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The Question of Lay Analysis by Sigmund Freud (1926)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Background

In 1926 the Viennese authorities began legal proceedings against Dr Theodor Reik, a non-medical psychoanalyst, under an old Austrian law against quackery, because he was practicing psychotherapy without a medical qualification. Freud wrote this pamphlet to clarify the underlying question of whether the practice of analytic therapy should be restricted to trained medical doctors.

Many first-generation analysts, themselves originally doctors by training, thought that psychoanalytic practice very much should be restricted to qualified physicians. But Freud’s answer was: No, it shouldn’t.

The book is cast in the form of a dialogue, with ‘An Impartial Person’ asking questions (which I highlight in italics) and Freud, in the first person, slowly, sensibly answering them.

The text comes in seven bite-size chapters and is written in a light-hearted style which I have copied in my own summary and comments.

1.

Freud outlines the kind of psychological symptoms which may take you to the doctor: a horrible sense of guilt, a compulsive need to perform obsessive actions, a fear of going outside or socialising, all sorts of phobias, sexual impotence, fear of women, frigidity, attachment to prostitutes or perversions, inability to concentrate or to stop the mind rambling along unconnected byways of its own.

You are referred to a psychoanalyst. What happens there? You talk, the analyst listens.

So it’s like a simple magical cure? Well, yes, except that it takes months, sometimes years of talking. So it’s like going to confession, then? No, because the most important part is that you are encouraged to say things you do not know. What?

2.

Before we go any further let’s explain a bit of theory. This account is not necessarily complete and the theory has changed and evolved into its present form over thirty years, but then this is Science not Holy Writ, so please bear in mind the things written here are contingent on new discoveries.

Science, as you know, is not a revelation; long after its beginnings it still lacks the attributes of definiteness, immutability and infallibility for which human thought longs so deeply.
(Freud Pelican Library volume 15, page 291)

Well now, all of us have moments when the mind slips off and wanders at will through a fantasy world which is very like the  mental world of some mentally ill people; and these are in dreams. Interpreting dreams is a key way of getting at the unconscious mind, although many people have picked up this idea from newspapers etc and distorted its application.

Anyway, let’s construct our mental picture of the mind. We are going to use spacial analogies, using metaphors of above, below, shallow, deep. Admittedly these don’t refer to actual positions in the mind: but it’s the best we can do and, after all, what do you expect? All scientific theories are a little rough at the beginning.

Well now, all of us are aware of a part of us mediating between our basic physical needs and the sometimes harsh realities of the outside world. Let’s call this mediating part of the mind the ‘I’ or, to use Latin, the ego. This is pretty much what we mean when we say ‘I’m hot’ or ‘I’m hungry’, reflecting the feelings of the conscious mind.

But behind this conscious assessment of what we feel, we often sense the presence of an enormous number of unexpressed feelings. Let’s call the place where these unexpressed feelings originate the ‘it’ or, in Latin, the id.

We propose that the ego is the layer of the mental apparatus (the id) which has been modified by the influence of the external world (of reality)…

For us the ego is something superficial and the id something deeper. The ego lies between reality and the id, which is what is truly mental. (volume 15, page 296)

Picture the ego as an organisation characterised by a focus on unity, trying to hold things together in the face of conflicting demands. By contrast, the id is all over the place; the multiplicity of urges which make up the id are each pursuing their separate agendas, in their own way, regardless of each other, of the ego or of outside reality.

You don’t believe this because you haven’t experienced it. Most of our trainees sit there thinking, Yeah, so what, big deal. Then they begin a training analysis and slowly the reality of this theory is demonstrated to them.

3.

Let’s look at the mind in another way, from a dynamic rather than a topographic perspective:

Instincts fill the id. All the energy in the id originates from them. Nor have the forces in the ego any other origin; they are derived from those in the id. What do these instincts want? Satisfaction – the establishment of the situation in which bodily needs can be extinguished. A lowering of the tension of need is felt by our organ of consciousness as pleasurable; an increase of it is soon felt as unpleasurable. (15:300)

Hence we say that mental activity operates under the rule of the Pleasure Principle. The id is continually pushing for satisfaction of all its instinctual drives – food, sex, booze, anger etc, literally the driving forces of the human animal.

The ego has to steer a ship driven by all these wild desires, avoiding all the snares and dangers of the real world. The ego observes the real world, learning how best to achieve satisfaction from it; and tries to rein in the drives of the id, keeping them on a tight rein until the moment is right.

The ego, then, operates under the Reality Principle. When things are going well, the ego and the id function together, because they are in fact made of the same stuff, mental energy. But:

A small living organism is a miserable, powerless thing in face of the overwhelming destructive might of the outside world. A primitive organism which hasn’t developed an ego-organisation is at the mercy of instinctual drives. It lives by the ‘blind’ satisfaction of its instinctual wishes and often perishes in consequence. The differentiation of an ego is above all a step towards self-preservation. (15:302)

If a desire brings the organism into peril which it, fortuitously, survives, the next time it approaches a similar situation it experiences a memory of the first event which is also a warning: it experiences this as anxiety. The ego will try and turn back the drive which is prompting the anxiety attack but can only repress it. Instinct will out. Roaming around within the crazy world of the id, the frustrated drive attaches itself to a more respectable colleague and emerges as a symptom. In a crazy distorted way, therefore, we see unconscious wishes which have been repressed for the survival of the organism emerge when our ego defences are low – hence our interest in those moments of low defence, during sleep in the form of dreams, in slips of the tongue and inexplicable amnesias, and in neurotic symptoms.

So the really serious mental cases I’ve heard about, the psychotics and the schizophrenics, with them maybe the ego didn’t even put up a fight but just went flying off with the id into its crazy world, into ‘a world of its own’?

Now you’re getting the hang of it. Nobody knows for sure, but that’s pretty much our theory.

Now I’m in a position to explain to you what psychoanalytic therapy is. We try to restore to the ego its autonomy; we try to restore its control over the id by bringing to light the repression of instinct which has driven the id to an unorthodox escape route i.e. created the patient’s symptoms.

