Sigmund Freud first read Montaigne’s Essays in 1914 as war broke out in Europe and his annotated copy of the text can be found today in The Freud Museum. The Essays would have offered Freud a model of self-directed analysis for they contain ‘the first sustained representation of human consciousness in Western literature’,26 or as Montaigne put it himself in the essay ‘On Repentance’, ‘No man ever went more deeply into his matter’.27 In Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Philip Rieff highlights the ‘genuine affinity between psychoanalysis and the psychological theories of Stoicism’,28 and positions Freud – alongside Montaigne – within a long tradition of thinkers that were inspired by Stoicism: ‘The Stoic imagination […] produced a number of psychologists – Montaigne, Burton, Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld – with whom it would be apt and even historically sound to compare to Freud’.29 Rieff argues that it is Freud’s commitment to honest self-examination through writing that links him to Montaigne: ‘I know of only one writer who, in a mood or urbanity not unlike Freud’s, may be said to have resolved the problem of being honest about himself: Montaigne.’30 Freud’s psychoanalytic work can be considered as an evolution of what Montaigne began when he retired from public life, turned inwards and made himself into his own subject matter. For in doing so, Montaigne began to translate the generalised theories of philosophy into something personal, specific and practical, and as such moved from philosophy into something that would come to be termed as psychology. By taking Stoicism personally and applying it to his own individual self, Montaigne demonstrated the differences both between and within individuals, and between general rules and particular practices.
In an interview with The Paris Review, the psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips spoke of the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, and more specifically, made a connection between psychoanalysis and the essay form that he himself has admired in Montaigne: ‘Psychoanalytic sessions are not like novels, they’re not like epic poems, they’re not like lyric poems, they’re not like plays – though they are rather like bits of dialogue from plays. But they do seem to me to be like essays […] There is the same opportunity to digress, to change the subject, to be incoherent, to come to conclusions that are then overcome and surpassed, and so on […] Essays can wander, they can meander’.31 Montaigne makes no attempt to think or to write in progressive sequence, for his content – namely his own psychological matter – cannot be arranged in a single, linear form. As he writes in the essay ‘How we weep and laugh at the same thing’, ‘We deceive ourselves if we want to make this never-ending succession into one continuous whole.’32
In an interview with The Economist, Adam Phillips again discussed characteristics of psychoanalysis which are akin to those of literature: ‘It is as though Freud invented a setting or a treatment in which people could not exactly speak the poetry that they are, but that they could articulate themselves as fully as they are able.’33 Montaigne developed a process of revision that was entirely unrepentant and which allowed him to articulate himself – in all his multiplicity – in full. His Essays defy conventional hierarchies of correction which would insist that mistakes are a source of shame and that first thoughts, once contradicted or superseded by a second thought, must be got rid of. He shows how it is possible to go backwards in a way that is healthy rather than regressive or ruminative. In particular, it is Montaigne’s sense of constructive uncertainty which allows him to loop backwards again and again, opening up more thinking space for himself and reactivating formerly closed off lines of thought. The psychoanalyst Susie Orbach discusses the importance of a similar kind of constructive uncertainty in her book In Therapy: The Unfolding Story:
Psychoanalysis and psychological theories of development see the capacity to hold complexity in mind – which is to say, when thinking is not arranged in banishing binaries […] Complexity is essential to thought. There is rarely one story, one subjectivity, one way to look at and evaluate things […] Complexity and category-making are the dialectical prerequisites of being human. We all struggle with the tension between the two poles of questioning and certainty. Out of that tension comes an enormous creativity.34
Montaigne’s Essays provide a clear model of this creativity in action. The importance of this cannot be overstated for it is very difficult to even begin to imagine doing or being something without access to an external template that proves that it is possible: Montaigne is the external template that defies any other fixed template. His portrayal of individual psychology in action demands to be met with ways of thinking and versions of therapy which go beyond universal cures or overgeneralised theories.
Chapter 6 of this book will – in part – look at exactly what does happen when a group of individuals are asked to write diaries arising out of their reading in the act of becoming personal essayists. But it would be to take Montaigne too literally, too slavishly, if, like Marion Milner, everyone was required to write. The Essays cannot show us in steps how to attain the healthy attitude that Montaigne has cultivated because his writing is so emphatically individual and unreplicable, but he has shown that it is possible to carve out an individual space and to develop individual thinking patterns that serve to make life much more bearable.
Notes
1Donald Frame, Montaigne’s Essais – A Study (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 97; hereafter cited as ‘Frame’.
2Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin Classics, 1991), Book III, Essay 5, p. 950; hereafter cited as Essays.
3Epistles, i, VII, p. 35.
4Essays, I, 8, p. 31.