Further Reflections on the Porcupine Dilemma - A Guest Post by Simon Solomon

The metal porcupine on Freud’s desk in the study 

of his Hampstead home, now the Freud Museum. 

Photo: Nick Cunard.

In his sublime essay 'The Porcupine's Illusion', the prickly-named George Prochnik (great-grandson of James Jackson Putnam) claims that, 'when it came to his own liaison with America, Freud yearned for the warmth and communal support America promised, but then felt needled and otherwise violated in consequence of whatever proximity he did attain'.

On Prochnik's reading, Freud's apparent repression of his debt to Schopenhauer - only admitting in 1925 to having come to the philosopher 'very late in life', despite thrice name-checking him in 'Interpretation of Dreams' (1900) and Schopenhauer's theory of the will being widely regarded as prefiguring the psychoanalytic concepts of repression itself, the death-drive and the centrality of sexuality to psychic life - was motivated by Freud's scientific ambition to purge psychoanalysis of its merely philosophical contours.

An undertaking which, if true, backfired with spectacular irony, since Freud's sole public recognition in his lifetime came from the award of the Goethe Prize for services to literature. In this context, Freud's Schopenhauer complex 'became one of distance and propinquity. How much influence was required to prevent one's pen from freezing, and how much would result in one being stabbed full of holes by the writerly quills of intellectual predecessors?' Here, the porcupine problem takes on the lustre of an inter-generational Bloomian anxiety concerning how well one can bear the stab to one's pretensions of originality.

Noting that, as a rule, 'it may be said that a man's sociability stands very nearly in inverse ratio to his intellectual value: to say that "so and so" is very unsociable, is almost tantamount to saying he is a man of great capacity', Schopenhauer strikingly posited a negative correlation between the hunger for closeness and human intelligence. One endowed with sufficient intellectual warmth in himself - an interesting concept in itself when thinking types in Western culture tend to be seen as cool and remote, while emotional people are viewed as warm - would have sharply curtailed inter-animate needs, so that the heat of thought might be conceived of as a kind of libidino-cerebral surplus, a vector to the inhuman. Or, those who seem like cold fish may be always already the hottest properties ...

On his reportedly arduous hike from Putnam's mountain cabin that he was sharing with Ferenczi and Jung, the porcupine to which Freud was led by two sailor-suited young women turned out to be a fly-blown, reeking corpse. His spiny mythos would be incarnated in an over-determined rodent, death irrupting into life, as though the ambivalent truth of humanity's barbed love arises where Eros and Thanatos collide.

This would surely be enough of a psychologically sobering denouement all by itself. But the still more resonant afterword, as Prochnik vividly recollects, relates to the bronze porcupine gifted to Freud by Putnam, which can now be found on permanent display at the Freud Museum in London, where Freud died in 1939. As he attests - and in some weird and wonderful metamorphosis that pierces the skin and makes the soul sing - its quills, when rippled by the fingers, emit a 'melodic, harp-like sound'.

Our painful proximity, which implies the interpenetration of vitality and oblivion, yields to poetic music.

Notes

George Prochnik, 'The Porcupine Illusion', Cabinet, Issue 26 (Summer 2007): click here.

Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas) is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He can be contacted via simonsolomon.ink

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. 

To read my own take on Schopenhauer, Freud and the porcupine dilemma, click here. 

Reflections on the Porcupine Dilemma

Freud's metal porcupine (12 x 16 x 8 cm) 
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.