Philosophia (2009) 37:565588 DOI 10.

1007/s11406-009-9201-9

Making the Unconscious Conscious: Wittgenstein versus Freud

Frank Cioffi

Received: 5 January 2009 / Accepted: 9 February 2009 / Published online: 16 June 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract The common assimilation of Wittgensteins philosophical procedure to Freuds psychoanalytic method is a mistake. The concurrence of Freudian analysands is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of their unconscious thoughts having been detected. There are several sources of this error. One is the equivocal role Freud assign the patients recognition of the correctness of his interpretation and in particular the part played by paradoxical reminiscence: another, the surreptitious banalisation of Freuds procedure by followersthe reinvention of psychoanalysis as a phenomenological enterprise; still another, the appeal of the activity of giving fuller expression to ones tantalisingly vague and inexplicit thoughts and suspicions. This activity has its own intrinsic value though it ought not to be permitted to usurp the place of empirical investigation, as futile as this often is. And yet both plausible hypotheses and felicitous further descriptions must yield in desirability to the attainment of a state of reconciliation to the person one has become however this was caused and whatever this is suspected to be. Keywords The unconscious . Self-knowledge . Wittgenstein . Freud

Part One Why Wittgensteins Assimilation of Freuds Procedure to his Own is a Banalisation of Psychoanalysis It may come as news to some of Wittgensteins commentators that Wittgensteins notion of making the unconscious conscious is to be opposed to Freuds since they have taken them as equivalentand on what appears to be Wittgensteins own

F. Cioffi (*) University of Kent at Canterbury, Frank Cioffi, 6 ST. Dunstans Terrace, Canterbury, Kent CT2 8AX, UK e-mail: ninair@live.co.uk

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authority (Baker 2004, 207). But not only is Wittgensteins procedure antithetical to Freuds, Wittgenstein on several occasion shows an awareness of this. And yet in his Wittgenstein Dictionary Glock observes that among the similarities Wittgenstein detected between his philosophical procedure and psychoanalysis was that both try to bring out a patients repressed worries and that the ultimate standard for articulating these worries is that the patient should recognize them (1996, 111). The view that the analysands agreement is a requirement for the correctness of a psychoanalytic interpretation imputing unconscious thoughts, impulses, aims etc is a banalisation of Freuds procedure. In dubbing Wittgensteins account of Freud a banalisation, I am extending the formula of the classical philologist, Sebastian Timpanaro: substitution of a simpler expression for a more difficult one (1976, 35)beyond words and word order to concepts. When, following Wittgensteins Schlick-Diktat remarks, his expositors assimilated his procedure of philosophical enlightenment to Freuds making the unconscious conscious, they replaced Freuds complex and esoteric notion of the unconscious by a simpler and more familiar one. The authentic non-banalised version, from which Wittgensteins must be distinguished, is stated clearly (if somewhat too boldly, ignoring Freuds equivocations) by D. H. Lawrence in the second chapter of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. Lawrence rejects the terms preconscious and subconscious as synonyms for unconscious because both these terms would imply a sort of nascent consciousness, the shadowy half consciousness which precedes mental realisation ... By his unconscious (Freud) intends no such thing. (1961, 209) Wittgenstein shows his awareness of the antagonism between his procedure and Freuds in, among other places, the third of the aesthetic lectures where he rebukes Freud for advancing a hypothesis as to the meaning of a patients dream instead of confining himself to assisting her in expressing it more adequately (LC 23). In the light of remarks like these, we must construe Wittgenstein when he likens Freuds procedure to his own as confining this likeness to those occasions on which Freud gave the patients say-so a role in the confirmation of the interpretation proffered. This reduces the appearance of contradiction between their respective procedures but they nevertheless remain markedly disparate even where both confer eventual introspectibility on the content of an interpretation. In those remarks in which Wittgenstein describes Freuds interpretations as attempts to recapitulate unconscious thoughts, which the analysand must recognize as his own, Wittgenstein was expressing a view of Freud, which several expositors of Freud share. But this account is profoundly revisionistsometimes candidly, sometimes surreptitiously so. One such revisionist account describes Freuds interpretations as focusing utterances, making conscious something which has been vaguely known, suspected or felt, or something which is just outside the focus range of consciousness (Jones, 1968, 95). The most succinct way of demonstrating the erroneousness of this conception is to invoke the phenomenon which Freud put forward on several occasions as paradigmatic of the operation of the unconsciouspost-hypnotic compliance. Although the subject of a post-hypnotic order can be induced to recollect the occasion on which the order was given, the conviction that his apparently inexplicable act was in compliance with an hypnotic suggestion does not at all depend on this recollection. It is credited because, as Freud himself points out, the

