Introduction
WITTGENSTEIN’S remarks on Freud do not form part of one continuous exposition. Most of them were not intended for publication. Some are sketchy to the point of incomprehensibility, others are apparently, and perhaps even ultimately, inconsistent. Nevertheless, they seem to me to offer a more illuminating characterization of Freud than any other and one of the few which can be confronted with its subject without producing acute feelings of incongruity.
There are three habits of mind which it is natural to refer to Freud. One is the tendency to see a large segment of human life as comprising the pursuit of ends of which the agent has no cognizance, even to the point of seeing as instances of purposive activity what would have formerly been considered happenings and of re-drawing the customary boundary between what we undertake and what we undergo. Another, the pursuit of hidden meanings, the readiness to see a wide range of phenomena, from dreams, errors and the symptoms of neurotics to works of art and the anonymous productions of culture—like legend and myth—as the distorted manifestation or symbolic gratification of unconscious impulses. (Everything is what it is and another thing.) Third, the tendency to trace the personalities of adults, their interests, attitudes, sexual proclivities and susceptibility to neurotic illness, to the influence of infantile sexual vicissitudes.
In what follows I try to elicit and assess Wittgenstein’s answer to the question of how the currency of these habits is to be accounted for, by examining two more determinate questions: What is Freud really up to when he proffers interpretations of symptoms, errors, dreams, etc? What is the character of the claim that these phenomena are ‘mental acts’, are motivated, are wish-fulfilments? Freud himself has more answers to these questions than he chooses to be aware of. However, all of them involve him in the claim that he is in some sort explaining these phenomena, that he is accounting for their occurrence. A prototypical Freudian utterance would have the following features: It would assert of some phenomenon like a slip of the tongue, a lapse of memory, a reminiscence, a dream, a phobia, an hysterical symptom, or an obsessive thought, that though it might appear to be something which the patient had passively suffered, it was, nevertheless, motivated, purposive, and that by submitting the item to free association and/or translating it according to certain rules, a wish would be arrived at, often of an infantile sexual character, of which the patient may have been unaware but which had been secretly at work, waiting for an opportune moment to contrive its gratification. About such remarks Wittgenstein holds the following views: They are not hypotheses; their production is more a consummatory than an instrumental activity. Neither the wish-fulfilling and symbolic character of the events they purport to explain nor their connexion with sexuality are matters of evidence. If such remarks have come widely to be accepted and made models for still other remarks, this is not to be attributed to any explanatory use to which they can be put but to the appeal they exert, an appeal partly to be explained in terms of their invocation of the notion of hidden meaning and of sexuality.
In the Introductory Lectures, Freud refers to ‘the displeasing proposition that mental processes are essentially unconscious’ and says, ‘By thus emphasizing the unconscious in mental life, we have called forth all the malevolence of humanity.’ In the New Introductory Lectures, he speaks of ‘the burdens under which we groan—the odium of infantile sexuality, the ludicrousness of symbolism’. In his 1925 paper on ‘The Resistances to Psychoanalysis’, he attributes these ‘above all to the very important place in the mental life of human beings which psychoanalysis assigns to what are known as the sexual instincts’. And in accounting for the popularity of Adler he said: ‘Humanity is ready to accept anything when tempted with ascendancy over sexuality as the bait.’
A succinct way of giving Wittgenstein’s view of Freud is simply to state that he stands these propositions on their heads. In a letter to Norman Malcolm, he said of Freud: ‘He always stresses what great forces in the mind, what strong prejudices work against the idea of psychoanalysis but he never says what an enormous charm this idea has for people just as it has for Freud himself.’1 In the first of the conversations with Rush Rhees on Freud, he says of the notion of the unconscious: ‘It is an idea which has a marked attraction.’2 In the third of the lectures on Aesthetics, he says about Freud’s sexual interpretation of a dream: ‘The connexions he makes interest people immensely. They have a charm. It is charming to destroy prejudice. … It may be the fact that the explanation is extremely repellent that drives you to adopt it’; and of psychoanalytic explanations in general that many ‘are adopted because they have a peculiar charm. The picture of people having unconscious thoughts has a charm. The idea of an underworld, a secret cellar. Something hidden, uncanny … A lot of things one is ready to believe because they are uncanny.’3
I
In what way are psychoanalytic explanations uncanny? Consider the protective, interest-serving relationship in which the unconscious so often stands to its possessor: Ferenczi’s unconscious makes him forget a witticism which might have caused offence and embroiled him in controversy; Jones’ causes him to mislay his pipe when he is suffering from the effects of over-smoking and to find it again when he has recovered; an engineer’s (who has reluctantly agreed to work one evening) to put out of commission the equipment necessary for the task; a house physician’s to absent himself during duty hours without detection; a keen classicist’s to present her with a coveted antique Roman medallion which she finds she has unwittingly packed among her belongings; that of girls with beautiful hair to ‘manage their combs and hairpins in such a way that their hair comes down in the middle of a conversation’. Freud’s unconscious permits him to forget to keep professional engagements which are not lucrative and to miss a train connexion while travelling to Manchester via Holland and thus fulfil a long-cherished with to see Rembrandt’s paintings without defying his elder brother’s request not to break his journey. On one occasion it admonished him before visiting a patient to take particular care not to repeat a diagnostic error.
It also assuages the sense of guilt by punishing moral breaches. In support of this view Freud cites a correspondent who informs him that he has observed how often men who turn round to look back at passing women in the street meet with minor accidents such as colliding with lamp-posts.
Along with this benevolence you must also consider the unconscious’ superiority in performance as compared with that of the person whose unconscious it is. Freud freely acknowledged his inferiority to his unconscious in performing arithmetical calculations or aiming accurately. He relates that on one occasion when he received news that a seriously ill daughter had taken a turn for the better and his unconscious had decided that a sacrificial act of thanksgiving to fate was in order, he impulsively kicked a slipper at a little marble statue of Venus, knocking it to the ground, where it broke. The fact that he did not hit any of the objects which were closely grouped around it, he attributes to the superior aim of the unconscious mind. Freud gives another example of the superior dexterity of the unconscious: the manner in which he broke the marble cover of his inkpot. ‘My sweeping movement was only apparently clumsy; in reality it was exceedingly adroit and well directed, and understood how to avoid damaging any of the more precious objects that stood around. It is my belief that we must accept this judgement for a whole series of seemingly accidental, clumsy movements … they prove to be governed by an intention and achieve their aim with a certainty which cannot in general be credited to our conscious voluntary movements.’ (Elsewhere Freud speaks of the ‘unconscious dexterity’ with which objects are mislaid ‘if the unconscious has a motive in doing so’.) Freud also informs us that ‘apparently clumsy movements can be most cunningly used for sexual purposes’. One such which he relates ‘was accomplished with the dexterity of a conjurer’. This was when Stekel, in extending his hand to greet his hostess, undid the bow of her gown without being aware of any dishonourable intention.
