Freud Versus Witt Gen Stein

8/6/2019 Freud Versus Witt Gen Stein

1/24

Making the Unconscious Conscious: Wittgensteinversus Freud

Frank Cioffi

Received: 5 January 2009 /Accepted: 9 February 2009 / Published online: 16 June 2009

# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract The common assimilation of Wittgenstein s philosophical procedure toFreud s psychoanalytic method is a mistake. The concurrence of Freudiananalysands is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of their unconsciousthoughts having been detected. There are several sources of this error. One is theequivocal role Freud assign the patient s recognition of the correctness of hisinterpretation and in particular the part played by paradoxical reminiscence :another, the surreptitious banalisation of Freud s procedure by followers thereinvention of psychoanalysis as a phenomenological enterprise; still another, theappeal of the activity of giving fuller expression to one s tantalisingly vague andinexplicit thoughts and suspicions. This activity has its own intrinsic value though it ought not to be permitted to usurp the place of empirical investigation, as futile asthis often is. And yet both plausible hypotheses and felicitous further descriptions must yield in desirability to the attainment of a state of reconciliation to the personone has become however this was caused and whatever this is suspected to be.

Keywords The unconscious . Self-knowledge . Wittgenstein . Freud

Part One

Why Wittgenstein s Assimilation of Freud s Procedure to his Own is a Banalisationof Psychoanalysis

It may come as news to some of Wittgenstein s commentators that Wittgenstein snotion of making the unconscious conscious is to be opposed to Freud s since they

have taken them as equivalent and on what appears to be Wittgenstein s own

Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588DOI 10.1007/s11406-009-9201-9

F. Cioffi ( * )University of Kent at Canterbury,Frank Cioffi, 6 ST. Dunstans Terrace, Canterbury, Kent CT2 8AX, UK e-mail: [email protected]


2/24

authority (Baker 2004 , 207). But not only is Wittgenstein s procedure antithetical toFreud s, Wittgenstein on several occasion shows an awareness of this. And yet in hisWittgenstein Dictionary Glock observes that among the similarities Wittgensteindetected between his philosophical procedure and psychoanalysis was that both try

to bring out a patient s repressed worries and that the ultimate standard for articulating these worries is that the patient should recognize them (1996 , 111).

The view that the analysand s agreement is a requirement for the correctness of a psychoanalytic interpretation imputing unconscious thoughts, impulses, aims etc isa banalisation of Freud s procedure. In dubbing Wittgenstein s account of Freud a banalisation , I am extending the formula of the classical philologist, SebastianTimpanaro: substitution of a simpler expression for a more difficult one (1976 ,35) beyond words and word order to concepts. When, following Wittgenstein sSchlick-Diktat remarks, his expositors assimilated his procedure of philosophical

enlightenment to Freud s making the unconscious conscious , they replaced Freud scomplex and esoteric notion of the unconscious by a simpler and more familiar one.The authentic non-banalised version, from which Wittgenstein s must be distin-guished, is stated clearly (if somewhat too boldly, ignoring Freud s equivocations) by D. H. Lawrence in the second chapter of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious .Lawrence rejects the terms preconscious and subconscious as synonyms for unconscious because both these terms would imply a sort of nascent conscious-ness, the shadowy half consciousness which precedes mental realisation ... By hisunconscious (Freud) intends no such thing. (1961 , 209)

Wittgenstein shows his awareness of the antagonism between his procedure andFreud s in, among other places, the third of the aesthetic lectures where he rebukesFreud for advancing a hypothesis as to the meaning of a patient s dream instead of confining himself to assisting her in expressing it more adequately (LC 23). In thelight of remarks like these, we must construe Wittgenstein when he likens Freud s procedure to his own as confining this likeness to those occasions on which Freudgave the patient s say-so a role in the confirmation of the interpretation proffered.This reduces the appearance of contradiction between their respective procedures but they nevertheless remain markedly disparate even where both confer eventualintrospectibility on the content of an interpretation.

In those remarks in which Wittgenstein describes Freud s interpretations asattempts to recapitulate unconscious thoughts, which the analysand must recognizeas his own, Wittgenstein was expressing a view of Freud, which several expositorsof Freud share. But this account is profoundly revisionist sometimes candidly,sometimes surreptitiously so. One such revisionist account describes Freud sinterpretations as focusing utterances , making conscious something which has been vaguely known , suspected or felt , or something which is just outside the focus range of consciousness (Jones, 1968 , 95).

The most succinct way of demonstrating the erroneousness of this conception isto invoke the phenomenon which Freud put forward on several occasions as paradigmatic of the operation of the unconscious post-hypnotic compliance.Although the subject of a post-hypnotic order can be induced to recollect theoccasion on which the order was given, the conviction that his apparentlyinexplicable act was in compliance with an hypnotic suggestion does not at alldepend on this recollection. It is credited because, as Freud himself points out, the

566 Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588


3/24

implantation of the order was witnessed. The endorsement of the subject addsnothing.

I want to ask not only why this mischaracterization of psychoanalysis came about but also to what extent it may nevertheless be desirable to bring the practice of

psychoanalysis into line with the Diktat-Wittgensteinian and revisionist miscon-ception of it. What kind of thing had Wittgenstein in mind when he compared his procedure to Freud s? There is a hint in lecture three of the Lectures and Conversations : someone says (as we often say in philosophy) I will tell youwhat is at the back of your mind: Oh yes. Quite so. The criterion for it being at the back of your mind is that when I tell you, you agree. (LC 18)

In Moore s notes, Wittgenstein described Freud as doing what aesthetics does and goes on to describe explanation in aesthetics as the giving of further descriptions rather than causal hypotheses (Moore 1966 , 308). What might be

some philosophical candidates for Wittgensteinian further description ? These areremarks that I can imagine a Wittgensteinian addressing to an interlocutor:

You think of someone else s toothache as hidden from you like the decay inthe tooth which is producing it You think of thought as gaseous and lighter than air You think of meaning someone as like walking up to him; or as like pointingwith your mind instead of your finger. You are puzzled as to how to conceive the mind when it thinks because you arelooking for something which stands to thinking as the hand to writing or themouth to speaking. When you say It is God s will you really mean this must be accepted and not struggled against . When you ask for a demonstration that there is value in the world what youreally want is the will to pursue it.

Anyone who recalls the kind of interpretation Freud gives his patients willrecognize how epistemically unlike they are to the philosophical ones Wittgensteinhad in mind (except on those occasions when Freud engages in a banalised versionof his usual and distinctive practice and plays the role of father confessor).Analysands may find gratification in being proffered interpretations which formulatemore precisely or felicitously what they had at the back of their minds but this is not what Freud took himself to be doing when he made the unconscious conscious. 1

Further Descriptions Versus Hypotheses

What does Wittgenstein mean by further description? Moore reports Wittgensteinas saying that reasons in aesthetics are of the nature of further descriptions (1966 ,208) Though it is in some ways infelicitous to refer to the reasons for an aesthetic

1 Here is one of Freud s accounts of how the unconscious may become accessible: certain practices of mystics may succeed in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, so that for example, the perceptual system becomes able to grasp relations in the deeper layers of the ego and theid which would otherwise be inaccessible to it (1933 New Introductory Lectures Anatomy of the MentalPersonality ). This seems remote from Wittgenstein s correct expression of feeling .

Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588 567567


4/24

judgment as a further description, it is clear enough what Wittgenstein means. What Wittgenstein has centrally in mind is what he elsewhere describes as the predicament of being intrigued and wanting to describe (LC 37).

The contrast between further descriptions and hypotheses emerges clearly in some

remarks on Freudian dream interpretation in the third of the lectures on psychologyand aesthetics, where among Wittgenstein s objections to Freud s dealings withdreams is that he advanced hypotheses concerning the source of the dream imageswhen he ought to have confined himself to soliciting the dreamer s supplementaryimpression of these images. I have abridged the remarks so as to give prominence tothis component in his objections:

Freud does something which seems to me immensely wrong. He gives what hecalls an interpretation of dreams ... A patient, after saying that she had had a beautiful dream, described a dream in which she descended from a height sawflowers and shrubs, broke off the branch of a tree etc. Freud shows relations between the dream, the dream images and certain objects of a sexual nature ...(LC 23 24)

In Freud s account of this dream ( 1900 ) we have both hypotheses and further descriptions. But the further descriptions are the dreamer s and the hypotheses areFreud s. Let us begin with the flowering branch. In the dream it is covered with redcamellia-like flowers. The flowering branch makes the dreamer think of the angelholding a lily spray in pictures of the Annunciation and of girls in white robes

walking in Corpus Christi processions, when the streets are decorated with green branches. These constitute the dreamer s further descriptions. Freud writes thesame branch which was carried like a lily was at the same time an allusion to Marguerite Gautier, the courtesan-heroine of Dumas play La Dame aux camelias ,who wore a red camellia when she was menstruating and a white one when she wasnot. These are Freud s hypotheses. In the case of the flowery dream, the unconscious pre-existing image which became the flowering branch of the manifest dream was a phallus, and the pre-existent image which became the camellias it sprouted, was theflowers worn by La Dame aux camelias in Dumas play, whose colour indicatedwhether she was menstruating.

But Freud did sometimes give a banalised account of his own method. Freud saccount of the manner in which contents formerly unconscious are made conscious tothe patient has generated two distinct construals. One, that it is just a matter of thesubject s eventual conviction that his condition error, symptom, dream image etc. isonly compellingly explained by assuming the truth of the interpretation proposed. Theother, that when the repression is lifted the dreamer will experience, i.e., not merelyconcede but r ecognize , the operation of the motive (or ideation or cerebration) that theinterpretation imputes to him. Which of these views is centrally psychoanalytic?

How did Freud himself think his interpretations were to be validated? Freudmakes one suggestion as to how in the last chapter of the Studies on Hysteria whenhe speaks of thoughts which the patient never remembers though he admits that thecontext calls for them inexorably (1895 , 272). So the patient can only acquiesce inwhat the analyst has shown to be so. But in the same work he asks a patient, whoacknowledges that she was in love with her employer, why she had not told Freudearlier and when she replies that she didn t know or didn t want to know but

568 Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588


5/24

wanted to drive it out of my head and not think of it again , Freud comments: Ihave never managed to give a better descriptions of the strange state of mind inwhich one knows and does not know a thing at the same time (1895 , 117 n.1). So it was not just a matter of what the context called for inexorably but of what the

patient could be brought to recall and recognize. The version making theunconscious conscious which invokes recognition by the patient is what I havetermed a banalisation. It is not, and given the nature of the interpretations Freudnormally proffers could not be, Freud s considered view.

The conception of unconscious thoughts as thoughts that are merely schematicand unthematised or consciously held at bay is unequivocally rejected in a work of 1905 where Freud writes: opponents of the unconscious ... had never realised theidea that the unconscious is something which we do not know but which we areobliged by compelling inferences to supply; they had understood it as something

capable of being conscious but which was not being thought of at the moment,which didn t occupy the focal point of attention (1905 , 162). And in the first chapter of The Ego and the Id, Freud writes: The thought which was previouslyunnoticed is not recognized by consciousness but often seems entirely alien ; hegoes on to complain of the deplorable tactic of seeking refuge from the unconsciousin what is unnoticed or scarcely noticed (1923 , 16 n. 1).

On the other hand in the Introductory Lectures we have: Well what do you do if Imake an unintelligible utterance to you? You question me, is that not so? Whyshould we not do the same thing to the dreamer question him as to what his dream

means?

(1916

17, 100). And yet when Joseph Wortis objected to one of Freudsinterpretations that he did not in the least feel that way he was accused of

disbelieving in the unconscious (Wortis 1963 , 102 3). Otto Fenichel in a review of Karen Horney berates her for banalising Freud since by the unconscious, Horneymeans not clearly conscious whereas Freud means that of which the subject knowsnothing whatsoever (1940 , 115). Freud s making the unconscious conscious is not Wittgenstein s formulating the correct expression of feeling.

When Freud speaks of making the unconscious conscious, thus producing a patient s sense of revelation as to the meaning of his symptoms or dreams, the patient srecognition cannot be assimilated to that of Wittgenstein s philosophical interlocutor recognizing the source of a philosophical misconception. The patient s post-interpretative experience is not the ground for the analyst s conviction that hisinterpretation is correct, nor is it required before he can conclude that it is correct.

There are several grounds for the failure of the analogy between the philosophicmethod Wittgenstein recommends and the role of the patient s agreement in Freud s psychoanalysis. In the first place many of the phenomena Freud purports to account for in his interpretations are not such that they could be confirmed or disconfirmed by the patient s agreement. Let us suppose that one of Freud s patients actually said Now I know why my head aches: I displaced my wish to be deflowered upwardsand transformed hymeneal pain into cranial pain . Would we credit it on her say-so? Nor would her inability to confirm it demonstrate that Freud must be mistaken.

Wittgenstein finds an analogy between his method and that of psychoanalysis inthat a simile operating in the unconscious can be made harmless by beingarticulated (Diktat fr Schlick 1932 quoted by Baker 2004 , 207). The similes of whose influence Wittgenstein persuades his philosophical interlocutors are not like

Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588 569569


6/24


7/24

1966 , 309). But condensation as it occurs in Freud s interpretation of his dream is aninference not a further description , however well-founded it might be. 2

The Concept of Paradoxical Reminiscence and Paradoxical Recognition

Paradoxical reminiscence is my term for the remembering of repressed material,which had always been in a state of repression and thus never experienced. Freud smost explicit account of paradoxical reminiscence occurs in a paper of 1914 inwhich he says it particularly often happens that something is remembered whichnever could have been forgotten because it was never at any time noticed, never was conscious (1914 , 149). (Wittgenstein s Blue Book reference to the discoveryof conscious thoughts which were unconscious may be an allusion to paradoxicalreminiscence [BB 57].)

The obvious objection to conferring on the patient the power to validate theanalyst s interpretation when this pertained to matters which had never beenconscious was made by Sartre in Being and Nothingness : how could he compare it to his present state since that is out of reach, and since he never had any knowledgeof it? (1969 , 574). Sartre here was imputing to Freud the notion of paradoxicalreminiscence and objecting to its coherence. Alfred North Whitehead on the other hand seems to find no difficulty with the notion. In Science and the Modern World,Whitehead took account of the phenomena I have called paradoxical reminiscence: We certainly do take account of things of which at the time we have no explicit

cognition. We can even have a cognitive memory of the taking account without having a contemporaneous cognition (1948 , 67).Though Freud only intermittently invokes the patient s recognition of an

unconscious which was never conscious he still leaves it unclear whether when hedoes not, the thoughts Freud imputes to the patient are accepted because the context calls for them inexorably (1895 , 272) or because they are recognised as those whichthey remember trying to drive out of their heads ( 1895 , 117 n.1)?

Some commentators on the unconscious are so intent on being celebratory that they leave us unclear as to the epistemic nature of the discovery they are celebrating.I have argued elsewhere that this fuzziness may not be entirely disinterested. Thegravitational pull of the father confessor model and of the desire to make obscureintimations more explicit may be resisted in spite of their welcome familiarity because the assumption that our repressed sexual and egoistic impulses are deeplyunconscious and alien is one which promises to spare us a lot of squirming andwriggling. What the unbanalised notion of the deep unconscious accomplishes, with

2 At least one analyst has noticed this. Donald Spence in a review of Schafer s A New Language for

Psychoanalysis , quoted Schafer as to the analyst s need to invoke some unseen mechanism when the patient is not ready to acknowledge his own responsibility. Spence illustrates the way in which Schafer shalf-hearted revisionism challenges the underlying analytic contract by citing the terms in which hedescribes a patient: Unfailingly, though still apprehensively, she avoids remembering those events of her childhood to which she reacted in a traumatized fashion . Spence comments: Note the use of the verb avoid . Does Schafer mean that the patient has made a conscious decision not to remember, and that oncethe avoidance is pointed out, it will be corrected? Probably not; but if he holds with a dynamicunconscious, he cannot turn round and hold the patient s responsible. (1976 ).

Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588 571571


8/24

our connivance, is a species of exorcism, which takes the sting out of our shameful perverse and vindictive fantasising by banishing it to a realm of which we areinnocently oblivious (Cioffi 2004 , 376 81).

How then, does Freud make the unconscious conscious? One of the notions that

needs addressing is that of the inner change which according to Freud must precede recognition of the unconscious content of the interpretation proffered beforeit can be, not merely accepted, but recognized as having occupied the patient s mind,at least peripherally, on some previous occasion. The notion of the inner change isintroduced in a passage on the two kinds of knowledge which the patient gains inanalysis or the two kinds of ignorance from which he suffered, one of which could be corrected by valid inference, the other not. (1916 17, 15) (This distinction seemsto be a variant on the familiar philosophical one between knowledge byacquaintance and knowledge by description.) The problem the notion of the second

kind of knowledge, the post inner change kind, raises is how one can haveknowledge by acquaintance of that with which one was never consciously acquainted; i.e., is paradoxical reminiscence intelligible?

Whatever view we take of this issue, the notion of paradoxical reminiscencedestroys any analogy between the corroborative experience of Freud s patients andthat of Wittgenstein s pupil-interlocutor. But there is a more general disanalogy.Even without the notion of paradoxical reminiscence the agreement of a patient cannot be assimilated to that of Wittgenstein s philosopher-pupil because the patient s recognition supervenes on an interlude of total unawareness unlike the

recognition accorded the misleading simile,at the back of his mind

, byWittgenstein s pupil.

Did Freud Sometimes Proffer Further Descriptions and thus Banalise his OwnDiscovery?

How can we tell whether in proffering a particular psychoanalytic interpretationFreud is advancing an account which he believes the patient is capable of directlyappreciating, i.e., verifying introspectively , or rather, one which the patient is onlycompelled by evidence to accept?

The Rat Man is obviously producing a further description when he explains hisviolation of the rule against leaving the couch by saying that he could not liecomfortably while heaping such filthy abuse on Freud and his family. It is lessobvious whether Freud was producing a rival further description or an hypothesiswhen he contradicted him by saying that his real reason was to put himself out of reach lest Freud fetch him a clip on the ear.

Freud tells us that the Rat Man s own account of his action of replacing a smallstone he had previously obsessively removed from a roadway on the implausibleground that it might overturn the carriage in which his fiance was shortly to travelwas a spurious rationalisation. The Rat Man had maintained that he replaced thestone because recognizing the irrationality of his action in removing it he wasdetermined to oppose his compulsions and weaken their power. For Freud it was a victory for his unconscious hatred of his fiancee and constituted a symbolicconsummation of this. It is difficult to see how other than as a hypothesis about strictly unconscious processes Freud s account is to be taken. Difficult but not

572 Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588


9/24

impossible. We need only imagine that the Rat Man s response to Freud s suggestionthat his motive was hostility was to recall at some point that it was with a feeling of what he now recognized as vengeful satisfaction that he replaced the stone. Not onlyhave we no grounds for thinking that this is how things went but in the case of other

of the Rat Man s compulsive symptoms, their unconscious roots are so elaborate that we could make no sense of their being at the back of the patient s mind waiting to besummoned to awareness by the analysts proffered interpretation ( 1909 passim).

On the other hand Dora s allusion to Frau K s beautiful white body is more likelyto have stood to her homoerotic feelings for Frau K as a thought to its further elaboration, i.e., a further description than as the conscious effect of an unconsciouserotic impulse. But for just this reason it is not a properly psychoanalytic interpretation.

How did Wittgenstein come to the erroneous conclusion that Freud s interpreta-tions were not hypotheses but were doing what aesthetics does , proffering further

descriptions? It arose in part through treating Freud s joke reductions as paradigmatic of Freudian interpretation whereas they are inassimilable to what isdistinctive in Freud s account of the meaning of dreams and symptoms.

Wittgenstein said of Freud s joke book that it was a good book for looking for philosophical mistakes . Here is an example of what he might have meant. This isFreud s energic formula for that subclass of laughables, which he calls humour : aneconomy in the expenditure of feeling (as contrasted with jokes, an economy in theexpenditure of repression or inhibition and the comic, an economy in theexpenditure of thought ). Freud gives as an example of what he means by economy

in the expenditure of feeling, a specimen of gallows humour

a man about to behanged on a Monday morning remarks, A fine way to start the week (1905 , 229).

Freud s energic analysis would thus run: When we are told a man is about to behanged we anticipate an occasion for feeling compassion but we get a quip insteadand so we are left with an unexpended amount of affect. Here the affect economisedis pity. Freud s philosophical mistake is to imply that it could have been somethingelse that his description of the condition of the psychic apparatus under circum-stances in which economy of affect occurs could have grounds independent of theaccount given by the person who laughed. If Freud were advancing a genuinehypothesis we would have no difficulty in imagining that he was mistaken and that the feeling economised was not pity but contempt, say. So Freud s theoretical,energic account is just the phenomenological fact jargonised and projected beneaththe appearances it purports to explain. Even if we could look forward to a time whena libido-meter or psychoanalytascope would enable us to determine what subterranean processes of cathexis and counter-cathexis were taking place whenwe laughed at a joke we would still need to have recourse to old-fashioned methodsof paraphrase to make clear to ourselves just what it was that we found amusing.Thus even when Freud s accounts of jokes are not mistaken they are explanatorilyredundant. They are further descriptions and not hypotheses. But it does not followthat therefore his interpretations of dreams or symptoms are equally so.

The Probative Value of the Patient s Endorsement

I have argued that a patient s recognition of his derepressed unconscious is unlike a philosopher s acknowledgement that his feelings have been correctly expressed

Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588 573573


10/24

because Freud s unconscious is extra-marginal not marginal , to employ WilliamJames s terms (1960 , 233 4). They are hypotheses as to what lies beyondconsciousness and not formulations of what might have lain at its periphery.

Adolf Grnbaum has a different objection to Freud s invocation of the patient s

say-so as a criterion of correctness than those I have invoked. He appears not tonotice the inappropriateness of agreement as a criterion given the nature of theinterpretations to be corroborated e.g. hysterical conversion. He appeals rather to thescepticism about first-person psychological explanation to which he thinks usentitled even when it is conscious motives, thoughts, and feelings etc, which are being invoked. He writes, Though the subject often does have direct and generallyreliable access to the individual content of his mental states he/she has onlyinferential access just like outside observers to such causal linkages as actuallyconnect some of his own mental states (Grnbaum 1985 , 279).

Isn t this a travesty of our mental lives? Has Grnbaum never tapped his foot tomusic? When Grnbaum scratches himself does he infer the relation between hisitching and his scratching? We can see why Pinocchio had to infer the connection between his lengthening nose and the lies he was telling. Is this how Grnbaumthinks he stands to his tapping foot?

Is the say-so of the subject as to the significance of an opaque action really asquestionable when it pertains to a conscious as to a formerly conscious but repressed thought? I read somewhere probably Macaulay that during the reignof George I, English Jacobites would express their subversive views by limping

whenever they toasted the Hanoverian King George. This would signal that their real loyalty was to James, thus: L stood for Louis 14 th at whose court James livedin exile, I stood for James (the Latin spelling) M for Mary of Modena his wife,and P for the Prince of Wales, their son. Would Grnbaum insist that in conferringthis significance on the perplexing accompaniment to their toast they were reallymaking an inference? Similarly with the Italian irredentists who expressed their hostility to Austrian rule by shouting Verdi! Verdi! at the performance of hisoperas, the secret subversive meaning being Vittorio Emmanuel re de Italia! Couldthey have been in error; could an observer been as well placed to construe their shouts?

Consider the scene of the boy crossing a field in the first chapter of Swallows and Amazons. His veerings and swoopings would puzzle an onlooker until he realisedthat the boy was imagining he was a sailboat responding to changes in the directionand force of the wind. Are we to credit that the boy was inferring the relation between the movement of his arms and his imagining himself a sailboat? In caseslike these there is no scope for the sceptical doubts that Grnbaum enjoins.

In his lecture on descriptions Wittgenstein alludes to the odd fact that wesometimes imitate someone else and recalled once walking down a street andthinking I am now walking exactly like Russell (LC 39). Although this hasanalogues in the psychoanalytic use of identification, its epistemic status is not comparable. For example we are told that the tablecloth lady of Introductory lectures17 and 18, in running from one room to another in which she enacted her ritual, wasidentifying with her husband s behaviour in running from his room to hers on their disastrous wedding night (Freud 1916 17). We can see why Grnbaum might findher agreement with this an insufficient ground for accepting it but there is no scope

574 Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588


11/24

for doubt in Wittgenstein s identification of the subject of his mimicry. The case for scepticism in the psychoanalytic case is quite other than Grnbaum takes it to be.

A colleague once confided that when feeling particularly inadequate he scratchedhimself like the Mifune character in Rashomon and felt somewhat better for it. Can

the right epistemic response to this be that though he knew he was scratchinghimself (Grnbaum s content ) he could only infer, like any outside observer that he was doing so in mimicry of Mifune (Grnbaum s causal linkage )? Mycolleague s remark about Mifune reminded me that if when seated at my desk overlooking the rooftops of Canterbury, I put my feet up and lean back in my chair,hands clasped behind my head, I became momentarily oblivious of the cosy chimney pots and became instead Raymond Chandler s Philip Marlowe pensively contem- plating the neon glow of the mean streets. Does imputing my momentary fantasy tomy posture involve me in a surreptitious inference? However we resolve this issue as

to when and why in everyday life the agreement of the subject certifies a conjectureas correct it can have no bearing on the validational problems raised by the Freudianexplanatory invocation of unconscious motives, impulses, thoughts etc.

The correct objection to the invocation of avowal in the Freudian cases of unconscious identification is that these cannot be assimilated to the everyday ones because the relation in which the analysand stands to the figure unconsciouslyidentified with differs epistemically from that in which the fantasisers in myexamples stood to Mifune and Philip Marlowe. In the case of the conscious mimicry,unlike that of the tablecloth lady, there was no interval of complete inaccessibility,

no false though truthful denial. The disanalogy precludes the assimilation of everyday psychological explanations to psychoanalytic ones. 3

The Reinvention of Psychoanalysis as a Phenomenological Enterprise: Freudas an Articulator of Worries

Wittgenstein s mistaken assimilation of Freud s procedure to his own may have been prompted by those occasions on which Freud apparently adopts a banalised versionof his own theory thus replacing unconscious states of affairs which exist independently of the patient s concurrence with those of which the patient wassubliminally aware and of whose truth his acknowledgement is constitutive. Thismisconstrual has some contemporary relevance for, alerted by Wittgenstein s

3 In Philip Roth s autobiography The Facts , when a taxi is taking the narrator to the morgue to identifyhis estranged wife s body, the cabbie comments on his buoyant demeanour and Roth suddenly becomesaware that he has been cheerily whistling. Roth was manifesting what Wittgenstein calls thecharacteristic expression-behaviour for joy and thus providing others with grounds for imputing that

state to him; But was Roth himself unconsciously inferring from his whistling that he was not bereft by thedeath of his wife. There are philosophers and psychologists who think it likely. Here is an example of someone apparently illustrating the anomalous case in which the meaning of an action is consciouslyrather than unconsciously inferred by an agent. W N P Barbellion recorded in his journal that he enduredan hour s torture of indecision over whether to go and propose marriage to his girlfriend or to the FabianSociety and hear Bernard Shaw. He writes found myself slowly, mournfully, putting on hat and coat. Youcan t shave in a hat and coat so I concluded I had decided on Shaw (1948 , 182-83). Isn t this a Wittgensteinian grammatical joke?

Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588 575575


12/24

emphasis on the contrast between hypotheses and further descriptions, it becomes blatant that many self-styled Freudians have deserted what was distinctive in Freud sconception of the unconscious, the idea of mental processes which could only beidentified by a procedure of arduous inference and which pertain to matters which

could be completely alien to the subject.It isn t merely theoretical remarks like Freud s baffling claim that the dreamer

knows the meaning of his dream which appear to intermittently commit him to anunconscious about which one could get clear in Wittgenstein s sense, but thoseexchanges with patients where he appears to be getting clear about a mental state,arriving at a further description of it, merely by formulating what was at the back of their minds . Such episodes appear to give some warrant to the revisionist s banalisation. An example is Freud s telling Dora that her anger at Herr K s sexualadvances was not a manifestation of affronted modesty but rather of wounded vanity

in that she recognized the phrases he employed were those he had used in seducingthe governess of his children ( What thought you dare he treat me like a servant )(Cioffi 1998 , 62 66).

Statements like this belong to Wittgenstein s category of questions which are not settled as hypotheses are settled but in entirely different way; more in the form what is in my mind when I say so and so (LC 18). This is also true of Dora s melancholy,her feelings of resentment towards her father, and towards Frau and Herr K. But it cannot hold of the tickle in her throat, her genital catarrh, and her limp. Theassimilation of these two disparate classes of interpretanda constitute what

Wittgenstein called Freuds

abominable mess.

The tendency of contemporary psychoanalysts to work with a weakened, banalised concept of the unconscious is illustrated by Janet Malcolm s pseudony-mous but paradigmatic analyst in her New Yorker articles on psychoanalysis. Hespeaks of bringing out stuff... barely on the fringes of his patient s consciousness (1982, 72). If this is what he did, he was not practicing psychoanalysis. How is bringing out stuff... barely on the fringes of his patient s consciousness to bedistinguished from the procedure the anti-Freudian, Aaron Beck tells us he adoptedwhen he abandoned psychoanalysis and decided to confine himself to pathogenicthoughts which operate at the margins of consciousness ?

Even in the literalist heyday of the unconscious we find (in a work once used inthe training of analysts) an explanation of a certain class of phobias which is closer to Wittgenstein s further description than to the hypotheses he disdains: Certain persons are afraid of seeing cripples or of witnessing accidents because they do not wish to be reminded of what might happen to me (Fenichel, 1966 , 196). This isobviously a further description of their phobic state and for that very reason Freudwould have denied it the capacity to produce symptoms and would probably havetreated it as a rationalisation of castration anxiety.

Another instance of oblivious banalisation is provided by a researcher in psychotherapy, Allen Bergin. Bergin characterises good psychoanalytic interpre-tation as responding to client affect just below the surface and labelling,identifying or emphasizing it rather than telling the patient about feelings he"really has" when he is not experiencing them. He says that analysts, in commonwith non-analytic therapists, followed this procedure of good interpretation (1966 , 241).

576 Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588


13/24

In so far as they did they had momentarily ceased practicing psychoanalysis. It may be true that every Freudian has a phenomenologist inside him struggling toemerge, but this does not justify obscuring the distinction between them 4 .

Summary and Conclusion to Part One

One source of the disanalogy between an analysand s relation to an interpretationand Wittgenstein s interlocutor s agreement to suggestions as to the source of a philosophical misconception is that in the psychoanalytic case the diagnosis is oftennot the kind of thing which the say-so of the patient could confirm, e.g. conversionhysteria.

What distinguishes a psychoanalytic patient s recognition of the correctness of aninterpretation from Wittgenstein s interlocutor in cases other than conversion is that

the experience that leads the patient to agree need never have been, even peripherally, conscious and that even where the repressed was once conscious it later passed into a state in which the patient could not recognize it if it were put tohim. Moreover, nowhere does Freud imply that an interpretation must be incorrect if a patient fails to endorse it. That the patient stand in a more intimate relation to hisunconscious than just intellectual conviction is required for therapeutic purposes not probative ones.

In his notebooks Wittgenstein gives expression to a profoundly characteristicutterance: If the place I want to get to could only be reached by a ladder I would

give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to, is the place I amalready at now (CV 7). Wittgenstein s conflicting construals of psychoanalysissuggest that it was for him both the ladder he abjured and the means of remainingwhere he was.

Part Two: When should Further Descriptions be Preferred to Hypotheses?

Why all this fuss about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mysteryof the conscious? What do they know about that? James Joyce

Just what are Hypotheses in Rivalry with?

The thesis that Freud seeks for causal explanations in a context where this isinappropriate (Johnston 1989 , 49 50) is one often found among Wittgensteiniancommentators on Freud. Paul Johnston says that what is appropriate instead is

4

Robert Fliess gives an account of making the unconscious conscious which appears at first to support theWittgensteinian and revisionist construal. He writes that the alteration in the patient s personality willultimately enable him to verify introspectively the hitherto unacceptable statement about himself .However in the same preface Fliess disqualifies the patient in a way which shows how alien theunbanalised Freudian view of the role of the patient s concurrence is to the Wittgensteinian one: Althoughthe discovery of the unconscious has actually deprived the nave observer of his last province, he is as yet unaware of his deposition. Unacquainted with his incompetence, he believe himself, on the strength of possessing a psyche, capable of evaluating a psychological statement. (Fliess 1950 , xv).

Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588 577577


14/24

arranging what we already know. But this encounters a strong and apparently cogent objection. The analyst Charles Hanly for example objects that arrangements of thefacts of hysteria would not have added anything to the understanding of itsgenesis This is so, but is it all there is to be said? Not all of Freud s

interpretations were of hysterical symptoms.Is there in other cases an alternative context? One which invites us to clarify

without explaining as Monk puts it (1990, 511). When is this the appropriatecontext in a enquiry which ostensibly addresses diagnostic and explanatory issues?The task this question sets us is the difficult one of determining when a hypothesistrumps a further description and when a further description can only be trumped by a further, further description.

We sometimes appear to be confronted by a choice between explanation without understanding and understanding without explanation. An existential psychothera-

pist, Rollo May maintains (in the International Encyclopedia of Social Science entryon existential psychology) that psychoanalytic explanation precludes understandingof that which it explains (May 1968 ). What might have induced him to say this? Ithink similar considerations were at work as those, which moved Wittgenstein todeny that an hypothesis as to his condition would confer peace or calm onsomeone troubled by love (GB 123). Even if we take calm/peace to refer to therelief of intellectual perplexity rather than to spiritual tranquillity we can still seewhat would prompt someone to dismiss the pertinence of hypotheses:

& There were an insufficient number of convolutions in the Frankenstein monster s brain thus it is argued in James Whale s film, a life of brutality, violence andmurder .

& "Something about me that explains everything" says Bob Mitchum of a childhood trauma he has repressed in Raoul Walsh s Pursued the first Freudianwestern.

There is a tendency to think that of these two explanations only the invocationof the missing wrinkles in the monster s brain necessarily fails to render the phenomenon explained perspicuous. But Wittgenstein s remark on the love-troubled one can be construed to imply that repressed childhood traumas are asincapable of conferring genuine understanding as brain wrinkles since they are noless external, i.e., not immanent to the current experience of the subject. This mayseem an arbitrary restriction on what can count as an explanation and both brainwrinkles and infantile traumas ought to count as providing it. But althoughexplanations as external that is, as transcendent to the self-awareness of thesubject as cerebral idiosyncrasies or infantile traumas may sometimes be what the context calls for there is a demand that they nevertheless fail to meet. Theycannot confer the kind of perspicuity which results when the explanatoryrevelation is continuous with pre-reflective awareness, something analogous tothe successful attempt to recall a momentarily forgotten name (Wittgenstein sanalogy) or recapturing the momentarily forgotten purpose which took us from oneroom to another.

Thus it was the fact that the causes invoked by psychoanalysis were not immanent to the experience explained which moved those in the phenomenological tradition todeny them the capacity to render the condition of the subject intelligible to him. On

578 Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588


15/24

occasion, clarity about my feelings as to what befell me and the view I should takeof its putative consequences matters more than what these really were: who or what I blame more than who or what was really to blame. And these would seem to bematters that a-causal, a-hypothetical discourse might be adequate to. It was the same

externality as that to which existential therapists object, which incited Wittgensteinto describe Freud as doing something immensely wrong in his interpretation of theflowery dream (LC 23).

Suppose that in the search for self-understanding we confined ourselves to what Wittgenstein chastised Freud for failing to confine himself to in his dealing with theflowery dreamer. What would we lose if we abandoned hypotheses for further descriptions? States of mind which are troubling can take us in either of twodirections, that of determining their causal origins or that of articulating more fullytheir troubling or perplexing aspects. This latter enterprise, which is characteristic of

Wittgenstein, constitutes a banalisation of Freud s procedure though it hascompensating merits.

The implication of Wittgenstein s criticism of Freud s dealings with the flowerydreamer are that we should confine ourselves to doing what Freud did when heexplained what made a joke funny and eschew what he was doing when he told theflowery dreamer that her dream was bawdy even though she did not recognize it assuch. We can easily imagine that taking the conversation with the flowery dreamer inthe direction of the passionless marriage implicit in some of her remarks might be for her a more illuminating course than determining the unconscious antecedents of the

image of the flowering branch, however diagnostically profitable this latter might be.It must be conceded however that to adopt such a course would mean abandoningmany of the traditional diagnostic goals of psychopathology.

The Prerogatives and Limits of Banalisation

Rush Rhees s suggestion that someone s bewilderment at the sort of person heturned out to be might be assuaged by the same means as those which would enablehim to formulate what he felt as he listened to Mozart s Requiem ( 1971 , 23) mayseem extravagant but there is a way of reducing its apparent extravagance. Our self-feeling has unarticulated, occluded formal relations which may be brought into focusand illuminated in the way in which a felicitous further description illuminates anaesthetic experience.

There are occasions when my life and the self that lived it stand to me like thoseexperiences which Wittgenstein felt seemed to be saying something and set him thetask of discovering what it was that they were saying (BB 185). Suppose that for these experiences we substitute that peculiar and yet familiar intentional object, one sown self. The self we are attempting to fathom need not figure as merely anexplanandum the antecedent conditions of which we are in search of but as a complex intentional object whose aspects we are striving to discriminate andarticulate and towards which we are trying to clarify our feelings. We don t onlyhave a need to know why or how we became the particular person we are but alsofor a deeper or more comprehensive grasp of in what this particularity consists theelucidation of our self-feeling something which a knowledge of its unconsciousdeterminants or organic causes cannot confer. The problem that the person I have

Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588 579579


16/24

turned out to be presents need not take the form Why have I become thus-and-thus? But rather What is this thus-and-thus that I have become?

In the first of the Introductory Lectures Freud speaks of the information required by the analysis as concerning what is most intimate in his mental life, everything

that as a socially independent person he must conceal from other people and beyondthat everything that he will not admit to himself (1916 17, 18). It is precisely thesubject s attempts to evince this aspect of his intimate mental life, which answer toWittgenstein s a-causal, self-clarificatory, further description account.

What would an analysis conducted along Wittgenstein s a-causal, non-explanatory lines look like? It would confine itself to those items in Freud s list,which a father confessor would expect his penitent to be conversant with, e.g., thosematters that he attempted to conceal from others things ill done or done to othersharm . These rarely require dream interpretation or free association for their

discernment.What is wrong with this mode of banalisation of Freud s procedure is not its lack

of candour as to its deviation from psychoanalysis proper but its lack of candour asto its explanatory limitations.

Developmental Questions and the Limits on the Explanatory Power of Further Descriptions

In his essay Disposition and Memory Stuart Hampshire speaks of the

discovery that a memory of something in the past has been continuously thereason for inclination and conduct, unknown to the subject and without hishaving been aware of the memory as a memory (1982 , 85). Hampshire seems to be invoking the strictly Freudian claim to uncover episodes occluded rather thanimmanent. But if we banalise Hampshire s thesis we can easily supply plausibleinstances. It is said that Prosper Merime imputed his austere reserve to a childhoodepisode when on being rebuked by his parents he broke into tears and was mocked by them for it. From that moment he resolved never to so expose himself bydisplaying his feelings.

We need not suppose that this resolve was continuously in mind but only that if hewere reminded of it he might become aware of the influence of the episode in a moreintimate way than that in which the properly repressed episode is acknowledged tohave exerted its influence on the authority of the evidence produced by the analyst.

This phenomenon of something being continuously the reason without the subject scontinuous awareness, though recognizable in retrospect, is analogous to one described by Wittgenstein in connection with logical grammar: When formulating a rule wealways have the feeling; that is something you have known all along. We can do onlyone thing clearly articulate the rule we have been applying unawares (WVC).

Can t this notion of following a rule unawares be extended to our lives in general?May we not, in living, have been following rules, which need only be clearlyarticulated for some of the characterological and behavioural perplexities, which beset us to be resolved? But sometimes a banalised version of discovering theunconscious of this kind which confines us to the already known via a fuller recall of our evanescent reveries and ruminations may not cover the case as neatly as it didMerime s.

580 Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588


17/24


18/24

neural correlates of his infatuation (as Margalit observes [ 1992 , 314]). 5 But it is not obvious why an explanation, which attempted to demonstrate the similarities between his current love object and his childhood ones, might not have been greetedas pertinent. Suppose there was an overlap of which the love-troubled one was

oblivious between the terms in which he described his current love object and thosein which he described his past ones. Might not pointing this out to him haveameliorated his perplexity, if not his anguish?

There is another way in which the external, roundabout way of understanding may enlighten us. Even though developmental revelations do not take the form of uncovering episodes that confer perspicuity on the characterological conundrumsthat beset us, as they did on Merime s reserve, uncovering a non-perspicuouscause may yet resolve an empirical hermeneutic issue by foreclosing it. If someoneis discovered to have been pushed we need no longer speculate as to why he

jumped.It must be conceded that there are entire classes of problems which lie beyond the

power of anamnesis to resolve. There are certain changes in our life-mode of whichthere can be no perspicuous experiential account. For example, only the invocationof hidden physiological processes can explain why the male child passes fromcomparative unresponsiveness to women s bodies to obsessive interest in them. Andwhy with advancing age this interest wanes.

The psychiatrist, Richard Hunter (the co-author of The Madness of George theThird) maintained that Patients and relatives confuse the history of their illness with

what they think made them ill

(1973, 19). Were this shown to be so would not a great advance in self-understanding have occurred? When Yeats wrote: Meregrowing old that brought chilled blood / this sweetness brought , he wascontemplating an explanatory hypothesis. Where was the error in this?

The Past as Cause Versus the Past as Psychological Fixed Star

There is also a non-explanatory invocation of the past, a sorting out of one s feelingsabout some past episode rather than an attempt to trace its repercussions. Thememory of a past episode may have a suggestiveness to be pondered and elucidatedand not just causal consequences to be assessed.

A familiar instance of the use of the past to elucidate rather than explain the present is that of Marcel in La Recherche , repeatedly adverting to his mother s goodnight kiss to make a point about his feelings for Albertine. For example he explainshis alarm at the prospect of being left by Albertine by invoking an analogous alarmoccasioned by a separation from his mother. Of course there could have been a causal relation between his feelings about Albertine s goodnight kiss and those about his mother s many years earlier, but Marcel s concern was to register and conveythose feelings and not to venture a causal explanation of them. By contrast, whenMarcel traces the fatal decline of his will to the new regimen of indulgence

5 In an essay on Wittgenstein s Remarks on Frazer Avishai Margalit writes that someone who is sufferingthe pains of love is more likely to find satisfaction in understanding his situation through reading about thesorrows of Werther than through an explanation about the endogenous opiates that mediates his addiction .He goes on to argue that a compulsive gambler might nevertheless find more satisfaction in reading about the opiates mediating his addiction to gambling that in a literary evocation of that addiction. ( 1992 , 314).

582 Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588


19/24

initiated on the night he disobeyed his mother s order and insisted on staying upuntil she bestowed her kiss ( a black date in the calendar ), we have understandablemisgivings as to his authority for pronouncing on such a momentous developmentalissue.

I may be authoritative as to whether I live my life like an unprepared schoolboyfearful that he may be called on before the period ends. But not as to the extent that my apprehensive nature is due to an occasion when as a schoolboy I underwent thetrauma of being called upon unprepared and publicly humiliated. Explaining andevincing/evoking are distinct enterprises. If someone comes to feel that there is in hisrelation to his wife something of his relation to his mother this cannot be made anymore the case by tracing it to his infantile relation to his mother or any less the case by failing to.

A remark of Roy Schafer s in Language and Insight (1978 ) illustrates the

confusion between these two epistemically distinct tasks with respect to the past,assessing its repercussions or possessing it more fully. Schafer writes: Trauma isgiven meaning by its victim: analysts promote insight into the profoundly disturbingsense that the analysand has given to the traumatic event . This obscures thedifference between a past episode as a putatively pathogenic cause withrepercussions to be assessed and a past episode as an intentional object of reminiscence with a nature to be elucidated. It is only if our concern is with what Wittgenstein calls the correct expression of the patients feeling that they haveepistemic authority with respect to it.

Thomas Nagel is among those who are unwilling to concede this limitation onintrospection and reflection, for though he speaks of the aim of analysis as causalknowledge he also speaks of its distinctively inner character and holds that it is a matter of the patient s own self-understanding and is essentially perceptual (1994 ).

Faculties it has not Pleased our Creator to give us

Kierkegaard s famous observation that Life must be lived forward but can only beunderstood backwards is excessively sanguine. There are important aspects of our lives infatuations and disenchantments that are no more amenable to beingunderstood backwards than they were forwards as incomprehensible viewedretrospectively as they were surprising and unforeseeable. Scepticism as to thelikelihood of attaining to reconstructions which will resolve the narrative-explanatory puzzles that beset us in this area, is not unreasonable though sometimestoo total. Dr Johnson said of a particularly intractable counterfactual issue of thiskind that its resolution required faculties it has not pleased our creator to give us. This is a sentiment which we are often tempted to when frequenting the puzzles presented by biographies or psychoanalytic case histories.

When is it justified? One case where it seems justified and seems to have a representative character is provided though inadvertently by Wittgenstein him-self. He asks us to imagine that on an occasion on which he was walking along a riverbank with a friend, Taylor, the friend extended his arm pushing Wittgensteininto the river. Wittgenstein asks under what conditions we would say that Taylor deliberately, though unconsciously, pushed Wittgenstein into the river. He asks us to

Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588 583583


20/24

imagine that Taylor s analyst persuades him that an unconscious animus was aswork, though Taylor sincerely denies having pushed Wittgenstein in and insists it was an accident. Wittgenstein takes too complacent a view of the resolvability of the puzzle by asserting that both accounts Taylor s and his analyst s could be true.

This is to give too authoritative a status to Taylor s sincere denial that he pushedWittgenstein in. The analyst s account and Taylor s could not both be true. Taylor could not continue to give his self-exonerating answer after he had been persuadedof the truth of the analyst s explanation.

What would be consistent with the truth of the analyst s account that Taylor unconsciously pushed him in is a further description of the apprehension anddismay Taylor experienced at the sight of Wittgenstein floundering in the water.What is not consistent with the analyst s account is Taylor s statement that it was anaccident. And attempting to decide which of these was the case tempts us to invoke

Johnson s dictum. Even if Taylor confessed to a subliminal feeling of satisfaction at seeing Wittgenstein floundering in the water this would not resolve the issue sincethis post hoc relish is perfectly compatible with the drenching having been theoutcome of an unintentional movement on Taylor s part. 6

Paul Steinberg, an Auschwitz survivor, wonders of some of his less admirablecharacter traits whether they were the work of the camp or the result of a motherlesschildhood bereft of tenderness. Both Perhaps (2002 , 161). But that there are suchexplanatorily intractable phenomena does not warrant abandoning the hope for empirical explanation.

In his review of a biography of Virginia Woolf, P. N. Furbank expressesscepticism about causal explanation in biography. He invokes Wittgenstein s viewon the irrelevance of causal hypotheses in aesthetics and argues that this objectioncan be extended and that it is arguable that biographers (like historians) might dowell to eschew causal explanations in general (1998 ). This is too sweeping. We canoccasionally rise above pure guesswork. When a bullfinch sings like a canary I amentitled to suspect that it was reared with canaries. And when I confirm that it wasraised with canaries, scepticism as to the connection, though possible, is wanton.Something analogous is sometimes available in the case of humans.

The problem is that there are no explicitly formulated rules which will enable usto determine when an homology is good enough to warrant the imputation of a causal relation between two discreet bits of behaviour widely separated in time. The judgment whether the degree of homology is sufficient to warrant an imputation of causal connection is often pretty subjective and so we are left with our rivalintuitions. Even the subject himself may feel compelled to take this view. JeanGenet s brusque reply to an interviewer who asked what difference it would havemade to his development had he not been incarcerated for thieving at an early agewas: Ask God. I have no idea.

6 Candidates for Dr. Johnson s dictum are not uncommon Freud s wolf man was unable to resolve himself on the question whether his sister s childhood seduction of him influenced his neuroses and all his later relations with women. But must that necessarily have such consequences? Perhaps it also happened toother little boys and had no effect. I don t know... (Obholzer 1982 , 37).

584 Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588


21/24

However the unlikelihood of discovering cogent causal relations between the past and future of particular individuals is not in itself sufficient ground for abandoningempirical enquiry for a more elaborate expression of self-feeling.

We can sometimes find good grounds for imputing certain adult vicissitudes to

certain early influences. There was an investigation into the relation between marital breakdown and the position of the spouses in their family s sibling structure. If I mayMicawberize the result:

A man with a sister older than himself marries a woman with a brother younger than herself. Result: harmony.A man with a sister younger than himself marries a woman with a brother younger than herself. Result: discord.

What possible objection could there be to undertaking enquiries of this kind?

What in the context of Freud or any other therapist or biographer could precludethe search for comparable data? Dr Johnson s dictum must not be resorted to toomechanically.

Thematisation: The Intrinsic Value Placed on the Correct Expression of Feeling

But the value of an analysis need not depend on diagnostic success. Analysandsoften testify that their analytic hours had a value for them independent of any ulterior explanatory outcome. One spoke of her gratitude at the succinct way in which her

therapist had summed up her predicament. Stephen Mulhall comments on this modeof gratification: A human being in a state of deep despair may come acrossMarlowe s line in Dr. Faustus ( perpetual cloud descends ) and acknowledge it as a uniquely appropriate articulation of the state of mind in which he finds himself (1990 , 67). But articulating a state of mind and leaving it at that is not always asinnocuous and appropriate. It can slip into the synaesthetic inanities D. H. Lawrencemocked in certain modernist novels:

Is my aura a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot blacking or is it myrrh and bacon fat and Shetland tweed? asks every character and when the

answer comes it is none of these, it is abysmal chlorocoryambasis, the audiencequivers all over, and murmurs: that s just how I feel myself. (1936, 517)

The gratification and relief attendant on uniquely appropriate articulation is not sought only with respect to painful or traumatic matters (as in the Ancient Mariner sand till my ghastly tale is told, this heart within me burns .) Oliver Sacks commentson an encephalitis patient in remission who responded to Sacks question: What s it like being the way you are? in terms which make explicit the intrinsic value whichmay be found in thematisation: Again and again, with his penetrating descriptions,his imaginative metaphors, or his great stock of poetic images, Mr. L. would try toevoke the nature of his own being and experience (1976 , 242). The desire to recordor express what it s like being the way you are is entertained by many whosesituation is not as extreme and dramatic as Mr L s.

Robert Graves wrote a poem ( The Cool Web of Language ) about the balefuleffects of inarticulacy and the beneficent powers of utterance extending them beyondthe abreaction of the strictly traumatic ( A cool web of language winds us in /

Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588 585585


22/24


23/24

let yourself think that all human problems can be solved in this way (1981 , 165).The book in question was Sargent and Slater s Introduction to Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry. The book s epigraph, taken from Henry Maudsley, gives a succinct account of the spirit in which it was written :

The observation and classification of mental disorders have been soexclusively psychological that we have not sincerely realised the fact that they illustrate the same pathological principles as other diseases, are producedin the same way, and must be investigated in the same spirit of positiveresearch. Until this be done, I can see no hope of improvement in our knowledge of them and no use in multiplying books about them. (Sargent &Slater 1944 )

Of course we can embrace organicist explanations for the wrong reasons. There

is more of gravy than of grave about you says Scrooge to Marley s ghost in a dogged attempt to evade the demoralising implications of Marley s visit. Nevertheless we should not in premature despair of objective knowledge as to thecontribution of material determinants to our destiny settle for a felicitous evocationof our predicament. We must strive for a more determinate grasp of what we wouldlose if we confined our discourse to the articulation of worries . Reflection maygive us a better view of the phantoms which must be laid, but can reflection alwaysteach us how we came to be haunted or bedevilled?

It would have been better if Wittgenstein, when pronouncing on these matters,

instead of indulging a generalised disparagement of empirical enquiry, had confinedhimself to his counsel to Drury, Don t ever let yourself think that all human problems can be solved in this way.

References

Baker G. (2004) Wittgenstein s Method: Neglected Aspects . Edited and introduced by K. Morris. Oxford:Blackwell.

Barbellion, W. N. P. (1948). Journal of a Disappointed Man . London: Penguin.Bergin, A. (1966). Some Implications of Psychotherapy Research for Therapeutic Practice. Journal of

Abnormal Psychology.Cioffi, F. (1998). Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience . Chicago: Open Court.Cioffi, F. (2004). The evasiveness of Freudian apologetic. In A. Casement (Ed.), Who owns

psychoanalysis? , pp. 363 84. London: Karnac.Drury, M. (1981). Conversations with Wittgenstein. In R. Rhees (Ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal

recollections . Oxford: Blackwell.Farber, L. (1976). Lying, Despair, Jealously, Envy, Sex, Suicide Drugs and the Good Life . New York:

Basic Books.Fenichel, O. (1940). Review of Karen Horney's New Ways in Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytical QuarterlyFenichel, O. (1966). Psychoanalytic the theory of the neurosis . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Fliess, R. (1950). The psychoanalytic reader . London: Hogarth.Freud, S. (1895) Studies on hysteria, the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud in Freud (2000), vol. 2.

Freud, S. (1900) The interpretation of dreams, the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Worksof Sigmund Freud in Freud (2000), vol. 5.

Freud, S. (1905) Jokes and the unconscious in Freud (2000), vol. 8.Freud, S. (1909) Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis. In Freud (2000), vol.10Freud, S. (1914) Recollection, repetition and working through in Freud (2000), vol. 12

Philosophia (2009) 37:565 588 587587


24/24

Documents

Freud Versus Witt Gen Stein