Freud and Kafka - Kaj Bernhard Genell

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Freud and Kafka –

draft for a myth-critical science

Kaj Bernhard Genell

1 
Freud and Kafka – ......................................................... I 
Kaj Bernhard Genell .............................................................................................i 
INTRODUCTION ................................................................. 4 
Three Hypothesizes ......................................................................................... 4 
THE PROLIFIC MYTH ................................................................................. 11 
ENTHUSIASM ...................................................................... 8 
PART ONE: MYTH AND REALITY ............................... 18 
PSYCHOANALYSIS .......................................................... 19 
Historical background ........................................................................................ 19 
PSYCHIATRY .................................................................................................. 34 
DADAISM, SURREALISM in Freud's time ..................................................... 37 
LITERARY FICTION DURING FREUD´S EARLY YEARS ......................... 38 
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT ................................................................................... 39 
ZOLA - A ROLE MODEL ................................................................................ 47 
HALLUCINATORY EROTIC. ......................................................................... 49 
SCHNITZLER ................................................................................................... 50 
KRAUS .............................................................................................................. 50 
GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITY .............................................................. 53 
FAIRY TALE & SYMBOL .............................................................................. 61 
A CATASTROPHE as MEDIATOR for CULTURAL CHANGE ................... 66 
HYSTERIA ........................................................................... 67 
THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX .............................................................................. 69 
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE DREAM ..................... 76 
THE FANTASTIC and THE CENSOR ............................. 87 
THE PSYCHOANALYTIC BIOGRAPHY ...................................................... 95 
THE PSYCHOSIS ........................................................................................... 100 

FREUD and KAFKA 
2 
THE STATUETTES ....................................................................................... 104 
FREUD´s SECOND TOPIC ........................................................................... 108 
RIDICULE over Freud´s idea of  UNCONSCIOUS JOKE ............................ 111 
OTTO GROSS – a link ...................................................... 113 
PART TWO: THE DIFFRACTED MYTH .................... 115 
RECEPTION AND SCIENTIFIC CRITIQUE ............................................... 115 
PHILOSOPHICAL CRITIQUE ...................................................................... 116 
**SARTRE** ................................................................................................. 117 
**SIWEK** ............................................................................................... 122 
**PIAGET** ................................................................................................... 122 
**Wittgenstein** ............................................................................................ 127 
**ADORNO** ................................................................................................ 128 
PART THREE: THE MYTH – THICK SYMBOLISM 129 
The Soul of Things ..................................................................................... 153 
KIERKEGAARD, CAMUS and FREUD and MYTH .................................... 156 
CAMUS AND HORROR ........................................................................... 158 
FREUD and the ANTROPOLOGISTS ...................................................... 152 
PART FOUR: The Divan-Cartoon in Playboy Magazine162 
 ............................................................................................. 162 
PART FIVE: ...................................................................... 169 
KAFKA .............................................................................. 169 
MYTH ABOUT a MYTH .......................................................................... 169 
KAFKA'S MYTH "BEFORE THE LAW": ............................................... 169 
THE PROCESSED MYTH: KAFKA ............................. 187 
KAFKA'S “AMERIKA” ................................................................................. 188 
The Sisters Kafka's Eyes Shone: The Short Story "The Judgment" ................ 224 

FREUD and KAFKA 
3 
The Judgment, and the birth of the Kafkaesque. ......................................... 224 
“CRASH COURSE” IN THE KAFKAESQUE .............................................. 233 
**MASTERLY INTUITION**** .................................................................. 235 
**The Metamorphosis** ............................................................................ 236 
"The train has started, the journey is over." ................................................ 254 
“One does not know what one has in store in their own house” A Country 
Doctor .............................................................................................................. 255 
Jackals and Arabs ............................................................................................ 263 
Be just! – The Penal Colony ............................................................................ 269 
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................... 280

FREUD and KAFKA

INTRODUCTION

Three Hypothesizes

“However paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function

is to distort, not to make disappear.”

( Barthes,

Mythologies

)

In my previous books related to the subject of Kafka,

Kafka och det

Kafkaeska

and ,

Kafka –

A Freud-Structuralist Analysis

(2022)

, I

attempted to provide evidence for a single hypothesis: that the

Kafkaesque could not have been created without Kafka's ability to draw

on material connected to Freud's psychoanalysis. I thus claimed that,

B.; Mythologies, p.121.

2017

The English translation .

FREUD and KAFKA

historically speaking, there is no Kafka without Freud. In this present

book, I have another hypothesis, which builds on the previous book's:

I assert that with Kafka, the enormous influence that Kafka's works

began to have, primarily from around 1940, when

The Trial

was

published, was a.) a demystifying influence in large parts of the West,

which largely b.) depended on a processing of the myths

psychoanalysis.

Cl. Lévi-Strauss compares the analysis of a myth to a chess game, in his book about

the lynx.

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Fig.1.

An anaclastic instrument, intended for studies of refraction.

Kafka had this new theory as a subtext in essential works such as

The

Trial

and

Metamorphosis,

which made an avalanche-like success

everywhere, and in one fell swoop incorporated the Kafkaesque into

the general consciousness, and in the implied canon on which Western

post-war culture rests.

If this was the case, how could that be? What was it about the myth

Psychoanalysis, “the ubiquity of unconscious forces, which has changed

how we perceive our entire culture, and Kafka’s treatment of it in his

works, which in some parts could be perceived as caricaturing, which in

turn could have accelerated this shift toward secularism? What I imply

is that perhaps it is more myths, more than philosophies, that bring

about great changes. Certainly, neither Kafka nor the general public

who read Kafka had particularly solid knowledge of psychoanalysis.

Furthermore, the case is that the myths – which one can perceive as a

form of “ideological speech” ( in accordance with the theories of

The term "myth" is used by me in a broad sense. Edith Kurtzweil. (

The Freudians

p. xv.)

FREUD and KAFKA

Barthes )

- that bring about changes often do so by transforming into

other myths, partly as a result of the intellectual criticism, which by being

powerfully pretentious, always distorts myths, or through art and

literature, which, in accordance with their nature, can do nothing but

distort them.

Since myths are a kind of “système semiologique second”

, a second

hand signification system, we thus have here an effect, which can be

characterized as a third party one..

Kaj Bernh. Genell – Gothenburg, Nov 2025.

Cf. Barthes,

Mythologies

, (1957) p.193-247.

Ib.p.199.

FREUD and KAFKA

ENTHUSIASM

IT IS SAID ABOUT Franz Kafka that he was very easily thrilled and

enthusiastic

. Yes, one could turn the reasoning around and state that

The word "enthusiasm" is in itself a small effective mini-myth, with a powerful

reference, as the word originally in ancient Greece meant "filled with God." Thus, in

our days, one can hardly be happy without risking being labelled as religious. Lauri

Honko, in the essay “What is a myth?” (in a journal published by the Donner

Foundation ), defines what a myth is. Many of these points overlap, so the number is

considerably too large: 1) Myth as source of cognitive categories. Myth is seen as an

explanation for enigmatic phenomena. The intellect needs to conceptualize certain

aspects of the universe, to establish the relationship between different phenomena.

Myth as form of symbolic expression. Myth is placed on par with other creative

activities, such as poetry or music. Myth has its own laws, its own reality, its own forms

of expression; it may be viewed as a projection of the human mind, as a symbolic

structuring of the world. 3) Myth as projection of the subconscious. Myth is viewed in

relation to a substratum shared partly by all humans, partly only by members of the

same race, nation, or culture (Neo-Jungian emphasis on socialization and cultural

group instead of racial-genetic inheritance). Freud offered the concept of daydreams

as models for myth. The message is disguised and condensed; the projection of the

subconscious is controlled partly by tradition, partly by elementary life facts. 4) Myth

as an integrating factor in man's adaptation to life: myth as world view. In myths, man

is faced with fundamental problems of society, culture, and nature. Myths provide

opportunities for selecting different elements that satisfy both individual tendencies

and social necessities. From these elements, it is possible to create an individualized

yet traditional way of viewing the world. 5) Myth as charter of behaviour. Myths

support accepted patterns of behaviour by placing present-day situations in a

meaningful perspective concerning past precedents. Myths provide a valid justification

for obligations and privileges. Myths act as safety valves by allowing people to vent

their emotions without socially disruptive effects. 6) Myth as legitimation of social

institutions. Myths sustain institutions: together with ritual, they express common

religious values and consolidate them. 7) Myth as marker of social relevance. Myths

are not regarded as a random collection of stories; in a culture, there is a clear

correlation between the distribution of mythical themes and what is considered

socially relevant in that culture. 8) Myth as mirror of culture, social structure, etc.

Myths are considered to reflect certain facets of culture. This reflection is seldom

direct or photographic but may reveal values that would otherwise be difficult to

detect. 9) Myth as result of historical situation. Emphasis is placed on the

reconstruction of those events that were most decisive in the formation of the myths.

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he struggled to see anything at all in daily life or in the world of ideas as

something "normal" or "ordinary." Even a visit to the Post Office, at the

post office, made him gasp in admiration over how quickly and easily

everything was handled by the staff: envelopes flew this way and that,

and it took not more than seconds, and several letters and packages had

already ended up exactly where they should! Kafka's eyes shone in

enthusiasm.

The same was true when he went to the cinema: he never

ceased to be like a child. He could not calm down in the cinema chair

before the miracle of all the moving pictures. He succeeded in irritating

his companion at the cinema by asking – anti-filmically - if they couldn't

stop the film, so they could look more closely at some pictures he

thought were particularly good. And during a lecture at a friend's house

given by the anthroposophe Rudolf Steiner, whose ideas about the

human soul Kafka - as an atheist and anarchist - thought were pure

nonsense, it was not easy for Kafka to stop being thrilled as Steiner used

such enthralling images when he spoke about the human soul. A

woman who observed him later told a friend how she - hidden behind

a drapery - saw Kafka's eyes shine like beacons throughout the lecture.

Thus, the author of

The Trial

and

Metamorphosis

also set up an

appointment with Rudolf Steiner, who generally had a practice in the

places he travelled through - to perhaps gain some clues about how he

himself could feel better psychologically. Immediately upon meeting

Steiner, however, Kafka felt compelled to say that he did not believe a

Myths are appraised in light of their historical background; their subsequent use and

modification in light of new historical developments are examined in relation to their

origin. 10) Myth as religious communication. Myths may be regarded as information

transmitted from sender to receiver via different media. Closer analysis of this

communication process implies examining redundancy in the language of religion and

in non-verbal forms of expression, the definition of the basic elements of a message,

etc. 11) Myth as religious genre. Myths are considered principally as narratives: they

are seen in relation to other narrative genres and to non-epic genres that help

disseminate the myth's message. This genre analytical aspect of myth implies that

traditional forms condition the nature of the communication process. 12) Myth as

medium for structure. This category includes research methods often characterized as

structural but that deal in various ways with the language, content, and structure of

myths. The structure of myths can be analyzed from syntagmatic or paradigmatic

perspectives, for example. The concept of binary opposition is one of the most

popular watchwords in this respect.

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word of anthroposophy.

Soon, at the closer (!) personal meeting, the fascination thus faded, and

Kafka left the room and the encounter without having gained any clearer

understanding of himself and his anxiety.

Kafka preferred to seek - when it came to reality - firsthand experiences

and less theoretical contexts, in order to also be ABLE to be personally

enthused! For example, when Kafka travelled to Paris with his friends

(he was family-oriented and cherished friendships throughout his life,

and was always happy to help people for free according to their needs,

as a lawyer) to see the world city, he again astonished his friends: they

had decided to go to the Louvre. This did not entice Kafka. The entire

group was indeed culture-interested, just like Kafka, who read all the

newcomers in poetry in Prague and had opinions about them, but the

Louvre did not attract Kafka. So the comrades went to the Louvre, while

Franz did what he preferred: attending the horse races.

It also seems just as likely that Kafka, when he was at his regular café,

among friends at Café Arco in Prague's Old Town, became completely

enthusiastic when he first heard about psychoanalysis. Not until much

later would he - who was not particularly theoretical minded - read some

thin writings by Freud. But since Freud's thoughts were - even when

heard second-hand - so marked by the aura of the self-evident, and were

also so suggestive, inspiring, and accessible to the average person - it

seemed, and apolitical, so playful, Kafka fell in directly. Yes, in fact, it

was not only Kafka who became enthusiastic; No: Everybody acted like

children! All of Europe.

“Indeed, the matter is such that we all seemingly have the ability to live, because we

at some point have fled into lies, into blindness, into enthusiasm, into optimism, into

a conviction, into pessimism, or something else. But he /FK/ has never fled into any

protective sanctuary, not into any. He is completely unable to lie, just as he is unable

to get drunk. He is without every refuge, without a home. Thus, he is exposed to

everything that we others are protected against. He is like a naked person among the

dressed. It is not even the truth that he speaks, that which he is and lives. He is such a

determined being all alone, without all the accessories that could help him brave life

– in beauty or misery, whichever. And his asceticism is altogether unheroic – and

precisely thereby so much greater and higher. All ‘heroism’ is lies and cowardice. He

is not a man who constructs an asceticism as a means to achieve a certain goal; he is a

man who, through his terrible clarity, his purity, and his inability to compromise, is

forced into asceticism.” (Kafka’s last friend, playmate, and lover, the Hasidic Dora

Dymant from one of her letters to M. Brod).

FREUD and KAFKA

In reality, almost no one among ordinary citizens read Freud's books:

people simply went on the summaries and immediately began to

psychoanalyze each other, and interpret each other's dreams, with

particular regard to their relationships with father and mother. Freud's

books sold almost nothing. But they were talked about much more.

Just as with the Post Office, at the cinema, at Steiner's lecture, and the

Paris trip, it was the very astonishment and enthusiasm that was the

primary - and perhaps almost the only - result of the meeting between

psychoanalysis and Kafka.

And it seemed as though Kafka had an extraordinary ability to retain –

if not the initial enthusiasm – at least the memory of it. If that had not

been the case, Kafka's books would not have looked like they do!

How Kafka came to integrate parts of psychoanalytic ideas into his

stories is a complicated and enigmatic history. That is what I have tried

to delve into in my previous book: Kafka and the Kafkaesque. In this

new book, the subject is: What did the myth look like, that was quickly

woven around psychoanalysis's image of humanity in Europe? For it is

so in history that what presents itself as science, or another importance,

quickly gains a magical sheen, and what is presented as this magic is

soon seen as science. Often it transmogrifies (transforms) in literature.

This is what happened – which is my thesis - in the Kafkaesque. It would

likely then be that the myth, which would be woven around

psychoanalysis, would depend on the way in which the Freudian

doctrine, in MYTHICAL FORM ( in that the doctrine was so vague…)

was diffracted through the prism that constituted Kafka’s fantasy and

psychotechnical writing.

THE PROLIFIC MYTH

A common idea is that a myth is something one might analyze, and that

it is something not really real, but more fiction, albeit a fiction that has

some kind of more ”profound” meaning than stories in general. The

strangeness of this is seldom subject to analysis. What few people realize

is, that we all, individually, are parts of not just one, but parts of many

myths. Equally few realize that these myths, of which we are so scarcely

FREUD and KAFKA

aware, significantly determine our lives. As Claude Lévi-Strauss asserts

it is not the task of myth research to clarify how humans think, nor how

myths think, but how myth thinks in humans. Another task for myth

research is to determine how myths (very often also parallel to religion)

not only evolve but also originate.

To gain perspective on what a myth is and is not - which is not entirely

easy to determine - one can, while trying to determine this, also consider

what humanity would have instead, as a better or worse substitute, if

myths had never existed. Some people argue that myths are socially

necessary, being as they are ( according to Barthes ) “ideological

speech”

- and that the criterion of truth for a myth is its "effectiveness."

L.-S.,

Le Cru et la Cuit

, p. 20.

Mythologiques

. (1957)

WIKIPEDIA:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythologies_(book)

” Barthes addresses the question of "What is a myth, today?" with the analysis of

ideas such as: myth as a type of speech, and myth as a type of politics./…./ Barthes

justifies and explains his choices and analysis. He calls upon the concepts of

semiology developed by Ferdinand de Saussure, who described the connections

between an object (the signified) and its linguistic representation (such as a word, the

signifier) and how the two are connected.[Working with this structure Barthes

continues to show his idea of a myth as a further sign, with its roots in language, but

to which something has been added. So with a word (or other linguistic unit) the

meaning (apprehended content) and the sound come together to make a sign. To

make a myth, the sign itself is used as a signifier, and a new meaning is added, which

is the signified. But according to Barthes, this is not added arbitrarily.[6] Although

we are not necessarily aware of it, modern myths are created with a reason. As in the

example of the red wine, mythologies are formed to perpetuate an idea of society

that adheres to the current ideologies of the ruling class and its media.[7]Barthes

demonstrates this theory with the example of a front cover from Paris Match edition

no. 326, of July 1955,[8] showing a young black soldier in French uniform saluting.

The signifier, a saluting soldier, cannot offer us further factual information of the

young man's life. But it has been chosen by the magazine to symbolise more than the

young man; the picture, in combination with the signifieds of Frenchness,

militariness, and relative ethnic difference, gives us a message about France and its

citizens. The picture does not explicitly demonstrate 'that France is a great empire,

that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag,'

etc.,[9] but the combination of the signifier and signified perpetuates the myth of

imperial devotion, success and thus, a property of 'significance' for the picture. I am

at the barber’s, and copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On the cover, a young

Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a

FREUD and KAFKA

fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture. But whether naively or

not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her

sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under the flag, and that there

is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by

this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors ...[10]Myth and power.: Exploring the

concept of myth, Barthes seeks to grasp the relations between language and power.

He assumes that myth helps to naturalize particular worldviews.[11]

According to Barthes, myth is based on humans’ history, and myth cannot naturally

occur. There are always some communicative intentions in myth. Created by people,

myth can easily be changed or destroyed. Also, myth depends on the context where

it exists. By changing the context, one can change the effects of myth. At the same

time, myth itself participates in the creation of an ideology. According to Barthes,

myth doesn't seek to show or to hide the truth when creating an ideology, it seeks to

deviate from the reality. The major function of myth is to naturalize a concept, a

belief. Myth purifies signs and fills them with a new meaning which is relevant to the

communicative intentions of those who are creating the myth. In the new sign, there

are no contradictions that could raise any doubts regarding the myth. Myth is not

deep enough to have these contradictions; it simplifies the world by making people

believe that signs have inherent meaning. Myth “abolishes the complexity of human

acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences…” [12 -------- Why do people believe in

myth? The power of myth is in its impressive character. It seeks to surprise the

audience. This impression is far more powerful than any rational explanations which

can disprove the myth. So, myth works not because it hides its intentions, but

because the intentions of myth have been naturalized. Through the usage of myths,

one can naturalize “the Empire, [the] taste for Basque things, the Government.”[13]

Speaking of myth and power, Barthes asserts that myth is a depoliticized speech. He

uses the term ex-nomination ( or

exnomination

), by which he "means 'outside of

naming'. Barthes' point was that dominant groups or ideas in society become so

obvious or common sense that they don't have to draw attention to themselves by

giving themselves a name. They're just the 'normality', against which everything else

can be judged."[14] For example, he says, "[the bourgeoisie] makes its status undergo

a real ex-nominating operation: the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which

does not want to be named" (italics in original).[15] Myth removes our understanding

of concepts and beliefs as created by humans. Instead, myth presents them as

something natural and innocent. Drawing upon Karl Marx, Barthes states that even

the most natural objects include some aspect of politics. Depending on how strong

the political side of myth is, Barthes defines the strong and the weak myths ( des

mythes forts et des mythes faibles ).[16] Depoliticization of the strong myths

happens abruptly, as the strong myths are explicitly political. The weak myths are the

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The effectiveness of a myth—so the argument goes—would be connected

to its general, empirically validated, positive validation and inspirational

power. Roland Barthes , professor in semiology and a radical left

political agitator, in his book

Mythologies

(1957)argued that myths

constitute a system of communication that transforms historical, cultural

meanings into purported natural absolute truths. Myths are using

everyday objects, images, or phrases or concepts as for, filling them with

potent ideological concepts ( meaning ). Myths, according to Barthes,

upheave bourgeois values, make them seem NATURAL, by creating a

layer of meaning ( a "signification" ) that immediately simplifies complex

myths which have already lost their political character. However, this character can

be brought back by “the slightest thing”.[17]The model of semiosis suggested by

Barthes.Barthes also provides a list of rhetorical figures in bourgeois myths: The

inoculation. The government admits the harm brought by one of the institutes.