Rank, Freud reports, has provided evidence of the superior ability of the unconscious to see under unfavourable conditions: it enabled a girl, who coveted a cheap piece of jewellery, to find on the pavement, a note for exactly the amount required. ‘Otherwise it would be impossible to explain how it was, that precisely this one person, out of many hundreds of passers-by—and with all the difficulties caused by poor street lighting and the dense crowds—was able to make the find.’
Don’t these stories remind you of something? Don’t they illustrate the degree to which the notion of the unconscious meets the same demands as those which produce the invisible companion phantasies of our childhood? Though we know what Freud would have said to this suggestion: that invisible companion phantasies are endopsychic perceptions of the operation of unconscious agencies.4
It may seem strange but it is undeniable that accounts in which the rôle assigned to the unconscious is a punishing rather than a benevolent one are found equally gratifying. In this connexion Freud writes of a class of patients whom he describes as ‘those wrecked by success’, people who fall mentally ill ‘precisely because a deeply rooted and long-cherished wish has come to fulfilment’. He cites the case of a teacher who developed melancholia when offered promotion and of a woman who broke down when the obstacles to her marriage to the man she loved were removed.5 The ‘peculiar attraction’ of such explanations can be illustrated by contrasting them with the case of the cricketer who was perfectly happy as long as he scored no runs, but broke into tears if he scored more than fifty. If this were all, one could have added him to Freud’s list as a particularly striking case of self-punishment consequent on success, and predicted a great bibliographical future for him in the literature of psychoanalysis. But he was diagnosed as a diabetic whose distress was induced by the effect on his blood sugar level of the exertion of running between the wickets. When he was given glucose sweets to suck he was able to score a century without too much anguish. Don’t we feel that by unimaginatively responding to so banal a form of treatment he forfeited his claim to our interest?—though we could restore this interest if we could be persuaded that, as Freud once remarked when he came upon an organic determinant of an illness, ‘the neurosis had seized upon this chance event and made use of it for an utterance of its own’.6
This remark brings us to another characteristic of the unconscious; one which reinforces Wittgenstein’s suggestion as to its affinities and the source of its appeal. It is alluded to rather cryptically in the Introductory Lectures in the remark that ‘the neurosis of hysteria can create its symptoms in all systems of the body (circulatory, respiratory, etc.)’.7 Though this could be construed as simply an allusion to the phenomenon of hypochondriacal conviction which does not involve any assumption of mental control over physical processes, there is reason to believe that Freud means more than this. In the case history of Dora, Freud explains how Dora was able to make use of an organically based disorder of the throat, which induced coughing and aphonia, to express symbolically her unconscious love for a man by falling ill when he was away and recovering when he returned. That the periods did not invariably coincide is attributed by Freud to the fact that ‘it became necessary to obscure the coincidence between her attacks of illness and the absence of the man she secretly loved, lest its regularity should betray her secret’.8 Unlike Kitty Bennett, Dora had complete discretion in her coughs and timed them beautifully.
Since Freud isn’t clear as to whether the wish produces, or merely exploits the catarrh, this example might seem open to an alternative construction. More conclusive evidence of his proclivity for this mode of thought, along with a suggestion that he was nervous about making it too explicit, is contained in a letter to Groddeck: ‘… it is not necessary to extend the concept of the unconscious in order to include your experience with organic disorders. In my article about the unconscious which you mention, you will find a small footnote: “We shall save for mention in another connexion a further important prerogative of the unconscious.” I shall tell you what I kept back there, namely the assertion that acts of the unconscious have intense plastic effects on somatic processes in a manner impossible to achieve by conscious acts.’9 Further evidence on this point is to be found in Ernest Jones’ biography, where we are told that at the end of 1916 Freud was considering writing a book, the essential content of which was ‘that the omnipotence of thoughts was once a reality. Our intention is to show that Lamarck’s conception of need which creates and modifies organs is nothing else than the power unconscious ideas have over the body, of which we see the remains in hysteria—in short, “the omnipotence of thoughts”.’10
We can account both for this conviction of Freud’s and for our readiness to be convinced by varying slightly his judgement on Adler: ‘There is nothing humanity won’t accept with ascendancy over matter as the bait.’
But what is noteworthy in Freud is not the credulity he evinces, and evokes, towards the outlandish but the tendentious way in which he describes the commonplace. This brings us to another of Wittgenstein’s theses: that in Freud’s hands the notions of unconscious mental acts and of wish-fulfilment are notations.
Among the most reliable stigmata of a notation is the advancing of a thesis in the company of its own counter-examples. The principle at work is that all putative counter-instances are to be considered clandestine specimens of confirmatory instances. If we examine Freud’s investigation of errors of which he said that it was ‘the prototype of every psychoanalytic investigation’ and that it was ‘better calculated than any other to stimulate a belief in the existence of unconscious mental acts’, we see how great is the notational component in the claim that ‘acts of a mental nature, and often very complicated ones, can take place in you… of which you know nothing’. Less than a quarter of the 250 or so examples which The Psychopathology of Everyday Life came to contain are even apparently illustrations of the phenomena they are said to exemplify, ‘of a will striving for a definite aim’.
Consider those cases of forgetting which Freud describes as ‘forgetting from a motive of avoiding unpleasure’. Let us suppose that the empirical facts are not in question, i.e. that there is a tendency for names or words or intentions with unpleasant associations to be forgotten. Is there anything in this fact which demands description in terms of the behaviour of an unconscious agency which censors the thoughts of the subject in the interests of his peace of mind? Freud says of these cases ‘the motive of forgetting actuates a counter-will’. But he also compares them with the flight reflex in the presence of painful stimuli. Why then do they demand description in terms of an unconscious agency any more than this does? Is my inability to hold my hands above my head for an indefinite period to be ascribed to the victory of a counter-will to lower them? ‘Couldn’t the whole thing have been differently treated?’11 Considerations like these suggest that what Freud often sees as instances of the operation of unconscious agencies really register his determination to describe familiar facts in a novel and congenial idiom.