Experience shows that the decisive repressions which lie behind most symptoms originally occurred in most patients’ childhood, when the ego was struggling to master its instinctual drives and finding its place in the outside world.

It should come as no surprise, then, that analysis takes the patient back to the earliest period of their life and uncovers memories which most of us would prefer to leave buried in the oblivion of childish amnesia.

The problem areas are identified by exploring the patient’s past, using dream interpretation and free association. As we approach the danger area the patient dries up – the associations and the memories stop. We have to teach the patient to overcome this resistance. We are educating the ego not to take refuge in the mental equivalent of ‘flight’, but to drag the memory, and the wish behind it, into the light of day. Once this is expressed, the patient is empowered to begin trying to overcome it.

Why, if it was impossible to face up to this experience back then, should the patient be able to handle the truth of his wishes now?

Because back then the patient was three-years-old and, although the terror was real and overwhelming to the infant at that age, to the adult mind whose ego-mechanisms are hugely more developed, the final revelation of what has been troubling  them all along often appears embarrassingly infantile.

The thing from which the patient’s childish ego fled in terror will often seem to their adult and strengthened ego no more than child’s play. (15:305)

4.

What about sex? I thought psychoanalysis was all about your sex life and surely only doctors who are entirely trustworthy and trained to a high level of dispassionateness have the integrity to be trusted with that kind of matter?

As to sex, yes, it has turned out to be the basis of so many of our patients’ problems that we are led to believe it plays a key role in mental life. But what, after all, would you expect? Just look at the importance of reproduction for animals

Insofar as we have evolved from the animal kingdom, of course we have inherited a strong sex drive; a drive which is not restricted, as it is in most animals, to certain seasons when they are ‘on heat’, but operates all the year round.

If you asked people to speak openly and with utter candour about all aspects of their lives’ wouldn’t you expect their sexual experiences, their sexual fears and fantasies, to crop up sooner or later.

All this seems to me simple and reasonable. That it has brought down on our heads all kinds of denunciations and accusations of immorality and pansexualism and obsession with sex, I attribute to the deeply neurotic and repressed nature of our civilization, which leads most people to reject and deny the truth about human nature.

Back to psychotherapy: So we return to memories of infancy to find the cause of the repressions which afflict the adult. And we find that most of those infant repressions are to do with sexuality.

You mean…?

Yes. Psychoanalysis’s greatest discovery has been the sexuality of children. People say we have desecrated the innocence of childhood. I say we are reporting what every nurse and many pediatricians have always known but been too afraid to put into words.

The sex life of a child is of course different from that of an adult. It passes through a long process of development during which it becomes involved with numerous component instincts with different aims, until at last it arrives at the seat of, and is ready at the service of, the grand goal of reproduction. But in such a long development there are bound to be hiccups.

For instance, the libido can become fixated at certain points, tied up with other instincts. Years later, when obstacles arise to normal sexual function, the libido may retreat to these earlier fixations, a process called regression.

The oddest thing is not that children have sexual feelings; when you really think about it, it would be odd if, as little animals, they didn’t have inklings of, or experiment with, the apparatus for the all-important task of reproduction to come.

The odd thing is that those feelings go into abeyance at about age 5 and are suppressed. Much is forgotten or loses its attraction during this period, the latency period. During the latency period the child builds up what we call reaction-formations, of disgust and shame, which combine with what it is told by parents to form a ‘morality’, something missing from the first five years as any parent knows and hard enough to instil into the older child.

This is the period when rules of behaviour, when ethics and morality, when right and wrong are instilled into the child who is repeatedly told that the simple gratification of its wishes (as in the early years) is ‘dirty’, ‘naughty’, ‘bad’ etc. From an evolutionary point of view you can see why the tribes who managed to do this to their young probably functioned better and survived.

We believe what happens is that the child needs a respite between the purely instinctual development of the early years, and the eruption of strength and renewed desires and lusts at puberty.

Civilization, therefore, is based on the effective repression of individual desires. A good citizen represses their desires effectively; a bad citizen either gratifies themself in an anti-social way, or falls prey to the kind of illness we began by looking at.

As to the content of those childhood feelings, consider the contents of fairy tales and mythology. There we see a persistent fear of the father. Kronos swallowed his children and castrated his father, Uranus. In his turn Kronos was himself emasculated by his son, Zeus, who he had tried to kill and who only triumphed through the help of his loving mother.

Think of the big bad wolf coming to eat you. Psychoanalysis says these are all projections of the primal fear of the huge father and that the most vivid way this terror can express itself, for a boy, is the fear that Daddy will chop off his penis. We call this the castration complex.

Maybe there is such a close correlation between the mental life of the child and the myths and stories of the earliest peoples because the child literally lives through the intellectual state of the primitive, rather as the embryo undergoes reptile or fish-like stages in its gestation in the womb.

However this may be, the essential fact about childhood sexuality is that it climaxes in the Oedipus Complex. The boy develops strong feelings for the mother, the girl for her father. You have to appreciate the vehemence of the love and the equal vehemence of the hate against the same-sex parent. The boy violently wishes to supersede the father, to replace him in his mother’s affections.

Eventually the Oedipus Complex is overcome, it disintegrates, it is resolved and the child lapses into the general amnesia of the latency period. But only rarely are all the stresses and strains associated with the Oedipus Complex in its full complexity totally mastered. And with the onset of puberty what hasn’t been properly sorted out returns to dominate the subject –  sometimes within the bounds of ‘normal’ behaviour, sometimes pushing the subject beyond these bounds into illness.

And the evidence for all this is?

  1. The records of earliest civilisations i.e. most mythologies include incestuous liaisons between father and daughter and mother and son. By the time we hear of them they have been repressed from everyday life and projected, culturally, onto gods and heroes who amount to psychological fantasy figures.
  2. The overwhelming testimony of adults under analysis.
  3. The analysis of children themselves down to the earliest years which we are now carrying out.

5.

So much for theory. This is what you need to know as an analyst, but now come the skills of technique.

You must listen in an unprejudiced way to everything the patient says. Nothing is too trivial. Everything has meaning. But the meaning isn’t clear. It has been distorted, by time, by the telling, but above all by the censoring processes of the ego.

