InfoPoland (12994 bytes)

Bruno Schulz and Psychoanalysis:
The Images of Women in August
by Pawel Dybel

Father, don't you see that I am burning?      
Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams


The bizarre world of Bruno Schulz novels seems to have very little in common with the Freudian concept of unconscious; at least any direct links and similarities have to be excluded. What is more, although Schulz was a voracious reader of Freud, in his sparse comments on psychoanalytic theory he was rather skeptical about the fruitfulness of its application to literature. While, for example, commenting on the neurotic, manic-depressive character of the heroine of the novel Cudzoziemka by the Polish writer Kuncewiczowa, Schulz writes:
"Psychoanalysis knows very well these centers of psychical energy, cut off and without a way out, which are contained in some words, in some obsessive thoughts and actions. The question arises if the psychoanalytic experience could be the object of literary works.

It seems to me that, for someone who is uninitiated, the psychoanalytical argument is not convincing enough. The mechanism of the unconscious processes and its logic differs from that which we are accustomed to in literature. In a novel, the truth is not the decisive and ultimate argument - it is the probability. The revelations of the analysts, though true, will remain for a long time unconvincing to a mind not accustomed to them. Some day, when introspection will be permeated with the psychoanalytic method to such an extent that we shall learn to grasp the mechanisms of the unconscious in the very act, and when our thoughts will familiarize themselves with the mechanics of these processes - then the time will come for psychoanalysis in the novel." [1]
One can easily see that this assessment of psychoanalysis by Schulz is based on a traditional understanding of Freudian theory, very common in the intellectual and artistic circles of that time. According to it, psychoanalysis is a new therapeutic method whose practitioners search first of all for the "deep" truth of the human soul and then, having found it, make use of it in the process of therapy. Also, Schulz's argument that contemporary writers are not sufficiently accustomed to the "mechanics of the unconscious processes" revealed by Freud, and that therefore they still cannot apply these to literature, mirrors the widespread way of thinking, current at the time, about the relationship between literature and science. According to that view, the discoveries and revelations of science are always ahead of the analogous transformations in literature and art. Accordingly, before they can be applied successfully /to the latter, they first have to be "worked through" by the artists.

Already in the very next sentence of his review, however, Schulz unexpectedly calls this argument into question, while maintaining that the author of the reviewed book represents an exception to the rule:
"However, the novel of Kuncewiczowa contradicts this prognosis. It represents in a way a proof that the methods of psychoanalysis are mature enough to be applied to literature. But I suspect that this occurs due to some falsification of the unconscious processes, due to their artificial elevation in the hierarchy of psychic products and approximation of their structure to the normal processes, which, after all, I think is admissible and necessary to make them understandable." [2]
In the end then, psychoanalytic methods are seen by Schulz as already applicable to literature, and Kuncewiczowa novel is the best proof of that. But this conclusion by Schulz deserves our attention not only as a perspicacious statement concerning one of the best Polish novels written in the period between WWI and WWII. Nor because it shows very clearly that Schulz, although quite skeptical about the possibility of "applying" psychoanalysis to literature, nonetheless treated it as a scientific theory revealing some basic truths about the human psyche, a theory which, in the future, could potentially be of use to the novelists. It also deserves our attention because Schulz unwittingly tells us here how he himself makes use of psychoanalysis in his novels and short stories, i.e. how he tries to transform the key Freudian insights concerning the structure and the working of the human psyche in his own writings.

Let us take a closer look at his statement. According to Schulz, the transformation of the unconscious processes by the novelist into conscious ones should consist of making the former much more similar in the latter. By this means the novelist "elevates" the unconscious processes and thereby renders them more understandable for the reader.

Of course, in comparison to the other writers, who during that period tried to make use of the Freudian technique of "free associations" [3], Schulz appears to be much more conservative. According to him, the unconscious processes when "applied" to literature need not only, like in the dream, a "secondary elaboration" (S.Freud) but they have to be "falsified". That is, they have to be so deeply transformed in their very essence as to become an inherent element of the writer's conscious life - and thereby, of the fictitious world of his/her novels.

