Kaspar Hauser Between the Analyst and Werner Herzog

Dr Elias Mercer meets Werner Herzog at the Restaurant at the End of the Road.

Kaspar Hauser Between the Analyst and Werner Herzog

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser — Film Outline

Werner Herzog’s 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser follows Kaspar, a young man who has apparently spent most of his life imprisoned in near-total isolation. In 1828 he is abruptly released and abandoned in Nuremberg, barely able to speak and possessing little understanding of ordinary social life.

Kaspar becomes both a curiosity and an object of investigation. He is taught language, manners, religion and music while doctors, clergy, academics and townspeople attempt to understand and categorise him. Yet as Kaspar learns the ways of civilisation, he also exposes their strangeness. His apparently naïve questions reveal assumptions that those around him no longer recognise as assumptions.

Herzog resists turning Kaspar into a puzzle that can finally be solved. His origins remain uncertain, while his developing consciousness retains an irreducible otherness. After Kaspar is mysteriously attacked and ultimately dies, even the official examination of his body promises explanations that somehow fail to explain the man.

The Analyst Who Had No Intention of Analysing Werner Herzog

Dr Elias Mercer had recently seen Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser again. He remembered the film from another time in his life, but this viewing had stayed with him differently. Kaspar enters the human world and almost immediately becomes something to be examined. People teach him, question him, observe him and attempt to understand what kind of human being could have emerged from such extraordinary isolation.

Yet Herzog does not finally explain Kaspar. Something remains in shadow.

A few weeks later Mercer found himself sitting across from Herzog at the Restaurant at the End of the Road.

Someone had mentioned that Mercer was a Jungian analyst.

Herzog regarded him with what appeared to be genuine concern.

“I would rather die than go to an analyst.”

Mercer smiled.

Herzog explained that he had a deep aversion to introspection. Psychoanalysis, he said, was among the great mistakes that had helped make the twentieth century so terrible. There were places in the human soul that should remain dark. Illuminate every corner of a house and eventually the house becomes uninhabitable.

Mercer listened with increasing interest.

“I saw Kaspar Hauser again recently,” he said.

Herzog stopped.

For a moment neither man spoke.

Mercer had no intention of defending psychoanalysis. Indeed, he found himself strangely attracted to Herzog’s image of the over-illuminated house. Jung had taught him something different from the conquest of darkness. The shadow was not an error awaiting correction. Nor was analysis an archaeological expedition in which every buried object had to be dragged into daylight.

Some things changed merely because consciousness learned that they were there.

What interested Mercer more was where Herzog himself had located the darkness. He thought of jungles, deserts, caves, volcanoes, conquistadors, bears, impossible journeys and men possessed by impossible ambitions. Herzog had spent a lifetime travelling towards extremity while declaring his distaste for travelling inward.

Perhaps there was no contradiction.

Perhaps this was Herzog’s method.

Mercer looked across the table.

“You may be right,” he said. “Perhaps we analysts have sometimes turned on too many lights.”

Herzog nodded.

“But I wonder,” Mercer continued, “whether you have spent your life looking for the shadow somewhere else.”

The restaurant became very quiet.

Outside, beyond the last window, the road disappeared into darkness.

Kaspar Hauser Between Them

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser sits quietly beneath the meeting between Mercer and Herzog. Kaspar enters society as a mystery, and almost immediately people begin examining, educating, questioning and categorising him. Civilisation turns its lights upon him. Doctors, teachers, clergy and intellectuals seek explanations for this extraordinary human being who has appeared among them. Yet Herzog refuses to allow all that illumination finally to explain who Kaspar is. Something remains beyond their categories.

Mercer recognises something important here. Herzog’s hostility to psychoanalysis may arise partly from the same resistance. His image of the house whose every corner has been harshly illuminated suggests that relentless explanation can itself become destructive. There may be dimensions of human life that need darkness, ambiguity and mystery.

Yet Mercer also sees the Jungian complication. What remains unexamined within us does not necessarily remain quietly inside. The shadow can appear outside ourselves, projected into other people, landscapes, conflicts and events. Herzog has spent a lifetime travelling towards extremity — jungles, deserts, volcanoes, caves, madness, obsession, impossible undertakings. Mercer cannot help wondering whether Herzog has discovered an outward method of encountering some of the territory that analysis approaches inwardly.

But Kaspar now provides Mercer with a warning.

If Mercer decides that this interpretation explains Herzog, he begins repeating the very process that Herzog resisted in Kaspar Hauser. Herzog says that he has little interest in introspection; Mercer must resist replying, in effect, “Ah, but you have been introspecting all along. You simply do not understand your own method.”

The Jungian interpretation may be illuminating. It may also be wrong.

More subtly, it may contain some truth while still failing to contain Werner Herzog.

Mercer therefore has to examine something in himself: the analyst’s desire to explain. Interpretation can become another form of mastery, a way of reducing the disturbing mystery of another person to something already accommodated within one's own system of thought. Even Jung can become such a system if held too tightly.

Kaspar reminds Mercer to leave some rooms dark.

He can wonder whether Herzog has spent his life encountering the shadow in the external world. He can offer the thought. He can listen to what happens next.

But he cannot claim the answer.

Perhaps that restraint, as much as interpretation itself, is part of the analyst’s art.