Dostoevskian character has at least three layers. On the top layer is the announced motive: Raskolnikov, say, proposes several justifications for his murder of the old woman. The second layer involves unconscious motivation, those strange inversions wherein love turns into hate and guilt expresses itself as poisonous, sickly love. Thus Raskolnikov's mad need to confess his crime to the police and to Sonia the prostitute presages Freud's comment on the action of the superego: 'In many criminals,' writes Freud, 'especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive.' Or in the case of Fyodor Karamazov and his desire to punish the neighbour to whom he was once nasty, you could say that guilt is causing him, unconsciously, to be horrible to his neighbour; his behaviour recalls the quip— both funny and deadly serious—of the Israeli psychoanalyst who remarked that the Germans would never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust. [...]

Thus Raskolnikov's mad need to confess his crime to the police and to Sonia the prostitute, presages Freud's comment on the action of the supergo