www.psychspace.com心理学空间网人的現象與經驗
與人的現象與經驗
的理解架構
與回到人的現象與經驗
March 1, 2006
醴陵張凱理
題綱
1. 引言: 來信回信及其它
2. BEFORE THEY BEGAN TO DIVERGE …
3. … AT A TIME WHEN ‘THE SCIENCES OF MAN’ WERE BEGINNING TO EMERGE
4. ENDNOTE
REFERENCE
APPENDIX: BREGER, 1989, P 1-13; KUNDERA, 1986, P 3-44
1.引言: 來信回信及其它
Subject: Russian man (Feb 8, 2006)
I try to read through your material, slowly.
Today, I help to do the psychological test (WASI), and the subject is a Russian. I don't have time to know his background. I know he uses cocaine i.v. injection, which is very very rare, dangerous and extreme.
He is young, nice, sweet, and has strong accent. He carried a big black bag when he entered my office. Generally speaking, the interview was smooth, although he was very frustrated about his performance. Then he went to the exam room for blood test, at that time, we had a chance to see into his black bag. Some nasty clothes, a tourniquet, cigarettes and a knife.
A knife, big and shinning, reminds me of the reality.
It's hard to express what I feel, but I knew I spent time with a Russian man, his knife and many stories that I don't have chance to know, or better not to know.
* * * * * *
The reality is always more frightening than our theories.
That piece of talk is supposed to be given on March 1. Two main points: (1) The psychoanalytic theories are protective barriers between us and the reality. Though they are also meant to illuminate the latter. (2) Take Dostoevsky for an example, who interestingly lived and wrote before the birth of psychoanalysis. His works are wonderfully complex and polyphonic (to use Bakhtin’s term). And that is exactly what reality is, in his times, in Freud’s times, and in our own.
Therefore, two phrases are the key points: “before they began to diverge …” and “(he wrote) at the time when the ‘sciences of man’ were beginning to emerge”.
If I am an eternal student, then let it be student of that reality.
* * * * * *
... We were both slightly over twenty years old. I was then residing in Petersburg; one year before I resigned from the engineers' corps, not knowing why, full of vague and uncertain aspirations. This was in May, 1845. Early in the winter, suddenly, I began to write Poor Folks, my first novel; before that I had never written anything. ... In the evening of the same day that I submitted the manu (to Grigorovich and Nekrasov), I went far off to visit a former friend of mine. All night we spoke about Dead Souls and read the novel for how long a time --- I don't remember. In those days it used to be this way among young men; two or three of them would get together: "Gentlemen, shall we read Gogol?" --- They would sit down and read, sometimes, all night. ... I returned home at four o'clock, in a white Petersburg night, bright as a day. The weather was beautiful and warm, and upon entering my apartment I did not go to bed, but opened the window and seated myself in front of it. Suddenly I heard the bell ring. This surprised me very much. Presently Grigorovich and Nekrasov rushed upon me and in a perfect transport started embracing me, and both were almost crying. ... In the evening they came home early, took my manu and began to read it, just for a test. "We shall be able to judge from the first ten pages." But having read ten pages, they decided to read ten more pages, and thereupon, without interruption, they sat all night till morning reading aloud and taking turns when one grew tired. ... “He is reading about the student’s death,” --- Grigorovich later told me, when we were alone --- “and suddenly I notice, in that place where the father runs behind the coffin, Nekrasov’s voice begins to falter, once, then a second time, and then, losing control over himself, he raps upon the manu with his palm, exclaiming: ‘The rascal!’ --- meaning you. And thus all night.” …After they had finsihed reading (112 pages in all), they unanimously decided to call on me immediately: "What does it matter that he is sleeping! We'll wake him up. This is more important than sleep!" ...
(The Diary of A Writer, by F.M. Dostoevsky, George Braziller, 1954, p 584-585)
Back in Rockville, Frieda buried herself in work. As millions of Europeans were being slaughtered or forced into exile … Frieda focused, as always, on the individual. Hilde Bruch recalled her reaction to the Pearl Harbor. … “Then came the meeting on December 8, 1941 [the day Roosevelt issued his declaration on war]. …This evening stands out vividly in my memory,” Bruch later wrote. “Everybody talked about what he or she was going to do for the war effort, and everybody had grandiose ideas. Frieda said very quietly, ‘I know what I’m going to do. I’ll do what I know best. I’ll do psychotherapy.’
(To Redeem One Person Is To Redeem The World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, by Gail A. Hornstein, Free Press, 2000, p 117)
Most critiques of contemporary scientific approaches to clinical psychology are built on the European philosophical traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics. ... the approach I take here is to mine the riches of common sense and the unanalyzed notion of knowing people well in everyday day that is taken for granted by both logical positivist and hermeneutic approaches to science. In this way, my approach resembles more that of the philosopher Stephen Toulmin than it does the European Husserl or Heidegger. ...
I approach the moral engagement of clinical psychology in this book by examination of four topics: the concept of suffering, the analysis of the concept of knowing people well in everyday life, the nature of clinical knowledge, and the narrative clinical case study as a vehicle uniquely suited for the scholarly communication of morally engaged clinical knowledge.
(Facing Human Suffering: Psychology and Psychotherapy As Moral
Engagement, by Ronald B. Miller, American Psychological Association, 2004, p xi)
"賓雁曾經對我說過：我祇希望將來在我的墓碑上，寫上這麼一行字：「長眠於此的這個
中國人，曾做了他應該做的事，說了他自己應該說的話。」我知道賓雁還有很多話想跟我們
說，想對他牽念的祖國的父老鄉親說.可是，他也許再也沒有力氣說出來了。他在生命的最
後時光，最惦記的還是中國老百姓的自由和民主，幸福和權利，他為此奮鬥、拚搏了一生。
在他在進入昏迷以前，對身邊親友說的最清晰的一句話是：「將來，我們想起今天這樣的日
子，會非常有意思。」我想，這是他的最大的遺願。" （2005年12月4日上午9時 於賓雁彌留之際）
(賓雁的遺願, 朱洪, Beijing Spring, Vol 152, p 10, Jan, 2006)
2.BEFORE THEY BEGAN TO DIVERGE …
The Freud Wars: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, by Lavinia Gomez, Routledge, 2005
The premises of Object Relations (Gomez, 1997) led to the premises of psychoanalysis itself. After too many wrong turnings and blind alleys, the focus of this book emerged: how can psychoanalytic thinking be justified? … How do we know what we know? Can science explain everything? And that enduring enigma, whatever is a person?
How Can Psychoanalytic Thinking Be Justified?
* * * * * *
Chap 1. Introduction: What sort of subject might psychoanalysis be?
The aim is to work towards an understanding of psychoanalysis through its central concept, the unconscious …
1. The context of the enquiry
“The Freud Wars”:
‘The Unknown Freud’ (Crews, 1993) condemns the whole edifice of psychoanalysis as a vast confidence trick played on suggestible patients and an unwary public by an unscrupulous and self-seeking psychoanalytic establishment. … Crew’s objections to psychoanalysis’ claim to scientific status are drawn largely from Grunbaum’s work. (The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique, Adolf Grunbaum, 1984)
Psychoanalysis, Thomas Nagel (1994) argues, introduces a new way of thinking which has triumphantly succeeded in transforming our views of what a person is, within a broader conception of empirical science.
The two philosophers’ opposing views form the centerpiece of an eighteen-month debate, with philosophers, psychoanalysts, academic psychologists and others all joining in. … The two critiques give us a solid platform from which to assess the scientific credentials of psychoanalysis.
One question which is never considered throughout the erupting debate is whether psychoanalysis should be categorized as a science in the first place. The possibility of classing it with the humanities is not even entertained.
This enquiry would be incomplete without a critique which puts psychoanalysis forward as an interpretative or ‘hermeneutic’ subject. The inaugural hermeneutic critique by Jurgen Habermas (1971) seems a particularly appropriate example, as a reading which Grunbaum explicitly and Nagel implicitly rejects.
Empirical and hermeneutic principles:
There are thus two questions for this enquiry to consider. Can psychoanalysis be justified at all? And should its acceptance of rejection depend on scientific or hermeneutic principles of knowledge? …
The empirical-hermeneutic distinction is a dichotomy which goes back to the very root of Western thought. … the etymology brings out their essential meaning. … ‘Empirical’ derives from ‘empeiria’ --- experience --- referring to the sensory experience by which we come to know a world outside ourselves; ‘hermeneutics’ is related to Hermes, messenger of the gods and symbol of communication. … The empirical science looks at phenomena from the outside. It uses the language of mechanics, going back to the physical laws and concepts through which we understand the material world. … Hermeneutic approaches explain phenomena --- sometimes the same phenomena --- from the inside. Their explanations are couched in the subjective language of desire and belief, value and intention, emotion and experience. These terms reflect the background of personal meaning and purpose which differentiates the action of a person from the output of a system, or a state of mind from a state of matter.
‘Science’, in itself, means nothing more than an organized body of theory. However, it has become overwhelmingly identified with ‘empirical science’, often with the implication that this kind of knowledge is more ‘real’ than any other kind. … Hermeneutic theorists such as Habermas challenge these assumptions. They claim that the knowledge represented by developed interpretational systems is just as legitimate as that of empirical systems, and should therefore be called ‘hermeneutic science’.
2. The theoretical background
The ‘mental’, the ‘physical’ and the ‘psychical’:
The sources of the confusion in psychoanalysis go back to its point of departure. … Freud developed psychoanalysis as one of a number of contemporaneous attempts to solve the most frustrating puzzle of 19th-century psychiatry. (i.e. hysteria) … ‘Psychical reality’ is Freud’s third area, lying between the physical and the mental realms, but conceivable only in mental or physical terms. … yet the psychical has no language of its own …
The three levels of psychoanalytic theory:
Each level treats the concept of the ‘psychical’ in its own way. The clinical theories approach it through the work of mental reality; the psychological models and theories, through the work of physical reality. The psychological foundations state formally that there must be a point of meeting between the two.
