CEZANNE'S DOUBT
477
find in our past the forecast of what we have become. It is for us to
understand both things at once and how freedom dawns
in
us without
breaking our bonds with the world.
Whatever arbitrariness there be in the
explanations
of Freud
cannot discredit the
psychoanalytic intuition.
More than once the
reader is arrested by the insufficiency of the proofs. Why this and not
something else? The question seems to present itself
all
the more in that
Freud often gives many interpretations: each symptom was, accord–
ing to him, "overdetermined." Finally, it is clear that a doctrine which
brings in sexuality everywhere could not, according to the rules of
inductive logic, establish its efficacy anywhere; since it deprives itself
of all counter-proof by excluding in advance every differential case.
Thus we triumph over psychoanalysis, but on paper only. For the
suggestions of the psychoanalyst, if they can never be proved, can no
longer be eliminated: how impute to chance the complex harmonies
which the psychoanalyst discovers between the child and the adult?
How deny that psychoanalysis has taught us to perceive, from one
moment to the next of a life, echoes, allusions, repetitions, a linking
up which we would not dream of doubting if Freud had made a
correct theory of it. The purpose of psychoanalysis is not to give us,
as do the natural sciences, necessary relations of cause and effect, but
to indicate relations of motivation which, on principle, are simply
possibilities. More precisely: birth and the past define for each life
fundamental categories or dimensions which do not impose any act
in particular, but which are read or discovered in everything. The
very decisions which transform us are always taken with regard to a
situation of fact, and a situation of fact can be accepted or refused,
but cannot in any case fail to provide our impetus and to be itself for
us, as a situation "to accept" or "to refuse," the incarnation of the
value which we give it.
If
the object of psychoanalysis is to describe
this exchange between future and past and to show how each life
dreams of enigmas whose final meaning is not written anywhere in
advance, we do not have to exact from it inductive rigor. The herme–
neutic daydreams of the psychoanalyst, who multiplies our communi–
cations to each other, take sexuality as a symbol of existence and
existence as a symbol of sexuality, seek the meaning of the future
in
the past and the meaning of the past in the future-are better adapted
than rigorous induction to the circular movement of our life, which
leans its future on its past, its past on its future, and where everything
symbolizes everything. Psychoanalysis does not render freedom im–
possible; rather it teaches us to conceive it concretely, as a creative
