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Fresh Brains: Jacques Lacan's Critique of Ernst Kris's Psychoanalytic Method

in the Context of Kris's Theoretical Writings

Article in American Imago · December 2012

DOI: 10.1353/aim.2012.0023

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This is an early, prepublication version of the article published in American Imago, 2012,
69(4):507-542.

Dr. Steffen Krüger, Dept. of Media and Communication, Oslo, Norway.

Fresh Brains –

Jacques Lacan’s critique of Ernst Kris’s psychoanalytic method

in the context of Kris’ theoretical writings

Abstract

This essay is a detailed interpretation of Ernst Kris’s method of psychoanalytic treatment as

presented in “the case of the man who craved fresh brains” (Fink, 2002, p. 52; Kris, 1951,

pp. 237–251) – a case made (in)famous by Jacques Lacan’s crushing critique (1953–4, pp.

52–61; 1955–6, pp. 73–88; 1966, p. 318–333 + 489–542). Loosely conceived as a counter-

part to Bruce Fink’s 2002 study Lacan to the Letter – Reading Écrits Closely (2002), in which

Fink conducts a step-by-step analysis of Lacan’s various assessments of Kris’s case, this es-

say will approach the subject from the opposite end and work out the origins of Kris’s treat-

ment method in the diverse phases of his multidisciplinary career as an art-historian, psycho-

analyst, and – for the duration of World War II – propaganda-analyst. By unfolding the main

lines of thought that informed the inner logic of Kris’s approach to treatment, I want to con-

tribute to a clearer understanding of the dynamics and aesthetics, politics and ethics of this

much discussed and exemplary case in the history of post-Freudian psychoanalysis. I will

work out parallels in Kris’s and the early Lacan’s methodological thinking and point out in

how far Kris’s application of psychoanalytic concepts to propaganda research is still of ex-

1
emplary value today. I will end this article by showing how Kris’s later modification of his

approach to propaganda research resulted in a loosening of methodical stringency – a loos-

ening which found its continuation in his postwar psychoanalytic method. Arguably, it is this

modification that made Kris most vulnerable to Lacan’s critique.

Introduction

Jacques Lacan’s (1901–1981) attack on ego psychology became specifically identified with

his polemics against Ernst Kris (1900–1957), a Vienna-born analyst of the ego-psychological

tradition, who, from 1940 until his death in 1957, practiced in the U.S. It was particularly

Kris’s 1951 article, “Ego Psychology and Interpretation in Psychoanalytic Theory”, which

kept irritating – and fascinating – Lacan. In this article, he came to find a paradigmatic exam-

ple of ego-psychological treatment, an example instrumental in making his case against this

most influential direction in psychoanalysis after World War II.

Lacan dedicated considerable time and energy to Kris’s case, discussing it twice in his semi-

nars (1953–4, pp. 52–61; 1955–6, pp. 73–88), then coming back to it another two times in his

writings (1966, p. 318–333 + 489–542). Due to this strong interest in the case, as well as its

exemplary nature, the discussion of which served to make Lacan’s otherwise highly coded

work more accessible, Kris’s study has gained considerable notoriety in Lacanian circles,

serving as one of the most eminent examples of how not to treat a patient.

Astonishingly, though, with all the original contributions by Kris and Lacan dating back to the

1950s and 60s, the case never seemed to obtain more than proverbial character for Lacanian

analysts.1 It was only in 2002 that it received serious critical attention: in his study Lacan to

the Letter, Bruce Fink meticulously analyses Lacan’s treatment of Kris’s case report as well

as the chronological development of his four readings of it. Fink’s observations are an im-
2
portant help to every student interested in the intricacies of the debate, as well as Lacan’s rela-

tion to ego-psychological psychoanalysis in general. Yet even Fink has to admit to the limit-

edness of his observations: “Had Kris provided us with a great deal more detail and Lacan

given us more than a few vague lines, I might feel a bit more confident about my commentary

here” (2002, p. 62), he writes in rounding off his subchapter on the case.

It is at this point that the article at hand wants to step in and expand on Fink’s observations,

which are grounded in Lacanian thought, with a contribution that locates Kris’s case report, as

well as Lacan’s critique, within the context of Kris’s oeuvre – an oeuvre which stretches over

three academic fields: art history, psychoanalysis, and propaganda-analysis, i.e. communica-

tion research. Kris, who began his career as an art historian at the Kunsthistorische Museum in

Vienna and whose ensuing acquaintanceship with Sigmund Freud brought him in touch with

psychoanalysis, had to flee Austria after the country’s annexation by Nazi-Germany in 1938.

In exile in Great-Britain, and subsequently in New York, he became one of the leading re-

searchers of Nazi propaganda during the war. And just as his wartime work can be seen as a

continuation of the art-psychological studies of the 1930s, especially those on caricature (see

Rose, 2007; Krüger, 2011), his postwar analytic work can be seen as a continuation of his

wartime approach to propaganda.

Therefore, Lacan might have been righter than he himself wagered when he, in his last read-

ing of Kris’s case, offers a personal anecdote on meeting Kris in order to characterize the lat-

ter’s approach to psychoanalytic treatment:

“I remember him at the Marienbad Congress [1936; S.K.] where, the day after my ad-

dress on the mirror stage, I took my leave, anxious as I was to get a feeling for the

spirit of the time – a time full of promises – at the Olympics in Berlin. He kindly ob-

jected, ‘Ca ne se fait pas!’ (‘That isn’t done!’), having already acquired that penchant

3
 for the respectable that perhaps influenced his approach here [i.e. in “Ego Psychology

and Interpretation in Psychoanalytic Theory”; S. K.]” (Lacan, 1966, p. 501).

In the same way as Kris in 1936 tried to intervene with Lacan’s travelling plans into the ‘heart

of darkness’, he would try to intervene with the regressive tendencies in German (and later

U.S.) radio listeners which were facilitated by Nazi-propaganda. It is this knack for interven-

tion – rather than for analysis, as Lacan holds – that Kris carried over from his wartime into

his peacetime work in psychoanalytic treatment.

In the course of my essay, then, I will show how Kris’s psychoanalytic method was informed

by his work in propaganda analysis during WWII – a work which itself relied heavily on the

application of his art psychological writings of the 1930s. It is in this application, I argue, that

Kris’s psychology of caricature received its rectifying use, or, in Lacan’s words, its “direction

of the treatment” (1966, p. 489). By thus unfolding the main lines of thought that informed the

inner logic of Kris’s approach to treatment, I want to contribute to Bruce Fink’s project from

the other end, so to speak, and contribute to a clearer understanding of the dynamics and aes-

thetics, politics and ethics of this much discussed and exemplary case in the history of post-

Freudian psychoanalytic thought. In the process, I will work out some parallels in Kris’s and

the early Lacan’s psychoanalytic thought – parallels that might well astonish against the

background of today’s schismatic view of the camps that the two thinkers personify. Further-

more, while Kris’s wartime work offers a fascinating example of how psychoanalysis can

contribute to media analysis as well as the latter to the construction of psychoanalytic meth-

odology, I will utilize Lacan’s critique in order to point to the potentially counterproductive

aspects of this transfer, as well.

Before I begin, however, I have to point to a limitation of my approach. By necessity, my fo-

cus on the intrinsic aspects of Kris’s oeuvre has to leave aside the institutional context of the

controversy between the two analysts.2 At the same time, however, it is hoped that this argua-
4
bly narrow focus avoids the dogmatism and ideological warfare, which has often accompa-

nied broader discussions of what have become two diametrically opposed paradigms of psy-

choanalysis. In this way, I further hope to make perceivable the affinities of the two ap-

proaches that exist despite and within their unbridgeable differences. The former seem to have

haunted Lacan as much as the latter.

In the following, then, I will first revisit Kris’s report on his treatment of his case in order to

then branch out into those aspects of his career which served as this case’s methodological

foundation.

The Case of the Man Craving Fresh Brains

In order to illustrate his comments on psychoanalytic technique, Kris presents an exemplary

case of “Ego Psychology and Interpretation”: the analysis of a man in his early thirties, a sci-

entist whose chief complaint is being unable to publish his research. The man’s inability

stems from his belief that he is a plagiarist – someone “under constant pressure of an impulse

to use somebody else’s ideas” (Kris, 1951, p. 244). Years before, he had already undergone

analysis with Melitta Schmideberg and had learned that “fear and guilt kept him from being

productive”, as Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black accurately summarize the point of

departure of Kris’s case in their History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought, explaining fur-

ther that:

“The first analysis had interpreted the symbolic meaning of the problem by identifying

and exposing the infantile instinctual wish that propelled it, seeing the wish to plagia-

rize as representing the patient’s hidden wish to steal and aggressively devour some-

one else’s ideas” (Mitchell/ Black, 1995, p. 28).

Kris reports that the patient had felt some relief after the first analysis but, since the problem

had returned, approached him for further treatment. In the course of his analysis with Kris, the
5
patient apparently began to work on a new study. After a while, however, he chanced over a

text which he reported to have read years before, and in this text the patient found “the same

basic idea” as in his planned publication. Kris detected in his patient’s report a “paradoxical

tone of satisfaction and excitement”, which led him to “inquire in very great detail about the

text he was afraid to plagiarize. In a process of extended scrutiny”, Kris reports, “it turned out

that the old publication contained useful support of his thesis but no hint of the thesis itself”.