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implantation of the order was witnessed. The endorsement of the subject adds nothing. I want to ask not only why this mischaracterization of psychoanalysis came about but also to what extent it may nevertheless be desirable to bring the practice of psychoanalysis into line with the Diktat-Wittgensteinian and revisionist misconception of it. What kind of thing had Wittgenstein in mind when he compared his procedure to Freuds? There is a hint in lecture three of the Lectures and Conversations: someone says (as we often say in philosophy) I will tell you what is at the back of your mind: Oh yes. Quite so. The criterion for it being at the back of your mind is that when I tell you, you agree. (LC 18) In Moores notes, Wittgenstein described Freud as doing what aesthetics does and goes on to describe explanation in aesthetics as the giving of further descriptions rather than causal hypotheses (Moore 1966, 308). What might be some philosophical candidates for Wittgensteinian further description? These are remarks that I can imagine a Wittgensteinian addressing to an interlocutor: You think of someone elses toothache as hidden from you like the decay in the tooth which is producing it You think of thought as gaseous and lighter than air You think of meaning someone as like walking up to him; or as like pointing with your mind instead of your finger. You are puzzled as to how to conceive the mind when it thinks because you are looking for something which stands to thinking as the hand to writing or the mouth to speaking. When you say It is Gods will you really mean this must be accepted and not struggled against. When you ask for a demonstration that there is value in the world what you really want is the will to pursue it. Anyone who recalls the kind of interpretation Freud gives his patients will recognize how epistemically unlike they are to the philosophical ones Wittgenstein had in mind (except on those occasions when Freud engages in a banalised version of his usual and distinctive practice and plays the role of father confessor). Analysands may find gratification in being proffered interpretations which formulate more precisely or felicitously what they had at the back of their minds but this is not what Freud took himself to be doing when he made the unconscious conscious.1 Further Descriptions Versus Hypotheses What does Wittgenstein mean by further description? Moore reports Wittgenstein as saying that reasons in aesthetics are of the nature of further descriptions (1966, 208) Though it is in some ways infelicitous to refer to the reasons for an aesthetic
1

Here is one of Freuds accounts of how the unconscious may become accessible: certain practices of mystics may succeed in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, so that for example, the perceptual system becomes able to grasp relations in the deeper layers of the ego and the id which would otherwise be inaccessible to it (1933 New Introductory Lectures Anatomy of the Mental Personality). This seems remote from Wittgensteins correct expression of feeling.

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judgment as a further description, it is clear enough what Wittgenstein means. What Wittgenstein has centrally in mind is what he elsewhere describes as the predicament of being intrigued and wanting to describe (LC 37). The contrast between further descriptions and hypotheses emerges clearly in some remarks on Freudian dream interpretation in the third of the lectures on psychology and aesthetics, where among Wittgensteins objections to Freuds dealings with dreams is that he advanced hypotheses concerning the source of the dream images when he ought to have confined himself to soliciting the dreamers supplementary impression of these images. I have abridged the remarks so as to give prominence to this component in his objections: Freud does something which seems to me immensely wrong. He gives what he calls an interpretation of dreams ... A patient, after saying that she had had a beautiful dream, described a dream in which she descended from a height saw flowers and shrubs, broke off the branch of a tree etc. Freud shows relations between the dream, the dream images and certain objects of a sexual nature ... (LC 2324) In Freuds account of this dream (1900) we have both hypotheses and further descriptions. But the further descriptions are the dreamers and the hypotheses are Freuds. Let us begin with the flowering branch. In the dream it is covered with red camellia-like flowers. The flowering branch makes the dreamer think of the angel holding a lily spray in pictures of the Annunciation and of girls in white robes walking in Corpus Christi processions, when the streets are decorated with green branches. These constitute the dreamers further descriptions. Freud writes the same branch which was carried like a lily was at the same time an allusion to Marguerite Gautier, the courtesan-heroine of Dumas play La Dame aux camelias, who wore a red camellia when she was menstruating and a white one when she was not. These are Freuds hypotheses. In the case of the flowery dream, the unconscious pre-existing image which became the flowering branch of the manifest dream was a phallus, and the pre-existent image which became the camellias it sprouted, was the flowers worn by La Dame aux camelias in Dumas play, whose colour indicated whether she was menstruating. But Freud did sometimes give a banalised account of his own method. Freuds account of the manner in which contents formerly unconscious are made conscious to the patient has generated two distinct construals. One, that it is just a matter of the subjects eventual conviction that his conditionerror, symptom, dream image etc.is only compellingly explained by assuming the truth of the interpretation proposed. The other, that when the repression is lifted the dreamer will experience, i.e., not merely concede but recognize, the operation of the motive (or ideation or cerebration) that the interpretation imputes to him. Which of these views is centrally psychoanalytic? How did Freud himself think his interpretations were to be validated? Freud makes one suggestion as to how in the last chapter of the Studies on Hysteria when he speaks of thoughts which the patient never remembers though he admits that the context calls for them inexorably (1895, 272). So the patient can only acquiesce in what the analyst has shown to be so. But in the same work he asks a patient, who acknowledges that she was in love with her employer, why she had not told Freud earlier and when she replies that she didnt know or didnt want to know but