Yet although Schulz very clearly indicates the dominance of consciousness over the unconscious in the process of writing, he nonetheless still treats the unconscious as an essential "point of reference" in this process. And when we look more closely at the world represented in his novels, it seems to be pervaded in its every nook and cranny with his unconscious fantasies. Imperceptibly welded to the elements of the real world, as described by Schulz, they endow it with an enormous dynamic and with a kind of hidden glow and radiation. In this sense, one could say that the unconscious is at the very core of this world. It is recognizable in the dreamlike form of narration, in all the grotesque distortions of reality, in the "polymorphous" sexual fantasies, in the masochistic cult and admiration of women, and in the "degraded" patriarchal figure of a schizophrenic father, which in some regards is so remindful of "Senatspraesident Schreber".

For all his skepticism about the possibility of the direct and immediate "application" of psychoanalysis in literature, I think, Schulz remains one of the most "psychoanalytic" Polish writers to this day. For though in his novels he deeply transforms his unconscious fantasies, "elevating" them to the rank of inherent elements of "consciously" narrated fiction, these fantasies remain center around which everything else revolves. What is so specific about Schulz is precisely his unsurpassed gift of sublimation ("elevation") of all the "unconscious processes" into the conscious ones so that the reader gets the irresistible impression of the absolute autonomy and self-determination of the fantasy world of his novels.

To demonstrate this particular feature of Schulz prose let me concentrate on August, one of his short stories. It opens The Cinnamon Shops, the first novel published by him and one that immediately caught the attention of the prominent literary critics and the broader public. It also led to his being awarded a prestigious Gold Laurel prize by the Polish Literary Academy.


These are the opening words of The Cinnamon Shops. The author seems to recall in them some real event that occurred in his childhood. For as we know from biographers Schulz father was ill and often had to go to the sanatorium, leaving his wife with the children behind. But is that really everything we can say about this fragment?

Let us read the first sentence again:
The father who goes away and leaves the child with his mother behind is a prominent Oedipal motif, as had been already noted by Freud. It refers to the figure of the father whom the child would like to "do away with" since the father is the main obstacle to his unlimited access to the mother, to her love. However, in the fragment quoted above, it is not the son who does away with the father, rather it is the father himself, who does away with the son by leaving him behind. The typical Oedipal motif mentioned above has been turned upside down here and recurs in the form of the recollection by the son of the disappearance of the father. Analogously, it is not the son here who feels himself guilty in the eye of the father, but on the contrary, it is the father who is guilty in the eye of the son (or, strictly speaking, whom the son recognizes as being guilty before him and the mother).

No wonder, therefore, that everything that occurs in the novel takes place in a world w i t h o u t a f a t h e r . For even if the father returns later, it is only as his own grotesque old-childish double, deprived of any seriousness or prestige. Thus the father who went to take the waters in a way left his son forever. He will never be identified by him as the "real" father, around whom revolves the life of the whole family and who impersonates the unquestionable authority in all matters.

No wonder, therefore, that we hear a tone of reproach in the last part of the sentence. For, as it says, the father who left the son made him:
"a prey to the blinding white heat of the summer days."
One can of course understand this fragment very literally: as the recollection by the son of the fact that after the father had left, the summer in the town became extremely hot. And it was probably really so. But should we read this fragment simply and only as a reproach of the abandoned son who, while the father takes the cool, refreshing baths at the resort, is exposed to the relentless scorching heat of the summer days?

Let me quote the following fragment:
"On Saturday afternoons I used to go for a walk with my mother. From the dusk of the hallway, we stepped at once into the brightness of the day. The passers-by, bathed in melting gold, had their eyes half closed against the glare, as if they were drenched with honey. Upper lips were drawn back, exposing the teeth. Everyone in this golden day wore that grimace of heat - as if the sun had forced his worshipers to wear identical masks of gold. The old and the young, women and children, greeted each other with these masks, painted on their faces with thick gold paint; they smiled at each other's pagan faces - the barbaric smiles of Bacchus." [4]
The heat of the summer reveals the "pagan" side of all faces that the narrator-son encounters while walking with the mother through the town. He discovers in their smiles the "barbaric" enjoyment that does not know any limits, the raging passion of Bacchus in which the excess of pleasure is at the same time horribly painful, almost impossible to stand. But, actually it is his own excessive enjoyment that he projects onto the faces of all passers-by while walking at the side of the mother after the father had left.

