Monologue on the monologue. Part III.
Monologue on the monologue.
Part III.
FRANZ KAFKA.
1. Prague. Hermann und Julie Kafka. Felice Bauer. Franz or ...Franticek. The
nineteenth century. Judaism. Tradition. Socialism. G. Flaubert. Ch. Dickens.
S. Freud and the concept of the unconscious.
2. On Kafka´s writings in general. A non-philosophical mind. An authorship
divided into two....
3. On the very special technique of F.K.s.
4. The Kafka technique and "the unconscious". America., The Process.
Josef K. and his shadowlessness.
5. The Metamorphosis. The perfect short story!
6. The problem of "fancy" , the unconscious and human freedom. The
unknowingness.
7. The problem of the unconscious.
8. Milena Jesenska and the phenomenon of human strength and weakness.
9. Kafka and society . Kafka retires .
10. The Castle.
11. On F.K. , imagination and the concept of mental disintegration.
&
12. On F.K., & his writings in connection with the theory of monologism.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Personnel:
Hermann Kafka, father.
Julie Kafka, born Löwy, mother.
Franz Kafka, himself.
Ottla, Ottilia favourite sister.( Elli and Valli were the other two.)
Oscar Pollak, friend.
Max Brod, author, friend.
Gustave Flaubert, author.
Sigmund Freud, Psychiatrist.
Felice Bauer, F. K.s two times engaged.
Julie Woryzec, engaged to F.K..
Grete Bloch, friend and mistress.
Milena Jesenska, friend and mistress.
Dora Dymant,( Diamant) friend and mistress.
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"The misery of Don Quixote is not his fantasy, but Sancho Pansa."(
Kafka,1917 )( Kafka´s spelling.)
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"Kierkegaard is a star , that is shining over a landscape
which is for me nearly inaccessible."
( Kafka in a letter to M. Brod.)
"The case of Kierkegaard is, despite the essential differences,
very alike mine. Anyway he is situated upon the same
side of the world ... He confirms me in my existence, as a friend."
( Kafka in the diary, 21 aug. 1913, after having read the diaries of Kierkegaard
in excerpts in German , Das Buch des Richters, a title actually planned
by S.K. but never realized.)
"I want to write with a constant shiver in my frontal
lobe of the brain."/ einem ständigem Zittern auf dem Stirn/."
(Kafka 1911.)
" By all that I have written only these matters: The Judgment ,The stoker,
The Metamorphosis, In the penal colony, A Doctor on the countryside and
the story A Hunger artist."
( Kafka, 1924.)
"Dearest Max, my last wish: all without exception and unread to be burnt."
( Kafka, 1924.The year of his death.)
"It is with the most supreme feelings you make bad
literature."
( André Gide )
"Between me and life there is always a veil of words."
( Oscar Wilde in conversation with Conan Doyle.)
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A portrait of F. Kafka in words:
" He was tall and slender, with a soft, elastic walk, which at first made
me think that he was half blood and not Caucasian. I paid attention to his habit
of carrying his head a bit askew (aslope) . This trait was very characteristic
with him. He carried himself like a loner, who always is in contact with something
outside himself. In his conduct were something listening, but added with amiability
and goodness. I would define it as a need for connection with the surrounding
world, or otherwise expressed approximately this: All alone I am of no importance
at all. Only when I am in connection with something around me can I achieve
something /.../ The most appalling with his exterior, when he spoke and when
he listened, was his big, often widely opened , eyes. Not that them should have
been widened by fear ( as people have said ), rather by curiosity. They were
brown - and shy. When he spoke they lit. It was a great deal of humour in his
eyes,- not so much irony, but rather a kind of a certain slyness - as if he
himself knew something, that nobody else knew. He was not at all an exhibitionist.
He spoke very lively and
often. He then developed the same richness in pictures as when he wrote. You
could often get an impression that he felt an almost craftmanshiplike satisfaction
when he had succeeded in expressing himself well." ( Dora Dymant ( in 1923
?) )
( cit. Harry Järv, Insikt och handling, 2, nr. 3/4,s.111. )
" It is only pictures, Franz; it is only pictures."
( Felice Bauer in a letter to F.K..)
Foreword.
