90
STEVEN MARCUS
when J:te appears in the character of a psychologist. But in the world
of reality, which I am trying to depict here, a complication of
motives, an accumulation and conjunction of mental activities -–
in a word, overdetermination -- is the rule.
In this context it is next to impossible to tell whether Freud is up to
another of his crafty maneuverings with the reader or whether he is
actually simply unconscious of how much of a modern and modernist
writer he is.
Fo~
when he takes to describing the difference between
himself and some hypothetical man of letters and writer of short stories
he is in fact embarked upon an elaborate obfuscation. That hypothetical
writer is nothing but a straw man; and when Freud in apparent contrast
represents himself and his own activities he is truly representing how a
genuine creative writer writes. And this passage, we must also recall,
came from the same pen that only a little more than a year earlier had
written passages about Oedipus and Hamlet that changed for good the
ways in which the civilized world would henceforth think about litera–
ture and writers.
*
What might be thought of as this sly unliterariness of
freud's turns up in other contexts as well.
If
we return to the point in the Prefatory Remarks, we find that
Freud then goes on to describe other difficulties, constraints, and proble–
matical circumstances attaching to the situation in which he finds him–
self. Among them ' is the problem o f "how to record for publication"
even such a short case -- the long ones are as yet altogether impossible.
Moreover, since the material that critically illuminated this case was
grouped about two dreams, their analysis formed a secure point of
departure for the writing. (Freud is of course at home with dreams, being
the unchallenged master in the reading of them.) Yet this tactical
solution pushes the
entire problematic
back only ano ther step further,
since Freud at once goes on to his additional presupposition, that only
"'Some years earlier Freud had been more candid and more innocent about the
relation of his writing to literature. In
Studies on Hysteria
he introduces his
discussion of the case of Fraulein Elisabeth von R. with the following disarming
admission.
I have not always been a psychotherapist.
L~ke
other neuropathologists , I
was trained to employ local diagnoses and electro-prognosis, and it still strikes
me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories
and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must
console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently
responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own. The fact is that local
diagnosis and electrical reactions lead nowhere in the study of hysteria, whereas
a detailed description of mental processes such as we are accustomed to fmd in
the works of imaginative writers enables me, with the use of a few psychological
formulas, to obtain at least some kind of insight into the course of that
affection.