His “patient had made the author say what he wanted to say himself”, he writes, arriving at

the general conclusion that, far from stealing the ideas of others, his patient had projected his

own ideas onto people in his surroundings, in this way making it impossible for himself to use

them without becoming a plagiarist and, in turn, paralyzing himself in his work (Kris, 1951, p.

244).

At this point of the analysis, Kris makes the first advance in his treatment. When he calls the

“mechanism of give and take” to the patient’s attention, he reports that other aspects in the

latter’s biography began to fall into place. An eminent colleague and friend of the patient

comes into the picture. Apparently, it was this colleague who had repeatedly taken the pa-

tient’s ideas, which had been exchanged in conversations, and published them as his own. The

patient “wasn’t a plagiarist, but a ghostwriter!” (Mitchell/ Black, 1995, p. 29).

With the tables thus turned, Kris begins to attend to the patient’s past, and especially to his

relation with his father. This father, Kris reports, had failed in his profession and therewith

stood in stark contrast to the patient’s grandfather who had been a distinguished scientist.

What Kris thus discovers in his patient’s “complex defensive distortion” is “a persisting boy-

hood wish to admire and learn from a disappointing father whose own inhibitions prevented

his professional success” (Mitchell/ Black, 1995, p. 29). He interprets that “the projection of

ideas to paternal figures was in part determined by the wish for a great and successful father

6
(a grandfather)” (Kris, 1975/51, p. 245). In Bruce Fink’s words, “the patient’s belief that he

was plagiarizing a man’s ideas was a way of propping up his own father” (Fink, 2002, p. 53).

Kris writes that the projection of ideas onto father figures thus appeared as the patient’s “deci-

sive displacement” in the ongoing “oedipal conflict” – a conflict which had formerly found its

expression in dreams about fights with the father in which books were used as projectiles and

ultimately in a fishing competition that the patient remembered vividly. “Only the ideas of

others were truly interesting, only ideas one could take; hence the taking had to be engi-

neered”, Kris concludes (Kris, 1951, p. 245).

At this point, he has collected enough material about the patient’s relation with reality in order

to make his decisive advance. In a sudden moment he confronts his patient with a dense

summary of his above observations. His interpretation aims to span all relevant phases of his

patient’s life. Then he is “waiting for the patient’s reaction” (ibid.). And it is this reaction

which serves as the high and end point of his account:

“The patient was silent and the very length of the silence had a special significance.

Then, as if reporting a sudden insight, he said: ‘Every noon, when I leave here, before

luncheon, and before returning to my office, I walk through X Street (a street well

known for its small but attractive restaurants) and I look at the menus in the windows.

In one of the restaurants I usually find my preferred dish – fresh brains” (Kris, 1951, p.

245).

Here, Kris’s report ends – elliptically and artfully, leaving the layman wondering what it was

in the answer of his analysand that satisfied him so much so that he chose to break off his case

report at exactly this point. Astonishingly enough, it is Lacan, in his first reading of Kris’s

case, presented in his 1954 seminar on Freud’s “Die Verneinung”, who convincingly sums up

what Kris regards as the significance of this reply.

7
Lacan confirms Kris’s interpretation of the patient’s repetition compulsion of creating re-

sourceful father figures for himself by which to satisfy a desire which had plagued him during

childhood and subsequently determined his life: “It goes without a doubt that this interpreta-

tion fits”, Lacan agrees (1953–4, p. 81). What he is mainly interested in, however, is the pa-

tient’s reaction to Kris’s final interpretation. When the analysand gives his answer of eating

fresh brains, Lacan “goes so far as to say that the comment made by the analysand […] is the

kind of ‘response elicited by an accurate interpretation’, such an interpretation being ‘a level

of speech that is both paradoxical and full in its signification’” (Fink, 2002, p. 54).

Slavoj Žižek identifies this level of “full speech” in Lacan’s theory (e.g. Lacan, 1953–4, p.

50) as the “intersubjective dimension of speech”, explaining further that “the goal of analysis

is to produce the recognition of desire through 'full speech', to integrate desire within the uni-

verse of signification” (Žižek, 1996/2006). In other words, what Lacan, initially and in ac-

cordance with Kris, finds in the patient’s response is exactly that which he later rejects, spe-

cifically, that Kris “has managed to give rise to a valid way out for this id” (Lacan, 1966, p.

331).

“Paradoxical and full in its signification”

This initial evaluation is the starting point of Bruce Fink’s step-by-step analysis of Lacan’s

increasing unease with, and ultimate rejection, of Kris’s method. Conceived as a parallel to

Fink’s text, the essay at hand is to give a detailed analysis of Kris’s own understanding of this

method of treatment by viewing it in the various contexts within which it evolved.

Indeed, overlooking Kris’s oeuvre from the point of his case study, one can easily get the im-

pression that his whole academic – and, as will be shown: non-academic – career prepared

him for the method he applied to it. Already in his 1933 Imago essay “A psychic sculptor of

the 18th Century”, a psychoanalytic contribution to the debate on the Austrian artist Franz

8
Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783), Kris had found an incident of paradoxical signification

that appears to have served him as a visual counterpart to the patient in his later account. Even

more so, one can say that this early ‘case study’, which became paradigmatic for Kris’s appli-

cation of psychoanalytic theory to problems of art-history in general, laid the groundwork for

the whole of his later psychoanalytic approach.

Amidst the late works of Messerschmidt, a large series of busts which Kris took to be varia-

tions of self-portraits, the analyst identified two works which in his opinion stood in marked

contrast to the rest. While the overall series appeared to serve notions of resistance, passive-

ness, and paralysis (fig. 1) – a defense against penetration centered on the mouth, as Kris sug-

gests3 – the two exceptions, the so-called “beak heads” (fig. 2+3), seemed to turn this logic

inside out. According to Kris, they present a “break-through of the passive feminine fantasy,

which the tightly closed lips of Messerschmidt’s other busts seem to have warded off”. Fur-

ther explaining these two busts’ meaning, he writes:

“Messerschmidt has risen […] to the creation of an ornamental configuration. We may

speak of a transition from the autoplastic function of a mimic ritual [in the rest of the

series; S. K.] to the alloplastic function of the work of art. Hence a different position

of the beak heads as works of art […] seems to correspond to their particular psycho-

logical position […]. […] The artist’s ‘transformation’ of reality, to which the beak

heads owe their effect, seems to be related to the fact that we find in them the clearest

expression of the sexual nucleus of Messerschmidt’s delusions” (Kris, 1933, p. 141;

emphasis S.K.).4

Whereas Messerschmidt’s overall series appeared to re-affirm the artist’s defensive concep-

tion of reality, the two exceptions – the “demons of proportion” (Kris [quoting Nicolai], 1933,

p. 140) – transformed this reality by artfully rendering the root cause of the series’ psychology

perceivable. Indeed, in a more detailed, art-historically weighed contribution on Messer-

9
schmidt from 1932, Kris compares the artist’s achievement in the two “beak heads” to that of

“gargoyles of gothic cathedrals” or the “grotesque ornaments of the renaissance”, pointing out

that “especially in grotesques one sometimes encounters composite beings […] that freely

process a ‘natural residue’ in a similar way” (Kris, 1932, p. 217; translation S.K.; emphasis

S.K.).5

Returning to Kris’s patient’s answer of “fresh brains” in the light of this psycho-iconological

interpretation of an artist’s works, it appears that what Kris saw in the former was indeed very

much akin to an “ornamental configuration”. While Messerschmidt had rendered the lips of

his two busts into sexualized, phallic beaks, Kris’s patient articulated “the sexual nucleus” of

his character formation by turning himself into a ‘brain eater’. Both patients6 had managed to

produce symbolic means that broke through their defensive façades; in both cases, Kris’s

analysis exposed the same “unconscious instinctual current: primitive oral aggression”

(Mitchell/ Black, 1995, p. 28).

Regression in the Service of the Punch Line

The parallels between these two instances of “full speech”, as Kris must have perceived them,

become clearer when viewed in context of the evolution of the concept with which Kris be-

came widely known in analytical and art-psychological circles: the “regression in the service

of the ego”. Kris first presented this idea in his 1934 article on “The Psychology of Carica-

ture” (1936, p. 290). Here he attempts to transfer Freud’s early theory of jokes into later meta-

psychological terminology.

In Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Freud had observed that verbal wit

was begotten from the same fundamental psychic mechanisms, specifically: condensation,

symbolization, and displacement, which were in operation in states of impaired ego-control,

e.g. dreams and psychopathology. In jokes, however, the meaning of such creations was

10
readily accessible to the next person despite their ambiguity. Jokes were produced by regres-

sive means; yet they were by no means signs of pathological regression. Quite to the contrary,

it was through their very guise as ‘non-sense’ that they managed to produce an excessive,

enhanced sense of reality, their regressive properties actually working in favor of reality test-

ing.

When, in Seminar V (The Formations of the Unconscious), Lacan writes in view of the first

example of a joke in Freud’s study – Heinrich Heine’s neologism famillionär7 – that such

formations represent “a regression that we can consider, not as being infinite, but as going to

the origin of language” and that “[w]e should consider all human meanings as having been at

some time metaphorically engendered by signifying conjunctions” (Lacan, 1957–8, p. 36),

this is by no means far from Kris’s take on jokes as “regressions in the service of the ego”.

