Horror Vacui

Constructing the Void from Pascal to Freud

Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

In 1895, in the midst of his studies on anxiety neuroses, obsessions, and pho-
bias, Freud addressed himself to a French audience with the aim of “correct-
ing” Jean-Martin Charcot on the nature of such phenomena.1 He began by
putting to one side a specific kind of obsession, an example of which was ex-
hibited by the philosopher Pascal and was apparently well enough known to
stand with little explanation:

I propose in the first place to exclude a group of intense obsessions which

are nothing but memories, unaltered images of important events. As an
example I may cite Pascal’s obsession: he always thought he saw an abyss
on his left hand “after he had nearly been thrown into the Seine in his
coach.” Such obsessions and phobias, which might be called traumatic,
are allied to the symptoms of hysteria.2

Freud uses this example to point to the difference between what he calls “in-
tense obsessions,” which are little more than simple memories or “unaltered
images of important events,” and “true obsessions,” which combine a forceful
idea and an associated emotional state; he further distinguishes these true ob-
sessions from phobias, where the emotional state is one of anxiety (angoisse in
the original French version). Here I am not so concerned with Freud’s dismissal
of this abyssal anxiety, nor why he felt so confident in excluding Pascal from
the realm of true obsession or of phobia, but rather with the place held by the
seventeenth-century philosopher in the history of such neurosis, a place that
was secure enough in the medical tradition to warrant its initial and immedi-
Horror Vacui

ate exclusion by Freud.

In a footnote to this article, Freud acknowledged his debt to the latest
French work on phobias, J. B. E. Gélineau’s Des peurs maladives ou phobies,
published in 1894. If we follow this trail backward, we find that Gélineau’s
contemporaries are themselves somewhat obsessed with Pascal’s obsession, of-
ten termed “Pascal’s disease” in reference to the newly psychologized phobia of
“la peur des espaces,” or, as the German psychologist Westphal had termed it
in his study of 1871, “agoraphobia.” For many French psychologists, indeed,
Pascal had become a founding case for this phobia, the more important as a cel-
ebrated French example of a mental disease all too closely connected with Ger-
man psychology, especially following the siege of Paris in 1871.3

1. Blaise Pascal,
“Experiments with the
Equilibrium of Liquids
and the Weight of Air,”
Traitez de l’équilibre des
liqueurs et de la pesan-
teur de la masse de l’air
(Paris, 1663).

It would seem, in any event, that Pascal was bound to be a perfect exem-
plar of the disease as the preeminent and school-textbook theorist of the void,
of “l’horreur du vide,” of “l’infini” and “le néant.”4 His well-known philo-
sophical and scientific interests in the variety of vacuums, psychological and
empirical, were no doubt endowed with additional veracity for late nineteenth-
century enthusiasts of the case study by the reported incident on the banks of
the Seine. Thus hardly a study on the newly “discovered” spatial phobias failed

Constructing the Void from Pascal to Freud

to mention his case, one that resonated with all the literary and philosophical
traditions and commonplaces of French secondary education. Charles Binet-
Sanglé, writing in 1899 and convinced that Pascal suffered from the equally
popular malady of “neurasthenia,” traced his entire religious philosophy to his
celebrated obsession.5
Interest in Pascal’s affliction was not, however, an invention of the psy-
chologizing climate of the 1870s. Indeed, the anecdote seems to have been well
enough established in popular lore over the two centuries after his death to have
served seventeenth-century biographers, eighteenth-century theologians and
philosophes, and nineteenth-century romantics as a dramatic example of the re-
lations between spatial experience and psychological-philosophical enquiry.
The general sense of the legend was described by the nineteenth-century critic
George Saintsbury, who tells the story in great detail in his article “Pascal” for
the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, with some skepticism but
nevertheless according it great importance. For him, as for numerous earlier
commentators, the anecdote is held to explain Pascal’s second great “conver-
sion” of 1654 when he joined his sister Jacqueline in seclusion at Port-Royal.
Saintsbury writes:

It seems that Pascal in driving to Neuilly was run away with by the horses,
and would have been plunged in the river but that the traces fortunately
broke. To this, which seems authentic, is usually added the tradition (due
to the abbé Boileau) that afterwards he used at times to see an imaginary
precipice by his bedside, or at the foot of the chair on which he was
sitting.6

The apparent concurrence of the accident and his second and final “conver-
sion” to religion was too dramatic to be ignored. As Saintsbury suggests, the tra-
ditional story originated in 1737, some seventy-five years after Pascal’s death,
in a letter written by the abbé Boileau reassuring one of his penitents who suf-
fered from imaginary terrors:

Where they see only a single way, you see frightening precipices. That re-
minds me of M. Pascal—the comparison will not displease you. . . . This

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great genius always thought that he saw an abyss at his left side, and he
Horror Vacui

would have a chair placed there to reassure himself. I have this on good
authority. His friends, his confessor, and his director tried in vain to tell
him that there was nothing to fear, and that his anxiety was only the
alarm of an imagination exhausted by abstract and metaphysical studies.
He would agree, . . . and then, within a quarter of an hour, he would
have dug for himself the terrifying precipice all over again.7

