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PARTISAN REVIEW
they treat unconscious experiences as
if
they were exactly like our most
lucid, conscious ones-except for what seems the entirely contingent fact
that these experiences were somehow happening in the dark.
Wittgenstein is not saying that such comparative, pattern-directed,
similari ty-seeking modes of thought could or should be avoided. His point,
rather, is that only by recognizing them for what they are, can one avoid
the effacement of differences and the consequent distortion, vacuity, or
dogmatism that otherwise occur. Freud's failure to demonstrate this kind
of critical self-awareness is bound up with his commission of a closely
related error, an error Wittgenstein viewed as perhaps the cardinal sin of
the philosophical tradition: this is to confuse what is really a method of
interpretation, frame of reference, or way of representing facts with a set of
discoveries or hypotheses about the external world itself. G. E. Moore
reports that, in the early 1930s, Wittgenstein said that Freud's books were
an excellent place to look for philosophical mistakes, "because there are so
many cases in which one can ask how far what he says is a 'hypothesis' and
how far merely a good way of representing a fact-a question as to which
[Wi ttgenstein] said Freud is constantly unclear."
Freud usually presents his views as bold empirical hypotheses, but as
Wittgenstein noticed, many of his claims are not actually capable of being
verified or falsified through empirical observation. The notion of dream as
concealed wish fulfillment, for example, cannot on principle be refuted
since it actually serves as a principle that organizes and limits the
form
of
discussion or reflection on the topic in question; in fact, it offers the cri–
terion of what, out of an infinity of possible associations, will be allowed
to
count
as the meaning of a dream, symptom, or slip. It follows that what
may seem to constitute potential counterexamples to psychoanalytic
claims, often turn out, as various critics have noted, to be less a threat to
the claims of the theory itself than a challenge to the ingenuity of the
interpreter. This is clear enough if one reflects on the impossibility (or, at
least, extreme difficulty) of finding counterexamples, given, for instance,
Freud's willingness to countenance the possibility of masochistic or self–
punishing wishes and even of forms of anxiety that are supposedly
pleasurable; and if, in addition, one recognizes the psychoanalyst's discre–
tionary power in selecting his data. The recollections of an American
psychiatrist who underwent analysis with Freud bring this last point out
very nicely: "I would often give a whole series of associations to a dream
symbol and [Freud] would wait until he found an association which would
fit into his scheme of interpretation and pick it up like a detective at a line–
up who waits until he sees his man."
Frank Cioffi, Sebastiano Timpanaro, and others have pointed out the
widespread presence of this and other sources of empirical nonrefutability