Both theorists follow Freud in acknowledging the creative potential of regression and both

claim the mechanism of joke production to be inherent in a wide variety of instances of

‘meaning making’.

In his 1939 “On Inspiration”, for example, Kris establishes the serviceable regression at the

heart of “scientific thinking” when he observes that a “sudden experience concerns some step

in the attempt to solve a problem”, writing further that:

“The work of the mind in research and discovery does not consist only in a continuous

application to the quest for a solution. A part of the work is done in preconscious elab-

oration, the result of which comes into consciousness in sudden advances. It is almost

always possible to find traces of an interrelation between some external stimuli and

this preconscious process” (Kris, 1939, p. 296).

The way in which Kris here describes the process of problem solving has concrete bearings on

his later account of treatment as well as that of his patient’s reaction. Indeed, the parallels

between the two texts, “On Inspiration” and “Ego-Psychology and Interpretation”, are more
11
than conceptual. When Kris put the above quotation to paper in 1939, it was already with ex-

actly that patient in mind whose treatment he describes in his 1951 essay, the actual case thus

dating back more than ten years before the 1951 article (Kris, 1939, p. 298).

Therefore, when Kris applies his “external stimulus” in the form of his interpretation of his

patient’s reality construction, it is with the intention of giving him a “sudden advance” in con-

sciousness. With regard to the peculiar nature of its result, however, – the patient’s somewhat

paradoxical answer – it seems that there was more in play in Kris’s advance than just “pre-

conscious elaboration”. Rather, the insight which Kris believes to have given his analysand is

won by pushing the latter’s process of elaboration momentarily over the threshold of the un-

conscious. “[A] preconscious thought is given over for a moment to unconscious revision and

the outcome of this is at once grasped by conscious perception”, Freud explains the “sudden

release of intellectual tension” in joke production (Freud, 1905, p. 166),8 and Kris follows suit

in his 1939 article, writing that “[s]cientific thinking is never sharply separated from the realm

of the unconscious” (Kris, 1939, 297). Therefore, it is Freud’s “release in intellectual tension”

that Kris finds in his patient’s reaction – a release which momentarily lays the logic of the

patient’s defense open. When the latter falls silent as a result of Kris’s interpretation and then

produces his ‘punch line’ of “fresh brains”, Kris interprets this as a serviceable regression that

his interpretation has triggered, a first step on the way to the “solving” of the patient’s mental

“problem”. “A sequence of this kind indicates normal progress”, Kris writes about his meth-

od, “the interpretation concerns the warding-off device, the reaction reveals the impulse

warded off“ (Kris, 1951, p. 243).

Now, it would be naïve to claim that Kris’s approach here is entirely in line with Lacan’s

view on the psychological merits of regressive phenomena. Already the optimistic – and

somewhat positivistic – notion of “problem solving”, which would take a central place in

Kris’s later writings (e.g. 1953, p. 473), runs counter to Lacan’s outlook on psychoanalysis as

12
a therapeutic practice;9 and it would ultimately be the nature of Kris’s “external stimulus” that

would create a rift between the two analysts’ approaches. Nevertheless, it would be just as

wrong to have one’s assessment of Kris’s and Lacan’s ideas on the constructive potential of

regression be excessively colored by today’s polarized perspective. It was only in his fifth

session of his Seminar I that Lacan began his evaluation of Kris’s case, i.e. at a time when the

divide, which separates current ego-psychology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, was merely

beginning to form.10 Therefore, as mentioned earlier, it is equally important to note the vari-

ous correspondences and intersections in Kris’s approach of controlled regression and Lacan’s

description of the joke mechanism. In view of Heine’s famillionär, for example, Lacan (ac-

cording to the German translation) speaks of a “knot”, a “nexus” (according to the English)

“at which appears this new paradoxical signifier” (Lacan, 1957–8, p. 16); this signifier he

calls an “unexpected thing”, “a new message”11, and a “scandal in the enunciation” (ibid.)12,

and it is without resistance that these descriptions can be fitted into Kris’s therapeutic ap-

proach. From this perspective, then, it is no longer surprising that the result of Kris’s treat-

ment of controlled regression appealed to Lacan, as it was indeed “metaphorically engendered

by signifying conjunctions” (Lacan, 1957–8, 36; see above).

Unlike Lacan, however, Kris saw his concept as by no means restricted to the realm of verbal

language. As an art historian and specialist in late renaissance visual art, he aimed to open up

Freud’s joke theory to the visual field, specifically to the genre of caricature. It “extends to the

vast domain of aesthetic expression in general and […] applies over the whole field of art and

symbol-formation”, he wrote in 1934 (English translation: 1936, p. 290), only to extend his

concept even further in succeeding articles.13 Yet, in all its metamorphoses, the concept of the

“regression in the service of the ego” remained firmly rooted in the theory of caricature,

which he formulated throughout the 1930s.

The “Approach from the Surface”

13
As I will show in the following, it is first and foremost this rootedness of Kris’s later treat-

ment method in a practice of visual transformation that would attract Lacan’s harsh criticism.

Already in Seminar I, one can detect a spot of bother when Lacan qualifies his praise by inter-

jecting the following impatient questions: “What makes this an accurate interpretation? Are

we dealing with something which is at the surface?” (Lacan, 1953–4, p. 60-1). What he refers

to here is that which Kris, in drawing on Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating, and Working

Through”, calls the “approach from the surface”.14 Instead of aiming “at direct or rapid access

to the id”, as the first analysis had done (Kris, 1951, p. 246), Kris stresses the importance of

remaining at the level of the patient’s reality construction itself, focusing on the defenses in

life and resistances in therapy which the patient erects in order to protect his symptom. His

analysis, he points out, began with “the ‘exploration of the surface’”, i.e. with “the most care-

ful phenomenology”, starting “on a descriptive level” and proceeding “gradually to establish

typical patterns of behavior, present and past” (ibid.).

Through the ordering and patterning of his patient’s imaginary material, Kris evokes in his

description a slow, circular movement around the core of the patient’s problem – a core which

is thus presented as being enclosed by (as opposed to being inherent in, as Lacan would have

it) the patient’s narrative. Lacan, in his last reading of the case, rightly interprets this approach

as a circling in of the id when, as a main aspect of his critique, he points to Kris’s unuttered

presupposition that “defense and drive are concentric, the one being molded, as it were,

around the other” (Lacan, 1966, p. 501). “It suggests a whole topography or model of the psy-

che”, explains Bruce Fink further, “the id being a sort of inner circle or sphere and the ego

being a sort of outer circle or sphere that envelopes it” (Fink, 2002, p. 58).

Lacan criticizes this topography “as overly simplistic and as nowhere to be found in Freud’s

work”, writes Fink (2002, p. 58). And in direct response to Kris, Lacan himself comments:

“[T]he idea that the surface is the level of the superficial is itself dangerous […], for it is on

14
the surface that depth is seen, as when one’s face breaks out in pimples on holidays” (Lacan,

1966, p. 503). This point of his critique, however, which reinforces the poststructuralist view

that there is no meaning beyond language, is only half adequate here, since, while Kris might

have indeed conceived of an id “beyond [the patient’s] discourse – a beyond, you’ll be careful

to note, which is nowhere”, as Lacan states in a related context (1953–4, p. 51) – Kris himself

would have happily agreed with Lacan’s claim that it is “on the surface that depth is seen”;

after all, his approach aimed exactly at that which Lacan demanded, namely, for his patient

“to realize this beyond” (Lacan, 1953–4, p. 51). Contrary to Lacan, however, he did not un-

derstand his method as a realization by specifically linguistic means. Rather, one can say with

Lacan that Kris aimed at “bringing out the pimples” on his patient’s face in a more direct and

at the same time less symbolically specific way, namely, by evoking an image that would

bring the patient’s likeness to a head., or simpler put: that would suggest to the patient what

he was really like.

This will become clearer when turning to Kris’s caricature theory now. When Kris stresses the

importance of ordering and patterning his patient’s biographical material, this strategy is not

so much a take on Edmund Husserl’s “eidetic reduction” (see e.g. Husserl, 1938, pp. 255–

270)15 as it is the adaptation of a method of condensation and simplification typical of classi-

cal portrait caricature. In their unpublished book manuscript on the history and psychology of

caricature, Kris and his co-author, Ernst H. Gombrich, enthusiastically wrote about the carica-

ture style of Baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini: “His work starts with the whole of the face

and condenses the richness of the object to a schematic form. This simplification is the aim of

his caricaturing per se” (Kris/ Gombrich, 1934–7, p. 34).16

In the treatment of his patient, Kris apparently attempted something very similar by condens-

ing his patient’s account down to its basic gestalt and formative principle, in this case, the

“mechanism of give and take” – of propping something up to devour it. This process of sim-

15
plification, however, was not conceived as an end in itself, as the authors of the caricature

manuscript write further: “The simplification of the form, which […] we found accomplished

in Bernini, aims in all cases at a […] double effect. Something of the familiar person remains;

something of a new schema enters” (Kris/ Gombrich, 1934–7, p. 97).17 As an example they

refer to Bernini’s famous caricature of a grinning major (fig. 4) who becomes transferred “in-

to a grin swallowing the person” (ibid.).18

Once more, we encounter the concept of the “regression in the service of the ego” – the idea

of the preconscious being fertilized by the primary process. And it is here, in Kris’s theory of

caricature, that it found its central place. In his patient’s treatment, Kris obviously aimed for

the same switch mechanism of visualization, the same “double effect” which he and Gom-

brich observed in Bernini’s art, for, also this time, when his act of ordering and patterning

reached a certain level of saturation, the entry of a second schema announces itself. He con-

fronts his patient with a compressed, simplified image of himself, and this image is obviously

so piercing in its analysis, so caricature-like, that the overwhelmed patient can only muster up

a poor defense against it. It is in this moment that he is provoked to regressively produce his

self-caricature of the “brain eater” and, in so doing, the second schema comes into being. Just

as Messerschmidt had rendered the lips of his “beak heads” so as to caricature himself and

“give the whole of the head its meaning” (Kris, 1932, p. 217)19, Kris’s patient had brought

himself down to an all-encompassing image.

