Key Papers in Literature and Psychoanalysis

Paul Williams, Glen O. Gabbard, Paul Williams, Glen O. Gabbard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367325268
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429915413
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Psychology

This book presents several essays from the International Journal of Psychoanalysis that explore overlaps of literary experience and psychoanalytic process, providing the reader with a substantive contribution that reflects the principal concerns of contemporary psychoanalysis.

CHAPTER ONE

Italo Svevo and the first psychoanalytic novel

Aaron Esman

The first fictional work that used psychoanalysis as a central plot device was La coscienza di Zeno [Confessions of Zeno], published in 1923 by Ettore Schmitz, a Triestino Jewish businessman who wrote under the pseudonym of “Italo Svevo”. This paper describes Svevo’s background, his relations with such important literary figures as James Joyce and with such central figures in Italian psychoanalysis as Dr Edoardo Weiss. It seeks to demonstrate to the anglophone reader the particular psychoanalytic elements in the novel and to relate them to Svevo’s personal experience (including his indirect contacts with Freud) and to the intellectual currents of the period in a city which had, until the aftermath of the First World War, been a crossroads of European culture.

Some time in 1914, a feckless middle-aged, upper-middle-class Jewish idler named Zeno Cosini consults a psychoanalyst in Trieste, his home town, seeking a cure for a variety of neurotic and psychosomatic symptoms and, in particular, his unshakeable addiction to cigarettes. The analyst, Dr S, suggests to him that, in addition to his daily sessions, he write an autobiography as “a good preparation for the treatment.” Zeno, in his characteristic passive–aggressive way, complies, and in a series of often hilarious chapters describes in intimate detail the history of his addiction, his reactions to the illness and death of his father, his marriage and his taking a mistress, and his dazzlingly unsuccessful attempts at a business partnership. His self-descriptions oscillate between penetrating self-observation and massive self-deception, the latter founded on copious use of such defences as denial, projection, and rationalization. Finally, in angry response to Dr S’s insistent interpretation of Oedipal conflicts, he abruptly breaks off the analysis. In revenge, Dr S arranges for the publication of Zeno’s memoirs, and thus is born the first psychoanalytic novel, La coscienza di Zeno, published in 1923 and issued in English translation in 1930 with the somewhat inaccurate title of Confessions of Zeno.

Or, at least, this is how it is told by the novel’s actual author, the man who called himself Italo Svevo (which means “Italian–German”). Who was Italo Svevo? What were his connections with the Italian and European literary worlds of the time? And what was his place in the history of psychoanalysis? These questions have been extensively reviewed in Italian literature (e.g. Accerboni, 1992; Lavagetto, 1975; Palmieri, 1994).¹ The anglophone literature is, however, sparse; apart from the literary biographies by Furbank (1966) and Gatt-Rutter (1988), I have found only a perceptive 1931 review by Burrill Freedman and a 1970 paper by Paula Robison that touch on them in any significant way.

“Italo Svevo” was the pseudonym of a middle-aged, upper-middle-class Jewish Triestino businessman named Ettore Schmitz. He was born in 1861, the fifth of eight children and the oldest of four sons by Francesco and Allegra Schmitz. Francesco had come to Trieste from Transylvania and had worked his way up the commercial ladder to become a successful and moderately prosperous businessman. Allegra was of a middle-class Triestine Jewish family that had resisted her marriage to an immigrant. Like most of the small but thriving Jewish community in Trieste, the family was moderately observant but not orthodox. Ettore was educated in Jewish schools, but he identified most strongly with the Italian majority that formed the cultural and linguistic identity of the city, an Italian island in the sea of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Like most of his compatriots, he spoke the local dialect, a variant of the Venetian, and had difficulty all his life with literary Italian. As an Austrian citizen, and educated in a German boarding school, he was fluent in German and had at least a good reading knowledge of French as well.

Francesco Schmitz was determined that his sons should follow him into the business world and saw to it that they obtained business educations. Thus, despite his strong literary bent, upon his graduation Ettore Schmitz went to work as a clerk in the local branch of a Viennese bank, and there he remained for twenty years. All the while, he read voraciously in three languages and wrote continually, mostly in the form of critical essays for a local newspaper, theatre reviews, one-act plays, and occasional short stories, some published, most not. He remained a businessman malgré lui for the rest of his life.

In the years before Zeno, he wrote (as Italo Svevo) and published at his own expense two novels, Una vita [A life] in 1893 and Senilità in 1898, which when later translated into English bore the title As a Man Grows Older, suggested by no less a person than James Joyce (of whom more later). Both novels fell like stones in the sea of Italian literature of the period, and their neglect by both the public and the critics led Schmitz/Svevo to withdraw from the literary world for years. Instead, he concentrated on his business affairs which—following his marriage in 1896 (aged 35) to his beautiful and much younger Catholic cousin Livia Veneziani—consisted of serving as the manager of a successful marine paint factory owned by his wife’s family. He was profoundly devoted to Livia; at the same time he was often wildly jealous of her, particularly when they were separated for any length of time, although she never gave him the slightest cause. Meanwhile, he wrote incessantly, essentially for his own amusement, plays and stories that went unpublished until much later, some only after his death. He had little use for poetry; “he said it seemed a pity to use a part of the paper when you have paid for the whole of it” (Furbank, 1966, p. 140).