In Zettel, § 444, Wittgenstein compares Freud’s theory that all dreams are wish-fulfilments with the thesis that every proposition is a picture. ‘… it is the characteristic thing about such a theory that it looks at a special, clearly intuitive case and says: that shows how things are in every case. This case is the exemplar of all cases.’12 And in the ‘Conversations on Freud’, he says of this theory of Freud’s, ‘it is not a matter of evidence’ but ‘is the sort of explanation we are inclined to accept …13 Some dreams obviously are wish fulfilments: such as the sexual dreams of adults for instance. But it seems muddled to say that all dreams are hallucinated wish-fulfilments.’14
Even those dreams which are incontestably wish-fulfilments don’t justify the inferences which Freud draws from them. Consider Freud’s anchovy dream. On nights on which he has eaten anchovies he wakes thirsty, but not before he has dreamt of gulping down draughts of cold water. This is certainly an instance of wish-fulfilment. As is the case of the hungry dreamer who dreams of a delicious meal. But Freud goes on to say of this last example: ‘The choice was up to him of either waking up and eating something or of continuing sleep. He decided in favour of the latter.’15 What is there in these examples to justify the assumption of a supervisory agency accompanying the phenomena and regulating their manifestations? If I succeed in waking at a predetermined hour, must I assume that some delegate of myself has kept vigil through the night? ‘Unconscious mental acts’, ‘choice’, ‘decision’: If it were a matter of Penelope unravelling her web in a nocturnal trance, or Lady Dedlock sleep-walking her way to Captain Hawdon’s grave, there might then be some justification for the suggestiveness of these idioms.
Freud has various devices for dealing with counter-examples. The most notorious occurs in Chapter 4 of The Interpretation of Dreams. A patient recounted a dream in which something she wished to avoid was represented as fulfilled. Freud comments: ‘Was not this in sharpest opposition to my theory that in dreams wishes are fulfilled? No doubt … the dream showed that I was wrong. Thus it was her wish that I might be wrong, and her dream showed that wish fulfilled,’16 (Freud’s italics.) Nor is he timid about generalizing this solution. ‘Indeed it is to be expected that the same thing will happen to some of the readers of the present book: they will be quite ready to have one of their wishes frustrated in a dream if only their wish that I may be wrong can be fulfilled.’17 Anxiety dreams are dealt with either by invoking the masochistic wish for pain or the super-ego’s satisfaction in inflicting punishment on the ego.
The problem that most dreams have a neutral or indifferent content is dealt with by means of the distinction between the latent and the manifest content of the dream. It is the latent content which constitutes the fulfilment of the wish, the manifest content being a consequence of distortion.
Wittgenstein comments on this in the second conversation: ‘The majority of dreams Freud considers have to be regarded as camouflaged wish-fulfilments and in that case they simply don’t fulfil the wish. Ex hypothesi, the wish is not allowed to be fulfilled and something else is hallucinated instead. If the wish is cheated in this way, then the dream can hardly be called a fulfilment of it. Also it becomes impossible to say whether it is the wish or the censor that is cheated. Apparently both are, and the result is that neither is satisfied. So that the dream is not an hallucinated satisfaction of anything.’18
The applicability of these remarks is not confined to the dream theory but extends to Freud’s account of the neuroses, where one is often equally at a loss to see the grounds for Freud’s insistence that the symptoms of the disorder represent the fulfilment of a wish, or of the wish to frustrate the wish, or both.
Consider his explanation of epileptoid attacks like those from which Dostoevsky suffered in his youth. Deathlike seizures of this kind ‘signify an identification with a dead person, either with someone who was really dead or with someone who was still alive and whom the subject wished dead’, in which case the attack has the significance of a punishment. ‘One has wished another person dead and now one is this other person and is dead oneself …’ Thus Dostoevsky’s ‘early symptoms of deathlike seizures can be understood as a father-identification on the part of his ego, permitted by his super-ego as a punishment. “You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father… now your father is killing you” ’19 And this is how Freud derives a wish-fulfilment from a young girl’s attempt at suicide: She was simultaneously punishing herself for a death-wish against her mother and gratifying it since ‘the girl’s identification of herself with her mother makes this “punishment-fulfilment” again into a wish-fulfilment’. I.e. if I am my mother and I kill myself, I kill my mother and my mother’s murderer.20
Interpretations like these are the conceptual equivalents of impossible objects. But to speak of Freud’s conceptual confusion in this context is to slight his grammatical genius, his ingenuity in devising unconstruable idioms. It is as if one were to attribute the self-contradictory structures in M. C. Escher’s prints to his inability to draw.
(We tend to be diffident about characterizing explanations like these because it is so difficult to be sure one has got hold of them. But why shouldn’t this resistance to paraphrase be the most important thing about them? Why shouldn’t it be the essence of the matter? What a psychoanalytic explanation tells us is itself.)
Though ‘the peculiar attraction’ of the uncanny goes far towards explaining the appeal of the idioms in which psychoanalytic explanations are couched it is inadequate as an account of why Freud employs them. In the Blue Book Wittgenstein says of the thesis that there exist unconscious thoughts: ‘… it is just a new terminology and can at any time be translated into ordinary language’.21 Later, after remarking on how we may be ‘irresistibly attracted or repelled by a notation’, he says: ‘The idea of there being unconscious thoughts has revolted many people…. The objectors to unconscious thoughts did not see that they were not objecting to the newly discovered psychological reactions, but to the way in which they were described. The psychoanalysts, on the other hand, were misled by their own way of expression into thinking that they had done more than discover new psychological reactions: that they had in a sense discovered conscious thoughts which were unconscious.’22 These remarks seem to me mistaken in seeing in the notion of unconscious thoughts a disinterested notational compulsion and in thinking that they merely record ‘newly discovered psychological reactions’ which ‘can at any time be translated into ordinary language’. The notion of unconscious thoughts is not a detachable excrescence which can be removed leaving a neutral core of ‘phenomena and connexions not previously known’.23 Its function is to give a self-authenticating character to psychoanalytic method.
When Freud says ‘we call a process unconscious when … it was active at a certain time although at that time we knew nothing about it’,24 he is not merely succumbing to the appeal of a notation, not just adopting a form of description which ‘adds nothing to what we know but only suggests a different form of words to describe it’.25 For what other manner of speaking would enable him to insist on the irrelevance of any doubts as to the existence of such connexions not based on the use of a specialized method of introspection? What has been taken for conceptual audacity was really prudence.
