Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind

by Anthony Storr

  Although writing may have saved Kafka from madness, writing is not, and can never be, a total substitute for living life in the world, and Kafka, with his customary insight, realized this. I think that “The Burrow” demonstrates this insight. Professor Thorlby, in his study of Kafka,51 has given a very interesting interpretation of this story. If my emphasis is different, this is not only because I am a psychiatrist rather than a literary scholar, but because Kafka contains such multitudes that different interpretations of his work can often be complementary rather than contradictory.

  “The Burrow” is the story of an animal’s attempt to find security by constructing a hugely elaborate burrow in which it can find safety from potential enemies and a retreat from the external world. The burrow has taken a very long time to construct; the network of passages is elaborate. Not quite in its center, chosen to serve as a refuge in case of extreme danger, is a cell called the Castle Keep, in which the animal assembles its store of food. It is, as a rule, beautifully still within the burrow; the air is balmy, there is hardly any noise, and the animal feels that he can sleep “the sweet sleep of tranquillity, of satisfied desire, of achieved ambition.”52 But, in spite of all the complex defenses, certain anxieties cannot be altogether eliminated. There is, for example, the entrance. Although this is concealed by a covering of moss, and has so far not attracted the attention of enemies, it is impossible to be confident that this will be so forever. It is dangerous, but perhaps advisable, to look at the entrance from the outside from time to time. Moreover, the burrow is rather confined, and the food outside is better. Sometimes the animal spends quite long periods outside, concealed from enemies, gloating over the burrow which lies waiting for him with its promise of infinite bliss. When he is in the burrow, it is difficult to leave it for the outside world. When he is in the outside world, it is equally difficult to descend into the burrow. One solution might be to enlist a confidant, who could keep watch over the burrow and warn of danger. But no, there is no one he can trust; and he could certainly never let anyone else into the burrow itself.

  Kafka perfectly illustrates the dilemma in which he finds himself. He can neither be fully engaged in the external world, nor can he entirely withdraw into his inner world. In the story, the two worlds may even exchange their characteristics, so that what appeared tranquil becomes threatening, and vice versa.

  At last, the animal settles for retreat. Exhausted by conflict and perpetual watchfulness, he makes his way to the safety of the Castle Keep. He sleeps for a prolonged period, but, after a while, is awakened by a disturbing whistling noise. At first he concludes that this noise is made by the small fry, the tiny animals which do not threaten him but are always around and constitute his food. But the noise grows louder and more insistent. It is, he decides, some new type of beast which he has never before encountered. Perhaps all his precautions against attack are insufficient. He tries to guess at its plans. One thing is certain; if they do encounter each other, there will be a bloody battle. He finally contents himself with the hope that the beast, although undoubtedly a threat, may never have heard of him. The story (of which the final pages are missing) ends on this note of unresolved unease.

  Kafka is surely saying that security is not attainable, either in the external world or in the enclosed world of the imagination. The fate of those who are unable to risk loving and living, and who seek to be safely protected within the burrow of their own narcissism, is, inevitably, to be haunted by creatures of the imagination (like Kafka’s own sadomasochistic fantasies) which will not leave them in peace.

  The theme of this story seems to me to be similar to that of one of Henry James’s most powerful tales, “The Beast in the Jungle.” This is the story of John Marcher, who for years has led a futile existence because he is haunted by the conviction that he is being reserved for an unusual, perhaps terrible experience, which he pictures as a beast tracking him through the jungle. He confides his story to a sympathetic woman who becomes his Platonic companion. Only when they become old and the woman is ill does he learn the truth. He has been haunted by the beast because he has avoided commitment and has lost the woman he might have loved. The beast is a product of his own blindness, self-centeredness, and lack of courage; and it springs when he realizes that his own life has been rendered sterile by his efforts to protect himself.

  Kafka was originally driven to affirm his identity through writing because he found involvement with others threatening; but it is clear that, through his writing, and through recognition of his talent by others, and their acceptance of the self which manifested itself in his stories, he became more confident. What would have happened to him if his life had not been prematurely brought to a close by tuberculosis? My guess is that he would finally have been able to commit himself to Dora or to some other woman, and would have become more capable of living something approaching a normal life. What the effect upon his writing would have been is another matter. Kafka’s writing is so bound up with the more pathological parts of his personality that, if he had become happier, his drive to write might have been greatly diminished.

  NOTES

  References are to Kafka’s works unless otherwise noted.

  1. Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London: Nelson, 1968), p. 68.

  2. Erik Erikson, Identity (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), p. 19.

  3. C. G. Jung, “The Development of Personality,” in Collected Works, 20 vols., trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953–79), vol. 17, para. 289.

  4. “Two Dialogues” (from a work later destroyed, “Description of a Struggle”), trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 80–81.