It has - in later years - been an ongoing discussion about the impossibility of biography. In early 20th century Freud claimed that the psychoanalytical biography would sidestep all other kinds of biographies. A little later J.-P. Sartre came to be known for ( among other things ) his giant sketch of a life of G. Flaubert, in "the existential-biographical mode" , with it's famous final reservation .... .This discussion about the difficulties of biography has sunk somewhat into oblivion, - discussions around impossibilities often do -, but it still has a certain point. Some of this has already been discussed in the part concerning Kierkegaard in this paper,( Monologue on the monologue.)and when I am now intruding the "area" labelled "Franz Kafka", it is not at all astonishing , that I am being struck by the contrast which an attempt to a biography of Franz Kafka - it is here only the matter of simple sketches - offers in comparison with a try at a Kierkegaard-biography .
F.K. had not at all the kind of compulsive reflection and energy like that
of S.K.s, but was , in a certain way, - mostly caused by utter influence -,
a close type of personality. ( Cf. F. Billeters comparative dissertation on
Kafka and Kierkegaard ! There are naturally certain resemblance between B.s
work and mine. But great differences as well.) Kafka was equally drawn and repelled
by Kierkegaard's writings, - of which he read very little... It is said that
he once read S.K.s Fear and trembling and a selection of the diaries in a German
version ( with the terrible title once planned by S.K. , His diary thus was
planned for the general public from the beginning ) ; F. Kafka had got hold
of it in august 1913, right when he was in the midst of composing the since
long planned letter to his father, Brief an den Vater ( compare biographies
by Brod, E. Pawel, and others ) , but he also read some Kierkegaard during the
year of 1917.
Unquestionably there was a big difference regarding writing itself: F. Kafka
was periodically as mono manically dedicated to writing as Kierkegaard - , It
is impossible to imagine that anything besides writing could have caught Kierkegaard's
interest after the Regine-period -,- but Kafka seems to have spent much time
on trying to escape writing, - very often by his acquaintances with women -,
but by trying to socialize and indulge in different hobbies and personal projects
like learning to play the violin, learning Hebrew and travelling. Much in his
life was held up by dreams about doing something else than write. He sometimes
wanted to be a gardener, he wished he had taken up sports at an early stage
of his life, he loved to sketch ( "If I could draw I would not do anything
else."), he had a small rowing boat on the Moldau etc.. Periodically he
did not estimate writing at all. Towards the end of his life he much continued
to live in this (severe ) ambiguity, - as far as I can understand...... ( What
can you know, after all, about another (?) human being.)
But here we are writing, and writing about writing, and we are writing about
writers who are writing about writers too.
Albert Camus asserts in his famous essay about Kafka in Le mythe de Sisyphe,
that each chapter in the three novels of Kafka´s is like one well played,
finished game of chess.
( Between who and who? The inner fight, the inner play, the inner half-dreaming,
the state of being half awake, so often described by Kafka when he writes about
his own writing. Like he was dreaming his stories.)
Kafka is mocking the monologue. Ironizing it. He is playing with our expectation. We do believe that something eventually with appear in the monologue, but Kafka is in the steady state of teasing us. What cards he seems to have in his hand, he never displays. That is his game. And his game is, that he will never show us anything, but he will act as if he might... It is his gambit ( in terms of Stephen Potter´s Lifemanship. ). Kafka is playing a game. A game he seems to be loosing to himself. So to say - rather vulgar, too.... by me.
Kafka is the steady irony. The ironic stereology. He purports to be writing books, novels, but we are all the time deprived of the whole structure of a "landscape" - compared - for instance - to Dickens we are in a waste land. Dickens´ landscape is economy ( like Balzac's )( Cf. the excellent S.Spenders essay about novels from the early forties...).Kafka can be characterized by these to words, these concepts.
The concept of Irony and the concept of Dream.
The Irony of Kafka is covert, ( cf. W. Booth, A rhetoric of Irony, for these terms.... "overt- covert". ) it is a structural one and it is not directed towards anything outside Kafka ( except the Whole...). In this respect it differs widely from the irony of S. Kierkegaard, whose irony is overt,( when it is not totally covert, and thus unattainable....)and is an "intimate irony", i.e. :S.K. tries to develop his ironic attitude (?) in his reader by proxy. ( The irony of S.K. is not quite a Socratic one, as we explained above...).
