The Parasites of Parricide. Living through the Other when Killing the Father: Interpassivity in The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoyevsky’s novel Brothers Karamazov contains, as Sigmund Freud has perspicuously noted, an utterly paradoxical and psychologically most interesting scene - one that immediately calls for attention from the perspective of the theory of interpassivity: Why can one be relieved and grateful to someone else for having killed his father - even if they are not brothers? By what psychic mechanism does the parricide of the other allow one to renounce one’s own? Is it identification? Or love? Or something else?