Freud - Complete Works (741 page)

  
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.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4564

   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?’

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4565

   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.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4566

   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.)

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4567

   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.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4568

   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.