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Making the Unconscious Conscious: Wittgenstein versus Freud

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Abstract

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

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Notes

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

  2. At least one analyst has noticed this. Donald Spence in a review of Schafer’s A New Language for Psychoanalysis, quoted Schafer as to the analyst’s ‘need to invoke some unseen mechanism when the patient is not ready to acknowledge his own responsibility.’ Spence illustrates the way in which Schafer’s half-hearted revisionism challenges ‘the underlying analytic contract’ by citing the terms in which he describes a patient: ‘Unfailingly, though still apprehensively, she avoids remembering those events of her childhood to which she reacted in a traumatized fashion’. Spence comments: ‘Note the use of the verb “avoid”. Does Schafer mean that the patient has made a conscious decision not to remember, and that once the avoidance is pointed out, it will be corrected? Probably not; but if he holds with a dynamic unconscious, he cannot turn round and hold the patient’s responsible.’ (1976).

  3. In Philip Roth’s ‘autobiography’ The Facts, when a taxi is taking the narrator to the morgue to identify his estranged wife’s body, the cabbie comments on his buoyant demeanour and Roth suddenly becomes aware that he has been cheerily whistling. ‘Roth’ was manifesting what Wittgenstein calls the ‘characteristic expression-behaviour’ for joy and thus providing others with grounds for imputing that state to him; But was Roth himself unconsciously inferring from his whistling that he was not bereft by the death of his wife. There are philosophers and psychologists who think it likely. Here is an example of someone apparently illustrating the anomalous case in which the meaning of an action is consciously rather than unconsciously inferred by an agent. W N P Barbellion recorded in his journal that he endured an hour’s torture of indecision over whether to go and propose marriage to his girlfriend or to the Fabian Society and hear Bernard Shaw. He writes ‘found myself slowly, mournfully, putting on hat and coat. You can’t shave in a hat and coat so I concluded I had decided on Shaw’ (1948, 182-83). Isn’t this a Wittgensteinian grammatical joke?

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

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

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

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Correspondence to Frank Cioffi.

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Cioffi, F. Making the Unconscious Conscious: Wittgenstein versus Freud. Philosophia 37, 565–588 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9201-9

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