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Sigmund Freud and the Case of the Underground Man

Susan C. Fischman, Brown University

Describing the discourse of Dostoevsky's Man in Notes from Underground, Mikhail Bakhtin concludes that it "cannot be seen as a lyrical or epic discourse, calmly gravitating toward itself and its referential object; no, first and foremost one reacts to it, responds to it, is drawn into its game."(1) Bakhtin 's last word should be carefully noted, for there is a game going on in the text. A Freudian perspective on Notes from Underground will reveal the nature of that game, the identity of its players, and the small detail that contains the key to its solution.

In order to situate the game as it is orchestrated by Dostoevsky, it is helpful to consider Bakhtin's insights into the mechanism used to animate the Underground Man: his preoccupation with, and dependence on, the impression he makes on those around him. Although Bakhtin notes that "Dostoevsky's [Underground Man] is not an objectified image but an autonomous discourse, pure voice; we do not see him, we hear him",(2) this "pure voice" operates in a very particular way:

...[w]hat the Underground Man thinks about most of all is what others think or might think about him; he tries to keep one step ahead of every other consciousness, every other thought about him, every other point of view on him. At all the critical moments of his confession he tries to anticipate the possible definition or evaluation others might make of him, to guess the sense and tone of that evaluation, tries painstakingly to formulate these possible words about himself by others, interrupting his own speech with the imagined rejoinder of others.(3)

The result of this constant interaction is that the "genuine life of the [Underground Man's] personality is made available only through a dialogic penetration of that personality, during which it freely and reciprocally reveals itself."(4)

What is suggested here is the psychoanalytic method, which might well be described, to use Bakhtin's words, as the "dialogic penetration of a personality." If Bakhtin would read Notes from Underground as a dialogue between the protagonist and his reader, it is also, more specifically, possible to read the text as the interaction of a patient and his analyst. The reader must assume not simply the role of imaginary listener, but the more active role of analyst as well, carefully reading the clues provided by Dostoevsky in order to understand the Underground Man's psychic composition.

In allowing his troubled narrator to reveal the source of his disease through a ludic discourse with his reader-as-analyst,

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Dostoevsky has not only illustrated in a clear and systematic way certain neurotic tendencies which Freud himself would identify and explore in his own patients, but he has also anticipated the methodology which would come to be known as 'psychoanalysis'. It is not unusual to find that still another literary text anticipates Freudian psychoanalysis in interesting ways. Writers have been animating their characters with psychological insight as early as Sophocles, and Freud himself acknowledged his debt to literature. (5) Nor is it unusual to find this trait in Dostoevsky, whose work and psyche have been explored by Freud. (6) What is unusual is how closely Dostoevsky, who precedes Freud, captures both the spirit and the letter of psychoanalysis .

Such a psychoanalytic approach is invited, of course, by the psychic state of the protagonist, as well as by the structure of the work. From the beginning of the text, Dostoevsky 's Underground Man demonstrates symptoms that would immediately draw the attention of the Freudian analyst. He introduces himself to the reader with the following observation:

I'm a sick man... a mean man. There's nothing attractive about me. I think there's something wrong with my liver. But, actually, I don't understand a damn thing about my sickness; I'm not even too sure what it is that's ailing me. (7)

The character himself has enough insight into the workings of his psyche to understand that there is something most definitely wrong with him, and enough intelligence to reject the ease of a physical explanation.

On the surface, the reader-as-analyst has access to other superficial manifestations of the Underground Man's problems as well, such as his anger, his low self-esteem and his defensiveness. Early in the story, Dostoevsky inscribes the Underground Man's hypersensitivity. In the second section of Part I, he describes himself as follows:

I, for instant, am horribly sensitive. I’m suspicious and easily offended, like a dwarf or a hunchback. But I believe there have been moments when I'd have liked to have my face slapped. I say that in all seriousness - I'd have derived pleasure from this too. Naturally it would be the pleasure of despair. (8)

The choice of metaphor is noteworthy: the underground Man identifies himself with deformed beings: the dwarf, the hunchback. Later he will develop the metaphor of the mouse in much the same way. Equally noteworthy is the rhetoric, whereby language is manipulated for its effect. The Underground Man uses language melodramatically, enabling him to interact with the reader-as-analyst and invite her or him to play his game.

But, like all of Freud's patients, the Underground Man evades observation even as he invites it. He uses his powerful intellect throughout the course of the narration, adroitly defending against his own and the reader's access to his innermost feel-

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ings. If, at times, he does seem to offer insight into his real emotions, he immediately shifts gears, as though he has realized what he has done, and tries to correct it before he reveals too much of himself. It is here that we find the first manifestation of Dostoevsky as Freud's methodological predecessor: In a series of ploys and dodges which may be seen as the prototype for what Freud would later call resistance, the Underground Man thereby thwarts - or hopes to thwart - any insight the reader-as-analyst might have into the secret workings of his psyche.

With Freud, resistance would become a normal part of the psycho-analytic situation, a 'necessary evil' that the informed listener would have to learn to diagnose. Attempting to depict resistance more graphically for students of psychoanalysis, Freud offers the example of the "man who has gone to the dentist because of an unbearable toothache will nevertheless try to hold the dentist back when he approaches the sick tooth with a pair of forceps."(9) He goes on to note a characteristic of neurotic resistance wherein the patient, by resisting, is really only harming her or himself. According to Freud, "the patient, who is suffering so much from his symptoms and is causing those about him to share his sufferings, who is ready to undertake so many sacrifices in time, money, effort and self-discipline in order to be freed from those symptoms... this same patient puts up a struggle in the interest of his illness against the person who is helping him."(10)

But this paradoxical aspect of human nature was already evident to Dostoevsky, and was an integral part of his Underground Man well before Freud would recognize it as a symptom of resistance. Consider the situation suggested by the Underground Man himself:

...listen carefully some time to the moans of a nineteenth century intellectual suffering from a toothache... His moans soon become strident and perverse... He certainly knows that he's not helping himself by moaning like that. No one knows better than he that he's tormenting and irritating himself and others for nothing... Well, there's voluptuous pleasure in all this degradation...(11)

When Freud was faced with resistance in his patients, he noted that it "it exhibited protean changes in the forms in which it manifested itself."(12) The Underground Man's own resistance to analysis by the reader matches several of the forms which Freud would later categorize as intellectual in nature. Thus, in the first part of the text, the Underground Man is noticeably reluctant to draw on his own experiences. In the midst of a discussion of free will, which he posits as his goal, ultimately his desire, he suddenly plunges his argument into a remark as far away from the personal - that is, away from his own feelings - as he possibly can:

Look at the United States, that indissoluble union, plunged into civil war! Look at the Schleswig-Holstein farce... Have you noticed... that the most refined, bloodthirsty tyrants, compared to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins

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are mere choirboys, are often exquisitely civilized?(13)

The reader-as-analyst must silently note this trick, and wonder whether the Underground Man is trying to impress with his historical acumen and the striking manner in which he uses rhetoric to make a point. Or is this simply an attempt at submerging himself in order to all but eliminate himself from the emotional arena?

Another sign of intellectual resistance is defined by Freud as the patient "frightening by means of arguments and exploiting all the difficulties and improbabilities which normal but uninstructed thinking finds in the theories of analysis." (14) The Underground Man anticipates this by first positing a formula that is remarkably like the psychoanalytic process. This formula could, he believes, define the "root of all our wishes and whims." Since Freud, however, we know our "wishes and whims" to be rooted in the richest psychic soil, and therefore available for analysis, explanation, and cure.