It was not until after he met James Joyce in 1907 that he began, cautiously at first, then more actively, to resume a literary career while still attending to his business duties. Joyce, having left Dublin to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, had come to Trieste in 1904 to work for Berlitz as an English instructor. He soon quit that position and left for Rome, only to return in 1907 to set up as an independent tutor, and it was thus that he met with Schmitz, who wanted to improve his English largely for business reasons. Despite the considerable difference in age, they soon became friends, and Schmitz began to show Joyce his early writings. It was Joyce’s praise and encouragement that led him once again, despite his earlier failure, to think of himself seriously as a writer. In his turn, Joyce pumped Schmitz, who despite his adult atheism had had a traditional Jewish education, for information about Judaism that he used in developing the character of Leopold Bloom, the un-Jewish Jewish protagonist of Ulysses who appears to have been at least in part modelled on Schmitz. He also, as Gatt-Rutter (1988) tells it, borrowed from Schmitz’s wife her name and her long blonde hair for the character of Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegan’s Wake.

Joyce spent the war years in Zürich, but returned briefly to Trieste in 1919, when the relationship resumed. It was then, in the aftermath of the war, that Svevo began working on Zeno. The initial Italian response to its publication in 1923 (again at Svevo’s expense) was disappointing, but Joyce vigorously promoted the critical acclaim and recognition that Zeno ultimately received, particularly among French critics to whom Joyce, by then in Paris and world-famous, had ready access. By 1927 Svevo was in demand as a literary personality in Italy as well as in Paris, and delivered in Milan a much-quoted lecture on Joyce, in which he spelt out his version of the controversial relationship between the Joyce of Ulysses and psychoanalysis:

I can prove that Sigmund Freud’s theories did not reach Joyce in time to guide him when he was planning his work. This statement will astonish those who discover in Stephen Dedalus so many traits that seem beyond doubt to have been suggested by the science of psychoanalysis: his narcissism which will probably be attributed not to his being an artist but to his being a firstborn son, the adored mother who turns into a haunting spectre, the father despised and shunned, the brother forgotten in a corner like an umbrella, and finally the eternal struggle within him between his conscience and his subconscious.

There is something more. Might Joyce not have borrowed from psychoanalysis the idea of communicating the thoughts of his characters at the very moment in which they are formed in the disorder of a mind free from all control? On this head the contribution of psychoanalysis can be ruled out for Joyce himself has told us from whom he learned this technique. In fact, his words were enough to confer celebrity on the venerable Edmond Dujardin, who had used this technique in his “We’ll to the Woods No More”.

For the rest I can bear good witness. In 1915 when Joyce left us he knew nothing about psychoanalysis. Moreover his knowledge of current German was too weak. He could read some poets, not scientists. Yet at that time all his works, including Ulysses, had already been conceived.

From Trieste he went to Zurich, the second capital of psychoanalysis. Undoubtedly he became acquainted there with the new science, and there is reason to think that for a while he more or less believed in it. But I never had the satisfaction of knowing him to be a psychoanalyst. I left him ignorant of psychoanalysis. I found him again in 1919 in open revolt against it—one of those scornful rebellions of his by which he shook himself free of everything that hampered his thought. “Psychoanalysis?” said he to me. “Well, if we need it let us keep to confession.” I was dumbfounded. It was the rebellion of the Catholic in him, enhanced with greater harshness by the unbeliever.

Joyce’s works, therefore, cannot be considered a triumph of psychoanalysis, but I am convinced that they can be the subject of its study. They are nothing but a piece of life, of great importance just because it has been brought to light not deformed by any pedantic science but vigorously hewn with quickening inspiration. And it is my hope that some thoroughly competent psychoanalyst may arise to give us a study of his books which are life itself—a life rich and heartfelt, and recorded with the naturalness of one who has lived and suffered what he writes. They are as worthy of study as that poor Gradiva of Jensen’s, which Freud himself honoured with his comments. (1927)

In fact, it appears that Svevo was wrong in his assertion that in 1915 Joyce was completely ignorant of psychoanalysis. In his celebrated biography of Joyce, Richard Ellmann (1982) points out that Joyce had in his library in Trieste several books about psychoanalysis, including Freud’s “Leonardo” essay, Jones’s study of Hamlet, and at least one work of Jung, all published between 1909 and 1911 and presumably purchased during that period. Indeed, Ellmann speculates that Joyce learned about psychoanalysis from Ettore Schmitz, who was, as we shall see, quite caught up with Freudianism at that time. So although >Freud’s works were virtually unknown to the general Triestine public of the pre-war period (C. Weiss, personal communication), Joyce appears to have been less innocent of them than Svevo contended.² In Gatt-Rutter’s words:

It was from the end of the war that Freudianism became part of Triestine culture, especially among Jews, as Georgio Voghera, Socialist schoolteacher and writer, and himself Jewish, relates with gusto: “The fanatical adherents of psychoanalysis in Trieste were constantly swapping stories and interpretations of dreams and telltale slips, carrying out amateur diagnoses of their own and other people’s neuroses, attempting to fit them into one or another of Freud’s three ‘phases’ (oral, anal, genital, as we then used to say), continually finding other people’s ‘id’—but really their ego as well—guilty of the nastiest intentions and the foulest sentiments.” (1988, p. 306)

Svevo’s daughter Letizia (n.d., p. 90) also noted the diffusion of psychoanalysis in Trieste, “above all in the Jewish intellectual circles of the city” during the second decade of the century.

But what of Svevo himself? What was his involvement with psychoanalysis? Where and how did he learn what he used to such fictional advantage in Confessions of Zeno? The evidence is clear, confirmed by all biographers including his widow Livia, that Schmitz/Svevo was never analysed nor did he ever consult with an analyst professionally for any reason. He did, however, have three principal sources of information about psychoanalysis. The first, of course, was reading. According to his own statement and echoed by all his biographers (Furbank, 1966; Svevo, 1990; Gatt-Rutter, 1988), he was introduced to Freud’s writings as early as 1908 by Edoardo Weiss, a school friend of his wife’s youngest brother, Bruno Veneziani. He disliked Freud’s literary style—”I read something of Freud, with effort and antipathy”—but he was—and remained—fascinated by his ideas. It is not clear precisely what he read, but by 1918 he was venturing to translate Freud’s essay “On dreams” (1901a) into Italian, with the hope of introducing Freud’s writings to the Italian public. And, as Svevo himself said, “As a treatment it was of no importance to me. I was healthy, or, at least, I liked all my maladies” (Lavagetto, 1975, p. 40). Consequently, he noted, “I shall only say that after reading the works, I undertook treatment in solitude without a doctor” (Gatt-Rutter, 1988, p. 247); that is, by some effort at self-analysis.

Despite his fascination with the words, however, Svevo was less impressed with the practice. In 1910 his youngest brother-in-law, Livia’s brother Bruno—a severely neurotic and, according to Edoardo Weiss (1970), actively and exclusively homosexual young man—was sent off to Vienna to be analysed, and referred by Weiss first to Viktor Tausk, then to Freud. The outcome was unsatisfactory. Bruno was, therefore, Svevo’s second source. As Livia Svevo put it:

He had himself psychoanalysed and returned from the cure destroyed, as lacking in will power as before, but with his feebleness aggravated by the conviction that, being as he was, he could not behave otherwise. It was he who convinced me how dangerous it was to explain to a man how he is made . . . (1990, pp. 74–5)

It seems that, in fact, both Tausk and Freud gave up on Bruno, considering him too rigid and narcissistic to be analysable. He appears to have had no interest in his family’s expectation that he change his sexual orientation. Remarkably, in 1919 Weiss proposed to Freud that Bruno serve as his collaborator in the translation into Italian of the Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis (Freud, 1916–1917). Weiss wrote:

I soon realized that Dr. A. [Weiss’s disguise for Bruno] was too disturbed to be of any help in this work. He suffered from some addictions and led a very disturbed life. With his permission I complied with his mother’s wish and wrote to Freud asking if he would be willing to take him back into treatment . . . . Freud answered (3 October 1920):

Dear Doctor: I was indeed surprised when you announced Dr. A. as your co-worker for the translation, considering all I knew about him. Since you are asking me today for a professional report on him, I shall not hesitate to give my opinion. I believe it is a bad case, one particularly not suitable for free analysis. Two things are missing in him: first, a certain conflict of suffering between his ego and what his drives demand, for he is essentially very well satisfied with himself and suffers only from the antagonism of external conditions. Second, he is lacking a halfway normal character of the ego which could cooperate with the analyst. On the contrary, he will always strive to mislead the analyst, to trick him and push him aside. Both defects amount actually to one and the same, namely, the development of a fantastically narcissistic, sel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Preface
• About the Editors
• Foreword
• Chapter One Italo Svevo and the first psychoanalytic novel
• Chapter Two A father’s abdication: Lear’s retreat from “aesthetic conflict”
• Chapter Three “The music of what happens” in poetry and psychoanalysis
• Chapter Four From symbols to flesh: the polymorphous destiny of narration
• Chapter Five “It seemed to have to do with something else . . .” : Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Bion’s theory of thinking
• Chapter Six Some thoughts on the essence of the tragic
• Chapter Seven Negation in Borges’s “The secret miracle”: writing the Shoah
• Chapter Eight Killing the angel in the house: creativity, femininity, and aggression