Abstract
In his 1896 short story “Disillusionment” (Enttäuschung: disillusionment, disappointment, disenchantment), Thomas Mann creatively interrogates the developmental process of disillusionment. Only a few pages long, the work consists of a story-within-a-story: the narrator, a young tourist in Venice not yet disenchanted with life (the exotic city fails to disappoint) tells of a curious encounter with a stranger of indeterminate age who volunteers the story of his life. The man explains that since his youth he has suffered from the malady of “great and general disappointment with which everything, all of life, has in store.” His life began in “a clergyman’s family, in quite a small town.” There, he says, We breathed a strange atmosphere, compact of pulpit rhetoric, of large words for good and evil, beautiful and base, which I bitterly hate, since perhaps they are to blame for all my sufferings. For me life consisted utterly of these large words. . . . From man I expected divine virtue or hair-raising wickedness, from life either ravishing loveliness or else consummate horror; and I was full of avidity for that and of a profound, tormented yearning for a larger reality, for experience of not matter what kind [Mann 1896, p. 738].
Life would vex the Venetian gentleman, never fulfilling his “magnificent expectation of life”—a treasured illusion emblematized by his beloved “large words.” Nevertheless, he struggled to maintain the longings that he “zealously fed” with “a thousand books and the works of all the poets. Ah, how I have learned to hate them,” he confides, “those poets who chalked up their large words on all the wall of life. . . . I came to think of every large word as a lie or mockery” (p. 739).
And, despite life’s betrayal, this Venetian stranger—a nineteenth-century man of letters who, deserted by the romantic, was left with bleak realism—yet turns to the poets and their hated, but perhaps still also beloved, large words. So “extravagantly rich compared with the poverty and limitations of life,” they can still take him away from his beginnings in that “quite small” town, articulating and letting loose something larger—the greater and chaotic feelings that dwell, constrained and subdued, under the protective “surface of [his] consciousness.” Illustrating these thoughts—and at the same time divulging his stubborn love for the poets who ostensibly have failed him—he turns to Goethe: “What is man?” asks young Werther—man, the glorious demi-god? Do his powers fail him just where he needs them most? Whether he soars upwards in joy or sinks down in anguish, is he not always brought back to bald, cold consciousness precisely at the point where he seeks to lose himself in the fullness of the infinite? [p. 740].
The poets and their “large words” were, of course, a more satisfying alternative to the suffocating “pulpit rhetoric” of his clergyman father—once, but no longer, a small son’s “glorious demi-god,” a term that cannot but summon that most famous demigod, Hercules. The poets are the new Herculeans, and no doubt their words, even when scorned, also offered hope, however illusory, in salvation, beauty, and infinitude, to Mann, whose own father passed away when he was only sixteen, five years before he wrote “Disillusionment.” And so be it; for fiction is heir to the elaborate, discredited fantasies of childhood, as Mann well attests: I might feel quiet satisfaction in the independent power of my phantasy, of which nothing could rob me. When still a young boy in Lübeck, I awoke one morning with the resolution to be for the day an eighteen-year-old prince by the name of Karl. I clothed myself in a certain kindly majesty, carried on an animated conversation with a governor or adjutant, whom I had appointed in my imagination, and walked about proud and happy in the secret of my dignity [Mann 1940, pp. 26–27].
Mann’s remembrance recalls what has been called the first modern novel, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, whose eponymous hero’s grandiosity is driven and shaped by the beautiful words of the chivalric romances he values above all else. Typically understood as “mad,” Don Quixote suffers not from delusions, however, but from wishful illusions, for he is (mostly) well aware of the fictional nature and literary source of his fantasies, and chooses to adopt them as his own narrative—disavowing, rather than denying reality, and performing himself as he prefers. The Venetian stranger would well understand: “It is my favourite occupation to gaze at the starry heavens at night—that being the best way to turn my eyes away from earth and from life. And perhaps it may be pardoned in me that I still cling to my distant hopes?” (Mann 1896, p. 740).
The four papers on disillusionment to follow, together with Lynn Zeavin’s discussion, reprise in expanded form the panel on the topic convened at the winter meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association in January 2017. The four papers approach illusion and disillusionment from various angles, understanding it as both developmental trajectory and potential catastrophe; as a capacity for both creation and deception; and, most of the time, as a quietly pervasive part of life. As Jane Tillman observes in her valuable review of the psychoanalytic literature, illusion derives from the Latin illudere, “to mock”—hence the feeling of Thomas Mann’s Venetian gentleman, who feels mocked by the “large words” that betray their promise. Using clinical research methodology to dissect the varied roles of illusion and disillusion in suicidal ideation and impulse, Tillman turns to literature to explicate the concept of disillusionment—an essay by Elizabeth Barrett Browning with particular relevance for our current political situation.
Indeed, Browning’s civic disillusionment anticipates a vein of commentary in the next three papers, as well as the discussion that follows, all of which reflect on the unprecedented events of our times—no small feat for psychoanalysts, typically preoccupied more with the world within than the one without. Our panel took place during what we were all acutely aware would be our last such meeting at the Waldorf Astoria, the end of a psychoanalytic tradition that we somehow expected to last forever. That was the least of our shattered illusions, however. Right outside the hotel, thousands of women and men were marching in the streets, railing against the inauguration of a president whose election exposed a side of democracy and capitalism darker than anyone had ever thought possible. (Some of us joined the stragglers at the tail end of the protest.) It could not but infiltrate our discourse that day, as our collective disillusionment established itself as a pervasive subtext.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ensuing year saw a radically shifting engagement in sexual and gender politics, to which Britt-Marie Schiller’s essay elegantly speaks. Schiller challenges conventional constructs of masculinity and femininity as illusory, and offers alternatives to those espoused by Freudian theory. Stephen Seligman applies Winnicott’s notion of illusion as wholesome and life-sustaining. Taking as an example Freud’s belief in the primacy of the oedipal complex, Seligman considers both the salubrious aspects of illusion and, in a clinical context, some consequences of its failure. Alfred Margulies takes a philosophical view of our current chaotic state of alienation, sagely viewing illusionment as something that can be understood only après coup—that is, from the perspective of eventual disillusionment—even as it forms the basis of our day-to-day existence.
Knitting all this together is Zeavin’s skilled synthesis, which adroitly distinguishes the various perspectives on disillusionment offered here, while weaving them together within a containing, integrating theoretical framework.
When I proposed the panel on disillusionment several years ago, I had no idea how deeply germane, on so many levels, it would be. Chairing the panel felt, truth be told, a bit uncanny; it seemed we were all struggling to maintain some sort of faith in our democratic process, while at the same time attempting to talk “objectively” about the very thing we were experiencing. One year later, the shock has dissipated somewhat, but it seems ever more difficult to make sense of our world. Perhaps our clinical and scholarly work offers—as Seligman suggests it did for Freud—some reparation, keeping at least some illusions alive.
Like Cervantes before him, Mann implies that one’s illusions never completely die: even when mortally disillusioned, man continues to seek the “fullness of the infinite,” a larger world of larger things. Like Don Quixote and his Venetian gentleman, Mann did not lose faith in the transformative power of words, which, when put together, conjure something larger than the sum of their parts—even when, as in fiction, that “something” is necessarily illusory. Hopefully this section, too, offers something more than the sum of its parts. However humbling it is to accept that all theory may in the end be reducible to illusion, it has its truths, and its uses.