But after first anticipating the psychoanalytic process with his formula, he subsequently rejects it. According to the Underground Man, such a formula would be harmful - it would create a deterministic framework wherein the very predictability of human "wishes and whims" would ultimately destroy the freedom necessary to express them. Thus during the eight section, he says:

Now, suppose one day they really find a formula at the root of all our wishes and whims that will tell us what they depend on, what laws they are subject to, how they develop, what they are aiming at in such and such a case, and so on and so forth - that is, a real mathematical equation? Well, chances are that man will then cease to feel desire. Almost surely. What joy will he get out of functioning according to a timetable? Furthermore, he'll change from a man into an organ stop or something like that, for what is a man without will, wishes and desires, if not an organ stop?... For when desire merges with reason, then we will reason instead of desiring.(15)

The Underground Man's objection might serve as a typical example of a deliberate, albeit subconscious, misinterpretation of what such a formula would actually set out to do.

The Underground Man also uses denial, later included by Freud as still another form of resistance, to keep himself and the reader from gaining access to his deeper feelings. When, for example, during the eleventh section he states,

I'd feel better if I could only believe something of what I've written down here. But I swear I can't believe a single word of it. That is, I believe it in a way, but at the same time, I feel I'm lying like a son of a bitch. (16)

the reader recognizes that resistance, in psychoanalytic terms, "has withdrawn on to the doubt belonging to the obsessional neurosis and from that position is successfully defying"(17)

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any attempts to go beyond. Freud, in what is almost a paraphrase of the Underground Man's statement, will later come to explain denial as an instance where the patient seems to be saying: "Yes, that's all very nice and interesting... It would change my illness a lot if it were true. But I don't in the least believe that it is true; and, so long as I don't believe it, it makes no difference to my illness."(18)

In this case, Freud would remind the analyst that it is vital to bear in mind that "the patient is willing to be argued with; he is anxious to get us to instruct him, teach him, contradict him, introduce him to the literature, so that he can find further instruction."(19) It would seem, then, that beneath the patient's resistance lies a deeper need to seduce the analyst into playing a sort of 'devil's advocate'. In the game created by Dostoevsky between his protagonist and reader, the same type of subliminal seduction occurs. The author allows a wish similar to Freud's insight into what the patient really wants, to emerge quietly when, at the end of the tenth section, the Underground Man addresses his imaginary listener with these bittersweet words:

But, after all I've said now, shall I tell you something? I'm sure that mousehole dwellers like me should be kept out of the way. Their kind may spend forty years sitting under the floor somewhere, but once they emerge from there, they'll talk and talk and talk; they'll talk your head off without stopping.(20)

The reader is moved by the pain and seduced by the hopefulness of the sad inner voice of this "mousehole dweller" who really does wish, indeed positively threatens, to 'tell' himself.

The ways in which Dostoevsky's protagonist manipulates the reader-as-analyst, managing to invite and repel emotional involvement at the same time, clearly anticipate Freud's observations on resistance. But Dostoevsky has done more than create a character whose neurotic traits - his anger, denial, obsession with and fear of free will, his need and yet his reluctance to talk, and his low opinion of himself - can be catalogued through Freudian analysis. In order to solve the game of 'cat and mouse' with the Underground Man, the reader must look still more closely. And the author has provided the clue that makes this possible.

The solution rests in a tiny detail masterfully placed by the author. Consider this small piece of information that the Underground Man suddenly reveals in the fifth section:

...I couldn't stand saying "Sorry, Papa, I'll never do it again." And it wasn't at all because I was incapable of saying it. On the contrary, perhaps I was only too prone to say it... I'd get myself blamed, almost purposely, for something with which I'd had nothing to do... But, even so, I was always deeply moved, repented my wickedness, and cried. (21)

Here is the locus of the original pain, that was to be followed

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later by resistance to these early feelings, in the form of anger, denial, and low self-esteem. Its source was a father who inspired conflicting feelings of fury and remorse in his son.

Typically, no sooner has the memory of this interaction with Papa surfaced than the Underground Man immediately passes judgment on it:

It makes me sick to remember all this, but then I was sick at the time too. It took me only a minute or so to recognize that it was all a pack of lies; all that repentance, those emotional outbursts and promises of reform - nothing but pretentious, nauseating lies. I was furious.(22)

The feelings in the adult had turned into anger directed inward, at himself instead of at Papa. That is why he compares himself with the hunchback, the dwarf, and the mouse. The feelings had become the active desire for suffering, the daily self-doubt and self-torment. "I'm a sick man, a mean man..." he told us when he first introduced himself. Here he tells us that he was made sick as a child, too.