The Kafka irony is to be found in the structural field. His novels are built in a way very much alike how irony is built. This will be shown below. It is not uncommon to find a picture in peoples minds concerning F. Kafka, where irony is at hand, only they could usually not explain why and what kind of irony it is about. Maybe one can see by the biographical facts and the letters that F.K. had an ironic attitude towards himself deeply set together with his doubts and earnestness. He could easily use irony as a shelter and seems sometimes to crumble and , for instance in the photo where he is standing leaning towards a pillar next to his sister Ottla ,to carry a smile of utter self-denial with an ironic air about it.
Kafka had an intense relation to dreaming, and he said himself that he nearly
always wrote in a state of half dreaming. ( He also explicitly in his diary
thanked S.Freud - who was at the time a daily issue in the debate = for the
short story Das Urteil.( The verdict .) Thus his relation was conscious
and somewhat intellectually reflected). When you ask the person on the street
about Kafka it is as usual to get the word "dream" ( or nightmare
) as the word "irony" back. And one can easily see how Kafka used
the language of the dream ( There seems to be such a language.) and to play
around with it with not much respect, as if it was both natural and necessary
for him to be dreaming awake and lustful to write it down, to use his ability
to transcend the border to the land of the dreams in the state of clear consciousness!
It hardly never struck him that this could be a "dangerous" thing
to do. But it still came to a rather strange end, as we shall see. For S. Kierkegaard
the dream had no special importance at all. S.K. was not dependent on it more
than normal person and was, as we already have seen, not interested in it more
than he was generally interested in all that concerned human life and the human
condition in general. ---------- .... to be cont.
................................................................
A short life of Franz Kafka.
Introduction.
Most of us have probably read some of Kafka´s novels, some of these three
- to use the words of Max Brod - the "Trilogy of loneliness", whose
unfinished, but yet published ( posthumously) parts are called The Process.
The Castle and Amerika.( The original name for the book Amerika
was actually "The disappeared one"). Known to most people is also
Kafka´s wish that these manuscripts should be relentlessly burnt. The
wish was formulated during a depression in a resort in the winter sport village
of Spindelmuhle 1922. But as far as we know, Kafka never changed his mind on
this point. Even when he was about to die - in the presence of D. Dymant(Diamant)
and his friend, the doctor, he expressed his wish, that only a few short stories
should remain public. The depression was due to his sickness, a tuberculosis
in his throat, who eventually was to put an early end to his life in 1924, when
he was only aged 42.
Thus - Kafka´s wish was that his friend - if he had any friends - Max
Brod, should burn the manuscripts, but Brod did not, posed as he was in front
of an ethical dilemma. Few are blaming him. ( Most people do think one should
burn ones unwanted papers oneself. )
Even if many of us regard Kafka as the perfect short story writer, and even
if some regard him to be best when he is writing these short stories, his enormous
reputation has undoubtedly become based upon the mighty three novels, - which
he did not want to be published, and which he never finished.
The novels never appeared automatically, like the short stories. Kafka was a
long time dissatisfied with the fact, that what he wrote always tended to be
rather short pieces. ( He complains about this in his famous Diary.) And one
can sometimes read chapters of the novels as short stories. ( The first chapter
of Amerika was in fact published by Kafka as a short story in a journal.
As .....The stoker.)
It was - thus - kind of "the editor's choice"- that Kafka not
remained a Czech short story teller, but … a "concept". When
the novels were published ( around 1935 ) the readers of the Western world were
enthusiastic. And the interest grew , especially after the Second World War.
There has never been any followers of Kafka. ( This is a remarkable and
unique thing in Western Literature.) Kafka has thus became a classic of his
own, in a special league. He has become a "solitaire" in many respects…
And he has even become a concept. ("Kafka-like", "Kafkaesque").
Why is that so ?
They are kind of anti-novels. They are - if any - not possible to relate. La
Bruyère wrote - a long time ago - " All is said and one is much
too late now when there has been human beings around for 7000 years thinking.
Regarding the manners, the best and most beautiful are taken; what remains is
now only picking of seeds from the elders and after those among the authors
of the newer era , who has understood their task." (1680)
I. Background. Childhood and youth.
I would like to make a brief sketch of the cultural background against which the works of Franz Kafka has to be looked upon. The century break 1800-1900 in Prague, a town in the Austrian-Hungarian double monarchy, where the Jewish part of the population was important in size and still more in influence, like in Vienna at this very time. The Jewish ghetto in Prague was maybe the largest in the whole of Europe . The population was separated very clearly since there were 30.000 speaking German and about 400.000 Czechs. ( Separated living and separated schools.) In Prague were according to many- not everybody - a lively cultural climate during the years of Kafka´s youth. ( I am not in this essay referring all my sources, but they are all accounted for in the Swedish version on my internet site. This makes this version much more easy to read!)( We might regard Vienna as the centre of the region.)
