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conflict-the classic definition of a neurosis-requiring a constant
suppression of one side of his nature, which sporadically broke through
in some disguised form, giving momentary relief, but, at the same
time, reinforcing the underlying anxiety and feeling of guilt. Ac–
cording to Freud, Dostoevsky's epileptic fits were his prime symptom,
and they had their origin in a guilt feeling associated with the murder
of his father by his own serfs when Dostoevsky was still a boy. One
could further track down this aberration to its sources in an early
Oedipal situation, where the father image aroused an unusual reaction
of hate and fear. This would account for his ambiguous relations with
women, whom he usually converted into maternal figures, his in–
grown friendships with men, and a masochistic streak that exhibited
itself in an almost pathological shyness and sense of inadequacy ac–
companied by fits of self-laceration. Similarly, his mania for gambling,
as Freud suggests, was probably a fom1 of sexual play, enacted with
all the compulsiveness and guilt usually associated with the forbidden
-again going back to the prohibitions of childhood. In general Dos–
toevsky's personal life was wholly lacking in a sense of order and
responsibility, nor was he noted for the ability to decide in his own
life between good and evil, or, for that matter, between illusion and
reality. And no wonder-when one considers that his unconscious
was perpetually torn by conflicting drives and inhibitions.
Fundamentally, Dostoevsky seems to have been engaged in a con–
stant-and fruitless-search for
authority,
that is, for some represen–
tative of the father principle. The under-side of his being, striving
at all costs to assert itself, had destroyed the one force that could
curb it, for it had killed the father. Hence Dostoevsky, if he were
to stay within the bounds of sanity, had to find a surrogate : first in
the Czar, then in morality, finally in God.
Here is our underground man, emerging from the depths of his
author's pathology. Here is the source of his absurdity, his paranoia,
his criminal instincts, his overpowering guilt, and his craving for
redemption. And the conflicts that give Dostoevsky's fiction its re–
markable power and depth can be seen to have their roots in the
heroic effort of the man to live with himself.
Nietzsche once said, "Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from
whom I had anything to learn." Yet the wise psychologist, like those
other great amateur psychologists, Pascal, Kierkegaard-and Nietzsche
himself-was possessed of an abnormal psychology. In this seeming
paradox lies the secret of Dostoevsky's art-and, perhaps, of all truly
creative art in our time.
