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The call of conscience

A psychoanalytical
reading of Camus through
Kierkegaard
a
Judy Gammelgaard
a
Olufsvej 37, 2100, Copenhagen , Denmark
Version of record first published: 21 Jan
2013.

To cite this article: Judy Gammelgaard (2000): The call of conscience A

psychoanalytical reading of Camus through Kierkegaard, The Scandinavian
Psychoanalytic Review, 23:2, 216-230

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 Scand Psychoana/. Rev. (2000) 23, 216-230 Copyright 2000
--THE--
SCANDINAVIAN
PSYCHOANALYTIC
REVIEW
ISSN 0106-2301

The call of conscience

A psychoanalytical reading of Camus through
Kierkegaard
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Judy Gammelgaard

In this paper, the author thematizes guilt through a

reading of Camus' novel "The Fall". The first part of
the novel is presented as describing a state of mind in
which the main character has not been able to become
his own self, and this is conceptualised through Kierke-
gaard's concepts "sickness unto death" and "sickness
of despair". The second part of the novel is described
as picturing a "fall", i.e., the coming into being of a
self that realizes itself and becomes conscious of its own
guilt. This guilt is finally described through Freud's
"scientific myth" of patricide, and the "nachtrii.glich"
realization of this ancient deed.

PRESENTATION OF THE PENITENT JUDGE

The setting for Camus' novel The Fall (1956) is a bar in Amsterdam. The
novel unfolds as a long narrative about a choice made by the narrator,
Jean-Baptiste Clamence, one fateful evening in Paris many years before.
That night became the turning point of his life and the event became the
filigree that collects the threads of his life and story.
The story is a monologue that opens with Clamence introducing himself
as a penitent judge to a customer at the bar. In the first pages, we are

216
 already given a hint of the story, about the fateful evening that led Clam-
ence from Paris to Amsterdam in a vain attempt to escape from himself.
After beginning his story the first evening, Clamence accompanies the
stranger when leaving the bar, but refuses to cross one of the bridges.

"I never cross a bridge at night. It's because of a vow. Suppose, after
all, that someone should jump into the water. One of two things -
either you follow suit to fish him out, in cold weather, that's taking a
great risk! Or you forsake him there and to suppress a dive sometimes
leaves one strangely aching" (Camus, 1956, p. 13).
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We sense that something important is hidden here - an event presum-

ably, but also the key to the narrator's personality. We are acquainted with
this person as we gradually learn about the fate of the penitent judge.
The ironic narrative style portrays a man who has presented himself
according to an idealized and strong narcissistic self-image. The story of
the extremely self-satisfied judge has many similarities with the ironic pic-
ture of the Philistine in Seren Kierkegaard's works, who is described with
such a characteristic expression, not least in the sickness of the self, which
Kierkegaard calls despair or sickness unto death. The story about the
penitent judge invites, at the same time, a psychoanalytical interpretation.
Camus seems to confirm an observation that Freud commented on repeat-
edly, especially in his later writings. This observation concerns the human
feeling of guilt, which in the end Freud considered the greatest resistance
to analytic work. I will return to that.
As a lawyer in Paris, Clamence was rather well-known, probably be-
cause he took the noble cases, as he called them, the widowed and the
orphaned. His persistance in pleading for everyone appearing to be vic-
tims was so noticeable that "you really must have thought justice slept
with me every night" (ibid., p. 15).
In his defence of the lost and the victims, he let himself be guided by
two real emotions: "the satisfaction of being on the right side of the bar
and the instinctive scorn for judges in general" (ibid., p. 15), a remark
revealing the projective devaluation of a part of the self, so familiar with
the narcissistic character.
What was the purpose of the apparent altruism, he asks himself? It was
not, as one might suspect, a form of material greed. No, his aim was
higher, he confides to the foreigner, adding: "You will see that the express-
ion is exact in my case" (ibid., p. 17). He continues the story about a

217
 person who loves to escort old women across the street, to give alms, to
be able to load his car with unhappy citizens the day public transportation
is at a standstill because of a strike.
The irony of the story informs us indirectly, in the manner of Kierke-
gaard, that we are dealing with a person who is not himself, and who
restlessly and desperately does not want to be the self he is. In fact, he
will, using Kierkegaard's word, construct the self he attempts to be.