Focusing on one institute, myth hides the inconsistency of the system. Inoculation

consists in "admitting the accidental evil of a class-bound institution in order to

conceal its principal evil." A "small inoculation of acknowledged evil" protects against

"the risk of a generalized subversion."[18][19]

The privation of History. A history standing behind a myth gets removed. People

don't wonder where the myth comes from; they simply believe it.[20]

Identification. The ideology of the bourgeoisie seeks sameness and denies all

concepts that don't fit into its system. The bourgeoisie either ignores subjects that

differ from them, or they strive to make this subject the same as the bourgeoisie.[21]

Tautology. The myths of the bourgeoisie define the concepts through the same

concepts (Barthes provides an example of theatre, “Drama is drama”)[22]

Neither-Norism (le ninisme). Two concepts are defined by each other, and both of

the concepts are considered inconsistent.[23]

The quantification of quality. Myth measures reality by numbers, not by quality. This

way, myth simplifies reality.[24]

The statement of fact. Myth doesn't explain the reality. Myth asserts a certain picture

of the world without explanation just like a proverb does.[25]

The model of semiosis suggested by Barthes seeks to link signs with the social myths

or ideologies that they articulate.” [ This Wikipedia fragment – which does not deal

with Barthes text in its entirety, for example not with the philosophical implications

of neutralizing every myth - is for common reference and clarity ]

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realities and cover their rather vulgar origins. Myths are thus by Barthes

seen as sheer propaganda.

What is seldom discussed is Barthes concern ( in the final part of of

Mythologies

, ) , that myth criticism, if it is a fundamentalist one

, is

problematic, and almost impossible.

As everyone knows, fiction can be both a myth itself and a part of a

myth. Fiction can still examine, in a conscious or unconscious way, the

current overarching myth, as well as myths from earlier eras, or

alternatively, myths from humanity’s very early childhood, when we

separated ourselves from beings with, in some respects, lower levels of

consciousness. The myth is peculiar when looked at more closely; as

Lévi-Strauss—the man behind books such as

The Savage Mind

and

The

Jealous Potters—

points out, the myth and its parts are such that no part

of a myth is more important than another.

Indeed, one could say of a

myth—unlike historical writing—that no part is independently significant,

or that all parts are. Just as it is in a work of art. Through integrated

totality, art operates. But fiction is then—as mentioned—both a myth, as

a historical phenomenon, and a creator of myth in its diverse forms:

literature, visual arts, or film, etc., etc.

Myths are messages;

they are communication. Myths are not very often

created on demand.

A conspiratorially inclined person might believe

Outcries kind of: ”Ban all myths!” Barthes refers to the fundamentalist type of

myth critique as “monologuism”, and seems thus to indicate that the myth renders

a dialogical layer to the world. It does not occur to B. that myths can v be several

different types, so that one kind of myth can be excellent to humans, while other

kinds of myths can be quite detrimental.

As if through some marvel, many historians of ideas are also renowned

musicologists, like, for instance, Adorno, Lévi-Strauss, and Vladimir Jankélevitch, and

it is in fact very rare to meet with absolutely tone-deaf people, like S. Freud, involved

in the study of myth. Thus, one might hypothesize that the study of myth involves an

aesthetic element. But that might be ALL wrong too.

Barthes, p.193.

Cf. The Huntington myth of “the clash of civilisations”. Philosophical myths can be

regarded as ordered. They are often ordered by religious leaders, or by failed

Philosophy itself, and is often construed, rationalistic, as a material for religious

speculation, involving dubious concepts like “The Absolute”, “radical”, which has

absolutely no meaning at all. Cf. Spinoza, Lévinas, Kolakowski.

It is interesting that the Renaissance ( which in many ways is a myth ) is also a period

when two very strong cultural and philosophical movements coalesce, merging ancient

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that this is precisely what they do. That they are tailored to lead the herd

of sheep. No, myths mostly emerge from other created things, or other

signs, concepts or myths.. They often come as something imposed, as

if to seal holes that have opened up, or because something hangs loosely

and flaps in the wind. That this is the case does not mean that Power

cannot benefit from it, and that the powerless cannot suffer from the

effects of the myths sanctioned by power.

Myths are, unlike mystique,pure form.

Mystique has certain properties, but myth is a totally empty form.

Myths are not created from nothing, no, they are never primary, but

they always build on some event or idea that has matured for a while.

After a suitable time period, the myth thus – second hand predators as

they are - emerges. In this, it resembles mysticism, which, according to

a theory presented by G. Scholem, arises in relation to a religion only

after some time has passed, and perhaps when the religion in question

has lost a little of its initial charm. And it is like the Renaissance, which

did not arise fifty years after antiquity, but only in the 1300s-1400s, when

an aura had begun to form around what the ancient people had engaged

with, which attracted as one perhaps found one’s own time rather

gloomy

, and a bit too overshadowed by Christianity

. It would, of

course, not least in the interest of the powerless, be beneficial to try to

clarify what promotes the creation of holes and rifts, and what they are

primarily filled with in terms of mythic material, and what it means when

things hang loosely and flap in the wind, especially when myths are keen

to ensure that this does not happen. What regularities exist in this vast

ideological, trope, and narrative supramechanism of myth production?

What is it that causes, as soon as a sign, a concept, an ideology, a set of

beliefs, a conceptual phenomenon is born or made conscious, that a

myth forms in its vicinity, overshadowing it?

Are there, as Barthes and Baudelaire thought, objects that are

fundamentally suggestive,

so that they are almost doomed from their

conception to evolve into myths? If so, why?

Greek culture with a very modest form of Christianity. One can notice this in one of

my favourite books, The Courtier, c:a 1508.

In this Myth ressembles Music.

Scholem,

Den Judiska Mystiken

. (

Jewish Mysticism

Michael Levey,

Early Renaissance

Barthes, p.194.

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Were the works of Kafka and Freud such objects, -

“fundamentally suggestive”? If so, why? If they were, were they only

suggestive in a certain historical context? If so, which context? “Le

rapport de la crise et du discours définit l´œuvre.”

It is important to realise that when the myth is formed it regards its

object, which is a conception, a set of conceptions or a set of beliefs and

values, as PRIMA MATERIA, as something given, established, and

which in it self can not n be disputed. Hence myth, so to says, sets out

as a source interpreting the EVIDENT. Myth speaks directly to the

people, as myth almost always is very simple in its form, and positions

itself as the friendly interpreter, the underdog, in service of the broader

layers of the people.

That is why, because people also knows this, myth subsequently

has been seen equivalent to “lie”, to untruth. At the same time as the

myth is seen as something which is not true, it has yet an existence, and

since it has obliterated what it is a myth about, it still stands as a kind of

description of something real, which, even if people always realize that

it may not be true at all, still forms itself as some kind of fact in the actual

cultural universe.

Myth is, therefore, like the well-known face of the unknown, thriving as

a backdrop in our society and in the primitive parts of our minds.

We do not spend much time thinking of them, because we cannot. We

are locked out of understanding the myths because they are

determinants of our thinking.

Ib.p.199.

FREUD and KAFKA

PART ONE: MYTH AND REALITY

FREUD and KAFKA

PSYCHOANALYSIS

Historical background

“One day it was discovered that the pathological symptoms in certain

neurotic patients have a meaning. Upon this discovery was built the

psychoanalytic treatment method. During the treatment of these

patients, they, instead of showing symptoms, told their dreams. A

suspicion then arose that dreams also had meaning.” (Freud)

”Psychoanalysis has one catastrophically weakness: the

psychoanalysts themselves, whose products are a mixture between

Talmud and pornography.”

( Egon Friedell )

Kulturhistoria,

III,( History of Culture ) s.504. According to EF psychoanalysis is a

Jewish science, an odium generis humani ( hate towards the human race ) and “sets

out to deprive the world of its divine nature, and to make it uglier, according to

Friedell. Friedell, who was born a Jew, hated Nazism. When Nazism came to power

in Germany 1933, Friedell wrote in a newspaper:” They are from Anti-Christ. Every

trace of noblesse, faithfulness, education, reason is in the cruellest manner prosected

by a bunch of retarded maniacs.” When the SS eventually came to arrest Friedell, he

jumped from a window and died.

FREUD and KAFKA

”I cannot fathom that there can be any good tragedy without

character.”

( Lud. Castelvetro )

Sigmund

Shlomo Freud was born in 1856 in Bohemia, in the present-

day Czech Republic, not far from the place from which Franz Amshel

Kafka's father, Hermann Kafka, originated. Sigmund grew up in Vienna

in a large Jewish semi-secular middle-class family, in the dynamic,

cosmopolitan Vienna, and lived there his whole life, until, after Hitler's

takeover in Austria, he moved to London and died, still fleeing from

the SS, in 1939, just in this city.

Freud chose, after graduating with high marks as a doctor in his

hometown in 1881, the “psychological path,” an apt term, as it was still

scientifically legitimate to speak of the soul at the time. The choice was

a direct result of Freud a.) being unable to tolerate the sight of blood

and b.) being more interested in the humanities and authorship than

medicine. But what was Vienna, the birthplace of psychoanalysis, for a

city during these years?

It was a cauldron, boiling with ideas. Freud lived in the hectic bubble of

Vienna, the Habsburg double monarchy, around the year 1900. The

Habsburgs, a gigantic, multi-hundred-year power apparatus, in which

the family, until 1889, held power in Austria-Hungary and half of

Europe, often by marrying into various royal families. The Habsburgs'

motto had been: “

Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube”

= “Let others

wage war, the Habsburgs marry.” They had not only owned Central

Europe, but even held the imperial throne in Brazil, through Pedro I

and Pedro II. Pedro II was overthrown in a military coup. A side note

to this was his relative Maximilian I - Fernando Maximiliano José Maria

de Habsburgo-Lorena; born 1832, archduke of Austria, brother to

Franz Josef I of Austria, Maximilian, who was emperor of Mexico from

1864 until the Mexican Republic executed him in June 1867. Nearly all

the remaining Habsburg relatives of Franz Joseph returned to Vienna

after the transatlantic let-us-have-a-go-at-it adventure. The Habsburgs

had roots in the 1500s, when Charles V created the Catholic empire in

battle with Francis I and Henry XIII, which, at least for a brief period,

Orig.: ”Sigismund”, like the famous Polish and Swedish king.

FREUD and KAFKA

was so large that "the sun never set" upon it. It stretched from India to

Mexico. Little did all these nobles suspect that in just two decades, after

the Great War, their power position would be completely eradicated,

and the remaining members of the family would live in exile in the

Netherlands, etc., certainly financially secure, but stripped of political

power.

Kafka was named after Emperor Franz Josef II. The shopkeeper

Hermann Kafka – son of a kosher butcher – and himself with frostbite

on his hands from goat herding as a child - had little interest in Judaism

but primarily wanted to assimilate - and to succeed - into the Bohemian

society, where German-speaking Jews constituted a class sanctioned by

“Volkskaiser”

Franz Josef II, dominating the 80% Czech-speaking

population, who were disadvantaged in several ways compared to the

German-speaking.

In Prague, which was a significantly smaller city than Vienna

, and

where Franz Kafka lived, simultaneously with Freud, and significantly

less multicultural, and culturally overall, with its lower education level,

spread throughout the population, the Jewish contribution to the

economy was less massive. Vienna was considerably more turbulent,

definitely a big brother, and in Vienna, there was a boil of liberal politics,

press debates, and nearly stinking eroticism. Herzl also grew up here,

although he was born in Budapest and later lived and worked in Paris.

There was a sense that great changes were coming, and in an

atmosphere of staggering anti-Semitism, they entered the new century.

“The Jews, as Hannah Arendt has rightly observed, were the 'state-

Hermann Kafka's interest in Judaism was very likely zero.

In the villages in the countryside, Franz Josef had had a plaque depicting himself,

with his hand on the plow, put up on the outer wall of the town hall.

Franz, like Sigmund, was a parvenue, a social climber. However, Franz's father was

somewhat better off than Sigmund's, as he had a successful clothing store.

The founder of modern Zionism, which occurred amid the affair ( around the year

of 1900 ) with the officer falsely accused of espionage in France, Alfred Dreyfus, when

anti-Semitism was particularly severe in Paris, polarizing the entire city's population.

Many, including Zola, Proust and Mirbeau, were involved, have written about this.

Compare with Stephen Toulmin’s Wittgenstein's Vienna, S. Zweig's The World of

Yesterday, and others.

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people'

par excellence in Austria

. They did not constitute a

nationality, not even a so-called unhistoric nationality like the Slovaks

or Ukrainians. Their civic and economic existence depended not on

their participation in a national community, such as the German or the

Czech, but, on the contrary, on not acquiring such a status. Even if they

became assimilated completely to the culture of a given nationality, they

could not outgrow the status of 'converts' to that nationality. Neither

allegiance to the emperor nor allegiance to liberalism as a political

system posed such difficulties. The emperor and the liberal system

offered status to the Jews without demanding nationality; they became

the supra-national people of the multi-national state, the one folk which,

in effect, stepped into the shoes of the earlier aristocracy. Their fortunes

rose and fell with those of the liberal, cosmopolitan state. More

importantly for our concerns, the fortunes of the liberal creed itself

became entangled with the fate of the Jews. Thus, to the degree that the

nationalists tried to weaken the central power of the monarchy in their

interest, the Jews were re-attacked in the name of every nation.” ( Carl

Schorske, p.129.

Fin-de-siecle Vienna.

)

During Freud's time, Marxism and anarchism

also entered as strong

political forces in Western and Central Europe. Industrialization,

modernization, and urbanization escalated hand in hand. For state

apparatuses, both this urbanization, technological developments, and

social commitments increased the amount of bureaucracy and

institutions at an accelerating rate, something that contributed to a

Edw. Crankshaw,

The fall of the house of Habsburg

, s. 313.

This was also the case in Bohemia, thus in Prague.

Jewish students at the university could be harassed in anti-Semitic Vienna, by

teachers, and be beaten by other students on the street. (S. Gilman, p. 128.

The Case

of Sigmund Freud

In 1844, the Berliner Max Stirner's book on nihilism -

Der Einzige und sein

Eigentum

- caused a great up-roar. "Ich hab mein Sach auf Nichts gestellt," preached

the high-headed young man, who said he worked for a society where everyone relies

solely on themselves and refrains from all ideals. He became so sickly eventually, and

dragged himself forward, impoverished – probably wishing for some kind of social

safety net, one that he had always preached against.

Cf. Stephen Toulmin’s

Wittgenstein’s Vienna

, S. Zweig’s

The World of Yesterday,

among others.

Cf. P.M. Meyersson p. 167.

1866-1934

(1926)

(compulsive symbolisation)

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heightened alienation, and was observed by and frightened among

others sociologist Alfred Weber. Media and communications,

including radio, grew with enormous power. Modernity came in its

peculiar form. A belief in the future and scepticism, with a fear of the

new, surged back and forth. Modernity, perceived as a kind of ghostly

figure of the time, gained its own cultural shadow with enormous

amounts of cultural shades. Vienna was a “cauldron of ideas,” a city

teeming with strong-willed talents from all corners of Europe. Freud

resided right in the seemingly safe bourgeoisie, this bourgeoisie whose

non-Jewish part often expressed its anti-Semitism with a white carnation

conspicuously in the buttonhole as the “secret” sign, meaning in this

case: openly presented. This exposed position that Freud found himself

in would leave indelible marks on him.

It is also important to absorb the fact that both Nazism and

psychoanalysis had their roots in this thoroughly bourgeois

environment, that both these movements were born in circumstances

with plush-covered sofas and chairs, it was conceived on plush.

“National Socialism is neither a Philosophy nor an Ideology; it has

its roots in the petty bourgeoisie has conceived on Plush and is practised

inn the Gas ovens in Auschwitz and Teresienstadt. What was thought

out on Plush, was not thought out by chance//.”

The Jewish population in Vienna had increased rapidly in the last

decades before the turn of the century 1900, due to migration from

surrounding areas. Poor Jews came from Moravia and Galicia, etc., in

search of a better future in the capital. Between 1900 and 1910, the

Jewish population in Vienna doubled, from around 50,000 to 100,000

people. Many did well and climbed the social ladder quickly, and this,

not least, caused the already strong anti-Semitism to increase even

more.

This issue of Jewishness and the state hegemony holds significance.

Hünerfeldt,

In Sachen Heidegger

, s.96. “Der Nationalsozialismus ist weder eine

Philosophie noch eine Weltanschauung; er entstammt deutschen klein-bürgerlichen

Lebensbezug, auf Plüsh ersonnen und in den Gasöfen von Auschwitz und

Teresienstadt praktisiert. Was da freilich auf Plüsh ausgedacht war, kam nicht von

ungefähr// “

Cf. Historian Delumeau, p.356.

La Peur en Occident

FREUD and KAFKA

Likewise, that Freud was both a Jew and a doctor. Jewishness - and with

it, of course, the classically antisemitism that had existed in Europe since

the Middle Ages - was present, at home as a shadow, in society as a

painful reality. Freud's father, who was a relatively poor man but with

great integrity and sound judgment, had his hat maliciously knocked off

by the anti-Semite and demagogue, the mayor Karl Lueger, in Vienna,

was asked to leave the sidewalk and pick it up, because he was a Jew;

Jakob Freud, the calm, always disdainful of violence, did as “one” said:

picked up the knocked-off hat himself. This episode, the cowardice of

father Jakob Freud - as young Sigmund perceived it - is said to have

shaped him for life. The episode tells us also a lot about the situation of

the time in Vienna and the situation of Jews there.

It is also the case that S. Freud - with the death of Jakob Freud in 1896,

and the self-analysis that Sigmund decided to undertake - had an

opportunity for a kind of reckoning with and final, thorough reflection

on their relationship. This was something that, for example, Kafka

never had the opportunity for, as Hermann and wife Julie Kafka

survived their son Franz - however without ending up in concentration

camps, which all of Franz's three sisters, Valli, Elly, and Ottla, came to

do. The self-analysis proved decisive and important for Freud’s world

of ideas, not least regarding the great role that the father figure would

come to have in psychoanalysis.

In the then ideologically and demographically more calm Berlin (where

people engaged more in theatre and music than in debate, and where

Franz Kafka’s fiancée, with whom he was engaged twice, Felice Bauer,

lived - and also his publisher, Kurt Wolff) physicians and

psychotherapist-novelists etc., like Georg Groddeck

, who was himself

a physician's son, could come up with ideas that resembled Freud's, or

vice versa. Groddeck sent Freud some articles, supported him

throughout his life, and even borrowed him a term from his book:

Das

The father figure was a historically and sociologically determined figure, and the

entire construction upon which the Oedipus complex came to rest was historically

determined. As shown, for example, by the French-Egyptian psychoanalyst

Moustapha Safouan, in 2020, we live in the 21st century in a new situation - the Post-

Oedipal era - where the paternal figure has been more or less erased, and what

remains of the real father is the figure one sees occasionally when he undertakes his

trips to and from the sperm clinic. (

La civilisation post-œdipienne,

2018. )

1866-1934

FREUD and KAFKA

Es, Psychoanalytische Briefe an eine Freundin,

“das Es”, The Id, to

Freud's second topology. Groddeck wrote the article Der

Symbolisierungszwang,

in Imago, 1922, which included a stimulating

interpretation of the fairy tale of

Sleeping Beauty,

and the book

Der

Sinn der Krankheit

---------------------------

In 1901 - the year after Freud’s success with the book

The

Interpretation of Dreams

- Henri Bergson

announced that the

overarching task of the new century would be “to work in the spirit's

lower world” and “to explore the unconscious.”