‘Summaryism’

It is from his second reading onward that Lacan starts paying increased attention to Kris’s

methodology and starts to take notice of – and issue with – its caricaturing practices. It begins

to dawn on him that, while Kris might have “pressed the right button” (Lacan, 1955–6, p. 80)

and obtained a relevant response, he might have done so in a very disturbing fashion, specifi-

cally, by detaching his patient’s account from its exact wording and constructing from it a
16
vision of reality of his own. In Lacan’s words, Kris has approached the case exclusively “in

the order of reality [i.e. in that of the imaginary; S.K.] and not within the symbolic register”

(ibid.).

It is in the evaluation of the above point, i.e. Kris’s quasi-visual technique of caricaturing his

patient’s life-surface with his own repertoire of linguistic (or as he has it: descriptive) sym-

bols, that one can find the two theorists in uttermost opposition to one another, indeed, so

much so that it is possible to misread many of Lacan’s polemical accusations as mere

acknowledgements of Kris’s method. From Kris’s point of view, the term “summaryism

[‘bilanisme’]” (Lacan, 1966, p. 330), for example, might not even have appeared derisive of

the caricature method as he conceived of it.20 After all, using one’s means in order to give a

highly pointed summary of another person was exactly what a caricaturist did. In a similar

vein, when Lacan accuses Kris of “fabricating a symptom from scratch” (ibid.), the notion of

fabrication, if understood without its pejorative connotations of untruthfulness, can be seen to

capture Kris’s technique of tidying up and ordering his patient’s imagery so as to facilitate the

entry of a “second schema” rather well. And even when Lacan accuses Kris’s approach of

“attacking the subject’s world” (Lacan, 1966, p. 332), his polemical choice of the word “at-

tack” is probably more to the point than he himself might have wagered, as the notion is not

only inherent in the method’s origin in caricature – i.e. aggressive image making – but also in

Kris’s experience as a propaganda-analyst during World War II. Ultimately, it is here, in his

war work, that Kris’s art-psychological theory received its interventionist dimension and rec-

tifying use. In exile in London and subsequently in New York, Kris would thus continue the

work of Bernini in a fashion that would combine the theory of caricature with the method of

content analysis and, via this detour, pave the way for his later psychoanalytic approach. In

other words, while Kris obviously brought psychoanalytic ideas to his work in propaganda

17
analysis, I will show in later parts how his experience in propaganda research impacted on his

later clinical work.

BBC Caricaturing Service

Unfortunately, there is not nearly enough space to outline Kris’s path to propaganda analysis,

fascinating as it is. Only this much: Through contacts in the British state service, he came in

touch with the BBC Monitoring Service, which in 1939 invited him to set up “a separate Re-

search Department […], whose task it was to prepare a weekly analysis dealing with trends of

propaganda looked at from a wider point of view” (Renier/ Rubinstein, 1986, p. 39).

In a 1941 Collier’s Magazine article with the sensational title “The Secret Four” (1941, p. 23

+ 47–48), the journalist William Hillman reports on the peculiar work of Kris’s department.

In this article, which is the only existing one about Kris’s wartime work in Great Britain, it

becomes clear that what the art psychologist Kris must have seen in the BBC Monitoring Ser-

vice cannot have been anything short of a gigantic ‘caricaturing machine’. It is little astonish-

ing, then, that all relevant aspects – also the problematic ones – of the transfer of his carica-

ture theory into his psychoanalytic method can be found in Hillman’s report.

Already here, Kris was confronted with the problem of applying image-making practices to a

field of verbal communication. As stated above, Kris and Gombrich, in their unpublished

book on caricature, had observed that a successful portrait caricature would take its cues

“from the expression of the face as a whole” (Kris/ Gombrich, 1934–7, p. 36; see above).21 In

Kris’s analysis of Nazi propaganda, it was a more abstract idea of “the whole” which was to

take the place of the concrete face. Kris surmised that if one wanted to make reasonable infer-

ences about the Nazi’s intentions and war strategies, these inferences had to be based on the

surface of axis propaganda as a whole. This was as straightforward as it must have appeared

18
impossible in its scope; thanks to the BBC Monitoring Service, however, Kris found himself

in the highly unlikely circumstance that this had become feasible.

At the Service’s headquarters in Evesham, Hillman reports, “[c]lose to three hundred alert

listeners and translators under supervision of the British Broadcasting Corporation” were tak-

ing down each and every broadcast from German and Italian sources every day. “About 350

records of broadcast talks are made every twenty-four hours and three quarters of a million

words are caught daily in wax and rubber” (Hillman, 1941, p. 47), Hillman writes gaspingly.

This totality of Axis propaganda was then

“turned over to an editorial staff of about seventy-five men and women who condense

it to about forty thousand words. These represent an essential summary of what the

[…] radio waves have been saying. They are mimeographed and distributed to all gov-

ernment departments” (Hillman, 1941, p. 48).

Hillman’s choice of words, “condense”, “essential summary”, echo the caricature-like nature

that Kris must have seen in the Monitoring Service’s work. But still this “daily digest” was

too voluminous for the “government departments” to interpret in a meaningful way. “‘Can’t

some sense be gotten out of all this?’ asked Salt [John Salt, administrator of the BBC’s Moni-

toring Service; S.K.], and this is where Professor Kris came in”, writes Hillman (ibid.).

What Kris found missing for the BBC’s daily broadcast summaries to ultimately take on cari-

catured form was a further process of “analysis, study, and comparison”, as Hillman states

vaguely – a process Kris surely understood as an ordering and patterning of the material – in

order to squeeze out the punch lines, the “hidden motive[s] and objective[s]” (Hillman, 1941,

48), which would then put the condensed gestalt of Nazi propaganda into perspective and

highlight the character traits towards which the whole of its output was gravitating. In the

logic of the image that Lacan would later use to describe Kris’s topographical model: Kris

19
was looking for ways to determine the id around which the whole of the Nazi propaganda’s

output was evolving at a given time.

In a non-pejorative sense, Kris’s method of propaganda analysis can thus be summed up as

the “fabrication of a symptom”, indeed. Also in this case, his analysis remained on the surface

of what his German patient would tell him; his team would compress the material and in this

way tease out, isolate, and elevate the cracks and flaws in the otherwise clean and immaculate

façade of axis communication, the misalignments in the “Gleichschaltung” of Nazi propagan-

da that would expose the true intentions behind its information policy.

However, as with Kris’s approach to psychoanalytic treatment, his propaganda-analytical

method did not remain without criticism. In the latter case, it was Kris’s colleague, Ernst

Gombrich, for whom Kris had secured a monitoring position with the BBC, who illustrated

the problem in his letters to Kris. “You realise, of course, – so I hope – that we are far from

finding the digest perfect”, Gombrich wrote in April 1941, explaining that

“It is of course produced in a great rush but even so it is not always easy to see why

they cut out this interesting passage and leave a perfectly trite one and why they

change a perfectly good word into a vague and bad one. You can imagine that there is

quite an amusing little guerrilla between our departments which blossomed out into a

skit of mine – Antony’s speech from ‘Julius Caesar’ as rendered by the digest. Begin-

ning with the words ‘This is a funeral oration, not an eulogy.’ and – of course – leav-

ing out all ‘repetitions’ of ‘Brutus is an honourable man’ because he said so once al-

ready” (Gombrich [letter to Kris], 3.4.1941).

In an admirably uncomplicated way, Gombrich’s example anticipates Lacan’s later apprehen-

sions of Kris’s “approach from the surface” being “in the order of reality and not within the

symbolic register” (see above). Instead of taking off “from the subject’s own words in order

20
to come back to them” (Lacan, 1966, p. 502), as Lacan proposed as the manner of conduct in

analytic treatment, Kris’s method of condensing his patient’s account into a comprehensive

vision of reality constantly ran the risk of becoming a fabrication in the full – and pejorative –

sense of the word. Another of Gombrich’s letters, in which he discusses the perfectly mun-

dane act of German-English translation, can be taken to bear witness to this: “What on earth

did you think of when you wrote that ‘disengagement’ has almost superseded the word ‚re-

treat’ and even the milder form ‚withdrawal’ --??”, he angrily commented on the study Ger-

man Radio Propaganda (1944), which Kris had co-authored with the sociologist Hans Speier,

“[s]urely the German Home Service does not speak English? There is no word ‘withdrawal’

in German so they can’t use it with the best will in the world“ (Gombrich [letter to Kris],

2.4.1943).

