Freud’s published
case-histories are classics in the literature of detection.
-- Peter Gay, Freud,
Jews, and Other Germans (1978), p. 50
My course is a kind of detective
investigation of the mystery of literary structures.
-- Vl. Nabokov, Lectures on
Literature
There is a natural affinity between the figures of Sigmund
Freud and Sherlock Holmes. The
movie “The Seven Percent Solution” had the good idea of bringing them together
to work on a case. The
adjunction was by no means arbitrary -- both Freud and Holmes are intimately
connected with cocaine (for which the phase “7% solution” occurs in the
memorable opening to The Sign of the Four).
It is my personal view that both Freud and Holmes are semi-fictional characters.
Each could qualify as the other’s Smarter Brother.
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Both were known for wringing solutions out of
small details. To some
extent, that’s just like good police work. Only, most investigators do not really manage to draw such
dramatic conclusions from a speck of rare Turkish tobacco, or an
innocent-sounding slip of the tongue. There is something more. And so, taught at the feet our our masters, let us ourselves
give their remarkable ability a second look.
A striking feature is that they notice strange details, and
magnify them in their minds, which no-one else notices. As in the movie “Blow-Up”, there
is something uncanny about knowledge derived in this way. It smacks, indeed, of the paranoiac,
who is able to make a strange sense of it all -- one that eludes everyone else
-- via codes he detects in newspaper advertisements or the patterns of
clouds.
It may lead, like the glittering insect that opens “El laberinto del
fauno”, to magic and to madness.
(For our essay on the
subject, in a cinematic context, try this: Take Shelter.)
The allusions to cinema are in point, since I am speaking
now, not of the mind-insides of the actual Freud and Holmes, but of the effect
they have on us, as characters.
Their resonance for us is in part derived from our unconscious thought
that the odd details they espy, sticking out at odd angles from the weft and
web of everyday life, are signals
from another world -- signals that may not even be intended for our ears; in any event we almost never understand them. It is as if, long ago, and at an age at which language
itself had been only imperfectly acquired, we, pausing perhaps outside our
parents’ bedroom late one evening after we were supposed to be in bed (but,
strangely unable to sleep, had crept out into the corridor) -- as though we had
(crouching in the dark) overheard strange uncouth noises -- nothing definite --
emerging muffled through the door …. straining to hear … (there it is again!)
-- and fantasized about what it all means.
But Freud and Holmes emphatically do not represent for us that baffled and eavesdropping toddler: their example is rather that of having transcended that infantile fantasy, and diverted
the cathexis from it triumphantly
into their own work. My own
enthusiasm for these two figures must stem partly from that; for indeed, by
now, my own work has come to require the teasing of dark meanings out of
confused and cryptic comms, on whose interpretation actual lives may depend.
~ Aviso ~
Mr Sherlock Holmes leads with his head,
while the Murphy brothers
lead with their heart.
You can sample their excellent detective adventures here:
~
Freud himself (his biographer recounts) was fond of relaxing
with whodunits (particularly those by Dorothy Sayers); but the greatest
mysteries he observed were those in life.
~
~ Posthumous Endorsement ~
"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,
this is what I'd be reading: "
(Ich bin Sigmund Freud, and I approved this message.)
~ ~
~
The meaning for us, of Freud as of Holmes, is more a matter
of a lingering taste, that we savor,
than of any substance remembered and assimilated in detail.
Re-reading the Holmes stories in adulthood is disappointing. Logically they are quite
threadbare; there is little in the
way of actual deduction, as opposed
to deus ex machina (“Behold this
speck of tobacco! I just happen to
know that it is a rare blend produced only in the mountains of Tibet; hence the murdered gentleman must be
the exiled Prince of Nepal, whom I once met at a fancy-dress ball disguised as a penguin, and who, like the
corpse, was only four feet tall.”)
There is less actual sifting of
evidence than in a run-of-the-mill police procedural.
Re-reading Freud (more critically and carefully, in tandem
with biographical and explanatory apparatus) is likewise something of a
let-down. Oh, it is all dense enough, and with ever a sense of insight … but you become aware
of nagging gaps. Quite apart
from the fabulous (in both senses, alas) late work : go right back to the Traumdeutung. The individual interpretations proceed from inspired
guesses; but the ratification of
their validity is often by way of implausibly handy corroborative knowledge from the
patient’s innermost private life or even childhood. You get the impression that Freud must have attended a lot
of Viennese dinner parties, where the guests are all friends and relatives and
ex-nannies of his patients. “I
hear Dora has been feeling out of sorts ever since her lesbian encounters
with the nursemaid.” “How’s Wolfie
doing? Haven’t seen the chap since
I threatened to cut off his widdler.”
 | ||
| Elementary, my dear Sigmund. |
 |
| Hmm... "Elementary".... A revealing choice of words ... |
~
Psychology in the Holmes stories is either shallow or
absent. He is an
Asperger’s-savant for tiny yet telling details, but he does not see into souls. (For the greatest possible
contrast: cf. the detective-priest
Father Brown.) Matters are always
thus, in most juvenile adventure literature (of which the Holmes stories are
splendid examples). More
surprisingly, there is surprisingly little ordinary everyday or novelistic
psychology in Freud, either. He too notices arcane semiotic
details, and (above all) makes ingenious connections (going much farther in
this regard than Holmes could dream of). Yet in his writings, we don’t get much sense of what
individual people are like. Indeed Ernest
Jones, his admiring biographer, finally concludes that Freud, though an
analytic genius, wasn’t really much of a Menschenkenner.
