书评丨《往事与刑罚》与弗洛伊德的忧郁理论

The punishment expert is the past of the real self. This can be learned from the various hints in the article saying that the expert carries the stranger’s memory, or directly from the claim of the expert himself. The stranger resembles a present-tense ghost of the self, examining the past of the self from God's perspective. He can’t intervene with the decision of the self. The stranger seems to be sober and persistent to disclose the secret of March 5; while the expert appears to be manic and painful. The two form of an entity meet since the stranger longs to uncover what happened at March 5. As time goes by (well I don’t think time makes any sense in this article), the stranger finds it impossible to approach March 5. Two reasons might account for it. For one, the self will die at that day so people can’t relate to things that never happen. For the another, March 5 1965 is just a symbol of a crucial milestone in the self’s life. The time sequence doesn’t real matter in this story. They are just a random reference of the everyday pain.

According to Freud's theory, the expert behaves much like people with melancholia. He has suffered from an unknown trauma and haven’t figured out how to get rid of it yet. In order to maintain the balance of life, he needs to find a substitute object to get over the trauma. Therefore, he seeks help in studying all kinds of punishment, envisioning how they will be operated on people to vent his pain. The four special dates are merely one of the arbitrary days when he fantasies the use of the object of suffering. Time order doesn’t work here, otherwise it is impossible to die in 1965 but still perform executions in 1967 and 1971. He assumes to finally work out a substitute for actual pain. We can see how obsessed the expert is when referring to the original text describing those four executions, as if they are some kind of fireworks display, gorgeous and spectacular. It seems to be a feast as the expert are indulged himself in extreme punishments. The dates become the object of his punishment, a revenge to the actual pain. However, these fantasies cannot relieve himself from the actual trauma. He turns to hoping himself being shoot by others, an extreme and optimal punishment to terminate his life. At the crucial moment, he shrinks away, not daring to pull the trigger in his illusion. In the end, he thought of self-abuse, which is the last resort used by melancholic patients when they can't find the object of revenge outside, to empty the meaning of the self and loathe themselves so as to compensate the void melancholia. The expert chooses to hang himself, which is considered to be the most vulgar way to commit suicide by self-deprecated people. He eventually surrounds himself with them, the ultimate end of a melancholic person.