And we can go still further with this small bit of information. (23) From it, we understand that the Underground Man's interaction with the reader-as-analyst was determined by his interaction with Papa. The Underground Man directs his fury at his imaginary listener; the reader is made to bear the brunt of the Underground Man's endless attacks. He argues passionately, bitterly, and so the Underground Man's imaginary listener becomes his imaginary enemy:

Well, I wish I could stick you into a mousehole for forty years or so with nothing to do, and at the end of that time I'd like to see what kind of state you'd be in. Do you think it's permissible to leave a man alone for forty years without anything to do?(24)

These angry words, hurled at the reader, art the very words the Underground Man would have liked to have been able to say to his Papa, rather than "Sorry, Papa..." But he could not; and, as he himself observed, it made him sick.

A similar conclusion is drawn by Bakhtin, who notes that:

[w]hat [the Underground Man] fears most of all is that people might think he is repenting before someone, that he is asking someone's forgiveness, that he is reconciling himself to someone else's judgment or evaluation, that his self-affirmation is somehow in need of affirmation and recognition by another. And it is in this direction that he anticipates the other's response.(25)

But now not only can we trace this fear back to his childhood, we can also identify the "other" as the Underground Man's father: he is playing out a battle that, had it been rightfully waged, would have been fought with Papa. Because that was

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impossible, he carries with him into adulthood the old ambivalent feelings for his father, and enacts them with the reader.

Freud would later identify this same enactment of unresolved feelings as a symptom of a very specific type of resistance which he would call transference. In transference, according to Freud, -"the patient... repeats attitudes and emotional impulses from his early life which can be used as a resistance against the doctor and the treatment..."(26) Further, delving more deeply into the nature of transference, Freud discovered that "if the patient is a man, he usually extracts this material from his relation to his father, into whose place he fits the doctor, and in that way, he makes resistances out of his efforts to become independent in himself and his judgments. " (27)

When we note this last discovery of Freud's and reconsider in light of it the underground Man's interest in free will, it becomes clear that his insistent desire for free will stemmed from the conflict that had grown around the issues with Papa. As Bakhtin observes, "the Underground Man's attitude toward the other's consciousness and its discourse" - (an attitude which we have identified as belonging to Papa but transferred to the imaginary listener, the reader-as-analyst) - is one of "extraordinary dependence upon it and at the same time extreme hostility toward it and nonacceptance of its judgments." (28) The need for independence, expressed in the impassioned arguments for free will, had become infected with the Underground Man's unresolved and festering feelings toward this father upon whom, as a child, he had of course depended.

The author's inclusion of the unobtrusive but psychologically-loaded information about Papa reaches beyond the requisites of narrative or aesthetic. No character of Dostoevsky's pen was ever merely a vehicle for his philosophic or political ideas, and the Underground Man in his turn is hereby brought into being as a psychologically palpable, psychically damaged human specimen. In the painful memory of the cry against Papa resides the humanity of the Underground Man.

Finally, then, as the role of Papa is understood, the various components of the game fall into place, and an invention of the Underground Man himself - the analogy of the mouse - makes sense. That the Underground Man powerfully identifies with the mouse becomes evident by the great length and detail in which he describes it. He explains to the reader:

Let's assume it has been humiliated (it is constantly being humiliated) and that it wishes to avenge itself... the mouse, with its heightened conscious- ness, is bound to deny the justice of it... In addition to being disgraced in the first place, the poor mouse manages to mire itself in more mud as a result of its questions and doubts ... that a fatal pool of sticky mud is formed, consisting of the mouse's doubts and torments as well as of the gobs of spit aimed at it by the practical men of action, who stand around like judges and dictators and laugh lustily at it. (29)