~
Another point of similarity: the inter-resonance of the titles in their case-files: from “The Adventure of the Blue
Carbuncle”, “The Adventure of the Twisted Lip”, “The Adventure of the Speckled
Band”, vis-a-vis the “Traum von
Irmas Injektion”, the “Traum von
den Maikäfern”, and the eminently Holmesian “Traum von der botanischen
Monographie”.
~
The delicately (surgically) probing stance of the analyst is well-illustrated in
the (excellent) early story, “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor”. Holmes’ aristocratic client dismisses a
question: “The incident was too
trivial to relate, and can have no possible bearing upon the case.” To which Holmes, quasi the
Doctor, patiently and insinuatingly replies: “Let us have it, for
all that.”
This, note, originally
published in 1892, thus antedating the great analytic talk-therapy
publications of Sigmund Freud.
~
Freud and Holmes are connected as well by a thread of mesmerism.
In “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet”, after Holmes has
(in his signature, mildly provoking way) asked whether a certain man he’d
never seen had a wooden leg:
Something like fear sprung up in
the young lady’s expressive black eyes.
“Why, you are like a magician,” said she. “How
did you know that?” She smiled,
but there was no answering smile in Holmes’ thin, eager face.
Not, note, “You are a genius”; rather, she strikes an occult note. The tableau (pretty, young
patient/client; ascetic older man
probing for hidden evil) is reminiscent of Freud’s early days with Breuer, when
he used hypnosis.
Or again: The
detective, like the analyst, as Magus.
In “The Empty House”, the opening story of The Return of
Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watkins is talking with “an elderly, deformed man”:
I moved my head to look at the
cabinet behind me. When I turned
again, Sherlock Holmes was standing smiling at me across my study table.
I rose to my feet, stared at him for some seconds in utter amazement,
and then it appears that I must have fainted…
Again: Watkins doesn’t
complement Holmes on his skill, but is overcome by the spookiness of this
revenant (for it is Holmes apparently back from his death at Reichenbach Falls)
and shape-shifter.
~
Other points of contact:
Holmes assumes, as a matter of course, that his readers --
of course! -- understand German, and is not averse to quoting Goethe without
supplying any translation. As, in The
Sign of the Four:
“Wir sind
gewohnt
dass die Menschen verhöhnen
was sie
nicht verstehen.”
(An epigram that could well describe the fate of Freud, during much of
his lifetime.)
Indeed, the Germans (with their customary thoroughness) do a
better job treating of the Holmes stories on Wikipedia, than do the
anglophones. The English wikiarticle
on The Sign of the Four is
a flip disgrace; while at the
German site you get a proper précis of the plot:
Inhalt
Sherlock Holmes und Dr. Watson
werden von Miss Mary Morstan beauftragt, bei der Suche nach ihrem verschollenen
Vater zu helfen. Dieser war Offizier in Indien und verschwand vor zehn Jahren
bei seiner Rückkehr nach England.
Ein anonymer Brief bringt die drei
auf die Spur von Thaddeus Sholto. Von ihm erfahren sie, dass dessen Vater mit
dem Gesuchten befreundet war und zusammen mit ihm in Indien in derselben
Kompanie gedient hat. Außerdem berichtet er vom Tod der beiden Männer, von
einem Schatz, den diese mit aus Indien brachten und wie er und sein Bruder den
Schatz entdeckten.
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Both Freud and Holmes are men of wide and arcane learning;
but there is a different overall tint to each. Freud is, by and large,
literary and antiquarian; Holmes, a keen follower of current colonial
adventures, and something of a practical engineer. When the
beryl-encrusted coronet, pilfered during the night, is discovered in the
hall with a piece broken off, Holmes mischievously asks its bailee to break off
another chunk himself; this challenge is declined in horror.
Holmes then gives it his best, to no avail, and explains: “Though I am
exceptionally strong in the fingers, it would take me all my time to break it.
Now, what do you think would happen if I did break it? There would be a
noise like a pistol shot. Do you tell me that all this happened within a
few yards of your bed and that you heard nothing of it?”
Whether this description be accurate, I cannot say, never
having personally rent a crown by brute brawn; but the point is, the feat is presented as the sort of thing
Holmes knows, presumably as he experiments with such things in his study,
noting down the results; whereas
Freud would never so bestir himself, and thus is not so expert in matters of
materials science.
-- But why note differences, when the point of this post was
to show parallels?
-- Well, I never said that they were twins; brothers,
merely, under the skin. And the
difference of technical skills is more a matter of parallax than of disparity, producing a more
rounded fraternity, like William and Henry James …
~
Oh dear, that last dodge was pretty specious; this essay is falling apart. Get me rewrite!!
Yet more, I now must needs, in all conscience, note a
glaring disparity between the two men.
It is a matter widely known tacitly -- and embodied by Murphy
explicitly -- that no true detective can ever marry; and an analyst is a detective of the mind. Yet der Sigmund was happy in a stout
Hausfrau, and fathered a passle of apple-cheeked crumb-snatchers. How to explain this outrageous
derogation from the ascetic ideal?
Well, as I admitted earlier, Dr. S. Freud is only semi-fictional: he had one leg in reality, and that leg
got the better of him here. It
happens to the best of legends.
~
Miscellaneous rapprochements:
… Ernest Jones, the docile and
deferential My Dear Watson to the Sherlock Holmes of the Unconscious …
-- Ernest Gellner, The
Psychoanalytic Movement (1985; 2nd edn. 1993), p. 78
~
[Update 1 March 2014] Compare now this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/03/from-case-files.html
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