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C. G. Carus' Psyche and Dostoevsky

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2018

George Gibian
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Extract

Dostoevsky's characters made a deep impression on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nietzsche claimed that Dostoevsky was the only writer from whom he learned anything about psychology, Gide's view of the human personality was affected by Dostoevsky, and to enumerate all others who bear marks of the influence of Dostoevsky's psychology would mean listing a substantial portion of the outstanding authors of the last sixty or seventy years.

The importance of Dostoevsky's psychology to the generations which followed him causes great interest to be attached to the fact that he, in his turn, was so struck by a German psychological treatise that, together with his friend Baron Vrangel, he intended to translate it into Russian.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , October 1955 , pp. 371 - 382
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1955

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References

1 Vrangel, A. E., Vospominanija o F. M. Dostoevskom v Sibiri (Petersburg, 1912), p. 34 Google Scholar.

2 Stephenson Smith, S. and Isotoff, Andrei, “The Abnormal From Within: Dostoevsky,” Studies in Psychology, I, Bull. 7, (1935), 361-91Google Scholar.

3 The best studies of Carus’ psychology are: Bernoulli, Christoph, Die Psychologie von C. G. Carus und deren geistesgeschichtliche Bedeutung (Jena, 1925)Google Scholar; Wäsche, Erwin, Carl Gustav Carus und die romantische Weltanschauung (Düsseldorf, 1933)Google Scholar, and Ludwig Klages’ introduction to his edition of Psyche (Jena, 1926). The biographical data on Carus in the following paragraph are indebted to all three works.

4 Klages, op. cit., p. ii. On the other hand, a measure of Carus’ positive achievement is given by Goethe's appraisal: “When I consider the latest progress in the natural sciences, I feel like a wanderer who walked toward the east at daybreak, joyfully beheld the awakening light, and eagerly awaited the coming forth of the great fiery ball, yet who at its appearance had to turn aside his eyes, which could not endure the sight he had longed and hoped for. I am not putting it too strongly when I say that such is the state I find myself in when I take up Herr arus’ work, which studies the intimations of all Becoming, from the simplest to the most complex forms of life and puts before us, by word and picture, the great secret: that nothing comes about but what has been announced and that the announcement only becomes clear through the object announced, as a prophecy through fulfillment.” Quoted in von Mangoldt, Ursula, ed., So Spricht Carus (Miinchen-Planegg, 1953), pp. 126-27Google Scholar. The publication of her anthology of extracts from various writings of Carus in the series Lebendige Quellen zum Wissen um die Gamheit des Menschen is in itsel a sign of the current revival of interest in his work.

5 Carus, , Psyche (Jena, 1926), p. 1 Google Scholar.

6 Wäsche, , op. cit., p. 86 Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., pp. 86-87.

8 Carus, , op. cit., p. 100 Google Scholar.

9 Idiot, in Dostoevsky, F. M., Polnoe sobranie sochinenij (Petersburg, 1885), III, 40 Google Scholar.

10 Carus, , op. cit., p. 65 Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., p. 66.

12 Carus, , op. cit., p. 99 Google Scholar; Klink, Siegfried, Das Prinzip des Unbewussten bei Carl Gustav Carus (Würzburg Univ. diss., 1933). P.55 Google Scholar.

13 Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenij, III, 298.

14 Carus, , op. cit., p. 220 Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., p.201.

16 Ibid., pp. 121-22.

17 Dmitry Čiževsky, “Dostoevskij—psikholog,” in A. L.|Bern, ed., O Dostoevskom (Prague, 1933), II, 55–60 Google Scholar, speaks of a Dostoevskian subconscious as well as a superconscious, and distinguishes between a positive and a negative unconscious; but the negative unconscious appears to be an injured or perverted unconscious, rather than a negative one.

18 Besy, in Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenij, IV, 63.

19 Ibid., IV, 332.

20 Ibid., III, 247.

21 Carus, op. cit., pp. 166-67Google Scholar.

22 Some of the changes which occur in a person's emotional state and are inexplicable by reference to the conscious mind may be attributed to the subtle influence of the environment on the unconscious. Psyche affirms that such factors as clear and beautiful air, mild temperature, and lovely landscape may favorably affect the soul, just as fog, darkness, humidity, and dirty air can harm it. Carus, , op. cit., pp. 433-35Google Scholar; Klink, , op.cit., pp. 58–59 Google Scholar. Dostoevsky recognizes an equally close bond between environment and the psychic state of his heroes. Rogozhin's house, Raskolnikov's room, and the influence of the atmosphere of Petersburg and of Siberia in Crime and Punishment are only a few of many such instances.

23 Unizhënnye i oskorblënnye, in Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochineni], II, 165.

24 Carus, , op. cit., pp. 195-99Google Scholar.

25 Ibid., p.21.

26 Unizhënnye i oskorblënnye, in Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenij, II, 1.

27 Dreams as revelations of the unconscious are also apposite in this connection, although their use by Dostoevsky is too large a subject to broach here and would require independent treatment. Psyche touches on dreams in several passages; in a later work, Vber Lebensmagnetismus, Carus pushed his views still further. He considered the “creative dream” to be a form of magic perception, in which our mind is enabled to know things beyond all empiric experience: “It is obvious that there cannot be any foresight in conscious thinking, but the unconscious … thinks in images … and bears within itself the power of such a way of knowing.” Quoted in Wäsche, op. cit., p. 100.