‘The Freud of Fiction’? : DOSTOEVSKY The Author as Psychoanalyst <i> by Louis Breger</i> (<i> New York University Press: $35; 295 pp.) </i>

The Vicomte de Vogue, a 19th-Century popularizer of Russian literature in the West, wrote enthusiastically about Tolstoy and Turgenev but felt he had to warn non-Russian readers about Dostoevsky at the time “Crime and Punishment” and “The Idiot” were just being translated for the first time. Get ready, he counseled his French audience, here come the Scythians!

De Vogue’s unease was occasioned, of course, by the wildness of Dostoevsky’s novels, that quality of excess that Max Beerbohm captured with only slight exaggeration when he ascribed to his parody of Dostoevsky a “burning faith in a personal devil, a frank delight in earthquakes and pestilences, and a belief that everyone but himself will be brought back to life in time to be frozen to death in the next glacial epoch.”

Such extremes have made the Russian novelist a favorite subject of psychoanalytically oriented critics. Nietzsche claimed Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom he ever learned anything, and it was in his 1928 essay on “Dostoevsky and Parricide” that Freud himself conceded that “before the problem of the creative artist, analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.”

But, of course, Freud went right on to analyze the Russian novelist nevertheless, arguing that Dostoevsky, as do all men, desired to kill his father; when the father was in fact murdered by his serfs, not only did Dostoevsky begin to experience epileptic attacks but found the great theme of his art, culminating in “The Brothers Karamazov.” Freud is led to conclude that “it can scarcely be owing to chance that three of the masterpieces of the literature of all time--the ‘Oedipus Rex’ of Sophocles, Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and Dostoevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’--should all deal with the same subject, parricide. In all three, moreover, the motive for the deed, sexual rivalry for a woman, is laid bare.”

From the point of view of a more rigorously defined literary criticism, Freud provides here an example of what is wrong with the majority of psychoanalytic readings of literary texts. As literary critic Peter Brooks, hardly an opponent of Freudian theory, has recently put it: “Psychoanalysis in literary study has over and over again mistaken the object of analysis, with the result that whatever insights it has produced tell us precious little about the structure and rhetoric of literary texts.”

Louis Breger, a practicing psychoanalyst and a professor of psychoanalytic studies at the California Institute of Technology, is aware of this problem, and in his new book on Dostoevsky seeks to get around it by reaccentuating the typical object of Freudian readings. In a gesture that might itself be read as Oedipal, Breger the psychotherapist rejects Freud’s approach to literature, arguing that “too often, applications (of Freudian techniques) to literature have relied on particular psychoanalytic observations--the Oedipus complex, the primal scene . . . “ and in so doing, have impoverished the art that they seek to elucidate. Breger seeks to avoid such pitfalls by thinking of Dostoevsky “not as a ‘patient’ to be analyzed but as a fellow psychoanalyst, someone who, in the creation of his novels, carried out an exploration of himself and his fellow man.” Breger’s approach is to treat Dostoevsky as if he were a fellow psychoanalyst, “the Freud of fiction.”

Such a shift in emphasis does provide Breger with some new things to say about Dostoevsky, as opposed to the predictable results of classical psychoanalytic readings. Among these is the idea that Dostoevsky was indeed conflicted about his parents, but that by far the most important of these was his mother, and not, as Freud would have it, his father.

The most basic drive in Dostoevsky’s life, argues Breger, was the rage he felt as a child against his mother, an anger that grew out of his jealousy of the many siblings she bore who displaced him in her affections. Details from various biographies of Dostoevsky are used as evidence that he not only hated his mother but also pitied her, as her many pregnancies, her tyrannical husband and tuberculosis forced her to cough her life away when the novelist was only 15 years old.

Such anger and compassion for his mother might account for Dostoevsky’s complex rendering of women as saints and whores. But Breger is prepared to speculate further that the child Dostoevsky may have acted out his ambivalent feelings with his younger sisters in “games that expressed his need for physical-sexual contact and his anger.”

It is not merely what we know of Dostoevsky’s life that leads Breger to such a conclusion, but his reading of details from the novels, especially the relationship between Raskolnikov and his sister, Dunia, in “Crime and Punishment” and the fascination with girls and childish women that characterizes Svidrigailov in the same novel, or Stavrogin in “The Possessed.”

Alternating between details from various biographies of Dostoevsky and episodes from the novels, Breger seeks to show that Dostoevsky was guilty of some of the transgressions that led early Russian critics to label him “a cruel talent.” In this, Breger is not all that different from other psychoanalytically oriented critics of Dostoevsky. But he goes on to argue that the novelist was aware of these tendencies in himself and projected them into his fiction. In doing so, he not only rose above the limitations of his psychic life but created a world in which the insights he had learned from his own experience could be translated into the analysis of characters whose complexity would impel Freud himself to professional admiration.

In making this argument, Breger pays a good deal of attention to details in the novels themselves, and has interesting things to say about some of them, particularly “Crime and Punishment.” His interpretation of Raskolnikov’s dream about a horse that is beaten to death (a projection of Dostoevsky’s lust for, rage against and guilt about his mother) is one of the more convincing that I have read. In general, Breger is especially good at bringing out subtle nuances in the role played by women characters in the novels.

But the strongest claim that the book makes is for its novelty among Freudian treatments of literature, Breger’s treatment of Dostoevsky as if he were a psychoanalyst and the novels a complex form of case history. It is this approach that Breger hopes will exempt his study from charges usually leveled at Freudian criticism. So we are justified in asking, Does the approach work?

I believe it does not. First of all because there is really nothing theoretically very powerful about such an assumption, which in the end amounts to no more than claiming that Dostoevsky was able to gain unusual acuity in delineating character through projection of his own psychological struggles.

This is at best a truism, and one far from new. Strakhov, Dostoevsky’s first biographer, made much the same claim, if very crudely, and Gide’s study of the Russian novelist makes the point with more useful application to an understanding of Dostoevsky’s art.

Ultimately, Breger fails to avoid the charge of reductionism. The book is filled with statements such as: “From what is known clinically, about such patterns, and from what we see in the novel, the following hypothesis suggests itself . . . “, or “Studies of such situations show that. . . .”

The cumulative effect is to turn Dostoevsky’s complex narrative experiments into illustrations of “what is known clinically.”