There were a German University, two German theatres - one which was a music
theatre, several art societies, literary clubs and so forth… Kafka was
entirely German spoken and did not master the Czech language. He published his
works - i.e. his short stories - in German, either in Journals or as small books.
He had to arrange with translators to publish himself in the Czech language,
- and as such a translator the young Milena Jesenská became acquainted
to him, and he to her.
Kafka often went to the theatre and could enjoy works by Strindberg ( Miss Julie
), Ibsen, Shakespeare, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Moliere, G.B.Shaw, and he
might also have heard Enrico Caruso in Verdi's Rigoletto.
The time of Kafka is a time of change. We are on a threshold to another era.
( This is probably true.) Franz was born in 1883, named after the emperor Franz-Josef
(1830-1916), raised in the royal Boehmen, and was to suffer through the chock
of The First World War, The World War, as a coward civilian ( a "saghafter
Zivilist", as Kafka himself put it ....), and he was very much ashamed
over this.
Jaroslav Hacek wrote in Soldier Schvejk:" "The doctor:"
The entire Czech people are a bunch of simulates." P.56.)
Praha.
A picture of the Prague of around 1900 varies substantially from one depicter
to another. It is not an exaggeration to say, that after the second World War
has been, and still is an ongoing, quarrel whether the town of Prague was markedly
divided or not, - the not uncommon problem of ethnicity -, and if it was, to
what extent. There certainly was a German bourgeoisie, quite rich, which was
mainly Jewish ( in origin ) - c:a 30.000 - and which lived in a special part
of the city and a large population of Czechs - c:a 400.000, of which few was
highly educated .
Kafka was the only son ( that survived childhood ) of a prosperous merchant
from the countryside, Hermann Kafka, of western Jewish decent and his wife ,Julie
( born Löwy ) of eastern, orthodox, Jewish decent.( The Löwys was
highly educated, and Franz uncle on his mother's side was a doctor. Hermann
was not an educated man.) Hermann Kafka ( the name means "jackdaw")
was dealing with clothes en gros. He was eager - as a West oriented Jew,
and as a merchant, a capitalist - to assimilate himself. There was a tension
between the parts of the ancestors, but Julie was always standing by Hermann's
side and helped him in business, played cards with him and was extremely loyal,
- more loyal to him than to her children - as far as we can guess.
Hermann - a farmer's boy, with frostbitten toes - had little interest in religion
and was only formally - even with nonchalance - introducing Franz to Judaism.(
Like he also introduced him to prostitutes.) Franz never became religious, as
far as we can see ....
Franz had three sisters, called Valli, Elli and Ottla. ( F.K.s favourite
sister was Ottla. She resembled him in character. ) These sisters was murdered
by the Germans during the Second World War. F.K. died before his parents and
his name ( in the Czech form "Frantisek Kafka" is engraved on top
of the gravestone on the Jewish churchyard in Prague with the names of his parents
underneith. ( It was probably - once again - due to his father will to assimilate.
By the time of F.K.s death - 1924 -the ruling hegemony of the German-speaking
was broken.)
We have few reliable sources regarding the childhood of Franz . It is his own
Diary, The Letter to his father, ( never delivered, no uproar ever...
) and the accounts of Max Brod ( Franz Kafka ) and some other of F.K.s school
fellows. Not much more. This much due to the extermination of the relatives
by the German Nazis.
What we know is that Hermann was prosperous and probably something of a tyrant
in his family and in his store. We also know that Julie early got help to take
care of the children and that Franz had a French gouvernant from early years.
He learnt French at an early age and could read French fluently.
Quite early there came up a conflict with his father. He was locked out on a
balcony for a minor cause, as punishment. ( We can compare this to Strindberg's
conflict with his father, when he was falsely accused by him and forced to admit
what he had not committed.) Since Franz showed no interest in his father's store
but in books and art his father used to tease him and used fervently - according
to F.K. - irony against him.