Making the reference of his claims an imperceptible process, contemporary with the ‘act’ it is supposed to explain, enables Freud to combine the compatibility with an agent’s candid disavowal of a hypothesis about the causes of his behaviour, with the invulnerability to counter-example of Collingwood-type reconstructions of an historical agent’s grounds for his action. The objection to speaking in this connexion of the ‘abominable mess’ made by Freud’s disciples in confusing cause and reason,26 is that it represents the state of affairs too much as one of helpless confusion and overlooks the way in which the confusion is ingeniously exploited in the interests of the theory. In the notion of reasons which are causes there is more grammatical flair than grammatical muddle.
By encapsulating the thought inside the agent’s head, Freud is enabled to dispense with the surroundings and by making it unconscious to dispense with the agent’s assent as well. Once we grasp that it is not the hypothesis of the existence of unconscious wishes which gives Freud’s theory its distinctive character but the assumption that psychoanalytic method affords a unique access to them, many puzzles surrounding psychoanalytic claims are dissipated.
III
Wittgenstein thinks psychoanalytic explanations are like aesthetic explanations; but it doesn’t help us to know this unless we know what he thinks aesthetic explanations are like. All that is certain is that he thinks they are unlike explanations in terms of brain mechanisms. But though, when he says that the giving of a cause cannot resolve our puzzlement over an aesthetic impression, he sometimes means that the giving of the physical substrate of the impression cannot answer our question (e.g. an account of the state of the olfactory nerve while we are smelling a rose doesn’t shed light on the aesthetic question why it smells pleasant),27 he doesn’t always mean only this.
In his remarks on Frazer in the same series of lectures something else is in view. According to Moore, ‘He said that it was a mistake to suppose that why, e.g. the account of the Beltane festival “impresses us so much” is because it has “developed from a festival in which a real man was burnt” … Our puzzlement as to why it impresses us’ (which Wittgenstein said was an aesthetic question), ‘is not diminished by giving the causes from which the festival arose, but is diminished by finding other similar festivals: to find these may make it seem “natural”, whereas to give the causes from which it arose cannot do this.’
Darwin is taxed with a similar mistake in supposing that ‘because our ancestors when angry wanted to bite’ is a sufficient explanation of why ‘we show our teeth when angry’. I am not sure of the force of ‘sufficient’ here and not sure how the question why we show our teeth when angry is like the question why the account of the Beltane festival impresses us. And there are other puzzles connected with these remarks. The question to which Frazer is supposed to have given a mistaken reply is never raised by Frazer, whose main interest (in Balder the Beautiful) seems to be whether the point of Fire festivals is to reinforce the sun’s heat by sympathetic magic or to destroy evil and threatening things. Also, the method recommended by Wittgenstein to relieve us of our puzzlement as to why we are impressed—’… finding other similar festivals’—sounds like a description of what Frazer is doing a good deal of the time: ‘Bonfires at the Ponggol festival in Southern India … bonfires at the Holi festival in Northern India … the fire walk in China … the fire walk at the Hindu festival … the fire walk among the Badagas … the fire walk in Japan etc., etc.’ I have said enough to show why it is difficult to have much confidence in the construction one puts on these remarks. Nevertheless, it is hard not to feel, at some points, an almost Spenglerian disdain for causal inquiry at work; that, e.g., Wittgenstein hasn’t misremembered the question that Frazer set himself but just feels that his own is more interesting and Frazer’s an error of sensibility. But there is an alternative and plausible construction that might be put on these remarks which fall short of attributing to Wittgenstein an antipathy to causal questions. Wittgenstein may just be calling attention to an error which there is a natural tendency to make. The error in question might be described as looking for consummation in the wrong place; an instance of which is asking for the etiology of a phenomenon where what we really want is an analysis of the impression produced on us by the phenomenon. For example, we often think we are interested in the past when it is really the experience of pastness which absorbs us. We forget that the peculiar impression ruins make on us is not accounted for by discovering how they came to be in that condition. Someone who embarked on a course of astronomical study in the vague hope of shedding light on the nature of the impression made on him by the night sky when the stars are out is also making this kind of mistake. Again, the peculiar impression made on us by the distinctive movements of achondroplastics (‘a friendliness was in the air as of dwarfs shaking hands’) is not elucidated by an account of the endocrinology of the condition. And yet when Wittgenstein speaks of ‘the sort of explanation one longs for when one talks of an aesthetic impression’ one doesn’t feel that it is the analysis of an impression that he wants: it is still too much like a hypothesis.
A clue to what he does have in mind is provided by a comparison he makes in the second lecture on Aesthetics between aesthetic remarks and expressions like ‘What is it I wanted to say?’ and ‘What people really want to say is so and so’.28 In Philosophical Investigations, § 334, of the expression ‘So you really wanted to say …’, Wittgenstein says ‘We use this phrase in order to lead someone from one form of expression to another’. This suggests to me that the kind of remark which Wittgenstein thinks aesthetic puzzlement calls for is one which, though it may seem to be describing or explaining a certain past state of mind, is really prolonging an experience in a particular direction; like the angle-trisector who, when shown the proof that what he was attempting to do was impossible, says ‘That this was the very thing he was trying to do, though what he had been trying to do was really different’, or the regular pentagon-constructor who, in similar circumstances, says ‘ “That’s what I was really trying to do” because his idea had shifted on a rail on which he was ready to shift it’.29 Perhaps the remarks of William James’ Mr. Ballard are another instance of this. The Egyptian intellectuals of the twenties, who declared that their countrymen were Arabs, exemplify a related phenomenon, as do the estranged couple who say they never loved one another: statements which, though apparently descriptive of the past, really serve to orient their utterers to a projected future; and like some interpretations of the analyst ‘make it easier for them to go certain ways … make certain ways of behaving and thinking natural for them’.30
Often these remarks take the form of an analogy; the finding of something to which we feel we stand in a similar relation as to that which puzzles or impresses us.
