dostoevsky’s characters and his own
experiences, see René Fülöp Miller’s remarks
in the introductory section of Fülöp-Miller and Eckstein
(1925), which are based upon N. Strakhov.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4555

   We have selected three factors
from Dostoevsky’s complex personality, one quantitative and
two qualitative: the extraordinary intensity of his emotional life,
his perverse innate instinctual disposition, which inevitably
marked him out to be a sado-masochist or a criminal, and his
unanalysable artistic gift. This combination might very well exist
without neurosis; there are people who are complete masochists
without being neurotic. Nevertheless, the balance of forces between
his instinctual demands and the inhibitions opposing them (plus the
available methods of sublimation) would even so make it necessary
to classify Dostoevsky as what is known as an ‘instinctual
character’. But the position is obscured by the simultaneous
presence of neurosis, which, as we have said, was not in the
circumstances inevitable, but which comes into being the more
readily, the richer the complication which has to be mastered by
the ego. For neurosis is after all only a sign that the ego has not
succeeded in making a synthesis, that in attempting to do so it has
forfeited its unity.

   How then, strictly speaking, does
his neurosis show itself? Dostoevsky called himself an epileptic,
and was regarded as such by other people, on account of his severe
attacks, which were accompanied by loss of consciousness, muscular
convulsions and subsequent depression. Now it is highly probable
that this so-called epilepsy was only a symptom of his neurosis and
must accordingly be classified as hystero-epilepsy - that is, as
severe hysteria. We cannot be completely certain on this point for
two reasons - firstly, because the anamnestic data on
Dostoevsky’s alleged epilepsy are defective and
untrustworthy, and secondly, because our understanding of
pathological states combined with epileptiform attacks is
imperfect.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4556

   To take the second point first.
It is unnecessary here to reproduce the whole pathology of
epilepsy, for it would throw no decisive light on the problem. But
this may be said. The old
morbus sacer
is still in evidence
as an ostensible clinical entity, the uncanny disease with its
incalculable, apparently unprovoked convulsive attacks, its
changing of the character into irritability and aggressiveness, and
its progressive lowering of all the mental faculties. But the
outlines of this picture are quite lacking in precision. The
attacks, so savage in their onset, accompanied by biting of the
tongue and incontinence of urine and working up to the dangerous
status epilepticus
with its risk of severe self-injuries,
may, nevertheless, be reduced to brief periods of
absence
,
or rapidly passing fits of vertigo or may be replaced by short
spaces of time during which the patient does something out of
character, as though he were under the control of his unconscious.
These attacks, though as a rule determined, in a way we do not
understand, by purely physical causes, may nevertheless owe their
first appearance to some purely mental cause (a fright, for
instance) or may react in other respects to mental excitations.
However characteristic intellectual impairment may be in the
overwhelming majority of cases, at least
one
case is known
to us (that of Helmholtz) in which the affliction did not interfere
with the highest intellectual achievement. (Other cases of which
the same assertion has been made are either disputable or open to
the same doubts as the case of Dostoevsky himself.) People who are
victims of epilepsy may give an impression of dullness and arrested
development just as the disease often accompanies the most palpable
idiocy and the grossest cerebral defects, even though not as a
necessary component of the clinical picture. But these attacks,
with all their variations, also occur in other people who display
complete mental development and, if anything, an excessive and as a
rule insufficiently controlled emotional life. It is no wonder in
these circumstances that it has been found impossible to maintain
that ‘epilepsy’ is a single clinical entity. The
similarity that we find in the manifest symptoms seems to call for
a functional view of them. It is as though a mechanism for abnormal
instinctual discharge had been laid down organically, which could
be made use of in quite different circumstances - both in the case
of disturbances of cerebral activity due to severe histolytic or
toxic affections, and also in the case of inadequate control over
the mental economy and at times when the activity of the energy
operating in the mind reaches crisis-pitch. Behind this dichotomy
we have a glimpse of the identity of the underlying mechanism of
instinctual discharge. Nor can that mechanism stand remote from the
sexual processes, which are fundamentally of toxic origin: the
earliest physicians described coition as a minor epilepsy, and thus
recognized in the sexual act a mitigation and adaptation of the
epileptic method of discharging stimuli.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4557

   The ‘epileptic
reaction’, as this common element may be called, is also
undoubtedly at the disposal of the neurosis whose essence it is to
get rid by somatic means of amounts of excitation which it cannot
deal with psychically. Thus the epileptic attack becomes a symptom
of hysteria and is adapted and modified by it just as it is by the
normal sexual process of discharge. It is therefore quite right to
distinguish between an organic and an ‘affective’
epilepsy. The practical significance of this is that a person who
suffers from the first kind has a disease of the brain, while a
person who suffers from the second kind is a neurotic. In the first
case his mental life is subjected to an alien disturbance from
without, in the second case the disturbance is an expression of his
mental life itself.

   It is extremely probable that
Dostoevsky’s epilepsy was of the second kind. This cannot,
strictly speaking, be proved. To do so we should have to be in a
position to insert the first appearance of the attacks and their
subsequent fluctuations into the thread of his mental life; and for
that we know too little. The descriptions of the attacks themselves
teach us nothing and our information about the relations between
them and Dostoevsky’s experiences is defective and often
contradictory. The most probable assumption is that the attacks
went back far into his childhood, that their place was taken to
begin with by milder symptoms and that they did not assume an
epileptic form until after the shattering experience of his
eighteenth year - the murder of his father.¹ It would be very
much to the point if it could be established that they ceased
completely during his exile in Siberia, but other accounts
contradict this.²

  
¹
See René Fülöp-Miller
(1924). Of especial interest is the information that in the
novelist’s childhood ‘something terrible, unforgettable
and agonizing’ happened, to which the first signs of his
illness were to be traced (from an article by Suvorin in the
newspaper
Novoe Vremya
, 1881, quoted in the introduction to
Fülöp-Miller and Eckstein, 1925, xlv). See also Orest
Miller (1921, 140): ‘There is, however, another special piece
of evidence about Fyodor Mikhailovich’s illness, which
relates to his earliest youth and brings the illness into
connection with a tragic event in the family life of his parents.
But, although this piece of evidence was given to me orally by one
who was a close friend of Fyodor Mlkhailovich, I cannot bring
myself to reproduce it fully and precisely since I have had no
confirmation of this rumour from any other quarter.’
Biographers and scientific research workers cannot feel grateful
for this discretion.

  
²
Most of the accounts, including
Dostoevsky’s own, assert on the contrary that the illness
only assumed its final, epileptic character during the Siberian
exile. Unfortunately there is reason to distrust the
autobiographical statements of neurotics. Experience shows that
their memories introduce falsifications which are designed to
interrupt disagreeable causal connections. Nevertheless, it appears
certain that Dostoevsky’s detention in the Siberian prison
markedly altered his pathological condition. Cf.
Fülöp-Miller (1924, 1186).

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4558

   The unmistakable connection
between the murder of the father in
The Brothers Kamarazov
and the fate of Dostoevsky’s own father has struck more than
one of his biographers, and has led them to refer to ‘a
certain modern school of psychology’. From the standpoint of
psycho-analysis (for that is what is meant), we are tempted to see
in that event the severest trauma and to regard Dostoevsky’s
reaction to it as the turning-point of his neurosis. But if I
undertake to substantiate this view psycho-analytically, I shall
have to risk the danger of being unintelligible to all those
readers who are unfamiliar with the language and theories of
psycho-analysis.