Looking at the psychology, philosophy, and intellectual history of that

time, a mixed picture of a society with a thousand ideas emerges.

A theory of evolution, prior to Darwin’s, was built on the post-Kantian

idealism's foundation by a series of proto-Darwinists, such as Carus and

Oken.

Carus, he founder of comparative anatomy, who was also a painter and

philosopher, a friend of the fine painter, Professor Caspar David

Friedrich

in Dresden, - heavily affected by the early death of a beloved

brother, provided wild speculations as a prerequisite to ideas about a

plan, according to which life developed. Here, Lorenz Oken also

worked, the founder of the organological theory of evolution in

Germany. Everything, plants and animals, had according to Oken

originated in an organic "primordial slime." Pure speculation and

fantasy. In the history of science, there is a parallel to the “phlogiston

theory,” which existed before Scheele and Priestley discovered oxygen

in the 1770s. By Oken, one can thus see the basis for August

Strindberg’s note in the Occult Diary when he notes in an unusually

laconic manner for him, after long studying and comparing the cactus

and the cucumber: “Stuck."

An important note, as N. Frye points out, is that one cannot expect any

precision within romantic thinking. Vagueness was intrinsically

1926

Who immediately came to influence M. Proust in his masterpiece, the circular,

A la

Recherche

du Temps perdu

much like the influence of Freud upon Kafka.

C. D. Fr. was most known for his obsession with motives denotating longing for

eternity.

FREUD and KAFKA

connected with the mystical, dreamlike, and speculative approach.

J.W. von Goethe, the anti-Hegelian, wrote a

Metamorphose der

Pflanze

a book in comparative morphology.

Darwin’s groundbreaking – but highly controversial – work was

published in 1859 after a three-year delay.

-------------

K. F. Wolff's

Theoria generationis

- 1759 - was the basis for what is

called scientific psychology and had a view of the unconscious as the

foundation for conscious life. Such ideas were thus found everywhere

in that time, including in Henrik Steffens, a neutralized Dane, and Jena

circle man, such as the idea of “The Spirit in Nature” from Steffens'

compatriot H. C. Ørsted, as well as similar ideas from Karl Friedrich

Burdach, and among the most popular of all, the very popular G.H.

Schubert, whose

Ahnungen einer allgemeinen Geschichte des Lebens,

and

Geschichte der Seele,

which both dealt with unconscious

foundations for psychological disorders, and

Symbolik des Traums

became normative. It is difficult to understand the enchantment with

the hint that prevailed in Romanticism.

Compare with the title of Goethe's novel about affinities,

Elective affinities,

a novel

about an old man yearning for a young woman.

The slightness is here related to the SWAYING, which is yet another romantic

“genre”: Swaying. /ty. Schweben. n./ Romantic ideal. One can observe this time-bound

phenomenon in romantic literature and philosophy, understand its longing of the

Romantics to find an imaginary place, a peculiar place, where one can reflect on what

has been, sighing, in a monologue, while being chained like Prometheus to Caucasus.

At a comfortable distance from a writing place. This makes the thought airy and clear.

However, the form of the Romantic was not of infinity, rather that of the fragment, as

in Novalis... Airy floating, swaying fragments, to remain FREE, negatively free. As if

to hint at just infinity. Timeless. Just the swaying, das "Schweben," and the romantic

illusion of that timeless state, is actually mocked already in its own time, even during

the Romantic period (which had not yet received that name - it would come later with

the late Fr. Schiller) by both Bonaventura and E.T.A. Hoffmann (the man who was

encouraged by the Hitzig children to become a writer instead of a jurist. Chamisso

also knew these children.) in his

Confessions of Kater Murr

(The Talking Cat – the

cat in this book writes - he writes his manuscript between the lines of an old book as

a palimpsest - and he has - he mentions, the cat himself - he has four legs, and does

not float!!). But often, paradoxically, the word "swaying" recurs as an ideal in

Kierkegaard. "Swaying" can indeed be seen as an aesthetic ideal, but as an ethically

irresponsible attitude in the guise of negative freedom. In

Repetition

, S.K. describes

repetition as the true, as a kind of swaying, irony, and as an aesthetic, a life-aesthetic

ideal. It is also G.W. Schlegel's time. Repetition, the repetition, is similar to the Greek

FREUD and KAFKA

The psychology that Freud studied during his education was chiefly

influenced by two men, primarily the recently mentioned Gustav

Fechner (1801-87), originally a physicist, and J. F. Herbart (d.1841),

whose associative psychology dominated the teaching of the subject. In

his neurology, Freud would later come to apply Herbart's ideas about

associative chains of concepts.

Regarding contemporary philosophy - an area he ended up touching

upon - it can be added that Freud is said to have remarked late in life:

"I denied myself the study of Nietzsche, if only because it became

recollection, the mother of all knowledge - it is only that the repetition is a reversal, to

remember forwards... Kierkegaard embarks here on a special, aesthetically

emphasized philosophy of history, finely elaborated in the book

Aa ironic Story

(2003)

by Jens Holmgaard. Nietzsche also plays a significant role here, especially his early

dissertation from his Basel years, the years before he became the convalescent author

who, like Kafka and Kierkegaard, sought to maintain his health as long as possible

through constant walking. N. had fallen ill in connection with the Franco-Prussian War

of 1870. However, from the small, self-published dissertation On the Utility and Harm

of History for Life (1874) (which is part of

Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen

, the second

volume alongside a critique of David Strauss (1873), a third piece on Schopenhauer

as educator (1974), and the fourth, the infamous, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth

(1876)...) is quoted the fine temporally psychological dialectical masterful passage: “It

is a wonder: the moment, one moment here, the next moment gone, before it, an

emptiness, afterwards an emptiness, yet it returns as a ghost and disturbs the calm of

a later moment. It constantly frees a page from the book of time, it falls out, flies away

– and suddenly flutters back and rests in man’s lap.” (N. Saml V.

The Birth of Tragedy

and other critical studies edition, p. 102f.) A solitude like N.'s was colossal. And it was

as if it was intensified when he found that it generated so many thoughts about the

world and people, so that through this productivity it was reinforced and yielded even

more insights. Swaying? Between one side... and the other side, there is a constant

reflection that can be likened to a raised hand. Up to a level, the disinterested, or

rather the interested disinterest, where the view is also good... In Kierkegaard and

Kafka, we have two writers who were both raised with the romantic tradition, for the

romantic was indeed long-lived, and who both revolted against it. They perhaps did

not say farewell to it. - remember that the romantic was born in the bourgeoisie - and

S.K. like F.K. are born in the bourgeoisie, and they have, in a certain sense, the

bourgeoisie as the solid point behind. Kierkegaard: "I have everywhere no Meaning,

but only experiment with the Problem." (In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in

a section on infant baptism. S.K. is against bourgeois Christianity, against all those "a

la Christians," against infant baptism, yet finds himself in favour of it, as it makes it

even harder to become a Christian, for "it is indeed harder to become that which one

already is." S.K. S.V. IX. ( Regarding "like-swaying," see: Freud.)

FREUD and KAFKA

apparent to me that I would find insights there that were very similar to

those of psychoanalysis."

Nietzsche and his ideas would haunt Freud throughout his life, much

like something of an evil dream. It is important here to think of

Nietzsche as a creative skeptic, a doubter. Nietzsche's radicalism was

something Freud did not comprehend, just as he did not understand

nihilism, which characterized Hägerström in Sweden (the only

significant philosopher of our country) where scepticism towards the

state and law was at the centre, but whose interest in ontology was also

significant.

Freud was to a large extent, like the entire bourgeois society of the time,

a child of Romanticism.

All across Europe, the cultural life was under the influence of

Romanticism,

and the philosophical and ideophilosophical/historical

view that prevailed during his formative years was that of romantic

philosophy. Much of the popular Romanticism stems from the

extraordinarily fluid and precocious natural philosophical treatises of

Schelling from 1797-99. To attempt to understand a whole, a totality,

through the principle of the influence of natural forces on each other,

this was perhaps something Schelling was the first to embark on during

this era. Schelling had a teleological viewpoint. For Fichte, the world

was a result of a subjective I, the individual created their world.

Schelling: “Nature is becoming intelligence. It is the unconscious reason

that seeks to become an I.” The essence of nature signified a drive,

which had a goal in its consciousness!

For Schelling, in this high romantic philosophy, the essence of nature is

Drive and Force, and the physical reality arises as a product of these.

All drives and forces come, in turn, from a Primordial Drive, which has

been divided into opposites in order to be able to live and reach its goal.

Here it was not a matter of a collection of the mechanical movements

of atoms, but of a composite life of a Primordial Force.

The term "World Soul" was added within romantic philosophy – which,

thus, constitutes the basis for the implemented world. The Welt Geist -

The only ones who did not live under any cultural currents, and thus were not at all

affected by the journey of the World Spirit's towards itself, were, according to Hegel

in his

Phenomenology

, the peasants. They simply stood in a direct relationship (not

controlled by capital) to the earth, and that was that.

FREUD and KAFKA

World Soul is, for Fichte, "Das Ich", which wants to come to conscious

life, the Great Spirit, Der Riesengeist, which in its petrified state

struggles and pulls and tries to find the right shape and form, and

ultimately finds it in a dwarf, who "in language is called the human child,"

which suddenly stands - astonished - before itself. Here, Hegel is

foreshadowed.

It should be mentioned that the Romantics - in all their nebulosity -

came to influence many thinkers from S. Kierkegaard to Freud. H.

Jacobi put forward during this time the monist Baruch Spinoza as an

ideal and contrast to Kant. Spinoza had never seen any gap between the

inorganic and organic, but had a principle of universality, which Jacobi

enthusiastically presented in

Briefe über die Lehre Spinozas.

Spinoza

thereby stands in contrast to the mechanist G.W. Leibniz. Thus, Jacobi,

in the midst of a rain shower, could spinozisticcally declare: “I am

raining.” All in existence is one for the monist. It is difficult to argue

against monism: in some respects, of course, everything is a wholeness.

But Anne Conway “criticized Spinoza for confusing God, the creative

force, with the universe, the created. The divine essence must

necessarily differ from the created, Spinoza does not realize this, she

claims.”

The subjective idealist Fichte

- a disciple of Kant - declared that life is

only possible through struggle and in exchange of power, and the

individual was only possible through the hindrance, binding, and

restriction of opposing forces. All individual existence in nature,

Schelling argues, is a transient image, where the interplay of forces has

reached a temporary rest, only to begin acting once again. The essence

of nature consists of antagonistic ( dialectical

) opposing forces. The

foundation of all becoming is Dualism and Polarity. Becoming consists

of a synthesis. For Hegel, this became dialectics. Hegel claimed – in a

volcanic, dazzling, and somewhat incomprehensible presentation, in

Cf.: W. Windelband

Geschichte der Philosophie

, (1922), pp. 244-255). (Here also

compare the racist Johann Gottfr. Herder's

Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of

Mankind,

I-IV (1815), where the term "semiotics of culture" probably appears for the

first time in world literature.

The cardinal concept in the philosophy of Hegel.

FREUD and KAFKA

Phänomenologie des Geistes

- that the world is governed by an

objective spirit.

For Romanticism, in the late 1700s, the old Platonism/Neoplatonism

emerged, this current that had been reborn during the Renaissance in

Rome and Florence in the 15th century as a critique against papal

power, with scholars like Plethon and Pico della Mirandola, to name

the most powerful. Just on this Neoplatonism run its terms such as

“Urbild,” “Urscen,” “Urvater,” and so on. Friedrich Schleiermacher's

battle cry was “Origin is the goal!” Compare Swedish Romanticism and

the Swedish poet Erik Johan Stagnelius “urbild” in the poem

Amanda

and also Albert Nilsson's classic

Swedish Romanticism

and former

secretary H. Engdahl's

The Romantic Text

. Sweden was heavily

impacted by German Romantic literature until the 1960ies. The prefix

“ur-” is thus used to construct a philosophical prerequisite for the idea,

the concept, both for Schelling and for Freud. Romanticism had arisen,

to some extent, from the preface to one of Immanuel Kant's "Critiques,"

which would stand as beacons in intellectual history, and help both

humanism and science to more quickly reach the esteem they would

come to have. Kant struggled throughout his life against all kinds of

superstition, from religious mysticism and clairvoyance to philosophical

rationalism ( which advocates that one can ascertain the scientific truths

of reality

solely through theoretical reasoning, without consulting

empiricism

), to present a thinking built on scepticism, logic, and

empiricism, developing a more Aristotelian worldview, and thoughts

from the late antique Sextus Empiricus and others, and asserted that the

goal is not predetermined for humanity, but that the goal is a moral task

handled through a “moralizing of nature.”

During Romanticism, one can see how the boundaries between art and

science were practically erased, and that a mystical, religiously inspired

pure fantasy - against Kant's spirit - pretended to have scientific status.

e.g. “Die Kontraktion Gottes.” Confer Hegel's satirical preface to

Phänomenologie des Geistes

, where this relationship to fantasy is also

ridiculed.

Phenomenology

1807, whose tremendous complexity and originality stirred the

entire intellectual world in Central Europe, which, however, 95% did not understand

at all what the book was about.

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In the extensive literary magical idealism flourished ideas of knowledge

to reach “beyond”, through a kind of “inner life of the will,” sometimes

expressed in the most fantastic allegories, in a poetization of existence:

nature as a petrified magic wand or as an encyclopaedic index of the

soul; rumour is “a time's impact,” water is “a humid flame.”

Schelling survived - like on the side of - the shock entailed in being

“outstripped” by Hegel in honour and reputation. Romanticism had

been a side movement to the French Revolution, and consisted, among

other things, in a rebellion against religion and the church's oppression

( … compare Volkmann-Schluck

Geschichte

…, Novalis's magical idealism ( which of

course differs from “magical realism” ) in

The German Romanticism

(1967).) Jean

Jacques Rousseau – who is a transitional figure between enlightenment and

romanticism – undoubtedly occupies a special position among the authors belonging

to the period that precedes the era. Rousseau (admired by Kant as he was) realized,

which was a new idea then, that man was very much a product of his own civilization.

Rousseau's – often incredibly prescient and broad – sometimes meandering

speculation was in its dual character both astute and vague. It was transgressive but did

not exclude vast amounts of scepticism and self-critique in its breadth. Kant devoted

an entire book in 1766 to questioning the Swede Swedenborg, who at that time was

making waves in Central Europe with his spiritual writings. Kant titled this “spirit-seer.”

"Dreams of a Spirit-Seer." In the humorous book, Kant could, as Kuno Fisher writes,

hit two birds with one stone: metaphysics and Swedenborg. Swedenborg's books are

both charming and ridiculous at the same time. That angels speak with accents, well,

everybody knows that. The Napoleon complex. Compare with Kierkegaard's

Repetition

, as well as with Thomas Mann in

Occult Experiences

(1924): "A

masterpiece of metaphysical thought is 'Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.' "The

mysterious thought that Schopenhauer develops therein is, in brief, that just as in the

dream our own will, without being aware of it, appears as an unrelenting-objective fate,

everything arises from us, and everyone is the secret theatre director of his dreams, -

so also in reality, this great dream that a single being, the will itself, dreams with us all,

our destinies would like to be the product of our innermost, our will, and thus we

would, what seems to happen to us, actually organize it." (p. 220). One should also

consider that Schopenhauer's "Will" was a response (well, somewhat) to Imm. Kant's

contradictory concept within transcendental philosophy, "Das Ding an sich" (one of

countless objections to this somewhat intellectually risky concept) and to the

historically incredibly important hint of “self-consciousness,” or “self-knowledge,” in

the preface to the first edition of the

Critique of Pure Reason

(1781). Imm. Kant

writes: "The indifference and appearance of time is a challenge to reason, the most

burdensome of all its tasks, namely the one to regain self-consciousness and establish

a court to assure itself against all baseless self-exaltation, not through authority but in

accordance with its eternal and unchanging laws, to be able to dismiss it (the

appearance), and this (court) is none other than that in pure reason itself." / (p. 13./A

XI) ( My translation ). (compare with Hegel’s infamous foreword to the

Phenomenology of Spirit

, 1807.)

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of body, mind, and social freedom. Kant struck from the professor's

chair in Königsberg down on superstition and mysticism wherever he

found it. Almost all significant Romantics were secularized priest's sons.

Schelling and Hegel had had priests as fathers, who in varying degrees

oppressed them. God was - in Romanticism - replaced with nature or

Spirit. When Napoleon rode into Jena on a stallion, Hegel stood on his

balcony there and cheerfully shouted: “Look, there comes the World

Spirit on horseback!” High romantic speculation merged here with a

kind of revolutionary pathos. Napoleon took the crown himself and

crowned himself in the cathedral in Reims, unconcerned that his name

would be crowned as a concept in psychoanalysis.

Hegel was never, as the myth suggests, “the state philosopher in

Prussia.” He was, one discovered, even if in many ways conservative,

not entirely trustworthy, yet he aligned himself adequately, and claimed

that the meaning of life was to get a job. Jurisprudentially, Hegel is

conservative, but his works became - through their philosophy of

consciousness and through diffraction - revolutionary. Schelling - with

his ethereal ideas - despised by Kierkegaard, who actually attended the

old Schelling's lectures in Berlin – was, however, completely harmless

to the regime. However, Schelling's ideas ( immediately inspiring to the

imagination ) stretched throughout Romanticism within quite a broad

cultural field - only to cease thereafter, apart from - mythically - in

psychoanalysis, while Hegel’s influence became more far-reaching,

purely philosophically.

Freud writes in 1917 ( cf. Thomas Mann ) the following about

Schopenhauer:

“Our precursor above all others is the great thinker Schopenhauer,

whose unconscious “Will” is equivalent to the mental instincts in

psychoanalysis. It was the same thinker who in unforgettable

expressiveness meant to ponder the importance, so long suppressed, of

its own sexual demands.”

And:

“The mysterious thought that Schopenhauer develops here is, in

short, that just as in dreams our will, without knowing it, appears as an

inexorable-objective fate, everything in this comes from ourselves, and

each one is the secret theatre director of their dreams - so too in reality,

this great dream, as a single essence, the will itself dreams with us all,

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our fate can be a product of our innermost, our will, and we thus arrange

that which seems to happen to us.”

Oswald Spengler does not belong to the ranks of the sceptics but of

visionaries: Spengler predicts the decline, not only in his Magnum Opus

Der Untergang des Abendlandes, I-II,

but also in the sequel

Mensch

und Technik,

while Nietzsche has an attitude - schooled in ancient

philosophy and philology - to constantly question, in order to ... almost

as by bringing oneself over a Wittgensteinian fence - to move forward.

However, it is not a total downfall that concerns Spengler, which the

rumour might lead one to believe: the book deals with the disintegration

of a culture. Moreover, Spengler clearly states in his book that this is

not meant as science but is intended as a medium for the reader to seek

a truth through the book. Spengler.

Nietzsche would - after stirring up Europe with his writings - die as a

national treasure at home with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche,

who had returned from the colony Germania in Paraguay - in the very

year Freud's

"The Interpretation of Dreams"

was published. Nietzsche -

born in the same year as Strindberg - had a broad authorship, which can

perhaps be divided into two categories: a societal and philosophical

analytical ( e.g., "Beyond Good and Evil" ) and a more poetic-prophetic

( e.g., "Zarathustra," "Will to Power" ), marked by Nietzsche's severe

mental illness. The sense in the time of the absence of God noted by

Nietzsche was underscored by the historian H. Heine as well as by the

literary oracle G. Brandes. "The conclusion was drawn" by Nietzsche,

which would be repeated starting in the 1930s by existentialists like

Sartre: "When around the 1880s some French scholars attempted to

create a non-religious morality, they said roughly this: God is an

expensive and unnecessary hypothesis; therefore, we get rid of it, but

for there to be morality, a society, a civilized world, it is nevertheless

necessary that values are respected and regarded as given a priori: it

must be a duty a priori to be honest, not to lie, not to hit one's wife, to

bring children into the world."

