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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
The ‘abominable mess’ of which Wittgenstein complains is that of confounding reasons and causes. What does Wittgenstein mean to call attention to by this contrast and why does he think himself entitled to hold that Freud confounded them? Sometimes by reasons he means just what someone says on being asked why he did what he did or reacted as he reacted, and sometimes what an experience meant to a subject on further reflection upon it—its ‘further description’.
1 For example, in the following remarks a different antithesis is in view. ‘“Because” and “why” can refer to either a reason or a cause. If a traffic signal acts on you in a manner analogous to a drug, then your explanation of your action is giving a cause. If, on the other hand, you see the red light and act as if someone had said “The red light means stop” then your explanation would be giving a reason’ (WLL, 783). Here the drug-cause of the stopping isn't even capable of being a reason. Furthermore it is not clear whether when Wittgenstein says ‘Freud had genius and could therefore sometimes give someone the reason for his dream’ (Moore, , 1966, 310)Google Scholar, the genius in question is the fertility in felicitious further descriptions kind, or of the kind which enabled Poe's Dupin to infer the location of the purloined letter.
2 There are remarks in Freud which Wittgenstein might have found conciliatory had he known of them. In New Introductory Lectures Freud says of the unconscious processes which bring about symptom formation that he ‘dare hardly call them thoughts’ (Freud, , 1933, 29)Google Scholar. And in the Outline he says that the occurrence of unconscious thoughts is something of which ‘we are totally unable to form a conception’ (Freud, , 1949, 66)Google Scholar. On the other hand, he does intermittently phenomenalize the unconscious, implying that what we now see through a glass darkly, we may under favourable conditions see face to face. In New Introductory Lectures he also writes: ‘certain practices of mystics may succeed in upsetting the normal relation between the different regions of the mind so that the perceptual system becomes able to grasp the relations in the deeper layers of the ego and the id which would otherwise be inaccessible to it’ (Freud, , 1933, 106).Google Scholar
3 Freud himself invokes his aesthetic explanations as elucidatory of the character of his psychopathological ones. In the case history of the Rat Man he assimilates ellipsis as it occurs in obsessional thoughts to ellipsis in jokes (Cioffi, , 1987, 345–346).Google Scholar
4 More recent specimens of the confusion are to be found in those peer group comments on Grunbaum, 's The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984)Google Scholar which defend the relevance of the subjects’ ultimate recognition of their motives or meaning, and in Grunbaum's denial of it (Behavioural and Brain Research, 06 1986)Google Scholar. Those who attempt to justify the patients’ ‘privileged cognitive status’ claim too much and Grunbaum concedes too little. How can we be unqualified to judge whether episodes from our past which figure in our self-elucidations as ‘psychological fixed stars’ have not also exerted a causal influence over us? How can I come to realize that throughout my life I have felt like an unprepared schoolboy praying that the period would end before he was called upon, while not at the same time having come into possession of the answer to many questions that present themselves to an outside narrator as explanatory puzzles? Of course there are truths reflection alone could not bring to light—facts ‘beyond the truth of immanence’ in Merlau-Ponty's phrase. But is our epistemic relation to ‘the expectant libidinal impulses we bring to each new person’ (Freud, , 1924, 313)Google Scholar, or to the hidden teleology behind the repeated self-frustrating relationships that Freud describes, like that in which we stand to an undiagnosed cancer (Hanly)? As for the issue that Grunbaum poses of avoiding the post hoc propter hoc error when imputing a patient's improvement to the therapeutic sessions, his way of putting the matter homogenises the phenomena excessively. Precisely what improvements? Why is it reasonable for a man who takes to weight lifting to attribute his expanding pectorals to his work on them, or for someone to attribute his increasing proficiency in a foreign language to his exercises in it, or the improvement in his game to the coaching of a golf or tennis pro, but not reasonable for a patient to attribute his improved mental state to the therapeutic sessions? The answer to this question will depend on the particular character of the changes explained. The problem cannot be resolved in the abstract terms in which Grunbaum poses it.
5 Van den Bergh, a phenomenological therapist, describes the Freudian unconscious as ‘a second reality behind the phantoms of healthy and neurotic life’ (and holds it to be the mistaken result of ‘the premature cessation of psychological analysis’) (Van den Bergh, , 1960, 83).Google Scholar