… the clinical theories cover all psychoanalytic concepts that can be expressed in the language of experience, and are themselves something to be explained. … Freud’s way of explaining them is termed the ‘psychology’, a word Freud coins as a direct counterpart to ‘physics’. ‘physics’ and ‘psychology’ refer to the ‘first principles’ of the sciences of physics and psychology respectively. … physical and psychological theories and principles are unprovable, since by definition there can be no deeper theoretical level on which ‘first principles’ can rest. …
Freud’s main psychological proposition is that psychical phenomena can be thought of in three different ways: ‘when we have succeeded in describing a psychical process in its dynamic, topographical and economic aspects, we should speak of it as a psychological presentation’ (Freud, S.E. 14, p 181, 1915)
… the clinical theories form the ground of explanation for Freud’s psychoanalytic observations, and the psychological models and theories form the ground of the clinical theories. … but they are still not the absolute foundation of psychoanalysis. This is to be found in the presuppositions they carry, which set out the unconditioned starting-point for psychoanalytic theorization. … the two fundamental hypotheses … the first hypothesis proposes that the psyche has to be conceived as a complex ‘apparatus’, with mental activity as its output … ‘the majority of philosophers … declare that the idea of something psychical being unconscious is self-contradictory. But this is precisely what psychoanalysis is obliged to assert, and this is its second fundamental hypothesis’ (Freud, S.E. 23, p 158, 1938) … thus Freud’s deion of the psyche is of a quasi-physical ‘apparatus’ churning out a continuous stream of quasi-mental ‘processes’ … the conception of the psychical as the primary psychophysical reality …
These two hypotheses are still not the most fundamental level of psychoanalysis. This is to be found in the ‘basic assumption’ and ultimate bedrock of Freud’s psychoanalysis: that a theory of mental life must begin with the unified conception of processes which are usually cast in either physical or mental terms. … The task of psychoanalysis is to ‘(act) as an intermediary between biology and psychology’ (Freud, S.E. 13, p 182, 1913)
* * * * * *
Chap 5: The apparatus of the soul: how can mental and physical explanations coincide?
… turns away from conventional work to the thinking behind Freud’s theories, in a search for the roots of their strange theoretical ambiguity. We find that this goes back to the very beginning of his thought. His underlying philosophy is neither wholly scientific nor purely interpretative. He seems to hold a picture of reality which pre-empts the division into the mental and physical modes on which empirical and hermeneutic approaches rest. …
Together with Freud’s thinking, the work of the philosophers Sebastian Gardner (Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, 1993) and Peter Strawson (Individuals: An Essay in Deive physics, 1959) (‘Deive physics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary physics is concerned to produce a better structure’. ibid, p 9) suggest the basis for a new foundational approach which seems to come from within psychoanalysis itself. Instead of the empirical basis in the body, or the hermeneutic basis in the mind, psychoanalysis goes back to the psychophysical basis of the person, as the source from which all thinking must arise.
* * * * * *
Chap 6. Conclusions
… based on the intimate association between psychoanalysis and the ‘pre-theoretical’ psychology of everyday living … allows the practical foundational principle to be drawn out … the ground of the psychical is neither the mind of hermeneutic approaches nor the body of empirical approaches. It can only be the person, as the irreducibly psychophysical holder of the psychical reality from which all knowledge derives.
… psychoanalysis defines itself as reflection on a self, by a self; directly, or by attunement with another. Psychoanalysis is most secure on the basis that there is no specialized arena, no technical or linguistic model of knowing or knowledge to which it must accede. It is not a hermeneutic theory, since its material is treated as ‘real’ rather than ‘merely’ symbolic. Neither is it an empirical science, because its concepts and explanations must be reachable, and reached, through reflections alone. Perhaps it could be described as systematic enquiry into the unspoken explanation of oneself, at a generalized level, and taking both mental and physical convictions into account.
The subject matter of psychoanalysis, its method and its underlying nature are all centred in reflection, making psychoanalytic thinking even less fixed and more ‘critical’ than psychoanalytic theory itself. In psychoanalysis more than in any other subject, theoretical consolidation and theoretical renewal pull against each other. Experience and reflection lead to both the establishment and the challenge of theoretical concepts and structures. The only theory that can be made use of psychoanalytically is theory that has been assimilated and modified to become personal knowledge. The extent to which psychoanalytic concepts are taught or learned, rather than recognized or reached through reflection, is the extent of the loss of their critical-reflective potential. This does not mean that psychoanalytic thought is confined to the ‘lowest common denominator’; just that interpretations have to be individually rather generally inspired, and should arise from the subjective or intersubjective situation rather than straight from the theoretical preconceptions of the individual.
Whatever the conceptual necessity of a mental or a physical theorization, we feel we should not have to choose between them in our minds, because in our lives we cannot: we can only choose the person.
We can now see why empirical-scientific or hermeneutic readings of psychoanalysis fail to satisfy. They enter into the theorizing process too late to encompass the whole of what psychoanalysis has to offer. The concept of the psychical implies foundations in which mental and physical explanations can in principle converge. The place at which the psychical arises is the place in which the ‘soul’ meets with its concrete ‘apparatus’. The question of how mental and physical explanations coincide cannot be answered, by psychoanalysis or anything else. It becomes, instead, the question of where they coincide. The answer seems to be: before they begin to diverge.
3… AT THE TIME WHEN ‘SCIENCES OF MAN’ BEGAN TO EMERGE
Dostoevsky is not only a philosopher, he is also a philosophical problem.
(“On Reading Dostoevsky”, George Florovsky)
“A survey of Russian critical literature on Dostoevsky’s works shows at once that with very few exceptions it does not rise above the spiritual level of Dostoevsky’s favorite characters. It does not dominate the material at hand, the material dominates it completely. It is still learning from Ivan Karamazov and Raskolnikov, from Stavrogin and the Grand Inquisitor, entangling itself in the same contradictions that entangled them, stopping in bewilderment before the problems that they failed to solve and bowing respectfully before their complex and tormenting experiences.”
Mikhail Bakhtin, 1929, p 6, quoting B. M. Engelhardt
Dostoevsky 1821-1881
Dostoyevsky (Dostoevsky), Fyodor (Feodor) Mikhailovich, Russian author, born in Moscow, on the 3oth of October 1821, was the second son of a retired military surgeon of a decayed noble family. He was educated at Moscow and at the military engineering academy in St. Petersburg, which he left in 1843 with the grade of sub-lieutenant. Next year his father died, and he resigned his commission in order to devote himself to literature thus commencing a long struggle with ill-health and penury.
In addition to the old Russian masters Gogol and Pushkin, Balzac and George Sand supplied him with literary ideals. He knew little of Dickens, but his first story is thoroughly Dickensian in character. The hero is a middle-aged man who entertains a pathetic, humble adoration for a fair young girl, a solitary waif like himself. Characteristically the Russian story ends in tender gloom. The girl marries a middle-aged wealthy man; the hero dies of a broken heart, and his funeral is described in lamentable detail. The germ of all Dostoyevsky’s imaginative work may be discovered here. The story was submitted in manu to the Russian critic, Bielinski, and excited him by its power over the emotions. It appeared in the course of 1846 under the title of Poor People. An English version, Poor Folk, with an introduction by George Moore, appeared in 1894. The successful author became a regular contributor of short tales to the Annals of the Country, a monthly periodical conducted by Kraevsky; but he was wretchedly paid, and his work, though revealing extraordinary power and intensity, commonly lacks both finish and proportion. Poverty and physical suffering robbed him of the joy of life and filled him with bitter thoughts and morbid imaginings.
During 1847 he became an enthusiastic member of the revolutionary reunions of the political agitator, Petrachevski. Many of the students and younger members did little more than discuss the theories of Fourier and other economists at these gatherings. Exaggerated reports were eventually carried to the police, and on the 23rd of April 1849 Dostoyevsky and his brother, with thirty other suspected members, were arrested. After a short examination by the secret police they were lodged in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul at St Petersburg, in which confinement Feodor wrote his story A Little Hero. On the 22nd of December 1849 the accused were all condemned to death. As the soldiers were preparing to carry out the sentence, the prisoners were informed that their penalty was commuted to exile in Siberia. The novelist’s sentence was, four years in Siberia and enforced military service in the ranks for life. On Christmas eve 1849 he started the long journey to Omsk, and remained in Siberia, like a man buried alive, nailed down in his coffin for four terrible years. His Siberian experiences are graphically narrated in a volume to which he gave the name of Recollections of a Dead-House (1858). It was known in an English translation as Buried Alive in Siberia (1881). Upon the accession of Alexander II., he was finally recalled from exile.
After herding for years with the worst Criminals, Dostoyevsky obtained an exceptional insight into the dark and seamy side of Russian life. He formed new conceptions of human life and of the Russian character. Psychological studies have seldom, if ever, found a more intense form of expression than that embodied by Dostoyevsky in his novel Crime and Punishment. The hero Raskolnikov is a poor student, who is led on to commit a murder partly by self conceit, partly by the contemplation of the abject misery around him. Unsurpassed in poignancy in the whole of modern literature is the sensation of compassion evoked by the scene between the self-tormented Raskolnikov and the humble street-walker, Sonia, whom he loves, and from whom, having confessed his crime, he derives the idea of expiation. Raskolnikov finally gives himself up to the police and is exiled to Siberia, whither Sonia follows him. The book gave currency to a number of ideas, not in any sense new, but specially characteristic of Dostoyevsky: the theory, for instance, that in every life, however fallen and degraded, there are ecstatic moments of self-devotion; the doctrine of purification by suffering, and by suffering alone; and the ideal of a Russian people forming a social state at some future period bound together by no obligation save mutual love and the magic of kindness. In this visionary prospect, as well as in his objection to the use of physical force, Dostoyevsky anticipated in a remarkable manner some of the conspicuous tenets of his great successor Tolstoy. The book electrified the reading public in Russia upon its appearance in 1866, and its fame was confirmed when it appeared in Paris in 1867. To his remarkable faculty self awakening reverberations of melancholy and compassion, as shown in his early work, Dostoyevsky had added, by the admission of all, a rare mastery over the emotions of terror and pity. But such mastery was not long to remain unimpaired. Crime and Punishment was written when he was at the zenith of his power. His remaining works exhibit frequently a marvelous tragic and analytic power, but they are unequal, and deficient in measure and in balance. The chief of them are: The Injured and the Insulted, The Demons (1867), The Idiot (I869), The Adult (1875), The Brothers Karamazov (1881).