We begin to understand now the factual sense of the reproach directed by him at the father: it is actually not the heat of the summer days but the "heat" of his own Bacchic fantasies to which the departure of the father exposed him. Or, more precisely, it is the departure of the father which, combined with the heat of the summer, make him prey of his own scorching fantasies now thriving in him without any limits.

One comes across here, I think, one of the basic features of Schulz's writings: his ability to narrate about the apparently "outer" real events in such a way that these can, at the same time, be read as the events of the narrator's "inner" imaginary life. The "outer" and "inner" are here intertwined in such a way that everything that goes on in the world "outside" simultaneously points to the "inside" of the narrator-son and superimposes itself on it thus becoming a kind of metonymic description of his inner mental landscape.

One can say then that the linguistic operation most preferred by Schulz is "displacement" (metonymy) whereas "condensation" (metaphor) appears only as a kind of secondary effect of the former. Yet, this does not occur in his novels in the same way as, for example, in a dream, for in the latter - according to Freud - the displacement directly expresses the "free" logic of the unconscious by suspending the usual relationships of contiguity between things and events and by replacing them with its own "absurd" ones. In Schulz's writing, the displacement appears instead on the threshold between the dream and consciousness, yet subordinated to the restrictive logic of the latter. That is, any "absurd" links and relationships that primarily appear in the unconscious fantasies of the subject are immediately ("on the spot") worked through by his consciousness and become the inherent element of his own fictitious world. That is, the world that, at the first sight, seems to be organized in much the same way as the real world outside of him and one maintaining the same relations of contiguity between things.

On a closer reading one realizes, however, that what is presented by the author as a world "outside" of him is permanently undermined by the simultaneous movement which points towards his "inward" mental world. The result of this double movement is an enormous condensation of the image, very much like in that of modern poetry. And this is precisely the basic feature of Schulz writing: the extent to which he is able to construct in his prose the condensed and multi-layered imaginary worlds so characteristic of modern poetry.

In the history of the modern novel there was one author who was able to narrate in a similarly condensed "poetic" way: Franz Kafka. Therefore, it is not by chance that many Polish and American interpreters of Schulz point to the author of The Trial as his closest kindred spirit. [5]

All of these similarities notwithstanding there is however one essential difference between Kafka and Schulz. Whereas the style of narration of the former is raw, logically lucid and concise, the style of the latter is more baroque and voluptuous:
This passage comes from the opening scene of The Cinnamon Shops. It follows directly the sons complaint pertaining the departure of the father. The woman, the maid Adela, is later presented here as the omnipotent ruler of the house who takes on the previous position of the father and subordinates to her own stern decisions the whole household. But in this scene she looks "like Pomona" while bringing from the market the basket full of fruits, meat and vegetables. The poetic beauty of this fragment is, of course very much reminiscent of the paintings of still life by the Dutch masters. The simile, however, points simultaneously in another direction. It implies that all the fruits and the meat that Adela brings from the market are at the same time the attributes (or extension) of her inner self since, like the Roman goddess of fruit, she impersonates also the earth and its fertility.

Who then is Adela as Pomona? Let me notice how much all the things brought by her from the market have the conspicuous phallic attributes: "pink cherries full of juice", "apricots in whose golden pulp...", "sides of meat (...) swollen with energy and strength", "and seaweeds of vegetables...". Looked at this way Adela appears as the almighty woman bursting with vital energy and strength, whose abundant oval shapes point at her consummate and self-sufficient nature. She is the real phallic woman "without a lack" (phallic deficiency) whose powerful image fascinates and overwhelms the narrator-son.


August, the short story which opens The Cinnamon Shops, could be read as a sort of initiation into the whole literary work of Bruno Schulz. And this is a very cruel and brutal initiation since what it effectuates is the disappearance of the figure of the father. It's no wonder, therefore, that the place rendered empty by the father's departure becomes immediately populated, in the son's fantasy, with the overpowering images of women. It's for him the only way to make up for that departure.