Julie always supported her husband.
( She is not mentioned in his Diaries. But the father is nearly always present.)
Franz always sought for confirmation from his strong and successful father,
but got little in return. He felt awfully physically inferior to Hermann.
In school he was just an average boy. Nobody noticed Franz. And nobody has remembered
anything unusual about him.( As one of them - Oscar Baum - later cleverly put
it: "The remarkable with him was, that it was nothing remarkable at all
with him.")
Kafka began to write quite early. In his teens he wrote extensive novels, which
he burnt. He had a fancy for writing, and many speculation can be made regarding
the cause of this. His style was fluent.
When at the university - he chose to study law ( after one year with humaniora
) - there was a student's literary club, called "Die Halle", where
there was arranged with lectures and discussions on culture, philosophy, politics
and so on. Kafka had already as a small school fellow expressed his sympathy
for socialism, together with his friend, Hugo Bergmann, later a professor of
philosophy in Jerusalem.
He frequently visited Die Halle, but at the same time he found his favourite
lecture,: he read memoirs and biographies , one after another. Among the first
was the classic Eckermann´s Talks with Goethe.
He met at the club a young man of the same age, Max Brod, when this one was
lecturing upon Schopenhauer. Since Brod in his lecture assaulted the works of
Nietzsche, and Kafka very much was fond of N.,(!!!) Kafka looked up Brod afterwards
and they had a strong debate. Kafka was thus not a very shy fellow, which one
could believe according to the myth.
---
Writing a biographical sketch like this one, I am aware of a lot of the problem.
People often want the facts, but when the facts are presented they change and
want the myth. It is the strange need of illusion that is very common and very
human, but may be dangerous, and makes it tough to try to write a biography.(
A biography is not art. The learned Robert Louis Stevenson meant that biography
was "the lowest of the arts".)
---
Now - after the discussion a friendship began. It would last for the rest of
Kafka´s life.( But he later confessed to his Diary, that he could not
talk with Maxen about everything.) They where different in that Max had a much
more easy going attitude towards women, while Kafka thought of women as a very
serious ( and dangerous) matter.
Max and Franz studied in their leisure time Plato and Flaubert together and
exchanged what they wrote. They even translated Plato together ! They read Flaubert
aloud at each others houses. Later on Kafka was to be a great admirer of Franz
Werfel. But Flaubert was to them the greatest of modern authors, and Kafka was
visiting Paris with comrades.
Kafka had no great interest in philosophy.( The translation of Plato does not
seem to have been a very serious matter.)
One of his teachers at his school, a Dr. Gottwald, became though an important
man in the education of Kafka and his classmates. G. was very fond of the philosophy
of Franz Brentano. Brentano in his turn - who early became blind - was a predecessor
to Edm. Husserl, the foundator on modern phenomenology, and it was Brentano
who underlined the importance of correct description of matter. The most known
book by Brentano probably is Wahrheit und Evidenz. It happened, that
one of Kafka´s classmates, Oscar Pollak, later became philosopher and
editor of the collected works of Franz Brentano. Pollak died in the First World
War as a volunteer. But Kafka exchanged letters with O.P. for a long time and
it is not unlikely that he came to know something about the philosophy of Brentano.
It is apparent, though, that Kafka had a very small interest in Philosophy,
and he did - what we know - not own but one book of philosophy ( by Schopenhauer.).
But he loved Flaubert.
Flaubert.
Flaubert is like a shadow in the early life of Kafka´s. Flaubert's
Education sentimentale was read and reread and had a place my his bedside.
Why Flaubert?
"I would like to write a book, a book about nothing at all, a book with
not the slightest bonds to the utter world and that only would hold together
by the power of it's own style." (Gustave Flaubert.)
/....../
Writing about nothing at all.
Are the monologues of Kafka ( and Kierkegaard )about anything? Do they contain
any information? (Kierkegaard would protest violently against this question.
He was certainly of the opinion, that his writings were about lots of important
matters. At least when he was writing his books.)
