Abstract

COSTA, Mariana Lins. A cultural pathology of modernity: Freud and "doctor" Dostoevsky. Nat. hum. [online]. 2017, vol.19, n.1, pp. 75-101. ISSN 1517-2430.

In the antepenultimate paragraph of "Civilization and its Discontents", Freud suggests that, despite all difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture to develop a pathology of cultural communities. Although Freud had considered Dostoevsky as an artist whose place was not far behind Shakespeare himself, and whose masterpiece, The Karamazov Brothers, was the most formidable novel ever written, because of the severity of psychic pathology of this writer, humanity will have a little to thank him for. Instead of making himself a liberator of humanity, Dostoevsky sided with his oppressors. In this article, we are willing to investigate the reason for the generalization of mental illness in the Dostoevskian universe, and to suggest that, through Freud's terminology itself, the Russian, all too Russian Dostoyevsky is the one who that develops such a cultural pathology characteristic of modernity.

Keywords : Freud; Dostoevsky; modernity; superego; cultural superego.

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