Psychoanalysis in Literature

Abstract

Anz, Thomas, ed., in collaboration with Christine Kanz. Psychoanalyse in der modernen Literatur. Kooperation and Konkurrenz. WUrzburg. Konigshausen & Neumann, 1999. 231 pp. EUR30.00 paperback. Kaus, Rainer J. Kafka and Freud. Schuld in den Augen des Dichters and des Analytikers. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000. 58 pp. EUR15.00 hardcover. "Not I, but the poets discovered the unconscious," confessed Freud in one of the last interviews before his death. Conversely, writers from Lou Andreas-Salome to Doblin and Schnitzler have described their acquaintance both as patients and as curious readers of Freud's psychoanalysis as a "revelation," a "turning point" in their lives as well as an enormous boost to their literary production. In an unprecedented move in 1930, a long list of writers, including Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf, signed a petition to the Nobel Prize jury urging them to consider Freud as a recipient. But this close alliance, cooperation, and mutual esteem between psychoanalysis and modern literature mark only one side of their relationship. The attitude towards psychoanalysis is also accompanied by massive resistance, a weary fear of territorial intrusion and the anguish, as in Rilke or Hofmannsthal, that an objectifying scientific discourse on the secrets of the psyche would suffocate the inspirational sources of poetic production. There is often much more involved than an "anxiety of influence" if one considers Karl Kraus, whose polemic statement, "Psychoanalysis is the madness whose therapy it pretends to be," will echo in different permutations throughout literary and non-literary circles. This highly ambivalent relation between both fields, the instances of cooperation and competition, of eager collaboration and fervent rejection is the focal point of Psychoanalyse in der modernen Literatur, edited by Thomas Anz with the help of Christine Kanz. In twelve essays ranging from the question of hysteria in Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and Schnitzler to the traces of psychoanalytic examination in Andreas-Salome, Kafka, Canetti, Otto Gross, Joyce, Aragon, and Pabst, and in more theoretical considerations on the interaction between modern literature and psychoanalysis, this excellent anthology pursues the charged drama of delineation and mutual admiration, rivalry and respect. Is it coincidental that the discovery of the workings of the unconscious and the foundation of an entirely new practice of reading and writing occurs exactly at the same time as literature was revolutionizing its own practices and mimetic tools? Is it accidental that the psychoanalytic investigation into hysteria and madness, the whole range of internal struggles within the subject, coincides with the massive literary thematization of madness and fragmented subjects in modernism? As Thomas Anz points out in his insighful essay "Die Seele als Kriegsschauplatz," the metaphor of "struggle" (within the conscious and unconscious forces of the subject, as "Geschlechterkampf," "Generationenkampf," "Kampfums Dasein," etc.) defines not only the revolutionary spirit of the aesthetic avant-garde but reverberates through Freud's own texts. The sentiment of "struggle" belongs furthermore to the central symptoms of a modern subject which loses its coherence and autonomy in the face of an ever more differentiated social world. As Anz shows, this is far from a psychoanalytic or literary insight alone. Shortly before World War One, the psychiatrist Bleuler coined the term "schizophrenia" and Karl Jaspers "depersonalization," pointing to similar internal struggles within the modern subject. At times the conceptual framework of Anz' article becomes somewhat confusing as he uses the terms "ego," "subject," and "individual" almost synonymously rather than differentiating them as Freud did himself, particularly after writing The Ego and the Id. It also would have been very interesting to analyze the concepts of "shock" and "nervosity" in conjunction with "struggle" in modernism. …