were analyzed by him. In an essay of 1907, "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's. Gradiva" (in Freud 1995: vol. 9), Freud calls writers his "valuable allies" and.
Understanding/ Misunderstanding Contributions to the Study of the Hermeneutics of Signs Edited by Eero Tarasti Associate Editors Paul Forsell Richard Littlefield
Acta Semiotica Fennica X V I International Semiotics Institute at Imatra Semiotic Society of Finland 2003
Irina Golovatcheva 1
Misunderstanding of Utopia and Utopia of Misunderstanding Aldous Huxley and Psychology Good Lord, what a world this is, where it is impossible to be decent without becoming neurotic! (Hermann Hesse) The archaeology of consciousness is not just the domain of psychology or the humanities. Still, it is generally believed that fiction demonstrates writers' insights into human conduct. This may be the case in the classical prose of the nineteenth century. The literary situation, though, became quite different after psychological concepts had been discovered, for instance, those of William James. On the other hand, Sigmund Freud, in his psychoanalytical theories, may have derived some of his basic ideas from prose and drama rather than from his clinical practice. It is a common belief that Freud took a special interest in literature and visual art, treating them as precious sources for biographical investigations that would allow him to explain texts as a result of the artist's complexes. But should we agree with this statement? To answer this question, let us have another look at what he did in the field of literary criticism. Freud saw the creative writer as a person capable of overcoming automatic and thoughtless existence so as to register the disorders not only of character but also of culture. The artist, according to Freud, is a person of stronger drives and higher demands than others. The founder of psychoanalysis believed that the artist could provide diagnosis and better therapy. It was Freud who uncovered the meaning of the deepening conflict of human instincts and cultural regulations. He thought that sexuality basically opposed civilization. His humanistic vision, which is so often misunderstood and classified as pessimistic, supported the liberation of the ego from the ever growing
219
Irina Golovatcheva
demands of culture. Most of his contemporaries overlooked this critical and at the same time Utopian cornerstone of Freud's "culturology". Freud's literary interests are easily spotted in his works and letters. For instance, in 1907 he wrote two papers, in one of which the artist is analyzed as a fantasizing neurotic ("Creative Writers and Day-dreaming"; in Freud 1995: vol. 9). In the other he presents the child as an artist and demonstrates that fantasies have one and the same origin. The latter paper, "Family Romances" (ibid.), treats the functioning of consciousness as the development of a dramatic plot or as a story. In his view, fantasies are structured almost according to the laws of the popular romance. In the same paper the reader's attention is caught by the fact that the author evidently projects patterns of popular fiction onto the daydreams of neurotic children. The patterns aid in developing a future, adult neurosis. Dreams, no matter how chaotic, are also analyzed as stories and compared to "works of fiction". Literary works, in their turn, are seen as clinical cases presented in the form of a tale, a drama or a novel. Freud's analysis of any piece of art was always presented as a self-contained composition, and he frequently called his presentations "psychoanalytical romances or novels". He had earlier confessed that the presentation of psychic processes in the form common for writers helped him attain an adequate vision of the medical record as a story ("Studies on Hysteria"; ibid,: vol. 2). In the process of psychoanalysis, two stories correlating with the psychic reality are to be created: one about the patient, who is seen as a persona dramatis, the other about the analyst. The story told by the patient is a drama of his reality, both past and present. The story created by the analyst is a drama of understanding the truth of the first story; at the same time, it is the story of analyst / analysand relations. What is probably even more significant is that, like a work of literature, the patient's discourse is understood through the understanding of its parts, and the meaning of each part is derived from the whole. Both literature and psychology, charged by the pluralistic ideas of Henry James and the discursive analysis of Freud, demonstrated that there is no boundary between the two discourses. Thus, psychoanalysis had to solve the "point of view" problem (subjectivity problem) which was successfully dealt with by contemporaneous fiction. Both a work of literature and a patient's case were to be interpreted by means of going beyond the subjective intention of the author (or patient). Are we to think, then, that this rhetoric of "drama" was simply a matter of convenience or a fagon de parler for Freud? Prior to Freud, a causal approach to diagnostics had dominated therapy. A comparison of Freud's clinical practice and analytical discourse with that of Janet and Charcot shows us the difference in his methods. Was it his neuro-physiological and medical experience that led 220
Misunderstanding of Utopia and Utopia of Misunderstanding
him to this new vision? Was there any other source nurturing his new "literary" approach? In my view, literature and drama alone provided enough material for Freud's new method. It is not by chance that quite a few men of letters and their creations were analyzed by him. In an essay of 1907, "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva" (in Freud 1995: vol. 9), Freud calls writers his "valuable allies" and confesses that "their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know the whole host of things between heaven and earth, of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream. In their knowledge of the mind they are far in advance, because they draw upon sources which we have not yet opened up by science" (ibid.: 8). Hermann Hesse agreed with Freud when he wrote about the artist "who passes secretly between Here and There, between Conscious and Unconscious as though he were at home on both sides" (1979: 135). Freud thought that what he discovered in works of literature supported his theories, whereas in fact his ideas of sexuality and culture were influenced by things he had read in fiction (e.g., in works of A. Schnitzler, whom Freud called "his double", F. Dostoevsky, H. Ibsen, etc.) and seen on the stage (e.g., the erotic dramas of the highly popular Austrian playwright, F. Wedekind) - in other words, by what was in the air, by the Zeitgeist. On the other hand, in his article about Gradiva Freud foresaw the criticism of his future opponents, who insisted that the creative writer should avoid contacts with psychiatry and let the doctors describe psychic disorders. But, he argues, none of the true writers complied with this restriction since psychology and psychopathology was their domain. Moreover, Freud points out that fiction preceded psychology as a field of knowledge. Freud says that both he and the writer draw from the same source - the unconscious. The difference is that the analyst learns from others what the writer can learn from himself. What we are trying to maintain can be reduced to the following statement: literature was unaware of the process which it had long before stimulated on its own. Hence, what was attributed solely to the genius of Freud had already gone through a long preparatory stage in the world of letters. In Freud's case we may assert that he made a successful attempt at, so to speak, "invading" (cf. Ricceur 1986) fiction as an alternative discursive and cognitive mechanism. I will only mention here one of the striking coincidences in the history of ideas. I am referring to Schnitzler's short-story The Sensitive (1896), which explored the theme that would be analyzed two years later in Freud's "Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses" (in Freud 1995: vol. 3). As for the idea of the unconscious, it was not a new descriptive entity either in science or in fiction. Ideas about the unconscious had been aired by writers for over two hundred years. Russian prose of the fin-de-siecle readily provides us with examples of 221
