Abstract
It is with respect to the difficulty of defining what should yet be basic elements of psychoanalytic theory that Freud frequently refers to ‘figurative language’ [Bildersprache]. This heading encompasses as much the use of a model [Vorbild], an ‘intellectual scaffolding’ [Hilfskonstruktion], a ‘fiction’ [Fiktion], an analogy [Analogie], a comparison [Vergleich], a simile [Gleichnis], as that of an example [Beispiel]. If the presence of such figures is particularly noticeable throughout the Freudian corpus, however, it is partly in so far as Freud draws our attention to it, by inserting in many theoretical developments, amidst figures themselves, pronouncements concerning the impossibility of not using them. In these statements, Freud turns to science in order to justify what could easily be considered as a defect of psychoanalytic theory, and underlines the no less figurative aspect of scientific language.
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Notes
There are numerous well-known pronouncements throughout Freud concerning the way in which philosophers like Schopenhauer conceived of the unconscious before psychoanalysis, not to mention those referring, by par-alipsis, to Nietzsche. See P.-L. Assoun’s classical study Freud, la philosophie et les philosophes (Presses universitaires de France, 1976). Assoun argues that Freud develops two parallel discourses on philosophy (in a nutshell, one of rejection and one of sanction), the conflictual relations of which alone can tell us something about Freud’s attitude towards philosophy. See also, P. Herzog, ‘The Myth of Freud as an Anti-philosopher’, in Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals, ed. P. E. Stepansky (The Analytic Press, 1988)
S. Kofman, ‘Freud et Empédocle’, in Quatre romans analytiques (Galilée, 1973), pp. 46–66. That any philosophical consideration of psychoanalysis should
There are numerous well-known pronouncements throughout Freud concerning the way in which philosophers like Schopenhauer conceived of the unconscious before psychoanalysis, not to mention those referring, by par-alipsis, to Nietzsche. See P.-L. Assoun’s classical study Freud, la philosophie et les philosophes (Presses universitaires de France, 1976). Assoun argues that Freud develops two parallel discourses on philosophy (in a nutshell, one of rejection and one of sanction), the conflictual relations of which alone can tell us something about Freud’s attitude towards philosophy. See also, P. Herzog, ‘The Myth of Freud as an Anti-philosopher’, in Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals, ed. P. E. Stepansky (The Analytic Press, 1988)
S. Kofman, ‘Freud et Empédocle’, in Quatre romans analytiques (Galilée, 1973), pp. 46–66. That any philosophical consideration of psychoanalysis should
‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’ (1917), SE XVII, p. 137. For a recent rejection of such therapeutic claims, see M. Borch-Jacobsen’s Remembering Anna O., A Century of Mystification [Souvenirs d’Anna O.] (1995) trans. K. Olson, X. Callahan and the author (New-York and London: Routledge, 1996). Borch-Jacobsen seems to have maintained only the terms, if one dare say so, of his sophisticated analysis of the ‘mythical status’ of psychoanalysis developed in the last part of Le Sujet freudien (Flammarion, 1982). Myth in Remembering has indeed become a term of abuse, in so far as it points to the fact that psychoanalysis has, from the start, and thanks to various ‘dissimulations’, developed as a ‘delusive therapeutic technique’. One of the most important dissimulations would be the influence of hypnosis on Freud and Breuer’s hysterical patients. This ‘influence’ is demonstrated with reference to a general, public interest in spectacles involving hypnosis, with which the hysterics cannot not have become acquainted. Space and incentive are lacking here for entering into a debate upon the arguments developed in this book. Let us simply note that the latter appears to be largely determined by contemporary debates in America designated under the heading of the ‘False Memory Syndrome’. One senses in it an intense fascination with the guarded and secretive nature of Freud’s (and the psychoanalytic movement) archives, a fascination that is apparent in the way in which, when finally obtained, the means for gaining access to ‘incriminating’ documents, are described with the greatest amount of details.
SE V, p. 538. J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (1967) trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1973) p. 358. In Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams, more particularly in the section devoted to ‘Wish-Fulfilment’, the reflex apparatus represents an ‘earlier stage’ of the psychical apparatus: ‘at first the apparatus efforts were directed towards keeping itself so far as possible free from stimuli’ (p. 719). This description of the psychical apparatus is, later in the same chapter, referred to as ‘the fiction of a primitive psychical apparatus [die Fiktion eines primitiven psychischen Apparats] (p. 757).
M. Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science (Notre-Dame University Press, 1966), p. 130.
These ‘analogies’ are found in The Interpretation, as far as ‘language’ is concerned, see in particular ‘The Means of Representation’, p. 430 note 1 on K. Abel’s The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words (1884) and Freud’s review of this book entitled ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’ (1910). The work of language could be considered as a source of borrowing. The way in which dreams ‘treat the category of contraries [Gegensatz] and contradictories [Widerspruch] is highly remarkable’, writes Freud, ‘[t]hey show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity and for representing them as one and the same thing. Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or a negative’ (p. 430). It is with respect to the treatment of ‘contraries and contradictories’ that Freud refers to Abel: according to this philologist and others too, ‘the most ancient languages behave exactly like dreams [die ältesten Sprachen sich in diesem Punkte ganz ähnlich benehmen wie der Traum]’ [my emphasis] (p. 430). See J. Forrester, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (Macmillan, 1980).