"The self in despair ... constantly relates itself to itself only by way of im-
aginary constructions, no matter what it undertakes, however vast, how-
ever amazing, however perseveringly pursued. It recognizes no power
over itself; therefore it basically lacks earnestness and can conjure forth
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only an appearance of earnestness, even when it gives its utmost attention

to its imaginary constructions" (Kierkegaard, 1849, p. 68).

The self is its own master - it's absolute master, as the saying goes,
and this is exactly its despair, but also what it regards as its pleasure, its
enjoyment.
Clamence expresses it thus:

"These are just little touches but they will help you to grasp the con-
stant delights I experienced in my life, and especially in my profession.
Being stopped in the corridor of the law-courts by the wife of a defend-
ant you represented for the sake of justice or pity alone - I mean with-
out charging a fee - hearing that woman whisper that nothing, no,
nothing could ever repay what you had done for them, replying that it
was quite natural, that anyone would have done as much, even offering
some financial help to tide over the bad days ahead, then - in order to
cut the effusions short and preserve their proper resonance - kissing
the hand of the poor woman and breaking away - believe me, cher
Monsieur, this is achieving more than the vulgar ambitious man and
rising to that supreme summit where virtue is its own reward. Let us
pause on these heights. Now you understand what I meant when I
spoke of aiming higher. I was talking, it so happens, of those supreme
summits, the only places I can really live. Yes, I have never felt comfort-
able except in lofty surroundings. Even in the details of daily life, I
needed to feel above. I preferred the bus to the underground, open
carriages to taxis, terraces to being indoors" (ibid., p. 19).

The story plays repeatedly with the stylistic effects of irony, as it lets
the narrator neutralize the picture he himself has created. Repeatedly, the
hollowness and nothingness are revealed.
Kierkegaard writes that the effect of irony is not simply to allow

218
 truth to appear by destroying the lopsided and one-sided, but to create
something just as lopsided and one-sided. The aim of total irony is a
disclosure of nothing - or to disclose, when everything is peeled off and
unmasked, that what is left is nothing (Kierkegaard, 1841). As already
mentioned, he illustrates the means of irony by describing the despair of
the self.

"The self in despair is always building only castles in the air, is only
shadowboxing. All these imaginatively constructed virtues make it look
splendid; like oriental poetry, they fascinate for a moment" (Kierke-
gaard, 1849, p. 69).
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These excerpts seem to support my hypothesis that Camus, with his

brilliant description of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, has portrayed a human
being suffering from the despair that Kierkegaard called sickness unto
death a hundred years earlier. In his dissertation of the same title, the
different forms of despair the self can encounter are described. Instead of
accepting the task to be itself or come to itself, the self either despairingly
does not want to be itself or the opposite, despairingly wants to be itself.

SICKNESS UNTO DEATH

Sickness unto death (or the sickness of despair) occurs because the self is
not substantial and cannot be determined positively. The self is dialectic
and negatively determined and is always in the making.
Kierkegaard's negative dialectic introduces an understanding of the self
that is a direct antithesis to many contemporary psychoanalytical theories,
which assume an a priori given self that develops in a straight line of
increasing complexity. Kierkegaard's concept of the self also presents itself
as an alternative to many psychoanalytical theories of development that
understand the self dyadically, limited as they are to the mother-child re-
lation (Muller, 1996).
Thus, Sickness unto Death begins with a negative determination of the
self:

"The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's

relating itself to itself in the relation ... In the relation between the two,
the relation is the third as a negative unity and the two relate to the
relation and in the relation to the relation" (Kierkegaard, ibid., p. 13).

219
 This means that the self cannot be in balance or at peace by itself, but
only by relating to itself and to what has determined the relation. There
is no doubt what this means in terms of Kierkegaard's thinking. Let it
suffice to note that the self is not. It is a task and this task consists of the
double movement Kierkegaard has described as "infinite moving away
from itself in the infinitizing of the self and infinite coming back to itself
in the finitizing process" (ibid., p. 30). If the self, however, does not come
in to possession of itself, it despairs whether it knows it or not.
Despair is a "misrelation", but not a simple "misrelation". Instead, it
is a "misrelation" relating to itself and determined by something else.
What is the cause of despair, Kierkegaard asks. Despair arises because the
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self is a synthesis, a synthesis that relates to itself. "Where, then, does

despair come from? From the relation in which synthesis relates itself to
itself, inasmuch as God, who constituted man a relation, releases it from
his hand, as it were - that is, inasmuch as the relation relates itself to
itself' (ibid., p. 16).
Literally and concretely, we take charge of our lives. To be yourself
means to be concrete.