Is it even possible to write about "nothing"? Is it something like
the old dream of Lárt pour Lárt of T. Gautier, or something
like the ideal with the proclaimers of the circular novel, a Raymond Roussell
-, is it like when Mag. Soren Kierkegaard is busy writing his Forewords, in
the book with the same name ( Forord )(1843), claiming that the book
is about nothing at all, that to be writing forewords is like spitting out through
the window: "ligesom at spytte ud af Vinduet"…
The thought of writing about nothing at all ( not "Nothing", ....
the "Naught" ) - and hence everything…? - is now and then present
with both Kafka and Kierkegaard. Here there are also hints about, that writing
is something else, and that it is about the wish not being in need to write
at all …. There is a very freqquent dilemma of every author in these remarks…
there is a despair "appearing" concerning their own belief, that they
are not good enough at anything else but this writing business… There is
another despair too, the misologi-despair, ( the mistrust in language ), that
was to come clear along with the modern age…There is a need of producing
that never stops with neither Kafka nor Kierkegaard. They are both "producing
words" all their lifes.
Anyway, -there is a long way for a culture before it is confronted with thoughts
like these, for a conscience ( a conscience, which according to the logician
Aristotle is "to know about knowing", ? , before you begin to think
of writing about nothing at all. (Cf. the thesis of Maturana, that language
appears when you starts discussing what language is…))
Telling about nothing? Isn´t this utter despair?( Or confidence in
the absurd? )
The Swede G.Printz-Paulson writes in his Solen och spegeln (1957):"
It is possible, that it is required a certain pillar of despair to be able to
create important poetry.".- Only a human being with free will is able to
play music,Dr. Johnson claimed once :" A human being that is like a machine
cannot play, because he or she cannot stop playing, or smashing the violin."
( Johnson to Boswell in Boswell´s Journey of a tour to the Hebrides,
p. 233.)
Freud.
1.
Kafka learned about Freud by his comerades, especially from Gross, the son of one of his teachers at the University. Freud was "the talk of the town" in Prague and Vienna , and it was a social habit to psychoanalyze one another at the cafées.
2.
The discussion concerning the concept of the unconscious.( "The unconscious is not thinking." Ricoeur.) A "duplicity in the heart of unity". Sartre's early criticism of Freud..
J.-P. Sartre asserts ( in his Being and nothingness ) that people take refuge to the unconscious, to the model of Freud´s, to escape the all to usual behaviour of lying to oneself, that which Sartre names: Bad Faith. To be able to lie it is necessary to know what is true, Sartre continues, - which is true enough, but seems to be a bit scholastic in it's rigor, and implies ..... Sartre also thinks it being a remarkable thing how a person, a human being, at the same time can be both Ego and Id. I have got an Id, but only via a psychoanalyst. Sartre's reasoning concerning bad faith runs like this:
"Psychoanalysis has not gained anything for us since in order to overcome
bad faith, it has established between the unconscious and consciousness an autonomous
consciousness in bad faith. The effort to establish a veritable duality and
even a trinity ( Es, Ueber-Ich, Ich expressing themselves through the Censor
) has resulted in a mere verbal terminology. The very essence of the reflexive
idea of hiding something from oneself implies the unity of one and the same
psychic mechanism and consequently a double in the heart of unity,/.../"
Sartre continues: "tending on the one hand to maintain and locate the thing
to be concealed and on the other hand to repress and disguise it. Each of the
two acts aspects of this activity is complementary to the other; that is, it
implies the other in its being. By separating consciousness from the unconscious
by means of .the censor, psychoanalysis has not succeeded in dissociating the
two phases of the act, since the libido is a blind conatus (/ty. Trieb/) toward
conscious expression and since the conscious phenomenon is a passive, faked
result . Psychoanalysis has merely localized this double activity of repulsion
and attraction on the level of the censor." S. is citing the wiener psychiatrist
Steckel and his La femme frigide: "Every time that I have been able to
carry my investigations far enough, I have established that the crux of the
psychosis was conscious." from N.R.F.,( Nouvelle Revue Francaise.).
Sartre writes about Freud´s view on Man, that the distinction between
the Ego and the Id divides the psyche in two. To get the two together you need
a psychoanalyst. I a only able to become a One through the Other.
Another problem is: Am the I the one who am the resistance, or is it the
Ego ? The censor is also supposed to have a capability of judgment and sense,
because the censor is letting forward what it is choosing to let forward. Psychoanalysis:"
allows me to understand how it is possible for me to be lied to without lying
to myself, since it places me in the same relation to myself that the Other
is in respect to me."
It thus creates a duality between the liar and the victim of the lie in it between
Ego and Id. Is this a satisfying explanation, Sartre asks.