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Note that the mouse, the means by which the Underground Man chooses to reveal most directly both his pain and impotent rage, is a tiny being relative to these men of action and authority, like Papa. Authority objectifies the mouse, spitting and laughing at it. He describes his mouse in the third person, another distancing technique, and the careful listener hears in the description the suffering of the underground Man - the child and the adult - as well:

[the mouse] shrug[s] its puny shoulders and, affecting a scornful smile, scurr[ies] off ignominiously to its mouse-hole... in its repulsive, evil- smelling nest, the downtrodden, ridiculed mouse plunges immediately into a cold, poisonous, and - most important - never-ending hatred... endlessly taunting and tormenting itself... it will hurt itself a hundred times more than it will hurt the one against whom its revenge is directed...(30)

X X X

In Part I of Notes from Underground, the Underground Man works his way through some of the forms of resistance normal to the "analytic process" devised for him by Dostoevsky, and thus exhibits many of the classic symptoms of resistance that would later be categorized by Freud. Beneath his resistance lay important emotional material which emerged as dependence and hostility transferred onto the imaginary listener. The eleven sections in the first part of the text are thus like analytic sessions, which together move toward the possibility of a "cure", the "breakthrough" that separates Part I from Part II.

It is after the eleventh 'session' that the Underground Man is finally ready to reveal the real events of his life. Part II contains the story of real and significant incidents in his life, patterned on problems that were born already, as we have seen, in his childhood, and especially in his relationship with his father. Dostoevsky himself wrote about this change in a letter to his brother:

You know what a modulation is in music. It's exactly the same thing here. The first [part] is apparently idle chatter; but suddenly this chatter is resolved, in the last [part]/ by an unexpected catastrophe.(31) (emphasis added)

Notes from Underground may thus be interpreted in an alternate light, grounding the ideological and philosophical aspects in a more human, and psychological side. This draws the Underground Man closer to one of Freud's clinical cases, and his creator closer to Freud himself, and is a tribute to the power of Dostoevsky's insights into the human psyche. To Bakhtin's equation for the Dostoevskian protagonist as "the sum total of his consciousness and self- consciousness", (32) then, we must add the sub-conscious.

NOTES

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky 's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

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Press, 1984), p. 237.
Bakhtin, p. 53.
Bakhtin, p. 52.
Bakhtin, p. 59.

Of. an anecdote recounted by Lionel Trilling in an essay entitled "Freud and Literature", 1941: When, on the occasion of the celebration of his seventieth birthday, Freud was greeted as the "discoverer of the unconscious", he corrected the speaker and disclaimed the title. "The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied."
See, for example, "Dostoevsky and Parricide", in Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Rene Wellek, (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 68-111.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. A. R. MacAndrew, (New York: The New American Library, Inc., 1961), p. 90.
Notes, p. 95.
Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1966), p. 287.
Freud, p. 286.
Notes, pp. 100-101.
Freud, p. 287; this is not unlike Bakhtin's observation on the underground Man's superb use of the "loophole in the word", whereby the protagonist's "self-definition [is made] unstable [and] the word in them has no hard and fast meaning, and at any moment, like a chameleon, it is ready to change its tone and its ultimate meaning." (p. 234).
Notes, p. 108.

Freud, p. 289.
Notes, p. 111.
Notes, p. 120.
Freud, p. 289.
Freud, p. 290.

Freud, p. 289.

Notes, p. 120.
Notes, p. 101.

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Notes, p. 102.
We already know from Freud that no detail is gratuitous. And although the remark is only apparently of slight significance within the greater context of Part I, we might also recall Bakhtin's conclusion on the Underground Man's discourse in Notes from Underground: everything that we see and know apart from his discourse is non-essential and is swallowed up by discourse as its raw material, or else remains outside it as something that stimulates and provokes." (p. 53).
Notes, p. 120.
Bakhtin, p. 229.
Freud, p. 290.
Ibid.
Bakhtin, p. 230.
Notes, p. 97.
Ibid.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, to Mikhail Dostoevsky, 13 April 1864, Pis'ma, 1, p. 365. Cited in Bakhtin, p. 41.
Bakhtin, p. 48.

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