Many intellectual centres were split, and ideas transformed and were

cast in a new light - many new dark elements emerged from its darkness.

Around the year 1900, there were countless images where modernity

sought to "describe itself." Interestingly, figures like Nietzsche, Spengler,

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and Kierkegaard wrote their great works without discussing the

fundamental ideas in them with anyone. Freud was largely alone in his

writings as well. This contradicts the "scientific dialogue faith" that,

among others, Popper presents. It is, astonishingly enough, entirely

possible for humanity to be monological and think for itself without

dialogue. "He who year after year, day and night sat alone with his soul

in confidential conversations /…./. Does one not write books to hide

what one conceals within oneself? – /…./; there lies something

completely arbitrary in this, that he did not look back, did not look

around, that he here did not dig deeper but laid aside the spade - it

raises a certain distrust. Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy.

Every opinion is an ambush. Every word a mask."

What is revealed here in Nietzsche is - indeed - a suspicion of immense

hidden depths. ( These depths do not necessarily have to be filled to

the brim. The suspicion concerns everything, both presence and

absence. It is - perhaps needless to point out - much that haunts here,

including the

Unconscious

. It is an enticing distrust. )

PSYCHIATRY

Psychiatry has never become a very exact science, but it was utterly

diffuse during its early years, which played out during the 19

tth

century.

Methods to handle psychopathological states ranged from witchcraft to

bloody excavations in the brain.

Hypnosis first appeared in a more "scientific" form in France with A.

Mesmer and mesmerism. He discovered that in certain cases,

suggestion alone was enough to alleviate symptoms, and even to cure

certain psychosomatic diseases. In the early 1880s, several publications

on hypnosis were written – under Charcot/Bernheim began to use it –

and hysteria was seen as proof of just the activity of the unconscious.

Dessoir wrote a work in 1890 with the thrilling title

The Double Self,

where he described an upper and a lower consciousness, in connection

with a topology already established by the famous Fechner. Charcot

exhibited patients with dissociative identity disorder – double

personality – and polypsychism – that is, multiple personalities. Often

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these demonstrations were pure patriarchally defined theatrical

performances, where the patients, mostly women, "hysterics," pretended

to faint or suggested themselves to faint and so on, to please their

doctors to whom they had become emotionally connected, becoming

"partners in crime." Bernheim would also inspire the Russian Pavlov's

conditioning theory. All of this brought the young, enormously

receptive, and career-driven Sigmund Freud into close contact.

Hypnosis, often inspired by "animal magnetism" – a social pastime, fell

out of fashion roughly between 1860-80 but reemerged in France with

Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault (d. 1904) and Bernheim in what is

referred to as the "old Nancy school." In the town of this name – more

like a little sleeping village compared to Vienna – Hippolythe Bernheim

treated thousands of patients with various symptoms, psychosomatic

diseases, etc., using suggestion/suggestion hypnosis. Freud visited the

Nancy clinic and learned. That hypnosis would later take up Freud's

thoughts, both consciously and unconsciously, throughout his life, he of

course did not foresee. A faction at the school included doctors Coué

and Baudouin. They introduced, among other things, self-suggestion –

a precursor to CBT – as a method to alleviate symptoms such as pain

in various disease conditions and also introduced the concept of "the

unconscious" into their theory.

Rewarded with a larger scholarship, Freud almost immediately began to

work together with Josef Breuer in Paris, where he came into contact

with hysteria and other mental states, where one of the primary

treatment methods was hypnosis. Hypnosis is – one could say – the

foundation of psychoanalysis and would implicitly continue to be a

substantial part of it. Already during this time in Paris, Freud – who had

long dreamed of becoming a writer in one way or another and never felt

comfortable in the role of a doctor, which seemed to be a perfect alias

for him – began to write case descriptions, sometimes together with

Breuer. These descriptions are very well-written.

Freud had, therefore, in his youth held both literary and philosophical

ambitions. In the contemporary Viennese press, which was lively and

rich, there was also a half-mocking question of whether Freud would

now embark on an author career or continue to be a doctor. Freud

discovered, as is well known, that the dream was “the royal road” to the

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unconscious, to “the other stage,” “der andere Schauplatz.” Actually,

the word “royal road” here is somewhat ambiguous, as royal roads are

indeed rarely found: there is no royal road to mathematics, the old

Diogenes argued in conversation with the "world conqueror" Alexander;

– analogously to this, it is questionable whether it is that easy to access

the unconscious, as just walking the path of dreams…

Breuer’s and Freud’s pioneering cases have in common that they are

examples of how women are cured of hysteria, and they all end happily

and well – after a sharp unravelling with curative insight with the happy

analyst's sigh: "…and I never saw her again." One would have to search

for a more effective plot. These Breuer’s and Freud’s pioneering cases

–

Anna O., and Emmy von N., Miss Lucy R., Miss Elisabeth von R.,

and The Girl with the Umbrella

– have in common that they are

examples of young women who are cured of hysteria, conversion

hysteria, and they all end happily and well – after unravelling and

curative insight with the analyst's sigh: "and I never saw her again."

What they all in these medical circles thought they were discovering was

the hysterical conversion, and it was undoubtedly significant, as one

could connect, for example, a repressed memory to the hysterical

symptom, and when one – with a detective-like cunning – succeeded in

bringing the memory out into explicitness, the symptom disappeared,

and hysteria itself. The hysterical symptom – a product of conversion –

is according to Freud always built on forgetfulness, amnesia, or most

often: a series of amnesias. In forgetfulness – in the memory in the

unconscious – the decisive traumatic event evidently continues to live,

for a life of its own, refuses to die, but comes forth – haunting day and

night – in the various hysterical symptoms.

The foundation of psychoanalytic treatment thus rests partly on old

practices, on suggestion. One suggests the patient to tell, interpret, and

release their fear in a somewhat induced half-drowsiness and to free

themselves, by realizing after the "self-confession" that they have indeed

survived their trauma, etc. Freud learned this from Charcot. Additional

elements would be introduced, such as dream interpretation, etc., as

well as a formalization – yes several of them – in a theory.

It is important to emphasize that much psychiatry and psychology in

France around the mid-19th century – in its frantic attempts to free itself

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from the morbidly religion-laden psychiatry that had previously ravaged

– had not been particularly imaginative or therapeutic, but seemed

almost obligatory. Thus, clinic chief Boismont published in 1845 a large

standard work on hallucinations, "Hallucinations," with a tremendous

amount of striking examples and varieties, but where no forward-

looking perspectives are ever hinted at. The mere thought that any

hallucination could stand for anything

other

than what the hallucination

explicitly denotes seems never to have occurred to Boismont. Nor

could he come up with the idea that the hallucination itself could be

something healing. But very few have thought so, on the other hand.

What must be inserted into this background sketch – which

concentrates most on the treatment of dreams, the unconscious, and

the drive element within philosophy – is the abstract phenomenon that

came to be so significant in Freud's psychoanalysis: the symbolic

element and myth.

One cannot interpret the dream unless one has a code key! Freud

believed he found a certain code key in ancient myths ( or at least a key

to the code key ).

-------------------------------------

DADAISM, SURREALISM in Freud's time

Dadaism, an aesthetic fashion, which swept through France, Austria and

Switzerland around the year of 1900 - which both Kafka, in his wholly

independent and unpretentious manner, questioned, thrived at this

time, but also the more significant surrealism in this context, whose

banner-bearer in France, the French doctor, poet, etc. André Breton,

would publish several manifestos, journals, and more. He, along with

George Bataille, both an economist and a womanizer, sought various

ways to revolutionarily create a better human, free from materialism

through the "unconscious" for nearly half a century in France. Bataille

also became known for erotic tales like the story about O. In Europe,

socialism, anarchism, and all kinds of spiritualist and technology-

friendly movements were on the agenda. One sensed a golden future.

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All except a world war and a societal upheaval.

LITERARY FICTION DURING FREUD´S EARLY YEARS

Apart from his admiration of ancient myths and Greek Drama, Freud

also during his entire life monitored carefully every cultural aspect of

modern life – except music, in which he had no interest at all.

The romantic authors in France, along with the symbolists and writers

on the way to realism, and the realistic authors - all influenced Freud.

Most of what I have sketched here as a background to Freud is material

- of various natures - that also directly or indirectly impacted Franz

Kafka and his authorship, as well as his shaping of modernity, even

without the path through Freud. Kafka and Freud thus exist here in the

form of a reduplication of a myth.

Yes, there were countless influences in Central Europe for those who

further wanted to cement the existence of an unconscious, or develop

their image of it. The versatile Hugo von Hofmannsthal's "

The Tale of

the 672nd Night

" from 1895 was influenced by Andrians "The Garden

of Knowledge," published the same year. Paul Hervieu in France wrote

the remarkable novel

"L’inconnu"

in 1887, where the author, who is a

doctor, questions the concept of madness. Long before that, in 1864,

the Goncourt brothers wrote the great novel

"Germaine Lacerteux

about a case of "hysteria."

As we shall see, his interest in figurative art was hampered by his inability to look at

figurative art from any other aspect than the strict descriptive aspect.

It is indeed remarkable how many of the very historical theorists of ideas

corresponded regarding their relationship to empirical data. A person like

Giambattista Vico, who wrote the extensive exposé of Europe's culture, had never left

Naples; Kant, who lectured in Königsberg about London’s architecture, had never left

Königsberg; and Hegel, who expounded on Antiquity and the Orient, had never set

foot there, only visited places in Prussia, Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands.

Oswald Spengler had not gone outside the German-speaking area either, and seldom

left Munich. – So, idea historians really are more precisely historians of ideas, but as

if ideas arose in a conceptual room.

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GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Both Kafka and Freud – who both of them were good at enjoying the

French language - were keen readers of the works of Gustave Flaubert.

Flaubert eventually published, after years of revisions, his grand novel

"Madame Bovary" in 1856, three years before Charles Darwin finally

published

"On the Origin of Species":

"She wanted this name, Bovary,

which was hers, to become famous, to be visible in libraries, shouted in

newspapers, and recognized by all of France.” ( Emma Bovary, in

"Madame Bovary" )

We think of Gustave Flaubert - the author of perhaps the world's most

famous case study of a hysterical woman - "Madame Bovary" - who

theorized greatly about writing and found writing to be a way of life. We

also think of Flaubert: “A book is for me a special way to live,” “All I

did was to speak the truth, however terrible, cruel and naked it may be.”

And all the advice he gave to the young secretary Guy de Maupassant,

who reciprocated it with gratitude, partly by dedicating the novel "A Life"

to Flaubert.

Flaubert could allow himself to linger, as it was so melancholically said

before, - with a delicate emphasis on the abundance of time that

characterized bourgeois existence - over manuscripts for over ten years.

But he kept his basic idea intact and his models unaltered: Emma

Bovary is (it is assumed) modelled after the interior of the beautiful

Louise Colet, a girl from Lyon.

L. Colet was, before meeting Flaubert, the mistress of Victor Cousin –

a professor of Literature - and thus moved in society. Colet had literary

ambitions, wrote poetry and prose, published compromising letters,

which she stole from her friends, in pursuit of money and attention, etc.

She published in 1857 the indiscreet novel "Lui," the "truth" about the

relationship between the authors George Sand and Alfred de Musset.

The relationship between Louise Colet and Flaubert was very

passionate and lasted over two long periods of several years each.

Flaubert was probably amazed by her, in every respect, and despite his

eventual rejection of her physical person, she seems to have left deep

marks. Not least could her willpower and enterprise scarcely be

forgotten. Colet also desired a marriage, but Flaubert was more like he

was in a marital relationship with his writing. They exchanged hundreds

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of letters between Rouen and Paris about their mutual love and

literature. Several of Flaubert's aphorisms about life and poetry are

taken from the letters to her. In the last letter to Louise, Flaubert simply

writes: "When I intend to marry? Never, I hope. A man who does not

have five thousand a year and who marries, I consider to be a wretch, a

rogue who ought to be whipped."

The style in this letter is found in many of his other letters, which often

boil over with.... exuberant rage. If he knew, or believed, that she would

survive such letters, it only testifies to a relationship where the sincerity

of the quarrels seemed to be a bonding element, until the recently

referenced letter, that is. The two women, Elisa S. and Louise C., recur

in the many female portraits in the novels. It seems as if the oscillation

between the images of them contributes to a peculiar resignation

regarding life and love. For something of immobility - staticness - and

boredom forms the overall impression of Flaubert's world.

In "

L'éducation sentimentale

," even violent battle scenes cannot make

the reader feel that something truly real is taking place.

Throughout his life, Gustave Flaubert was filled with contempt: "The

earth is Satan's kingdom." - he is one of the "great despisers" - they are

common, these misanthropists - within the literary sphere. He despises

bourgeois morality, especially considering the Catholic Church's grip on

individuals and lifestyle, but he remained a bourgeois, half-invalidated

by his neuroses, for his entire life. Flaubert ties together the classical era,

philosophy, and Catholicism with a... spirit of upheaval. He did not

despise a theatrical man like the classicist Pierre Boileau, who,

according to Flaubert, knew exactly what he was doing, and Flaubert

studied, among other things, his father's twenty-three volumes of

Voltaire and loads of history.

From all this, along with his childhood experiences, his experiences of

society as a whole, and his self-experienced frailty, he made his choices

as an author. For Flaubert was determined, like his father, and realistic,

- but like him (who refrained from a greater career in Paris than in

Rouen) - never capable at all of compromising in the least. In the precise

description and above all:

l'impassibilité

, - the unaffectedness - which

became his hallmark (Flaubert in the tabloid caricature as a dissector of

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souls…..), he connected with the naturalists, with an Émile Zola - also a

workaholic… Zola, who was characterized by Joris Karl Huysmans as:

“His heroes lacked soul /…/.”; “But Zola was Zola, that is to say a

reasonably massive artist, gifted with powerful lungs and huge fists.”

With a fanatical

l'art pour l'art

-attitude, an attitude that had previously

been connected either with mysticism or frivolity, Flaubert introduced

the exact expression and the ideal of precise description as a building

That Flaubert was surrealism's most evident predecessor is best noted in his

tentation de Saint Antoine

, a hallucinatorily marked, fantastic story – (with its

grotesquely poetic imagery, its view of history – a flowing one – and its

philosophical/religious reflections! --- One also thinks here of the conflict be-tween

desire and longing: desire is the longing to possess (hold) for a long duration, to own,

while longing (fr. la jouissance = enjoyment, a cardinal virtue) relates invariably to a

"constantly disappearing Now", a Now that has the sorrowful property of not returning

persistently; the enjoyment (in a being, Fr. être) constantly vanishes. Desire is outward

directed towards an Object (which belongs to society), while longing is inward directed

towards oneself, in enjoyment inevitably, as it seems to us, forgetting the desired

Object. The illusion supported by desire drives us. In a race with no other goal than

the next. Desire seems to drive us to continually create new illusions. Is this

simultaneity, this kind of repetition, this contrasting simultaneity, a form of

surrealism..... a form of humour, poetry.... – one gladly thinks here of Rimbaud's wide-

reaching poetry and the line of poetry that originates from him. This form of poetry

is structured such that it is forward-moving in its movement, both in a dreamy way and

in a waking wait for the last stanza's flowering...., relief-giving or a means to

transcendence, liberation and katharsis? Or all of it – simultaneously? Answers here

can probably only be... subjective. In Flaubert’s, the simultaneity in the referred

section with the two lovers is of course nothing but a burlesque.

; ( Swedish “The Command of the Heart.”).

Ch. Bernheimer has in an essay,

Psychopoetics. Flaubert and Kafka's Wedding

Preparations in the Countryside,

treated the phenomenon, its possible genesis and the

parallelism we (think we) can discover here. Bernheimer concentrates, much like

Sartre did in

his L’Idiot de la famille

regarding Flaubert, on the family situation and

the hatred towards the father. At the same time, Bernheimer argues that both authors,

due to being treated coldly by their mothers, appropriated language, not as a means

of communication (!) or as a means to express feelings, but as a means of power,

perhaps the foremost for each of them. Did they take on the "symbolic order" and

elevate it to the imaginary, to speak in Lacanian terms? This then implies a gloomy

regression. They had thus, according to Bernheimer, acquired a distorted perception

of language. The desire to write purely, like "la poesi pure", to write a book that does

not deal with anything – cf. above – that desire is early in Flaubert. Such a desire in

Flaubert, or for ex-ample Kafka, would then, according to this theory, be founded in

a language pathology.

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block of his style and fused this with irony into a whole. Every sentence,

every syllable, was closely scrutinized, with the sensitivity of a musician

by Flaubert himself, before he released it to the public. Flaubert sought

the "phrase." “Style, it is life! It is the very blood of thought!”, Flaubert

believed: “I struggle and agonize; my novel has difficulty getting started.

What a heavy oar the pen can be. I become so desperate that I must

laugh at my own expense.”; “You talk about your disappointments; you

should see mine! Sometimes I can't believe that my arms do not fall

down after my body from exhaustion, that my head does not start

boiling. I live a bitter life, deprived of all outer joy, and the only thing

that keeps me going is a kind of persistent rage, under which I

sometimes weep out of helplessness but which is nevertheless lasting. I

love my work, intensely and perversely, like an ascetic loves the hair

shirt that lashes his chest. Sometimes, when I do not notice that I am

empty inside, when I cannot express what I want to say, after having

scrawled long pages full - when I discover that I have not succeeded in

creating a single phrase, then I throw myself on the divan and lie there,

listlessly sunk in a swamp of boredom.”

Gustave Flaubert continued to live almost his entire life - interspersed

with periods in Paris - in the vicinity of Rouen with his mother. His

father died in 1844, when Gustave immediately stopped pretending to

study law. The family estate was called Croisset. From there, Flaubert

carried on a rich correspondence with a considerable number of the

time's literary celebrities, including his mistress Louise. In the letters,

Flaubert is natural and spontaneous, often ostentatiously rude and

vulgar, suffering as he did from a terrible temper, while in his novels

and short stories he is an extremely meticulous and restrained stylist.

Flaubert: “... the choice of an adjective can make me sweat blood!”. The

works he wrote are relatively few. In addition to

"L'Éducation

sentimentale"

and

"Madame Bovary

," the novel "

Salammbô

" (1862), a

historical narrative about ancient Carthage ( he travelled - with his sister

Caroline - to Tunis to study the environment on site. Famous is his

statement, which once greatly delighted the surrealist André Breton, a

writer of the new era - and other more experimental authors: "I tried,"

writes Flaubert, "with this novel to convey the impression of yellow.” )

"La tentation de Sainte Antoine

" ( 1874 ) is a moral/religious-

philosophical speculation dressed in a surrealist guise, long before its

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time, and is, like "Salammbô," historical but more imaginative in all

respects. It received both criticism and praise from contemporary

readers and was scrutinized and debated intensely by both historians

and literary critics.

A hint of Flaubert's greatness might be guessed by readers of that time

already in 1842 when he, at twenty-one years of age, wrote the small

novella "November." All in all, it resulted in a dozen works. Not more.

Flaubert died in 1880 while he was working on a satirical piece about

human stupidity, "

Bouvard et Pécuchet,"

intended as a kind of literary

testament. In many ways, Flaubert is like the master of the small format,

an author who tamed a spontaneity that existed in his temperament, as

"November

." Towards the end of his life, he wrote three excellent

novellas - highly appreciated: "A Simple Heart," "The Legend of Julian

the Hospitality," and "

Herodias

," - a masterpiece - some seem written

even more spontaneously than the earlier texts. When Flaubert's letters

were published in 1884, they were eagerly read and admired. They

probably provide a pretty good picture of Flaubert, of the relationship

with Colet as well as of his obsession with literature, and also a good

picture of the intellectual climate of the time.