From 1865, when he settled in St, Petersburg Dostoyevsky was absorbed in a succession of journalistic enterprises, and suffered severe gambling losses. He had to leave Russia, in order to escape his creditors, and to seek refuge in Germany and Italy. He was further harassed by troubles with his wife, and his work was interrupted by epileptic fits and other physical ailments. It was under such conditions as these that his most enduring works were created. He managed finally to return to Russia early in the seventies, and was for some time director of The Russian World.
The last eight years of his life were spent in comparative prosperity at St. Petersburg, where he died on the 9th of February 1881.
(From The Free Library By Farlex)
Dostoevsky’s works do not force one view of human freedom to be taken by the other. He provides no definite image of man. The presentation of freedom in this manner is a defense of man, a speaking on behalf of man against dissolution into the rhetoric that theology and science bring. It is worth observing that Dostoevsky wrote these novels at a time when “the sciences of man” were beginning to emerge. His artwork defends man against a dissolution into the acid bath of psychology, sociology, and economy, all of which sought to account for man’s being in terms of their own rhetoric.
(Dostoevsky’s Conception of Man: Its Impact on Philosophical Anthropology, by Peter Mcquire Wolf, PhD Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 1997, p 9)
Four facets may be distinguished in the rich personality of Dostoevsky:
the creative artist, the neurotic, the moralist and the sinner. How is one
to find one’s way in this bewildering complexity?
The creative artist is the least doubtful: Dostoevsky’s place is not far behind Shakespeare. The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written; the episode of the Grand Inquisitor, one of the peaks in the literature of the world, can hardly be valued too highly. Before the problem of the creative artist analysis, alas, lay down its arms.
… I included Dostoevsky the psychologist under the creative artist. Another objection I might have raised against him was that his insight was so much restricted to abnormal mental life. Consider his astonishing helplessness in face of the phenomena of love. All he really knew were crude, instinctual desire, masochistic subjection and loving out of pity. … in spite of all my admiration for Dostoevsky’s intensity and pre-eminence, I do not really like him. That is because my patience with pathological natures is exhausted in analysis. In art and life I am intolerant of them.
(Freud, S.E. 21, p 177 & 196)
Traditional interpretation of literature from a psychoanalytic standpoint has relied extensively upon the work of Sigmund Freud. In the case of Dostoevsky, however, this method is both anachronistic and inadequate. Dostoevsky's great works, considered individually or holistically, though fictional, established him as one of the forefathers of psychoanalysis, and a predecessor to Freud. Indeed Freud himself acknowledged that "the poets" discovered the unconscious before he did, stating further in a letter to Stefan Zweig, "Dostoevsky 'cannot be understood without psychoanalysis- i.e., he isn't in need of it because he illustrates it himself in every character and every sentence.'"
Louis Breger seems to present the most comprehensive and adequate approach to psychology in Dostoevsky. While building upon Freud, he rejects the simplicity and atomistic nature of his analysis: "Too often, applications to literature have relied on particular psychoanalytic observations- the Oedipus complex, the primal scene,- or some version of theory- orthodox Freudian, Lacanian. But observations and theory can only be guidelines in the application of the method."
Breger argues here, that Freudian methods of analysis tend to think of the author as patient, and believes rather, in the case of Dostoevsky, that he should be considered a fellow psychoanalyst. "What is most characteristic in [Dostoevsky] is the presence of multiple points of view; he is never, as an author, completely identified with one character.”
(Dostoevsky and Psychology, by Dan Cantrell)
THE UNDERGROUND MAN: BACKGROUND OF THE MODERN SELF
There are many possible beginnings. Any one of a number of incidents in the literature of the last century might serve to dramatize the special and very complex issues and languages of the modern self. Nineteenth-century Russian literature offers a usefully consistent and varied succession of events, none so pertinent as Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. (1864)
(Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self, by Frederick Hoffman, Southern Illinois University Press, 1962)
Dostoevsky and psychology (Chap 7)
In Dostoevsky's time, the boundary between science and philosophy was as indistinct as it had been before Socrates, and the study of the psyche merged inseparably with that of religion, politics and all of nature. As a man of his times, Dostoevsky knew a number of psychological systems: some entered his imagery and his cultural awareness; some shaped the way he described his characters; and the struggle between two of these systems interacted with his most basic social ideas. He knew the Renaissance theory of the four humours, … had also encountered the ancient science of physiognomy, which discovered character in facial features …But like most of his contemporaries, he drew his central psychological doctrines from two great traditions, both thousands of years old, but both growing directly out of eighteenth-century thinking: the tradition of the neurologists, and that of the alienists. …Dostoevsky had grown up in a charity hospital and shared lodgings later on with a doctor, and his sympathies lay far closer to the healers than to the scientistic researchers who were remaking psychology in his own lifetime. …Dostoevsky was more like his contemporary, Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93), who used both hypnotism and neurology at the Salpetrière in Paris to produce the great synthesis of these two psychological schools. When Charcot's student, Freud, went on to generate one of the chief psychological systems of the twentieth century, he expressed his indebtedness not only to his medical mentors, but also to the insights of Dostoevsky, probably without realizing that they had the same intellectual underpinnings.
He made the psychological novel a philosophical instrument by exploring the relation between characters' ideas and their drives and personalities. …He makes us feel psychology as part of a novelistic whole.
(The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevsky, by W. J. Leatherbarrow, Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Mikhail Bakhtin, 1895-1975
Bakhtin is especially known for his work on the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoyevskogo (1929; 2nd ed., 1963, retitled Problemy poetiki Dostoyevskogo; Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics), which he published under his own name just before he was arrested. It is considered one of the finest critical works on Dostoyevsky. In the book Bakhtin expressed his belief in a mutual relation between meaning and context involving the author, the work, and the reader, each constantly affecting and influencing the others, and the whole influenced by existing political and social forces. Bakhtin further developed this theory of polyphony, or “dialogics,” in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (1975; The Dialogic Imagination), in which he postulated that, rather than being static, language evolves dynamically and is affected by and affects the culture that produces and uses it.
("Bakhtin, Mikhail." Encyclop?dia Britannica. 2006.)
A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristics of Dostoevsky’s novels. … Dostoevsky’s major heroes are, by the very nature of his creative design, not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse. In no way, then, can a character’s discourse be exhausted by the usual s of characterization and plot development, nor does it serve as a vehicle for the author’s own ideological position. The consciousness of a character is given as someone else’s consciousness, another consciousness, yet at the same time it is not turned into an object, is not closed, does not become a simple object of the author’s consciousness.
(Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, by Mikhail Bakhtin, 1929 (1984), p 6-7)
Mikhail Bakhtin has been given a place in the canon of modern literary theory because, according to Julia Kristeva, he began the deconstruction of character and mimesis, thereby invalidating Russian Formalism's assumptions of representation and transcendence and becoming a precursor of poststructuralism. The semiotics of Kristeva and the deconstruction of Derrida have as one of their main tenets the decentering or break-up of the unified "I" or transcendental ego, based on the theories of Freud, Nietszche, Lacan, and others. Both Kristeva and Derrida wish to expose the fallaciousness of Husserl's transcendental Being and ego, a last remnant of physical idealism, because this is a product and prisoner of logic, law, theology, and the masculine - hence the term "phalologocentric," denoting the law/logic of the father, which is seen by both Kristeva and Derrida as tyrranous.
Bakhtin claims that Dostoevsky was the first author of the polyphonic novel which presents speaking subjects instead of defined characters, and in which the author's voice, instead of controlling the discourse from above, descends into the polyphony of clashing ideologies and sounds with no more authority than the voices of characters with different views. Critics such as Roland Barthes see in this polyphony the "death" of the author and the birth of the reader.
My purpose here is to show how Bakhtin, although he can be seen as a precursor if modern semiotics and deconstruction, does not deny the authorial voice in Dostoevsky, does not claim that Dostoevsky has lost control of his characters, and does not completely deconstruct the "I."
We can remember the existential maxim that not to take a position is to take a position. Not to judge monologically is to make a serious statement about the worth and dignity of the individual and to celebrate the birth, not the death, of the "I", which is - or can be - the result of its spiritual communion with others.
(Bakhtin, Dostoevsky, and the Status of the "I", by Barbara Z. Thaden, Dostoevsky Studies, Vol 8, 1987, p 200-207)
This book will try to show that Dostoevsky’s philosophy, though not constituting a “system” in the traditional sense, has a strong single focus. Like that of most Russian philosophers, it is decidedly anthropocentric: it was prompted not by abstract cosmological and epistemological concerns but by an obsession with humanity. More precisely, Dostoevsky wishes to understand the condition of being human, or as he put it in a late notebook, “to find the man in man” (27:65). Intellectually this absorption in philosophical anthropology was so intense as to co-opt and transform all his other concerns. Whatever subject he took up --- religion, art, the state, history, morality --- he was interested above all in its human significance and specifically in what clues he could find in it to the question of what it means to be human.
At an early age Dostoevsky announced his view of humanity as a puzzle to be solved and committed himself to the work of solving it. In a letter written when he was seventeen to his older brother Mikhail, he speaks of studying “what man and life mean.” “Man is a mystery,” he goes on. “The mystery must be solved, and if you work at solving it all your life, don’t say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery because I wish to be a man” (28/I: 63). These words could easily be dismissed as juvenile romanticism but for the fact that he did work at it all his life, incorporating the quest in some way in virtually everything he wrote.
