The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1975)

Psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich proposed that the Oedipus complex be replaced by the Kaspar Hauser complex. Kaspar Hauser, man-child, historical conspiracy, enigma of the eponymous Werner Herzog film, exemplifies a story of devolution, in his own words, “a terribly hard fall” from the inchoate realm prior to language acquisition (in this case years locked in a cellar) into the social and the symbolic (and the cursed knowledge that he had been locked in a cellar). In other words: the fall from the mystical into the mundane. Kaspar, a teenage boy without language, appears in the square at Nuremburg one day with a letter in his hand. The town teaches him to speak and shows him what it means to be a gentleman in Germany in the 1820s; eating soup, wearing high collars, boating, playing Mozart on the piano, questioning the use-value of women and so on. Mitscherlich recognizes, along with many other psychoanalysts (though by no means all) that Kaspar Hauser, and children in general—the oedipal writ large—complicate the ancient Greek notion of development, the transit form the old cave of Plato into the sunshine realm of philosophy and elite society. Rather than an ascent into light, reason and selfhood, human development is a descent from the prelinguistic oceanic state (no self and no other) into cursed knowledge, a thicket of fantasies both repressed and not-so-repressed. The consensual hallucination that we call “reality” is imposed upon the child from without; the child falls into the dream of 19th century German society with its attendant religious biases and inflexible gender norms. It is a dream that becomes difficult to wake up from. The original and far better title of this movie auf Deutsche is Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (Everyone For Themselves and God Against All).