Freud's metal porcupine (12 x 16 x 8 cm)
Image Credit: Freud Museum (London)
Image Credit: Freud Museum (London)
In a series of reflections published in 1851, the German philosopher Schopenhauer discussed (amongst numerous other topics) the prickly question of human intimacy by making reference to the predicament faced by the Stachelschwein.
In brief, the so-called porcupine dilemma is this: it might be preferable to move closer to others of your own kind and advantageous to share body heat when the weather outside is frightful, but, if you're covered in sharp spines, then it's not so easy to do so without (unintentionally) causing or receiving serious injury.
And whilst people are not porcupines and lack quills, we nevertheless find it just as problematic getting up close and personal with others - no matter how desperate we may be to do so. In the end, the best individuals can hope for is a compromised form of relationship that calls for caution on both sides if they are to avoid mutual harm. We can smile at one another but never really touch, obliged as we are to always keep a safe distance.
This - as Freud later realised - helps to explain our frustrated sense of social isolation and why sexual relations so often end in tears. We are driven by inner needs and external conditions to seek out others, but quickly discover just how intolerable these others are thanks to the many disagreeable qualities and natural defence mechanisms they possess. The best that anyone might hope for, concludes Schopenhauer (pessimistically), is that they can generate their own heat and thus remain entirely self-sufficient; thereby avoiding the risk of either pricking or being pricked by other people.
Freud - as indicated above and who has as interesting and as close a relationship to Schopenhauer as he does to Nietzsche - exploited this tale of the porcupine in his own psychoanalytic work, directly referencing it in a key section of his 1921 text Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
In fact, if the story has become widely known in the English-speaking world - where it is commonly termed the hedgehog's dilemma - it is largely because of Freud's reading, rather than familiarity with the original text by Schopenhauer, who is today a shamefully neglected thinker, but to whom we owe a great deal.
Notes
The metal porcupine pictured above was a memento of Freud's trip to the USA in 1909. Thought to have been given to him by the American neurologist James Jackson Putnam, Freud kept the handsome beast with its razor sharp quills on his desk for the rest of his life.
See: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, translated and edited by Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway, (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ch. 31, Section 396.
For further reflections on this question, by Simon Solomon, click here.
The metal porcupine pictured above was a memento of Freud's trip to the USA in 1909. Thought to have been given to him by the American neurologist James Jackson Putnam, Freud kept the handsome beast with its razor sharp quills on his desk for the rest of his life.
See: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, translated and edited by Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway, (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ch. 31, Section 396.
For further reflections on this question, by Simon Solomon, click here.