THE FALL

We left the hero of Camus' novel at a time when he was trying to be a self
that he is not. Through irony, we hear about the disparity between the self
he builds up and the self he will not be. In other words, we sense the
impending catastrophe or the unavoidable fall. How can such a project
succeed? In Camus' version, fate intervenes, but only seemingly, as some-
thing coming from outside.
Stylistically, the novel follows the narrative structure familiar to Aris-
totle's definition of tragedy. The suspense, constructed around an individ-
ual's imaginary greatness, converges towards peripeteia, the nemesis con-
nected to man's hybris.
"I was of respectable but humble birth (my father was an officer), and
yet, on certain mornings, I felt like a king's son, or a burning bush ... as
a result of being showered with blessings I felt, I hesitate to admit, marked
out. I soared to that evening..." (Camus, ibid., p.23-24). Here, the narrator
stops himself. He is about to create a story where the fall will be described
as something coming from outside. He composes himself- he still has, as
Kierkegaard says, some reflection in him- and continues. "Anyway, I am,
perhaps, exaggerating. I was at ease in everything to be sure, but at the

220
 same time satisfied with nothing. Each joy made me desire another. I went
from festivity to festivity!" (ibid., p. 24).
At the limit of exhaustion and fatigue, in glimpses, he sees the truth or,
as he calls it, the secret of true life. But, the fatigue disappears the follow-
ing day and with it the secret.

"I would rush forth anew, I ran on like that, always heaped with fa-
vours, never satisfied, without knowing where to stop, until the day -
until the evening rather when the music stopped and the lights went
out. The gay party at which I had been so happy" (ibid., p. 24).

Much later, towards the end of the novel, we learn the story of that
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evening.
First, however, we shall hear about another evening - an evening that
chronologically follows the fateful evening.

"I had gone up to the Pont des Arts, deserted at that hour, to look
at the river that could hardly be made out now that night had
come. Facing the statue of the Vert-Galant, I dominated the island.
I felt rising within me a vast feeling of power and - I don't know
how to express it - of completion, which cheered my heart. I
straightened up and was about to light a cigarette, the cigarette of
satisfaction. when at that very moment, a laugh burst out behind
me" (ibid., p. 30).

But of course, there is nobody there - laughter emerges from inside -

from something in himself - as an echo. However, it has the effect of
hitting him as a blow (an apres coup), because the situation reminds him
of an earlier one, its guilt-ridden echoes suddenly reaching full force,
breaking the picture he tries in vain to hold on to. In a sudden moment
of unmasking, he feels the hollowness, the falsehood.
At home, he goes into the bathroom to have a glass of water.

"My reflection was smiling in the mirror, but it seemed to me that my

smile was double" (ibid., p. 31).

The past catches up with him. The escape from guilt, or from the self
that was guilty, has broken down. From that moment on, he no longer
sets foot on the quays of Paris.
At that time, he also has troubles with his health - nothing definite. He
becomes dispirited - tired - has trouble finding his usual cheerfulness. He

221
 senses the contradiction or disproportion between the self he does not
want to be and the self he tries in vain to be.

"Besides, if everyone told all, displayed his true profession and identity,
we shouldn't know which way to turn ... On my cards; Jean-Baptiste
Clamence, play-actor? Why, shortly after the evening I told you about,
I discovered something" (ibid., p. 36).

A slip of the tongue facilitates irony's function of unmasking.

He is talking about how he helped a motorist one day. When the motor-
ist thanks him, he wants to say, "Anybody would do that". However, a
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slip of the tongue makes him say, "Nobody would have done the same."
The attempted modesty has no limits. "I was always bursting with vanity.
I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life and it could be heard in everything"
(ibid., p. 37).
Gradually, he begins to discover this and other truths about himself,
not at once and not very clearly. First, he has to regain his memory: he
has the godsent gift to forget. However, little by little, he regains his mem-
ory. Or more precisely, "I returned to it, and in it found the recollection
that was awaiting me" (ibid., p.39). Repression, denial and idealization
had been his defence against the sin that could not be eliminated. The sin
that Clamence cannot free himself from, in spite of all his conceited ef-
forts, is existential in character. He has let down a human being in need.
However, he does not know that. Or rather, he refuses to acknowledge it.
A trivial incident becomes the turning point, because all the conceit
makes the house of cards - the pipe dream - collapse. He is humiliated
on public street.

