3 - Psychological and Psychoanalytical Readings

Summary

Soviel Agathe sehen konnte, hatte er die Psychoanalyse dabei außer Betracht gelassen […]; aber Ulrich sagte, er ließe sie nicht deshalb beiseite, weil er die Verdienste dieser bedeutenden Theorie nicht anerkenne […], sondern es hänge damit zusammen, daß bei dem, was er vorhabe, ihre Eigenart nicht so zur Geltung komme, wie es ihres immerhin auch sehr anspruchsvollen Selbstbewußtseins würdig wäre.

(MoE, 1138–39)

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NATURE OF Musil's fiction struck Musil's literary public from the beginning. His first novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß, for example, deals with the anxieties of a young schoolboy. Young Törleß finds himself unable to become master of his troubled inner state, and therefore unable to commit to action to end a campaign of brutality of two schoolboys against a fellow pupil. That these “confusions” were not confined to adolescence, but referred to wider confusions in the social world of turn-of-the-century Austria, was one reason for the immediate success of the novel. Since Musil's later works did not end this exploration of states of inner confusion, but extended them into all areas of mature life, his concern with psychological states was quickly held to be programmatic. Moreover, the fact that Musil's career as a writer was exactly contemporaneous with early psychoanalysis — Törleß was published in 1906, only six years after Freud's pioneering work Die Traumdeutung — and that Musil, like Freud, lived and worked in Vienna, added to the impression that his works were preeminently psychological in outlook.