Freud - Complete Works (740 page)

   We have one certain
starting-point. We know the meaning of the first attacks from which
Dostoevsky suffered in his early years, long before the incidence
of the ‘epilepsy’. These attacks had the significance
of death: they were heralded by a fear of death and consisted of
lethargic, somnolent states. The illness first came over him while
he was still a boy, in the form of a sudden, groundless melancholy,
a feeling, as he later told his friend Soloviev, as though he were
going to die on the spot. And there in fact followed a state
exactly similar to real death. His brother Andrey tells us that
even when he was quite young Fyodor used to leave little notes
about before he went to sleep, saying that he was afraid he might
fall into this death-like sleep during the night and therefore
begged that his burial should be postponed for five days.
(Fülöp-Miller and Eckstein, 1925, lx.)

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   We know the meaning and intention
of such deathlike attacks. They signify an identification with a
dead person, either with someone who is really dead or with someone
who is still alive and whom the subject wishes dead. The latter
case is the more significant. The attack then has the value of a
punishment. One has wished another person dead, and now one
is
this other person and is dead oneself. At this point
psycho-analytical theory brings in the assertion that for a boy
this other person is usually his father and that the attack (which
is termed hysterical) is thus a self-punishment for a death-wish
against a hated father.

   Parricide, according to a
well-known view, is the principal and primal crime of humanity as
well as of the individual. (See my
Totem and Taboo
1912-13.)
It is in any case the main source of the sense of guilt, though we
do not know if it is the only one: researches have not yet been
able to establish with certainty the mental origin of guilt and the
need for expiation. But it is not necessary for it to be the only
one. The psychological situation is complicated and requires
elucidation. The relation of a boy to his father is, as we say, an
‘ambivalent’ one. In addition to the hate which seeks
to get rid of the father as a rival, a measure of tenderness for
him is also habitually present. The two attitudes of mind combine
to produce identification with the father; the boy wants to be in
his father’s place because he admires him and wants to be
like him, and also because he wants to put him out of the way. This
whole development now comes up against a powerful obstacle. At a
certain moment the child comes to understand that an attempt to
remove his father as a rival would be punished by him with
castration. So from fear of castration - that is, in the interests
of preserving his masculinity - he gives up his wish to possess his
mother and get rid of his father. In so far as this wish remains in
the unconscious it forms the basis of the sense of guilt. We
believe that what we have here been describing are normal
processes, the normal fate of the so-called ‘Oedipus
complex’; nevertheless it requires an important
amplification.

   A further complication arises
when the constitutional factor we call bisexuality is comparatively
strongly developed in a child. For then, under the threat to the
boy’s masculinity by castration, his inclination becomes
strengthened to diverge in the direction of femininity, to put
himself instead in his mother’s place and take over her role
as object of his father’s love. But the fear of castration
makes
this
solution impossible as well. The boy understands
that he must also submit to castration if he wants to be loved by
his father as a woman. Thus both impulses, hatred of the father and
being in love with the father, undergo repression. There is a
certain psychological distinction in the fact that the hatred of
the father is given up on account of fear of an
external
danger (castration), while the being in love with the father is
treated as an
internal
instinctual danger, though
fundamentally it goes back to the same external danger.

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   What makes hatred of the father
unacceptable is
fear
of the father; castration is terrible,
whether as a punishment or as the price of love. Of the two factors
which repress hatred of the father, the first, the direct fear of
punishment and castration, may be called the normal one; its
pathogenic intensification seems to come only with the addition of
the second factor, the fear of the feminine attitude. Thus a strong
innate bisexual disposition becomes one of the preconditions or
reinforcements of neurosis. Such a disposition must certainly be
assumed in Dostoevsky, and it shows itself in a viable form (as
latent homosexuality) in the important part played by male
friendships in his life, in his strangely tender attitude towards
rivals in love and in his remarkable understanding of situations
which are explicable only by repressed homosexuality, as many
examples from his novels show.

   I am sorry, though I cannot alter
the facts, if this exposition of the attitudes of hatred and love
towards the father and their transformations under the influence of
the threat of castration seems to readers unfamiliar with
psycho-analysis unsavoury and incredible. I should myself expect
that it is precisely the castration complex that would be bound to
arouse the most general repudiation. But I can only insist that
psycho-analytic experience has put these matters in particular
beyond the reach of doubt and has taught us to recognize in them
the key to every neurosis. This key, then, we must apply to our
author’s so-called epilepsy. So alien to our consciousness
are the things by which our unconscious mental life is
governed!