Everything – memories, dreams, free associations – require skillful interpretation. This interpretation, of course, may be influenced by your personality. So you need to undergo a thorough analysis yourself to bring all your own neuroses to the surface, to transform you as much as possible into the ideal interpreter.

There is a method and there are the lessons of symbolisation we have built up since psychoanalysis emerged. But there is no denying it has a strong subjective element, too. How could it be otherwise in psychological treatment. Even doctors have to listen carefully and interpret what the patient is telling them.

Doctors are often wrong because they are taught about the body and modern pharmacology but fail to listen. Analysts have this advantage over doctors, that their entire training is in how to listen, how to suspend disbelief and listen to the hints and tips given out by the unconscious mind.

You have to have the insight and the tact to know exactly when to intervene in the analysis to put forward your interpretation. Too soon and you arouse resistance and defiance; too late and you have missed the moment.

And as if that wasn’t hard enough, when you finally tell the conscious ego of the patient what’s wrong with him – he denies it. All his wishes for a cure are thrown out of the window while he absolutely denies all your interpretation. Because every neurosis represents a flight from reality, a flight into illness, it is not easily to be given up.

For many patients this is because being ill has positive advantages. It brings them sympathy, allows them to avoid onerous duties (like going to the Front during the War), enables them to impose on their families or on friends or loved ones. Such basic strategies are hard to overthrow.

But there is another more complicated reason. There is something I omitted from our topographical description of the mind:

Within the ego itself a particular agency has become differentiated, which we name the superego. This superego occupies a special position between the ego and the id. It belongs to the ego and shares its high degree of psychical organisation; but it has a particularly intimate connection with the id. It is in fact a precipitate of the first object-cathexes of the id and is the heir to the Oedipus Complex after its demise.

This superego can confront the ego and treat it like an object and it often treats it very harshly. It is as important for the ego to remain on good terms with the superego as with the id. Estrangements between the superego and the ego are of great significance in mental life.

The superego is the vehicle of the phenomenon we call conscience. Mental health depends on the superego being developed i.e. on it being sufficiently impersonal [representing the impersonal values and ethics of society]. And that is precisely what it is not in neurotics, whose Oedipus Complex has not passed through the correct process of transformation. Their superego still confronts their ego as a strict father confronts a child; and their morality behaves in a primitive fashion, in that the ego gets punished by the superego. Mental illness is employed as the means of this self- punishment. (15:324)

Guilt is the affective malaise generated by the disobedient ego when confronted with the prospect of the imperfectly developed, over-punitive superego. Effective therapy is the overcoming of the patient’s resistances i.e. his attachment to illness as a defence. There are various mechanisms of resistance (anger, denial, partial concession) and an all-consuming guilt is the resistance of a defective superego. The overcoming of these resistances requires much more time and ingenuity than the relatively simple act of interpretation. Maybe you can see now why analysis takes so long. It is very far from being a ‘magical cure’ as you initially suggested.

Oh and one more thing. Just as you think you have finished extracting the psychic material, just when you have made your careful interpretation, just when you have wrestled with the various forms of resistance – the patient falls in love with you. It is very embarrassing.

Surely that is a help, though, because you will cooperate with someone you love and trust?

At first it seems like that, but slowly the love becomes more possessive, more demanding and reveals the other side of the coin, a fierce jealousy and finally a rage and anger and defiance. It drives away all other mental activity. In other words ,it is a very sophisticated form of resistance.

This is what we call transference, the projection of the patient’s early loves and jealousies onto the analyst which the analyst – the detached impartial observer – never prompted or merited. Instead it slowly becomes clear that in the transference the patient is acting out a fantasy; he or she is re-enacting the scene of the real or imagined love and hatred which lie at the root of the neurosis.

Thus transference can be co-opted as part of the cure as the patient is brought to see that he is reliving the past, grappling with his old demons.

So who is the patient really in love with, then?

The parent of the opposite sex. Nine times out of ten the patient is reliving scenes from the early, primitive period of his life when his sexuality was rampant and uncontrolled, when he was infatuated with and terrified by his parents, and projecting onto them his own rages or lusts. Thus we come full circle. You see how we have derived the theory I outlined above and you realise why it is necessary to know the theory when dealing with the practicalities of therapy.

6.

[Now we come to the nub of Freud’s argument for the lay practice of analysis.]

Now, with a correct understanding of what analysis involves it is clear that many of the requirements for it can quite easily be found among exceptional men in society who are prepared to undergo the rigorous training. By contrast, medical doctors are taught about the body as if it were a machine. When it breaks down they are instructed in either the physical techniques or the pills to fix it.

Five years of imbibing this attitude and you are completely the wrong person to undertake the delicate hermeneutics required of analysis.

What’s more, analysis has been greeted by the medical profession with howls of derision and has failed to be incorporated into any medical college’s curriculum. Doctors, being taught in that sceptical atmosphere, are just about the worst kind of people who could practice analysis.

No. Any laws restricting the practice of analysis to qualified doctors would prevent many perfect candidates taking it up, and restrict it to the people least likely by inclination and training to submit to yet another long course of specialist training.

What many doctors have already tried to do as individuals (shorten the analysis period or water down its premises by rejecting the sexual theories) would then be carried out wholesale by the medical profession and all the hard-won wisdom of Freud and his followers be reduced to an ineffective appendage of traditional psychology.

7.

But don’t many of the medical men in your own movement actually want analysis to be restricted to qualified medics to prevent it falling into the hands of quacks?

That is true and I’m not sure why. But for doctors only to be allowed to practise analysis would add a couple of years to the medical curriculum, which is already too long. It is true there are many possible somatic causes of neurosis and it would be as well to be aware of these. But in any case, every patient should be referred before analysis to a medical doctor in order to ensure that they are physically healthy; and, if symptoms arise in analysis, the patient should be referred back again to a doctor.

Wouldn’t it be easier if the analyst was also a doctor and could do this in one?