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wanted to drive it out of my head and not think of it again, Freud comments: I have never managed to give a better descriptions of the strange state of mind in which one knows and does not know a thing at the same time (1895, 117 n.1). So it was not just a matter of what the context called for inexorably but of what the patient could be brought to recall and recognize. The version making the unconscious conscious which invokes recognition by the patient is what I have termed a banalisation. It is not, and given the nature of the interpretations Freud normally proffers could not be, Freuds considered view. The conception of unconscious thoughts as thoughts that are merely schematic and unthematised or consciously held at bay is unequivocally rejected in a work of 1905 where Freud writes: opponents of the unconscious ... had never realised the idea that the unconscious is something which we do not know but which we are obliged by compelling inferences to supply; they had understood it as something capable of being conscious but which was not being thought of at the moment, which didnt occupy the focal point of attention (1905, 162). And in the first chapter of The Ego and the Id, Freud writes: The thought which was previously unnoticed is not recognized by consciousness but often seems entirely alien; he goes on to complain of the deplorable tactic of seeking refuge from the unconscious in what is unnoticed or scarcely noticed (1923, 16 n. 1). On the other hand in the Introductory Lectures we have: Well what do you do if I make an unintelligible utterance to you? You question me, is that not so? Why should we not do the same thing to the dreamerquestion him as to what his dream means? (191617, 100). And yet when Joseph Wortis objected to one of Freuds interpretations that he did not in the least feel that way he was accused of disbelieving in the unconscious (Wortis 1963, 1023). Otto Fenichel in a review of Karen Horney berates her for banalising Freud since by the unconscious, Horney means not clearly conscious whereas Freud means that of which the subject knows nothing whatsoever (1940, 115). Freuds making the unconscious conscious is not Wittgensteins formulating the correct expression of feeling. When Freud speaks of making the unconscious conscious, thus producing a patients sense of revelation as to the meaning of his symptoms or dreams, the patients recognition cannot be assimilated to that of Wittgensteins philosophical interlocutor recognizing the source of a philosophical misconception. The patients postinterpretative experience is not the ground for the analysts conviction that his interpretation is correct, nor is it required before he can conclude that it is correct. There are several grounds for the failure of the analogy between the philosophic method Wittgenstein recommends and the role of the patients agreement in Freuds psychoanalysis. In the first place many of the phenomena Freud purports to account for in his interpretations are not such that they could be confirmed or disconfirmed by the patients agreement. Let us suppose that one of Freuds patients actually said Now I know why my head aches: I displaced my wish to be deflowered upwards and transformed hymeneal pain into cranial pain. Would we credit it on her say-so? Nor would her inability to confirm it demonstrate that Freud must be mistaken. Wittgenstein finds an analogy between his method and that of psychoanalysis in that a simile operating in the unconscious can be made harmless by being articulated (Diktat fr Schlick 1932 quoted by Baker 2004, 207). The similes of whose influence Wittgenstein persuades his philosophical interlocutors are not like