In Moore’s notes Wittgenstein speaks of Aesthetics as a matter of ‘giving a good simile’ and of ‘putting things side by side’. And in the third lecture on Aesthetics he speaks of ‘the explanation we should like to have when we are puzzled about aesthetic impressions. … As far as one can see, the puzzlement I am talking about can only be cured by peculiar kinds of comparison …’31 In the second conversation he says: ‘When a dream is interpreted it is fitted into a context in which it ceases to be puzzling. In a sense, the dreamer re-dreams his dream in surroundings such that its aspect changes.’32 In the Brown Book, in discussing what an explanation in Aesthetics is like, he says: ‘… it may consist in finding a form of verbal expression which I conceive as the verbal counterpart of the theme … the word which seemed to sum it up’. There is some inadvertent testimony from Wittels that psychoanalytic explanation may also be a matter of ‘the word which seemed to sum it up’.33 He speaks of ‘… neurotic patients who were peculiarly ready to adopt the use of the word “castration” as soon as they heard me employ it. Their reminiscences then tended to assume some such form as the following: “My mother castrated me when I was a little boy. But the one who especially castrated me was my paternal grandfather. Yesterday my mistress castrated me.” ’34 Freud gives a sexual explanation of obsessive thinking. He speaks of the tendency to ‘sexualize thinking and to colour intellectual operations with the pleasure and anxiety which belong to sexual processes proper … investigations become a sexual activity … the thought process itself becomes sexualized … the gratification derived from reaching the conclusion of a line of thought is experienced as sexual gratification… (the feeling that comes from settling things in one’s mind and explaining them replaces sexual satisfaction)’.35 We can easily imagine that someone on reading these words might have a delighted feeling of recognition and be moved to assent. But would it follow that they constitute a hypothesis? When in this connexion Karl Abraham points out that ‘In Biblical Hebrew the word to “know” is used for the sexual act. A man is said to know his wife’, and that ‘the comparison of mental and sexual acts is not uncommon. We speak for instance of the conception of a poetical work’; or when Freud says of Leonardo ‘He had merely converted his passion into a thirst for knowledge … at the climax of intellectual labour, when knowledge had been won, he allowed the long restrained affect to break loose and flow away freely …’, aren’t these once again simply a matter of ‘giving a good simile’, of ‘placing things side by side’? And even if some sequaceous patient testified to an irresistible compulsion to shout “Eureka” whenever he achieved orgasm wouldn’t this just be another copy of the same newspaper?
Consider Baudelaire’s comparison of the act of love to an application of torture—’… these sighs, these groans, these screams, these rattling gasps… . What worse sights can you see at any inquisition? These eyes rolled back like sleep-walkers, these limbs whose muscles burst and stiffen as though subject to the action of a galvanic battery, etc., etc.’ Contrast our state of mind as we read these words with that in which we take in Freud’s observations on the sadistic nature of coitus, or his characterization of sexual consummation as a minor form of epilepsy (‘a mitigation and adaptation of the epileptic method of discharging stimuli’).36 No one would confuse his gratitude to Baudelaire for momentary relief from the burden of being high-spirited about his sexuality with the appreciation of a discovery or the consideration of a hypothesis, but with Freud this is happening all the time.
‘The attraction of certain kinds of explanation is overwhelming. At a given time the attraction of a certain kind of explanation is greater than you can conceive. In particular, explanations of the kind “this is really only this”. ’ This remark of Wittgenstein’s brings out what most discussions of Freud, even when they are critical, miss—the compulsive quality of Freud’s interpretations. ‘There is a strong tendency to say: “We can’t get round the fact that this dream is really such and such” … If someone says: “Why do you say it is really this. Obviously it is not this at all”, it is in fact even difficult to see it as something else.’37 Try telling someone who is psychoanalytically oriented that Van Gogh’s mutilation of his ear may have had no connexion with castration, or that Oedipus’ blinding of himself was not a castration-substitute and you meet not so much with incredulity as bewilderment. He will have difficulty in giving your statement sense. He behaves as if he had learned the expression ‘castration-symbol’ ostensively. This is simply what castration-substitute means. ‘The correct analogy is the accepted one.’
IV
In Moore’s account of the 1933 lectures Wittgenstein is reported as saying ‘that Freud did not in fact find any method of analysing dreams which is analogous to the rules which will tell you what are the causes of stomach ache’.38 But aren’t repressed thoughts the green apples of Freudian psychopathology? We might ask how Freud manages to detect allusions to castration, defloration, birth, intercourse, menstruation, masturbation, etc., etc., on so many occasions if he has not discovered rules analogous to those ‘which will tell you what are the causes of stomach ache’. And in the second conversation, in contrasting the real character of psychoanalytic interpretations with their apparent character, Wittgenstein describes what ‘might be called a scientific treatment of the dream … one might form a hypothesis. On reading the report of the dream, one might predict that the dreamer can be brought to recall such and such memories. And this hypothesis might or might not be verified.’39 But isn’t this what Freud does? Doesn’t Freud produce instances where the interpretation is tied to some independently authenticatable event? But before we accept this argument we must look more closely at Freud’s reconstructive achievements. When we do, we find that they are almost invariably inconclusive in one of the following ways: either the inferred event is ubiquitous, or it was known independently of the procedure which ostensibly inferred it. In either case the reality of the inferred event wouldn’t, in itself, show the validity of the means by which it was arrived at.
If we doubt this and consult the case histories to reassure ourselves on the point, we find that either the events or scenes reconstructed have too great an independent probability to support the validity of the interpretative technique (as with Dora’s urinary incontinence), or were known independently of the analysis (as with the severe beating Paul had from his father and the castration threats to which Little Hans was exposed). The apparent exception to this is, what is often regarded as Freud’s greatest reconstructive achievement, his discovery that a patient, at the age of 18 months, saw his parents engage in ‘a coitus a tergo, thrice repeated’,40 at five in the afternoon. This certainly doesn’t lack circumstantiality. What it lacks is corroboration. Freud is aware of this and falls back on a coherence argument.
It might be felt that even if these objections hold of the cases Freud reported at length, he does assure us that he has produced reconstructions to which these objections do not apply; where the reconstructed events were not known in advance and were independently authenticated through ‘lucky accidents’ as, for example, Marie Bonaparte’s servants confirming Freud’s suspicion that she had witnessed intercourse before the age of one.41 But for this to count in favour of the claim that Freud discovered the laws according to which repressed memories are distorted, we should have to know how often Freud gave reconstructions which contained primal scenes; and we have reason to believe that it was very often. That he should have failed to report those which were not corroborated doesn’t involve attributing to him any improbable degree of disingenuousness, since he himself tells us that he attached no importance to this kind of authentication, convinced as he was that his reconstructions must have been essentially true in any case:
I should myself be glad to know whether the primal scene in my present patient’s case was a phantasy or a real experience; but taking other similar cases into account I must admit that the answer to this question is not in reality a matter of very great importance. These scenes of observing parental intercourse, of being seduced in childhood, and of being threatened with castration are unquestionably an inherited endowment, a phylogenetic inheritance… .42
If they can be found in real events, well and good; but if reality has not supplied them, they will be evolved out of hints and elaborated by phantasy. The effect is the same, and even today we have not succeeded in tracing any variation in the results according as phantasy, or reality, plays the greater part in these experiences.43
With phylogenetic inheritance to fall back on Freud deprives himself of any way of discovering that his reconstructions are mistaken and his principles of interpretation invalid, which means that he deprives himself of any reason for believing that they are not. He fails to see this because he exploits an unconscious presumption that the complexity of an interpretation, the number of cross-references it contains to incidents in the life of the patient, ‘… the long thread of connexions that spun itself out between a symptom of the disease and a pathogenic idea’, is an index of its truth. We underestimate enormously the possibility of producing such an appearance of intricate coherence where the items are not genuinely related. (Isn’t this the real moral of the discovery of the falsity of so many of the assumptions on which the Leonardo essay was based?)
