Sigmund Freud
Who has not yet, in his life, and in the lives of others, felt it and learned that there is a cure for mental illness - with words?
One small word to heal the whole soul, what kind of miracle is that?
There are small worlds, assumptions for large ones. There are cities - little ghettos in them! - indispensable for understanding the history of ideas. There are minor literatures, such as, for example, Church Slavonic, copyist and compiler literatures in relation to their source: one of the most complete in history (Byzantine), and another also among the greatest (medieval literature of the Roman West); the literary diaspora of late Byzantium and the Latin Middle Ages.
There are places in the history of ideas that are ruins but still serve.
Sigmund Schlomo Freud, an Austrian writer from a family of Galician Jews, thinker, neurologist, who founded a dialogue with his patients for the purpose of treatment, was born in 1856 in the Czech town of Pšibór, German Freiburg. There is now his museum, a minor memory of an empire (Austria-Hungary), where a man was born who influenced the mental climate of today.
Dr. Freud, the founder of the doctor-patient dialogue, died in 1939 in Hampstead, near London, while fleeing from the Nazis (four of the five sisters died in a concentration camp). At the beginning and end of his life, like gates, stand two small worlds, a small town in the lee of the Czech province, and the artistic suburb of London, where the poet WH Auden wrote that Freud's thought will be the climate in which we will lead our diverse lives.
CZECH HOMELAND
I want to admire Eva Weissweiler, a writer, music pedagogue and storyteller from Menhelgladbach, in addition to the biographer of the creator of psychoanalysis, the chronicler of his family of biblical proportions, how she observes a sixteen-year-old boy, named Schlomo Freud, while traveling by train from Vienna to Pšibor - she returns to the old region, for the school holidays, in the summer of 1872, where she will hear three languages: German, Czech and Yiddish (cf. Eva Weissweiler, Die Freuds. Biografie einer Familie. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2006).
There, where the Jewish nanny led him by the hand, told him fairy tales, not about Czech princes and princesses, about fairies and elves that raise Prague, the mother of cities, not about Libusha, the legendary ancestor of the dynasty Pšemislović, and the Czech people, but about Joseph and little Jesus while he was still a Jew. And where his mother reads him the history about Gog and Magog, about Isaac and Abraham, about the trumpets of Jericho, and someone else, later, talks about Protestantism, which gave the Jews refuge from pogroms. Freud is the epic protagonist of both minor and major worlds.
I remember a wonderful pan Jaroslav Hornát, my professor Shakespeare and Elizabethan literature, to whom I dedicated Baroque of Montenegro I-III, all three volumes, mentioning his obsession with detail, minutiae, nuance, minor worlds:
"I know, Mr. colleague, he said, that your medieval religious and church manuscripts will be in Prague, for example, a common place, few people will notice them because there are tons of them here. But in your homeland, those same manuscripts, with the same system and content, with the same discourse, will be something huge, because their function in their small world is increased by as much as that small world is authentic to itself. And that little world of yours, Mr. Colleague, seems to be aware of that, definitely, paper is the body and ink is the blood...!"
I remembered the kind words of Mr. Doctor Hornát countless times, working, in the monasteries of Montenegro, often clucking from winter, because they only have firewood for the dining room, on copies of the Byzantine literary corpus made by the hand of minor scribes (Literature and literacy from Crnojević to Petrović I-II, Cetinje, 2016). On our small literary diaspora of late Byzantium.
Different behaviors of one and the same matter (spirituality) of small circles, in large circles, the metapsychological behavior of something, which is minimal, within the framework of the other maximal one can in one case look strange, like some kind of Freudian eros.
I come in the second - in what Mr. Hornát calls the native case, that is already something else. Every literary diaspora is, in its own way, a procedure. Just like the ancient diaspora from the XNUMXth to the XNUMXth century, Byzantine-Latin, so is this second, newer, literary diaspora of Jewish Prague in the German language, to which I have dedicated thousands of hours - if not pure writing, but experiencing and thinking over the decades.
