Using Freud responsibly

[truepenny]

Freud is such a problem.

Partly this is because he was right, and partly it is because he was grossly, irredeemably wrong. Oftentimes in the same essay. And partly it is because his disciples and intellectual descendants have reified his ideas, transforming them from theories into universal truths. (Not that Freud himself did not contribute to that tendency with his pontifical--in fact, patriarchal--stance.)

And any truth Freud has to offer is most assuredly not universal.

But that doesn't mean he isn't thought-provoking and it doesn't mean he can't be illuminating. It just means you have to approach him with caution and an independent mind.

Case in point: I started reading Frederick Karl's biography of Kafka, Franz Kafka: Representative Man: Prague, Germans, Jews, and the Crisis of Modernism and very shortly thereafter posted a plaintive call for better biographies. Happily, perverse_idyll suggested Ernst Pawel's The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. I haven't finished Pawel yet, but I've found an oddly illuminating point of comparison which I think will demonstrate why I found Karl unreadable and Pawel compelling.

First, from Karl:

Politically ambitious and sexually promiscuous, [the Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince] Rudolf was in many respects almost the exact opposite of Franz Kafka--Rudolf's active nature contrasts dramatically with that of the passive, private, intensely introspective, body-hating apolitical writer. At the same time, Kafka and Rudolf were also precise reflectors of each other, two very real sides of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (the Dual Monarchy). Oedipal conflict was clearly a theme running through the lives of both Kafka and the young Rudolf. Rudolf, unable to kill Franz Josef and succeed him, killed himself in a displacement of father-son murder; Kafka, for his part, repeatedly destroyed a surrogate self in his work, where the father figure is almost always a crushing, authoritarian, physically imposing older man.

It is no coincidence that the Modernist avant-garde nature of much Viennese-Prague art and writing has its origin in the desire to kill or replace the father. The avant-garde, or radical innovation in the arts, exists in order to question authority, order, convention, tradition, and history--it exists by breaking out and breaking through, by undermining established value systems. When Rudolf killed himself at the Mayerling hunting lodge, he acted out a drama that Kafka, less than twenty-fve years later, would write about in "The Judgment," "The Metamorphosis," The Trial, and not least, in his letters to Felice Bauer.

The suicide pact--in which, ordinarily, the man kills the woman, as painlessly as possible with a gun or poison, and then himself--has a certain satisfactory neatness to it, as both Rudolf and Kafka, who toyed with fantasies of suicide during much of his adult life, recognized. Its striking, even Modernist, statement established that authority could be baffled and defeated. This hatred of authority in Franz Josef's kingdom killed not only his son. If we see the suicide pact as somehow son fighting father, then we can view the various nationalities fighting to break out of the Dual Monarchy as themselves in an oedipal struggle--to defy authority, kill Vienna-Budapest paternalism, assume their own identities as Serbs, Croats, Slovaks, Czechs, and others.
(Karl 11-12)

Compare with:

Altogether, the economic position of Austro-Hungarian Jewry in the second half of the nineteenth century improved rapidly. The manifest success of the "founding fathers," however, ought not to obscure the merciless struggle it took to rise from well below subsistence to even the relatively modest heights eventually scaled by a Herrmann Kafka. The attitudes and opinions shaped by this experience came to dominate Jewish middle-class life to the end. But even more significant was the preponderance of certain personality traits favoring survival in the ruthlessly competitive world of emerging capitalism, a natural selection that made for a remarkable degree of uniformity in the pattern of their family relations.

No one defined and explored that pattern more creatively than Sigmund Freud, himself a child of that same time and place--born at Pribor, Moravia, the son of a textile merchant who went bankrupt as a Czech anti-German and anti-Jewish boycott and moved his family to Vienna in 1859 when Freud was three years old. The world that shaped Freud's vision, the rising Jewish middle class in nineteenth-century Austria, was also the world of the Kafkas, and the almost paradigmatic nature of the oedipal conflict in that family, the often startling literalness with which Kafka himself seemed to be acting out the Freudian script, no doubt owes much to these common antecedents.

Psychoanalysis, not least for that very reason, has contributed highly pertinent insights to an understanding of Kafka's character and work. But our ultimate concern is not so much with the ways in which he typified all sons locked in mortal combat with their fathers as with the ways in which he was different and unique: how he came to be Franz Kafka.
(Pawel 7-8)

Pawel uses Freud with a scrupulous, humane awareness of the context that produced him. When he generalizes, which he will do later in talking about the circle of artists in Prague of which Kafka was a part, he does so in terms of the conflict between generations: metaphorical sons and metaphorical fathers--not Karl's careless and honestly kind of insulting conflation of politics and psychology. He also is aware, and acknowledges, that there is something unsettling about the exactitude with which Kafka reinscribes Freud's theory on his life: "The image, here [in Letter to His Father], of the stereotypically oedipal constellation, that once revolutionary concept long since ossified into a schematic platitude, is almost too pat for comfort" (Pawel 15). Pawel understands that this isn't a proof of the universality of Freud, but an eerie demonstration of the pressures that shaped Freud and Kafka's generation of European Jews.

Karl, on the other hand, applies Freud's oedipal theory with a trowel, not merely reifying it, but turning it into a Key to All Mythologies: if Rudolf, Kafka, and the entirety of the avant-garde can all be reduced to Oedipus, then is there anything that can't? Or, to turn it around, if oedipal conflict can produce all of these things, what use is it as an analytical tool? With such broad application, it becomes meaningless.

And there is, in fact, another problem. Applying Freud wholesale, with his misogyny intact, automatically prioritizes men over women--like several miles over. Karl recognizes this, in a shuffle-footed footnote:

Where does woman fit into "representative man"? One of the elements that so defines Kafka for the twentieth century is his paralleling of Freudian psychoanalysis, particularly Freud's insight into the male fear of female sexuality. Kafka's numerous "bachelors" live on the edge of such fear. Women are everywhere, even when they are revealed traditionally as sexual playmates, servants, kitchen slaves, or mere "connectors" to whatever men ultimately seek. They are the ever present "other" in Kafka's male-dominated world. He rarely socially empowers them, unless as whorish creatures who trade in sexuality, but he makes them a profound element of male life, even when homoerotic themes are implied. The very fact of Kafka's dilemmas and problems with women, as we see in chapter 9, suggests what a large role they played in his imaginative life: as the mother who failed him, as the fiancée who could never meet his needs as a writer, as the wife who failed to stand up to the patriarchal Hermann Kafka. Women are agents and players often by the pressures they exert. To be a bachelor is to be reminded of how the male has failed women, not the other way around.
(Karl xvii, note)

And that looks fine and reasonable and broad-mindedly realistic, until you read Pawel, who dedicated his book to the memories of Ottla Kafka and Milena Jesenská, and you realize that what Karl is doing here is neatly reinscribing Freudian misogyny on his own project, establishing it as an a priori given so that, rather than questioning the oppositional definition of "man" and "woman" which he ascribes to Kafka, he can simply proceed under its banner. And thus he denies Kafka's much wider power, not merely as "representative man," but as a sad, wise, luminous commentator on the human condition.


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WORKS CITED
Karl, Frederick. Franz Kafka: Representative Man: Prague, Germans, Jews, and the Crisis of Modernism. 1991. New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1993.

Pawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1984.