Sadly, there are no replies by Kris to the two letters from Gombrich in existence.22 For Kris

the application of the caricature technique to radio propaganda did apparently not pose bigger

problems since, in most cases, it produced results which appeared meaningful and valid to

Kris and his team. Also his colleague at the BBC, John Salt, confirmed that the “standard of

the various products seems to be keeping pretty high“ (Salt [letter to Kris], 4.2.1941). As an

example of a successful application, Kris mentioned in his interview with Hillman German

broadcasts of a “thirty-thousand-ton British battleship” which was reported to have been

“sunk in just over thirty seconds by one bomb from a German bombing plane’” (Hillman,

1941, p. 47). By analyzing the monitored material of this rather incredible story which was

reported from both German and Italian propaganda sources, Kris’s team revealed its propa-

gandistic value as a variation of the David-versus-Goliath myth: an attempt at “wish fulfill-

ment” with which the Italian population was to be prepared “for Italy’s entrance into the war”.

And indeed, a few weeks later, Italy joined the Germans.

Interventions in reality constructions

21
“We can often read the minds of propagandists in a way that would astonish them“, Hillman

cites Kris (1941, p. 46), and it is in statements such as this that one beholds of the war-

strategic notions which also set the tone for Kris’s approach to treatment. Yet the parallels do

not end here; rather, it can be gathered from Kris’s war correspondence that the results of his

department’s work had a purpose very similar to that of the technique of “sudden advance”

(Kris, 1939, 296) which he sketched out in his later psychoanalytic case report. “German

home broadcasts now answer our stuff in detail, apparently on the assumption that the bulk of

their audience will have heard it anyway and that a direct reply does not, therefore, give any

further publicity to the original”, reported the BBC’s John Salt on the effects of their depart-

ment’s work at a time when Kris had already moved to New York (Salt [letter to Kris]

4.2.1941). In other words, the BBC’s strategy was to broadcast the findings of Kris’s research

team back to Germany and then wait for the Germans’ reaction.23

A similar combination of first establishing “typical patterns” (Kris, 1951, p. 246) followed by

a “sudden advance” (Kris, 1939, p. 296) can be found in Kris US-publications on propaganda,

only this time the interventionist effort was directed towards US-Americans, instead of Ger-

mans who secretly listened to the BBC. In these articles, the readers were to be exposed to the

reality of Nazi Germany. In “German Propaganda Instructions of 1933“, for example, an es-

say in which Kris proves in a painstakingly detailed process the authenticity of an early Nazi

strategy paper which had been leaked to the French press in 1933 but then been continuously

discounted as a fraud, he ends with the following appeal:

“Might we not say that those who did not at an early date wish to realize the danger of

Naziism may to some extent have been identical with the skeptics who did not believe

in the authenticity of these Instructions? In fact, was their attitude anything but another

example of that mechanism which psychoanalysis calls the denial of reality? Was not

22
 the refusal to see Hitler for what he is which may have driven our document into virtu-

al oblivion?” (Kris, 1942, p. 79).

In both of the above described cases of counter-propagandistic measures, Kris’s application of

war intelligence can be described in Lacan’s words as “attacking the subject’s world […] in

the name of the analysis of defense” (Lacan, 1966, p. 332). In both cases, an attack was in-

tended, and reality, or more precisely: the defense mechanism of the “denial of reality”, was

its target. The aim of this method was obviously to poke holes into the ideological armor of

the Germans – and to some extent the US-Americans – and to shock the respective audiences

into that vision of reality which the propaganda-analyst found to be buried underneath the

defenses, propagandistic and other.

Renewal of the symptom

That this ‘reality shock therapy’ was not without its risks is manifest in the central role that

regression played in it. As mentioned earlier, the type of regression that Kris wanted to ad-

minister was intended as a controlled and serviceable one; it had its origins in Freud’s model

of the joke. Yet Kris was acutely aware that his transfer of Freud’s ideas into the visual field

was not without consequences for its affective potential. “All play with words is play with

conventional signs; play with form is play with the being itself” (Kris/ Gombrich, 1934–7, p.

243),24 he and Gombrich formulated in their caricature manuscript, stating further that the

“tendentious character of caricature […] is closer to action than all verbal humor” (1934–7, p.

244).25

In „Ego Development and the Comic“ (1938), Kris had defined the comic in general as a re-

sistance test against old, half assimilated fears. Only those situations from which the subject is

fully able to distance itself are experienced as comic, he wrote here (Kris, 1938, p. 83). In the

analytic situation, however, he consciously applied comic practices borrowed from caricature,

23
which he knew to be “closer to action”, in order to break down this distance and thwart his

patient’s attempts at withdrawing from the immediacy of the experience. Against this back-

ground it seems almost consequential that Lacan came to revise his initial understanding of

Kris’s patient’s reaction from an incident of “full speech” to an “acting out” (Lacan, 1955-6,

p. 80 + 1966, p. 331ff + 501). Even though Lacan still held on to his initial agreement with

Kris’s evaluation of “the act itself” being “a true emergence of a primordially ‘excised’ oral

relation” (Lacan, 1966, p. 332), he came to radically question its potential to give the patient

insight. “[T]he fact that it appears in the form of an act which is not at all understood by the

subject does not seem to me to be of any benefit to the subject” (ibid.), he wrote.

Consequently, when, in Seminar III, Lacan states that the patient merely “renews his symp-

tom”, this assessment opens for the legitimate question of how much insight Kris was really

willing to afford his patient. Overlooking the similarities between his therapeutic approach

and the counter-propagandistic measures which he had developed during the war, it does not

even seem impossible that the idea of a renewal of his patient’s symptom– if only understood

as “transitory”, as Lacan accedes in his last reading (1966, p. 501) – was to a certain degree

anticipated and catered for in his therapeutic strategy. After all, in the division of labor pro-

vided for in Kris’s analytic setting, it was the analyst who steered and controlled his patient’s

regression. And even though Kris states clearly that “the id impulse, the impulse to devour,

emerged into consciousness” (Kris, 1951, p. 247), it is by no means clear in what way this

emergence took place and how the patient experienced it.

“In one of his last papers Freud […] stresses an area of cooperation between analyst and pa-

tient and implicitly warns against dictatorially imposed interpretations”, Kris wrote in a relat-

ed context, only to continue that “[t]hat does not mean that it is possible or desirable always to

avoid opposition of the patient to any interpretation” (Kris, 1951, p. 241). Statements such as

this one seem to point to the precariousness which Kris himself knew to be inherent in his

24
comic procedure “beyond the pleasure principle”. What would give it stability and ultimately

make it a reliable therapeutic technique, he hoped, was the nature of the stimulus he applied to

his patient. In contrast to Lacan, who was convinced that the renewal of the symptom had

taken place “at a point that has no more foundation or existence than the one at which [the

patient] showed it at the outset” (Lacan, 1955–6, p. 80), Kris was absolutely of the opinion

that he had created such “foundation and existence” – and that he had done so by virtue of the

vision of reality which he had (re)constructed for his patient.

“Foundation and Existence”

Put in art-historical terms: Kris was convinced that only his particularly emphatic sense of

life-likeness, which he had provided for his patient, served the latter as a secure foundation

and relevant frame for his regression to result in something meaningful. In his writings, this

peculiar idea of ‘mimetic foundation’ can be traced back far beyond his caricature theory with

its paradigm of “the whole of the face”, almost to the very beginnings of his academic career.

As early as 1926, in the publication of his PhD-thesis on The Style “Rustique”, he writes:

“[O]n the firm ground of nature the richly unfolded splendor of the artwork is built” (Kris,

1926a, p. 151; translation S.K.)26, and this speculation about the meaning and motivation of a

late-renaissance art work – a table-fountain that Kris ascribed to the mannerist artist Wenzel

Jamnitzer – already anticipated the dynamics of the “regression in the service of the ego”, as

well as the function which solid empirical research was to have within it, astonishingly well.

Kris conceived of his Style “Rustique” as an undercurrent of mannerism. In the midst of the

16th-century, an epoch best known for its experimental play with perspective, distortion and

breaches of mimetic conventions, he isolates a sub-genre that, on the surface, appears to aim

for the complete opposite of such experimentalism. Kris finds this style to be hyper-realistic;

it uses casts of small animals in order to depict nature down to its finest details and to create

25
the utmost illusion of life-likeness, vividness – realness. Representation of reality in the tradi-

tional sense, however, is not amongst the intentions Kris sees as characteristic of it.

“The mastering of the problem of representing nature […] had long since become irrelevant”,

he writes in “Die Venus auf dem Frosch” (1926b, p. 494), a short article which summarizes

the findings of The Style “Rustique”. By the 16th century, the technique of live casts was not

used to make representation better or more accurate any more, Kris explains; rather, what he

sees in these works is an effort to lead the concept of representation itself ad-absurdum, to

take life-likeness to an extreme where it is not understood as a straightforward depiction of

outer reality anymore but instead turns into “a carrier of emotional content in a new, until then

unprecedented sense” (Kris, 1926a, p. 207).27

Again returning to Kris’s postwar psychoanalytic method, it becomes clear that the above

described premise, which he had developed in his art historical writings, was still in place.