This anecdote was given more force in 1740 by the discovery of the Recueil
d’Utrecht, with its report of the report of the accident on the bridge at Neuilly
in a “Mémoire” on the life of Pascal which cited a M. Arnoul de Saint-Victor,
the curé of Chambourcy, who “said that he had learned from the Prior of Bar-
rillon, a friend of Mme Périer [Pascal’s sister], that M. Pascal a few years before
his death, going, according to his custom, on a feast day, for an outing across
the Neuilly Bridge, with some of his friends in a four or six horse carriage, the
two lead horses took the bit in their teeth at the place on the bridge where there
was no parapet, and falling into the water, the reins that attached them to the
rear broke in such a way that the carriage remained on the brink of the
precipice, which made M. Pascal resolve to cease his outings and live in com-
plete solitude.”8
These anecdotes took their place in the Pascal hagiography, to be read-
ily exploited by critics and supporters. Thus, as Jean Mesnard notes, Voltaire
accused Pascal of madness on the basis of the “relation of cause and effect” he
established “between the accident at the Neuilly Bridge and this curious illness
from which Pascal suffered,”9 while Condorcet in his eulogy of 1767 joined
both incidents together and linked them to Pascal’s conversion of 1654.10 And
it was perhaps yet another tradition, one that held that Pascal had in his ear-
lier life conceived of a public transport system for Paris, with carriages run-
ning along fixed routes at specified times, that helped to sustain this synthetic
myth of a philosopher of the void, scientist of the vacuum, practical inven-
tor, and celebrated recluse falling prey to the conjunction of his own fantasies
and carriage accidents.11 In this way three very separate pathologies—a void
to the side of the body, a fear of falling into the Seine, an interest in spatial
circulation—were by the end of the eighteenth century combined in a Pas-
calian myth.
Despite Voltaire’s scorn, Pascal remained a powerful source for reflecting

Constructing the Void from Pascal to Freud

on the void and especially for late eighteenth-century architects like Etienne-
Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, who were increasingly led to refor-
mulate the progressive ideal of Enlightenment space under the influence of
Boileau, Burke, and Rousseau. Pascal’s resistance to the open transparency of
rationalism was seen as a way of symbolically and affectively exploiting the
ambiguities of shadow and limit, remaining a sign of potential disturbance
beyond and within the apparently serene and stable structures of modern
urbanism.12 But it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that Pascal’s com-
posite myth was summoned up to authorize a new medical pathology. The doc-
tor Louis-François Lélut, in a communication to the Académie des Sciences
Morales in 1846,13 advanced the idea that Pascal’s second conversion stemmed
from a mental pathology precipitated by his accident. His diagnosis was only
the first of many to be repeated in different versions to the end of the century.14
By the 1860s, and despite the skepticism of Victor Cousin and Sainte-
Beuve, Pascal’s malady had become a commonplace of dinner conversation.
Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, on 2 September 1866, directly draw the com-
parison between Pascal’s vertigo and the new theories of neurosis: “Pascal, the
sublime depth of Pascal? And the saying of the doctor Moreau de Tours, ‘The
genius is a neurotic!’ There’s another showman of the abyss!”15 Edmond
twenty-three years later recalls that the old Alphonse Daudet was planning a
book on “suffering” (“la douleur”) with “a eulogy of morphine, a chapter on
the neurosis of Pascal, a chapter on the illness of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”
Daudet, Goncourt notes, had suggested the névrose of Pascal as a thesis subject
to his son Léon Daudet.16 This seemingly innocent proposal apparently
haunted the young Daudet (though he did not in fact pursue the research), who
recounted a nightmare on the subject to Goncourt ten days later. He had
dreamed, he said, that “Charcot brought him Pascal’s Pensées, and at the same
time showed him inside the brain of the great man, that he had with him the
cells in which these thoughts had lived, cells absolutely empty and closely re-
sembling the honeycombs of a dried-up hive.”17 Perhaps it was Alphonse
Daudet himself who was haunted by Pascal, for in December of the next year,
discussing the fear of mirrors in Georges Rodenbach’s Le règne du silence
(1891), where the author recalls the popular tradition in which the devil some-
times makes his face known, Goncourt relates: “One of us asked dreamily if

20 21
the dead did not leave their image behind, returning at certain hours of the day.
Horror Vacui