And we begin now to understand better his reproach: it is because you, father, left me that you exposed me to the "heat" of my imaginations which I cannot stand. You made me the prey to my scorching fantasies which, like burning objects, now persecute me.

August could be read as a kind of music variation on the theme "womanhood," like a fugue in which one motif that persistently recurs dazzles us each time with a new strange variation of the same melody. First, with the naturalistic image of the homeless beggar Touya, then with that of her insane mother Maria and later with the grotesque figures of the white-fleshy Aunt Agatha and of her young plump daughter Lucy.

Writers who comment on the "womanhood" theme in Bruno Schulz novels, usually put the stress on the predominant masochistic attitude of the narrator, so clearly obvious and impressive in Schulz drawings and paintings. According to them, the women who appear there are very much like Adela's image from the fragment quoted above: the almighty ruler of the world, bursting with vitality and self-sufficient: But, I think, that the feminine characters in Schulz novels are much more diversified and complex. Already the second image that appears in August, that of the madwoman Touya, could be read both as an allegory of feminine fertility and power and as an allegory ... of corruption and decay:
"Touya sits hunched up among the yellow bedding and old rags, her large head covered by a mop of tangled black hair. Her face works like the bellows of an accordion. Every now and then, a sorrowful grimace folds into a thousand vertical pleats, but astonishment soon straightens it out again, ironing out the folds, revealing the chinks of small eyes and dump gums with yellow teeth under snout-like, fleshy lips. (...) And while the rags slip to the ground and spread out over the rubbish heap, like frightened rats, a form emerges and reveals itself: the dark half-naked idiot girl rises slowly to her feet and stands like a pagan idol, on short childish legs (...). The sun-dried thistles shout, the plantains swell and boast their shameless flesh, the weeds salivate with glistening poison, and the half-wit girl, hoarse with shouting, convulsed with madness, presses her fleshy belly in an excess of lust against the trund of an elder which groans softly under the insistent pressure of that libidinous passion, incited by the whole ghastly chorus to hideous unnatural fertility." [7]
This is one of the most unusual scenes ever written by Schulz. The woman who appears here is drunk with the libidinal energy of life roaring from the heaps of rot and decay she inhabits. Her figure phosphorizes with many images: that of Circe, rat, prostitute, drunkard, lunatic, pagan goddess, insatiable wanton. It is as if "the barbaric smiles of Bacchus" of all the passers-by (compare my quotation above) now revealed their underlying layers: the image of the folly female Bacchus which is both, the source of life and death, of growth and decay.

And here again, like in a fugue, we recognize the same inundating image of a phallic woman. But this time the stress is placed on its gloomy, swinish and orgiastic side. Toyua appears like a fallen biblical Eve, who, however, unlike the latter, takes advantage of her fall, rising from a heap of decay and rot, like the pagan goddess, who reunites in her body the forces of life and death. She is literally a woman with the phallus since in the orgiastic mating with nature she assumes the active, fertilizing position of a man.

This way she also makes up for the gloomy fate of her foolish mother Maria, who, living in a house where she lays "in a straw-filled chest" is:
"white as a wafer and motionless like a glove from which a hand had been withdrawn." [8]
Mother is the extreme opposite of Touya. While living in a house (and what is more: lying in an "artificial" bed) she is separated from the real life - from its creative forces. She is a woman w i t h o u t a p h a l l u s and therefore having gone mad, lives expelled from life on the border of time, deprived of any feelings and expectations.


The fourth woman-image is that of Aunt Agatha. It's accompanied by the image of man, her husband. In a way, it is very remindful of that of Adela and Touya since Aunt Agatha also impersonates female fertility, overabundance and strength. However, at the same time there is something ill and rotten about this image, which makes her unlike them. For Aunt Agatha cannot be satisfied on her own. She is a woman who needs, desires, craves for the phallus as the indispensable medium of her own enjoyment and fulfilment:
"My aunt was complaining. It was the principal burden of her conversation, the voice of that white and fertile flesh, floating as it were outside the boundaries of her person, held only loosely in the fetters of individual form, and, despite those fetters, ready to multiply, to scatter, branch out, and divide into a family. It was an almost self-propagating fertility, a femininity without rein, morbidly expansive." [9]
Thus, while the overgrown, phallus-like body of Aunt Agatha gives the impression of her unrestrained power and fullness she actually - like Maria - is deprived of it. But at the same time, unlike Maria who is wholly reconciled in her folly with her lack, Aunt Agatha "complains". It is her very voice, its tearful melody and permanently reproachful tone, which betray this. But it is also the monstrous overgrowth of her white-fleshy body that testifies to the complete failure of her mimicry. For this body is nothing but the desperate craving for the phallus, for what she would have been if...

