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DOSTOEVSKY and PSYCHOANALYSIS by Magda DOSTOEVSKY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS by Magda Campbell, M.D.* New York University Dostoevsky's most complex personality, life full of events and the numerous heroes in his novels, each of whom alone is a psychological study in depth, per se, always fascinated psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychologists. Ever since Freud's study on Dostoevsky which appeared in 1928, analytic papers have been written about this great writer himself, his work, his characters and even of the dreams described in his novels. I will limit my topic mainly to Freud's paper, for two reasons. First, it was one of the earliest and remains one of the most important. Second, it is most interesting how one intellectual giant wrote about another one. When Freud thinks as a psychologist, he gives a brilliant picture of Dostoevsky's personality and ex- plains some of the relationships existing between his life and the figures in his novels. When he writes as a moralist about Dostoevsky, he fails entirely. He fails, because of his lack of understanding of the struggling, suffering man, the Christian, the great Russian, who in his anguish was striving for ideals and searching for the meaning of life for himself, for Russia, for mankind. Dostoevsky was born 150 years ago; psychoanalysis began with. Freud some 70 years later. Psychoanalysis started as a method of investigating mental processes. Psychoanalytic theory, which arose from psychoanalysis, is concerned with both normal and abnormal mental development and functioning in man. Today, it has become part of human psycho- logy. Psychoanalysis has been called depth-psychology, because of its concern with the unconscious mental processes, which significantly influence and even determine man's thoughts, actions, and behavior in general. Before Freud, psychical almost always meant conscious; *MAGDA CAMPBELL is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine. — 18 — Freud found, that unconscious, rather than conscious mental pro- cesses dominate both the so-called normal and abnormal psychic life. This is one of the major principles of psychoanalysis, the other being psychic determinism. This latter means, that each psychic event is determined by the psychic events which preceded it. Thus, nothing happens by chance: our thoughts, actions and even dreams can be explained by our past. There is ample evidence of these two principles of psycho- analysis in Dostoevsky's life and in his writings, including his notebooks. Dostoevsky himself must have had some awareness of this. He writes "I don't know why you consider the possession of reason, i. e. of consciousness, the highest of the possible forms..."1 Freud's first analytic paper came years after Dostoevsky's death. The study on Dostoevsky appeared in 1928, almost 50 years after Dostoevsky died, 11 years before Freud's own death. Thus, it ap- peared at a time when Freud fully developed his psychoanalytic theories and when Dostoevsky was long known and recognized not only as a great writer but also as one of the great psychologists of till time. The study was entitled "Dostoevsky and Parricide." It was to be a preface to Die Urgesta.lt der Brueder Karamasoff, which was one of the supplementary volumes to the complete German edition of Dostoevsky's works. Freud begins this paper as follows: "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?... Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms."® Freud questions Dostoevsky as a moralist and as a man of morals: "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 reached with smaller effort. This is the weak point in that great personality.... The future of human civilization will have little to thank him for.". Freud further discusses the basis of Dostoevsky's masochism and sense of guilt and classifies him as an "instinctual character." 1Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for the Possessed, edited by Edward Wasiolek (trans, by Victor Terras) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 2Sigmund Freud, "Dostoevsky and Parricide," (1928) in Collected Papers, Vol. V (New York: Basic Books, 1961), pp. 222-242. — 19 — He also questions the epileptic nature of Dostoevsky's seizures and discusses at length the differential diagnosis between hystero- epilepsy or affective epilepsy and the so-called organic or true epilepsy. He concludes, that it is "extremely probable" that Dostoevsky's seizures were hysterical, and that it was in this form that his neurosis expressed itself. He explains the meaning of the death-like seizures, of which Dostoevsky suffered since childhood, as a "self-punishment for a death-wish against a hated father." According to Freud, the