No, worse. For an analyst to physically examine a patient whom he is analysing is courting disaster. And again, the analyst’s training is not a small adjunct to a medical training; it actually – ideally – involves whole different areas: the history of civilization, ancient history and mythology, the science of literature. Wouldn’t it be better for analysts to be allowed to concentrate on what they require and for doctors to learn what they require and not to muddle up the two?

Freud has two last reasons for keeping analysis open to the public:

1. Rather than be swallowed up to become a footnote in medical textbooks ‘alongside hypnotism, autosuggestion and moral persuasion’, psychoanalysis is destined “to become indispensable to all the sciences which are concerned with the evolution of human civilisation and its major institutions such as art, religion and the social order.” (15:351)

2. Freud concludes with a vision of the future in which an army of analysts in the name of Science cures Humanity of all its neuroses and prepares the way for the millennium! (Compare Oskar Pfister’s critique of Freud’s scientific utopianism in his reply to Freud, Illusion of a Future).

Postscript (1927)

After an interval of discussion within the Psychoanalytic Movement itself, Freud rounded up the debate with this postscript to the main text. For him what matters is not whether an analyst is qualified as a doctor, but whether he is qualified to be an analyst. This requires a training very different from medical training, overlapping in some places but incorporating much sociology, psychology, history of civilization, of myths and religions etc.

Freud gives a brief review of his own career: though qualified as a doctor he never really wanted to be one and it was this distance from medical orthodoxy which gave him the intellectual freedom to discover psychoanalysis:

I became a doctor through being compelled to deviate from my original purpose; and the triumph of my life lies in my having, after a long and roundabout journey, found my way back to my earliest path… In my youth I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution. (15:358)

Although a medical training at the moment is probably the best preparation for becoming an analyst, Freud looks forward to a time when specialised training institutes dedicated to training analysts will accept people from all walks of life.

Thoughts

1. And this is what happened. Institutes of Psychoanalysis were, as Freud hoped, established in all major Western countries before Freud’s death. But for historian of science Frank Sulloway, it was a fatal moment when analysis set up institutes outside the structure of universities, with their 1,000 yearlong traditions of testing, debating and verification.

Freud wanted to save psychoanalysis from being watered down by the establishment. For Sulloway this short-term gain led to the longer-term dwindling and decline of psychoanalysis as a discipline, which we’re now seeing.

2. Freud’s overview of his theory is compelling, or at least very clear. But the most notable thing comes towards the end when he makes the frank admission that he was never very interested in medicine, and even in psychology, as such. He always wanted to investigate and solve the big cultural, religious and literary puzzles.

The quote about him having to make a detour away from his original interest and only after ‘a long and roundabout journey’ return to his first love, is repeated in all the summaries of him you find in humanities subjects, especially art and literature studies, and candidly and openly explains why in his last decade he devoted ever more energy to writing about religion, civilisation, the origin of society and so on, sometimes persuasively, but often, as in Totem and Taboo and Mose and Monotheism, using scholarship which has now been completely disproved, and with a crankiness which reflects very badly back on his claims for psychoanalysis to be a scientific objective discipline.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. The Question of Lay Analysis was first translated into English in 1959 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Quotes in this review are from the version included in Volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Historical  and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis’, published by Pelican Books in 1986.

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Iron In The Soul by Jean-Paul Sartre (1949)

He felt himself filled with a sense of vast and pointless freedom.
(Iron in the Soul p.92)

349 pages long in the Penguin paperback edition, Iron in The Soul repeats the format of the previous two novels in The Roads To Freedom trilogy by following a set of French characters over a very specific, and short, timeframe connected with the Second World War, in this case right at the end of the Battle of France.

Part one

Part one is 200 pages long, its first chapter has the dateline ‘New York: Saturday 15 June 1940 9am’ and the final chapter is dated ‘Tuesday 18 June 5.45am’. So it covers four days towards the end of the Battle of France.

In part one there is not much of the ‘experimental’ technique Sartre used to such effect in The Reprieve. In that novel I counted some 130 named characters, and the text made a point of cross-cutting unpredictably from one character’s actions and thoughts to another’s, from one scene to another, continually introducing new characters, sometimes just for brief cameos. This made it quite a challenging read but the reward was in the quite wonderful, almost musical, sense of rhythm in the interleaving of episodes, people and their deepest thoughts.

Part one of Iron in the Soul is more traditional, establishing fixed and static scenes and then following characters within them for substantial lengths of text, before starting new chapters or chapter sections to reflect new scenes and characters. Much more clear and comprehensible.

Timeline

Maybe a recap of the historical background would be useful. In spring 1940:

May 10 Germany invades France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands
May 11 British and French forces begin a long line of strategic defenses to defend Belgium
May 12 German General Guderian with his three divisions reaches the Meuse River
May 13 the first German forces emerge from Ardennes onto the Meuse
May 14 German Panzer Corps fifteen and nineteen break through Allied defenses at Sedan allowing German forces to bypass the Maginot line
May 15 German forces push on toward Paris and the English Channel
May 20 General Weygand replaces General Gamelin as Allied commander
May 17-18 Antwerp and Brussels fall to Germany
May 21 Allied forces try to counter attack German forces but are repulsed
May 24 The Luftwaffe bombs Allied defensive positions around Dunkirk
May 25 German forces take Boulogne as more retreating Allied forces reach Dunkirk
May 26 850 British civilian ships and vessels help Allied forces evacuate Dunkirk in the largest military evacuation in history
May 28 King Leopold of Belgium orders his army to surrender to German forces
May 29 around 47,000 British forces are evacuated from Dunkirk
May 30 around 120,000 Allied forces evacuated from Dunkirk
May 31 around 150,000 Allied soldiers arrive in Britain

June 3 The German Luftwaffe bombs Paris
June 4 Allied forces continue evacuation of the coast. In all some 338,326 British and 113,000 French forces are evacuated from Dunkirk to Britain
June 5th Second part of the Battle of France begins with the German striking south from the River Somme
June 9 German forces launch an offensive on Paris
June 10 Norway surrenders to Germany and Italy joins the war by declaring war on France and Great Britain
June 13 Paris is declared an open city by the French government which flees to Bordeaux
June 14 German troops enter Paris
June 16 Marshal Petain becomes Prime Minister of France
June 17 French government asks Germany for armistice terms. Germans cross the river Loire in the west and reach the Swiss frontier in the south-east
June 18 General de Gaulle broadcasts on the BBC telling the people of France to resist
June 22 France signs an armistice with Germany
June 23 Adolf Hitler begins a tour of the captured city of Paris
June 24 The French officially surrender at Compiegne, site of the German surrender in 1918
25 June All hostilities cease. France has fallen