Freudian eros, what is it?
Freud became famous when he paid attention to the sexual nature of one of the most powerful genres, drama.
THE SEXUAL CHARACTER OF THE DRAMA
The sexual nature of Greek drama is obvious: Oedipus the King Sophocles, Medea Euripides - after all,
All of Euripides (along with Shakespeare, the greatest dramatic poet) sees women as sexual power: protest against war, revenge for adultery, etc. Among the Greeks, powerful female masochism, or sadism, is a term reserved for problems on the direct line between will and sleep, war and peace, strength and death.
Galen of Pergamon (129 – 216 AD) placed the sexual affect at the top of the symptoms of key diseases of both sexes. This Greek scientist, surgeon and philosopher, who is usually given the flattering title of the greatest medical researcher in the ancient world, the personal physician of the Roman emperors, had a strong influence on anatomy, psychology and neurology, that is, on the disciplines in which Freud formed and developed his ideas.
It was he, who is, in action De locis affectis (Latin translation) discovered mental illnesses, not directly visible, and put the matter so that the illness lies in the psychic aura.
Western assessment of him in a polemical direction (Galen the Polemicist) is completely justified, since this polyhistor is interested in several directions of illness and psychological problems at once. The polemic is the development of the problem in several directions - if we take this discipline purely as a genre, in what sense did Galen develop the thought of the father of medicine, Hippocrates of Kos (460 - c. 370 AD, an older compatriot of the great Alexandrian philologist Fillets from Kos), whose work revolutionized medicine, and separated it from the divine practice, theurgy, as a separate science.
The polemical nature of medicine left its mark on the Freudian field of psychoanalysis, not for some invisible reasons, but because he, like every ancient author, considered the field of his medical research inseparable from the field of literary words (polemical in themselves), dialogically oriented, as which is dialogically oriented psychoanalysis: treating the patient with words.
And what else is literature, after all, if not treatment with words? Poetry in the short term, drama in the medium term, and novel treatment with words in the long run!
SEXUALITY AS A MINORITY
Freud based psychoanalysis precisely on the minority. Based on his empirical knowledge of hysteria, he believed that sexual abuse in childhood is behind every neurosis. After the death of his father, Jacob Freud, who, by the way, was never satisfied with his son, since Ziggy (that's what his mother called Freud) fell into a neurosis himself, persistently treating himself with morphine and strong intoxicants, he concluded that the neurosis was caused by the so-called intrapsychic dispute.
Freud regarded his religiosity as a kind of pain, a neurosis, and shunned it. That time he was of Jewish origin - he shunned him edmund husserl. In this direction, the family of the Freuds, a family of biblical proportions in its membership - was considered a civil, not a religious particle, in Vienna, until Nazism.
Nazism became a special pain for the Prague intellectual and creative circle, regardless of the case of Freud and Husserl - the coincidence of these two thinkers with other members of the circle became inevitable when the comforting (later tragically inconsolable) pain began to roll, which, in fact, only an exception that confirms the rule: that no one who carries in his being and creativity the attributes of the Prague Jewish creative circle will not escape the fate of the circle as a whole.
I see in this the polemical character of pain - pain is a permanent state, latent, inevitable. Pain is a dialectical polemic. Pain is a polyphonic opera. In that sense, Freud's end is a logical end, after the accumulation of so much pain, arriving from locations we do not know, as even Galen did not know them, although he possessed great knowledge, but by the very fact that a doctor must arrange, bring into some order, the locations of invisible pain in the soul and body, just as a poet must arrange words (particles of a totally polemical character!!) into a mechanical and meaningful whole.
Already at an early stage of his interest in hysteria, Freud transferred the problem from a purely female to a male level, first in his work About male hysteria (1886), and then in an extensive work Hysteria expanding research into bodily trauma.
A STRIKE ON DOSTOEVSKY
I love the attacks on great writers.