There is a bewitchment with words, an almost abnormal fixation on

words and the production of words, in both Flaubert and Kafka, as well

as with Freud.

Thus, one might ask whether one can even explain, for example, what

is characteristic of Flaubert. Flaubert's style. Can one describe and

explain a style at all? We must, or it is desirable, to somehow seek to

handle subjectivity helpfully - in conjunction with intersubjectivity - and

we often do this in the reception of art just with the term "style." As for

the perception of style and the construction of the concept of style,

including the romantic style concept, it is a totally comprehensible

investment, a projection: just as Horkheimer/Adorno wrote: “To

mirror the thing as it is, the subject must give the thing more back than

it has received from it.” (Perhaps this also applies to the theory of

diffraction.)

Thus, the concept of style is formulated as part of an ordering function

within a interaction between viewer, object, and other viewers. Many

have throughout history experienced it as an aesthetic curse to engage

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in concepts of style, and perhaps especially the hated -isms.

The concept of style moves freely alive within the sphere of

intersubjectivity and is a communicative tool, a dynamic sociocultural

binding concept, organizing everything - except possibly myths. His style

is not fluid, but meticulous. Burlesque, yet at the same time tender.

Laughing, yet depressive. Perhaps it is this very span that engages. Here

exists a despair, but if one looks closely, this despair is not greater than

what can be traced in existence itself.

"Madame Bovary

", Flaubert plays out the contrasts when Emma and

Léon visit Paris, at Notre Dame. This is Emma's first and only visit...

She never returns to Paris again. The visit bores the young couple to

their breaking point. This church visit, which also, through a small

leathery, shrill guide with brochures, is a journey through the history of

the cathedral, ends abruptly with Léon's decision to summon a horse-

drawn carriage via a street boy.

The couple then rides through Paris - Emma's so longed-for Paris, the

"true" home of the upper class (and beauty and happiness) - streets as

they fly along, (the driver has even squeezed his hat between his legs...),

with drawn curtains, and in the carriage their love culminates.

This reduplication - simultaneity is extraordinary: - one loves and rides

- or rather, the fascination that Kafka (and probably more) feel over this

simultaneity, (on the one side the wild ride in a horse-drawn covered

carriage, and on the other - the overtly suggested intercourse in the

carriage “/…/ a hired carriage with drawn curtains, that kept appearing,

now here, now there, walled up like a grave and rocking like a ship in a

sea tide - accompanied by Léon's shout to the driver to go on: “But then

drive on!”). Why extraordinary then?

What is it with these double exposures… what do they mean, and what

kind of problematic do they now represent the perfect (?) solution to?

Where do they derive from - what do they foreshadow?

They appear to be irony, and if so: what kind of irony? Here continues

a tradition of the grotesque, although perhaps not from the Roman

Petronius, but certainly from Rabelais, a tradition that moves through

those locked - from both the inside and outside of the works of Sade,

through the Dadaists, and

King Ubu's

literary father, Alfred Jarry,

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Guillaume Apollinaire, Baudelaire, all the way to Bataille and Genet.

Here appears a more or less explicit revolutionary and/or anarchistic

trend. The "low," which is also closely akin to "the natural," held a

peculiar anarchistic allure for Flaubert. The emergence of sexuality,

where it previously lay deep beneath the public culture, is a

phenomenon, a visibility, in modernism, and reflects also the equality

aspirations that are made possible in modernity - with the liberation

from religion that follows in the wake of the industrial and political

revolutions.

The breadth of environmental descriptions in

"Madame Bovary"

and

the richness of realistic detail are as rich as, for example, in Balzac's

"Father Goriot" or in Strindberg's "Hemsöborna" or "Red Room," or in

Melville's "Moby Dick" - but the difference is, as it were, that one does

not "become aroused by reality" in Flaubert. It is with a true pleasure

that one reads about the realities of Paris, Stockholm, Kymmendö, and

Nantucket in Balzac, Strindberg, and Melville respectively. Zola,

however, creates differently and does not invoke the same magic as the

others. He is not, just as little as Flaubert, a "natural writer," but more

like those who work their way to mastery. Few are the natural authors.

-------------------------------------------

But we can - to further try to understand the time - also remember many

other of the French symbolist modern authors such as Théophile

Gautier (d. 1872), the man who articulated the password for an entire

faction, for those who called themselves “the Parnassians,” namely:

“L'art pour l'art!”; "Only form means anything: no ideas are needed."

Gautier, who moreover idolized his slender teenage daughter, who was

“just intellect,” “pure brain” who wrote incessantly, and whose work, a

novel - a “Salammbô free from weight” according to Gautier - was

published in Liberté. Gautier, with his "life's collection of poems"

Emaux et cameos

- which was built up successively throughout Gautier's

life, acted as a chronicler towards the end of his life, writing about this

group, and declared that within it, it had been fashionable to be pale,

haggard, green in the face, and – if possible – “a bit ghostly.” Gautier

was originally a painter and mingled in the circle of the

lycanthrope

(wolf-man) Pétrus Borel, who belonged to the "existential romantics."

Borel ecstatically proclaimed: "Love, learning, poetry! Therein we

Cf. Jean Delumeau.

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wanted to drown our fiery souls, in ecstasy, as in a sea of ambrosia.

Therein I wanted, borne by a wondrous strength, to create a happiness,

unadulterated and pure. To be a greater artist than God!"

This collection of people, the bohemians, is thoroughly described, for

example, by H. Murger in his three books. E.T.A. Hoffmann had in

the novella "

Don Juan"

written: “May the dream, which you have

chosen to be both the terror of humanity and its gentle guide...”

This collection of people, the bohemians, is extensively described, for

example, by H. Murger in his three books. E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote in

his novella

Don Juan

: "May the dream, which you have chosen both as

the terror of mankind and as its friendly guide – may it lead my soul to

the Elysian fields while the body sleeps its leaden sleep!" (p. 31). Gerard

de Nerval, Théophile Gautier’s schoolmate, who translated E.T.A.

Hoffman into French, like H. Murger, had a strong passion for dreams:

"The dream – and another life in which the world of spirits opens up to

us,” the mystical correspondence between the world and the dream. De

Nerval perceived everything immediately as double, in

correspondences: a romantic semi-scientific idea, thus: A flower, a kiss

– they are both real and symbolic.

And we had de Lisle, Heredia, Verlaine, Mallarmé – this Mallarmé,

who emphasized the difference between the essence of the new poetry

and the dream, especially concerning Gautier – Baudelaire and the

volcanic Rimbaud, a circle that, in literature and life, moved around the

borders of madness and suicide. Rimbaud, whose incomprehensibly

beautiful works can be seen as a prophecy or as a hallucination, is

centered around the understanding that only a few people have contact

with "the unknown," "l'inconnu." In the novella Aurelia, de Nerval

describes his despair in life. He mentions a place, Rue de la Vielle-

Lanterne, near Châtelet, where he would be found dead one morning

in January 1855. What de Nerval died from is unknown. The

coincidence should not be overlooked.

These authors became, in France, a somewhat non-identical

counterpart to the German Romantics who "hovered in" romantic irony,

which we mentioned above. Across the channel in England, during the

One of Kierkegaard´s favourite stories.

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pre-romantic period, the lawyer and writer Thomas de Quincey,

alongside the stylistically skilled Coleridge, also a substance user but in

significantly worse shape, long survived with his opium pipe: “Dreams

are the one great tube through which man communicates with the

shadowy.”

; “The dreaming organ, in connection with the heart, the

eye, and the ear, forms the magnificent apparatus that leads the infinite

to the chambers of the brain, and casts dark reflections from the

underlying eternities of all life on the mirrors of the mystical camera

obscura, which is the sleeping human mind.”

De Quincey also took a great interest in horror stories. Cf. M. Shelley,

sister of the poet P.B. Shelley, who wrote the horror classic about

Frankenstein.

Coleridge’s dream poetry in verse about Kublai Khan and the Xanadu

is immortal. C. was also well acquainted with the German Romantic

movement, and had himself studied in Prussia.

Horror is neither a dialectical nor a philosophical concept - which

anxiety can be seen as. But it is a psychological one. Hysteria, though,

is both dialectical and psychological.

ZOLA - A ROLE MODEL

“/…/ Zola, who reasons better than he describes.” ( Henry James.)

Some contend that Zola drowned in detail, that is: in the naturalistic

method, but that he - by mistake - in psychoconstitutional fury,

abandoned his method and nonetheless succeeded in painting an

impressionistically accurate portrait of his time.

Émile Zola – the exceptionally productive and socially engaged – not

least in the protracted Dreyfus Affair, which would painfully lead the

Thomas de Quincey,

Confessions of an Opium-Eater.

Th. De Q.:

Suspira de Profundis. Deep sighs.

Cf. Coleridges

Biografía Literaria

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19th century into the 20th – occupied a unique position.

He was greatly

admired by Freud. Zola's realism was strict, yet it extended into areas

where psychopathology was present. Often Zola is excessively clear in

these contexts, and one gets a feeling of a kind of parallelism between

the presented action in the work and the underlying thought, analysis,

message. I’m thinking of

Thérèse Raquin

. In the novel

Doctor Pascal,

the theory of heredity is featured with the ingenious doctor who sought

to cure tuberculosis with ground sheep brain, and wondered whether

madness and stupidity could possibly be cured with… the same

injections. A whole suite of novels – including

Nana

and

Doctor Pascal

maps out the "hereditary dispositions" of the Rougon-Macquart family.

Monsieur le Doctor Pascal himself in

Doctor Pascal

prioritizes – as a

doctor – research over curing his patients, just as Freud would do. He

also places research, which is a study with his own family as material,

above living. He considers himself a "newcomer" (Pascal's own term),

like one in the family, who has avoided inheriting any traits from his

ancestors, like a person whom evolution has “skipped over.” Freud read

Zola intensively – Freud – as we mentioned already - read a lot in

general and was always up-to-date with the latest literature, just as he also

followed an astounding amount of research in various humanistic and

scientific fields. Freud also gave a lecture, which no longer exists, about

Zola's book

Fecondité

in Vienna in 1902.

One can say about Zola – childhood friend in southern France of the

sensitive, deeply original, expressionist painter Paul Cézanne – that his

realism is visibly cold, exact, and objective, while containing an implicit

sentimentality – and is strongly tendentious. It does not seem that

Freud, unlike, for example, M. Harden, realized that Émile Zola's

greatness lay in the description of the masses, and in the dynamic forces

behind (!) the people, but rather in the preoccupation with the

description and analysis of the individual. Thus, one can trace a

sociologist in Zola, before the term existed, a forerunner to Émile

Durkheim, who instigated the scientific discipline Sociology with a book

on … suicide. However, Zola's figures seem – unlike, for example,

Balzac’s – to be caricatures of ideas about people, so to speak pre-

censored to fit the given idea of the individual.

Cf. F. Brown, Zola – a life. (1995)

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HALLUCINATORY EROTIC

Erotic writing has along history in Central Europe as well as in Italy.

Extremely overlooked – possibly because he was politically

inconvenient – is the writer and botanist Octave Mirbeau (1848 – 1917),

whose absinthe-scented book about a chambermaid (

Le Journal d’une

femme de chambre

), published the same year as Freud's

The

Interpretation of Dreams

, that is, 1900) has become an erotic classic. It

was read by Kafka. This book is entirely concentrated around a shoe

fetishist. Another remarkable book by Mirbeau is

Torture Garden

which inspired Kafka to the furious protest piece, the novella

In the

Penal Colony.

This was the only book that the publisher in Berlin, Kurt

Wolff, wanted to censor.

Mirbeau has a powerful style, and an enormous presence in his works.

Unfortunately, his frantic anger against society and especially the church

(of which he was a victim, due to a priest’s sexual abuse of him as a

young man) seems to have affected his style, which always feels

impatient. If he could have adopted the calm printing style that August

Strindberg and Flaubert both learned, despite both being choleric, he

would have been seen – despite his rabble-rousing – as an equal to

Balzac.

One of Mirbeau's many genuinely fantastic books is also the one in

which his license plate number has become the title. The book is about

a car trip to Belgium. More and more books by the incredible Mirbeau

are being published, as we speak. Pornographic literature, in which

Mirbeau was occasionally included, was extremely popular among the

educated classes in France, Germany, and Austria. Freud’s wife Martha

is said to have claimed that she was convinced that what her husband

occupied himself with all day in the apartment on Berggasse was

indeed… pornography. This says a lot about the spirit of the time in

Central Europe in the years before and after World War I.

-----------------------------------------

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SCHNITZLER

Arthur Schnitzler, the well-established Viennese doctor, not only

surprised Freud and the other literate Viennese and Prague residents

with his many plays for the theatre, novels, and short stories, but also

with his occasionally prominent psychological surrealism. He stands,

alongside the much more modern Musil and Kafka, out as the most

important author in German-language literature at this time, around

1910, even though he does not have a greater stylistic finesse – unlike

the two others mentioned. Schnitzler: "All my short stories are

diagnoses." Schnitzler's oeuvre contains numerous short stories, such as

Traumnovelle

( filmed successfully as

Eyes Wide Shut

by Kubrick ).

Freud, in 1922 ( from doctor to doctor ) to Schnitzler: "I believe I have

avoided you out of a sort of fear of meeting a double. Not that I easily

identify with others, or that I forget the difference in talent that separates

me from you, but whenever I am deeply absorbed in your beautiful

creations, I always find – beneath the poetic surface – the assumptions,

interests, and conclusions that I recognize as my own… and all this

touches me with a peculiar sense of closeness. I have reshaped what you

know through intuition, or rather: through careful self-observation, all

that I have discovered through tireless work with other people."

In a letter to his 1913 fiancée Felice Bauer – after Kafka completed

the masterful novellas

The Judgement

and

The Metamorphosis

–

Kafka irritably wrote about Schnitzler, who was appreciated by Felice

Bauer. Felice read a lot, was generally eager for knowledge, and often

went to the theatre in her Berlin: “For I do not like Schnitzler and have

hardly any respect for him at all,” wrote Kafka. ( When Felice once

expressed an opinion about Immanuel Kant, the philosopher, Kafka

replied: “I know nothing at all about Kant.” Several of Kafka’s

girlfriends – Hedwig W. and Milena J. – had an education that far

exceeded Franz's. Others, however, like Julie V. and Dora D., had

almost no education beyond elementary school.

KRAUS

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With Karl Kraus, who was greatly appreciated by Franz Kafka, Freud

had early contact. Freud would, however, be criticized in

Die Fackel

. At

the same time, one cannot avoid the impression from reading various

letters between them that Kraus and Freud respected each other. Karl

Kraus, who founded his newspaper

Die Fackel

in 1899 in Vienna, and

travelled around Europe to lecture, said: "Prussia is generous with

muzzles." but meant Kraus: "Austria is the isolation cell in which one is

allowed to scream loudly."

Kraus spoke before enthusiasts in the student association “Die Halle.”

The great scoffer would later polemically and creatively neologize

Oswald Spengler as “der Untergangster.” Spengler’s vision of decline is,

to be sure, of the blurry kind. Spengler claimed that cultural history was

“physiognomy,” and that a culture was an organism. Whether Kafka

personally listened to Kraus’ lecture in Prague is uncertain, but it is

highly probable. Another Jewish intellectual who left Judaism, as Kraus

had done, was the Viennese Ludwig Wittgenstein

, later part of the

Wittgenstein, L. (born in Vienna, dead in Cambridge ). Austrian philosopher,

mathematician, aphoristican and mystic. W. was born a millionaire. W.'s mother was

a concert pianist. Most known for his breakthrough work,

Tractatus Logico-

Philosophicus

, (1921) where W. presents a picture theory of language.). He changed

his opinion after his debut work, Tractatus where he - influenced by Frege - asserted

that the meaningful proposition is a picture of reality. ( Picture theory.) Later became

an investigator of "language games," and asserted that language had an infinite structure,

which he dedicated the rest of his life to aphoristically commenting on, something that

led B. Russell - who had previously admired and helped W. - to accuse W. of

"intellectual laziness." , in

Philosophische Untersuchungen,

W. abandoned this theory

for another "language game theory," a theory of language that is much more complex

and situation-dependent. Also notably recognized are posthumous writings, published

On Certainty,

where W. almost claims to know less than what is logically possible.

Philosophische Grammatik,

with notes in the philosophy of mathematics (which are

untenable) and logic.

Zetteln.

W. had a significant impact through the creation of truth

value tables, which accelerated computer technology. W. did like Juan de la Cruz.

When Wittgenstein says that what can be shown cannot be said, multiple perspectives

open up. However, it seems to me there is something mystical about the early

Wittgenstein's propositions under the "4-series" in Tractatus (regarding: The thought

as the meaningful proposition, more specifically the proposition: 4.022 "The

proposition shows its meaning." and the sub-proposition 4.1212 "What can be shown

cannot be said." because one cannot show anything unless one has first made it clear

to the addressee that one intends to show something - even if chimpanzees and parrots

immediately "understand" that what I do can be imitated ( the same way), and thus act

as if they assumed I was "showing" them how to do it - I assume they assume that I

show how to do it…. It is not likely that they understand that I am showing! Showing

FREUD and KAFKA

Vienna logical positivist circle, an ontologist, and modern language

philosopher. Kraus was the latter's favourite author, apart from Fr.

Lichtenberg, and LW always had

Die Fackel

forwarded to him

wherever he was. Kraus later became a strong opponent of modern

Zionism, where, for example, Martin Buber, one of the foremost

representatives of modern dialog philosophy, was an intense advocate.

( Buber would later in life come to criticize Herzl, Weizmann, and Ben-

Gurion, and belonged to the cultural Zionists who worked for a two-

state solution to some extent. )

Kraus' influence was broad: as testified by both Freud and, for example,

the Viennese, the blunt Arnold Schönberg, who later moved to

California and became friends with the fantastic George Gershwin. The

drastic Kraus is practically untranslatable, partly due to the linguistic

virtuosity and the subversive ambiguities. For the learned Robert Musil,

Kraus was unequivocally a peer of Freud in societal influence within

Franz Joseph II's empire. Kraus was a tireless scourge of corruption and

abuse of power, and of new "doctrines" such as psychoanalysis:

"Psychoanalysis is the disease itself that it wants to cure." He reflected

the time, and the words of the time, through a multi-layered satire. After

the end of the war, Kraus continued with his newspaper but also

seems to be a half form of communication or: a communicative form that requires

some explanation, a clarification or "hint" so to speak, as a sign. Showing thus requires

for example the proposition: "I am showing you now that ...", so that the addressee

does not misunderstand and take the showing as something else, for example, as a

mere action (which he then hardly understands the purpose of). (cf. Lacan's

misunderstanding of W. in math).

A classic quote from Tractatus: "Wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man

schweigen." ( What of one cannot speak, there of one must be silent.) In his

posthumous papers (see for example Special Remarks), we can learn, among other

things, about many things, that Lichtenberg was a genius, and that Kraus had talent,

and about W.'s musical preferences. That Schubert was irreligious and melancholic

and that Mahler should not have composed, and that Brahms was knowledgeable. W.

is also partially involved in thoughts about a semiotics of music ( cf. for example Philip

Tagg and his theories about the significance of the phrase in music, inspired by Ch. S.

Peirce's semantics). W. lived a hectic life in Cambridge - England - and watched

western movies in the evenings. He mentions in his papers that bad American movies

are more inspiring than the less bad English ones. He generally believes that one can

learn a lot from silly cultural creations.