In justifying his conviction as to the reality of a primal scene Freud said: ‘Everything seemed to converge upon it… the most various and remarkable results radiated out from it [and] not only the large problems but the smallest peculiarities in the history of the case were cleared up by this single assumption … [the analyst] will disclaim the possession of the amount of ingenuity necessary for the concoction of an occurrence which can fulfil these demands.’44
Wittgenstein doubts this: ‘Freud remarks on how after the analysis of it, the dream appears so very logical. And of course it does. You could start with any of the objects on this table— which certainly were not put there by your dream activity—and you could find that they all could be connected in a pattern like that, and the pattern would be logical in the same way.’45
Either Wittgenstein’s table was more cluttered than mine or he shared Freud’s genius for constructing associative links between any two points, for I have not been able to produce patterns anywhere near as convincing as Freud’s. But the force of this consideration is weakened if we remember that Freud lays his own table: ‘The material belonging to a single subject can only be collected piece by piece at various times and in various connexions.’
But it is the elasticity and multiplicity of the rules which do most to reduce the a priori improbability of producing associative links to and between his patients’ dreams, symptoms, reminiscences, etc, where there are really none. The link between the unconscious thought and its manifestation is often simply that in both something is inside something, or something is going into something, or something is coming out of something, or something is being detached from something, etc., etc.
It is this which enables Freud to see an allusion to castration anxiety in a symptom of obsessional neurotics ‘by means of which they manage to ensure themselves continual torment. When they are in the street they are constantly watching to see whether some acquaintance will salute them first, by taking off his hat, or whether he seems to wait for their salute; and they give up a number of their acquaintances who they imagine no longer salute them or do not return their salute properly … the source of this excess of feeling can easily be found in relation to the castration complex.’46 (Something is being detached from something.)
And to an incestuous desire for his mother in ‘Little Hans’’ inability to venture out of doors. This phobia involved a ‘restriction on his freedom of movement…. It was, therefore, a powerful reaction against the obscure impulses to movement which were especially directed against his mother.’ That a horse should have been the object of his phobia lends itself to the same construction. ‘For Hans, horses had always typified pleasure in movement … but since this pleasure in movement included the impulse to copulate, the neurosis imposed a restriction on it and exalted the horse into an emblem of terror.’47 (Something is moving.)
And to defloration in the following example: ‘Do you know why our old friend E. turns red and sweats whenever he sees a certain class of acquaintance… . He is ashamed, no doubt; but of what? Of a phantasy in which he figures as the deflowerer of every person he comes across. He sweats as he deflowers because it is hard work. … Moreover, he can never get over the fact that at the university he failed to get through in Botany so he carries on with it now as a “deflowerer”.’48
‘It is all excellent similes.’ Freud turns his patient into a walking rebus.
Though the interpretations tell their own story there is some interesting testimony on this point from an American psychiatrist who underwent a training analysis with Freud: ‘I would often give a whole series of associations to a dream symbol and he would wait until he found an association which would fit into his scheme of interpretation and pick it up like a detective at a line-up who waits until he sees his man.’49
It seems that Freud stood to his patients’ associations, dreams, symptoms, reminiscences and errors more as the painter to his pigments than as the sleuth to his traces of mud and cigar ash.
The implications of this are that instead of seeing in ‘condensation’, ‘displacement’, ‘representation by the opposite’, etc., etc., laws governing unconscious processes, we recognize them as recipes for the construction of associative chains to preselected termini; not mechanisms by whose operation the symptom, dream, etc, was constructed, but rules for ‘working a piece of fancy into it’.
v
As to the thesis that infantile experience determines adult character, e.g. the rôle of primal scenes, Wittgenstein once again locates its persuasive power in its attractiveness, ‘the attractiveness of a mythology’, of ‘explanations which say this is all a repetition of something which has happened before’, thus ‘giving a sort of tragic pattern to one’s life. … Like a tragic figure carrying out the decrees under which the Fates had placed him at birth.’50
An objection which might be brought against Wittgenstein here is that he comes to this conclusion while discussing no topic other than interpretation. What of the evidence for the pathogenic power of infantile sexual occurrences and the developmental claims about infantile sexuality? Surely these provide a sufficient explanation of how the themes of infancy and sexuality came to figure so prominently in psychoanalysis, without the necessity of invoking ‘charm’ or the appeal of the repellent?
Wittgenstein’s failure to mention these topics might lend some credence to Professor Wollheim’s suggestion that his view of Freud is to be put down to a combination of ignorance and envy. On the other hand, perhaps Wittgenstein noticed something which Professor Wollheim missed. If, undisheartened by the extravagance of this supposition, we re-examine Freud to see what basis there might be for it, we find that far from constituting an objection to Wittgenstein, his implicit dismissal of Freud’s etiological and developmental claims alerts us to a certain peculiarity of psychoanalytic discourse which has gone largely unnoticed: the extent to which Freud dehistoricized his theory so that the etiological and developmental claims, which ostensibly underpinned his interpretations, were actually derived from them.
When we re-read Freud in the light of Wittgenstein’s remarks the conviction forces itself on us that the end of analysis, to serve which the rest of the theory exists, is the construction and emission of interpretations; that it is this activity which must at all costs be sustained; that if Freud had come to the conclusion that his views as to infantile sexual life were mistaken the stream of interpretations would not on that account have been halted.
