Leserbriefe zur Rezension

Michael Roloff schrieb uns am 05.12.2013
Thema: Max Beck: Phraseologie eines Psychoanalytikers

Allow me to comment in English and focus on one instance where Dr. Moser (an ex-author of mine, in translation, YEARS OF APPRENTICESHIP ON THE COUCH) focuses on a character in a novel: Gregor Keuschnig of DIE STUNDE DER WAHREN EMPFINDUNG. There is nothing particularly wrong nor original in categorizing this suicidally panicked character as a "border line" case - after all, Handke, induces a similar state in his reader, and the book, artistically, can be regarded, in Benjamin's words "the  work of art is the death mask of the experience.'  Handke, who makes it a point to avoid easy categorizations, does not describe or try to explain what if any origin of his state of mind - as a matter of fact, so what if Keuschnig had run around calling himself a border line case? He might have had a laugh in as much as that would have helped! Or even if he had realized that the reason he is in this state of mind, most immediately, without going  back to the the character's whatever childhood traumata, "it's because the bitch left me and now I have to take for a child." The point is, the character is wounded, as a matte of fact, Moser is eager to help the author, whose way of dealing  with a crisis, that lasted several years, was to ... write it out of his system, and not leave it on the couch! (which Handke actually sought out briefly, vide GEWICHT DER WELT). Keuschnig is unlikely to be helped if he told himself, accurately, I am suffering from a narcissistic wound, typhus of the soul let's call it, perhaps naming helps a little, but it is not the cure! Without going to the length that I did, who was Handke's first English language translator, and who knew him during that critical period,  but only subsequently trained as a psychoanalyst  who then devoted himself to "the Handke case"

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/2009/09/peter-hhandke-wounded-love-child.html
http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/2009/06/fugueing-section-from-part-ii-of-psycho.html

    Dr. Moser limits himself very justly to the matter of the character in the book, but as a sensitive analyst, of course knows that the book derives from the depths of its author's being, and that the "Moment" , Keuschnig's salvation is when he realizes that he loves his child, and since children are invested with our narcissism that he doesn't detest himself completely, and that his child needs him. Fortunately, therefore, the story has a sentimental background, and I am also troubled by the reviewers weird grammatical gloominess! in the event he knows what we mean by gloomy grammarians in Amerika.

--
MICHAEL ROLOFF