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travelled around the Habsburg Empire on lecture tours that became

personal shows, almost like a kind of stand-up comedy. He later wrote

comedic and satirical librettos to Offenbach's music and toured with a

performance, where he alone, through music, with a piano, his song,

and his extraordinary witty texts "entertained" the establishment he

deeply despised.

GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITY

In the background myth of psychoanalysis, and as a presupposition,

there also existed in European bourgeois society – which is the

environment this concerns regarding Freud’s cultural background – a

static knowledge of rudiments in ancient Greek and Roman culture,

which every bourgeois child had long received within the European

school system. Latin and Greek had been obligatory in the Christian

schools in Europe for a long time, and sometimes even Hebrew.

There was a very peculiar ideal of education, a very strong one since the

Renaissance, in which a nearly cement-like static knowledge of certain

norms, artistic expressions, and historical events was passed down,

which was supposed to guarantee a kind of promising civilization. Thus,

in the bourgeoisie, there was a general familiarity with Greek and

Roman history, myth, and art, and parts of this were integrated into the

language and architecture in all parts of Europe.

The authoritative and conservative character of this knowledge had

been founded precisely during the aforementioned Renaissance,

between the 14th century and the mid-16th century, until, towards the

mid-16th century, when the concept of education was even more of a

static phenomenon than it became in the 19th century, for example. For

the Renaissance nobles in Italy, it was even considered entirely

grotesque to seek to educate oneself, or expand one's knowledge in

adulthood. Education was something one acquired once, as a child and

young person, to then use, like the art of eating, walking, and talking.

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A towering intellectual such as Leon Battista Alberti, architect,

grammarian, and inventor of central perspective in painting, was able to

mention without any notion of physical exercise that he had not opened

a single book since turning thirty. In the learned conversations

presented in the book

The Courtier

, by Baldassare Castiglione (1529),

which displays a conversation held over several days in an Italian castle

in 1509, it seems the educated participants, who have chosen to talk

about which qualities a courtier – that is, the prince's advisor – should

posess, seem to be fully in agreement that they themselves all possess

the education and knowledge needed to solve all of the problems of the

world. Perhaps this is not unique, but for the Renaissance court, it was

obligatory.

Kafka's friend, the Zionist, and skilful writer Max Brod, would later –

which says much about the influence from Vienna – characterize

himself and Kafka as Prague-Austrians. It is important to point out that

one lived in a time primarily dominated by the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois

life entails hypocrisy. Living in a culture characterized by the internal

tension between two moralities made its artistic and cultural expressions

– including philosophy – special, and its appearance to be marked by

an inner unease. The feeling that the tension had to express itself in

something disastrous was a sentiment that lurked beneath the surface.

Over this surface reigned the apparent calm, created by a balance

maintained by class distinctions, and the repression of workers, a

conflict between fathers and sons, a Central European field, where

power was an alliance between capital and the old noble aristocracy.

The underclass lived in misery. In certain areas of Eastern and Southern

Europe, slavery had not been abolished. During this childhood of

industrialism, the labour movements and strikes were newly invented

means for the working class to assert themselves. Various political

ideologies, such as anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, and socialism

manifested themselves in the formation of internationals and trade

unions. Sociology in France explicitly sought to find the causes of the

societal and political developments. Philosophy would in some cases

intertwine with sociology, just as historical philosophers had done

before, like the two schematics Hegel and Giambattista Vico, and would

continue to do so, albeit without the use of the term "sociology."

Now, Kafka belonged to the bourgeois layer during this in many ways

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unique and rapidly transforming time. He came as an author – just like

Freud and Weber – to be part of what is broadly referred to as

"Modernism," – the society that crystallized after WWI. What is

revealed in the philosophy and literature of the late 19th century is a

suspicion that humanity can create itself as well as an awareness of the

immense, mostly hidden depths of the human soul. As now with Freud,

it seems more accessible.

The old time in Central Europe, with its concentration on the family

unit, and a Christian religion, focused on promising a happy afterlife,

was gone by the time Freud appeared on the literary scene. The sense

of divine absence was emphasized by the perpetually ill yet immensely

productive German Heinrich Heine living in Paris. The "conclusion"

was drawn partly by Nietzsche, and later, partly following him, by the

existentialists of modernity: Jean-Paul Sartre, 1964, also of Jewish

descent but completely unburdened by Jewish tradition: "As the 1880s

approached, some French scholars attempted to create a non-religious

morality, they said approximately thus: God is an expensive and

unnecessary hypothesis, therefore we dispose of it, but in order for

there to be a morality, a society, a civilized world, it is still necessary to

show that values are respected and regarded as given a priori: it must be

a duty a priori to be honest, not to lie, not to beat one's wife, to bring

children into the world, etc. With a little effort, we will then be able to

show that these values, despite everything, exist inscribed in an

understandable heaven, even if God otherwise does not exist. This, in

other words, means – and I believe this is characteristic of the attitude

of all so-called radicalism in France – that nothing needs to change

because God does not exist. We will rediscover precisely the same

norms regarding honesty, progress, humanism, etc., and God has

merely become an outdated hypothesis that quietly dies."

Psychoanalysis was just waiting – in the midst of a time where religion

had rapidly gained only a negligible role in people’s lives – to be

invented, it seemed.

In earlier epochs of more civilized prosperity within European culture,

when one could afford the luxury of attempting to feel mentally free,

questioning all sorts of myths, within the higher classes, we find, for

example, the Renaissance courts in Italy, where the nuncio, the papal

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diplomat, the aforementioned Castiglione in

The Courtier

, shows how

these affluent people, scattered across the countless capitals of the

Italian peninsula, dealt with their sense of unfreedom with a mixture of

philosophical scepticism and a sense of style, manner, and cultural

finesse. Castiglione became a close friend of Charles V of Habsburg at

his Spanish court. Charles was an educated man who enjoyed debating

with Luther and who could speak an incredible number of languages,

including German, which he said he mostly used when he "talked to his

horses." Charles V spent his last days in the Jerónimos monastery in

Extremadura, after entrusting his Habsburg lands to younger relatives.

During the lifetimes of Castiglione and Charles V, the world grew larger,

largely through explorers at sea, partly financed by Charles (who in

Spain was better known as Carlos I).

Myths about El Dorado circulated in the courtyards of Spain. At the

same time the princesses played sonatas by Scarlatti on their

instruments.

Tizian: Castiglione.

The art of oil painting was invented during the Renaissance, both in

Italy and in the Netherlands, and while Count Castiglione was on his

many journeu ys, in Italy, in Spain and to London, his wife and kids

communicated with the husband and father through a portrait, painted

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on linen, ( now very famous ) by Rafael, a portrait, which was mounted

on the mantelpiece.

Rafael: Castiglione.

The art of portrait painting grew to be a communicative tool during this

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time, and in Sweden, Erik XIV sent his portrait, painted in linseed oil,

to London in search of a queen.

With growing knowledge of oil chemistry, superb masterpieces of

portrait painting, like the Tizian portrait of Charles V, the myth about

the supreme ruler, and the myths about power and the state slowly

evolved into new dimensions.

With communication, myths both grow more visible and more

invisible.

Most people in the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance, of course,

never saw any portraits other than the immobile one of the Virgin Mary

on the wall in their local church, painted in egg tempera.

Among the many functions the oil portrait possessed was its portability.

It could also last, and it could be sold and bought for a lot of money.

But oil portraits were not very expensive in the 16th century. In fact, the

reason that Rafael and others painted such an enormous number of

paintings was that they could barely survive on their art. Da Vinci – just

like much later Vermeer

- painted just a few, because he was not

dependent on the income from his figurative art.

Oil painting would later, during the 17

, 18th, and 19th centuries, be

the medium through which Greek and Roman myths were depicted

with staggering speed and quality.

If you were a painter during this era, you most likely had learned to

paint ancient Greek heroes and lofty temples, set on islands in the

Aegean Sea.

During the 1880s in Sweden, there was a clash – before the modernist

breakthrough - between painters of the old school, like Julius Kronberg,

and painters of the new school, like Richard Berg, over the fixation on

motifs from ancient Greek and Roman times. Those fights were bitter,

and many artists during this time went insane, and/or killed themselves.

All in all Vermeer did not produce more than around 60 paintings during his

entire life.

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J. Kronberg:

Diana

( the Roman version of Artemis )

Not only Myth – here in the skin and clothes of the heroes from the

conjoint empyré of the glorious times of Greek and Roman antiquity -

was used as a domain whose motives were on display, idealized and

mystified. By evolving the technique of oil painting artists like

Rembrandt, an dlater more Peter Paul Rubens and his collegues in the

Netherlands, France and Italy could, by using layered lin seed, or hemp

oil, or nut oil, or daisy oil paint in their art create a sombre mystical,

kind of glowing light, that seemed to originate in the paintings

themselves, ( during daytime ) and radiating from them, thus enhancing

the message, that there not only in the motives were some hidden truths,

and eternal values, but that these truths, and those values, by the fact

that they were displayed, could bring life to not only the paintings, but

also to the world in which they now, through the almost heavenly skills

of the ARTISTS, brought ancient timnes back to the future.

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Charles V, painted by Tizian, - Charles , who later resigned and spent

his last years in a monastry.

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FAIRY TALE & SYMBOL

What must be emphasized in this background sketch, which focuses on

the treatment of fantasy, unconsciousness, and instinct elements within

philosophy, is the element that became so significant in Freud's

psychoanalysis: the symbolic element. The symbols and rites of folklore

(sometimes connected with additional layers of symbols and notions,

thoughts about protection and fate), as well as transformation myths and

fairy tales about transformations, symbols in everyday life and culture,

etc., were important to the romantics and to Freud. This element has

always been present in human culture and regarded as natural. Often,

it has seemed so natural (and naive) that people have not cared about

it.

The activity of the historians, like the Brothers Grimm and Fr. Schlegel,

became significant for Freud, but also the Jewish tradition, which was

rich in fables - and jokes and sayings with meaning-bearing elements that

one - if one were like Freud - could see overflow into something else,

mean something more than one first thought, and which was useful in

the symbol-creating process that Freud - and Groddeck - discovered was

an important means in the semiotic intermediation process of the

human psyche. Many simple images and simple symbols, which one

had not given much thought to, became visible in a different way

through Freud.

Thus, Freud found in dreams repression, transformation (and

distortion) and a symbol-creation that was the genius of the inner human

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psyche and saw a possibility to check how this distribution of

information and this protective function were interconnected. Science

had never before realized the existence of and understood the

purposefulness of the type of defence mechanism that Freud would

come to discover and dissect: a human could not possibly take in all the

information from their senses, process everything that happened to

them, but it would also be an unusually foolish waste of information if

evolution had determined that humans should forever discard the

information they could not currently tolerate. It was like throwing away

a piece of history - that part that did not fit right now.

---------------------------------------

It is indeed so that we, as a kind of defense mechanism here too, when

faced with facts call for myth, and when we are given myth call for facts.

“Our actions are like rhymes, where each fills in the verses according

to pleasure.”

( Fr. de la Rochefoucauld,

Maxims

)

If Freud was critical of philosophers or uninterested in them, he was

much more interested in those he judged to be connoisseurs of

humanity, like Sophocles and Shakespeare. And several other great

writers and dramatists. Freud read fluently in English, French, Spanish,

Italian, Latin, and Greek.

However, his interest in Shakespeare spiralled into an engagement with

Looney's thesis that Shakespeare was not the author of the works

attributed to him but a certain Edward de Vere, an English Earl

contemporary with Shakespeare. This does not indicate anything

remarkable about Freud, in contrast to Swedenborg's interest in the

"longitude problem" - it's more a surplus of psychic energy. It is nearly

irrelevant "who" wrote Shakespeare's works. It was obviously someone,

and whether we call this Someone Shakespeare or not, it no longer

matters. Just as long as it was one and the same person who wrote

everything attributed to Shakespeare.

Additionally notable about Freud is that in his interest in literature, he

treated fictional characters like Lady Macbeth and Hamlet as real

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beings, for whose actions there existed an absolutely knowable motive

for their actions and behaviour, and that in the case of these individuals,

the task was to solve the puzzle of their psychic drives and inhibitions,

as if it were to treat a real analysand. Freud boasted of having solved a

problem in Hamlet that Goethe could not: namely, why Hamlet

hesitated to kill his stepfather.

Something absurd. An "inability" to separate fiction from reality here.

Freud was thus as engaged with tragic heroes like Hamlet as with Moses,

as he was with the Wolfman and other clients.

“Moses is not a leader. He is a judge,” Kafka remarked while reading

Freud's respectful essay on Michelangelo's statue of him in Rome. If

one does not confuse Moses himself with what he was for

Michelangelo? Freud perhaps identifies with both Moses and

Michelangelo - just like earlier with Leonardo in the fascinating book

about Leonardo da Vinci (1910), "the only beautiful thing I have written"

(Freud) - where a complex interpretation pattern comes to light.

Not least, Freud’s very broad interpretative method had a significant

impact. This method would influence reflections on meaning far

beyond what had already begun with Freud's predecessors in this,

Brentano

and Nietzsche - two very different thinkers - and lead to the

multitude of hermeneutic philosophy that flowed forth after 1960 in

Europe. Freud's influence - and presence - in the concept of

"interpretation" became significant during this time.

Among Freud's other works dealing with the cultural aspect is

Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego

" (1921).

( It is also evident that Freud was a compulsionary writer, not very

unlike Kierkegaard - that he quite "hypersthenic" in a plethora of energy

felt compelled to not only record his discoveries and thoughts, but also

always publish his attempts at solutions of problems attributed to these.

Often enough, with a strong personal resonance and a strangely

heightened ability to symbolize and transform. )

Brentano, read by Kafka in his early years, actually was one of Freud´s teachers at

the university in Vienna.

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This theoretical broadening of psychoanalysis - beyond what was

presented in "

The Interpretation of Dreams"

– rapidly evolved during

the years following 1912 while in Kafka's life - with the story "The Trial,"

and after the publication of "The Metamorphosis" a full-fledged writer

appeared. Kafka was not exclusively interested in the theory of

psychoanalysis, but Kafka was aware of this debate and saw it in German

and French press. Kafka read fluently in French, having had an

ambitious governess as a child. Some cafés in Prague subscribed,

pleasantly enough, to numerous journals during Kafka's time.

The Viennese doctor - in his hunger for a career, which, to be sure, also

involved supporting a whole family

- was anxious about accusations of

being epigonic. His concern over not having studied Kierkegaard

sufficiently, and his double attitude towards Nietzsche (1849-1900)

displayed the same "anxiety" in open daylight, anxiety in association with

his great ambition throughout his life. Certain parts of the authorship

can still be called philosophical, such as the parts dealing with society.

"If only I could stop reading!" Freud exclaimed in a letter to Fliess, - in

this, Freud was just like S. Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard: “Most people gladly approach reading a book with the

idea of how they themselves would have written it, how another here or

there would have written it /…/ This now begins the first possibility of

being unable to read a book /…/ - the two most opposite kinds of readers

meet - the dumbest and the smartest, both of whom have it in common

that they cannot read a book, the first out of emptiness, the last out of

richness of ideas; /…/."

Kierkegaard – who in the 1840ies had written extensively about

psychological states like anxiety and despair - believed that if he

encountered a book where the introduction revealed that it was based

on assumptions that he could not see as true, then further reading of

the book was absurd (this can be called reading economics).

Kierkegaard preferred summaries. It is unlikely, for example, that he

studied Hegel´s works himself. Probably, everything he picked up

about Hegel came from that priest Alfred Adler's book on Hegel, the

same Adler whom Kierkegaard later would declare insane in "The Book

about Adler" ( published posthumously ), because he philosophically

Freud had five sisters and two half-brothers and five children.

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leaned towards an experience of a revelation of God, in almost exactly

the same manner as Kierkegaard, as he leans upon the parable of the

"leap" referring to the mystical element of faith and thus - indirectly -

considers himself insane. Kierkegaard was - in certain respects - much

more modest than Sigmund Freud, and believed for his part that

everything he had written could more be viewed as "a little cinnamon

for the food." What the food consisted of, he did not mention. As always

- in Europe for centuries - the addressees of literature concerned a small

burgher layer. On the countryside, on the Danish islands, and mainly

in Jutland, poor people toiled hard, and slavery was not – just like in the

USA - yet entirely eradicated. These slaves did not even know what

"cinnamon" was.

Kierkegaard threw coins on the ground for them.

Psychoanalysis – created by a man, who, just like Spinoza before him

during the seventeenth century, had broke free from Judaism - would

come to be sold as a doctrine of freedom, and the goal was to live a full

life by becoming free from traumas and unhealthy inhibitions, far

removed from oppression, both from mental illnesses and unhealthy

societal norms that had nestled into people's minds and enslaved the

personality.

Hegel’s teachings would remain misunderstood and were then

transmogrified during Heidegger’s and Kojève's time around 1930

when these - through diffraction - could liberate the inherent strength in

the "Other dialectic" aspect of it, which would profoundly influence

psychology and philosophy – such as

existentialism

- for the rest of the

20th century. That such insights were buried in dialectical existential

psychology and dialogic philosophy within Hegel was never discovered

by Kafka and Freud when they flipped through the difficult-to-read

tome "

Phenomenology of Spirit

." Kafka ordered the book from the

library shelves to the reading room one day during his law studies in

Prague. He never commented on it. Neither did Freud.

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A CATASTROPHE as MEDIATOR for

CULTURAL CHANGE

However, in European history, a break and a tipping of the

philosophical, literary, psychoanalytical, and scientific development

soon occurred with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The

intellectual joy was no longer the same. Europe would, as is known,

never be the same again.

The psychotherapeutic movements came in the shadow of - and

sometimes in confrontation with - the political sentiments, the economic

and social developments. Stock market crash and fascism. Many

intellectual centres split, and ideas transformed, cast in a new light - and

many new dark elements emerged from its darkness.

Writing the spiritual history of this time is, of course, a complex issue.

One easily drowns in all historians' accounts or in narratives based on

this time, and even if one searches for those who allowed themselves to

be permeated by history down to the marrow to transform their

experience into literary works - and finds some - one can still despair

over reaching the "historical truth": historians - and sociologists - obscure

the view with abstractions and peculiar - often intuitive and unconscious

- categorizations, while storytellers use concrete examples, peculiar

fates, and personal tones, troubled by the tragedy that just unfolded in

real life.

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HYSTERIA

"The lunatic, the Lover and the Poet are of imagination all impact."

(W. Blake)

From the discovery of HYSTERIA - and all its mechanisms -

psychoanalysis would, in an almost hysterical manner, develop as an

ideal plague across Europe.

As Valabrega has nicely investigated, the fantasy of hysteria is a kind of

return to myth

– and then, according to V., the reversal: myth is a

return – a run back – to the fantasy, the hallucination, the hysterical

notion.

The hysterical symptom is always built on forgetfulness, amnesia ( from

Gr.

mnemesis

= to remember ) or rather: a series of amnesias.

J.-P. Valabrega,

Le problème antropologique du phantasme

.1967.

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(Sometimes the result of censorship.) It appeared further that the

patient/analysand was ashamed of the event they had forgotten to such

an extent that they repressed it into oblivion. But in the forgetfulness,

the event evidently continued to live, led a life of its own, refused to die,

transformed, converted (conversion) and then manifested again in

various hysterical symptoms. The concept of "conversion" in Freud’s

thinking comes from the religious sphere; it alludes to the conversion

from one religion to another, e.g., from Judaism to Christianity.

Hysteria is an … "ancient" concept, going back to Hippocrates' theories

of a disease condition (!) that only affected women and whose centre

was located in the uterus ( Gr.

Hystera

). Historically, this condition was

characterized by abnormal symptoms, which were often perceived by

the doctor as demonstrative (the patient is not aware of this

demonstrativeness). The condition develops without the patient being

aware of it or consciously wishing for it to arise. The symptoms are

striking, and their common forms have been known since antiquity and

throughout the medieval and modern times.

