Narrative and the Traumatic: apropos Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Psychoanalysts are attracted to novelists because both consider the ‘true’ to be a psychic quality, and both seek knowledge of psychic life. In Psychoanalysis, as in Art, pre-psychic and psychic experiences are relived via regression, seeking a transference theme in order to exist in the present time in the shape of magic hallucinatory elements, acts and fantasies. By studying the art that creates the beautiful, we acquire knowledge of the psychic work that transforms reality. In the work of art, we recognise our psyche at work. The “many different voices” which haunt Dostoevsky's novel narrate the painful and joyful process leading to self-knowledge. According to Bakhtin, the polyphony in Dostoevsky restores unity in the multiplicity of the subject and object. These are not abstract concepts but words and responses alive with a budding corporality and set within a frame of ethics. What is important is the emerging idea. The idea is intersubjective. Existence is also a live event enacted at the meeting point between two or more subjectivities with the many faces of their unconscious.

At this point, things appear as enigmas. They are revived because they again become strange to the reader.