Selbstkonstitution bei Robert Musil und in der Psychoanalyse: Identität und Wirklichkeit im Mann ohne Eigenschaften by Lilith Jappe (review)

Lilith Jappe’s book is a refreshing new take on the relationship between Robert Musil and psychoanalysis. The study’s core premise is that there are meaningful parallels between the ways in which Musil’s poetics and psychoanalysis generate constructs of the Self, reality, and the relation between the two. She has an accurate self-understanding of her project’s contribution in the field of Musil studies: “Statt das Romangeschehen einer psychoanalytischen Sichtweise zu unterwerfen, wird ein Modell der Selbstkonstitution rekonstruiert, das der Roman selbst formuliert, das mit dem psychoanalytischen Modell allerdings in mancher Hinsicht vergleichbar ist” (390). Up until now, diagnosing the novel’s characters with debilitating neuroses has been the main approach of critics working with a psychoanalytic conceptuality. These interpretations often seem to have more to do with the critics’ agenda than Musil’s, and have lead to some debatable conjectures that interpret denials as confessions, raise minor textual occurrences to the level of major themes, and/or conflate the author’s biography with his literary project. In good German-Germanistik fashion, Jappe reviews virtually every psychoanalytical study ever published on Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (MoE) (397–411).

Jappe’s break with psychoanalytical Musil scholarship covers three methods in which the characters of MoE constitute the Self: conventional, creative, and insane methods. She carefully illustrates how the border between these methods is fluid by cross-indexing them with conceptual pairs that are epistemological (“objective” knowledge and participatory understanding; determinate and indeterminate feeling), ontological (Normalzustand—Anderer Zustand), and a self-referential combination of the two (healthy and unhealthy self-love).

If this sounds confusing in summary, in Jappe’s elaboration, her analysis becomes quite clear in the second, largest section of the book, “Reflexionen über das Verhältnis von ‘Selbst’ und Wirklichkeit im Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften” (the first section consists of an introductory positioning statement). The clarity owes to a careful elaboration of concepts, helpful tables and summaries, and illustration by narrative exegesis. Regarding the latter, the study treats the novel’s title figure, Ulrich, sympathetically in showing how he orientates himself in the world by moving between the poles of determinate and hypothetical knowledge (which can be emotional and/or intellectual in kind), reality and possibility, Gewalt und Liebe, in a manner that does not commit him to one pole and allows him “einen anderen Bezug zur Welt zu finden” (121). In short, she reads Ulrich as a successful inventor of new approaches to living that do justice both to his Self and to reality. She supports her reading with counterexamples: Ulrich’s conventional opposite number, Dr. Paul Arnheim, uses “normal” methods of self-constitution that enable him “die Wirklichkeit in seiner Wahrnehmung so zu ordnen, als befände er sich in ihrem Zentrum” (240); and the prostitute-murderer Moosbrugger serves as Ulrich’s insane counterpart to show how finding a different relation to the world can go awry.

In the third section of the book, “Die Psychoanalytische Sichtweise: Das Selbst zwischen Verschmelzung und Abgrenzung,” Jappe explains how the constitution of “fictive” and “real” selves relies on processes also found in primary and secondary narcissism. Here she offers a resume of competing and complimentary theories— from Musil’s contemporaries (Freud, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Sandór Ferenczi, Victor Tausk, Paul Federn) onward (Margaret Mahler, Didier Anzieu, Donald Winnicott, and Christopher Bollas). Melding (Verschmelzung) and differentiation (Abgrenzung) are stages in the self’s movement through primary and secondary narcissism. In Jappe’s discussion, they are not however final, something to be overcome once and for all. Rather, they parallel the novel’s depictions of negative self-love (trübe Selbstliebe) and its positive manifestation (“Philautia,” the original experience of “Ich und Du”) (237). Primary narcissism is a theoretical condition in which the external world is contained in the Ich. The condition overlaps with the phenomenon of melding and in it...