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those which figure in Freuds interpretations. The disclosure of the simile operating in the unconscious means one thing to Wittgenstein and something quite different to Freud; Wittgenstein attempts to evince convincingly and felicitously a state of mind; Freud attempts to explain a symptom or a dream image. Freuds similes unlike Wittgensteins are causes. The piercing glance to which one of his patients felt herself subjected is invoked by Freud to explain the pain in her head. Freud says of a patient who entertained unconscious defloration fantasies concerning any attractive young girl he encountered that since at university he failed to pass in botany now he carries on with it as a deflorator (Masson 1985, 3456). So far we could have a Wittgensteinian further descriptionif a strained onebut Freud goes on, characteristically, to tell us that the deflorator sweats as he deflowers, because it is hard work. This is no longer just a simile like He now collects girls as he once collected flowersbut is a cause with material consequences. Moore reports Wittgenstein as saying of Freud: It is all excellent similes, e.g. the comparison of a dream to a rebus. But for Wittgenstein the rebus-like character of dreams is internally related to them. Rebus is a simile, which, when applied to a dream episode, need only be mentioned for us to recognize its felicity. But for Freud the rebus-like character of dreams is, an initially hidden, and then arduously excogitated feature of dream formation. For Freud the statement that dreams are rebus-like is a discovery like the deciphering of the Rosetta stone but for Wittgenstein it is like pointing out that we can discern a face in the contours of the moon. For Wittgenstein the term rebus would figure in a further description, for Freud it is a hypothesis. For Freud a dream image isnt a rebus because we find this a felicitous term for the impression it makes on us but because of the manner in which it came about, however it may impress us. Showing us clearly where we had been the whole time or telling us what was at the back of our minds or what was among our crush of thoughts or what it was that intrigued us, is not what Freud took himself to be doing when he imputed repressed unconscious ideation to a patient as an explanation of her condition. Why have so many of those who addressed this issue thought otherwise? One reason is that Freuds vocabulary sometimes encourages their misconstrual because of the way in which it can comprise epistemically disparate relations. E.g., the term condensation. In a dream concerning a paper sent him by a medical colleague who admired Ibsen and which Freud thought written in too emotional a style, Freud describes its style as positively Norekdal, a phrase his waking self finds incomprehensible. At last I saw that the monstrosity was composed of two names Nora and Ekdal characters in two well-known plays of Ibsens (1900, 296). To bring out the epistemic distinctiveness of this explanation, imagine an alternative context in which the phrase norekdal might have been used by Freud in an attempt at humorous derision of his colleagues paper. If someone slow on the uptake asked Freud to explain his remark, what Freud would then produce in clarification would be Wittgensteinian further description and Freud would then stand in an entirely different relation to it from that in which he stood to his interpretation of the dream-nonsense word norekdal. Though both occurrences of the word are instances of what Freud calls condensation, one was an inference the other not. In the case of the wordplay Freud would be offering the hearer a paraphrase for which the expression condensation was a felicitous mnemonic, a good way of representing a fact (Moore

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1966, 309). But condensation as it occurs in Freuds interpretation of his dream is an inference not a further description, however well-founded it might be.2 The Concept of Paradoxical Reminiscence and Paradoxical Recognition Paradoxical reminiscence is my term for the remembering of repressed material, which had always been in a state of repression and thus never experienced. Freuds most explicit account of paradoxical reminiscence occurs in a paper of 1914 in which he says it particularly often happensthat something is remembered which never could have been forgotten because it was never at any time noticed, never was conscious (1914, 149). (Wittgensteins Blue Book reference to the discovery of conscious thoughts which were unconscious may be an allusion to paradoxical reminiscence [BB 57].) The obvious objection to conferring on the patient the power to validate the analysts interpretation when this pertained to matters which had never been conscious was made by Sartre in Being and Nothingness: how could he compare it to his present state since that is out of reach, and since he never had any knowledge of it? (1969, 574). Sartre here was imputing to Freud the notion of paradoxical reminiscence and objecting to its coherence. Alfred North Whitehead on the other hand seems to find no difficulty with the notion. In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead took account of the phenomena I have called paradoxical reminiscence: We certainly do take account of things of which at the time we have no explicit cognition. We can even have a cognitive memory of the taking account without having a contemporaneous cognition (1948, 67). Though Freud only intermittently invokes the patients recognition of an unconscious which was never conscious he still leaves it unclear whether when he does not, the thoughts Freud imputes to the patient are accepted because the context calls for them inexorably (1895, 272) or because they are recognised as those which they remember trying to drive out of their heads (1895, 117 n.1)? Some commentators on the unconscious are so intent on being celebratory that they leave us unclear as to the epistemic nature of the discovery they are celebrating. I have argued elsewhere that this fuzziness may not be entirely disinterested. The gravitational pull of the father confessor model and of the desire to make obscure intimations more explicit may be resisted in spite of their welcome familiarity because the assumption that our repressed sexual and egoistic impulses are deeply unconscious and alien is one which promises to spare us a lot of squirming and wriggling. What the unbanalised notion of the deep unconscious accomplishes, with

At least one analyst has noticed this. Donald Spence in a review of Schafers A New Language for Psychoanalysis, quoted Schafer as to the analysts need to invoke some unseen mechanism when the patient is not ready to acknowledge his own responsibility. Spence illustrates the way in which Schafers half-hearted revisionism challenges the underlying analytic contract by citing the terms in which he describes a patient: Unfailingly, though still apprehensively, she avoids remembering those events of her childhood to which she reacted in a traumatized fashion. Spence comments: Note the use of the verb avoid. Does Schafer mean that the patient has made a conscious decision not to remember, and that once the avoidance is pointed out, it will be corrected? Probably not; but if he holds with a dynamic unconscious, he cannot turn round and hold the patients responsible. (1976).

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our connivance, is a species of exorcism, which takes the sting out of our shameful perverse and vindictive fantasising by banishing it to a realm of which we are innocently oblivious (Cioffi 2004, 37681). How then, does Freud make the unconscious conscious? One of the notions that needs addressing is that of the inner change which according to Freud must precede recognition of the unconscious content of the interpretation proffered before it can be, not merely accepted, but recognized as having occupied the patients mind, at least peripherally, on some previous occasion. The notion of the inner change is introduced in a passage on the two kinds of knowledge which the patient gains in analysis or the two kinds of ignorance from which he suffered, one of which could be corrected by valid inference, the other not. (191617, 15) (This distinction seems to be a variant on the familiar philosophical one between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.) The problem the notion of the second kind of knowledge, the post inner change kind, raises is how one can have knowledge by acquaintance of that with which one was neverconsciously acquainted; i.e., is paradoxical reminiscence intelligible? Whatever view we take of this issue, the notion of paradoxical reminiscence destroys any analogy between the corroborative experience of Freuds patients and that of Wittgensteins pupil-interlocutor. But there is a more general disanalogy. Even without the notion of paradoxical reminiscence the agreement of a patient cannot be assimilated to that of Wittgensteins philosopher-pupil because the patients recognition supervenes on an interlude of total unawareness unlike the recognition accorded the misleading simile, at the back of his mind, by Wittgensteins pupil. Did Freud Sometimes Proffer Further Descriptions and thus Banalise his Own Discovery? How can we tell whether in proffering a particular psychoanalytic interpretation Freud is advancing an account which he believes the patient is capable of directly appreciating, i.e., verifying introspectively, or rather, one which the patient is only compelled by evidence to accept? The Rat Man is obviously producing a further description when he explains his violation of the rule against leaving the couch by saying that he could not lie comfortably while heaping such filthy abuse on Freud and his family. It is less obvious whether Freud was producing a rival further description or an hypothesis when he contradicted him by saying that his real reason was to put himself out of reach lest Freud fetch him a clip on the ear. Freud tells us that the Rat Mans own account of his action of replacing a small stone he had previously obsessively removed from a roadway on the implausible ground that it might overturn the carriage in which his fiance was shortly to travel was a spurious rationalisation. The Rat Man had maintained that he replaced the stone because recognizing the irrationality of his action in removing it he was determined to oppose his compulsions and weaken their power. For Freud it was a victory for his unconscious hatred of his fiancee and constituted a symbolic consummation of this. It is difficult to see how other than as a hypothesis about strictly unconscious processes Freuds account is to be taken. Difficult but not

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impossible. We need only imagine that the Rat Mans response to Freuds suggestion that his motive was hostility was to recall at some point that it was with a feeling of what he now recognized as vengeful satisfaction that he replaced the stone. Not only have we no grounds for thinking that this is how things went but in the case of other of the Rat Mans compulsive symptoms, their unconscious roots are so elaborate that we could make no sense of their being at the back of the patients mind waiting to be summoned to awareness by the analysts proffered interpretation (1909 passim). On the other hand Doras allusion to Frau Ks beautiful white body is more likely to have stood to her homoerotic feelings for Frau K as a thought to its further elaboration, i.e., a further description than as the conscious effect of an unconscious erotic impulse. But for just this reason it is not a properly psychoanalytic interpretation. How did Wittgenstein come to the erroneous conclusion that Freuds interpretations were not hypotheses but were doing what aesthetics does, proffering further descriptions? It arose in part through treating Freuds joke reductions as paradigmatic of Freudian interpretation whereas they are inassimilable to what is distinctive in Freuds account of the meaning of dreams and symptoms. Wittgenstein said of Freuds joke book that it was a good book for looking for philosophical mistakes. Here is an example of what he might have meant. This is Freuds energic formula for that subclass of laughables, which he calls humour: an economy in the expenditure of feeling (as contrasted with jokes, an economy in the expenditure of repression or inhibition and the comic, an economy in the expenditure of thought). Freud gives as an example of what he means by economy in the expenditure of feeling, a specimen of gallows humoura man about to be hanged on a Monday morning remarks, A fine way to start the week (1905, 229). Freuds energic analysis would thus run: When we are told a man is about to be hanged we anticipate an occasion for feeling compassion but we get a quip instead and so we are left with an unexpended amount of affect. Here the affect economised is pity. Freuds philosophical mistake is to imply that it could have been something elsethat his description of the condition of the psychic apparatus under circumstances in which economy of affect occurs could have grounds independent of the account given by the person who laughed. If Freud were advancing a genuine hypothesis we would have no difficulty in imagining that he was mistaken and that the feeling economised was not pity but contempt, say. So Freuds theoretical, energic account is just the phenomenological fact jargonised and projected beneath the appearances it purports to explain. Even if we could look forward to a time when a libido-meter or psychoanalytascope would enable us to determine what subterranean processes of cathexis and counter-cathexis were taking place when we laughed at a joke we would still need to have recourse to old-fashioned methods of paraphrase to make clear to ourselves just what it was that we found amusing. Thus even when Freuds accounts of jokes are not mistaken they are explanatorily redundant. They are further descriptions and not hypotheses. But it does not follow that therefore his interpretations of dreams or symptoms are equally so. The Probative Value of the Patients Endorsement I have argued that a patients recognition of his derepressed unconscious is unlike a philosophers acknowledgement that his feelings have been correctly expressed

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because Freuds unconscious is extra-marginal not marginal, to employ William Jamess terms (1960, 2334). They are hypotheses as to what lies beyond consciousness and not formulations of what might have lain at its periphery. Adolf Grnbaum has a different objection to Freuds invocation of the patients say-so as a criterion of correctness than those I have invoked. He appears not to notice the inappropriateness of agreement as a criterion given the nature of the interpretations to be corroborated e.g. hysterical conversion. He appeals rather to the scepticism about first-person psychological explanation to which he thinks us entitled even when it is conscious motives, thoughts, and feelings etc, which are being invoked. He writes, Though the subject often does have direct and generally reliable access to the individual content of his mental states he/she has only inferential accessjust like outside observersto such causal linkages as actually connect some of his own mental states (Grnbaum 1985, 279). Isnt this a travesty of our mental lives? Has Grnbaum never tapped his foot to music? When Grnbaum scratches himself does he infer the relation between his itching and his scratching? We can see why Pinocchio had to infer the connection between his lengthening nose and the lies he was telling. Is this how Grnbaum thinks he stands to his tapping foot? Is the say-so of the subject as to the significance of an opaque action really as questionable when it pertains to a conscious as to a formerly conscious but repressed thought? I read somewhereprobably Macaulaythat during the reign of George I, English Jacobites would express their subversive views by limping whenever they toasted the Hanoverian King George. This would signal that their real loyalty was to James, thus: L stood for Louis 14th at whose court James lived in exile, I stood for James (the Latin spelling) M for Mary of Modena his wife, and P for the Prince of Wales, their son. Would Grnbaum insist that in conferring this significance on the perplexing accompaniment to their toast they were really making an inference? Similarly with the Italian irredentists who expressed their hostility to Austrian rule by shouting Verdi! Verdi! at the performance of his operas, the secret subversive meaning being Vittorio Emmanuel re de Italia! Could they have been in error; could an observer been as well placed to construe their shouts? Consider the scene of the boy crossing a field in the first chapter of Swallows and Amazons. His veerings and swoopings would puzzle an onlooker until he realised that the boy was imagining he was a sailboat responding to changes in the direction and force of the wind. Are we to credit that the boy was inferring the relation between the movement of his arms and his imagining himself a sailboat? In cases like these there is no scope for the sceptical doubts that Grnbaum enjoins. In his lecture on descriptions Wittgenstein alludes to the odd fact that we sometimes imitate someone else and recalled once walking down a street and thinking I am now walking exactly like Russell (LC 39). Although this has analogues in the psychoanalytic use of identification, its epistemic status is not comparable. For example we are told that the tablecloth lady of Introductory lectures 17 and 18, in running from one room to another in which she enacted her ritual, was identifying with her husbands behaviour in running from his room to hers on their disastrous wedding night (Freud 191617). We can see why Grnbaum might find her agreement with this an insufficient ground for accepting it but there is no scope

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for doubt in Wittgensteins identification of the subject of his mimicry. The case for scepticism in the psychoanalytic case is quite other than Grnbaum takes it to be. A colleague once confided that when feeling particularly inadequate he scratched himself like the Mifune character in Rashomon and felt somewhat better for it. Can the right epistemic response to this be that though he knew he was scratching himself (Grnbaums content) he could only infer, like any outside observer that he was doing so in mimicry of Mifune (Grnbaums causal linkage)? My colleagues remark about Mifune reminded me that if when seated at my desk overlooking the rooftops of Canterbury, I put my feet up and lean back in my chair, hands clasped behind my head, I became momentarily oblivious of the cosy chimney pots and became instead Raymond Chandlers Philip Marlowe pensively contemplating the neon glow of the mean streets. Does imputing my momentary fantasy to my posture involve me in a surreptitious inference? However we resolve this issue as to when and why in everyday life the agreement of the subject certifies a conjecture as correct it can have no bearing on the validational problems raised by the Freudian explanatory invocation of unconscious motives, impulses, thoughts etc. The correct objection to the invocation of avowal in the Freudian cases of unconscious identification is that these cannot be assimilated to the everyday ones because the relation in which the analysand stands to the figure unconsciously identified with differs epistemically from that in which the fantasisers in my examples stood to Mifune and Philip Marlowe. In the case of the conscious mimicry, unlike that of the tablecloth lady, there was no interval of complete inaccessibility, no false though truthful denial. The disanalogy precludes the assimilation of everyday psychological explanations to psychoanalytic ones.3 The Reinvention of Psychoanalysis as a Phenomenological Enterprise: Freud as an Articulator of Worries Wittgensteins mistaken assimilation of Freuds procedure to his own may have been prompted by those occasions on which Freud apparently adopts a banalised version of his own theory thus replacing unconscious states of affairs which exist independently of the patients concurrence with those of which the patient was subliminally aware and of whose truth his acknowledgement is constitutive. This misconstrual has some contemporary relevance for, alerted by Wittgensteins

In Philip Roths autobiography The Facts, when a taxi is taking the narrator to the morgue to identify his estranged wifes body, the cabbie comments on his buoyant demeanour and Roth suddenly becomes aware that he has been cheerily whistling. Roth was manifesting what Wittgenstein calls the characteristic expression-behaviour for joy and thus providing others with grounds for imputing that state to him; But was Roth himself unconsciously inferring from his whistling that he was not bereft by the death of his wife. There are philosophers and psychologists who think it likely. Here is an example of someone apparently illustrating the anomalous case in which the meaning of an action is consciously rather than unconsciously inferred by an agent. W N P Barbellion recorded in his journal that he endured an hours torture of indecision over whether to go and propose marriage to his girlfriend or to the Fabian Society and hear Bernard Shaw. He writes found myself slowly, mournfully, putting on hat and coat. You cant shave in a hat and coat so I concluded I had decided on Shaw (1948, 182-83). Isnt this a Wittgensteinian grammatical joke?