This might seem an idle speculation which there is no way of checking and which is in any case extremely implausible. It is therefore worth mentioning that Freud himself once discussed the possibility that ‘what analysts put forward as being forgotten experiences of childhood … may on the contrary be based on phantasies brought about on occasions occurring in later life’. This is his comment: ‘And if this interpretation of the scenes from infancy were the right one … The analysis would have to run precisely the same course as one which had a naïve faith in the truth of the phantasies … A correct procedure, therefore, would make no alterations in the technique of analysis, whatever estimate might be formed of these scenes from infancy.’51
But, if interpretations containing allusions to infantile sexuality are to be advanced in spite of a disbelief in the occurrence of infantile sexual phantasies, Freud’s convictions as to the rôle of infantile sexuality in the etiology of the neuroses cannot be his ground, but only his pretext, for interpreting symptoms in infantile sexual terms.
Just as often as Freud tells us that the psychoanalytic theory of infantile sexual development has been or could be confirmed by the direct observation of children, just so often does he imply that we are to expect nothing of the kind. ‘… Direct observation has fully confirmed the conclusions drawn from psychoanalytic investigation and thus furnished good evidence for the reliability of the latter method of investigation.’52 But elsewhere it is psychoanalytic investigation which confirms the reliability of our observation of infantile sexual life: ‘ … we call the doubtful and indefinable activities of earliest infancy towards pleasure sexual because, in the course of analysing symptoms, we reach them by way of material which is undeniably sexual’;53 ‘But those phases of the sexual development … which are of the greatest interest theoretically (are) gone through so rapidly that direct observation alone would perhaps never have succeeded in determining (their) fleeting forms. Only by the help of psychoanalytic investigation of the neuroses has it become possible to penetrate so far back …’;54 and of observations on small children: ‘They do not carry such complete conviction as is forced upon the physician by psychoanalyses of adult neurotics.’55 His account of his grounds for the conviction that the key to the neuroses is to be found in infantile sexual life is infected with the same ambivalence. ‘If anyone should enquire where he is to look for an incontestable proof of the etiological importance of sexual factors in psychoneuroses— since … a specific etiology in the form of particular infantile experiences is not forthcoming—then I would indicate psychoanalytic investigation of neurotics as the source from whence the disputed conviction springs.’56 It has not generally been realized how often Freud implies (what his practice confirms) that the character of a child’s infantile sexual life is to be determined by waiting until he is an adult and then psychoanalysing him.57
But the character of Freud’s claims concerning infantile life is often such that even the patient’s acquiescence cannot assuage our doubts; it merely raises the Ballard problem of Philosophical Investigations, § 342, and Zettel, § 109, in a more acute form. If it is a matter of ‘dim impulses which it is impossible for the child to grasp psychically at the time’,58 if we are to ‘consider how little the child is able to give expression to its sexual wishes and how little it can communicate them’,59 aren’t we justified in treating the patient’s assent as Wittgenstein treats Ballard’s reminiscence of the period before he knew language? ‘Are you sure—one would like to ask—that this is the correct translation of your wordless thoughts into words? … These recollections are a queer memory phenomenon, and I do not know what conclusions one can draw from them about the past of the man who recounts them.’60
When Freud says of the influence of infantile castration fears that ‘psychoanalytic experience’ has put it ‘beyond the reach of doubt’,61 this is not hyperbole. He means it. What allows him to mean it is his intermittent conviction that his achievement consists in having defeated the malice of nature in compelling men to observe each other’s minds through so opaque a medium as a human skull by providing access to the thing itself.62 (‘Off, you lendings!’) Wittgenstein has brought us to feel that this is an ambition which not even God could reasonably entertain.
The behaviour of patients under analysis, which began as evidence of the vicissitudes through which they had passed, gradually became criteria for the ascription of these vicissitudes. To say of a patient that he had entertained such and such wishes, or had repressed such and such phantasies, is to say that he now behaves towards the analyst in such and such a way, responds to the proffered interpretations in such and such a manner. Interpretation has been dehistoricized. The notion of truthfulness has replaced that of truth. The narration of infantile reminiscences has been assimilated (incoherently) to the narration of dreams.
When, in Moore’s notes, Wittgenstein speaks of Freud as giving accounts which sound like science when, in fact, they are only ‘a wonderful representation’,63 he may be referring to the extent to which the world, conceived of psychoanalytically, is just the everyday world taken over again with an altered expression. An illustration: in the grammatical phantasies which constitute the libido theory we can see the operation of a typically metaphysical motive in the way in which the quotidian world disappears from view behind the permutations of the libido, e.g. the meta-psychological account of why we mourn our dead; of why, as Freud puts it, ‘the ego never abandons a libido-position willingly’. If this fact is perplexing, by reference to what is it to be rendered intelligible? ‘… the adhesiveness of the libido’; ‘cathetic fidelity’; ‘the economic conditions of mental pain’. It seems that a Freud-person would have no difficulty in feeling grief—’that pattern in the weave of our lives’—for a second, or, if he did, it would be from the same causes which make it difficult to empty a bath tub or a bottle of glue in a second. But Freud is sometimes in the position of the impressionistic painter of Philosophical Investigations, § 368: ‘I describe a room to someone, and then get him to paint an impressionistic picture from this description, to show that he has understood it. Now he paints the chairs which I described as green, dark red; where I said yellow he paints blue—that is the impression which he got of that room. And now I say: “Quite right! That’s what it’s like.” ’
I think it is this sort of thing which Wittgenstein was referring to when he said that Freud had genius and therefore might ‘find out the reason of a dream’,64 even though ‘if you are led by psychoanalysis to say that really you thought so and so, or that really your motive was so and so, this is not a matter of discovery but of persuasion’,65 and that ‘there is no way of showing that the whole result of analysis may not be “delusion” ‘.66
Freud certainly produced statements to which an enormous number of people have said ‘yes’, but there are good grounds for assimilating his achievement to that of the anonymous geniuses to whom it first occurred that Tuesday is lean and Wednesday fat, the low notes on the piano dark and the high notes light. Except that instead of words, notes and shades, we have scenes from human life.
In this paper I have tried to demonstrate the impossibility of accounting for Freud’s preoccupations, or our preoccupation with Freud, without invoking what Wittgenstein called ‘charm’. We were caused to re-dream our life in surroundings such that its aspect changed—and it was the charm that made us do it.
1 Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein—A Memoir, (London, 1958), p. 44. Freud was not always so disingenuous about this. In 1893 he wrote to his friend
Fliess: ‘The sexual business attracts people; they all go away impressed and convinced, after exclaiming: No one has ever asked me that before.’ S. Freud, Origins of Psychoanalysis (New York, 1954), Letter 14.
2 Cyril Barrett (Ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein—Lectures and Conversations (Oxford, 1966), p. 43.