Also here, in the case of the “man who craved fresh brains”, the analyst presumed that his

depiction of outer reality, his “life cast”, could only work as a catalyst and adequate “carrier

of emotional content” for his patient because of its safe foundation in the “mastering of the

problem of representing nature” – or in Kris’s later words: in “the most careful phenomenolo-

gy” (1951, p. 246). He would provide the “firm ground” and, consequently, his patient would

“richly” unfold his “splendor”. And while Kris thus took the meaningfulness of his patient’s

regression to be warranted by the objectivity of his grounding, the same had to be true in re-

verse, i.e. the objective truth of Kris’s stimulus was proven by the meaningfulness of the pa-

tient’s response.

“I have no doubt but that the subject’s confession has its full transferential value”, Lacan

commented sarcastically on Kris’s circular production of objectivity (Lacan, 1966, p. 332). In

his opinion, Kris had merely harvested what he sowed, forcing his analysand to act under the

conditions of a master narrative – a dominant discourse (Lacan, 1953-4, p. 61) which Lacan
26
considered anything but objective, but rather took to be Kris’s subjective view, the “model of

the analyst’s world” (Lacan, 1966, p. 332).

“The text and not the facts”

It is between Kris’s belief in and Lacan’s challenge of this idea of objective reality that the

conflict between the two theorists can be seen to come to a head. Following Kris’s conception

of reality further, a particularly interesting passage can be found in “Approaches to art”, the

introductory essay to his 1952 collection of art-psychological works, Psychoanalytic Explora-

tions in Art. In view of the artist’s creative process he writes: “’Reality‘ is used here […] in

another and extended sense: The structure of the problem which exists while the artist is creat-

ing” (Kris, 1952, p. 15).

This statement can again be taken to bear on the case report of “the man who craved fresh

brains”. While in his treatment of the patient Kris identified at least to a certain degree with

the role of artistic creator1, he was faced with exactly that question which the above quoted

passage raises, specifically: How to define “the structure of the problem” for his patient’s

analysis? How wide and far reached “the surface” that could be said to be part of this struc-

ture? And how carefully did its borders have to be drawn? Astonishingly, one can see once

more that Kris had already approached an answer to these questions in his war work in propa-

ganda analysis. As Hillman wrote in his article on the research method of Kris’s department

within the BBC:

“They refuse to listen to inside information. They won’t look at secret reports. They

study only the news stories and propaganda from German and Italian radio stations.

1
This becomes apparent from the many notions of craftsmanship and virtuosity with which he peppered his case
report. Spitefully, Lacan picks up on these notions, commenting on Kris’s “elegance” and “mastery” (1966, p.
328) and presenting the patient’s reaction as “the height of [Kris’s] art” and the “trophy of his victory” (ibid., p.
331).
27
 […] The secret four are not concerned about the truth or falsity of what is said […].

The text and not the facts is the important thing” (Hillman, 1941, p. 23).

Interestingly, then, Kris’s team made a point of not consulting any additional intelligence out-

side of Axis propaganda itself; the surface was not allowed to extend beyond the latter’s lim-

its. By implementing this restriction, Kris obviously intended to make sure that, even if his

team did not cling to the exact wording of axis propaganda, it at least drew exclusively on

information gained from inside its universe. It is this self-restriction which, together with the

focus on the irritations and provocations that the material caused, has warranted the continu-

ing value of Kris’s propaganda work as an exemplary case of applying psychoanalytic meth-

odology to media discourse. Only thirty years after Kris’s wartime project, from 1970 on-

wards, the German psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and sociologist Alfred Lorenzer began to sys-

tematically outline a psychoanalytical approach to social phenomena such as Kris had put into

practice in his wartime work (see 1970 + 1986; for the further development of Lorenzer’s

“depth-hermeneutic” method, see: Bereswill, Morgenroth, & Redman, 2010).

However, turning back to Kris’s postwar clinical work, one can observe that psychoanalyst

did not maintain the empirical constraint that his propaganda research had demonstrated so

fervently. Lacan, in Seminar III, points to this significant breach in technique. When Kris re-

ports that a particularly troubling account of plagiarism by his patient – a treatise that the pa-

tient found at a library – led him, Kris, to initiate “a process of extended scrutiny”, Lacan as-

sumes that Kris went to the library, read the text in question, “and then told the patient direct-

ly that the treatise did not contain the patient’s own original idea” (Fink, 2002, p. 55). This is

how Fink sums up Lacan’s understanding of the course of events, and in the light of the post-

war development of Kris’s method, this understanding appears to be accurate.28

Therefore, whereas the propaganda analyst Kris would have agreed whole-heartedly with La-

can’s warning that “[t]o side with the objective situation is going too far, if only because pla-
28
giarism is relative to the customs in force” (Lacan, 1966, p. 502) – after all, it was exactly

these “customs in force” that Kris’s research team at the BBC were after –, the postwar psy-

choanalyst Kris had obviously opened up “the structure of the problem” to a degree that ap-

peared to willingly ignore all former constraints and opened the way for straightforward com-

parisons between, in Hillman’s words, “the text” and “the facts”, in other words: for evalua-

tions of “the truth or falsity of what is said” on an interpersonal, instead of an individual level.

Already in 1940, when Kris took his propaganda research project to the USA, one can see him

diverging from his imperative of restraining from the facts. When the Rockefeller Foundation

offered to finance further research into the nature of totalitarian communication, he suggested

using the BBC’s material in order to compile a historical account of German propaganda in

the first year of the war, explaining further that

“[i]n dealing with historical material, we have the advantage of being able to assess at

any given point the relation of the propaganda technique to subsequent events. This is

important from various points of view. It teaches us how propaganda is fitted into gen-

eral strategy, and it may illustrate in detail how the theory of propaganda is applied in

practice“ (Kris/ Speier [research program], 1941, p. 12; emphasis S.K.).

It is in these lines that one finds the seeds of a major reconstruction in Kris’s theoretical work,

as it is here that he departs for the first time in his writings from the precepts which he himself

had laid down. But while Kris’s comparison of his patient’s and the library text might still be

considered a relatively innocent assessment of “the relation of the propaganda technique to

subsequent events”, this did not remain the only incidence of its kind. Rather, when Kris fur-

ther explains about his analytic strategy that “the patient’s own productivity and that of others

had to be traced in great detail“ (1951, p. 246; emphasis S.K.) this has to be considered a

much more serious breach of “an analytic manner of proceeding” (Fink, 2002, p. ???).

29
Indeed, by comparing, and ultimately judging, his patient’s productivity against a notion of

“others”, Kris did not only risk to duplicate his patient’s confusion between the imaginary and

reality; he also lost sight of the intrapersonal nature of his patient’s problem, which in Kris’s

own theory had been convincingly captured in the paradigm of caricaturing “the whole of the

face”. Instead, Kris now extended the “structure of the problem” so as to make it cover not

only the whole of his patient’s ‘sur-face’, but also “that of others”. In so doing, he risked as-

sessing the former not on its own terms but against a more or less defined notion of what is

usual. Taking another look at Kris’s 1939 article, “On Inspiration”, where the patient’s case is

mentioned for the first time, one finds that it is exactly in the context of such a notion of nor-

malcy that the case finds its use.

“[F]or the sake of contrast”, Kris presents here the “libidinal nature” of otherwise “’normal’

conditions of creative activity” in its “pathological aspect” (Kris, 1939, p. 297). Such “‘nor-

mal’ conditions” are represented in the text by the likes of Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Rob-

ert Louis Stevenson, and A. E. Housman. These thinkers figure as the “others” and thereby as

the rule to which Kris’s patient was given to understand he was the exception. “I don’t doubt

but that the patient feels quite good, on the whole, going on a diet of fresh brains in his analy-

sis too” (Lacan, 1966, p. 332), Lacan writes, and it seems very plausible indeed that this diet

consisted to a large extent of the examples of those great artists, poets, and scientists with

whom Kris had come to identify. When it reads in his text that “the patient published at least

one of the contributions he had for a long time planned to publish” and that “he has found

satisfaction in his home life and in his career“ (Kris, 1951, p. 247), this does not seem to be

without a hint of father-like pride for his patient’s following in his footsteps. Lacan, however,

was highly provoked by what he interpreted as Kris’s patronizing attitude, as well as the lev-

eling, equalizing effects of Kris’s attempts to normalize his patient’s relation with reality.

30
“Kris’s ideas about intellectual productivity thus seem to me to receive the Good Housekeep-

ing Seal of Approval for America”, he writes bitterly (Lacan, 1966, p. 332).

Yet, paradoxically, even this commentary can be seen to have been anticipated by Kris him-

self; after all he, too, proved to be highly critical of the streamlining fantasies that had become

attached to the postwar psychoanalytic boom in the USA. “We can cure everything, and psy-

chosis must not last while the ‘American way of life‘ develops. In other words: therapeutic

optimism is part of the country’s idealogy [sic]”, he wrote in a letter to Dorothy Burlingham

(21.11.1945), and the ironic edge in his words seems to be a perfect match to Lacan’s frustra-

tions vis-a-vis Kris’s methodological turn. However, in Kris’s opinion, a possibility to stop or

avert the development, which he had outlined, was not in reach: “This is mass society, and

democracy in mass society presupposes a political machine, a clique to run things, and all the

evils of organized freedom”, he described the downsides of a strictly organized psychoanalyt-

ic mainstream in 1944, adding: “Mind you – they are the best evils we know of” (Kris [letter

to Anna Freud], 25.7.1944).29

Almost as a reply to the above can be read the critique of the process of institutionalization of

psychoanalysis that German analyst and cultural scientist Rolf Vogt published in the late

1980s:

“The mythical categories: cycle, fate, dominance, inalterable necessity return in hidden

form and appear in the pseudo-rationality of the process of institutionalization as inal-

terable constraints which the individual believes it must follow against better

knowledge” (Vogt, 1989, p. 10).30

Probably it was from an institutionalized mindset such as the one described here that Kris

refrained from responding to Lacan’s critiques, of which the first two will surely have reached

him. Anton Kris, Ernst Kris’s son and a distinguished psychoanalytical theorist himself, uses

the term “banishment” in order to describe the Hartmann Era’s (Bergmann, 2000) overall
31
relationship with Lacan. He explains this banishment with Lacan’s provocativeness on the one

side and the “authoritarianism of the times” on the other. Yet without entering into the discus-

sion of one or the other he emphasizes that this banishment “lost them [Lacan’s] powerful

reading of Freud“ (2000, p. 156). Ultimately, it is this lost opportunity of a dialogue that this

text has attempted to work through.