Freud also gets accused by Sartre in the "Freedom"-chapter of L´Etre et le Neant for being doubly a determinist. To the question:" Why does X act in this way ?" Freud is answering accordingly to a vertical axis: the action springs out of the underlying symbolism. To the question regarding the meaning of the symbolism, Freud answers that to answer that question, we have to look back upon the life of that person, the history of that person, to be able to determine any facts. ( Thus he uses both vertical and horizontal determinism.) The "philosopher of freedom" catches the throat of Freud. Man is sentenced to freedom !, like he himself is writing, and then Sartre cannot let Freud escape... Sartre thus destroys the whole topic system of the psychology of Freud, as it seems. But he cannot get rid of the fact , that the psychoanalytical method has cured neuroses ( as they called them). But he has not got into this discussion. He has not entered the discussion whether or not Freud's method can bring a human being from a state of not living to a state of living. The conclusion of Sartre's critic is quite clear though: The concept of unconscious is self-deception. Literally the unconscious = bad faith, in Sartre's superficial critic of this concept and the consequences of the same.
The Dream is a wishfulfillment.
In the famous case story, and in the case, of Irma, ( One of F.s earliest
documented cases. ) by identification. In other dreams by the fulfilment of
Freud´s wish for glory..... Freud - though - is clear that it is the dreamer
himself, who is capable of interpreting the dream, with his unique knowledge
of his own history by the free associating within the latter. In this way the
alert person is able to find the latent content, which, according to the theory,
should be regarded as the "meaning" of the dream . The test, whether
it is the true meaning or not is, whether or not the patient/interpretator becomes
free from some hampering symptom or the like, and thus a healthier person, gets
rid of a neurotic symptom, or that the patient feels that this or that attitude
towards this or that person is accurate or not, something one has not been quite
clear of earlier. Unconscious processes turned out to be less shielded in the
dream than in the state of being awake. ( Cf. Thomson,p. 155f. ) F. uses partly
- in his "self analysis" 1897-1900 prior to the Traumdeutung
(1900)- his own dreams to be absolutely sure. ( With the help of telling of
some of it to his collegue, Wilhelm Fliess. Fliess was in a way Freud´s
analyst. ) E. Fromm is describing some of the problems with the theory thus:"
.................................................. " /............................................/
Problematic and intriguing are the facts that psychoanalysis is concentrated
rather heavily upon the "word"- upon language - . In human communication
the words are generally only part among other signals. This has led to difficulties
...and progress.
Freud was occupied with bringing forth such pathogen conceptions, i.e. such
as ,that had awakened the defence mechanisms with the individual. Those conceptions
( ty. Vorstellungen ) were supposed to linger behind the neurotic symptoms,
like phobias or hysterical muteness. One could say that psychoanalysis is about
to help people get rid of that, which is blocking them from a full life, helping
them to get rid of obstacles, obstacles which they do not know of until the
analysis ( treatment ) is all clear, when the patient is supposed to rise from
the famous coach in the little room on Berggasse in Vienna, saying in a relieved
state:" Oh, but this I have known all the time!! "
But psychoanalysis is an art of interpretation. This makes it both difficult
and ... uncertain. It was a difficult task for Freud to claim the scientific
state of a method based on hermeneutics. It always is.
The prime source for the Freudian analyst is - as everybody knows - the dream.
The main possibility of the analyst to interpret these dreams lies in himself
and in the patient's supposed cunning" free association". Both the
analyst and the patient must be concentrated upon the task, and them have to
be open-minded in a certain meaning of this word.
The patient is himself the first interpretator of the dream. Freud here makes
a distinction.
1.) The manifest dream content.( The dream "itself". 2.) The interpretation
of the latent dream thoughts, or - contents. F. thought himself perceiving a
kind of work going on in the dreams themselves, or by the unconscious dream-work,
and that this work had certain very important features, often easily recognized:
a.) condensation .- b.) transformation.- c.) F. also though himself able to
find a kind of "censor", a censorship, much alike the daily evasion.
The Censor.