  5. Ibid., p. 80.

  6. “Description of a Struggle,” trans. Tania and James Stern, in The Penguin Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, ed. Nathan N. Glazer (London: Allen Lane, 1983), p. 33.

  7. Ronald Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), p. 47.

  8. Letters to Felice, trans. James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born (London: Secker and Warburg, 1974), p. 271.

  9. The Letters of John Keats, ed. M. B. Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 228.

  10. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1960), p. 45.

  11. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–64), 19:26.

  12. “Letter to His Father,” trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, in Wedding Preparations, p. 32.

  13. The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod, vol. 1, 1910–1913, trans. Joseph Kresh (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 50.

  14. Ibid., p. 124.

  15. “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, in Wedding Preparations, p. 10.

  16. Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: Calder, 1978), p. 15.

  17.17. Diaries, pp. 87–88.

  18. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels and Selected Writings in Prose and Verse, ed. John Hayward (London: Nonesuch Press, 1968), p. 115.

  19. “Letter to His Father,” p. 34.

  20. Ibid.

  21. George Painter, Marcel Proust, 2 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), 1:9.

  22. The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 145.

  23. “Letter to His Father,” p. 35.

  24. Ibid., p. 38.

  25. Ibid., p. 55.

  26. “Before the Law,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in Penguin Complete Short Stories, p. 4.

  27. “The Problem of Our Laws,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in ibid., p. 437.

  28. Ibid., p. 438.

  29. The Trial, p. 12.

  30. Ibid., p. 165.

  31. Ibid., pp. 142–43.

  32. Ibid., p. 175.

  33. Letters to Mil
ena, ed. Willi Haas, trans. Tania and James Stern (London: Secker and Warburg, 1953), p. 164.

  34. Max Brod, Franz Kafka (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), p. 116.

  35. Quoted in Allan Blunden, “A Chronology of Kafka’s Life,” in The World of Franz Kafka, ed. J. P. Stern (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), p. 28.

  36. Marthe Robert, Franz Kafka’s Loneliness, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Faber and Faber, 1982).

  37. Letters to Felice, p. 23.

  38. Ibid., pp. 155–56.

  39. Brod, Franz Kafka, pp. 73–74.

  40. Quoted in ibid., p. 74.

  41. Letters to Felice, p. 545.

  42. Letters to Friends, p. 95.

  43. Diaries, p. 333.

  44. “In the Penal Settlement,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in Penguin Complete Short Stories, p. 150.

  45. William Wordsworth, The Poems, vol. 1, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 525.

  46. Letters to Felice, p. 174.

  47. Jung, “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious,” in Collected Works, vol. 7, para. 228.

  48. “Description of a Struggle,” in Penguin Complete Short Stories, p. 22.

  49. Letters to Friends, p. 174.

  50. Erich Heller, Franz Kafka (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 15.

  51. Anthony Thorlby, Kafka: A Study (London: Heinemann, 1972).

  52. “The Burrow,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in Penguin Complete Short Stories, p. 327.

  3

  Isaac Newton

  ISAAC NEWTON IS generally acknowledged to have been one of the greatest creative men of genius who ever existed. It also happens that he showed many striking abnormalities of personality, and at one time was considered mad by his contemporaries. His early history, moreover, is such that, to my mind, it is not surprising that he grew up to be eccentric. I want to examine two questions that may or may not be related. Firstly, how far were his adult peculiarities the consequence of his childhood circumstances, and, secondly, were his scientific achievements in any way connected with his personality?

  There are those, even among psychiatrists, who deny that the experiences of early childhood play any important part in the formation of adult character, believing this to be the consequence of inheritance, hardly modified by circumstance. I do not find myself among their number, although I recognize that heredity must not only influence a child’s response to adverse circumstance but may also determine which experiences he perceives as harmful. Newton’s early childhood, however, was, as we shall see, so classically traumatic that I find it impossible to believe that it did not play a major part in shaping his personality.

  The relation between his personality and his achievement is more dubious. Some like to believe that scientific discovery is entirely the result of intelligence combined with application. When I ventured to suggest that the structure of Newton’s character and his discoveries might be related, Sir Karl Popper, who was at the meeting at which I spoke, said:

  I do not believe in the currently fashionable psychopathological interpretation of Newton. I think that Newton’s theory is a clear answer to a definite problem situation. The problem situation was set by the work of Galileo and Kepler, and subsequent to their work various people attempted to solve the problem that Newton eventually solved. Newton was certainly one of the greatest geniuses of all time, and he exhibited talents of a very special order; but to explain his work as the result of, say, an obsession with unity seems to me empty talk, and to represent a very dangerous kind of psychologistic approach.1

