ELIZABETH DALTON
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and riva lry with a fo rbiddin g fa ther and adopts instead a passive,
" feminine" a ltitude in the a llempt to be loved as a woman and
to
avoid
ri va lry and the threa t of castra ti on . Paradoxi call y, however, the wom–
an 's sexua l ro le a lso seems to th e boy to impl y bein g castrated; thus the
Oedipa l ha tred of the fa ther is heighten ed by th e fear o f being made to
pl ay the " feminin e" role in rela ti on
to
him, intensifying parricidal
wishes. The guilt associa ted with such wishes was streng thened
di sas trously by their fulfillment in rea lity: th e dea th of the elder
Dostoevsky, who was a lways th ought to have been murdered by his
serfs, could well h ave been construed as a kind of parri cide. (New
evidence described in Joseph Frank 's recent biograph y sugges ts tha t the
death may h ave been due to na tural causes. However, what is psycho–
logicall y signifi cam is no t wha t actua ll y happened , but what Dos to–
evs ky beli eved , and he beli eved tha t hi s fa th er had been murdered .)
Freud sees the epil epti c a llacks as self-punishmem: in the seizure the
son became tempo raril y dead, like the murdered fa ther, fo r whose dea th
he un conscio usly held hi s own guilty desires responsibl e.
After describing the dea th signifi cance of the seizures, Freud
writes, " Wha t furth er content they have absorbed , parti cul arl y sexual
cont em, escapes conj ecture." But in fact a pa rti cul ar ero ti c content is
strongl y suggested by th e epil epti c seizure. A central mo tif of infamil e
sexual life associa ted with the Oedipus compl ex is the primal scen e, the
experi ence o r fantasy o f observin g pa renta l intercourse, whi ch the
child often mi sunderstands as a sadi sti c puni shmem o f the mo ther.
The epil epti c allack-the " littl e co itus" -with its wil d excitement, its
loss of comrol, and its suffering and humili a ti on , is well suited to serve
as the symbo lic enactment of such a violent prima l scene fam asy.
About Dostoevsky's a llacks we can onl y specul ate; we canno t
cl a im to understand the mysteri o us illness o f a man long dead . But
about a character in litera ture we have a ll the relevam informa ti on , for
hi s emire exi stence is com a in ed in the wo rds of the text. Mys hkin has
two epil epti c se izures in
Th e Idia l.
The first and more spectacul ar takes
pl ace nea r the beg innin g o f Pa rt II. Myshkin has spent a long day
wanderin g about Petersburg in a pre-epilepti c sta te of increasing
anxiety and di so ri em a ti on . H e goes to vi sit Rogozhin , the crudely
powerful young mercham who is both hi s riva l for Nas tasya and hi s
shadowy counterpa rt, a sort of negative do ubl e embodying a ll the
vi olem and lustful impul ses repressed in hi s own persona lity. The two
men compare their different kinds of love fo r Nastasya. Myshkin loves
her chas tely, with compassion , whil e Rogozhin fee ls fo r her ming led
lust and h a tred . Nonetheless, each man o ffers to give her up for the
o ther. During thi s stran ge conversa ti on , Myshkin find s himself ab-