sense of guilt stems from the nature of the relationship of the boy to his father. In this study, he refers to his own work, Totem and Taboo? and says, parricide, that is the murder of the father by the sons in sexual rivalry over the females, "is the principal and primal crime of humanity as well as of the individual. It is in any case the main source of the sense of guilt..." Here Freud gives an account of the Oedipus complex, which is, in his own words, one of the corner-stones of psychoanalysis. The Oedipus complex is the ambivalent relation of a boy to his father: he loves his father and at the same time he hates him, because he sees him as a rival and tries to get rid of him. The jealousy and hatred of the father result in fear of retaliation, of punishment for these feelings and wishes, by castration. Out of this fear, the boy represses his wish for the mother. However, this wish remains in the unconscious and it forms the basis of the sense of guilt. This is, to quote Freud, "the normal fate of the so-called Oedipus complex." Freud adds, "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 is true in Dostoevsky's case..." Then, Freud refers to the fact that Dostoevsky's father was murdered by his serfs when Dostoevsky was 18 years of age: "Now, it is a dan- gerous thing if reality fulfills such repressed (death) wishes." Freud feels that the attacks Dostoevsky experienced since childhood, only after his father's death "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." The individual's relation towards authority is also based on the father relation. Freud elaborates on how the guilt feeling toward his own father determined Dostoevsky's attitude toward the secular authorities and God. In considering Dostoevsky's last and chief novel Freud points out that three of the masterpieces of literature of all time — the sSigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans, by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1950). — 20 — Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov — deal with the same subject, parricide. Here follows a beautiful, brief discussion on these three works of art and of their heroes, all of whom wonderfully fit Freud's theories. Freud ends his study with Dostoevsky's passion for gambling, tracing back the roots of this symptom into early childhood, and explaining what gambling meant to Dostoevsky: "... another method of self-punishment." I have endeavoured to give the essence of Freud's study. The fact that Freud dealt with some aspects of Dostoevsky brilliantly and with some others arbitrarily, was recognized by Theodore Reik4 and more recently by others.5 Actually, in a letter to Reik in April, 1929, Freud accepted some of Reik's criticisms.® Where then may one question Freud's view of Dostoevsky? First, there is Freud's treatment of Dostoevsky as a creative artist. Although he acknowledges Dostoevsky as such and calls The Brothers Karamazov one of the three masterpieces of literature of all time, Freud still says: "The creative artist is the least doubtful: Dostoevsky's place is not far behind Shakespeare." He treats this aspect of Dostoevsky only in two brief paragraphs in a rather lengthy article. Secondly, alongside the brilliant psychodynamic formulation of Dostoevsky's personality, Freud, rather arbitrarily, calls Dostoev- sky's seizures hysterical, when in fact Dostoevsky's seizures were diagnosed as epileptic. Thirdly, Freud says that Dostoevsky's reaction to his father's death was the turning point of his neurosis. One questions, if this may be absolutely so. Why couldn't the turning point be his im- prisonment and exile? It seems, that 8 or 9 such years would make a tremendous impact on anyone's life and personality. Although inner reality may be essential, outer reality cannot be entirely ignored. 4Theodor Reik, "The Study on Dostoevsky," Thirty Years with Freud, trans, by Richard Winston (New York: International Universities Press, 1949), pp. 158-176. "See G. M. Davidson, "Dostoevsky and the Perennial Drama of Man," Psychiatric Quarterly Supplement, XXXVII (1963), 88-105; Fritz Schmidl, "Freud and Dostoevsky," Journal of the Amerdan Psychoanalytic Association, XIII (1965), 518-532. eReik, op. cit. — 21 — Fourthly, Freud states, that Dostoevsky has chosen criminals, "violent, murderous and egoistic characters" for his novels because of "the existence of similar tendencies in his own soul." Isn't it possible, that again, Dostoevsky's imprisonment and exposure to criminal individuals, murderers, political prisoners, had at least something to do with the choice of the material in his writings — after the exile — since we know that the subject of his stories and the tone was quite different before, than after Siberia.
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