The cause of the so-called hysterical symptoms has been interpreted

differently throughout the ages, alternating between organic and

psychological (spiritual) origins. Thus, in the Middle Ages, contact with

the devil was considered the cause (: a "spiritual" cause ). Often, hysteria

is linked to the occurrence of anxiety. The explanation of anxiety

occupied much of Freud's thought in connection with his encounters

with patients, just as it can today.

From Breuer and Freud's speculations about hysteria and what hysteria

revealed, and how it could be successfully treated

– emerged an image

of the

Unconscious

In Sweden professor Richard Berg å painted a beautiful scene with

analysts bending over a woman struck by hysteria.

This painting suggests that there is something beyond that, which we

know.

The people in the painting are all dressed up in strict bourgeoise

clothes, very neatly buttoned up, but the woman is totally lost to her

whims and hallucinations.

It is a portrait of the Unconscious.

Confer all case descriptions.

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THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

“I have three obsessions: traveling, smoking, and collecting.” (

Freud )

"Totem and Taboo,"

Freud shapes parts of the mythology that

is typical as a foundation for a new view of culture. It is here that Freud

creates the myth of the primal horde, the primal father ( the

Oedipus

myth - with the father Laius and the mother Iocaste, referred to by

Freud as "The Primal Story," and psychoanalysis itself simply receives

the name "The Discovery" in psychoanalytic historiography ). The

primal father is killed by his sons because they desire to possess the

mother, but once the father is dead, they regret it and never exploit their

advantages as Lords, but begin to worship/exorcise in symbolic form the

dead father, all supported by the enchantment into which the mind is

placed by desires and the dance of illusions.

Freud created the well-known theory of the Oedipus complex (

Oedipus cluster ) – or as Freud sometimes called it: the Core complex,

which is central to psychoanalytic theory. Freud himself expressed at

times that the entire theory stands or falls with the O-complex. He

related the emergence of this in a letter to Fliess in 1897.

encountered a father hatred in men and conversely: an infatuation with

the father in women among his patients. It is about this hatred toward

the opposite-sex parent that the O-complex is concerned. The theory

was first publicly stated in 1910 and took on a more solid form with

Totem and Taboo

, 1911-13.

He linked this idea with a story or myth from antiquity. This is

transformed into a mega-myth, which he himself believes illustrates an

eternal, universal, structural, human condition, and whose meaning is

of pyramidal determining importance.

The nose doctor Fliess was in reality Freud´s psychoanalyst. Freud broke the

contact with him in 1906, though.

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The O-complex posits that the small boy (in a family) wants to displace

– has thoughts of murdering – his father, in order to have sexual

relations with his mother, and that the little girl (in the same family)

always identifies with her father, wants to displace her mother, and

wishes to have a child with her father, with each subsequent man acting

as a "proxy" for the father.

The theory of the O-complex has been criticized by some for

contrasting with the more tangible seduction theory, where the child has

been harmed by actual sexual seduction from either parent. Freud

would thus have unconsciously repressed his knowledge of actual

incestuous child abuse.

One has speculated, e.g., Marianne Krull, about Freud's motives for

distancing himself from the seduction theory – to then relegate these

seductions to the realm of fantasy – and, as if out of piety toward his

deceased father, the traveling salesman Jakob Freud. Perhaps it was as

Freud suggests in a letter, that Jakob behaved poorly in some way, at

least toward his siblings, especially one of the brothers and the sisters.

She also argues that Freud overlooked King Laius – Oedipus's father –

crimes.

Child abuse was more common in the society Freud lived in

than one might have assumed. The 19th century was not the century of

the child.

However, the criticism of this counter-theory is more important: Freud

wanted to illustrate a basic relationship in every human being, that this

is determined – in a distinct, emotional, and sexually differentiating

manner – in relation to their parents.

- se:

The Passing of the Oedipus-complex

, 1924, where Freud discusses the matter.

That Oedipus, in the drama, is tricked into being a murderer is something Freud

just sees as an unhappy occurrence. He does not involve Fate, which perhaps would

be appropriate…. For ancient Greeks this would have been something w one would

accept. Not accepting fate was to them Hybris.

Christianity would replace a discussion about fate and hybris with the dogma about

inherited sin, which is more useful, if you want to enslave people.

Compare also Freud´s interest in

Hamlet

, and the Oedipus´ conflict that can be

associated with this play.

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In the well-known ancient drama by Sophocles, from Greece's classical

greatness, a man, without knowing that this is his father, kills him, in

what is dramaturgically called "tragic irony," forms, through effective

literary shaping, a fictional fate that becomes a myth, which, through

Freud, becomes a theory, which becomes a way of viewing Humanity,

part of a perspective on civilization, a means of civilization's self-analysis,

and becomes an analytic instrument and a form of therapy alongside a

Viennese couch.

The discussion about the father, among others mythically portrayed by

Freud as the Primordial Father in

Totem and Taboo

and in

Moses and

Monotheism

– and his interest in dominating the flock, seeing a threat

in the children's sexuality, which must lead to attempts to diminish their

sexuality, through the circumcision of boys and girls, has been richly

speculated upon, e.g., by M. Bonaparte (1951). MP moved within

Freud's circle and conducted an intensive correspondence with him.

The maternal perspective is almost completely absent in her book on

the mystical feminine. The theory of Oedipus also includes, in its

implicit reversal, a threat of castration from the father and a

corresponding castration anxiety in the child, which, in turn, reinforces

the need to "remove" the father.

What Freud aimed to address with the theory of the O-complex was, of

course, an explanation for the unconscious sexual desires he believed

governed the whole life of the human being. Also an explanation for

hysteria, depression, paralysis, fetishism, and perversion. The drive

theory – as it appears in Freud – is primarily a theory of the sexual drive

and its transformations.

He wanted to illustrate how the O-complex, the Core complex,

determined choices of love objects, determination of gender identity,

and the entire structuring of personality.

Quickly, ethnography and anthropology sought to corroborate or refute

the theory. A corresponding theory emerged, e.g., with Lévi-Strauss,

Lacanian philosopher Marie Balmary is suggesting a broader term: all gaslighting

of a child might induce a neurosis. The meaning of the ”Father”, - that is what

psychoanalysis is about.

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that the incest prohibition had a determining effect on the structure of

societies, and that one could see a connection with the O-complex

there

The abolition of patriarchy was – e.g. – also not something Freud

advocated; on the contrary.

According to Freud, there were numerous

myths that supported the view that man was the natural authority.

Already in

Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci

–

one of

the few writings of Freud that Kafka read

– there is a, in dual terms,

classical description, from Freud's pen, of a sublimation. … Freud also

uses the word narcissism – again referring to an ancient Greek myth

–

for the first time in

Leonardo da Vinci, a childhood memory.

He argues

that Leonardo loves himself, he has identified with his mother and loves

himself in the same way his mother once did. Freud describes here a

narcissistic identification, not a personality disorder. Freud later used

the term narcissism in

Sexual Theory

as a stage in "the perverse

personality." This book, according to certain sources, could be recited

by all in the "Wednesday Club" on Berggasse…

---------------------------------

The Oedipus cluster illustrates how Freud utilized his knowledge of,

and fascination with, myths – by allowing the content of the myths to

parallelize and powerfully illustrate what he thought to be general

psychological mechanisms. Thus, it happened in a kind of “perfect

storm” that Freud's descriptions of these psychological mechanisms,

referred to by him using mythological terms, in a peculiar way – through

diffraction in the Freudian mind – illuminated the ancient myths, and –

in their new, distorted, psychoanalytic form – strengthened their

Le Cru et le Cuit. Totemisme

, etc.

Erich Fromm is critical; he asserts that one reaches a higher degree of truth by

looking at the entire Oedipus´ trilogy,

King Oedipus, Oedipus in Kolonos

and

Antigone

. Fromm´s view is that Sophocles is concentrated upon the problem of

power and of authority

1910.

1911 FK is reading ,

Der Witz und seine Besiehung zum Unbewusstem.

. Kafka

almost never mentions Freud in his diaries. One day in July 1912, months before he

composes The Judgment, he is taking a walk together with a high school teacher in a

chat about Freud. Apart from the Leonardo-book, Kafka also seems to have

consumed

Moses and Michelangelo

Ovid´s

Metamorphosis

1915.

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position as eternal truths, to the same degree that these new eternal

truths reinforced the view that Freud put forward about these

psychological mechanisms. The phenomena mutually reinforced each

other, in a kind of carnival of myths.

As existing, popular myths began to illustrate psychological phenomena,

structures, and states, both human antiquity and human psyche became

mystified. Psychoanalysis as a whole soon became further mystified, as

hordes of authors in the psychoanalytic movement, and in its tail, soon

found a convoluted, extremely pretentious, and flowery abstract lingo,

with which they exploited the new double-exposed landscape that had

emerged, where psyche, human history, and prehistory quickly mixed

with a, in poetic terms disguised, salvation zeal, where civil society and

all expressions of modernity were seen as something that hindered

humanity from reaching a Sweetness of Freedom stage, where the Ego

= Id. This new language, similar to the Marxist jargon, soon appeared

to achieve a new harmony in a special sphere, where one glimpsed an

idealized paradisiacal existence, of course obscured every view of a

healthy scepticism-based human outlook. The intellectuals were

sucked, in their vanity, into the factional landscapes, and could thus be

easily sorted out by the powers that be as completely meaningless, as

they never had the slightest tools to deal with the realities that emerged

in large problematic shocks, as a result of all the transformations

brought on by the rapidly accelerating technical advancements, the

industrial galloping industrialism, and the enormous explosion of new

media. The high-culture layer became a collection of babbling idiots,

with their antiquated, reality-disconnected language, which was herded

through existence by the market and political leaders, who adopted a

simple, brutal language, which to the intellectuals appeared as

something one didn’t even want to touch with a pole. Thus, these

Marxists and Freudians slowly slid into the ditch of history and

disappeared. Meanwhile, real life continued as if nothing had

happened. To be intellectual soon meant standing behind new paradox

makers, who proclaimed themselves to be at the forefront of the Marxist

and/or psychoanalytic movement, and who sought to achieve a new

status, on level with that which was created for actors and actresses

within the new film medium, which through its wholly morbid stupidity

hypnotized the masses. To be intellectual was equated in the general

consciousness with being incomprehensibly serene. The intellectual was

an expert, who pretended to be understood later by other intellectuals,

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or disappear into the dark of unfair neglect, and it was considered both

presumptuous and base to imagine that an intellectual could have a

direct impact on society.

The myth, the psychoanalytic, when it married civil society, came in

certain respects to land in the salons, and thereby in pretentiousness.

Psychoanalysis could soon be identified with not just the couch, but also

with the environment surrounding the couch: mahogany, cigars,

genuine carpets, and alabaster and white antiquity, and thus became,

already in the midst of its development, a kind of serene commentary

on itself, a mythical mirror image in a wall mirror in a boudoir. The

magazines that emerged on the subject quickly became pretentious in

their own way, and a kind of secret lurked among the exciting terms that

soon appeared to form a crypt, written in elaborate style.

A danger constantly lurks in psychoanalysis: its intrinsic tendency

toward introspection: Within psychoanalysis, one can – it becomes

quickly apparent – express oneself quite freely. Interpret freely. It is

sometimes a doctrine in its own adornment, childishly, a theory that

distances itself from its purpose, isolated from everything else. This

shows itself almost immediately:

"For years I have been engaged in psychoanalysis from early morning

until late evening, I am a day labourer for this method, it is my

profession and my daily bread. And yet not a day goes by without me

having to pause – often in the middle of work – to admire the

phenomenal progress we have made in understanding the sick and

healthy human." “It is indeed a beautiful theory.”

(S. Ferenczi in a letter to Freud.)

Personal priorities could have a decisive impact on how the theory came

to look:

The struggle that would later flare up between Freud and his presumed

successor, C.G. Jung, was not only about scientific validity ( Jung was

also anti-Semitic and lacked Freud’s pretensions to scientific validity,

and the schism also extended ( in ambiguous words ) to much more.

"You are a dangerous competitor," Jung wrote to Freud in letters in 1911

Linda Donn, p.99

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and 1921, on the brink of psychosis, Jung noted: "How can two

intelligent and reputable men tackle the same scientific questions and

come up with contradictory answers?” In his published work,

Psychological Types

(1921), he gives the answer: he himself was

introverted, Freud extroverted.

Yet, there is a significant difference in

the view on criteria for what can be asserted and not asserted about

humanity, between the two. Telling is the encouraging comment about

C.G. Jung in Karen Armstrong's staunch conservative

History of

religion (1993), A History of God, The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism,

Christianity, and Islam,

with its nebulous blending of matter and person:

“Jung's continued belief suggests that a subjective God, which in a

mysterious way is identified with the essence of existence, can survive

psychoanalytical science; a more personal, anthropomorphic deity, who

truly encourages eternal immaturity, perhaps cannot.” (p. 399.)

In Jung one primarily finds imagination and mysticism. Compare

Modern Man in Search for a Soul (1933), where J. connects to the

classical Western tradition and mysticism and explains his view on the

relationship between psychology and religion.

The European philosophers and cultural figures and musicians –

primarily of Jewish descent – who were forced to leave Europe and

Russia and escape to the USA

during World War II were, in most

cases, shocked by the uncultured country. Adorno, Marcuse, Mann,

Schönberg, Dukelsky, and others. Some French intellectuals, who later

visited the country in the west during various periods, also became

boundlessly idolized, such as Derrida, while others were greatly

surprised to find themselves completely unrecognized but utterly

ignored, such as Lacan.

The decisive problem with the vast country in the west likely stems from

the fear that all the immigrants felt in the country, which caused a

completely morbid reliance on religion, which then secured such an

absurdly strong position, in its entirely disparate form, making this

Ib., p.206.

This escape was criticised by Sartre, who claimed the intellectuals had left the

struggle against Hitler, in order to go to the USA to make money on the writing of

scripts for the Movie Industry. See: R. Aronson,

Philosophy in the world

, s.319.

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horde of religions a foundational lie in society that, in fact, governs all

thinking. This base in religion was then reshaped – not least by the myth

factory of Hollywood – into the deafening sentimentality that has taken

over the entire country, falsely pretending to be a kind of morality.

Hollywood is mythologically interesting, as the myth maker itself has

become mythical, and how the myth of Hollywood is now quickly

eroding. What occurs is peculiar, as the myths that have arisen, in and

because of Hollywood, become in a way free-floating, but at the same

time hollow. Hollywood becomes a myth, like a spectral shape, a riddle,

and a monster, on which one can expose the seductive suspicion that it

never actually existed, like nobody has ever been on the moon, or that

the plane that struck the World Trade Centre was actually something

entirely different.

Strangely, psychoanalysis broke through relatively distinctly – first in

Europe – during the early 1900s. One cannot say it was with a bang.

The Interpretation of Dreams

sold 600 copies between 1900-1910. But

the ideas were – as we have seen – well-prepared in the Central

European culture, the landscape so favourable, that the ideas – as I have

already hinted – spread like a prairie fire from café table to café table in

Vienna.

Well. The fact is – at least – that patients came to Freud's couch on

Berggasse, that disciples flocked to him (many of them Jews

) and that

Freud and Jung, together, undertook a lecture tour in the USA in 1909,

with very successful results. The first psychoanalytic journal Imago was

founded in 1910, and the first psychoanalytic association in 1920 in

Berlin.

THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE DREAM

"The title of this work gives a hint of my opinion about dreams: I

want to show that dreams can be interpreted."

( Freud,

The Interpretation of Dreams,

p. 7 ).

Like for instance the sister of L. Ludwig Wittgenstein.

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We often find in Freud [as conservative as he is] a view of a "primal

state" - compare above - what later in terminology in this field is often

referred to as "the primordial" - in humans, individuals and language

which traces back to the above-sketched idealizing romantic view of the

primal state as conflict-free, a view that rightly has been criticized by,

among others, the stylish French language philosopher É. Benveniste.

Speculations about the primal state can be found here and there in

Freud, but they almost always have a symbolic significance, not

scientific, as in the book

Totem and Taboo

One can compare this to other philosophers of original states, who

more pretentiously speculated during this time. Earlier, for instance,

Herder had done so in his dissertation on the origin of language.

Among mystics, it concerns a dialogue between a higher being and its

subjects, or about God, ( "You are a thousand times more important to

God than He is to you." (

Master Eckehart

, Sermon on Luke, 2.42. ))

or the Absolute (a concept that goes back to Spinoza, and further back

to other Jewish speculation), or the Spirit's emergence through a

dialogue between the greater Absolute ( constantly existing ) unity and

the temporary consciousnesses that are increasingly awakened to life

and participate in an interaction—completing the Spirit. Thus, one can

- in this long tradition - see such a dynamic between Someone and

Another in Freud, in the play between the Conscious and the

Unconscious.

In 1901, Henri Bergson announced that the "overarching task" for the

new century would be "to work in the lower world of the Spirit," "to

explore the unconscious." Soon, in the new Modernity, Dadaism would

appear, with Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and others - but also the more

significant surrealism within this context, whose champion, the French

doctor and poet André Breton, would publish several manifestos,

journals, and other writings over nearly half a century in search of

different ways to create a better and liberated human being through the

help of the "unconscious." W. James - (the creator of the expression

"stream of consciousness," which for many became a literary ideal until

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someone pointed out the absence of an aesthetic element in it

) -

believed that the discovery of the unconscious was the greatest discovery

in psychology during his lifetime. This American pragmatist's view was,

as the eccentric Egon Friedell expressed it: "What suits us is true." - and

James likewise asserted, logically corrupt, explicitly, and literally:

"Everything that exists is true." The damage pragmatism has caused in

the USA is immense.

Central to psychoanalysis, and part of its entrance, was, almost from the

beginning, the dream. Freud's stark - yet incredibly powerful, opening

thesis in his

The Interpretation of Dreams

was this: that dreams can be

interpreted. "The title of this work gives a hint of my opinion about

dreams: I want to show that dreams can be interpreted." That this has

been asserted since young David's days in Egypt, and even earlier, is

something one can overlook. For here, it is claimed to present 1.) solid

evidence for the thesis, as well as 2.) an explanation. That it is not

possible to interpret all dreams has, however, turned out/showed itself

to be the case. This main message about the openness of dreams does

not mean that he is primarily interested in examining what the dream

is; he is not a sleep researcher - but that he is interested in how one can

come to knowledge about oneself (!) and one's history by interpreting

dreams through their cryptic symbolism. Dream interpretation is a

means in a broader therapy, which is psychoanalysis. The dream is, for

the awake, the gateway to the Unconscious.

In the pursuit of both scientific credibility and generating interest,

The

Interpretation of Dreams

is overflowing with examples of dreams,

mostly, cryptomemetic and by principle, Sigmund Freud's own. It is,

therefore, an introspection. It is a book in which one marvels at the

wealth of previously unimaginable, original thoughts. Here about

dreams, a subject that has nevertheless been quite richly described in

literature in various ways, although never with a similar force, a

tremendous yet controlled approach. I myself think here - regarding the

genre of groundbreaking thoughts that have directly influenced the

average person - of literature professor Marshall McLuhan's

encyclopaedic communication-philosophical prophecy,

Media

, as a

Cf. James Joyce, loathed by the symbolist writer and essayist Virginia Woolf.

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modern counterpart, ... now - incredibly enough - largely forgotten.

Many have compared Freud to Copernicus

, although the term

"paradigm shift" is not often used concerning Freud: the dream had until

then been invisible, the unconscious likewise. If anything has been

absent from serious theoretical development, there is no paradigm to

shift.

At the same time, one is astonished by the amount of assertions and

conclusions presented by Freud, especially in all his case studies, where

he seeks to grasp the whole person with tools and claims that are far too

weak for this and have a fabricated character. However, Freud himself

is initially quite lyrical about what his discovery may imply:

"When one has walked through a narrow hole and suddenly comes

up to a height, beyond which the roads diverge and an expansive view

opens up in all directions, it happens that one stops for a moment and

considers where to turn first. In the same way, we find ourselves when

we've made this first dream interpretation. We are suddenly confronted

with a completely new discovery."