And Daudet compared the living life of this silent thing to the living silence of
Pascal’s stars.”18
It was Maurice Barrès, in his 1909 lecture on behalf of his Ligues des Pa-
triotes, who drew together all the Pascalian myths into a narrative of an inter-
nally developed illness out of which developed a thinker who, with singular
heroism in Barrès’s terms, broke with the prevailing spirituality of the church
and philosophy. Struck by the fact that, coming from a solid and even stolid
bourgeois and religious upbringing, surrounded by the comforts of dwellings
and family, Pascal nevertheless “lived in anguish,” he undertook an enquiry
into the roots of his suffering, his angoisse and his douleur. Rejecting out of
hand theories of poverty, worldly excess, or the misfortunes of his age, Barrès
concluded that “the suffering of Pascal did not come from outside” but from
“a great interior tragedy.” Pascal had, he pointed out, been “tortured by physi-
cal pain from infancy until his death”; it was an illness that changed its nature
all the time—a malady “subject to change” as Pascal himself noted. “At the age
of a year he fell into a decline and exhibited phobias. He could not look at wa-
ter without flying into a great rage. He could not see his father and his mother
one after the other without crying and struggling violently.”19 From the age of
eighteen, his sister recounted, he suffered every day: only able to drink hot wa-
ter, drop by drop; paralyzed from the waist down, walking with the help of
crutches; his lower limbs always cold; and, “it is said, but this is not certain, that
beginning in 1654 he always thought there was an abyss on his left side.” In his
later years he could neither talk, read, nor work and suffered convulsions and
headaches, dying at the age of thirty-nine. Descartes, Barrès recounted, rec-
ommended bed rest and soup: “this is today,” Barrès concluded, “the classic
treatment of neurasthenics.”20 Such infirmities, added to the “rigor and inten-
sity of his thought,” led, Barrès thought, to the “sublime unhappiness,” the
“anguish” of the philosopher. Not the “vertigo” of a philosopher who despair-
ingly finds a “Christian” solution to his problems, but rather a scientific spirit,
beset by phobias, who searches for the truth of phenomena with a sense of the
powerlessness of science to discover the essential secret of the universe, a
philosopher who, so to speak, makes a virtue out of his suffering: hence, for
Barrès, the fear of “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.”21
Here, for Barrès, is the one outside influence that he admits as formative

Constructing the Void from Pascal to Freud

for Pascal’s thought: that of space and its earthly precipitate, architecture. In
nostalgic pilgrimages, recounted in articles published in the Echo de Paris in
1900 and reprinted in L’angoisse de Pascal, the conservative ideologue of la pa-
trimoine visits the birthplace, family houses, and haunts of Pascal, as if to re-
capture the essence of his character through a metonymy, the rooted stones
juxtaposed to the metaphysical philosophy. But in searching for roots, Barrès
not unexpectedly finds ruins: at Clermont-Ferrand, the birthplace of Pascal is
about to be demolished: “Already a wing of the building has no roof; the poor
rooms where the Pascals lived in so noble an atmosphere of order, discipline
gape open, naked and soiled with that abjection characteristic of disembow-
eled apartments.”22 The theoretical void has been repeated by the architectural:
the inhabitants of Clermont are, Barrès proposes, no less culpable in this than
those of Paris “who ferociously destroy every historical vestige, to the point that
Paris . . . is perhaps of all towns in France the most empty of memories.” For
Barrès, “we form an attachment to the places where genius has lived insofar as
they form it and help us understand it.”23 The recuperation of memory, the en-
counter with the traces of history, is sought again in Barrès’s pilgrimage to the
Château de Bien-Assis, the seat of the Périer family in the countryside outside
of Clermont. Among the half-ruined walls, in the light of the setting sun, Bar-
rès succeeds in capturing what for him is the spirit of the Port-Royal philoso-
pher, not in the town but on the soil of a long-established manor.
Such nostalgia for a “deep France” is to be expected from Barrès; more
surprising is his revelation of the true place of Pascalian understanding, situ-
ated precisely on the right bank of the Seine, the scene of his purported acci-
dent, and the “material setting” of his thought. This was a “sacred site,” stated
Barrès, one that should be accorded its real importance in the explanation of
Pascal’s 1654 conversion, that “magnificent hallucination” that was apparently
so “fertile.” “We are authorized to understand,” he concluded, “how, under the
influence of a shock, parts of ourselves enter into activity, elaborate images and
feelings that we do not know we harbor in our innermost recesses.”24 Pascal’s
near-fall into the Seine, then, loosens the replis or folds of the psyche; spatial
phobia, here, would be the release of images of the void, providing the means
for its spiritual comprehension.

22 23
Whether or not Pascal’s second conversion in 1654 was precipitated or
Horror Vacui

reinforced by the celebrated accident, it is significant that some four years later
he was to write the fragment “De l’esprit géométrique,” among other questions
an examination of the geometrical understanding of the void.25 In this brief
essay Pascal pressed the theory of perspective to the limits, in an introduction
intended for a textbook for the Port-Royal “petites écoles.” As Hubert Damisch
notes, it was Pascal who drew the conclusion that because “a space can be infi-
nitely extended, . . . it can be infinitely reduced.”26 To illustrate the “paradox”
of these two infinities, Pascal gave the example of a ship endlessly drawing near
to the vanishing point but never reaching it, thus anticipating the theorem of
Desargues whereby infinity would be inscribed within the finite, contained
“within a point,” a basic postulate of projective geometry. But whether or not
the meeting of parallel lines at infinity would be geometrically verifiable, the
“obscurity,” as Descartes called it, remained: the ship endlessly disappearing to-
ward the horizon, the horizon point endlessly rising, the ship infinitely close to,
and infinitely far from, infinity.27 Here geometrical theory coincides almost too
neatly with the interlocking relations of agoraphobic and claustrophobic space,
diagnosed by the doctors who, in the 1870s, found in Pascal their most cele-
brated patient.