( Thus, three central concepts: condensation, transformation, evasion. )
In all his work with dreams, which started out with Traumdeutung and then continued
with often highly gifted and well off people in the bourgeoisie town, Freud
found out that symbols not only were frequent with several individual, but that
they often had a the same sense. He then rapidly came to the conclusion, that
symbols does not have linguistic borders. ( FW,VII. p.245. ) A characteristicon
of F.s was his industriousness, his inventiveness,- but also his willingness
to revise his theories, even if some "principles" were always remaining,
like the thought of the , sometimes changing force of libido. - It is also noteworthy
that he was not inclined to deal with the more severe cases of psychosis ( like
schizophrenia ) as much as with the neurosis ( i.e. hysteria ).
"By narcissistic aberrations the libido is drawn away from foreign
objects. They are therefore not available to analytical therapy." ( Ib.p.252.)...
to be continued.........................
Discussing psychoanalysis with people , experts and non-experts, is often as
difficult as tiresome a task. It almost always seems very alike discussing religion.
It seems that it was very important to Freud not to get lost in speculation,
but working on a scientific basis. All his life he was to underline this, and
he was very careful not to be mislead by reading philosophers.( Not Schopenhauer,
not Nietzsche and so on. But he had read S., as T. Mann has pointed out.)
- J. Lacan - who like F. "permitted" himself to be analysed by himself
- has later tried to become the "philosopher of the unconscious",
- but seems to me rather a unconscious philosopher. This might go for Freud
too. ( Cf. Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen. in Returns of the French Freud, p.209
ff.)
Parts of his extensive writings are still worth reading, I think. He is - in
quite another way than F. - very literary. Because Freud was kind of a keen
short story teller...) F. was always in close contact with praxis, his analysand
on the coach in the room at Berggasse, the praxis and the constant task, the
goal of "making a person free".( Cf. Kierkegaard.... )
An important thing is to be aware of the irreversible in the discovery of the
unconscious. The world would never be the same again. Paul Siwek underlines
this in a lecture 1953 in Amsterdam ( Le probleme de l´inconscient
): Siwek gives a picture of the unconscious according to Freud:
"The one person, who only temporarily has been robbed of his conscience by alcohol, cannot function . He loses his logic in speech and action. Quite different is the case with the behaviour of the unconscious acts, according to Freud: these acquire their goals with an almost superior ease. They immediately find other acts to cooperate with. The complete cooperation (coincidence) in the acts (/fr. actes/ ) of the unconscious is not at all an effect caused by chance. It is governed by a law ( follows a ) What then is the formula of this law, and how has the acts of the unconscious gotten hold of them ? Isn´t it necessary here to admit that the acts, which are called "unconscious" in reality has to it's service a conscience , and as a matter of fact: an infinitely perfect conscience; only THIS conscience would be capable of communicating with the individual, it would be unknown to him or her. We would have here a very RELATIVE unconscious."
Paul Siwek is also brooding over how the unconscious can become conscious, - by which common relation ( /fr. relation/ ) Freud, or the analyst have a curious position. It seems a constant problem for psychoanalysis to establish the qualifications for the analyst. This person has to get rid of common associating in an almost superhuman way. And equally the analysand is forced to make all efforts towards free associations on his sofa. Neither of them sees the other's face ( there is no glance between ). Almost the sole link is the words.( It was very seldom the analysand was not present. Cf. though the case regarding Little Hans.) .We have a connection on the metodical level. We also must remember one of the
About Kafka´s dependence of the dream "as such".
" El sueno, autor de representaciones..." ( Gongora. ) (i.e. the dream as upheaval of all our conceptions.".)
("The world is a dream just about to wake up."
( ? ))
No dream is without an end. It has a beginning and an end. In this it is like
a monologue.
The free monologue on Dr. Freud´s divan is not eternal, really. It is
a presumption, that the monologue is not eternal. ( There is
a farthest point!) The dream is what it is. We cannot exactly compare
the dream to the monologue of life, since the latter , according to my point
of view, is a function of some kind of deliberate choice.
And the dream was used by F.Kafka, - or - more accurately - :he used "a
dreamlike state" when writing, according to his diary. And we might see
this as an escape... Only he himself knew. The dream was connected to his habit
of writing a diary. Sometimes he used it as a dream-book. We can often trace
the beginning of some story to pages in the diary. Kafka was very dependent
on writing in an inspired state of mind. He never changed his manuscripts, but
through away the bad tries and wrote it all anew. He was writing like a musician
playing, and in one single breath.
/........./
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Conclusion.
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© Kaj Genell 2009