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Re: THOUGHTS--Lolita and the Viennese child woman
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In his February 4 essay-review in the TLS, Thomas Karshan says of Lolita:
. . . the novel is an old-fashioned text on the fin-de-siecle theme of the older
man vainly desiring to possess the spirit of the living language as embodied in
a young girl--the theme of Shaw's Pygmalion and Frank Wedekind's Lulu. Indeed,
the French critic Maurice Couturier has found at least three French works of the
fin-de-siecle in which a Lolita appears.
In this same vein, I wish to call attention to another work that evokes a
similar theme and also fits nicely into the discussion of VN vs. Freud. The
book, Freud and the Child-Woman: The Memoirs of Fritz Wittels, waspublished in
1995 by Yale University Press--Wittels being a psychoanalyst who died in New
York in 1950. The editor of the volume, Edward Timms, explains in his Preface
that he became interested in Wittels while researching a book titled Karl Kraus:
Apocalyptic Satirist (Yale, 1986). “I identified [Wittels] as a pivotal figure,”
Timms says, “who, by linking the circles of Kraus and Freud, contributed to the
cross-fertilization between different disciplines which was such a feature of
Viennese culture around 1900.” For this reason, Timms tracked down Wittels’s
papers. He goes on to say that “it was Wittels who in 1907 initiated the cult of
the ‘child woman’, in a paper which he read to Freud in private, presented to
the Psychoanalytic Society and then published in Kraus’s magazine Die Fackel
(‘The Torch’).” According to an endnote, there is some doubt about the child
woman’s birth date, but in her own reminiscences she stated that Kraus “took me
away from home as a girl of fourteen-and-a-half.” Her name was Irma Karczewska.
At the time Wittels came on scene, she was apparently 17 and still very
childlike.
Wittels’s Memoirs were reviewed in the London Review of Books, January 4, 1996
by Adam Phillips, who summarizes the case as follows:
‘Irma was our laboratory,’ Wittels writes proudly, and then proceeds to tell us
how and why they treated her as one. Irma was 17, the youngest daughter of a
janitor in the suburbs of Vienna. Kraus had seen her on the street and been
struck by her resemblance to a woman he had previously fallen for. . . . When
Wittels gave his paper . . . he presented Irma herself as a kind of heroine of
the polymorphously perverse, ‘sadistic, lesbian and whatnot’. She is the
exemplary alternative to our modern neurasthenia. The opposite of a hysteric,
she articulates her desire unambiguously and directly. Unlike her civilised
contemporaries, she is not crippled by ambivalence. She is ‘a girl of great
sexual attraction, which breaks out so early in her life that she is forced to
begin her sex life while still, in all other respects, a child. All her life she
remains what she is: oversexed and incapable of understanding the civilised
world of adults. Nor does this world understand her.’ At the meeting Wittels
backs up his case – ‘my flood of enthusiasm’, as he calls it – by quoting Helen
of Troy, Lucretia Borgia, Manon Lescaut and Zola’s Nana: but not, of course, the
uneducated Irma. Her account of herself is oddly irrelevant to Wittels (and to
Kraus, who soon tired of her), despite the fact that at the time he was writing
and, indeed, giving the paper, he was having an affair with her. But then, in a
sense, none of it had anything to do with her.
I do not, of course, claim that VN took anything from the story of Irma, or that
he was even aware of it. Nevertheless, there are some clear similarities between
Irma and Dolores. In both cases, a young girl is treated not only as a sex
object but also as a suitable object of study by much older, well-educated men
who “solipsize” her for their less-than-honorable purposes. And for Kraus as for
Humbert, there was a “precursor” who had died. Kraus’s precursor, however, was a
grown woman--the actress Annie Kalmar--and there is no suggestion that either he
or Wittels was a pedophile.
Besides the parallels between the two girls, we may also be reminded that among
early reviewers of Lolita, there were several who saw Dolores as a coarse,
oversexed brat who brings a well-bred scholar-gentleman first to his knees and
then to grief and murder.
Phillips goes on to speak of Freud’s response to Wittels’s paper:
. . . the fury of Freud’s reaction suggests that Wittels had touched Freud’s
deepest fears about psychoanalysis. ‘It was not his intention, he said, to lead
the world to an uninhibited frenzy. On the contrary he wished to teach men not
to satisfy their instincts in a thousand more or less neurotic disguises. They
should consciously decide what to do and what not to do. Instead of repressing
and lying to themselves they should consciously reject what they consider evil.’
Wittels talks about ‘the child woman’ – ‘one of my more important contributions
to analytical psychology’ – and Freud hears the Bacchae over his shoulder.
For his part, Wittels accuses Freud of not having the courage of his own
convictions. So we see, even at this early date, deep conflicts within the inner
circle of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society over the meaning of Freud’s message.
For such conflicts even to arise suggests that Stephen Blackwell is right in
holding Freud at least partly responsible for the popularization of his ideas.
As Wittgenstein--another Viennese whose family had ties both to Freud and to
Kraus--pointed out a long time ago, psychoanalysis charmed as many as it shocked
and was therefore bound to give rise to a wide popular following.
I cannot here begin to do justice to Phillips’s wise, witty and sometimes
hilarious review, but for those who are interested, here’s the link:
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
Women: what are they for?
Adam Phillips
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v18/n01/adam-phillips/women-what-are-they-for
As for Wittels’s Memoirs, used copies are available at Amazon. Such humor as the
book contains is most often of the unintentional kind.
Jim Twiggs
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