"When I was threatened, I became not only a judge in turn but even
more: an irascible master who wanted, regardless of all laws, to strike
down the offender and get him on his knees. After that, mon cher
compatriot, it is very hard to continue seriously believing one has a
vocation for justice and is the predestined defender of the widow and
orphan" (ibid., p. 42).

Characteristically, the story stops and passages of another kind are in-
serted. He has just told something of an external character. He then
pauses to provide further information concerning himself. This time it
seems to be about his relations with women and his sexuality. Another
facet of his perfectly developed ability to deny any consciousness of guilt

222
 is revealed through the indirect, ironic narrative. Sinfulness does not exist
for such a person.

"I am not hard-hearted; far from it - full of pity, on the contrary, and
with a ready tear to boot. Only, my emotional impulses always turn
towards me, my feelings of pity concern me. It is not true, after all,
that I never loved. I conceived at least one great love in my life, of
which I was always the object ... I had principles, to be sure, such as
that the wife of a friend is sacred. But I simply ceased quite sincerely,
a few days before, to feel any friendship for the husband" (ibid., p. 44).

He ends the story about the cynical seducer, whose whole aim is to have
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everybody confirm and admire him, with the declaration that it embar-
rasses him to tell this. The feeling forces to the surface the true story of
the sin he wants to forget.
"That particular night in November, two or three years before the eve-
ning when I thought I heard laughter behind me, I had gone up on to the
Pont des Arts" (ibid., p. 30). Thus, the story of the sin is introduced; he
turned his back on a human being in a time of need. This person,
attempting to take her own life by throwing herself into the river, at the
last moment calls for help. Clamence walks the other way.
We have reached the story's climax: the peripeteia. Now begins the
necessary decline. While the novel until this climax has described the in-
crease in self-deception, the second part of the novel is about unmasking:
the fall and the guilt. "I have no more friends," Clamence continues, "I
have nothing but accomplices. To make up for this, their number has in-
creased; they are the whole human race" (ibid., p. 55).

HUMAN GUILT OR CONSCIOUSNESS OF SIN

Before arriving there, however, he tries once again to hold on to old de-
fences. He projects, devaluates and denies.
"After all I have told you, what do you think I developed? An aversion
for myself? Come, come it was mostly with others that I was fed up. To
be sure, I knew my feelings and regretted them. Yet I continued to forget
them with a rather meritorious obstinacy. The prosecution of others on
the contrary, went on constantly in my heart" (ibid., p. 57). He imagines
this must shock the listener and seem illogical. When it comes to lying
about yourself or despair of yourself, as Kierkegaard writes, anything
goes. "The question is how to slip through, and above all - yes above all,

223
 the question is how to elude judgement" (ibid., p. 57) is the penitent judge's
message.
Gradually, the reader realizes what this means. It turns out to be the
theme for the last part of the story.
He does not fear punishment. It can be endured and we gladly endure
it. To remind us of our innocence, we have given it a name. We call it
misfortune. Judgement, on the other hand, reminds us that we are guilty.
However, we do not want to be guilty. We all claim our innocence. We will
stick to our innocence at any price, regardless of all human suffering.
What kind of guilt is it that we cannot accept? It becomes increasingly
clear that it is the same guilt that Kierkegaard refers to in his dissertation
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The Concept of Anxiety (Kierkegaard, 1844), which adds a new perspective

