Dostoyevsky’s Dad: Marc Gafni

Freud said after reading Dostoyevsky, “Here, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms,” so overwhelmed was he by the sublime and erotic power of that which he read. And yet Freud, unable to resist, soon after returns to Dostoyevsky trying to locate the power of his presence somewhere in the recesses of his relation to his father.

Freud missed the point. The notion of a core spiritual erotic energy coursing through life was simply too much for his materialist mind to absorb. Life is not sublimated sex. It is eros itself. Freud’s blind reductionism remain a great symbol of the Shechina’s exile.

Similarly Kinsey, the great sex researcher, who did us a great service by taking much of sexuality out of the closet, radically split sex from eros. Admittedly, he did so with much less sophistication than Freud. For him, sex was a more simple and happy affair not much different than the animals he had been taught to observe in his zoological training. Yet while for

Kinsey, sex remains a bland and zoological kind of function, and for Freud a more dark and deterministic kind of force, for both of them the sexual remains uninspired and unerotic. Both Kinsey’s and Freud’s views ignore the soul of sex. To split sex from Eros so dramatically is to exile the Shechina. Both of these thinkers are seminal expressions of our society’s disenchantment.

marc gafni
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