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Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was certainly well positioned to witness the
onset of the psychoanalytic era. Although he apparently did not read Freud
before 1920, he came from a Viennese milieu steeped in psychoanalytic
ideas, where interpreting dreams quickly became a sort of parlor game. His
sister Margarete was an early defender of psychoanalysis who knew Freud
well and had herself been analyzed by him, largely for reasons of "specula–
tive curiosity." Though Wittgenstein never wrote a sustained treatise on
psychoanalysis, he would not infrequently allude to it in his philosophical
writings and more personal notes, sometimes as a model for escaping false
analogies and other kinds of philosophical error, but more often as an
example
of
such error. In a recently translated book,
Wittgenstein Reads
Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious,
a French philosopher, Jacques
Bouveresse, brings together and discusses virtually all of Wittgenstein's
remarks on Freud and psychoanalysis, setting these in the context of more
recent philosophical treatments of psychoanalysis by Wittgensteinians and
other philosophers and theoris ts including Frank Cioffi, Brian
McGuinness, Karl Popper, Adolf Griinbaum, Sebastiano Timpanaro, and
David Archard. Here I want to address the intriguing relationship between
Wittgenstein and Freud, a task much facilitated by Bouveresse's useful
book, and in the course of doing so to comment from time to time on
Bouveresse's approach.
The original title of Bouveresse's book is
Philosophie, Mythologie, et
Pseudo-Science;
the work offers a convincing discussion of how, in
Wittgenstein's view, psychoanalysis exemplifies each of these three (rather
dubious) modes of human understanding. Like (metaphysical) philosophy,
like pseudo-science, and like mythology, psychoanalysis, according to
Wittgenstein, is not so much a mode of discovery as of
persuasion-far
less
a matter of uncovering new facts than of seducing us into seeing or rep–
resenting the world in a new way. Though turgidly wri tten in parts
(perhaps the translation is at fault), and in some respects unbalanced,
Bouveresse's book is nevertheless a project of singular importance.
It
pro–
vides the first comprehensive overview of how our century's most
brilliant philosopher (or antiphilosopher) reacted to the writings of its
most influential psychologist.
Arguments around psychoanalysis have been sharply, sometimes
absurdly, polarized in recent years. Wittgenstein's comments on Freud,
though casual and themselves unbalanced on occasion, nevertheless point
the way toward a more complicated as well as more healthy relationship to
Freud and his legacy, one in which we can overcome our subservience
without losing our appreciation, and in which we can better understand
the rhetorical sources of Freud's (at times) mesmerizing power. Bouveresse
is a helpful and generally reliable guide. But he does not leave the reader