Part one of Iron In the Soul tracks its characters over the four days during which Parisians flee their city before it is taken by the Germans and when retreating Second Tier armed forces are abandoned by their officers and find themselves at a loss what to do. Key characters from the first novel recur:

  • Gomez is in New York scrabbling for a job in the art world.
  • His wife, Sarah, and son Pablo are caught in the huge stream of refugees fleeing Paris.
  • Daniel, the gay banker who married Mathieu’s mistress, Marcelle, has packed her off and roams the streets of an empty Paris like the last man in the world – until he encounters Philippe, the spoilt youth we met in The Reprieve, and sets about seducing him.
  • Boris Serguine, who we saw join the Army in The Reprieve, was wounded in the fighting but is well enough to go to the apartment of his mistress, the nightclub singer Lola Montero who, however, has been diagnosed with a stomach tumour but can’t bring herself to tell him.
  • We saw Boris’s sister, the prickly Ivich, give herself to a unnamed man in The Reprieve partly as rebellion against her bourgeois parents, partly because she thought war was about to break out and the world end. Nearly two years later, we discover she got pregnant, the man married her, she had a miscarriage, he’s off at the front fighting where, characteristically, she hopes he gets killed.
  • Mathieu’s intolerably pompous self-serving brother, Jacques, a lawyer, forces his wife to pack in a hurry and flee from Paris only to get half way across France and realise he wants to go back, and blames the whole thing on her. She is livid. She goes to sleep in the car dreaming of Mathieu.
  • And the ‘hero’ of the first book – over-sensitive, over-thinking, angst-ridden but ineffectual philosophy tutor Mathieu Delarue? We find him with a platoon of second string infantry who never saw any fighting. For 200 pages they laze around wondering what to do after their officers have treacherously abandoned them, smoking and getting drunk – until a platoon of Chasseurs arrive who are battle-hardened and disciplined. On a whim – or more accurately, as a result of the incredibly complicated and tortuous meditations about the nature of ‘freedom’ which have filled the previous 800 pages – Mathieu decides to join them, is given a rifle, sent with a squad to be sharp-shooters up a church belfry and when the Germans finally arrive, is involved in a fierce firefight which ends with the belfry being blown up by artillery and Mathieu blazing away till the last minute like a Hollywood hero.

Part two

Part two is significantly different. It took me a few pages to realise that the entire part – all 120 pages – consists of just three paragraphs. With the exception of just two small breaks, these 120 pages make up a solid block of print, with no incidental breaks or indentations. Possibly this is to reflect the subject matter.

(Craig Vasey’s introduction to The Last Chance: Roads of Freedom IV, the unpublished fourth book in the series, tells me that in the original French there weren’t even the two small breaks: the entire 120 pages consisted of one paragraph. Moreover, all the verbs in the original were in the present tense, something the English translation here rejects.)

The ‘plot’ picks up (with savage irony / comedy / bleak farce) at exactly the point where Mathieu is killed – because taking refuge in a cellar of a house off the very square where Mathieu keeps shooting till he’s blown up, is his friend and contemporary, the strong, manly Communist Brunet. (In The Age of Reason, there’d been a passage where Brunet tries to persuade Mathieu to become a communist, but the timid philosopher, as with everything else in his life, hesitates and puts the decision off.)

Anyway, Brunet has no idea Mathieu is up in the church tower about to be blown to smithereens. He has his own concerns. He has fought bravely but most of his platoon were killed. Now, as the Germans finally enter the village, he surrenders to the Germans. He falls in with a trail of French POWs which grows and grows till it is maybe 10,000 strong, a vast concourse of defeated and demoralised men stumbling along dusty roads in blinding heat. Finally, they arrive at a disused barracks which has become converted into a POW camp.

Here the French are easily shepherded inside and locked up. The next hundred pages give in great detail the dialogue between a cast of about a dozen peasant and proletarian infantrymen, while Brunet makes his plans to create a Communist cell among them. While they fuss about food and the weather and gossip, Brunet is planning for the future.

In this he is sort of helped by Schneider, a tough, surly man who is not exactly a Communist, but agrees to help him. The spine of the section is the wary dialogue between these two men, with Schneider proving himself both more of a man of the people, and smarter than Brunet in various situations. It is difficult to know what this section is ‘about’. Possibly it is a prolonged examination of the nature of a ‘Communist Activist’, with Brunet given Schneider as a foil to dramatise different approaches to handling men, creating a cell, combating cynicism and fatigue, and so on.

Whatever the precise intention, the overt or political purpose of the section now feels completely redundant, part of a long-lost history. It doesn’t even – as with so much Sartre – lead to any real action, for next to nothing happens to this vast concourse of freed men. After five or six days without food, trucks eventually arrive with soup and bread. One madmen runs amok screaming and the Germans shoot him. For the rest the defeated Frenchmen adopt a holiday mood, sunbathing, playing cards, establishing billets in every available building, nicking stuff, squabbling. Both Brunet and Schneider find it almost impossible to motivate anyone. No Germans of any authority appear. They don’t confront the camp commandant or organise a strike or anything really decisive or dramatic. Instead Brunet and Schneider squabble with each other, and with the dozen or so named characters around them.

In the last of the three ‘sections’, the setting jumps a bit to being aboard the massive train of cattle trucks in which thousands of POWs have been packed as it rattles north through France. A teeny tiny bit of suspense is given to this passage because the more intelligent among them (i.e. Brunet, Schneider, a few others) are pretty sure they’re being taken to Germany to become slave labour.

This section depicts the various forms of denial, fear, and panic among the POWs as they wonder which way the train will turn at the fatal set of points which will steer them either further north into France or East across the border. One character, a young printer who Brunet had recruited for his Communist cell, panics, jumps from the train when it slows at a cutting, runs away a little, then panics more and tries to return and catch up – only to be picked off by the German guards and fall dead beside the rails. That’s as dramatic as it gets.

When the train reaches the points, they are set East, confirming Brunet and Schneider’s gloomy assumptions. They are heading East to a dark future. The final words are:

Above the dead body, above the inert freight-van, the darkness wheeled. It alone was living. Tomorrow’s dawn would cover all of them with the same dew. Dead flesh and rusted steel would run with the same sweat. Tomorrow the black birds would come. (p.349)

Themes

The futility of life

As to the mood and feel of the text, we are back in bleak Sartre-land where the sunshine is futile, life is pointless, breathing is an effort, and the hyper-sensitive characters are oppressed by life, by other people, by other people looking at them, dammit – and everyone agonises about their ‘freedom’, panting after this mystical chimera without ever quite grasping what this much-abused term actually means.

Gomez, the artist has escaped to New York, where he walks around hating the heat, the sunshine, the big buildings, the streamlined cars, the adverts, the magazines and, everywhere, pictures of happy smiling people – Not to grin is a sin, he thinks bitterly – while ‘over there’ i.e. back in Europe, people are suffering, suffering I tell you! This is intercut with the plight of his wife, Sarah, a Jewess, and small son Pablo, who are caught in a vast traffic jam of refugees fleeing Paris. These are Gomez’s thoughts:

He looked at the street, at the meaningless sun, at the whole meaningless day. There would be nothing now, any more, but meaningless days. (p.9)

These are Sarah’s thoughts:

We are no more than the feet of an interminable insect. Why walk when hope is dead? Why live? (p.25)

Sartre’s novels could almost be designed to validate teenage depressives’ most suicidal thoughts and, above all, to make the depressive feel special, superior to what Gomez calls the ‘human tide’ of people in New York with their ‘bright dead eyes’, and Sarah’s description of the refugees as ‘insects’ (a favourite insult term of Sartre’s; he memorably describes Hitler as having an insect face; Mathieu looks down from the church tower on the villagers like ‘frightened ants’; Lola feels that Boris while screwing her is like an insect, when the Germans arrive in the village Mathieu feels they have ‘the eyes of supermen and insects’, p.212).

Everyone else is an insect, or an inane grinning American with dead eyes, part of the machine, part of the bourgeoisie – I, I alone, suffer – look how I suffer – look how special I am!

Suicide

Both The Age of Reason and The Reprieve contain extended sequences describing the thoughts and sensations, the hyper self-awareness, of two men on the brink of committing suicide – Daniel with a razor and Mathieu jumping into the Seine, respectively. Having tried to kill myself, I can vouch for the exquisite sense of self-pity you feel at such a moment, looking at your doomed hands, your tragic face in the mirror, afflicted by sentimental thoughts that this is the last time you’ll look at your face, the last time you’ll turn out the bedroom light (or whatever), after you slash your wrists, take an overdose etc.

So, Ivich invites her brother, Boris, to join her in a suicide pact (p.72) though she isn’t really a serious character, just a spoilt wilful girl. Daniel comes across Philippe, the spoilt son of bourgeois parents, hesitating on the brink of the Seine, trying to nerve himself to throw himself in. Various other characters – for example Mathieu’s sister-in-law, Odette, who is secretly in love with him – think they can’t go on, life is so damn pointless. What’s the point?

In Sartre’s novels, death, and suicide, are all around us. Describing the plot to my son he said, ‘sounds like teenage angst on steroids’.

Rootless, directionless, abandoned

You can’t help feeling that what many of these people need is a sound spanking (as Mathieu’s sister-in-law, Odette, memorably puts it). Or maybe just the support of a loving family, a job, some stability, something to focus their energy on.

But Sartre has chosen his characters carefully to be bohemian types, drifters, people without settled jobs or any real family commitments. Sartre selects a group of people with very few responsibilities and who we never see doing a single day’s work in their lives – thus allowing them all to give vent to maximum feelings of alienation and anomie, thus permitting them all to have lengthy and repetitive soliloquies about the pointlessness of life, about their feelings of abandonment.

As a married father of two, I see both marriage and especially fatherhood, as demanding, responsible roles, taking a lot of time and commitment. Significantly, none of Sartre’s characters are married or have children in the traditional manner:

  • Gomez is married but has dumped Sarah and his son to run away and fight in Spain, then flee to America.
  • Daniel only married Marcelle as an existential dare, in reality he hates her and can’t wait to get away from her.
  • Boris is going out with Lola the singer, but routinely hates her, and in fact dumps her for the army.
  • Ivich got married to Georges after he got her pregnant but, inevitably, hates him, and hopes he’s killed in the fighting (p.66). Ivich loathes her in-laws, and she ‘detests’ the French (p.68), but then she hates more or less everyone.
  • Sarah looks at her crying son and realises she hates him (p.25).
  • The villagers hate the French soldiers who’ve been billeted on them (p.97).
  • Mathieu realises he hates his drunken comrades (p.132).
  • Philippe tells Daniel that he hates his step-father, the general (p.149).
  • Pinette’s girlfriend hates Mathieu (p.157)

In fact, most of the characters hate most of the other characters most of the time. Do all French people hate all other French people? It would explain their notorious surliness.

So if you’re a drifter without a proper job, without any family ties or support, who hates everyone and despises bourgeois society, it’s highly likely this is how you will end up feeling: full of despair and anomie. It’s hardly rocket science.

Alone

It is a key axiom of existentialism that every individual is alone, completely alone, and condemned to complete freedom. We are not hemmed in or supported by social structures or traditions or morality, for we choose whether or not to accept those: to blame society or others in any way for any of our acts is bad faith, is a denial of our utter freedom.

But Sartre’s philosophy of life – or his melodramatic poetry about the horror of existence – all begins in this primal, fundamental sense of your complete solitude, the basic feeling of alienation from others, from your fellow soldiers, or your family, from everyone else in the bar or cafe or nightclub, some sudden feeling of your complete aloneness in the face of an utterly indifferent universe.

This is the moment in the characters’ lives which the text keeps returning to like a moth to a flame.

  • He shivered. He felt suddenly naked and alone, a man, I. (p.102)
  • No one needs me. he sat down on the edge of the road because there was nowhere for him to go. Night entered into him through mouth and eyes, through nose and ears. He was no one now; he was nothing – nothing any longer but misery and darkness. (p.162)
  • Mathieu saw the smile and felt utterly alone. (p178)
  • She felt lost in a world of which she could make no use. (p.191) [Odette]
  • She thought: ‘I am alone.’.. He speaks to me and kisses me, but when I come to die I shall be alone… (pp.205-6) [Lola]
  • Where are the Comrades? Brunet felt lonely. Never, in all the past ten years, had he felt so utterly alone. (p.239)
  • [When the French prisoners of war arrive in a huge fences barracks] They were going to bury their filthy old war among these high buildings, were going to stew in their own juice, unseen of the outer world, isolated and alone. (p.241)

Even sex doesn’t unify people, it merely emphasises their inescapable isolation. There are two memorable acts of sex in the book and both of them emphasise the essential loneliness of the male protagonist: first the peasant Pinette screwing the post office girl he’s picked up in a field outside the village where Mathieu and the other soldiers are mooching about; then handsome young Boris making love to Lola the ageing singer.

Lola has discovered she has a tumour of the belly and/or the menopause, both of which conspire to make sex very painful, but not as painful as the self-image she has, loathing her dry husk of a body and thinking of Boris as a repellent insect squirting her with sticky fluid. There are lots of disgusting, viscous fluids in Sartre.

It is through a wound that you will enter me. When he used to touch me in the old days, I became like velvet: now, my body is like dried earth: I crack and crumble under his fingers… He rent her to the roots of her belly, he was moving in her belly like a knife. On his face was a look of loneliness, of morbid concentration. She saw him as an insect, as a fly climbing up a window-pane climbing, falling, climbing again. She was conscious only of the pain he was causing her… (p.204)

No, not even sex is an escape from the ubiquitous sense of aloneness, of abandonment, which Sartre sees as the permanent basis of the human condition.

In the climaxes of the two parts, the male protagonist is invincibly alone. Mathieu, wounded, and the only survivor of an artillery shell which has brought the roof of the church tower down on all his comrades, struggles to continue shooting for just a few seconds more before being obliterated. In those moments:

He fired. He was cleansed. He was all-powerful. He was free. (p.225)

On the last page of part two, after the little printer has been shot dead and the train moves mechanically onwards.

Brunet was alone, rigid and uncomfortable. (p.349)

It is an oddity than a man so obsessed with the fundamental and irreducible aloneness of each human being became a communist, devoted to the idea of international solidarity. And that a man so obsessed with man’s terrifyingly absolute freedom, adopted the Marxist worldview which is characterised by the inevitability of History, that Marx had uncovered scientific laws of History which dictated that a Communist revolution was inevitable i.e that at some deep level human beings are not free. I leave this to the scholars to disentangle: it would certainly be good to reach a better understanding.

Science fiction states of mind

Not much happens in a Sartre novel. Page after page is filled either with lengthy dialogue between its ineffectual characters, or with even lengthier descriptions of their feelings of abandonment and futility. The firefight at the climax of part one, and the death of the printer at the climax of part two, are very much the exceptions which prove the rule. They are more or less the only bits of ‘action’ in the entire trilogy.

Every page features descriptions of the characters’ inner thoughts, lengthy internal monologues but these are not as they would be in a comparable English novel. The distinctive and unnerving feature of them is the extent to which they develop into often almost delirious hallucinations of the world around them, with objects coming alive, with great abstract ideas entering the sky or room or drowning them, with parts of their bodies becoming external objects (arms and particularly hands often seem to their owners to have become alien objects). Here is Mathieu in the bell tower of the village church.

Under their feet was the fragrance of spices and incense, coolness, and the stained-glass windows feebly shining in the shadows of the Faith. Under their feet was confidence and hope. He felt cold. He looked at the sky, breathed the sky, thought with the sky. He was naked on a glacier at a great height. Far below him lay his childhood. (p.200)

In a proliferating multitude of ways, the world around Sartre’s characters, including their own bodies, including their own ideas and sensations, come alive, infuse their thoughts, colour the sky, invade the world.

The effect is often bizarre, surreal or even druggy. ‘He thought with the sky.’

And very often these hallucinations go one step further by infusing these trippy states of consciousness with poetic renderings of grand abstract concepts like Death or Defeat or Despair. Characters frequently become dead men, anticipating their death (by suicide or in battle), realise that they are a dead man walking or thinking. Or death invades whole scenes, the huge vista of prisoners of war becomes a sea of the dead (to Brunet’s eye) or Paris becomes a vast tomb (in Daniel’s imagination), and so on.

Thus Daniel wandering the empty streets of Paris experiences what amount to such intense imaginative transports that they are effectively hallucinations. n a memorable simile the Boulevard St Michel becomes a vast beached whale. In fact, it was while reading the Daniel-wanders-round-empty-Paris section that it suddenly struck me that a lot of Sartre’s scenes have the feel of science fiction.

Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, was silence and emptiness, an abyss stretching horizontally away from him… The streets led nowhere. Without human life, they all looked alike. The Boulevard Saint-Michel, but yesterday a long southward spread of gold, seemed now like a stranded whale, belly upwards. He made his feet ring out upon the great, sodden, hollow carcass. (p.93)

This scene suddenly reminded me of all those science fiction novels in which a man finds himself more or less the only survivor of a disaster, a great plague or nuclear apocalypse.

Anyway, the passage quoted above could be categorised as a Level One hallucination, one which is still a metaphor of a recognisable state. But (as noted above) routinely Sartre’s characters progress to Level Two hallucinations in which the ‘reality’ around them becomes infused with great Abstract Concepts.