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   But what has been said so far
does not exhaust the consequences of the repression of the hatred
of the father in the Oedipus complex. There is something fresh to
be added: namely that in spite of everything the identification
with the father finally makes a permanent place for itself in the
ego. It is received into the ego, but establishes itself there as a
separate agency in contrast to the rest of the content of the ego.
We then give it the name of super-ego and ascribe to it, the
inheritor of the parental influence, the most important functions.
If the father was hard, violent and cruel, the super-ego takes over
those attributes from him and, in the relations between the ego and
it, the passivity which was supposed to have been repressed is
re-established. The super-ego has become sadistic, and the ego
becomes masochistic - that is to say, at bottom passive in a
feminine way. A great need for punishment develops in the ego,
which in part offers itself as a victim to Fate, and in part finds
satisfaction in ill-treatment by the super-ego (that is, in the
sense of guilt). For every punishment is ultimately castration and,
as such, a fulfilment of the old passive attitude towards the
father. Even Fate is, in the last resort, only a later projection
of the father.

   The normal processes in the
formation of conscience must be similar to the abnormal ones
described here. We have not yet succeeded in fixing the boundary
line between them. It will be observed that here the largest share
in the outcome is ascribed to the passive component of repressed
femininity. In addition, it must be of importance as an accidental
factor whether the father, who is feared in any case, is also
especially violent in reality. This was true in Dostoevsky’s
case, and we can trace back the fact of his extraordinary sense of
guilt and of his masochistic conduct of life to a specially strong
feminine component. Thus the formula for Dostoevsky is as follows:
a person with a specially strong innate bisexual disposition, who
can defend himself with special intensity against dependence on a
specially severe father. This characteristic of bisexuality comes
as an addition to the components of his nature that we have already
recognized. His early symptoms of death-like attacks can thus be
understood as a father-identification on the part of his ego, which
is permitted by his super-ego as a punishment. ‘You wanted to
kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you
are
your father, but a dead father’ - the regular
mechanism of hysterical symptoms. And further: ‘Now your
father is killing
you
.’ For the ego the death symptom
is a satisfaction in phantasy of the masculine wish and at the same
time a masochistic satisfaction; for the super-ego it is a punitive
satisfaction - that is, a sadistic satisfaction. Both of them, the
ego and the super-ego, carry on the role of father.

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   To sum up, the relation between
the subject and his father-object, while retaining its content, has
been transformed into a relation between the ego and the super-ego
- a new setting on a fresh stage. Infantile reactions from the
Oedipus complex such as these may disappear if reality gives them
no further nourishment. But the father’s character remained
the same, or rather, it deteriorated with the years, and thus
Dostoevsky’s hatred for his rather and his death-wish against
that wicked father were maintained. Now it is a dangerous thing if
reality fulfils such repressed wishes. The phantasy has become
reality and all defensive measures are thereupon reinforced.
Dostoevsky’s attacks now assumed an epileptic character; they
still undoubtedly signified an identification with his father as a
punishment, but they had become terrible, like his father’s
frightful death itself. What further content they had absorbed,
particularly what sexual content, escapes conjecture.

   One thing is remarkable: in the
aura of the epileptic attack, one moment of supreme bliss is
experienced. This may very well be a record of the triumph and
sense of liberation felt on hearing the news of the death, to be
followed immediately by an all the more cruel punishment. We have
divined just such a sequence of triumph and mourning, of festive
joy and mourning, in the brothers of the primal horde who murdered
their father, and we find it repeated in the ceremony of the totem
meal.¹ If it proved to be the case that Dostoevsky was free
from his attacks in Siberia, that would merely substantiate the
view that they were his punishment. He did not need them any longer
when he was being punished in another way. But that cannot be
proved. Rather does this necessity for punishment on the part of
Dostoevsky’s mental economy explain the fact that he passed
unbroken through these years of misery and humiliation.
Dostoevsky’s condemnation as a political prisoner was unjust
and he must have known it, but he accepted the undeserved
punishment at the hands of the Little Father, the Tsar, as a
substitute for the punishment he deserved for his sin against his
real father. Instead of punishing himself, he got himself punished
by his father’s deputy. Here we have a glimpse of the
psychological justification of the punishments inflicted by
society. It is a fact that large groups of criminals want to be
punished. Their super-ego demands it and so saves itself the
necessity for inflicting the punishment itself.

  
¹
See
Totem and Taboo
.

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   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.