Psychoanalysis is a conception of humanity and a method. Freud

himself wished to call it a science. But it does not meet the criteria for

such. Its assertions cannot be scientifically verified. One cannot conduct

controlled experiments/studies that can confirm or refute the theory's

practice. There is no scientific theory underlying it. This conceptual

structure has many components. Fundamentally, it is a practically

therapeutic method, based on interpretation, and around this method,

theories have formed, and the important dream interpretation work is

included as an operational part of accessing the patient's past.

Additional components include free association and transference.

Psychoanalysis is logocentric: it fixes on what the patient says and

interprets this. (In this logocentricity is a danger, as one can confuse the

logos that should be interpreted with the logos that interprets.) Here,

the analyst's ability and attitude play a decisive role, and this role is not

clearly fixed. To interpret, Freud built a dream interpretation theory, a

hermeneutics - consisting of a symbolism theory atop a theory about the

Much like Immanuel Kant was compared to Copernicus by Karl Popper.

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human psyche. A practically-analytical method has also been

developed, which includes the analytical hour on the couch, "freely

associating," recounting dreams, memories, fantasies, associations, etc.

We find in Freud an image of humanity that is also fundamentally based

on the idea of drives and sexuality - libido - crucial influence for the

individual.

LOGOS. Freud readily translates an image from a dream into words

and one word into another word. Precisely a not so small lexicon was

formed in Freud's (capable) head... Many have - remarkably enough! -

regarded his method as hermeneutically (interpretively) exemplary.

Others do not. It is essential to emphasize that it is a logocentric theory,

that this theory is largely constructed around words and their meanings.

The extraordinary and new aspect of the case studies is that it visually

illustrated a relationship between analyst and analysand in an exciting

form, and how this relationship changed as one or several enigmas of a

symbolic nature were solved by both involved in interplay. The

successful case thus strengthened the theory of interpretation in its two

respects: interpretation as a resolution of the riddle, the resolution of

the riddle's identity with the resolution of the fixation, trauma, etc., that

triggered the symptom.

A critique - relating to the strictly logocentric aspect was presented by

Swedish philosophy professor S. Carlshamre in an article about Lacan's

views on metaphor and metonymy in psychoanalysis's dream

interpretation:

"When Lacan summarizes the significance of language theory for

psychoanalysis, he states that 'the symptom is a metaphor, and the desire

is a metonymy.'

Let us illustrate what this can mean with an example

that Lacan takes from Freud. He recounts at one point about the

woman who, after having tried all other medical remedies, comes to

him to get help for her pain in the lower back. To make a long story

short, Freud and the woman eventually agree on the explanation that

she 'bears her cross,' atoning for a guilt with the help of her pain. The

interesting thing for us is that she, if Freud is correct, feels pain precisely

Metonymy then is when a part of something is set to represent the whole.

Example: The conductor of an orchestra ”Tell the trumpet to be quiet!”.

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in the lower back because it is called 'lower back.' The connection

between the symptom and its 'cause' is not causal but semiological and

mediated by (in this case) the German language. This is what Lacan

means when he says that 'the symptom is a metaphor' - even more apt

would be to call it a riddle. That 'desire is a metonymy' is illustrated by

another feature of the same anecdote. What leads the analyst on the

track of the metaphorical meaning is that the pain is 'misplaced' - there

is 'really' no reason for her to have pain in the lower back. But the pain

represents the emotional charge once originally associated with the guilt

now only understood metaphorically. The emotional charge, 'desire,'

shifts along the metaphorical chain - it is this displacement, I believe,

that Lacan refers to when he says that desire is a metonymy. Both sides

of the slogan can be summarized as follows: the manifest object of the

analysand's desire is a symbol for the latent object, and the mediation

between the two occurs through topological mechanisms that partly

operate on the pure riddle level."

Freud seems independent of the Kabbalistic view of dreams, which he,

through his early studies, was aware of, where dreams are generally

divided into two types: warning dreams and promise dreams. We might

confer E. Bishoff.,

Über elemente der Kabbalah

, (1920), on Old

Testament and Homer, who separates true dreams and dreams who

set out to deceive, or trick the dreaming person, by dreams that comes

trough devious entrances decorated with

elephas

, Ivory. However, the

danger of over-interpretation was undeniably great - and is still within

psychoanalysis today; Freud's famous retort: "Sometimes a cigar is just a

cigar." is emblematic.

One must not forget that language, even in dreams, has more than a

symbolic relation. It has a paradigmatic significance - i.e.: relates to the

symbolic system, as well as a syntagmatic one: discourse's before and

after. Hence, dream interpretation is never like looking up in a symbol

dictionary if one believes they are dealing with a complete language, as

the dream dictionary only takes into account a few aspects.

Freud starts out in

The Interpretation of Dreams

(

Traumdeutung

) by

explaining that his method is something between translating individual

symbols and translating a holistic meaning that the patient (analysand)

perceives at once. He also believes that the same dream content can

have different meanings for different people.

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ERICH FROMM:

"Dreams are understood as hallucinatory fulfilments of irrational

wishes, especially sexual wishes, that arose in early childhood and have

not been fully transformed into reaction formations or sublimated.

These wishes are expressed as fulfilled when the conscious control is

weakened, as is the case during sleep. However, if we were to allow

ourselves to... give vent to these wish fulfilments in our dreams, the

dreams would not be so puzzling or confusing. We rarely dream of

committing murder or incest or 'a crime of any kind, and even if it does

happen, we do not enjoy our wish fulfilments in our dreams. To explain

this phenomenon, Freud assumes that our moral censorship is also half

asleep while we sleep."

Fromm

continues: "In this way, thoughts and fantasies that are

otherwise completely excluded are allowed to enter our sleep

consciousness. The censor is only half asleep. It is sufficiently awake to

allow the forbidden thoughts to emerge clearly and unambiguously. If

the function of dreams is to take care of sleep, the irrational wishes that

appear in dreams must be sufficiently masked to fool the censor. Like

the neurotic symptoms, they entail a compromise between the

repressed powers of the 'Id' and the repressive power of the censuring

'Superego.' Occasionally, this distorting mechanism does not work

properly, and the dreams become too clear to escape the censor, and

we wake up. Consequently, Freud assumes that what mainly

characterizes the 'language' of dreams is this process of masking and

distorting irrational wishes, allowing us to continue sleeping

undisturbed. This notion is significant in relation to Freud's concept of

symbolism. He believes that the main function of the symbol is to mask

and distort the underlying desire. The language of symbols is

understood as a 'secret code,' and dream interpretation as the

Fromm was married to Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and later Karen Horney, both

of them with careers in psychoanalytic theory.

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deciphering work."

It addresses the relationship of dreams to literature. Freud himself

believed that psychoanalysis could never explain the mystery of

creation. Theodor Adorno is critical of the narrow concept of art that

psychoanalysis offers:

"From the point of psychoanalysis, art is daydreaming. It is a view that,

on the one hand, mistakes works of art for documents lodged in the

dreaming person's head."

Through the dream, we access, among other things, the roots of hysteria

(conversion = symptom). Dreams carry messages. However, they must

be sufficiently masked to fool the Censor, as we need the Censor to

avoid excessively harsh truths. Like the neurotic symptoms, they

encompass a compromise between the repressed forces of the 'Id' (in

the second topic) and the repressive power of the 'Superego' that

censors. Sometimes, this distortion mechanism does not function

correctly, causing the dreams to become too clear to evade the Censor,

and we wake up. Consequently, Freud assumes that what mainly

characterizes the dreams' "language" is this process of masking and

distorting irrational wishes, which allows us to sleep undisturbed.

This notion is important to consider when understanding Freud's

concept of symbolism. He believes that the main function of the symbol

is to mask and - in this - distort the underlying desire. The language of

symbols is seen as a secret (cleverly shaped by the Unconscious) code,

with dream interpretation being the deciphering work.

Psychoanalysis can come to know the Unconscious but, contrary to

romanticists, Freud's Unconscious is something that can be known as

something at the signified level - signifiers, - homogenous with the realm

of speech

, - so that the inner objects can be regarded as knowable. At

least to the same extent as the outer, physical objects.

But when various materials from the Unconscious reach the

Ästethische Theorie

p. 12.

Lacan would later assert that the Unconscious is structured much like a language,

and in a way is a language.

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Preconscious, Freud calls them various "derivatives," which belong to

the Preconscious, but their "origin determines their fate."

Material

flows from the Unconscious to the Preconscious but also vice versa. An

interaction. What reality level the Unconscious has (the ontological

question regarding psychological phenomena and functions) and its

constancy remains uncertain - it is unspecified - in Freud. Thus, we

cannot say that we believe we always have an instance called "the

Unconscious," which in some way, with reflection and will,

simultaneously directs what we do or prevents us from acting. That is to

say: reflection and will occasionally come into conflict with the

Unconscious, which seems to be dominant. The reality of the

Unconscious (ontological status) is constituted in an initial movement

through interpretation in an epistemological and transcendental sense.

Two things should perhaps be emphasized here above all: 1.) What was

new in Freud's reasoning was the convincing manner in which he could

equate "dream" with "symptom." Here likely lies the origin of the

paradigm shift. After that, much followed automatically.

Freud also sets out in

The Interpretation of Dreams

explaining that his

method (part of... practice) is something between translating individual

symbols and translating a whole meaning that the analysand perceives

immediately. Freud also believes that the same dream content can have

different meanings for different individuals.

"It was discovered one day that the pathological symptoms of certain

neurotic patients have a meaning. This discovery built the

psychoanalytic treatment method. It happened during the treatment of

these patients that they, instead of showing symptoms, recounted their

dreams. A suspicion then arose that dreams also had meaning."

( Freud,

On the Psychoanalytic Movement

, 1923 )

Thus, we arrive at another point where Freud's dream theory, in its

narrowest form, has faced harsh criticism. The theoretical idea that the

manifest dream, the "recounted dream," the formulated, remembered,

holds no value in itself, markedly collides with practical experiences

from psychoanalytic work, where the manifest dream itself "is a valuable

( Freud,

The Unconscious

, p.191.)

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contribution to understanding the analysand's inner world."

The test of whether it is the true meaning or not is whether the patient

becomes free from their life-impeding symptoms (or similar) or not,

and thus becomes a healthier person, sheds a neurotic symptom, or

feels that a certain attitude towards a certain person is adequate or not,

something the patient was not clear about before.

Even those who opposed the psychoanalytic theory as presented in

The

Interpretation of Dreams,

and that emerged otherwise and

progressively, could not completely shield themselves from this text. It

concerned them.

To interpret, Freud - in his discovery fervour - developed a theory

of dream interpretation, containing a symbolism theory and a theory of

the human psyche. A practically-analytical method has also been

constructed, which involves the analytical hour on the couch, "free

associating," recounting dreams, memories, fantasies, etc.

Psychoanalysis has even become a theory that has expanded to

encompass nearly everything in a patient's life, and to encompass

interpersonal phenomena, as well as societal, aesthetic, and other

subject areas. During his long life as a publisher, Freud treated several

areas outside the therapeutic. One could - regarding his broader

thinking - say that he was interested in all things human, and that he

viewed other sciences through the eyes of a psychoanalyst. That is, his

distinctly own. Psychoanalysis has grown from Freud's practice in

Vienna around 1900, and the publication of the book, The

Interpretation of Dreams, to become a worldwide movement. It grew

slowly, faced setbacks, was modified, and received competition.

One may feel, after reading through all of Freud's case studies and much

of the dream interpretation in other texts, that one has entered a

machine constructed by the legendary Ramon Lull, the Spanish

eccentric encyclopaedist, logician, etc., a machine that can deliver

answers regarding all ( existing in the world ) input information.

Psychoanalysis is so suggestive in ITSELF that one can lose contact with

reality. Today, it is - in the shadow of CBT - a rather fading presence

among psychotherapies influenced by psychoanalysis.

Often when we talk about "truth" in psychoanalysis, it is metaphorical,

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much like in religious practice. Through a type of self-reflection in

collaboration with the analyst. In a psychological sense, one could argue

that such self-reflection is searching for something that already exists,

although this self may feel like an "illusion," something only partially

attainable, something that is constantly beyond reach - compare here

Per-Olof Olofsson's theories on desire labelling and illusion-creating

about "the dance of illusions," i.e. illusions displacing one another for

humans, or how the "same" illusion changes its appearance in his books

The Primordial Fantasy and Order

(diss. 1987), and

The Naked

Human

concerning whether there is such a "self" in one as a child or

even as unborn.

8384

Dream interpretation, indeed, arises alongside the association method,

where the patient, through free associating, increasingly approaches the

hidden, the repressed (the trauma or whatever it may be), and this

method rests on the assumption that humans know something about

themselves without being conscious of it. In this lies a deep irony. That

may be true. Psychoanalysis seeks a truth beyond - or within - the

hysterical symptom (the most time-typical symptom for this era and

environment). This symptom is interpreted. Psychoanalysis, which

often interprets mythical images and conventions, has not

unsuccessfully created myths itself. Often magnificently and powerfully.

Something Kafka discovered, as an unbiased aesthetician. Freedom and

health are achieved - according to psychoanalysis - through analytical

insight. In the retracted university dissertation

The Concept of the

Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of Mind

(1927), Adorno

believed that "healing from neuroses is synonymous with the complete

understanding from the patient's side of the symptom."

Urfantasin och ordningen, Den avklädda människan.

8383

Cf. The concept of bewitched and unbewitched. See also Alex. Koyré in his

book on the Lie,

La Mensonge

Cf. Kierkegard´s reflexions around the relation between Self and Despair.

Philosophische Frühschriften.

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THE FANTASTIC and THE CENSOR

What remains unconscious - within us, in our mind - is kept

unconscious by the censor.

"A key unresolved area of contention concerns 'disguise-censorship.'

Disguise-censorship is generally considered by those critical of Freud to

be 'the heart of Freudian dream theory'" (Hobson, 1999, p. 170; cf.

Hobson, 1988; Hobson & Pace-Schott, 1999). On this view, "the

psychic censor acts to screen and block wishes unacceptable to

consciousness" (McCarley & Hobson, 1977, p. 1218; cf. Domhoff,

2004, p. 11), and here it is claimed there is not "the faintest modicum

of support" (Hobson, 1999, p. 157). Given this supposed centrality,

these authors believe that if disguise-censorship is false, then Freudian

dream theory as a whole can be rejected." (Simon Boag)

Freud thus divides the Unconscious into two types: The Unconscious,

which we never contact, and the Preconscious (Fmv) that we can easily

reach contact with. Freud also claims that the Unconscious has the same

reality as Consciousness. Here - in the question of reality - Freud

touches upon philosophy's (epistemology's and ontology's) ground.

It is here one raises the tricky question of how it can be that the

Unconscious would provide greater difficulties in determining

knowledge-wise than the Conscious. The ontology of Consciousness

seems tied to the discussion initiated by Descartes in the 1600s, with,

among others, his Cogito. "I think, therefore I am." But now an

additional, obscure element is introduced. There is something that

thinks inside me, - of which I am unaware. Freud realizes that humans

are aware of very little. The centre of study should address the causes

of what hinders humans from being as aware and free and

psychologically healthy as possible.

The Unconscious can be divided into two aspect categories in Freud's

theory formation. Both the descriptively Unconscious and the

dynamically Unconscious. The knowledge we have concerning 1.) The

descriptively Unconscious is something that is currently not attended to.

For the most part, we are unconscious of ourselves and the world. We

are also unconscious in a descriptive sense. All phenomena that are not

conscious fall within the descriptively Unconscious. Most of the

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knowledge we have during most of the time we sleep.

2.) The dynamically Unconscious encompasses psychic elements:

thoughts, knowledge, and wishes that the person is not aware of having,

but which sometimes control their thinking and acting. It contains both

the repressed and the repressing.

The dynamic Unconscious is strictly unconscious. "We have learned

that the dream replaces certain thoughts stemming from our everyday

life and has a logical context. We therefore cannot doubt that these

thoughts originate from each normal psychic life." However, the whole

is more complicated than that. We quote from The

Interpretation of

Dreams

, last chapter (The Psychology of Dream Processes): "dream

work can be ascribed to the activity of the unconscious during the day,

which provides the impulses for dreams to the same extent as neurotic

symptoms." (Ib.p.356).

One can compare this to Otto Weininger's work a few years after The

Interpretation of Dreams, perhaps describing psychoanalysis,

foreshadowing the shift in the conception of humanity that this brings

about, where self-awareness is already "dawning in the modern man, in

that its dialectic turns the poison against itself and transforms it into

scorpion stings," as Egon Friedell interprets modern intellectual history

in his original, overwhelming cultural history. Weininger is generally

mentioned in Freud literature as someone who realized human

bisexuality, and it has been claimed that this idea indirectly reached him

from Freud himself.

The Censor, or censorship, is an idea that arises in Freud as early as

1897, three years before the publication of

The Interpretation of

Dreams

, and then he speaks of it in terms of newspaper censorship, in

Tsarist Russia, in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess: "Have you ever read a

foreign newspaper that has gone through Russian censorship? Words,

entire parts of sentences and sentences crossed out in black, rendering

the rest incomprehensible." The censor is described in The

Interpretation of Dreams as "a selective fence." But who sets up the

fence, who selects?

The censorship exists, in the first topic, on two levels, between the

Unconscious and the Preconscious and between the Preconscious and

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the Conscious. In the second topic, censorship is more connected with

the idea of a defence mechanism: Freud speaks of a guardian, "a more

or less astute guardian in their position, a censor." between the hall and

salon. In 1938, 38 years after The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud

ascribes the censorship to the activity of the Superego and positions it

within the Ego's "service," regarding dream distortion.

It does not seem that the utterly inconceivable aspect of the "essence"

itself, or the intangible aspect of its seemingly independent "existence"

in the Censor, or censorship, would have significantly troubled or

disturbed Freud in his construction of models for the human psyche.

He observes that one "is not master in one's own house," but what then

is this "more or less vigilant" being, who is the true and absolute Lord?

The vagueness is – methodically and philosophically – apparent. Yet

there seems to be a reasonableness hidden/revealed behind it. We are,

after all, close to the core of the entire idea complex.

What is disturbing is – in any case – that Freud constantly paints striking

concrete images as illustrations for his theoretical reasoning, only to

later explain that one should not imagine anything in the psyche as

concrete! The advertising pillar has, so to speak, surpassed the product.

The Censor can thus be viewed as a defence with an ontogenetic and

phylogenetic background, designed to protect the individual, and that

without censorship we would not manage, and that it is of automatic-

neurological nature, and that it can sometimes – by chance – have

progressively overdeveloped, so that it becomes inhibiting and therefore

needs to be – through various methods – eased, for the individual to

become capable of taking more control over their life.

But is the Unconscious not greater, more, than the Censor? The

ontological being-question about the Unconscious's way of being can be

In the second topic, censorship is more connected with the idea of a defence

mechanism: Freud speaks of a guardian, "a more or less astute guardian of his official

position, a censor," placed between the hallway and the salon. Censorship is attributed

– in 1938, 38 years after The Interpretation of Dreams – by Freud to the functioning

of the Superego, and is, according to Freud – at least concerning dream distortion –

placed in the service of the Ego.

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seen as meaningless. An ontological Freud-view would be to develop a

sort of equivalent to a demonology, like Joseph Görres'. Görres' book

was appreciated by Kierkegaard and can remind one of Swedenborg's

angelic treatises.

The problematic nature of the Censor cannot be overstated. The path

to the construction of the concept of "Censor" for Freud went through

the study of hysteria as well as the study of dreams. Hence came, for

example, the slips of the tongue, which serve as another hermeneutic

portal to the Censor. Then the joke.

The concept of "censorship" and the Censor