Conclusion

Kris’s “analytic manner of proceeding” (Fink, 2002, p. 54), which shows considerable simi-

larities to his art-psychological assessment of the process of caricaturing in the 17th century,

was conceived as a circling in of the patient’s id by way of condensing and simplifying, and

ultimately: symbolizing the fundamental gestalt of his patient’s ‘life-likeness’. In contrast to

classical caricaturing, however, the process in analysis was divided between analyst and anal-

ysand, with the latter being provoked by the former to caricature himself. Kris would render

his patient’s likeness in “a schematic form” (Kris/ Gombrich, 1934–7, p. 34); his patient

would answer with a “new schema” (ibid.) which would prove to be inextricably tied to Kris’s

‘cast’: confronted with his analyst’s shockingly revealing image of himself, the patient would

regress to “a deeper level of reality” (Lacan, 1955-6, p. 80) and produce “the clearest expres-

sion of the sexual nucleus” (Kris, 1933, p. 141) of his ailment: the image of his eating “fresh

brains”.

While irritated by Kris’s method, Lacan was nonetheless intrigued by its outcome, as he could

not quite deny that this approach from the wrong “‘end’” (Lacan, 1966, 331) resulted in a

shared premise: the patient’s realization of his “beyond” (Lacan, 1953–4, p. 51). Kris, howev-

er, did not conceive of this realization as one specifically in and of language, as Lacan insisted

on, but identified his patient’s answer with the grotesque in visual art – an idea which he had

developed in his studies on Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. This identification would prove fate-

ful for later evaluations of the case, since, as Kris and Gombrich state in their manuscript on
32
caricature, “the realm of the grotesque” is “defined by its dual position between the comic and

the uncanny effect” (Kris/ Gombrich, 1934–7, p. 51).31 Arguably, it is between these two po-

sitions that Lacan’s assessment, first as an incidence of “full speech” (the comic), subsequent-

ly as one of an “acting out” (the uncanny), alternates.

But already in this point Lacan was merely putting his finger on something which had been

present all along in Kris’s theoretical work, since the greater immediacy and closeness to ac-

tion of caricature compared to verbal jokes was one of his theory’s greatest concerns (see

Krüger 2011, p. 241ff). Therefore, Kris himself must have been well aware of the highly am-

biguous and risky nature of his approach, but apparently, he saw his “play with the being it-

self”, to which he aimed to expose his patient in therapy, as a means justified by its end: a

rectified understanding of objective reality. This objectivity Kris believed to have secured by

his “most careful phenomenology”. And while Lacan makes a highly relevant point by claim-

ing that this alleged objectivity is nothing else than the conception of the “analyst’s world”, a

vision of reality no less prone to subjective bias than the analysand’s, the article at hand has

shown how this critique, too, can be developed from out of Kris’s own theoretical considera-

tions.

33
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method: Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Special Edition, 15 (3), 2010.

Bergmann, M. S. (ed.): The Hartmann Era, New York: Other Press 2000.

Fink, B. (2002), Lacan to the Letter – Reading Écrits Closely, Minneapolis and London 2002.

Freud, S. (1905 [1990]), Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Standard Edition, (Vol.

8), London: Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1914 [1999]), Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten, Gesammelte Werke, (Vol.

10), Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 125-136.

Hale, N. Jr. (1995), The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States. Freud and the

Americans, 1917 – 1985, Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press.

Hartmann, H. (1939), Ich-Psychologie und Anpassungsproblem. Internationale Zeitschrift für

Psychoanalyse und Imago, XXIV, 62-135.

Heller, P. (1994), Retrospektive Bemerkungen zum Thema Freud in Amerika. Werkblatt –

Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und Gesellschaftskritik, no. 33, 2, 64-79.

Hillman, W. (1941) “The Secret Four”, in: Collier’s Magazine, 4.1.1941, 23 + 47-48.

34
Husserl, E. (1938 [1985]), Wesenserschauung durch eidetische Variation, in: Klau Held (ed.),

Edmund Husserl. Die phänomenologische Methode, Stuttgart: Reclam, 255–70.

Kris, A. (2000), “Response to Bergmann’s assessment of the Hartmann Era”, in Bergmann,

M. S. (ed.): The Hartmann Era, New York: Other Press, 155–64.

Kris, E. (1926a), Der Stil »Rustique«. Die Verwendung des Naturabgusses bei Wenzel Jam-

nitzer und Bernard Palissy. Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, Neue Fol-

ge, 1, 137-208.

Kris, E. (1926b), Die Venus auf dem Frosch. Antikische und naturalistische Gesinnung in der

Spätrenaissance, Cicerone, 14, 490–494.

Kris, E. (1932), Die Charakterköpfe des Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Versuch einer histori-

schen und psychologischen Deutung, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien,

Neue Folge, 6, 169-228.

Kris, E. (1933 [1952]), Ein geisteskranker Bildhauer. Imago, Lps, 19, 384-411, Engl. transl.

in: ibid., Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, New York: International University Press, 128 –

150.

Kris, E. (1934 [1936]), The Psychology of Caricature. International Journal of Psychoanaly-

sis, 17, 285-303. German original: Kris, E. (1934), Zur Psychologie der Karikatur. Imago, 20,

1934, 450–466.

35
Kris, E. (1938), Ego Development and the Comic. International Journal of Psychoanaly-

sis, 19, 77-90.

Kris, E. (1939), On Inspiration (Preliminary Notes on Emotional Conditions in Creative

States). International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 20, 377-389; here in: ibid., Psychoanalytic

Explorations in Art, New York: International University Press, 291–302.

Kris, E. (1942), “German Propaganda Instructions of 1933, Social Research, 9, 46-81.

Kris, E.; Herma, H.; Shor, J. (1943), Freud’s Theory of the Dream in American Textbooks.

Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, 38, 319–334.

Kris, E.; Speier H. (1944), German Radio Propaganda. Report on Home Broadcasts during

the War, Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press.

Kris, E. (1951 [1975]), Ego Psychology and Interpretation in Psychoanalytic Thera-

py. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 20, 15-30; here in: Newman, L. M. (ed.) (1975), Ernst Kris.

Selected Papers, New Haven/ London: Yale University Press, 237–251.

Kris, E. (1952), Approaches to Art, in ibid., Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, New York:

International University Press, 13-84.

Kris, E. (1953 [1975]), Psychoanalysis and the Study of Creative Imagination. Bulletin of

the New York Academy of Medicine, 29, 334–351.

36
Krüger, S. (2011), Das Unbehagen in der Karikatur. Kunst, Propaganda und persuasive

Kommunikation im Theoriewerk Ernst Kris‘, München: Fink.

Lacan, J. (1953–4 [1978]), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I. Freud’s Papers on Tech-

nique 1953 – 1954. Miller, J.-A. (ed.), Engl. transl. by John Forrester, New York: W. W. Nor-

ton.

Lacan, J. (1955–6 [1993]), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III. The Psychoses 1955 –

1956. Miller, J.-A. (ed.), Engl. transl. by Russell Grigg, New York: W. W. Norton.

Lacan, J. (1957–8 [2006]), Jacques Lacan. Das Seminar V. Die Bildungen des Unbewussten

1957 – 1958, Miller, J.-A. (ed.), German transl. by Hans-Dieter Gondek, Wien/ Berlin: Turia

und Kant.

Lacan, J. (1957–8), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book V. The Formations of the Uncon-

scious, translated by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French typescripts; URL:

http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-05-the-formations-of-

the-unconscious.pdf (retrieved 28.12.2011).

Lacan, J. (1966 [2006]), Écrits. The first complete Edition in English, Engl. transl. by Bruce

Fink, New York: W. W. Norton.

Lorenzer, A. (1970), Sprachzerstörung und Rekonstruktion: Vorarbeiten zu einer Metatheorie

der Psychoanalyse. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.

Lorenzer, A. (1986), „Tiefenhermeneutische Kulturanalyse“, in: ibid. et al. (eds.), Kultur-

Analysen, Frankfurt/Main, pp. 11-97.

37
Makari, G. (2008), Revolution in Mind. The Creation of Psychoanalysis, New York: Harper.

Mitchell, S. A.; Black, M. J. (1995), Freud and Beyond – A History of Modern Psychoanalyt-

ic Thought, New York: Basic Books.

Peters, U. H. (2000), Physiognomik als Mittel der Psychoanalyse? – Ernst Kris deutet Franz

Xaver Messerschmidt, in Gilman, S.; Schmölders, C. (eds.), Gesichter der Weimarer Repub-

lik. Eine physiognomische Kulturgeschichte, Köln: DuMont, 262-279.