See J. Laplanche, Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse (Presses universitaires de France, 1987).
Freud, Collected Papers, ed. E. Jones, Vol. IV (Basic Books, 1959), p. 7.
For a useful discussion of the concept of Kultur in Freud (in particular as far as the genealogy of the terms Kultur and Civilization is concerned), see Assoun, chapter 10 ‘La Kultur et son malaise’, in Freud et les sciences sociales. Pychanalyse et théorie de la Culture (Armand-Colin, 1993), pp. 119–33. See too H. and M. Vermorel, ‘De l’Avenir d’une illusion au Malaise dans la culture’, Revue française de psychanalyse, IV (1993), pp. 1095–111,
and J. Le Rider, M. Plon, G. Raulet and H. Rey-Flaud, Autour du Malaise dans la culture de Freud (Presses universitaires de France, 1998).
For a broader discussion of the distinction, see J. Starobinski, ‘Le Mot civilisation’, in Le Remède dans le mal, Critique et légitimation de l’artifice à l’âge des Lumières (Gallimard, 1989), pp. 11–59.
See among others M. Moscovici, ‘Préface’ to L’Homme Moïse et le monothéisme, trois essais trans. C. Heim (Gallimard, 1986), pp. 15–59;
M. de Certeau, ‘L’Écriture de Moïse et le monothéisme’, in L’Écriture de l’histoire (Gallimard, 1975)
J.-J. Goux, ‘Moïse, Freud, la prescription iconoclaste’ and ‘Freud et la structure religieuse du nazisme’ in Les Iconoclastes (Seuil, 1978)
L. Poliakov, ‘Freud et Moïse’ (1968) in Les Juifs et notre histoire (Flammarion, 1973), pp. 227–47
J. Assman, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press, 1997).
Letter dated 30 September 1934. S. Freud and A. Zweig, Correspondance 1927–39 (1968), trans. L. Weibel and J.-C. Gehrig (Gallimard, 1973), p. 129. See too Freud’s detailed letter about his ‘historical novel of sort’ to Lou Andreas-Salomé, dated 6 January 1935, Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas Salomé — Letters [Sigmund Freud-Lou Andreas-Salomé Briefwechsel], ed. E. Pfeiffer, trans. W. and E. Robson-Scott (The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1963), where he recalls: ‘The strength of religion lies not in its material, but in its historical truth’ (p. 205).
In the first essay of Moses, Freud compares the distortion [Entstellung] of a text to ‘a murder’, but the essay indeed crucially pertains to ‘a murder’ (p. 115). On Entstellung and Moses, see J.-F. Lyotard, ‘Le Travail du rêve ne pense pas’, in Discours, figure (Klincksieck, 1978), pp. 241–3.
It would be possible to underline the fact that Freud uses ‘human masses’ descriptively in an essay written on the eve of exile in 1938–39, whereas the presupposition of a Massenpsyche occurs in an essay written more or less in safety in 1912–13, long before Freud was forced to leave Vienna. See Henri Ellenberger’s historicist description of Mass Psychology in The Discovery of the Unconscious. The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (Basic Books, 1970): ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego obviously was inspired by the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire at the end of 1918, with the panic and distress that followed’ (p. 528) and a similar approach in J. van Ginneken, ‘The Killing of the Father: The Background of Freud’s Group Psychology’, Political Psychology, 5, 3 (1984), pp. 391–414.
See P. Lacoste, ‘Destins de la transmission’, in S. Freud, Vue d’ensemble sur les névroses de transfert, Un essai métapsychologique (1915), trans. P. Lacoste (Gallimard, 1986), pp. 165–210. We cannot here embark upon a close examination of Freud’s twelfth metapsychological essay, that is, consider Freud’s ambitious project of establishing a ‘parallèle entre la succession des névroses selon leur ordre d’apparition et l’historique des générations’ (p. 169) and compare it with the other ‘analogical’ transpositions with which we have been concerned so far (Lacoste speaks of homology). This would involve examining the way in which, as Lacoste indicates, the phylogenetic point of view always threatens to be assimilated to the theory of hereditary etiology (p. 170).
For the complaint that the essays on Kultur have been misread, See A. Green, ‘Culture(s) et civilisation(s), malaise ou maladie?’ Revue française de psychanalyse, 4 (1993), pp. 1029–56. Green argues with others, for a ‘historical’ reading of them that makes them dialogue with contemporary events and intellectual movements of ideas.
On Totem and Taboo, see among others, J. Derrida, ‘Préjugés’, in La Faculté de juger (Minuit, 1985), pp. 87–139, around the invention of the concept of the ‘repressed’.
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© 2003 Céline Surprenant
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Surprenant, C. (2003). Figurative Language According to Freud. In: Freud’s Mass Psychology. Renewing Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913746_6
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