3 Barrett, Lectures and Conversations, pp. 24–5.
4 In The Red and the Black Stendhal attributes this same relish in the masterfulness of the unconscious to his Mathilde de la Mole:
‘As she made these reflections, Mathilde’s pencil was tracing lines at random on a page of her album. One of the profiles she had just completed amazed and delighted her; it was strikingly like Julien. “It’s the voice of Heaven! Here’s one of the miracles of Love”! she cried in rapture. “Quite unconsciously I’ve drawn his portrait.”
‘She rushed off to her room, locked herself in, applied herself to her task, and tried hard to draw a portrait of Julien. But she could not do it; the profile sketched by accident still remained the best likeness. Mathilde was enchanted by this; she saw in it a clear proof of a grand passion.’
All the examples referred to on pages 186 to 188 are from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. James Strachey’s translation has an index of all the examples Freud uses.
5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Some Character Types met with in Psychoanalytic Work (1915), Collected Papers, Vol. IV (London 1956), pp. 324–5.
6 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905), Collected Papers, Vol. III (London, 1925), p. 123.
7 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1915–17), (London, 1922), p. 259.
8 Freud, Collected Papers, III, p. 49.
9 Ernst Freud (Ed.), Letters of Sigmund Freud (London, 1961), Letter 176.
10 Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud—Life and Work (London, 1957), Vol. III, p. 335.
Freud explicitly endorses the felicity of Wittgenstein’s term ‘uncanny’. In his account of ‘the peculiar quality … which arouses in us the feeling of uncanniness’ (Collected Papers, IV, pp. 368–9), Freud invokes just those features which we have seen to characterize his notion of the unconscious. See also the essay ‘Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought’ in Totem and Taboo (Footnote 25, Strachey Translation: ‘ … we invest with a feeling of uncanniness those impressions which lend support to a belief in the omnipotence of thoughts’. It is as if he were constructing his explanations to a formula.
11 Barrett, Lectures and Conversations, p. 45.
12 In his autobiography Freud neatly exemplifies this habit of mind. ‘The state of things which he (Breuer) had discovered, seemed to me, to be of so fundamental a nature, that I could not believe it could fail to be present in any case of hysteria if it had proved to occur in a single one.’ (An Autobiographical Study, Hogarth Press, 1950, p. 36.)
13 Barrett, Lectures and Conversations, p. 42.
14 Ibid., p. 47.
15 Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (London, 1949), p. 36.
16 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London, 1954), p. 151.
17 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 158.
18 Barrett, Lectures and Conversations, p. 47.
19 Sigmund Freud, ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’ (1928), Collected Papers, Vol. V (London, 1957), pp. 229 and 232.
20 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’ (1920), Collected Papers, Vol. II (London, 1948), p. 220.
21 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and The Brown Books (Oxford, 1958), p. 23.
22 Wittgenstein, The Blue and The Brown Books, p. 51.
23 G. E. Moore, ‘Wittgenstein Lectures in 1930–1933’, Mind, Vol. 64 (1955), p. 15.
24 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures (London, 1949), p. 95.
25 Wittgenstein, The Blue and The Brown Books, p. 136.
26 Moore, Mind, Vol. 64 (1955), p. 20.
27 Moore, Mind, Vol. 64 (1955), p. 18.
28 Barrett, Lectures and Conversations, p. 37.
29 Moore, Mind, Vol 64 (1955), pp. 9–10.
30 Barrett, Lecturesand Conversations, pp. 44–5.
31 Ibid., p. 20.
32 Barrett, Lectures and Conversations, p. 45.
33 Wittgenstein, The Blue and The Brown Books, pp. 166–7.
34 Fritz Wittels, Sigmund Freud (London, 1924), pp. 160–1.
35 This passage is an amalgam of remarks in Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci (London, 1963), p. 114 and in his ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ (1909), Collected Papers, III, p. 380.
36 Freud, ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’, Collected Papers, V, p. 226.
37 Barrett, Lectures and Conversations, p. 46.
38 Moore, Mind, Vol. 64, p. 20.
39 Barrett, Lectures and Conversations, p. 46.
40 Freud, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918), Collected Papers, III, p. 508.
41 Jones, Freud—Life and Work, Vol. Ill, p. 129.
42 Freud, ‘History of an Infantile Neurosis’, Collected Papers, III, p. 576.
43 Freud, Introductory Lectures, p. 310.
44 Freud, ‘History of an Infantile Neurosis’, Collected Papers, III, p. 256.
45 Barrett, Lectures and Conversations, p. 51.
46 Freud, ‘Connection between a Symbol and a Symptom’ (1916), Collected Papers, II, p. 163.
47 Freud, ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy’ (1909), Collected Papers, III, p. 280.
48 Sigmund Freud, Origins of Psychoanalysis (New York, 1954), Letter 105.
49 J. Words, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Vol. X, 1940, pp. 844–5.
50 Barrett, Lectures and Conversations, p. 51.
51 Freud, ‘History of an Infantile Neurosis’, Collected Papers, III, p. 522.
In these remarks Freud is anticipating a contingency very like that which overtook him in 1897 when he concluded that in many cases the sexual interference which he had stated was the specific cause of hysteria had not taken place and which he met by assigning to infantile sexual phantasies the pathogenic role vacated by infantile seductions. And he is meeting it with the same tenacity.
52 Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex’, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York, 1938), p. 594.
53 Freud, Introductory Lectures, p. 273.
54 Freud, Introductory Lectures, p. 274–5.
55 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 258.
56 Sigmund Freud, ‘My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Etiology of the Neuroses’ (1905), Collected Papers, Vol. I (London, 1948), p. 281.
57 ‘An analysis which is conducted on a neurotic child … cannot be very rich in material; too many words and thoughts have to be lent to the child and even so the deepest strata may turn out to be impenetrable to consciousness. An analysis of childhood disorder through the medium of recollection in an intellectually mature adult is free from these limitations.’ (‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’, Collected Papers, III, p. 475.)
See also Freud’s explanation of why ‘we know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys’. Because ‘the sexual life of adult women is “a dark continent” for psychology’. (S. Freud, ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’ (1926), Standard Edition Vol. XIX, p. 243.)
58 Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931), Collected Papers, V, p. 265.
59 Freud, New Introductory Lectures, p. 155.
60 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1953), Section 342.
61 Freud, ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’, Collected Papers, V, p. 231.
62 ‘The unconscious is the true psychical reality.’ (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 613.)
63 Moore, Mind, Vol. 64, p. 20.
64 Ibid.
65 Barrett, Lectures and Conversations, p. 27.
66 Ibid., p. 24.