Pfarr, U. (2006), Franz Xaver Messerschmidt: Menschenbild und Selbstwahrnehmung, Berlin:

Gebr. Mann.

Renier, O.; Rubinstein, V. (1986), Assigned to Listen. The Evesham Experience, London (?):

BBC External Services.

Rose, L. (2007), Daumier in Vienna. Ernst Kris, E. H. Gombrich, and the Politics of Carica-

ture. Visual Resources, 23, 1-2, 39-64.

Schwartz, J. (1999), Cassandra’s Daughter. A History of Psychoanalysis in Europe and

America, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.

Vogt, R. (1989), Psychoanalyse zwischen Mythos und Aufklärung oder Das Rätsel der

Sphinx, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer.

38
Žižek, S. (1996 [2006]), Lacan: At What Point is He Hegelian?, translated by Rex Butler and

Scott Stephens. URL: http://www.lacan.com/zizlacan1.htm (retrieved: 28.12.2011).

Žižek, S. (2000), The Fragile Absolute or, Why is the Christian Legacy worth fighting for?

London: Verso.

Archive material

Gombrich, E. H., letter to Kris, 3.4.1941, Ernst Kris Papers, Library of Congress (in the fol-

lowing: LOC).

Gombrich, E. H., letter to Kris, 2.4.1943, LOC.

Salt, J., letter to Kris, 4.2.1941, LOC.

Kris, E.; Speier, H.: Research Programme to be taken under the auspices of the Graduate

Faculty for Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research, 24.3.1941,

Rockefeller Archive Center, Box 260, Folder 3100, p. 12.

Kris, E., letter to Burlingham, D., 21.11.1945, LOC.

Kris, E. letter to Freud, A., 25.7.1944, LOC.

Kris, E. letter to Gombrich, 18.11.1944, Gombrich Estate.

39
Endnotes
1
E.g., Slavoj Žižek (2000, p. 23) uses Lacan’s diagnosis of Kris’s “famous patient” in

order to critically apply it to the context of brand marketing: “So – along the same lines”,

Žižek writes in view of “caffeine-free diet coke”, “we drink the Nothingness itself, the pure

semblance of a property that is in effect merely an envelope of a void”. Bruce Fink, by con-

trast, is the first to point out that “Lacan’s diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, pretty as it, does not

seem […] to be the best possible diagnosis for Kris’s patient” himself (2002, p. 61).
2
E.g., Kris himself credits Helene Deutsch for his method; I argue elsewhere that Wil-

helm Reich’s Vienna seminars on technique might have also been an influence (Krüger 2011,

416f). Lacan, on the other side, focuses heavily on Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Ru-

dolph Loewenstein, his training analyst.

3
In my chapter on Kris’s Messerschmidt study in Das Unbehagen in der Karikatur

(2011), I point out that Kris interprets this as a defense against inspiration itself: Krüger 2011,

118ff.
4
The question of Messerschmidt’s alleged mental illness remains highly debated to this

day: see Pfarr, 2006, for a good overview of the literature.

5
German original: “Analogien wird man zuerst in der Zierkunst zu suchen haben, in

den Wasserspeiern gotischer Kathedralen oder in der Groteskenornamentik der Renaissance;

vor allem in den Grotesken begegnen zuweilen in Ranken und Stabwerk Mischwesen […],

die in einem ähnlichen Sinne einen ‚Naturrest‘ frei verarbeiten“.

6
Kris has indeed been accused to have psychoanalyzed Messerschmidt from an illegit-

imate timely and spacious distance. E.g.: Peters, 2000, pp. 262-279.

7
I.e. in a way as familial as is possible with a millionaire.

40
8
Freud’s sentence commences: “and the outcome of this is at once grasped by con-

scious perception” (1905: 166). In the case of Kris’s clinical study, however, this ending is at

the center of the debate between Kris and Lacan.

9
The whole notion of “problem solving” appears highly problematic, in turn, in the

context of psa. therapy. When Lacan, in „The Direction of the Treatment“ accuses ego-

psychological treatment of wiping “desire off the map” (1966/2006, p. 503), he refers to ex-

actly this lack in Kris’s approach, explaining further: “It’s that he [the patient] may have an

idea of his own which never occurs to him or barely crosses his mind.” I interpret this as La-

can informing Kris of the possibility of his patient having a problem he himself does not di-

rectly relate to in his account.

10
It is in the second session of Seminar I that Lacan starts out on his conflictual course,

writing in view of the contributions of Heinz Hartmann, Rudolph Loewenstein (his former

training analyst), and Ernst Kris that “[i]t is very interesting to follow the development of this

work in a series of articles we have seen appear over several years, especially since the end of

the war. I believe that what has happened there is a very significant failure” (1953-4, 25).
11
The German translation calls it an “unerhörte Botschaft, an “unheard-of message”:

2006, p. 30.
12
The German translation calls it the “scandal of enunciation”: 2006, p. 30.
13
E.g. in „Psychoanalysis and the Study of Creative Imagination“ (1953, p. 473) where

Kris applies the concept to “a broad meaning of problem solving”.

14
Freud writes here: “Endlich hat sich die konsequente heutige Technik herausgebildet,

bei welcher der Arzt auf die Einstellung eines bestimmten Moments oder Problems verzichtet,

sich damit begnügt, die jeweilige psychische Oberfläche des Analysierten zu studieren und

die Deutungskunst wesentlich dazu benützt, um die an dieser hervortretenden Widerstände zu

erkennen und dem Kranken bewußt zu machen“ (1914/ 1999, 127).

41
15
Having said that, it might be worthwhile to work out the influence of phenomenologi-

cal concepts such as “Noesis” and “Noema” on Kris’s thinking.

16
German original: „Seine Arbeit setzt am Gesicht an und drängt die Vielfalt des Gebil-

des auf eine schematische Form zusammen. Diese Vereinfachung ist schlechthin das Ziel sei-

nes Karikierens“.
17
German original: „Die Vereinfachung der Form, die wir […] bei Bernini vollendet

fanden, zielt in allen Fällen prinzipiell auf eine […] Doppelwirkung hin. Etwas vom alten,

seiner Umwelt vertrauten Menschen bleibt erhalten, etwas von einem neuen Schema dringt

ein.“
18
German original: „Der grinsende ‚Hauptmann‘ des Bernini ist nicht in ein zweites Le-

bewesen überführt, aber in ein Grinsen, das den Menschen verschluckt.“

19
German original: „das gibt dem ganzen Kopf seine Bedeutung“.
20
However, Laplanche and Pontalis, in their compendium The Language of Psychoanal-

ysis, warn that “[c]ondensation should not […] be looked upon as a summary: although each

manifest element is determined by several latent meanings, each one of these, inversely, may

be identified in several elements; what is more, manifest elements do not stand in the same

relationship to each of the meanings from which they derive, and so they do not subsume

them after the fashion of a concept” (Laplanche/ Pontalis 1973: “condensation”). Obviously,

it is in order to point out this misunderstanding that Lacan uses the word “summaryism” here.
21
German original: Der Karikaturist gehe „vom Ausdruck des Gesichtes als einer Ein-

heit“ aus, und nur „diesen Ausdruck“ verzerre oder steigere er (1934–7, 36).
22
Kris’s only reaction to Gombrich’s corrections of his manuscript goes as follows:

“Whatever you feel you can say about the book in a critical vain will interest others more than

it will interest me at present; it’s done and I am out of propaganda intelligence” (Kris [letter to

Gombrich], 18.11.1944).

42
 23
And Kris was sure that the Germans listened as can be gathered from one of his arti-

cles: „While it might have been possible to isolate the majority of the German people from the

world in peace time, in war time the enemy radio establishes a permanent contact between the

German people and those against whom they fight. All attempts at intimidation have by and

large failed. Millions in Germany listen to the B.B.C.” (Kris, 1943, pp. 447–448).
24
German original: „Alles Spiel mit Worten ist Spiel mit verabredeten Zeichen, das

Spiel mit Gestalten ist Spiel mit dem Wesen selbst.“

25
German original: „[D]er tendenziöse Charakter der Karikatur […] steht der Handlung

näher als alle Komik in Worten.“

26
German original: „ dass sich auf dem sicheren Boden der Natur die reichentfaltete

Pracht des Kunstwerks aufbaue.“

27
German original: „in einem neuen, bis dahin unerhörten Sinne zum Träger von Emp-

findungsinhalten [geworden]“.
28
See also Kris et al. 1943 where Kris and his assistants apply a very similar technique

of comparative content analysis to American psychology textbooks since 1900 in order to

determine the standing of Freud’s dream theory within the discipline.

29
Kris an Freud, A., Brief vom 25.7.1944, Ernst Kris Papers, LOC.
30
German original: “Die mythischen Kategorien: Kreislauf, Schicksal, Herrschaft, un-

abänderliche Notwendigkeit kehren in versteckter Form wieder und erscheinen in der Pseudo-

rationalität des Institutionalisierungsprozesses als unabänderliche Sachzwänge, denen der

einzelne gegen sein besseres Wissen glaubt folgen zu müssen“.

31
German original: „das Reich des Grotesken; es ist durch seine Doppelstellung zwi-

schen komischer und unheimlicher Wirkung umschrieben.“

43

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