… These two aims, analytic and critical, are pursued in six chapters, each devoted to an area in which Dostoevsky advanced and defended philosophical positions. If for the sake of simplicity we phrase his dominant philosophical concern in the language of Immanuel Kant’s blunt question, “What is man?”, we can say that Dostoevsky’s philosophical views, taken as a whole, form a set of complementary answers to that question, each reflecting a different perspective on the nature, capacities, and prospects of humanity. Each incorporates views that fall under traditional rubrics of philosophy such as physics, ethics, and aesthetics, but Dostoevsky himself did not formulate them in that way. To him what was important was that they captured some significance aspect of human life and work.
…We have the Nihilists to thank for the themes of much of his writing --- not only the notebooks, letters, and essays that have loomed so large in this study but also most of his great fiction, including Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. … We also have them to thank for the dialectical method of his philosophizing, by which I mean its dynamic counterposing of competing views. Each concerned with combating with ideas of others, Dostoevsky always kept his sights on the opposite of what he believed and sought to establish his own positions by demonstrating the failure of their antitheses, as in his frequent recourse to the rhetorical and logical device of reduction ad absurdum. In that way his philosophical thinking was inherently polyphonic and dialogical, to use the Bakhtin’s terms. The character of Dostoevsky’s post-Siberian novels was no matter of accident or purely stylistic preference: the dialogical novels were a natural complement to his dialectical approach to the problems of philosophy.
(Dostoevsky The Thinker, by James Scanlan, Cornell University Press, 2002, p 9-10, 231)
4.ENDNOTE
The sole raison deter of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.
The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes, in The Art of the Novel, by Milan Kundera, Grove Press, 1986, p 5-6
C.S.: I’d like to discuss the aesthetic of your novels. But where shall we
begin?
M.K.: With this assertion: My novels are not psychological. More precisely: They lie outside the aesthetic of the novel normally termed psychological.
… All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped? It is one of the those fundamental questions on which the novel, as novel, is based. … For Proust, a man’s interior universe comprises a miracle, an infinity that never ceases to amaze us. But that is not what amazes Kafka. He does not ask what internal motivations determine man’s behavior. He asks a question that is radically different: What possibilities remain for man in a world where the external determinants have become so overpowering that internal impulses no longer carry weight? Indeed, how could it have changed K.’s destiny and attitude if he had had homosexual inclinations or an unhappy love affair behind him? In no way.
… But understand me: If I locate myself outside the so-called psychological novel, that does not mean that I wish to deprive my characters of an interior life. It means only that there are other enigmas, other questions that my novels pursue primarily. Nor does it mean I object to novels that are fascinated by psychology. In fact, the change in the situation since Proust makes me nostalgic. …
… What lies beyond the so-called psychological novel? Or, put another way: What is the nonpsychological means to apprehend the self? To apprehend the self in my novels means to grasp the essence of its existential problem. To grasp its existential code. … made up of certain key words. … You see, I don’t show you what happens inside Jaromil’s head; rather, I show what happens inside my own: I observe my Jaromil for a long while, and I try, step by step, to get to the heart of his attitude, in order to understand it, name it, grasp it. … the whole novel is nothing but one long interrogation. Meditative interrogation (interrogative meditation) is the basis on which all my novels are constructed. … making a character “alive” means: getting to the bottom of his existential problem. Which in turn means: getting to the bottom of some situations, some motifs, even some words that shape him. Nothing more.
C.S.: It’s phenomenological.
M.K.: The adjective isn’t bad, but I make it a rule not to use it. I’m too fearful to the professors for whom art is only a derivative of philosophical and theoretical trends. The novel dealt with the unconscious before Freud, the class struggle before Marx, it practiced phenomenology (the investigation of the essence of human situations) before the phenomenologists. What superb “phenomenological deions” in Proust, who never even knew a phenomenologist!
… two things should not be confused: there is on the one hand the novel that examines the historical dimension of human existence, and on the other the novel that is the illustration of a historical situation, the deion of a society at a given moment, a novelized historiography.
C.S.: But what specifically can the novel say about history? Or, what is
your way of treating history?
M.K.: … First: All historical circumstances I treat with the greatest economy. … Second: Of the historical circumstances, I keep only those that create a revelatory existential situation for my characters. … Third: Historiography writes the history of society, not of man. That is why the historical events my novels talk about are often forgotten by historiography. … But it is the fourth principle that goes furthest: Not only must historical circumstance create a new existential situation for a character in a novel, but History itself must be understood and analyzed as an existential situation. …
Well, I’ll never tire of repeating: The novel’s sole raison deter is to say
what only the novel can say.
(Part Two: Dialogue on the Art of the Novel, an edited dialogue with Christian Salmon in 1983, in The Art of the Novel, by Milan Kundera, 1986, p 21-44)
“From the European writers, we can and should pick up their greater emphasis on what they call ‘philosophical anthropology’, that is, the attempt to define man, and the differences between man and any other species, between man and objects, and between man and robots. What are his unique and defining characteristics? What is so essential to man that without it he would no longer be defined as a man?”
What Psychology Can Learn from the Existentialists? In ‘Toward a Psychology of Being’, Abraham Maslow, 1962, p 9-15
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
---Albert Camus---
今年三月二十五日，俄國出版了兩張光碟，光碟上有一百三十萬個名字，是斯大林恐怖政治的受難者。看到報紙上的這個消息，儘管先前已經讀過不少有關書籍，知道斯大林的迫害規模之大和程度之深，我還是深感震動。一百三十萬，多麼大的數字。這是一百三十萬個人，曾經像我們一樣存在過的生命。
學校圖書館的俄文採購應我的請求去訂這套光碟。俄國製作人回信說他們不收費，只是經費有限，不能用快件寄來。好多個星期之後，光碟寄到了。我把光碟插進電腦打開。在首頁上首先看到了’1345796’ 數字。這就是報紙說的「一百三十萬」的受難者數字。光碟裡有他們的名字，履歷，還有照片。一個人一個人地陳列出來，總數準確到個位數。人的單位本來就是「個」，而不是「萬」。
… 有一個年輕人做了一些特別的事情。一九六四年出生的狄馬?尤拉索夫，像其他同齡孩子一樣，當局不提過去的政策使他們對斯大林時代的歷史一無所知。他在高中時偶然讀到關於迫害殺戮以及斯大林死後的「平反」。但是當時正是新斯大林主義氣氛籠罩的時候，連他的母親也不跟他談過去的事情。他立志學習歷史。他成績優異，卻沒有去考名牌大學，而是進了歷史檔案館，查找事實記錄。後來他被徵兵，他寫的歷史小說手稿被人告發了，手稿被沒收，他被迫「檢討」。後來到最高法院當了職員。他設計了一張受難者的標準表格，包括姓名，年齡，出生年月，死亡時間，民族，黨派，社會背景，最後的工作地點和被捕前的身份，被逮捕和迫害的事實，平反狀況等。在十八個月裡，他做了十萬張受難者的卡片。此事被上司發現後，他被開除，改行當卡車司機。
一九八七年，在作家中心的一個集會上，開始的發言者們都只是用一些隱喻和拐彎抹角的話來談論過去。老一代的人慣於用這種方式說話，他們最直接的抱怨僅僅是得不到資訊。狄馬產生了受挫感。在散會之前，這個二十三歲的年輕人走上台去，描述了他做的工作，他說他已經收集了十二萬三千張受難者卡片。他告訴聽眾，他看到了最高法院院長給赫魯曉夫的機密信件，從一九五三年到一九五七年，六十萬人得到了平反，從一九六三到一九六七年，又有六十一萬二千五百人得到了平反。聽眾被深深震動。主持會議的一位年老的歷史學者激動地說：「這個年輕人知道得比我們都多。我對他非常感激。」
在這十二萬三千名字之後，名字繼續增加。2000年，發行了上面有六十萬個受難者的光碟。然後，這個數字又增加了一倍。… 俄國人已經把一百三十萬個受難者的名字書寫出來了。他們沒有覺得名單太長、沒有人會感興趣。他們堅持努力，不但為受難者平反，也記載他們的名字和遭遇。他們堅持要還給死者名字和尊嚴，實際上也是為生者的存在作肯定。他們所完成的，是他們個人的努力成果，同時也讓我們看到了托爾斯泰與陀思妥耶夫斯基的俄國的偉大人文傳統。
(俄國出版百萬政治受難者光碟, 王友琴, 香港開放雜誌, Nov 2004)
*中國文革受難者紀念園 www.chinese-memorial.org 王友琴
REFERENCE:
1.The Freud Wars: An Introduction To The Philosophy Of
Psychoanalysis, by Lavinia Gomez, Routledge, 2005
2.Facing Human Suffering: Psychology and Psychotherapy As Moral Engagement, by Ronald B. Miller, American Psychological Association, 2004
3. Apprehending the Inaccessible : Freudian Psychoanalysis and Existential Phenomenology, by Richard Askay, Jensen Farquhar, Northwestern University Press, 2006
4. Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition: Philosophies of Life and Their Impact on Practice, ed. by Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg, New York University Press, 1998
5. Psychoanalysis and Existential Philosophy, ed. by Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek, Dutton, 1962
6. Dostoevsky and Parricide, by Sigmund Freud, S.E., 21, p 177-195, 1928, with Appendix: A Letter from Freud to Theodor Reik, ibid, p 195-196
7. Dostoevsky’s Conception of Man: Its Impact on Philosophical Anthropology, by Peter Mcquire Wolf, PhD Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 1997
8. Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. by Walter Kaufmann, Plume Books, 1988
9. Dostoevsky: The Author As Psychoanalyst, by Louis Breger, New York University Press, 1989
10.Dostoevsky The Thinker, by James Scanlan, Cornell University Press, 2002
11.Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, by Mikhail Bakhtin, University of Minnesota Press, 1984
12.Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision, by Louis Breger, Wiley, 2000
13.The Art of the Novel, by Milan Kundera, Grove Press, 1986
APPENDIX:
1. Prologue: The Horse, the Courier & Chap 1: The Author as Psychoanalyst, in Dosteovsky: The Author as Psychoanalyst, by Louis Breger, NYU Press, 1989, p 1-13
2. Part One: The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes & Part Two: Dialogue on the Art of the Novel, in The Art of the Novel, by Milan Kundera, Grove Press, 1986, p 3-44www.psychspace.com心理学空间网
與人的現象與經驗
的理解架構
與回到人的現象與經驗
March 1, 2006
醴陵張凱理
題綱
1. 引言: 來信回信及其它
2. BEFORE THEY BEGAN TO DIVERGE …
3. … AT A TIME WHEN ‘THE SCIENCES OF MAN’ WERE BEGINNING TO EMERGE
4. ENDNOTE
REFERENCE
APPENDIX: BREGER, 1989, P 1-13; KUNDERA, 1986, P 3-44
1.引言: 來信回信及其它
Subject: Russian man (Feb 8, 2006)
I try to read through your material, slowly.