to the discussion in The Sickness unto Death (1849). However, the final
and most radical version of this approach appears in Postscript (1846).
All three texts concern choosing the self you are. In the anxiety disser-
tation, this task is seen in light of the relationship between good and evil;
a knowledge man arrives at in the fall. In the fall, man is marked by this
knowledge. It is a knowledge about what to do, but in relation to what he
has already done. Clamence questions how he relates to his own past. How
do you get rid of a guilt-ridden past? Kierkegaard's answer is that you get
free by not repeating the past, in other words, by becoming "free forward".
However, anxiety anticipates the possibility of failure. "Anxiety is ahead;
it discovers the consequence before it comes, as one feels in one's bones
that a storm is approaching. The consequence comes closer; the individual
trembles like a horse that gasps as it comes to a halt at the place where
once it had been frightened" (Kierkegaard, 1844, p. 115).
Anxiety, Kierkegaard says, is a middle position between possibility (sin-
fulness) and reality (sin). It is not freedom as a matter of course; you do
not decide to be anxious, you become anxious, but at the same time,
anxiety is a way of relating. The ambiguity of anxiety consists in anxiety
happening to you. That is what Clamence experiences the evening he hears
laughter behind him on Pont des Arts. It appears as if this event forces
him to choose what he is trying to escape from. By this, he relates - but
unfreely. In other words, this concerns the relation between what he is
given (heredity) and what he does with it (guilt or sin). Slowly, he under-
stands. In Kierkegaard's words, he understands that while something hap-
pens to him, it happens with himself. He becomes conscious about him-
self; " ... that perpetual laugh and the laughers had to teach me to see
clearly within me and to discover at last that I was not simple. Don't smile;

224
 that truth is not so fundamental as it seems. What we call fundamental
truths are simply the ones we discover after all others. However that may
be, after prolonged research on myself, I brought out the basic duplicity
of the human being" (Camus, ibid., p. 62).
In this work with infinite coming back to the self, in the work of
conquering the anxiety of evil, Clamence experiences an even greater
anxiety, the anxiety of the good. That is, in Kierkegaard's sense, the
anxiety of recovery. I shall return to this, but first will finish this attempted
psychological explanation of the fall.

"A ridiculous fear pursued me, in fact: one could not die without
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having confessed all one's lies. Not to God or to one of his representa-
tives: I was above that, as you well imagine. No, it was a matter of
confessing to men, to a friend, to a beloved woman, for example. I
pulled myself together, of course" (ibid., p. 66).

Nevertheless, that does not work. He cannot turn his back. Instead, he
does something else. He exaggerates, or using psychoanalytical termin-
ology, he tries to act out what he does not want to acknowledge. "Since I
was a liar, I would reveal this and hurl my duplicity in the face of all those
imbeciles, even before they discovered it" (ibid., p. 67). Gradually, however,
this appears to be part of the resistance against self-knowledge and repre-
sents the anxiety of the good. "You see, it is not enough to accuse yourself
in order to clear yourself. One must accuse oneself in a certain way, which
it took me considerable time to perfect" (ibid., p. 70).
It takes a long time to acknowledge your sin. Although he understands
that we are all guilty and that Christianity's only use has consisted in
vouching for innocence, he refuses to the end to acknowledge his own
concrete sin. It does not prevent him, however, from realizing that we do
not need religion to tell us about sin towards our fellow human beings
and ourselves.

THE AMBIGUITY OF GUILT

The main character in Camus' story is now approaching the issue of the
ambiguity and totality of guilt. In these reflections, the author permits
his hero to examine an argument found in Kierkegaard's Postscript: an
argument about the problem of guilt, not alien to psychoanalytic
thinking.

225
 Total guilt, Kierkegaard says in Postscript, is not just guilt towards
single actions. Instead, it is a precondition and thus inexplicable, as it
cannot be founded on human conscious intention, but on its, psychologi-
cally seen, failure of the existential task.
N ordentoft interprets Kierkegaard's concept of the fall: "Man relates to
the existential task, starts to realize it but fails and discovers in this deeper
and deeper, that instead of climbing like Icarus towards the ideal, he
moves further away because at a given time, he took a wrong starting-
point" (Nordentoft, 1972, p. 232).
Guilt is a consequence of this - namely that man does not know in
advance the nature of the existential task or how to realize it, but gradu-
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ally becomes familiar with the task in his disappointing attempts to realize
it. Guilt is unavoidable for the individual who tries, because it arises from
the very condition that understanding is not a given prior to the action,
but first comes into existence with the action, i.e., moving forward. "And
just as the beginning is about to be made here, it is discovered that, since
meanwhile time has been passing, a bad beginning has been made and
that the beginning must be made by becoming guilty, and from that mo-
ment the total guilt, which is decisive, practices usury with new guilt"
(Kierkegaard, 1846, p. 526). Thus guilt is not created because a person
does something wrong. Instead, it comes into existence in the attempt to
take the existential task seriously, or rather, it is discovered in this attempt.
That is the experience Camus describes in the story about the evening on
Pont des Arts. The past catches up with the main character, because the
laughter reminds him of the task he solved in a way that later affects him
like an apres coup as guilt.

THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE

From a psychoanalytical point of view, the ambiguity of guilt will be ex-

plained as an ontological condition tied to man's two-phased development
and conceptualised with the idea of Nachtrii.glichkeit.
To clarify this concept and its association with Kierkegaard's reflections
on total guilt from Postscript, I will briefly recapitulate Freud's scientific
myth, as he calls it, of the origin of religion. This is the psychoanalytical
parallel to the interpretation of the fall in The Concept of Anxiety.
Originally, humans lived in a primitively organized primal horde that
was dominated by a tyrannical and jealous father who took possession of
all the women of the clan and forbade his sons to consort with them. The

226
 rule was broken. The sons conspired against the father, killed him and
devoured him collectively, but were then overtaken by remorse.
Freud says in Totem and Taboo (1912) that this is how guilt entered the
world and with it social order, morals and religion. The sons had to estab-
lish a social order to prevent a repetition of the primal crime. They had to
voluntarily impose restrictions on themselves regarding satisfaction (incest
restriction) and above all, they had to repress the guilty recollection of the
patricide by elevating the murdered man to a God. Civilization, morals
and religion are built on repression.
This line of thought is continued in Civilization and its Discontents
(Freud, 1930), where it becomes more evident that the repression re-
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ferred to is not a repression of the sexual drive, but of man's destructive

inclinations. The price, Freud says, for a civilized life and for the exist-
ence of our cultural values is a constant discontent with culture. There
is a corresponding inner unhappiness in the shape of a vicious circle in
which humans incessantly accuse themselves. In psychoanalytical terms,
the development of the super-ego is the guarantor of civilized life, and
the price we consequently pay is a total sense of guilt, using Kierke-
gaard's words.
Although small children can learn to control their destructive impulses
under the impression of parents' authority, the development of the super-
ego means that there is now an inner authority forbidding bad actions.
Unhappiness is caused by our use of the same destructive instinct against
ourselves; with our conscience, we accuse ourselves not only with remorse
over an action carried out, but with guilt of what we failed to do, the bad
we did but only recognized later.
The sense of guilt, Freud says, has two layers evoked by anxiety of the
external and internal authority, respectively. The superimposition of these
two strata, in many ways, makes it difficult to gain insight into the con-
ditions of conscience, he continues (Freud, 1930).
In The Ego and the Id, Freud (1923) accepts the consequence of the
split of the ego, making the super-ego the ideal by means of which the ego
values itself. With the ego taking a middle position, we must assume that
primordially it has a receptive structure in relation to the super-ego. Other-
wise, it would not be able to perform the function of mediator that Freud
accords it.
In the Camus novel, the imaginary interlocutor is an anonymous
countryman. However, towards the end of the novel he reveals himself as
the author's alter ego.

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 Using psychoanalytical terms, we can call him the super-ego, meaning
that the conversation is the interrogation to which the conscience continu-
ally exposes the sinful ego. We also understand that all the manoeuvres to
escape (from the idealized megalomania, to acting out sinfulness, to ex-
cesses and finally the attempt to put all mankind on trial) are the tools he
uses to avoid the task of becoming him and of being what he is.
"What shall you do to become another person", Clamence asks, para-
phrasing K.ierkegaard. "It is impossible. You have to be nobody, forget
yourself for someone at least once in a lifetime" (Camus, ibid., p.l06).
By approaching himself as another, he is able, on the last page of the
novel, to express the wish he has harboured inside himself since the fateful
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night:

"0 young woman, throw thyself into the water again so that I may a
second time have the chance of saving both of us!" (Camus, ibid., p.
108).

Camus, however, does not abandon the truth-insisting and reality-prob-

lematizing function of irony. He continues: "A second time, eh, what a risky
suggestion! Just suppose, cher maitre, that we should be taken literally? We'd
have to go through with it. Brr.. ! The water's so cold! But lets not worry! It's
too late now. It'll always be too late. Fortunately" (ibid., p. 108).
There is no doubt that in the Camus' novel, we must understand the
fall psychologically as the possibility appearing to man at the moment of
freedom. As with K.ierkegaard, Camus insists on the intimate connection
between anxiety and freedom. "On the bridges of Paris I too learned to
be afraid of freedom" (ibid., p. 99). K.ierkegaard would have acknowledged
the story at once. That evening, Clamence discovers the possibility of relat-
ing and thus that he himself has to answer for the way he relates. That
possibility, K.ierkegaard says, you discover in anxiety. Anxiety is not only
discovering the possibility of freedom. It also becomes the anxiety of this
possibility. In this anxiety or in the dizziness of freedom, freedom surren-
ders.
This explanation of the fall is, in K.ierkegaard's words, psychological
and that is the fall Camus so brilliantly describes. Camus' thinking does
not seem to reach further than the psychological. However, psychology
cannot assist us further, K.ierkegaard maintains. The explanation stops
here. The decisive factor is the step the individual takes and "in that
very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises,