By big, I mean a big, clear thing, not when someone is trumpeting at random. When I take it in my hands Ezra Pound, I can't get past the part where he rants at his teacher: "I've despised you long enough/Walt Whitman/it's time to settle the score!"
A pleasant shiver went through me when JL Borges he shoots with one bullet Günter Grass i Garcia Marquez for the novels Tin Drum, i.e. One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Both of them went overboard with the consumption of so much paper, it could all have been better written on five or six pages"; I don't even hate it when Borges is on the island Samuel Beckett with the Castilian diagnosis: "Un imbécil!... Un idiota!"
I was delighted by the attacks on Tolstoy which I discovered as a boy, for example Leonid Andreyev, having published the more than excellent novel Judas Iscariot, as well as Tolstoy's answer when the kobayagi whispers in his ear in confidence to Chekhov: "Andreyev roars, but Tolstoy is not afraid!"
Bertold Brecht kiddish on Thomas Mann: "I can't imagine how, and why, such an untalented man wrote so many books!"
I widen my eyes when The tick go on Andrić: "Sneaky Byzantine!..."
I also enjoy famous attacks on Dostoyevsky, such as the one Vladimir Nabokov ("Dostoevsky is waiting in the anteroom of my office for me to give him a bad grade"), or that one Milan Kundera ("The Idiot is a boring novel, a sick hero of an even sicker author"). Come on Joseph Conrad according to Dostoyevsky, they are a delicacy.
But one of these attacks is too many even for my taste. This is Freud's attack on the writer of Crime and Punishment, when he asserted himself "with the furious force of his genius", as he would say Stanislav Vinaver for an Old French writer (Francois Rabelais).
Ten years later, I published a monograph Dostoyevsky and the West, one of the three hundred existing books on the writer (2012st ed. 2013, XNUMXnd ed. XNUMX). Of these three hundred, about a hundred passed through my hands and they are not apologetics, but more critical, the authors are my witnesses: Malcolm Jones: Dostoevsky after Bakhtin; Irina Paperno: Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia; George Pattison: Dostoevsky and Orthodox Tradition; Barrio Cruz: La reception crítica de Dostoievski en España; Denis Dircherl: Dostoevsky and the Catholic Church; David Goldstein: Dostoevsky e les Juifs, French edition (Gallimard, 1976); so many other releases...
However, no one in history attacked Dostoyevsky as horribly as Freud attacked him. I don't think there is a more severe attack on a writer ever. He announced the war under the old days, 1928, with an infectious title Dostoyevsky and parricide. To make the paradox complete, he crucified him from adoration to exasperated rebellion. The beginning and the end go from extreme to extreme in this order: Dostoevsky's place is not far behind Shakespeare, says Freud to Kobayagi enthusiastically. The Brothers Karamazov, he continues, is the most magnificent novel ever written...
The Viennese psychoanalyst reveals Dostoevsky's vices with much more enthusiasm. We can safely say that Dostoevsky never got free from the feelings of guilt arising from his intention of murdering his father, he continues, and at the end he quips: intellectual inhibition due to his neurosis; Dostoevsky's sense of guilt; pathological passion; etc. (cf. Sigmund Freud: Dostoevsky and Parricide, 98, 106, 109 ff).
The mercy, says Freud, that Dostoevsky begged on his knees before the authorities, incomparably lesser spirits acquired for a handful of rubles. The sin of parricide made him a slave. A monster. Low passions. Etc. etc.
In Freud's monumental oeuvre, there is no place where he speaks more forcefully about himself. About anger towards the roots. According to the teacher. According to Judaism and the Jews. He is not alone among the great Jewish spirits of self-haters and self-cursors (technical term: self-hatred). There are more Karl Marx, the grandson of a rabbi, Ludwig Wittgenstein, high Habsburg nobility of Jewish lineage, Noam Chomsky, philologist and thinker. So many other eminent Jews.
But Freud dug the furthest and furthest.
Bonus video:
