Those who honored a complete outsider like me with an invitation to give the Ernest Jones Lecture must have been well aware that the last thing I had to offer was instruction in psychoanalysis. In what follows I shall discuss several intellectual disciplines, psychoanalysis being one of them—a sort of wide-angle view in which neither psychoanalysis nor anything else can hope to be displayed to the satisfaction of the expert. The only justification for doing this is that to see one’s subject in relation to some of its neighbors may, in spite of distortions in the presentation, provide a view of it that is useful only in so far as it is slightly unfamiliar.
In its origins psychoanalysis depended upon certain assumptions, not inherent in it, about the past. Having the support of the powerful natural sciences, nineteenth-century geology and biology, these assumptions were not even recognized as such; and so they were, for a time, inescapable. They controlled many other kinds of inquiry, for example, linguistics, biblical criticism, history generally and art history in particular. But well within the lifetime of Freud these assumptions came into question. Others began to replace them. There were new notions as to what constituted valid interpretation. The criteria appropriate to natural science no longer seemed so obviously and unproblematically appropriate to the human sciences. In particular, the relations between past and present became vexatious. Once upon a time it seemed obvious that you could best understand how things are by asking how they got to be that way. Now attention was directed to how things are in all their immediate complexity. There was a switch, to use the linguist’s expressions, from the diachronic to the synchronic view. Diachrony, roughly speaking, studies things in their coming to be as they are; synchrony concerns itself with things as they are and ignores the question how they got that way.
More about that later. Crudely, then, my subject is this switch of attention from explanations assuming a very long and rather simple past to explanations focused rather intensely on the here and now, with the past either ignored or given a new and difficult role as a sort of hinterland, in which fact and fiction are not readily distinguished, and perhaps do not need to be. This raises the further question, on which I shall, like Milton’s Satan, gloze but superficially, of the relation between historical fact and fiction in historical constructions, a matter to which Freud gave some attention. Like him, we still have a troublesome remnant of a conscience in such matters, though it is a very long time since St. Augustine remarked that “not everything we make up is a lie”; a fiction may be figura veritatis, a figure of the truth. Perhaps, in the end, we shall find some comfort in that observation.
A lot has been written lately about “the archaeology of knowledge”—about period systems of discourse which put invisible constraints on the kind of thing that can be said at any particular time. Only later, in a new period, can we identify the constraints of a former one; we cannot do it for our own.1 But it seems extravagant to maintain, as some do, that these epochs are necessarily discontinuous. With psychoanalysis, anyway, one may surely speak of an origin in one epoch and a development in the next. Freud himself, though the most important herald of a new era of interpretation, was formed under the old regime, at a time when it seemed right to give most things a historical explanation, and to be suspicious of explanations that did not appeal to objective historical truth. Science, especially geology and botany, had enormously extended the past of the planet and its occupants; and this new past provided a space for previously unthinkable explanations of how things came to be as they are. In such a climate it would have been extremely difficult to prefer explanations of another kind; that would have been to show less than the proper respect of historians and scientists for fact.
The reader might here wish to remind me that Freud did, on occasion, give some thought to the relation between fact and fiction, truth and the figure of truth. “In my mind I always construct novels,” he told Stekel.2 He called his Leonardo piece “partly fiction,” and “Moses and Monotheism” had as its working title “The Man Moses: An Historical Novel.” He seems always to have felt the attraction of the storyteller’s ways of making sense of the world. The case histories, and especially that of the Wolf Man, have often been thought to show a regard for narrative values—for coherence, development, closure—not entirely consistent with simple factual record. Even “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” has been plausibly studied as a fiction, a masterplot for psychoanalytic narration.3
Yet, so far as I know, Freud, when he considered these matters, always reaffirmed the criteria of truthfulness he inherited from science, and from an idea of history deriving from science—an idea that took no account of its fictive qualities. As we shall see, there were, during Freud’s lifetime, new approaches to such problems; but he seems to have taken very little notice of them. His own amazingly original work was founded in an older tradition. For example, when he decided to abandon the simpler version of the seduction hypothesis, he got out of the resulting dilemma not by appealing to some theory of fiction but by making use of the extended past. When he says in his “General Theory of the Neuroses” that neurotics are “anchored somewhere in their past,” and that their symptoms repeat the past as distorted by the censorship, he does add that the Kinderscenen thus recovered are not always true—they can be phantasies disguising childhood history, much as nations use legends to disguise their prehistory. But he goes on to claim that psychoanalysis is a technique that can be applied to transindividual subjects such as the history of civilization; and the next step is to explain the phantasies of the individual as inherited by means of genetic memory traces. So, talking of anxiety, he maintains that its “first state” has been “thoroughly incorporated into the organism through a countless series of generations.”4
By these means it was possible to extend the history of a neurosis beyond the bounds of an individual life, and so to confer upon phantasy the status of historical truth. That the case history of the Wolf Man depends equally upon this move is so obvious as to need no elaboration: the analysis had to proceed as though phantasies were true recollections, and could not otherwise succeed. Patients believe in the reality of the primal scene, and their conviction “is in no respect inferior to one based on recollection.”5 And later Freud remarks that while it would be agreeable to know whether a patient was describing a phantasy or recollecting a real experience, the point is not of much importance, for in either case what is being described has objective historical reality. The phantasies “are unquestionably an inherited endowment, a phylogenetic heritage.”6 Here he found himself in agreement with Jung, with the important qualification that correct method requires one to exhaust ontogenetic explanations before going on to phylogenetic ones. One goes behind the individual history only when historical validation is not to be found there.
The formula ontogeny repeats phylogeny thus provides Freud with the means to extend indefinitely the past of the individual, and so create space for acceptably historical explanations. “Totem and Taboo” (1913) clearly depends on the formula. Even more enthusiastic applications of it are to be found in Ferenczi, who mapped the findings of psychoanalysis onto the biological and geological record with much boldness and assiduity. Haeckel’s idea had been around for quite a while, and as it happens he was a Darwinian. But Freud and Ferenczi, though keen on the idea of recapitulation, associated the formula not with Darwin’s evolutionary biology but rather with the earlier theory of Lamarck, who believed much less ambiguously than Darwin in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Lamarck suited psychoanalysis much better; it seemed to need what Ferenczi called a “depth biology” that would explain how phylogenetic memory-traces accumulated in the germ plasma, imprinting there “all the catastrophes of phylogenetic development.”7
Freud’s own adherence to an outmoded evolutionary theory, strongly expressed in his letter to Groddeck in 19178 and lengthily expounded by Sulloway,9 was a source of distress to Ernest Jones;10 but he never gave it up. From his remarks in “The Future of an Illusion,” twenty-five years after the event, one sees that he was quite unperturbed that the ethnology of “Totem and Taboo” was said to be out of date,11 and he obviously felt the same about condemnations of Lamarck. It was important to be able to map neurosis, genitality, and so forth on to an indefinitely protracted past, or, as he himself put it, to “fill a gap in individual truth with prehistoric truth.”12 Actual historical occurrences are somehow genetically inscribed in the individual. Behind the idea of “prehistoric truth” we detect the immense authority of nineteenth-century science and its new explanations of the planet’s history.
I shall come back to Freud on this point, but it is now time to ask how this idea of a hugely extended past affected other disciplines outside the natural sciences, and how it began to be given up. The most striking case is probably that of linguistics, because here the twentieth-century break with the historical approach was so decisive, and so clearly marked by the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics,13 posthumously assembled from students’ lecture notes and first published in 1915. It is to Saussure that we owe the distinction between synchronic and diachronic. Hitherto the prevailing mode of linguistics had naturally been historical; languages were studied along a chronological axis. From their interrelations one could construct prehistoric states and parent languages from which they descended. This kind of linguistics was fully warranted as a science, and we know from the early essay on antithetical primal words, and from “Totem and Taboo,” that Freud respected it. He shows no signs of having read Saussure, and it is not difficult to guess that had he done so he would have felt little sympathy with the new approach. For Saussure argued that although there is nothing wrong in studying language historically, the investigation of language here and now has clear priority. The speaker of a language is confronted not with a history but with a state. “That is why the linguist who wishes to understand a state must discard all knowledge of everything that produced it, since what produced it is not a part of the state”; at this stage he must ignore diachrony.14 He must look at the systematic interrelations of a language as it is; other studies must be subsequent to that one. The questions how things are, and how things got to be this way, are therefore sharply separated.
I should perhaps add what everybody knows, that modern semiology and structuralism grow directly from Saussure’s emphasis on state or system, and accept his critique of diachronic assumptions. Freud had an inveterate suspicion of system, which he associated with magic, and with the prescientific, so it is conceivable that he would have thought Saussure’s methods regressive. But Saussure never came to his notice, and the direct impact of synchronic linguistics on psychoanalysis was delayed until the advent of Lacan.
The authority of a single person can, it is clear, affect the rate of change in this way; and there is also, more vaguely, a kind of inertia, say of stubbornness, which also tends to slow it. I myself was taught pre-Saussurian linguistics in the 1930s, and the reception of Saussure’s ideas did not happen everywhere all at once. So one should not make these changes seem quite as sudden as the importance of the date 1915 suggests. Nor, of course, should it be thought that the move into the here and now was wholly the work of Saussure, or that it always took precisely the same form. And here the example of biblical criticism may be useful.
The historical criticism of the Bible was an eighteenth-century development, but its flowering in the nineteenth century is rightly thought of as among the greatest intellectual achievements of the period. The Bible came to be thought of less as a divinely instituted unity than as a collection of miscellaneous documents, each with a prehistory of change and redaction and conflation over very long periods of time. What had been treated synchronically, as a homogeneous canon, was now to be explained diachronically, as a set of independent documents brought together by editors who did not manage to conceal every trace of their activities.
The Old Testament was sorted into various strands that had been put together in a way that left visible joins. Behind the written versions were oral sources, the subject of prehistoric constructions. The magical view of the Torah as a book somehow coextensive with creation, uniformly inspired, faded away. Something of the sort happened also in New Testament scholarship. It was established, to the satisfaction of most, that Mark’s was the earliest Gospel, and that Matthew and Luke used it as a source. But where did they find the material in their books which was not in Mark’s? The question is typical, and so is the answer: there must have been a sayings-source, a document having historical existence though now lost, which was labeled Q. But Q, thus constructed, cannot account for the material in Matthew that is not in Luke, and vice versa. So each had to have a private source, called M in one case and L in the other. And this was by no means the end of it.
Now it so happens that this practice of constructing historical precedents came in at about the same time as the discovery of an extended geological past. Now there was time for such things to happen; time became a space for interpretation to work in. What validated interpretation was history. The parallel with psychoanalysis seems obvious. The new biblical criticism was of course strongly contested, but it prevailed, and has still not lost its potency. In recent times, however, the grip of history has been somewhat loosened. The historical events of the New Testament themselves command a much less simple kind of assent, as we know from the existentialist theologians. The biblical canon, split, as I have said, into separate books, is once again studied synchronically, as a state, in Saussure’s word, of which the internal relations may be considered without regard to actual or conjectural chronologies. In a different though related tradition, structuralist anthropology treats the Bible as it would any other corpus of myth, that is, synchronically rather than diachronically, as something that developed through time.
An obvious question now is how this shift of interest affected the writing of history in the ordinary sense. It is a large question, and I shall begin to answer it by giving an example from a subdepartment of the subject, namely art history. German art historians were attracted by theories of transindividual memory, with archaic traces in art that could by research be found to originate in prehistoric events; ancient terrors, according to Aby Warburg, were transmitted by the cultural memory to reappear as sources of energy and delight, as when a girl in a fresco by Ghirlandajo recapitulates, in a beneficently distorted form, the image of a primitive Maenad.15 The cultural transmission of such “mnemic traces” or engrams is parallel to the genetic survival of prehistory in Freud’s individual patient. We may remind ourselves that similar notions were still extant in practitioners of the more exact sciences. The American neo-Lamarckian E. D. Cope, for instance, proposed a doctrine of mnemogenesis, which said that the recapitulation by the embryo of phylogenetic history is made possible by the existence of unconscious memory-structures in the organism.16
Warburg continued to think along these lines until his death in 1926; some of the methods he devised for the study of recurrence are still in use, though detached from his theories. He found support wherever he could for his mnemic traces, for instance in the work of Semon, which had much to say about memory traces. It is worth noting that only a few years later, in 1932, there appeared F. C. Bartlett’s Remembering, a work remembered when other books on memory are forgotten, yet which has no ancient traces or reactivated engrams. Bartlett prefers to speak of personal interest in the here and now—adaptation and response to an immediate stimulus. Once again it seems that the older historical assumptions are set aside.
Indeed they were under question as early as the 1870s, when Nietzsche called history “the gravedigger of the present”;17 and among other inquirers it would seem that a characteristically modern philosophy of history began to develop. Where does history happen? One answer was, in the historian’s head, now. The related question, what does it mean to do history? required of the historian a new effort of self-reflection. He could no longer claim to be merely arranging objective and verifiable facts. And the problem was to find new ways of talking about what now appeared to be the obscure relation of past to present. It fell within the domain of the revived discipline of hermeneutics.
Hermeneutics, as understood in our time, owes much to Wilhelm Dilthey (1831–1911). Dilthey distinguished between the natural and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), and this distinction was later to be important for psychoanalysis and indeed to all the other interpretive sciences. Freud seems to have ignored Dilthey; he would probably not have liked the philosopher’s insistence on taking into account the historical situation of the observer as well as that of the observed; which is to complicate something Freud insisted was simple. According to Dilthey, understanding is subject to time and change; no past is fixed, and no present is to be thought of as somehow outside time. We survey the past from within our own horizon, and that horizon is always changing. That is why, as a matter of course, we lose faith in world views formerly taken to be beyond controversy—in “any philosophy which attempts to express world order cogently through a series of concepts.”18
Dilthey’s line of thought, much transformed, has persisted into our own time, and hermeneutics has spread itself over the whole body of philosophy. But it continues to hold that meaning changes, including past meaning; and that the past is inextricable from the present of the interpreter. There and then cannot be detached from here and now, and objectively inspected. The past becomes, at least in part, a construction of the present. Thus Lévi-Strauss can say quite flatly that historical narratives are “fraudulent outlines” imposed on the data, which are of course synchronic.19 Most hermeneutic claims are less nihilistic, but still fatal to the old idea of the past.
And with that I conclude this extremely superficial account of altered attitudes to the past in some of the human sciences with which psychoanalysis must acknowledge kinship. Before I return to psychoanalysis with the object of seeing how it looks in this changed context, I should summarize the summary. The new long view of the past provided by natural science was imposed upon and in various ways exploited by the interpretive disciplines. In psychoanalysis individual histories were projected onto a longer phylogenetic scale, so that a present neurosis could be interpreted by reference to a remote “prehistoric” catastrophe; thus phantasy acquired the status of historical (scientific) fact. Linguistics, biblical criticism, and historiography also made use of these new time scales, accepting that historical factuality was the ultimate source of authentic interpretation. However, we thought we could see in these studies a shift into a new set of assumptions—rather dramatic in the case of linguistics, where Saussure explicitly affirmed the primacy of the synchronic, but no less certain, though more gradual, in the other disciplines. The interpretive emphasis, in short, was shifting away from that long past, so receptive of narrative explanations, and into the actual moment, the here and now. It would be easy enough to provide more evidence of this shift, say from the various kinds of formalism practiced in literary and other sorts of criticism, as they developed in different ways in Russia, America, and England; all were more or less dismissive of the historical dimension, all were concerned with synchronicity, the words on the page, the verbal icon.
To some who experienced this shift a particular problem must have grown more vexatious, namely the exact demarcation between historical truth and fiction, and, as I have remarked, it sometimes occurred to Freud to give the matter thought. How he dealt with it we may perhaps see from a single example. In 1911 Hans Vaihinger published his Philosophy of “As if,” though in fact he had written it twenty-five years earlier. It is, roughly, a Nietzschean philosophy of fictions. It was often reprinted, and came to Freud’s attention. Vaihinger’s explanation of the heuristic value of “as-if” thinking seems at first to have impressed him; but he soon dismissed it with the Johnsonian observation that this was an argument “only a philosopher could put forward.”20 For it was not philosophy but hard science that was in touch with the truth. When, in “The Future of an Illusion,” Freud defines illusion as the conformity of a belief with a wish,21 he obviously implies that psychoanalysis is saved from illusion by its observational basis. He allows the carping critic set up as a kind of Aunt Sally in that book to complain that Freud has set up his own system of illusions in place of another; science is neither system nor illusion, and psychoanalysis is a science.
At the same time, and with some inconsistency, he commends “Totem and Taboo,” despite its outdated ethnology, for the way in which it brought a number of disconnected facts into a coherent whole.22 Of course he knew very well that a capacity to be represented as whole and self-consistent does not guarantee theories against illusion. When he condemned Adler’s theories as “radically false” he said that their very consistency constituted a distortion comparable with those introduced by secondary revision in dream theory.23 In short, Freud would have agreed with the poet Stevens that “to impose is not / To discover.” Whatever theory imposes on observation is likely to induce distortion and illusion. The doctrine which holds that the innocent eye sees nothing would not have been acceptable to Freud. He affirmed, indeed, that the foundation of science was “observation alone”;24 and he held this to be as true of psychoanalysis as of physics.
Everybody is now much more skeptical about the possibility of context-free observation, and most are much more ready to allow that the criteria for valid interpretation in the human sciences are different from those obtaining in natural science. In particular, the notion that historical facts exist in simple and accessible objectivity has become hard to hold. And in the present climate few could be as calm and certain about the nature of historical constructions as Freud was. In the late essay entitled “Constructions in Analysis” he is still saying there is nothing delusive about the contact of such constructions with historical reality.25 And he denied that the issue was of much practical importance because all the relevant material, whether fact or phantasy, had some historical reality, however archaic and however distorted in transmission. He would have thought rather ill of the argument that everything relevant belongs to the here and now—that what occurred in the transference was not, in some perfectly real and genuine way, a recapitulation of actual events. To think in that way he would have had first to abandon the foreunderstanding he had inherited from the dominant science of his formative years.
Possessing a degree of hindsight, we may think it inevitable that psychoanalysis should one day break its bond with natural science and move into the more congenial context of the Geisteswissenschaften. I don’t know if he was a pioneer in this, but I learned that in 1939 Kroeber suggested that it was a mistake to treat the Oedipus complex as historical in origin. More recently Jerome Neu (from whom I gained this information) has asked “Must actual remorse for an actual crime be an essential step in superego formation?” replying that it need not be. Freud’s account of the matter would be unobjectionable, says Neu, only if Lamarckianism were true, which it isn’t.26 For this as well as other reasons psychoanalysis might want to reconsider its position among the disciplines.
A rapprochement between psychoanalysis and hermeneutics was proposed in Ricoeur’s monumental Freud and Philosophy.27 Ricoeur maintains that the proper questions to put to Freud are those one would put to Dilthey, Weber, or Bultmann rather than those one would put to a physicist or a biologist. “It is completely misleading,” he says, contra Freud, “to raise the question [of theory in psychoanalysis] in the context of a factual or observational science.”28 And he stresses the uniqueness of the transference, its unpredictability and its here-and-nowness, as the distinctive characteristic of psychoanalysis considered as a hermeneutic.
To treat it thus is to avoid the Popperian charge of pseudoscience by taking psychoanalysis out of the arena in which Popper’s criteria apply. The move once made, it is possible to think of psychoanalysis not merely as a hermeneutic science, but as the paradigm of all such sciences, and this is what Jürgen Habermas has argued. The interpretive disciplines differ from natural science in that they cannot yield demonstrative certainty, and depend on different procedures. In outlining them Habermas follows Dilthey. He adds that Freud took no account of all this, but stuck to the view that psychoanalysis was fundamentally a positive science, though with certain peculiarities.29 For Habermas the distinctive characteristic of psychoanalysis as hermeneutic is that it deals with discourses the authors of which are deceiving themselves; that is, it is concerned more with distortion of meaning than with meaning, or, as he says, with the intrusion of an at first incomprehensible private language into everyday language games. Analysis seeks to cure these linguistic deformations. Its explanations are not, as is supposed of those proper to the natural sciences, determined by context-free laws, for here interpretation is a formative part of the discourse; its aim is “the reintroduction into public communication of a symbolic content that has been split off.”30 Psychoanalysis, unlike the sciences which pretend to context-free observation, is necessarily self-reflexive, always making its concern as to what it is doing a part of what it is doing.
And here we may recall that it was during Freud’s most active years that poets and novelists discovered, or rediscovered and exploited, the possibilities of reflexivity, the values of systematic distortion, and the benefits of what is sometimes called “spatial form”—a detemporalizing of narrative which, accompanied by all manner of dislocation, overlaps, gaps, condensations, displacements, called for a quasi-synchronic reading and heightened interpretive awareness on the part of the reader. Works so composed can be seen only as wholes, and can be made sense of only by a collaborative act on the part of the reader; all reading is of course collaborative, but now the reader’s share of the work is quite deliberately increased. The analogy between psychological and fictional interpretation was there in posse from the earliest days of psychoanalysis, but the forces which bound Freud to objective history, and many novelists to the conventions of “secretarial” realism, prevented, and in some degree continue to prevent, its exploitation.
However that may be, it is now quite usual to speak of Freud’s historical constructions as delusive.31 One commentator will lament Freud’s “limited epistemology,” which prevented him from understanding that historical truth, or the appearance of it, is entirely the product of the analytical session. “The reality tested and the reality created … claim no authority outside the analytic process. What authorizes the process is immanent in the process.”32 Let us leave aside the question whether Dr. Schwartz has considered the possibility that he too has a limited epistemology, and remark that self-authorization of this sort is also commonly credited to poems and novels—to works of fiction. Skura, indeed, says that the analyst can now teach critics how to attend to details apparently too trivial to bear the weight of interpretation; but he can only do so because he has given up the “referential fallacy” and come to see “the psychoanalytical process as a self-conscious end in itself.”33
Such commentators take the death of the psychoanalytical past as a fait accompli. According to Merton Gill the analysis of transference ought to be “content-free,” and the analysand’s references to the past are to be interpreted as indirect, resistant allusions to the here and now.34 And Donald P. Spence35 attacks many aspects of psychoanalytical practice which seem to him to derive from mistaken assumptions governing the aims and techniques of traditional analysis: the partnership between free association and evenly hovering attention, thought to create the conditions for an interpretive recovery of the past, is nonexistent. Pasts, indeed, are not reconstructed; they are constructed here and now. Moreover, since the analyst inserts fictions into the discourse, he might be more usefully thought of as a kind of poet rather than as a kind of archaeologist. What psychoanalysis does is construct “truth in the service of self-coherence … It offers no veridical picture of the past.” Like the poet, the novelist, and the historian, the analyst creates under his specific conditions a past that is really here and now, a fiction appropriate to the present. Any interpretation is true “only in its own analytic space.”36 Moreover, it is pointless to call an interpretation erroneous; it works by contributing to narrative intelligibility, and is neither true nor false but only a means to an end.
Spence and Viderman (who seems to have originated the analogy with the poet) have been accused of seriously misrepresenting the analyst’s role, which, says one critic, is less like that of a poet than like that of a detective breaking an alibi.37 This analogy might have a certain appeal to all who would rather deal even with a policeman than with a poet, but it simply assumes the old historical dimension Spence and the others reject. As so often, old assumptions linger on, wearing the guise of common sense.
It is of course part of the premise that what is new will become old, perhaps lingering for a while as common sense before sinking into disuse or being revived and given a new dress. The most appealing thing about the hermeneutic approach is that it forbids itself to suppose that it can stop all movement at exactly the right place, namely one’s own moment, or that it has achieved an interpretive apparatus that is permanently valid. And of course the sort of paradigm change I have been discussing can only be represented as a matter of history, which at least to that extent is not dead at all, as linguists, theologians, and historians of the most modern sort perfectly well understand. But this is second-order history—the narrative not of events or linguistic change or whatever, but rather the narrative of such narratives. Anyway, the shift seems to have happened, and it is hardly a surprise that psychoanalysis, with its roots in one epoch and its branches in another, should demonstrably have been caught up in it.
There is, I think, one more thing to be said. The most radical theologians, some of them atheist to all intents and purposes, are still Christians. Philosophers eloquent in their distrust of history and system—as nowadays some influential thinkers are—remain for all that philosophers. The art-historical methods of a Warburg have become the possession of scholars who may think his theories of small concern. And all the critics of the Freudian concept of the past to whom I have referred in this essay are either psychoanalysts or friends of psychoanalysis. Nietzsche remarked in The Use and Abuse of History that every past is worth condemning; and it is possible to believe in psychoanalysis without thinking that any of its past pasts are exempt from this general rule. Nevertheless, certain values seem to survive the conceptual forms in which from time to time they have been—have to have been—embodied. The certainty that present structures of belief will also change is therefore not a reason for supposing that psychoanalysis will cease to figure among the arts or sciences of interpretation, or even that it will not dominate them, in times when they will probably be defined in ways quite unforeseeable by us.
For my own part I am happy to think that psychoanalytic interpretation may hold commerce with the theory of fiction. The theologians are interested in a similar concordat, having lost confidence in objective history. I promised comfort at the end: it is this, that we may all, under the special conditions of our trades, claim to be dealing with figurae veritatis, figures of the truth.