And although she accuses her husband of everything in her life actually it is not he who is responsible for it. It is rather she herself since what she actually craves for she could have become only from herself. For it is only she who could have made up for her lack. Although the man, his very smell, can "spark off her feverish femininity" for a time "and entice it to a lascivious virgin-birth" this does not mean that he is able to sooth her desire once and for all. For every man is in her eyes branded with the lack, "castrated". And this is not because of some deficiency of his particular being but because of the very manhood he impersonates. Therefore, a man, in the best case, could be only the temporary "medium" of her craving, the instrument of her passion that she would always throw away after reaching a moment of satisfaction.

So no wonder, that it is her "first man", her husband, who becomes the main victim of her permanent frustration with herself. She accuses him of everything, marginalizes him, humiliates in front of others, presses him down with the pitch of her voice, with the words full of reproaches and with angry gestures. And he has no chance in this battle since he had lost it already before it had begun. He is for her an impotent since in the end every man, if confronted with the raging "phallicallity" of her body, will turn into an impotent. Therefore, after some timid attempts to oppose her that are immediately crushed by Aunt's Agatha overpowering arguments, he becomes resigned and lets himself be wholly dominated by her. He is like a defeated male who, permanently "castrated" by his wife, becomes in the end "reconciled to his fate" and takes refuge "in the shadow of a limitless contempt".

But perhaps the most telling testimony of Agatha's craving for the phallus is her "panic of maternity, a passion for child bearing". However, she fails on this regard as well, and instead of alleviating her frustration this way becomes "exhausted in ill-starred pregnancies, in an ephemeral generation of phantoms without blood or face." [10]

Thus also the outcome of her second "phallic" strategy is the opposite of what she expected from it. Instead of covering or filling out her lack, her children look rather like the grotesque, morbid extension of her own overgrown body. Their bodies are branded with her own insatiable phallicallity - they betray it:
"Lucy, the second eldest, now entered the room, her head overdeveloped for her child-like, plump body, her flesh white and delicate. She stretched out to me a small doll-like hand, a hand in bud, and blushed all over her face like a peony. Unhappy because of her blushes, which shamelessly revealed the secrets of menstruation, she closed her eyes and reddened even more deeply under the touch of the most indifferent question, for she saw in each a secret allusion to her most sensitive maidenhood." [11]
This is the fifth image of a woman that appears in August. At first sight, it reminds us of those charming Renaissance paintings in which the strongly naked girls in a desperate gesture try to hide from the spectator the riddle of their womanhood. However, when we take a closer look at this picture it appears that there is something strange and unhealthy in the appearance of Lucy. For her body is very much like her mother's, white-fleshy and plump - the evident mark of the "craving for phallus" that inhabits it. Therefore, Lucy's oversensitive reactions of shame and embarrassment betray not only her own lack but her mother's lack as well. Or, strictly speaking, they unmask mother's desperate strategies to disguise it. And this is so since Lucy, contrary to her mother, is a young naïve girl who has not yet managed to cope with the mystery of her womanhood.


We have then five images of women that follow each other in a kind of the descendent order. There are, first two images of the truly phallic, goddess-like women, Adela and Touya, which in a way complement each other (Adela symbolizes the feminine super-ego, she is the woman who rules the world; Touya, on the contrary, seems to impersonate the feminine id which bursts with libidinal energies and reunites the forces of life and death). They are followed by the two images of "castrated" women of whom the first, Maria, is wholly resigned to her lack, whereas the second, Aunt Agatha, desperately tries to deny it). And, in the end, the charming image of the young Lucy not yet "mature" enough to take refuge to the sophisticated imaginary strategies to disguise her "lack".