He looked at the empty bridge, at the padlocked bookboxes on the quay, at the clock-face that had no hands… A shadow slipped past the Prefecture of Police…Paris was not, strictly speaking, empty. It was peopled by little broken scraps of time that sprang here and there to life, to be almost immediately reabsorbed again into this radiance of eternity. (p.91)

‘Scraps of time reabsorbed into this radiance of eternity.’ This is a kind of philosophical prose poetry, in that it invokes ‘deep’ ideas, but without any systematic application, merely for effect. It is a kind of pseudo-philosophical lyricism for its own sake.

I am here. Time, with its great fanning future, collapsed. All that was left was a tiny flickering patch of local moments. (p.108)

Suddenly this visionary quality reminded me of the prose of the great psychological sci-fi writer, J.G. Ballard. In the 1960s Ballard famously rejected ‘space opera’, the whole sci-fi tradition of rockets going to outer space, aliens and death rays – in order to concentrate on weird mental states achieved here on decaying planet earth. His characters wander landscapes of entropy and decay littered with empty swimming pools, abandoned motels, are attracted to car crashes or go schizo in high-rise buildings. They explore the altered states of inner space. Like Sartre’s.

All about him was once more swallowed in a planetary silence. He must walk, walk unceasingly, over the surface of a cooling planet. (p.134)

Reading Daniel’s visions of abandoned Paris I suddenly saw the surprising similarity between Ballard’s psychological explorations and the many many passages in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novels which obsessively depict mental states of hallucinatory intensity – not for any philosophic or propagandistic purpose, well, OK, partly to promote the feel of his existentialist world-view — but much more for their weirdness, to bring out the strangeness of what it’s like to be the animal who thinks, the animal with self-consciousness, the animal lost in the fever of its own compulsive hallucinations. Here’s Mathieu among his soldiers hanging round the village waiting for something to happen.

We are a vermin’s dream: our thoughts are becoming muddied, are becoming less and less human: thoughts, hairy and clawed, were scurrying around, jumping from head to head; the vermin was on the point of waking up. (p.102)

At which point it dawned on me that Sartre’s philosophy of freedom, the so-called existentialist philosophy, is maybe a rationalisation, an attempt to give a structure and a meaning to what in fact, in the fiction, on the page, comes over as an unstoppable torrent of weird hallucinations.

His mind felt completely empty. He was dead: the afternoon was bleached and dead. It was a tomb. (p.76)

Mathieu is not at all dead as he thinks this, just like none of the other characters who let thoughts of death and the dead ceaselessly invade their thoughts are actually dead. But then maybe ‘think’ is the wrong word. Maybe it would be better to say that this is a poetic description of an intense feeling which is passing through Mathieu’ consciousness. Mathieu is merely the vessel for these delirious psychological states.

All Sartre’s characters are. They are channels for Sartre’s uncontrollable gush of weird mental states. One of the soldiers hanging round with Mathieu begins to tell the others the armistice with Germany has been signed, but hesitates… and suddenly they all grasp the dreadful truth without having to be told.

A dazzle off steel, then silence. The blue, flabby flesh of the afternoon had taken eternity like the sweep of a scythe. Not a sound, not a breath of air. Time had become frozen; the war had withdrawn… (p76)

Is hallucination the right word for this kind of writing? Sometimes. Other times it’s just a peculiar, a very distinctive, way of conceiving human beings and human consciousness, in which ‘thought’ is perceived as an almost organic process and – this being Sartre – generally a revoltingly nauseating one involving slime.

At one moment he was just an emptiness filled with vague forebodings, at another, he became just like everyone else. His forebodings faded; the general mood welled sluggishly up in his mind and oozed from his mouth… (p.97)

The vermin eyes had ostracised him, were looking up at him with an air of astonished solemnity, as though they were seeing him for the first time, as though they were looking up at him through layers of slime. (p.102)

The fact that the French prisoners of war are made to trudge through the heat for hours before reaching the camp, and then aren’t fed for five days gives Sartre the opportunity to let rip with the altered states caused by starvation and dehydration. For an extended sequence Brunet passes into a delirium somewhere between dreams and hallucinations. For example, he imagines all the soldiers are chimpanzees.

There were chimpanzees in the next cage, pressing inquisitive faces to the bars. They had sad and wrinkled eyes. Monkeys have sadder eyes than any animals except man. Something had happened, he wondered what. A catastrophe. What catastrophe? Perhaps the sun had gone cold? (p.274)

Note, again, the tinge of apocalyptic science fiction.

In fact this long second part is a strange mixture of very realistic slangy chat between rough Frenchmen, arguing, crying, going mad, blaming their officers, squabbling, cadging fags etc – and passages of quite stunning prose poetry. Sartre’s philosophy I leave to the experts on Husserl and Heidegger to nail down; it belongs to the European tradition which is difficult for us Anglo-Saxons to really understand.

But for me the revelation of these books is the surprising amount of purple prose and lyricism they contain, the extent to which they are truly writerly. As a last example, imagine a huge prisoner of war camp with thousands of dusty, downcast men lying, squatting, standing, leaning about everywhere, as far as the eye can see. And then:

The airplane passed overhead with a shattering din. The crowded faces lowered, then upturned, passed from black to white, like a field suddenly bursting into flower: in place of hard, black heads, thousands of camelias broke into blossom. Spectacles glittered like scraps of glass in a garden bed. (p.243)

There are lots of passages like this. Whereas his analyses of the political situation have passed into dusty history and his existentialist philosophy may or may not still have adherents – the vibrancy, the unexpected imaginativeness and continual weirdness of Sartre’s continues to haunts with its strange power.

Credit

La mort dans l’âme by Jean-Paul Sartre was published by Editions Gallimard in 1949. This translation is not by the translator of the first two in the trilogy, Eric Sutton, but by Gerard Hopkins. It was published as Iron In The Soul by Hamish Hamilton in 1950. Iron In The Soul was issued as a Penguin paperback in 1963. All references are to the 1967 Penguin paperback reprint, which cost the princely sum of five shillings (25p). All quotations are for the purposes of criticism and review.

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by Simon on August 26, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, French literature, Novel, Second World War, War
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Posted by Simon on August 26, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/iron-in-the-soul-jean-paul-sartre/