Today, I help to do the psychological test (WASI), and the subject is a Russian. I don't have time to know his background. I know he uses cocaine i.v. injection, which is very very rare, dangerous and extreme.
He is young, nice, sweet, and has strong accent. He carried a big black bag when he entered my office. Generally speaking, the interview was smooth, although he was very frustrated about his performance. Then he went to the exam room for blood test, at that time, we had a chance to see into his black bag. Some nasty clothes, a tourniquet, cigarettes and a knife.
A knife, big and shinning, reminds me of the reality.
It's hard to express what I feel, but I knew I spent time with a Russian man, his knife and many stories that I don't have chance to know, or better not to know.
* * * * * *
The reality is always more frightening than our theories.
That piece of talk is supposed to be given on March 1. Two main points: (1) The psychoanalytic theories are protective barriers between us and the reality. Though they are also meant to illuminate the latter. (2) Take Dostoevsky for an example, who interestingly lived and wrote before the birth of psychoanalysis. His works are wonderfully complex and polyphonic (to use Bakhtin’s term). And that is exactly what reality is, in his times, in Freud’s times, and in our own.
Therefore, two phrases are the key points: “before they began to diverge …” and “(he wrote) at the time when the ‘sciences of man’ were beginning to emerge”.
If I am an eternal student, then let it be student of that reality.
* * * * * *
... We were both slightly over twenty years old. I was then residing in Petersburg; one year before I resigned from the engineers' corps, not knowing why, full of vague and uncertain aspirations. This was in May, 1845. Early in the winter, suddenly, I began to write Poor Folks, my first novel; before that I had never written anything. ... In the evening of the same day that I submitted the manu (to Grigorovich and Nekrasov), I went far off to visit a former friend of mine. All night we spoke about Dead Souls and read the novel for how long a time --- I don't remember. In those days it used to be this way among young men; two or three of them would get together: "Gentlemen, shall we read Gogol?" --- They would sit down and read, sometimes, all night. ... I returned home at four o'clock, in a white Petersburg night, bright as a day. The weather was beautiful and warm, and upon entering my apartment I did not go to bed, but opened the window and seated myself in front of it. Suddenly I heard the bell ring. This surprised me very much. Presently Grigorovich and Nekrasov rushed upon me and in a perfect transport started embracing me, and both were almost crying. ... In the evening they came home early, took my manu and began to read it, just for a test. "We shall be able to judge from the first ten pages." But having read ten pages, they decided to read ten more pages, and thereupon, without interruption, they sat all night till morning reading aloud and taking turns when one grew tired. ... “He is reading about the student’s death,” --- Grigorovich later told me, when we were alone --- “and suddenly I notice, in that place where the father runs behind the coffin, Nekrasov’s voice begins to falter, once, then a second time, and then, losing control over himself, he raps upon the manu with his palm, exclaiming: ‘The rascal!’ --- meaning you. And thus all night.” …After they had finsihed reading (112 pages in all), they unanimously decided to call on me immediately: "What does it matter that he is sleeping! We'll wake him up. This is more important than sleep!" ...
(The Diary of A Writer, by F.M. Dostoevsky, George Braziller, 1954, p 584-585)
Back in Rockville, Frieda buried herself in work. As millions of Europeans were being slaughtered or forced into exile … Frieda focused, as always, on the individual. Hilde Bruch recalled her reaction to the Pearl Harbor. … “Then came the meeting on December 8, 1941 [the day Roosevelt issued his declaration on war]. …This evening stands out vividly in my memory,” Bruch later wrote. “Everybody talked about what he or she was going to do for the war effort, and everybody had grandiose ideas. Frieda said very quietly, ‘I know what I’m going to do. I’ll do what I know best. I’ll do psychotherapy.’
(To Redeem One Person Is To Redeem The World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, by Gail A. Hornstein, Free Press, 2000, p 117)
Most critiques of contemporary scientific approaches to clinical psychology are built on the European philosophical traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics. ... the approach I take here is to mine the riches of common sense and the unanalyzed notion of knowing people well in everyday day that is taken for granted by both logical positivist and hermeneutic approaches to science. In this way, my approach resembles more that of the philosopher Stephen Toulmin than it does the European Husserl or Heidegger. ...
I approach the moral engagement of clinical psychology in this book by examination of four topics: the concept of suffering, the analysis of the concept of knowing people well in everyday life, the nature of clinical knowledge, and the narrative clinical case study as a vehicle uniquely suited for the scholarly communication of morally engaged clinical knowledge.
(Facing Human Suffering: Psychology and Psychotherapy As Moral
Engagement, by Ronald B. Miller, American Psychological Association, 2004, p xi)
"賓雁曾經對我說過：我祇希望將來在我的墓碑上，寫上這麼一行字：「長眠於此的這個
中國人，曾做了他應該做的事，說了他自己應該說的話。」我知道賓雁還有很多話想跟我們
說，想對他牽念的祖國的父老鄉親說.可是，他也許再也沒有力氣說出來了。他在生命的最
後時光，最惦記的還是中國老百姓的自由和民主，幸福和權利，他為此奮鬥、拚搏了一生。
在他在進入昏迷以前，對身邊親友說的最清晰的一句話是：「將來，我們想起今天這樣的日
子，會非常有意思。」我想，這是他的最大的遺願。" （2005年12月4日上午9時 於賓雁彌留之際）
(賓雁的遺願, 朱洪, Beijing Spring, Vol 152, p 10, Jan, 2006)
2.BEFORE THEY BEGAN TO DIVERGE …
The Freud Wars: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, by Lavinia Gomez, Routledge, 2005
The premises of Object Relations (Gomez, 1997) led to the premises of psychoanalysis itself. After too many wrong turnings and blind alleys, the focus of this book emerged: how can psychoanalytic thinking be justified? … How do we know what we know? Can science explain everything? And that enduring enigma, whatever is a person?
How Can Psychoanalytic Thinking Be Justified?
* * * * * *
Chap 1. Introduction: What sort of subject might psychoanalysis be?
The aim is to work towards an understanding of psychoanalysis through its central concept, the unconscious …
1. The context of the enquiry
“The Freud Wars”:
‘The Unknown Freud’ (Crews, 1993) condemns the whole edifice of psychoanalysis as a vast confidence trick played on suggestible patients and an unwary public by an unscrupulous and self-seeking psychoanalytic establishment. … Crew’s objections to psychoanalysis’ claim to scientific status are drawn largely from Grunbaum’s work. (The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique, Adolf Grunbaum, 1984)
Psychoanalysis, Thomas Nagel (1994) argues, introduces a new way of thinking which has triumphantly succeeded in transforming our views of what a person is, within a broader conception of empirical science.
The two philosophers’ opposing views form the centerpiece of an eighteen-month debate, with philosophers, psychoanalysts, academic psychologists and others all joining in. … The two critiques give us a solid platform from which to assess the scientific credentials of psychoanalysis.
One question which is never considered throughout the erupting debate is whether psychoanalysis should be categorized as a science in the first place. The possibility of classing it with the humanities is not even entertained.
This enquiry would be incomplete without a critique which puts psychoanalysis forward as an interpretative or ‘hermeneutic’ subject. The inaugural hermeneutic critique by Jurgen Habermas (1971) seems a particularly appropriate example, as a reading which Grunbaum explicitly and Nagel implicitly rejects.
Empirical and hermeneutic principles:
There are thus two questions for this enquiry to consider. Can psychoanalysis be justified at all? And should its acceptance of rejection depend on scientific or hermeneutic principles of knowledge? …
The empirical-hermeneutic distinction is a dichotomy which goes back to the very root of Western thought. … the etymology brings out their essential meaning. … ‘Empirical’ derives from ‘empeiria’ --- experience --- referring to the sensory experience by which we come to know a world outside ourselves; ‘hermeneutics’ is related to Hermes, messenger of the gods and symbol of communication. … The empirical science looks at phenomena from the outside. It uses the language of mechanics, going back to the physical laws and concepts through which we understand the material world. … Hermeneutic approaches explain phenomena --- sometimes the same phenomena --- from the inside. Their explanations are couched in the subjective language of desire and belief, value and intention, emotion and experience. These terms reflect the background of personal meaning and purpose which differentiates the action of a person from the output of a system, or a state of mind from a state of matter.
‘Science’, in itself, means nothing more than an organized body of theory. However, it has become overwhelmingly identified with ‘empirical science’, often with the implication that this kind of knowledge is more ‘real’ than any other kind. … Hermeneutic theorists such as Habermas challenge these assumptions. They claim that the knowledge represented by developed interpretational systems is just as legitimate as that of empirical systems, and should therefore be called ‘hermeneutic science’.
2. The theoretical background
The ‘mental’, the ‘physical’ and the ‘psychical’:
The sources of the confusion in psychoanalysis go back to its point of departure. … Freud developed psychoanalysis as one of a number of contemporaneous attempts to solve the most frustrating puzzle of 19th-century psychiatry. (i.e. hysteria) … ‘Psychical reality’ is Freud’s third area, lying between the physical and the mental realms, but conceivable only in mental or physical terms. … yet the psychical has no language of its own …
The three levels of psychoanalytic theory:
Each level treats the concept of the ‘psychical’ in its own way. The clinical theories approach it through the work of mental reality; the psychological models and theories, through the work of physical reality. The psychological foundations state formally that there must be a point of meeting between the two.