  I should, I suppose, have been abashed by being put in my place by one who has been described as the greatest living philosopher of science. Despite Karl Popper’s strictures, however, I find it difficult to believe that intellectual achievement can take place in isolation from other features of personality. Although the mind of a scientist may seem, at times, to act like an impersonal calculator, there are, it seems to me, traits of character and circumstances that render this possible that are not shared by all of us. Even the most detached intellectual operations are motivated, I believe, by forces that are emotional in origin rather than purely rational, a conclusion supported by the philosopher Hume, who wrote, “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”2 This is not to say that I subscribe to the kind of interpretations that the more fundamentalist psychoanalysts are only too ready to advance. I do not believe that the wish to make sense out of the universe is a sublimation of sexual or aggressive drives in any direct or simple sense, but I do consider it likely that those who, like Newton and Einstein, prove capable of creating new models of the universe are unusual in ways besides the obvious one of being unusually intelligent.

  Isaac Newton was born prematurely on Christmas Day, 1642. He was so tiny that his mother often remarked that at birth he was small enough to fit into a quart pot. His father, a yeoman without education, unable even to sign his name, had died three months before Newton was born. For his first three years Newton enjoyed the undivided attention of his mother without suffering competition from any rival. Indeed, as premature children often require special care, he may have had even more of her attention than was customary. Then on January 27, 1646, when Newton was just past his third birthday, his mother remarried. She not only presented Newton with an unwanted stepfather but added insult to injury by abandoning him, leaving him to be reared by his maternal grandmother under the legal guardianship of a maternal uncle. Although his mother, with her new husband, moved to a house that was only a short distance away, we know that Newton passionately resented what he felt to be a betrayal. When Newton was about eleven his stepfather died and his mother returned, bringing with her two little girls and a boy, the offspring of her second marriage. According to contemporary accounts, Newton’s mother was a remarkable woman of strong personality. Although his feelings toward her were ambivalent, Newton remained attached to her and looked after her during her last illness in 1679, when he was thirty-six; but Westfall records that he paid her few visits during his time at Cambridge despite living quite close to home.

  As a child Newton is reported as spending more time making ingenious mechanical models than playing with his fellows. A contemporary observed that “he was always a sober, silent thinking lad, and was never known scarce to play with the boys abroad, at their silly amusements.”3 If this was really his attitude toward boyish games, it is not surprising that his schoolfellows are reported as being “not very affectionate toward him. He was commonly too cunning for them in everything. They were sensible he had more ingenuity than they, and ‘tis an old observation, that in all Societys, even of men, he who has most understanding, is least regarded.”4 There is a story, which Newton himself repeated, that on one occasion when he did deign to compete, he beat the other boys at jumping by first noting the direction and then taking advantage of the gusts of a strong wind that was blowing that day. Westfall, who has examined what is known of his aggressiveness and disobedience in boyhood, writes that he must have been insufferable.

  Evidence suggests that as a boy Newton was often so abstracted as not to be aware of either his schoolbooks or what was going on about him. His ability was recognized by his schoolmasters, but examination of the curriculum offered at Grantham Grammar School, to which Newton went when he was twelve, shows how little mathematics was taught. Yet Newton invented the calculus four years after leaving school. His mother’s servants are said to have been glad to part with him, declaring that he was “fit for nothing but the ‘Versity.’”5

  In June 1661, when he was eighteen, Newton was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge. In February 1664 he was elected scholar and took his B.A. in 1665. In 1667 he became a minor fellow, in 1668 an M.A. and major fellow. In 1669, when still only twenty-seven, he became Lucasian professor of mathematics. Charles II provided, by letter patent, a special dispensation which allowed Newton to take this chair without at the same time t
aking holy orders, a step that was normally demanded of all fellows.

  What was Newton like as a young man? According to a contemporary account, he was a recluse, the archetype of the absentminded, solitary scholar:

  I never knew him to take any recreation or pastime either in riding out to take the air, walking, bowling, or any other exercise whatever, thinking all hours lost that was not spent in his studies, to which he kept so close that he seldom left his chamber unless at term time, when he read in the schools as being Lucasianus Professor, where so few went to hear him, and fewer understood him, that ofttimes he did in a manner, for want of hearers, read to the walls.… So intent; so serious upon his studies that he ate very sparingly, nay, ofttimes he has forgot to eat at all, so that, going into his chamber, I have found his mess untouched, of which, when I have reminded him, he would reply—“Have I!” and then making to the table, would eat a bite or two standing, for I cannot say I ever saw him sit at table by himself.… He very rarely went to bed till two or three of the clock, sometimes not until five or six.6

  Newton in youth was predominantly solitary, seldom receiving visitors or calling upon others. In old age he told a relative that he had never “violated Chastity,” and it seems probable that he died a virgin. There are hints that he had some obsessional traits: “He was very curious in his garden, which was never out of order, in which he would at some seldom times take a short walk or two, not enduring to see a weed in it.”7