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 sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no
science has explained and which no science can explain" (Kierkegaard,
1844, p. 61).

CONCLUDING REMARKS

According to Freud, Camus, and Kierkegaard, sinfulness has entered

humans through cultural mediation of prohibitions. That is prohibitions
transmitted from generation to generation. It is the cultural discontent,
the price we pay for being human beings with one another. Sin and guilt,
on the other hand, result from the steps the individual takes. The three
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authors also agree on the ambiguity of anxiety. According to Kierkegaard,

sin enters the world in anxiety. However, it is not caused by an arbitrary
decision nor does it enter as a necessity. The ambiguity of anxiety consists
in anxiety happening to you, but as it happens man relates to himself.
This is the ambiguity that ties Camus' story together. Something happens
to the main character, but while it happens, the self is revealed and is thus
affected by the event. It is in sickness - the sickness unto death - namely
in despair, that humans have access to the truth about themselves and
their sins. This idea connects Kierkegaard's dialectics to Freud. Freud was
increasingly convinced that the main obstacle to recovery is the uncon-
scious sense of guilt, which appears in treatment as the most effective
resistance and in sickness as an eternal accusation often expressed in the
unconscious as a wish for punishment. "No stronger impression arises
from the resistances during the work of analysis than of there being a
force which defends itself by every possible means against recovery and
which is absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering" (Freud,
1937, p. 242).
Kierkegaard's reflection ends by insisting on human guilt, which from
an ethical religious perspective is understood as sin already forgiven.
Freud, who would not acknowledge a duplicate of the already internalized
authority, cannot accept the thought of a god-given absolution. In a foot-
note in The Ego and the Id, he once more suggests that resistance to recov-
ery has its roots in an unconscious sense of guilt. He admits that the
battle with the unconscious sense of guilt is not made easy for the analyst.
"Nothing can be done against it directly and nothing indirectly but the
slow procedure of unmasking its unconscious repressed roots, and of thus
gradually changing it into a conscious sense of guilt" (Freud, 1923, p. 50,
footnote 1).

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 He then reflects on which opportunities we have for performing this,
suggesting that "it may depend too, on whether the personality of the
analyst allows of the patient's putting him in the place of his ego ideal,
and this involves a temptation for the analyst to play the part of prophet,
saviour and redeemer to the patient" (Freud, ibid.). Since the rule of
psychoanalysis is contradictory to using the analyst's own personality in
such a manner, "it must be honestly confessed that we have another limi-
tation to the effectiveness of analysis" (Freud, ibid). Freud (1924) turns
this theme around in The Economic Problem of Masochism and in Civiliza-
tion and its Discontents. He seems - as does Camus from his platform -
to let the human sense of guilt be the bedrock towards which we unavoid-
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ably are steering in life and perhaps also in the psychoanalytical process
of healing.

REFERENCES

Camus, A. (1956). The Fall. London: Penguin Books, 2000.

Freud, S. (1912). Totem and taboo. S.E., Xlll.
- - (1923). The ego and the id. S.E., XIX.
- - (1924). The economic problem of masochism. S.E., XIX.
- - (1930). Civilization and its discontents. S.E., XXI.
- - (1937). Analysis terminable and interminable. S.E., XXIII.
Kierkegaard, S. (1841). The Concept of Irony. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1989.
- - (1844). The Concept of Anxiety. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
- - (1846). Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992.
- - (1849). Sickness unto Death. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Muller, J.P. (1996). Beyond the Psychoanalytical Dyad. London: Routledge.
Nordentoft, K. (1972). Kierkegaards Psykologi. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag.

Judy Gammelgaard
Olufsvej 37
2100 Copenhagen 0
Denmark

Copyright Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review. 2000

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