… the clinical theories cover all psychoanalytic concepts that can be expressed in the language of experience, and are themselves something to be explained. … Freud’s way of explaining them is termed the ‘psychology’, a word Freud coins as a direct counterpart to ‘physics’. ‘physics’ and ‘psychology’ refer to the ‘first principles’ of the sciences of physics and psychology respectively. … physical and psychological theories and principles are unprovable, since by definition there can be no deeper theoretical level on which ‘first principles’ can rest. …
Freud’s main psychological proposition is that psychical phenomena can be thought of in three different ways: ‘when we have succeeded in describing a psychical process in its dynamic, topographical and economic aspects, we should speak of it as a psychological presentation’ (Freud, S.E. 14, p 181, 1915)
… the clinical theories form the ground of explanation for Freud’s psychoanalytic observations, and the psychological models and theories form the ground of the clinical theories. … but they are still not the absolute foundation of psychoanalysis. This is to be found in the presuppositions they carry, which set out the unconditioned starting-point for psychoanalytic theorization. … the two fundamental hypotheses … the first hypothesis proposes that the psyche has to be conceived as a complex ‘apparatus’, with mental activity as its output … ‘the majority of philosophers … declare that the idea of something psychical being unconscious is self-contradictory. But this is precisely what psychoanalysis is obliged to assert, and this is its second fundamental hypothesis’ (Freud, S.E. 23, p 158, 1938) … thus Freud’s deion of the psyche is of a quasi-physical ‘apparatus’ churning out a continuous stream of quasi-mental ‘processes’ … the conception of the psychical as the primary psychophysical reality …
These two hypotheses are still not the most fundamental level of psychoanalysis. This is to be found in the ‘basic assumption’ and ultimate bedrock of Freud’s psychoanalysis: that a theory of mental life must begin with the unified conception of processes which are usually cast in either physical or mental terms. … The task of psychoanalysis is to ‘(act) as an intermediary between biology and psychology’ (Freud, S.E. 13, p 182, 1913)
* * * * * *
Chap 5: The apparatus of the soul: how can mental and physical explanations coincide?
… turns away from conventional work to the thinking behind Freud’s theories, in a search for the roots of their strange theoretical ambiguity. We find that this goes back to the very beginning of his thought. His underlying philosophy is neither wholly scientific nor purely interpretative. He seems to hold a picture of reality which pre-empts the division into the mental and physical modes on which empirical and hermeneutic approaches rest. …
Together with Freud’s thinking, the work of the philosophers Sebastian Gardner (Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, 1993) and Peter Strawson (Individuals: An Essay in Deive physics, 1959) (‘Deive physics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary physics is concerned to produce a better structure’. ibid, p 9) suggest the basis for a new foundational approach which seems to come from within psychoanalysis itself. Instead of the empirical basis in the body, or the hermeneutic basis in the mind, psychoanalysis goes back to the psychophysical basis of the person, as the source from which all thinking must arise.
* * * * * *
Chap 6. Conclusions
… based on the intimate association between psychoanalysis and the ‘pre-theoretical’ psychology of everyday living … allows the practical foundational principle to be drawn out … the ground of the psychical is neither the mind of hermeneutic approaches nor the body of empirical approaches. It can only be the person, as the irreducibly psychophysical holder of the psychical reality from which all knowledge derives.
… psychoanalysis defines itself as reflection on a self, by a self; directly, or by attunement with another. Psychoanalysis is most secure on the basis that there is no specialized arena, no technical or linguistic model of knowing or knowledge to which it must accede. It is not a hermeneutic theory, since its material is treated as ‘real’ rather than ‘merely’ symbolic. Neither is it an empirical science, because its concepts and explanations must be reachable, and reached, through reflections alone. Perhaps it could be described as systematic enquiry into the unspoken explanation of oneself, at a generalized level, and taking both mental and physical convictions into account.
The subject matter of psychoanalysis, its method and its underlying nature are all centred in reflection, making psychoanalytic thinking even less fixed and more ‘critical’ than psychoanalytic theory itself. In psychoanalysis more than in any other subject, theoretical consolidation and theoretical renewal pull against each other. Experience and reflection lead to both the establishment and the challenge of theoretical concepts and structures. The only theory that can be made use of psychoanalytically is theory that has been assimilated and modified to become personal knowledge. The extent to which psychoanalytic concepts are taught or learned, rather than recognized or reached through reflection, is the extent of the loss of their critical-reflective potential. This does not mean that psychoanalytic thought is confined to the ‘lowest common denominator’; just that interpretations have to be individually rather generally inspired, and should arise from the subjective or intersubjective situation rather than straight from the theoretical preconceptions of the individual.
Whatever the conceptual necessity of a mental or a physical theorization, we feel we should not have to choose between them in our minds, because in our lives we cannot: we can only choose the person.
We can now see why empirical-scientific or hermeneutic readings of psychoanalysis fail to satisfy. They enter into the theorizing process too late to encompass the whole of what psychoanalysis has to offer. The concept of the psychical implies foundations in which mental and physical explanations can in principle converge. The place at which the psychical arises is the place in which the ‘soul’ meets with its concrete ‘apparatus’. The question of how mental and physical explanations coincide cannot be answered, by psychoanalysis or anything else. It becomes, instead, the question of where they coincide. The answer seems to be: before they begin to diverge.
3… AT THE TIME WHEN ‘SCIENCES OF MAN’ BEGAN TO EMERGE
Dostoevsky is not only a philosopher, he is also a philosophical problem.
(“On Reading Dostoevsky”, George Florovsky)
“A survey of Russian critical literature on Dostoevsky’s works shows at once that with very few exceptions it does not rise above the spiritual level of Dostoevsky’s favorite characters. It does not dominate the material at hand, the material dominates it completely. It is still learning from Ivan Karamazov and Raskolnikov, from Stavrogin and the Grand Inquisitor, entangling itself in the same contradictions that entangled them, stopping in bewilderment before the problems that they failed to solve and bowing respectfully before their complex and tormenting experiences.”
Mikhail Bakhtin, 1929, p 6, quoting B. M. Engelhardt
Dostoevsky 1821-1881
Dostoyevsky (Dostoevsky), Fyodor (Feodor) Mikhailovich, Russian author, born in Moscow, on the 3oth of October 1821, was the second son of a retired military surgeon of a decayed noble family. He was educated at Moscow and at the military engineering academy in St. Petersburg, which he left in 1843 with the grade of sub-lieutenant. Next year his father died, and he resigned his commission in order to devote himself to literature thus commencing a long struggle with ill-health and penury.
In addition to the old Russian masters Gogol and Pushkin, Balzac and George Sand supplied him with literary ideals. He knew little of Dickens, but his first story is thoroughly Dickensian in character. The hero is a middle-aged man who entertains a pathetic, humble adoration for a fair young girl, a solitary waif like himself. Characteristically the Russian story ends in tender gloom. The girl marries a middle-aged wealthy man; the hero dies of a broken heart, and his funeral is described in lamentable detail. The germ of all Dostoyevsky’s imaginative work may be discovered here. The story was submitted in manu to the Russian critic, Bielinski, and excited him by its power over the emotions. It appeared in the course of 1846 under the title of Poor People. An English version, Poor Folk, with an introduction by George Moore, appeared in 1894. The successful author became a regular contributor of short tales to the Annals of the Country, a monthly periodical conducted by Kraevsky; but he was wretchedly paid, and his work, though revealing extraordinary power and intensity, commonly lacks both finish and proportion. Poverty and physical suffering robbed him of the joy of life and filled him with bitter thoughts and morbid imaginings.
During 1847 he became an enthusiastic member of the revolutionary reunions of the political agitator, Petrachevski. Many of the students and younger members did little more than discuss the theories of Fourier and other economists at these gatherings. Exaggerated reports were eventually carried to the police, and on the 23rd of April 1849 Dostoyevsky and his brother, with thirty other suspected members, were arrested. After a short examination by the secret police they were lodged in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul at St Petersburg, in which confinement Feodor wrote his story A Little Hero. On the 22nd of December 1849 the accused were all condemned to death. As the soldiers were preparing to carry out the sentence, the prisoners were informed that their penalty was commuted to exile in Siberia. The novelist’s sentence was, four years in Siberia and enforced military service in the ranks for life. On Christmas eve 1849 he started the long journey to Omsk, and remained in Siberia, like a man buried alive, nailed down in his coffin for four terrible years. His Siberian experiences are graphically narrated in a volume to which he gave the name of Recollections of a Dead-House (1858). It was known in an English translation as Buried Alive in Siberia (1881). Upon the accession of Alexander II., he was finally recalled from exile.
After herding for years with the worst Criminals, Dostoyevsky obtained an exceptional insight into the dark and seamy side of Russian life. He formed new conceptions of human life and of the Russian character. Psychological studies have seldom, if ever, found a more intense form of expression than that embodied by Dostoyevsky in his novel Crime and Punishment. The hero Raskolnikov is a poor student, who is led on to commit a murder partly by self conceit, partly by the contemplation of the abject misery around him. Unsurpassed in poignancy in the whole of modern literature is the sensation of compassion evoked by the scene between the self-tormented Raskolnikov and the humble street-walker, Sonia, whom he loves, and from whom, having confessed his crime, he derives the idea of expiation. Raskolnikov finally gives himself up to the police and is exiled to Siberia, whither Sonia follows him. The book gave currency to a number of ideas, not in any sense new, but specially characteristic of Dostoyevsky: the theory, for instance, that in every life, however fallen and degraded, there are ecstatic moments of self-devotion; the doctrine of purification by suffering, and by suffering alone; and the ideal of a Russian people forming a social state at some future period bound together by no obligation save mutual love and the magic of kindness. In this visionary prospect, as well as in his objection to the use of physical force, Dostoyevsky anticipated in a remarkable manner some of the conspicuous tenets of his great successor Tolstoy. The book electrified the reading public in Russia upon its appearance in 1866, and its fame was confirmed when it appeared in Paris in 1867. To his remarkable faculty self awakening reverberations of melancholy and compassion, as shown in his early work, Dostoyevsky had added, by the admission of all, a rare mastery over the emotions of terror and pity. But such mastery was not long to remain unimpaired. Crime and Punishment was written when he was at the zenith of his power. His remaining works exhibit frequently a marvelous tragic and analytic power, but they are unequal, and deficient in measure and in balance. The chief of them are: The Injured and the Insulted, The Demons (1867), The Idiot (I869), The Adult (1875), The Brothers Karamazov (1881).