Therefore, Lucy actually not only betrays her mother's desperate craving but also - indirectly - unmasks the "totalitarian" claims lying behind the all-powerful phallic images of Adela and Touya. Lucy in her naïvete unwittingly reveals what womanhood actually is: the permanent painful confrontation with the lack experienced already on the level of the Real and not in the imaginary refuge to the mythological fantasies of the Mother-earth (or alike) in which this experience becomes negated and repressed.


There is however something deeply tragic about the figures of men that appear in this short story as well. The first one - that of the hunched husband of Aunt Agatha, permanently humiliated by her, has been already mentioned. The second one - is that of her eldest son Emil and appears in the closing sections of August. Emil looks like another ghostly offspring of his mother's "panic of maternity". However, unlike the sister, for whom the sexual life is still a mystery, he has not only already enjoyed its various "vicissitudes" but has been mentally burnt-out by them as well. She is the oversensitive young innocent girl; he is the mature life-experienced bachelor whose face has been emptied of all passion and feelings. Whereas Lucy flushed all the time:
"His pale, flabby face, seemed from day to day to lose its outline, to become a white blank wall with a pale network of veins, like lines on an old map occasionally stirred by the fading memories of a stormy and wasted life." [12]
Contrary to the phallic images of Adela, Touya and Aunt Agatha that brim over with libidinal energy, the deformed, phallus-like face of Emil seems to be deprived of any emotions. It expresses nothing but sheer boredom and exhaustion.

However, it is not always so. In the closing scene of August he:
"took me between his knees and, shuffling some photographs in front of my eyes as if they were a pack of cards, he showed me naked women and boys in strange positions. I stood leaning against him looking at those delicate human bodies with distant, unseeing eyes, when all of a sudden the fluid of an obscure excitement with which the air seemed charged, reached me and pierced me with a shiver of uneasiness, a wave of sudden comprehension." [13]
There is of course nothing exceptional in this scene of a child's initiation. In the absence of father his role is usually taken over by someone else, be it another man or a peer. But in this scene the father is absent forever, no matter if he physically exists or not. No wonder then that his place takes up the phantom-like guy with an effaced phallic face, who while introducing the boy into the enjoyments of sexuality knows himself very well what they are like: like the sun which scorches, like the memories that fade. Therefore, this is a "bad" initiation, a phantom-like substitute of the real one that never happened. For in this initiation the perpetrator instead of engraving upon the child's memory the unerasable trace of his Name withers away in time - like a ghost:
"But meanwhile that ghost of a smile which had appeared under Emil's soft and beautiful moustache (...), the tenseness which for a moment had kept his features concentrated, all fell away again and his face receded into indifference and became absent and finally faded away altogether." [14]
We understand now: there were not only the ghostly images of the overpowering women that began to haunt the imagination of the son when the father had left. There was also the ghastly father-like image of a man without face who, after initiating him into the mysteries of sexuality, slowly disappeared and left him alone with the horror of his fantasies: made him "a prey to the blinding white heat of the summer days".

  1. Bruno Schulz, Proza, Krakow 1964 p.464
  2. Ibidem p. 464
  3. Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, transl. By Celina Wieniewska, New York 1977 p.3
  4. Ibidem p.4
  5. See: the article of Henry Sussman, Modernist Night: Distortion, Regression, and Oblivion in the Fiction of Bruno Schulz. In: Bruno Schulz. New Documents ed. By Czeslaw Prokopczyk. New York, Washington 1993
  6. Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, op. cit. p. 3
  7. Ibidem p. 7
  8. Ibidem p. 7
  9. Ibidem p. 9
  10. Ibidem p. 9
  11. Ibidem p. 9
  12. Ibidem p. 10
  13. Ibidem p. 10
  14. Ibidem p. 11

The above is the text of a presentation made by Professor Dybel, the 2001-2002 Kosciuszko Foundation Visiting Professor of Polish Studies at the University of Buffalo, on April 18, 2002 to the Center for Studies of Psychoanalysis and the Polish Studies Program or State University of New York at Buffalo

