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PARTISAN REVIEW
with enough understanding of how Wittgenstein could have considered
himself to be, in any sense, a disciple or a follower of Freud. Bouveresse
fails to register the degree to which the acuity of Wittgenstein's critique
stems from his recognition of affinities between his own and Freud's
thinking, affinities that make him all the more sensitive to certain errors to
which Freud too easily succumbs.
Perhaps the most obvious and pervasive feature of Freud's approach
that offended Wittgenstein was his predilection for grand generalization.
Bouveresse remarks on the interesting contrast between the caution and
reticence of Freud's early collaborator,Josef Breuer, and Freud's own inter–
pretive boldness and explanatory zeal. Whereas Breuer was reluctant to
fix
on single explanations, preferring a more modest eclecticism, Freud seemed
drawn like a sleepwalker toward sweeping generalizations and the assertion
of single underlying essences. Thus he insisted on the fundamentally wish–
fulfilling nature of all (or virtually all) dreams and the unconscious sexual
meaning of all hysterical symptoms, on the way jokes always allow covert
expression of repressed wishes, and (I would add) on the primitive or
regressive nature of all psychopathological conditions. A telling passage
from Freud's
An Autobiographical Study
brings this cast of mind out very
clearly: "The state of things he [Breuer] had brought to light seemed to me
so fundamental that I could not believe it would be absent in any case of
hysteria, once it had been demonstrated in a single case."
But why, Wittgenstein would ask, should such an assumption be
made? Why assume that what may be obvious, salient, or central in one case
is necessarily true of all cases of what we may term "hysteria"? Hysteria,
after all, might well be an instance of what Wittgenstein famously termed
a "family-resemblance concept"-a loose grouping of individuals, each
characterized by one or another of a set of overlapping features or similar–
ities, no one of which pervades them all. And why should dreams, or jokes,
always have a single motivation, or always serve a single purpose?
Wi ttgenstein, by contrast with Freud, was above all a critic of what he
termed the "craving for generality" and its accompaniment, "the con–
temptuous atti tude towards the particular case," which he considered
perhaps the most important source not only of pseudo-science but also of
much philosophical error and illusion. He was fond of the adage,
"Everything is what it is and not another thing," and once thought of
using as a motto for his book a line he recalled (inaccurately) from
King
Lear:
''I'll teach you differences." In a passage alluding to Freud's dynamic
theory of dreams, Wittgenstein describes how this contempt for particulars
comes about, suggesting its link with a focus on hidden essences:
