"Past, Present, and Future of "Psychoanalysis and Literature

Past, Present, and Future of “Psychoanalysis And Literature” Henk Hillenaar Compared to other sciences, psychoanalysis has a rather short history, but it does have a long prehistory. As we all know, the concept of the unconscious was not invented by Freud. Speaking about psychoanalysis as a method, a way of self-examination, self-analysis, we can even go back as far as the Renaissance, when the modern European began to create himself against the background of a disappearing divine Subject. It was then that Ignatius of Loyola wrote one of the most famous books of his time, the Spiritual Exercises, which we could call, like Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, a “school of sentiment,” one of the very few “schools” of that kind in the history of our mainly rationally inspired Western civilization. Ignatius wants us to be men or women of desire; he teaches us how to scrutinize our feelings, and to “discern” or recognise the different good and bad “spirits” that are governing those feelings. He maintained that the person who goes through these exercises reorganizes his inner and external life, becoming a new being. This should be achieved in a month of silence and retreat, interrupted—and this is important—by regular, even daily talks with a spiritual adviser to whom one should be as open as possible. There are striking resemblances with psychoanalysis today. Obviously, before they became secularized, practices like these, where the inner life of an individual person was so systematically the center of a shared experience, had to occur in a religious setting. Prayer and images of biblical history shared the stage with personal feelings, individual history. I had this experience when I was young, during a whole month, sometimes in peace and at other times in pain, floating between hope and despair—heaven and hell, if you prefer—for its effects were also rather the same as those that I would experience in my psychoanalysis years later. Though Ignatius [End Page 237] in his own way seems to anticipate Freud, the latter would not have been very happy with this comparison. In spite of his genius and wisdom, Ignatius was—if you forgive the anachronism—something of a brainwasher. He knew what he wanted to obtain from the subject who did his exercises, who had to become a soldier of Christ, a servant of the poor, and who had to give up his own life and interests “ad maiorem Dei gloriam.” What was perhaps lacking most of all in Ignatius’ work with his followers, was the possibility to truly bring to life and examine again one’s “Family Romance,” the past being considered too quickly and too exclusively here as the realm of sin. Nevertheless, creating the Spiritual Exercises was really a huge accomplishment for someone living during the Renaissance. For me they became a challenge, though I managed rather well, in the middle of the twentieth century, to share that Renaissance feeling and its excitement. The Spiritual Exercises opened my eyes to reveal certain mechanisms which were at work in my inner world. They also introduced me to other ways of thinking and looking at the world. I got interested in the history of ideas, in exegesis and in literature, in language and in freedom. However, one cannot remain a Renaissance person. Sooner or later the Enlightenment arrives and this became very evident to me in France, where I was studying exegesis and literature. This Enlightenment ended, as it should, in romantic rebellion against the lack of freedom I had been living in for too long. It was at that point that psychoanalysis appeared on the horizon of my life and my ideas, and pulled me—better late than never—into the twentieth century. Freud helped me to leave the Roman Catholic Church, just as Marx had done for some of my friends, and revolutionary thinkers of our century like Fromm, Marcuse, or Foucault had for others. I continued to have a religious life, and I tried not to use Freudism as a kind of new Church as some tended to do with Marxism, or as some of my French friends did with Lacanism. Freud allowed me to revisit the places

Aesthetics · Art · Civilization · Epistemology · Feeling · Interpretation (philosophy) · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Reflexive pronoun · Silence · Subject (documents) · Unconscious mind · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications

• Bibliography Relations of Science to Literature and the Arts 1999

  Karl E Gwiasda, Susan Allender-Hagedorn et al.•Configurations•2001

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