From 1865, when he settled in St, Petersburg Dostoyevsky was absorbed in a succession of journalistic enterprises, and suffered severe gambling losses. He had to leave Russia, in order to escape his creditors, and to seek refuge in Germany and Italy. He was further harassed by troubles with his wife, and his work was interrupted by epileptic fits and other physical ailments. It was under such conditions as these that his most enduring works were created. He managed finally to return to Russia early in the seventies, and was for some time director of The Russian World.
The last eight years of his life were spent in comparative prosperity at St. Petersburg, where he died on the 9th of February 1881.
(From The Free Library By Farlex)
Dostoevsky’s works do not force one view of human freedom to be taken by the other. He provides no definite image of man. The presentation of freedom in this manner is a defense of man, a speaking on behalf of man against dissolution into the rhetoric that theology and science bring. It is worth observing that Dostoevsky wrote these novels at a time when “the sciences of man” were beginning to emerge. His artwork defends man against a dissolution into the acid bath of psychology, sociology, and economy, all of which sought to account for man’s being in terms of their own rhetoric.
(Dostoevsky’s Conception of Man: Its Impact on Philosophical Anthropology, by Peter Mcquire Wolf, PhD Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 1997, p 9)
Four facets may be distinguished in the rich personality of Dostoevsky:
the creative artist, the neurotic, the moralist and the sinner. How is one
to find one’s way in this bewildering complexity?
The creative artist is the least doubtful: Dostoevsky’s place is not far behind Shakespeare. The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written; the episode of the Grand Inquisitor, one of the peaks in the literature of the world, can hardly be valued too highly. Before the problem of the creative artist analysis, alas, lay down its arms.
… I included Dostoevsky the psychologist under the creative artist. Another objection I might have raised against him was that his insight was so much restricted to abnormal mental life. Consider his astonishing helplessness in face of the phenomena of love. All he really knew were crude, instinctual desire, masochistic subjection and loving out of pity. … in spite of all my admiration for Dostoevsky’s intensity and pre-eminence, I do not really like him. That is because my patience with pathological natures is exhausted in analysis. In art and life I am intolerant of them.
(Freud, S.E. 21, p 177 & 196)
Traditional interpretation of literature from a psychoanalytic standpoint has relied extensively upon the work of Sigmund Freud. In the case of Dostoevsky, however, this method is both anachronistic and inadequate. Dostoevsky's great works, considered individually or holistically, though fictional, established him as one of the forefathers of psychoanalysis, and a predecessor to Freud. Indeed Freud himself acknowledged that "the poets" discovered the unconscious before he did, stating further in a letter to Stefan Zweig, "Dostoevsky 'cannot be understood without psychoanalysis- i.e., he isn't in need of it because he illustrates it himself in every character and every sentence.'"
Louis Breger seems to present the most comprehensive and adequate approach to psychology in Dostoevsky. While building upon Freud, he rejects the simplicity and atomistic nature of his analysis: "Too often, applications to literature have relied on particular psychoanalytic observations- the Oedipus complex, the primal scene,- or some version of theory- orthodox Freudian, Lacanian. But observations and theory can only be guidelines in the application of the method."
Breger argues here, that Freudian methods of analysis tend to think of the author as patient, and believes rather, in the case of Dostoevsky, that he should be considered a fellow psychoanalyst. "What is most characteristic in [Dostoevsky] is the presence of multiple points of view; he is never, as an author, completely identified with one character.”
(Dostoevsky and Psychology, by Dan Cantrell)
THE UNDERGROUND MAN: BACKGROUND OF THE MODERN SELF
There are many possible beginnings. Any one of a number of incidents in the literature of the last century might serve to dramatize the special and very complex issues and languages of the modern self. Nineteenth-century Russian literature offers a usefully consistent and varied succession of events, none so pertinent as Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. (1864)
(Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self, by Frederick Hoffman, Southern Illinois University Press, 1962)
Dostoevsky and psychology (Chap 7)
In Dostoevsky's time, the boundary between science and philosophy was as indistinct as it had been before Socrates, and the study of the psyche merged inseparably with that of religion, politics and all of nature. As a man of his times, Dostoevsky knew a number of psychological systems: some entered his imagery and his cultural awareness; some shaped the way he described his characters; and the struggle between two of these systems interacted with his most basic social ideas. He knew the Renaissance theory of the four humours, … had also encountered the ancient science of physiognomy, which discovered character in facial features …But like most of his contemporaries, he drew his central psychological doctrines from two great traditions, both thousands of years old, but both growing directly out of eighteenth-century thinking: the tradition of the neurologists, and that of the alienists. …Dostoevsky had grown up in a charity hospital and shared lodgings later on with a doctor, and his sympathies lay far closer to the healers than to the scientistic researchers who were remaking psychology in his own lifetime. …Dostoevsky was more like his contemporary, Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93), who used both hypnotism and neurology at the Salpetrière in Paris to produce the great synthesis of these two psychological schools. When Charcot's student, Freud, went on to generate one of the chief psychological systems of the twentieth century, he expressed his indebtedness not only to his medical mentors, but also to the insights of Dostoevsky, probably without realizing that they had the same intellectual underpinnings.
He made the psychological novel a philosophical instrument by exploring the relation between characters' ideas and their drives and personalities. …He makes us feel psychology as part of a novelistic whole.
(The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevsky, by W. J. Leatherbarrow, Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Mikhail Bakhtin, 1895-1975
Bakhtin is especially known for his work on the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoyevskogo (1929; 2nd ed., 1963, retitled Problemy poetiki Dostoyevskogo; Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics), which he published under his own name just before he was arrested. It is considered one of the finest critical works on Dostoyevsky. In the book Bakhtin expressed his belief in a mutual relation between meaning and context involving the author, the work, and the reader, each constantly affecting and influencing the others, and the whole influenced by existing political and social forces. Bakhtin further developed this theory of polyphony, or “dialogics,” in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (1975; The Dialogic Imagination), in which he postulated that, rather than being static, language evolves dynamically and is affected by and affects the culture that produces and uses it.
("Bakhtin, Mikhail." Encyclop?dia Britannica. 2006.)
A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristics of Dostoevsky’s novels. … Dostoevsky’s major heroes are, by the very nature of his creative design, not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse. In no way, then, can a character’s discourse be exhausted by the usual s of characterization and plot development, nor does it serve as a vehicle for the author’s own ideological position. The consciousness of a character is given as someone else’s consciousness, another consciousness, yet at the same time it is not turned into an object, is not closed, does not become a simple object of the author’s consciousness.
(Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, by Mikhail Bakhtin, 1929 (1984), p 6-7)
Mikhail Bakhtin has been given a place in the canon of modern literary theory because, according to Julia Kristeva, he began the deconstruction of character and mimesis, thereby invalidating Russian Formalism's assumptions of representation and transcendence and becoming a precursor of poststructuralism. The semiotics of Kristeva and the deconstruction of Derrida have as one of their main tenets the decentering or break-up of the unified "I" or transcendental ego, based on the theories of Freud, Nietszche, Lacan, and others. Both Kristeva and Derrida wish to expose the fallaciousness of Husserl's transcendental Being and ego, a last remnant of physical idealism, because this is a product and prisoner of logic, law, theology, and the masculine - hence the term "phalologocentric," denoting the law/logic of the father, which is seen by both Kristeva and Derrida as tyrranous.
Bakhtin claims that Dostoevsky was the first author of the polyphonic novel which presents speaking subjects instead of defined characters, and in which the author's voice, instead of controlling the discourse from above, descends into the polyphony of clashing ideologies and sounds with no more authority than the voices of characters with different views. Critics such as Roland Barthes see in this polyphony the "death" of the author and the birth of the reader.
My purpose here is to show how Bakhtin, although he can be seen as a precursor if modern semiotics and deconstruction, does not deny the authorial voice in Dostoevsky, does not claim that Dostoevsky has lost control of his characters, and does not completely deconstruct the "I."
We can remember the existential maxim that not to take a position is to take a position. Not to judge monologically is to make a serious statement about the worth and dignity of the individual and to celebrate the birth, not the death, of the "I", which is - or can be - the result of its spiritual communion with others.
(Bakhtin, Dostoevsky, and the Status of the "I", by Barbara Z. Thaden, Dostoevsky Studies, Vol 8, 1987, p 200-207)
This book will try to show that Dostoevsky’s philosophy, though not constituting a “system” in the traditional sense, has a strong single focus. Like that of most Russian philosophers, it is decidedly anthropocentric: it was prompted not by abstract cosmological and epistemological concerns but by an obsession with humanity. More precisely, Dostoevsky wishes to understand the condition of being human, or as he put it in a late notebook, “to find the man in man” (27:65). Intellectually this absorption in philosophical anthropology was so intense as to co-opt and transform all his other concerns. Whatever subject he took up --- religion, art, the state, history, morality --- he was interested above all in its human significance and specifically in what clues he could find in it to the question of what it means to be human.
At an early age Dostoevsky announced his view of humanity as a puzzle to be solved and committed himself to the work of solving it. In a letter written when he was seventeen to his older brother Mikhail, he speaks of studying “what man and life mean.” “Man is a mystery,” he goes on. “The mystery must be solved, and if you work at solving it all your life, don’t say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery because I wish to be a man” (28/I: 63). These words could easily be dismissed as juvenile romanticism but for the fact that he did work at it all his life, incorporating the quest in some way in virtually everything he wrote.
