There is no crazier way ...

“There is no crazier way to pass the time than waiting for some critter to commit suicide and hang himself from a hook.”

Words Anna Sinofzik
Photography George Brendan Ko

What Swiss psychoanalyst Paul Parin once said with regard to intellectual work also applies to another of his great passions, recreational fishing, in times of catch and release: “You do things you know won’t accomplish anything. But you do them anyway.” In his book Die Leidenschaft des Jägers (The Passion of the Hunter), which Parin wrote as an old man who had long traded physically more strenuous forms of hunting for fishing, he muses on repressed sex drives and eroticized drive hunts.

The founder of ethnopsychoanalysis tells the disconcerted reader that he first orgasmed while shooting a hazel grouse; how a similarly good feeling befell him decades later while catching a fat trout. In addition to writing autobiographical exploits that disclose a very good deal of debauchery, Parin’s book on hunting includes a fishing anecdote experienced by former Tito partisan and later deserter Milovan Djilas, who once interrupted an important political mission to catch a few salmonids on the shores of Lake Biograd in Montenegro.

On behalf of the communist party of the former Yugoslavia, the thirty-year-old Djilas travels through his homeland in the early 1940s, which is then administered by the Italian occupying power following the Balkan campaigns. As a confidant of Josip Broz Tito, Djilas is tasked with preventing the uprising of the Montenegrin people from escalating into an uncontrolled national revolution. Accordingly, his mission has the utmost urgency. Nevertheless, along the way he takes a timeout to pursue a childhood passion — trout fishing. Djilas’ comrade and companion, a farmer’s son named Ilija, shows no understanding at first: “For nothing, we jeopardize the important mission,” he grumbles. “There’s no crazier way to pass the time than waiting for some critter to commit suicide and hang himself from a hook.”

The fascination for fishing is as far from Ilija as it is from the author of this text. After a while on the lakefront, however, he too is gripped by hunting fever and soon feels like Djilas, feels “as if the moment the first fish bites means the fulfilment of years of unfulfilled, inextinguishable longing, as sweet and fateful as life itself.” Before they continue their mission, the two stay on the shore for a while, suppressing their own impatience and waiting for the twitching of the rod, without really knowing why. They took sufficient provisions and, on the horizon, can already see the occupiers’ policemen approaching. Yet, they linger much longer than reasonable.

“The greatest danger to the existence of all hunting adventures is reason,” writes Paul Parin, who himself was for a time a medic in the Tito-led People’s Liberation Army. Like many anglers, he appreciated that “in fishing you can forget all the rest of the world.” But he also emphasized that it is not least one’s own relationship to that world that leads one to hold out the fatal hook for no good reason in the first place; that any fascination with hunting stemmed from repressed desires. As evolutionary theory tells us, every hunting instinct is predisposition. To be willing to prey on other living beings and thus contribute to the continuation of our own species, a certain degree of aggressiveness is innate in all of us. But the drive to kill is hardly compatible with current moral concepts. To counteract perceived inadequacies and discrepancies between subliminal desires and the ego ideal, the former are sublimated into socially accepted actions and activities. In the Freudian sense, sublimation is the most mature type of all mental defense mechanisms and the motor of all cultural development and advancements.

The etymology speaks for itself, the Latin sublimis translates to sublime, high, lofty, exalted. According to Freud, sublimation is based on constructive and creative conversion, it transforms the so-called primitive into the highly respected. Along these lines, it also serves us to elevate all sorts of morally problematic instincts and desires into forms of art. From stamp collecting to the chase for wealth and success, sublimations of the hunting instinct come in all sorts of guises. Sport in its increasingly differentiated varieties suggests itself as a particularly evident and effective substitution. While brutal martial arts such as boxing or wrestling are rather weakly sublimated, strategic-tactical disciplines have reached a relatively high sublimation level. The more sublimated and abstract the aggressive or amoral tendency is when present in a particular “sport”, the higher its social acceptance — its prestige, psychoanalysts argue. The game of chess, for example, transmutes all warlike intentions into shrewd mental stratagems. While frequently dismissed as niche expertise, mastery of the game’s manoeuvres neither hurts nor offends anyone and is thus compatible with most moral codes.

In contrast with original forms, which served the procurement of food, hunting itself is long considered a sport — albeit a highly controversial one. Of all its varieties, angling is considered comparatively peaceful and amongst all its forms, it is supposedly fly fishing that is most reconcilable with a demanding ego ideal. At least according to Jürgen Körner, another hunting-enthusiast cum psychoanalyst. Körner describes his passion less vigorously than Paul Parin. As an avid fly fisherman, he is certainly not unbiased when he elevates his personal hobby to the highest and most morally acceptable form of fishing. In a recent essay, he attempts a hierarchization of fishing methods, listing dynamite fishing as the lowest, least sublimated one. Dynamite fishers throw hand grenades into the water and simply skim off all dead fish that float to the surface after detonation. It’s pretty evident that patience, considered a virtue by more fastidious fishermen, is hardly required in dynamite fishing. Another practice that scores low in Körner’s hierarchy is eel spearing, where a large fork with broad, serrated tines is stabbed indiscriminately into the mud. With a little luck the fisherman captures an unsuspecting eel, as the serpentine fish like to rest in low waters or muddy areas during winter. A case of malice murder, if you will.

Widely prohibited, morally absolutely reprehensible and unthinkable as a recreational activity, fishing methods like these are brutally purposive. Dynamite fishing, for example, is used today only in times of war marked by hunger and need. With a view to the sublimation level, however, Körner is first concerned with how the angler “forges his relationship with the fish”: while dynamite fishers and eel spearers give the animal just as little a chance as large cutters with huge nets catching all aquatic life, “the angler throws out his rod and hopes that a fish will find interest in his bait and bite. It doesn’t have to, and often it doesn’t, and the angler returns home with an empty basket. Compared to other hunters and fishermen, he can morally redeem himself by crediting the fish with having decided to bite. And the more successfully he anthropomorphizes the animal, the better he can soothe his conscience.” The author of this text is reminded of the anecdote from Montenegro: “I couldn’t bring myself to let them go; my dear little fish would have been too unhappy then,” says Milovan Djilas, standing on the shore of Lake Biograd. “Don’t worry, you little fools, I’ll catch you one by one.” When his lure is lost, he cuts out the liver of a caught trout to use it instead. The modern fly fisherman would frown at the idea and proudly sift through his ever-expanding arsenal of artfully tied artificial insects.

Körner describes the “evolution” from more primitive forms of angling up to the “high art of fly fishing” as a sublimation process in its own right. The satisfaction of needs (catching fish in order to eat them) has been transformed into a more sophisticated form, the analyst argues, pointing to the subtle distinctions much like Bordieu might — between supposedly peaceful anglers: “There are those who sit patiently on folding chairs on the shore of a lake and wait for a carp to carry off the boiled potato. Others who drag flashing, hooked artificial lures through a lake or river, hoping to fool a fish into biting. Again others head out into the Baltic Sea in large groups, letting a heavy piece of sheet metal make delightful leaps in the depths. But some, relatively few, wade through flowing waters and try to outwit a trout or grayling with fake insects carefully crafted from deer hair to be tied around fishhooks.” This self-proclaimed elite group of anglers travels picturesque lakelands, catches only the finest fish and likes to stay among its own kind. Yet, since Robert Redford turned Norman Maclean’s novel A River Runs Through It into a blockbuster in the early nineties, the “relatively few” has become quite a few more.

Paul Parin reflected on the moment when Redford’s movie first opened the fly fishing niche to a wider set. Apparently, it resulted in “hundreds of thousands, more men than women, falling into the same passion and learning to fish with an artificial fly. The hobby of a few misfits has become a cultural phenomenon that has spread across the continent and throughout the Western world; not just a sport, a philosophy of life or ideology has, in less than thirty years, made an archaic-looking breach in the closed structure of the world of money, production and consumption.”

In addition to the psyche of the individual, Parin was most interested in processes that shape society and culture. Nearly three decades after Robert Redfordʼs film hit theaters and made fly fishing trendy, a new generation is taking a liking to it. “Fly Fishing Is the New Bird-Watching,” the New York Times proclaimed around two years ago. For some of the same reasons Millennials have recently taken off on ornithological excursions, “the sport, long dominated by old white men, is gaining popularity among a younger group. For those who can afford the leisure time and rudimentary equipment, it offers a reason to be outdoors, (...) a built-in community, an opportunity for creative expression, and a lifetime of niche knowledge.”

As passionate fly fishers like Körner know, rudimentary equipment is hardly sufficient for most in the long run: The fly fisherman’s gear and apparel is expensive, he warns, and there is quite some to own. Waders, vests with many pockets for specific utensils, tackle boxes, creels, flies, fly-tying tools, and of course: rods and reels. “Graphite rods cost as little as $30 but classic bamboo rods can cost thousands”, the New York Times informs. Perhaps the best evidence yet of the discipline’s commercialization was launched back in the late noughties: Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel Fly Fishing Rod for $20,000. The fashion designer gave one to Emma Watson for her eighteenth birthday.

According to the tabloids, the actress was pretty thrilled with the gift: “It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It’s actually my dad who’s the fly fisher in the family but what was so sweet was that Karl had obviously done some research and saw that I’d once donated to the Wild Trout Trust or something similar and thought this was something I would love.”

This causal chain may require a brief explanation: Many anglers like to claim that they are conservationists, as they keep an eye on the environment and make sure that native species are not threatened by other animals. The idea is part of the supposed idyll of the fly fishing world, where a whole branch of tourism has emerged to cater to the demands of the next generation of high flying anglers. The look of the new boutique hotels near the shore is close to nature, basic, doubling down on authenticity instead of bling. Fly anglers who are not vegetarian nor vegan, nor otherwise bound by the code of catch and release, see their favorite pastime as an extension of the farm-to-table movement,” the New York Times notes. But in fact, many measure and photograph their catch, then throw it back into the water.

It is typical of sublimation processes that evaluation criteria increasingly shift from pure effectiveness to performance, writes Jürgen Körner. The elitist consciousness of fly fishers is based not merely on their material efforts and expenses or on the beauty of the waters they visit, nor only on the desirability of the noble, increasingly rare fish they pursue, but above all “on the aesthetics and artistry they ascribe to their actions.” Looking at fly fishing, the shift away from effectiveness is most evidently expressed in the focus on refined casting techniques and elaborate fly tying, for which many spend more time than on the actual fishing act. But also in the broad acceptance of “catch and release”. 

In many countries, fly fishermen have successfully campaigned against a general ban on the method. As Körner notes, for them “it is not so important to bring home caught fish. Some even use barbless hooks exclusively for fly tying, so that the fish suffer little injury before being put back. Of course, this practice lowers the success rate, but that doesn’t get in the way of the sublimation idea — rather the opposite.” Advocates of catch and release point to dramatically reduced fish populations. But instead of investing their time in more effective conservation projects, they turn fishing into a game of cat-and-mouse. Fish to be released are first treated gently, carefully freed on so-called unhooking mats and released back into the water, sometimes to be caught again the same day.

“Those who hunt want to kill. Hunting without murder would be an oxymoron, a concept that cancels itself out,” writes Paul Parin, who remained an enthusiastic fly fisherman until old age: “Trout fishing with the artificial fly — casting — has replaced my hunting fever. One addictive passion has been imperceptibly replaced by another.” He didn’t say it sublimated it. Maybe because he knew that cultural development does not necessarily mean improvement, at least not in moral terms. “Maclean states unequivocally: Trout fishing is not a sport, is not the intrusion of archaic customs, but a sacred ritual. Modern man suspects that in the process he is becoming a murderer. The seduction comes from the greed to be able to kill with impunity, (...) far from progress and technology, and to enjoy it.” To kill time, too, perhaps, which is all too often working against us, dwindling away, like fish numbers in many waters.

Obviously, the widespread notion of angling as a contemplative timeout goes back not only to the tranquility of remote lakelands, but also to the immersive quality of the activity per se, to the way it can allegedly draw you in mentally and make you tune into an uncanny parallel universe. Underwater, which ticks quite differently, is a foreign notion and will remain forever so to all of us land-dwellers. For this reason, the trope of fishing in murky waters is frequently used as a metaphor to describe the psychoanalytical project, which has the analysand wade through a stream of associations to catch a fleeting moment now and then, but requires such a degree of patience that it is often unclear whether it is worthwhile. Among the most difficult and tedious things in psychoanalysis is so-called “containing”, the development of the ability to bear tensions in order to raise oneʼs tolerance for ambiguity.

“The struggle between good and evil is part of human existence, more precisely: human existence itself,” once expressed Milovan Djilas, who, not long after his fishing foray and partisan mission in Montenegro, became known as a pacifist, poet, and Josip Broz Tito’s harshest critic. “The political and social commitment that defined Djilas’ life was at odds with his passion for catching and killing trout,” Paul Parin remarks in his hunting book. As a civilized citizen, the psychoanalyst likewise rejected any kind of cruelty, was an anti-fascist, a socialist, a left-wing intellectual publicist — and at the same time, as he put it, “always a murderous hunter, a killer”.

The concept of sublimation surely suffers from its own contradictions and in some cases, the process that Freud understood as a catalyst of creative and cultural advancement appears instead to bring about new perversions, or as an attempt to explain them (away). The worse we get at enduring contradictions, it seems, the more artful our lures and lifestyles become.



References —

Paul Parin, Die Leidenschaft des Jägers
Hamburg (Europäische Verlagsanstalt)
2009

Jürgen Körner, Fliegenfischen: Der edle Flug der kleinen Mücke
in: Forum der Psychoanalyse
Heidelberg (Springer Medizin Verlag)
June 2021

Alexandra Marvar, Fly Fishing Is the New Bird-Watching
in: The New York Times
New York
October 14, 2019