… These two aims, analytic and critical, are pursued in six chapters, each devoted to an area in which Dostoevsky advanced and defended philosophical positions. If for the sake of simplicity we phrase his dominant philosophical concern in the language of Immanuel Kant’s blunt question, “What is man?”, we can say that Dostoevsky’s philosophical views, taken as a whole, form a set of complementary answers to that question, each reflecting a different perspective on the nature, capacities, and prospects of humanity. Each incorporates views that fall under traditional rubrics of philosophy such as physics, ethics, and aesthetics, but Dostoevsky himself did not formulate them in that way. To him what was important was that they captured some significance aspect of human life and work.
…We have the Nihilists to thank for the themes of much of his writing --- not only the notebooks, letters, and essays that have loomed so large in this study but also most of his great fiction, including Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. … We also have them to thank for the dialectical method of his philosophizing, by which I mean its dynamic counterposing of competing views. Each concerned with combating with ideas of others, Dostoevsky always kept his sights on the opposite of what he believed and sought to establish his own positions by demonstrating the failure of their antitheses, as in his frequent recourse to the rhetorical and logical device of reduction ad absurdum. In that way his philosophical thinking was inherently polyphonic and dialogical, to use the Bakhtin’s terms. The character of Dostoevsky’s post-Siberian novels was no matter of accident or purely stylistic preference: the dialogical novels were a natural complement to his dialectical approach to the problems of philosophy.
(Dostoevsky The Thinker, by James Scanlan, Cornell University Press, 2002, p 9-10, 231)
4.ENDNOTE
The sole raison deter of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.
The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes, in The Art of the Novel, by Milan Kundera, Grove Press, 1986, p 5-6
C.S.: I’d like to discuss the aesthetic of your novels. But where shall we
begin?
M.K.: With this assertion: My novels are not psychological. More precisely: They lie outside the aesthetic of the novel normally termed psychological.
… All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped? It is one of the those fundamental questions on which the novel, as novel, is based. … For Proust, a man’s interior universe comprises a miracle, an infinity that never ceases to amaze us. But that is not what amazes Kafka. He does not ask what internal motivations determine man’s behavior. He asks a question that is radically different: What possibilities remain for man in a world where the external determinants have become so overpowering that internal impulses no longer carry weight? Indeed, how could it have changed K.’s destiny and attitude if he had had homosexual inclinations or an unhappy love affair behind him? In no way.
… But understand me: If I locate myself outside the so-called psychological novel, that does not mean that I wish to deprive my characters of an interior life. It means only that there are other enigmas, other questions that my novels pursue primarily. Nor does it mean I object to novels that are fascinated by psychology. In fact, the change in the situation since Proust makes me nostalgic. …
… What lies beyond the so-called psychological novel? Or, put another way: What is the nonpsychological means to apprehend the self? To apprehend the self in my novels means to grasp the essence of its existential problem. To grasp its existential code. … made up of certain key words. … You see, I don’t show you what happens inside Jaromil’s head; rather, I show what happens inside my own: I observe my Jaromil for a long while, and I try, step by step, to get to the heart of his attitude, in order to understand it, name it, grasp it. … the whole novel is nothing but one long interrogation. Meditative interrogation (interrogative meditation) is the basis on which all my novels are constructed. … making a character “alive” means: getting to the bottom of his existential problem. Which in turn means: getting to the bottom of some situations, some motifs, even some words that shape him. Nothing more.
C.S.: It’s phenomenological.
M.K.: The adjective isn’t bad, but I make it a rule not to use it. I’m too fearful to the professors for whom art is only a derivative of philosophical and theoretical trends. The novel dealt with the unconscious before Freud, the class struggle before Marx, it practiced phenomenology (the investigation of the essence of human situations) before the phenomenologists. What superb “phenomenological deions” in Proust, who never even knew a phenomenologist!
… two things should not be confused: there is on the one hand the novel that examines the historical dimension of human existence, and on the other the novel that is the illustration of a historical situation, the deion of a society at a given moment, a novelized historiography.
C.S.: But what specifically can the novel say about history? Or, what is
your way of treating history?
M.K.: … First: All historical circumstances I treat with the greatest economy. … Second: Of the historical circumstances, I keep only those that create a revelatory existential situation for my characters. … Third: Historiography writes the history of society, not of man. That is why the historical events my novels talk about are often forgotten by historiography. … But it is the fourth principle that goes furthest: Not only must historical circumstance create a new existential situation for a character in a novel, but History itself must be understood and analyzed as an existential situation. …
Well, I’ll never tire of repeating: The novel’s sole raison deter is to say
what only the novel can say.
(Part Two: Dialogue on the Art of the Novel, an edited dialogue with Christian Salmon in 1983, in The Art of the Novel, by Milan Kundera, 1986, p 21-44)
“From the European writers, we can and should pick up their greater emphasis on what they call ‘philosophical anthropology’, that is, the attempt to define man, and the differences between man and any other species, between man and objects, and between man and robots. What are his unique and defining characteristics? What is so essential to man that without it he would no longer be defined as a man?”
What Psychology Can Learn from the Existentialists? In ‘Toward a Psychology of Being’, Abraham Maslow, 1962, p 9-15
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
---Albert Camus---
今年三月二十五日，俄國出版了兩張光碟，光碟上有一百三十萬個名字，是斯大林恐怖政治的受難者。看到報紙上的這個消息，儘管先前已經讀過不少有關書籍，知道斯大林的迫害規模之大和程度之深，我還是深感震動。一百三十萬，多麼大的數字。這是一百三十萬個人，曾經像我們一樣存在過的生命。
學校圖書館的俄文採購應我的請求去訂這套光碟。俄國製作人回信說他們不收費，只是經費有限，不能用快件寄來。好多個星期之後，光碟寄到了。我把光碟插進電腦打開。在首頁上首先看到了’1345796’ 數字。這就是報紙說的「一百三十萬」的受難者數字。光碟裡有他們的名字，履歷，還有照片。一個人一個人地陳列出來，總數準確到個位數。人的單位本來就是「個」，而不是「萬」。
… 有一個年輕人做了一些特別的事情。一九六四年出生的狄馬?尤拉索夫，像其他同齡孩子一樣，當局不提過去的政策使他們對斯大林時代的歷史一無所知。他在高中時偶然讀到關於迫害殺戮以及斯大林死後的「平反」。但是當時正是新斯大林主義氣氛籠罩的時候，連他的母親也不跟他談過去的事情。他立志學習歷史。他成績優異，卻沒有去考名牌大學，而是進了歷史檔案館，查找事實記錄。後來他被徵兵，他寫的歷史小說手稿被人告發了，手稿被沒收，他被迫「檢討」。後來到最高法院當了職員。他設計了一張受難者的標準表格，包括姓名，年齡，出生年月，死亡時間，民族，黨派，社會背景，最後的工作地點和被捕前的身份，被逮捕和迫害的事實，平反狀況等。在十八個月裡，他做了十萬張受難者的卡片。此事被上司發現後，他被開除，改行當卡車司機。
一九八七年，在作家中心的一個集會上，開始的發言者們都只是用一些隱喻和拐彎抹角的話來談論過去。老一代的人慣於用這種方式說話，他們最直接的抱怨僅僅是得不到資訊。狄馬產生了受挫感。在散會之前，這個二十三歲的年輕人走上台去，描述了他做的工作，他說他已經收集了十二萬三千張受難者卡片。他告訴聽眾，他看到了最高法院院長給赫魯曉夫的機密信件，從一九五三年到一九五七年，六十萬人得到了平反，從一九六三到一九六七年，又有六十一萬二千五百人得到了平反。聽眾被深深震動。主持會議的一位年老的歷史學者激動地說：「這個年輕人知道得比我們都多。我對他非常感激。」
在這十二萬三千名字之後，名字繼續增加。2000年，發行了上面有六十萬個受難者的光碟。然後，這個數字又增加了一倍。… 俄國人已經把一百三十萬個受難者的名字書寫出來了。他們沒有覺得名單太長、沒有人會感興趣。他們堅持努力，不但為受難者平反，也記載他們的名字和遭遇。他們堅持要還給死者名字和尊嚴，實際上也是為生者的存在作肯定。他們所完成的，是他們個人的努力成果，同時也讓我們看到了托爾斯泰與陀思妥耶夫斯基的俄國的偉大人文傳統。
(俄國出版百萬政治受難者光碟, 王友琴, 香港開放雜誌, Nov 2004)
*中國文革受難者紀念園 www.chinese-memorial.org 王友琴
REFERENCE:
1.The Freud Wars: An Introduction To The Philosophy Of
Psychoanalysis, by Lavinia Gomez, Routledge, 2005
2.Facing Human Suffering: Psychology and Psychotherapy As Moral Engagement, by Ronald B. Miller, American Psychological Association, 2004
3. Apprehending the Inaccessible : Freudian Psychoanalysis and Existential Phenomenology, by Richard Askay, Jensen Farquhar, Northwestern University Press, 2006
4. Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition: Philosophies of Life and Their Impact on Practice, ed. by Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg, New York University Press, 1998
5. Psychoanalysis and Existential Philosophy, ed. by Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek, Dutton, 1962
6. Dostoevsky and Parricide, by Sigmund Freud, S.E., 21, p 177-195, 1928, with Appendix: A Letter from Freud to Theodor Reik, ibid, p 195-196
7. Dostoevsky’s Conception of Man: Its Impact on Philosophical Anthropology, by Peter Mcquire Wolf, PhD Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 1997
8. Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. by Walter Kaufmann, Plume Books, 1988
9. Dostoevsky: The Author As Psychoanalyst, by Louis Breger, New York University Press, 1989
10.Dostoevsky The Thinker, by James Scanlan, Cornell University Press, 2002
11.Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, by Mikhail Bakhtin, University of Minnesota Press, 1984
12.Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision, by Louis Breger, Wiley, 2000
13.The Art of the Novel, by Milan Kundera, Grove Press, 1986
APPENDIX:
1. Prologue: The Horse, the Courier & Chap 1: The Author as Psychoanalyst, in Dosteovsky: The Author as Psychoanalyst, by Louis Breger, NYU Press, 1989, p 1-13
2. Part One: The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes & Part Two: Dialogue on the Art of the Novel, in The Art of the Novel, by Milan Kundera, Grove Press, 1986, p 3-44www.psychspace.com心理学空间网