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emphasis on the contrast between hypotheses and further descriptions, it becomes blatant that many self-styled Freudians have deserted what was distinctive in Freuds conception of the unconscious, the idea of mental processes which could only be identified by a procedure of arduous inference and which pertain to matters which could be completely alien to the subject. It isnt merely theoretical remarks like Freuds baffling claim that the dreamer knows the meaning of his dream which appear to intermittently commit him to an unconscious about which one could get clear in Wittgensteins sense, but those exchanges with patients where he appears to be getting clear about a mental state, arriving at a further description of it, merely by formulating what was at the back of their minds. Such episodes appear to give some warrant to the revisionists banalisation. An example is Freuds telling Dora that her anger at Herr Ks sexual advances was not a manifestation of affronted modesty but rather of wounded vanity in that she recognized the phrases he employed were those he had used in seducing the governess of his children (What thought you dare he treat me like a servant) (Cioffi 1998, 6266). Statements like this belong to Wittgensteins category of questions which are not settled as hypotheses are settled but in entirely different way; more in the form what is in my mind when I say so and so (LC 18). This is also true of Doras melancholy, her feelings of resentment towards her father, and towards Frau and Herr K. But it cannot hold of the tickle in her throat, her genital catarrh, and her limp. The assimilation of these two disparate classes of interpretanda constitute what Wittgenstein called Freuds abominable mess. The tendency of contemporary psychoanalysts to work with a weakened, banalised concept of the unconscious is illustrated by Janet Malcolms pseudonymous but paradigmatic analyst in her New Yorker articles on psychoanalysis. He speaks of bringing out stuff... barely on the fringes of his patients consciousness (1982, 72). If this is what he did, he was not practicing psychoanalysis. How is bringing out stuff... barely on the fringes of his patients consciousness to be distinguished from the procedure the anti-Freudian, Aaron Beck tells us he adopted when he abandoned psychoanalysis and decided to confine himself to pathogenic thoughts which operate at the margins of consciousness? Even in the literalist heyday of the unconscious we find (in a work once used in the training of analysts) an explanation of a certain class of phobias which is closer to Wittgensteins further description than to the hypotheses he disdains: Certain persons are afraid of seeing cripples or of witnessing accidents because they do not wish to be reminded of what might happen to me (Fenichel, 1966, 196). This is obviously a further description of their phobic state and for that very reason Freud would have denied it the capacity to produce symptoms and would probably have treated it as a rationalisation of castration anxiety. Another instance of oblivious banalisation is provided by a researcher in psychotherapy, Allen Bergin. Bergin characterises good psychoanalytic interpretation as responding to client affect just below the surface and labelling, identifying or emphasizing it rather than telling the patient about feelings he "really has" when he is not experiencing them. He says that analysts, in common with non-analytic therapists, followed this procedure of good interpretation (1966, 241).

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In so far as they did they had momentarily ceased practicing psychoanalysis. It may be true that every Freudian has a phenomenologist inside him struggling to emerge, but this does not justify obscuring the distinction between them4. Summary and Conclusion to Part One One source of the disanalogy between an analysands relation to an interpretation and Wittgensteins interlocutors agreement to suggestions as to the source of a philosophical misconception is that in the psychoanalytic case the diagnosis is often not the kind of thing which the say-so of the patient could confirm, e.g. conversion hysteria. What distinguishes a psychoanalytic patients recognition of the correctness of an interpretation from Wittgensteins interlocutor in cases other than conversion is that the experience that leads the patient to agree need never have been, even peripherally, conscious and that even where the repressed was once conscious it later passed into a state in which the patient could not recognize it if it were put to him. Moreover, nowhere does Freud imply that an interpretation must be incorrect if a patient fails to endorse it. That the patient stand in a more intimate relation to his unconscious than just intellectual conviction is required for therapeutic purposes not probative ones. In his notebooks Wittgenstein gives expression to a profoundly characteristic utterance: If the place I want to get to could only be reached by a ladder I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to, is the place I am already at now (CV 7). Wittgensteins conflicting construals of psychoanalysis suggest that it was for him both the ladder he abjured and the means of remaining where he was.

Part Two: When should Further Descriptions be Preferred to Hypotheses? Why all this fuss about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that? James Joyce Just what are Hypotheses in Rivalry with? The thesis that Freud seeks for causal explanations in a context where this is inappropriate (Johnston 1989, 4950) is one often found among Wittgensteinian commentators on Freud. Paul Johnston says that what is appropriate instead is

Robert Fliess gives an account of making the unconscious conscious which appears at first to support the Wittgensteinian and revisionist construal. He writes that the alteration in the patients personality will ultimately enable him to verify introspectively the hitherto unacceptable statement about himself. However in the same preface Fliess disqualifies the patient in a way which shows how alien the unbanalised Freudian view of the role of the patients concurrence is to the Wittgensteinian one: Although the discovery of the unconscious has actually deprived the nave observer of his last province, he is as yet unaware of his deposition. Unacquainted with his incompetence, he believe himself, on the strength of possessing a psyche, capable of evaluating a psychological statement. (Fliess 1950, xv).

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arranging what we already know. But this encounters a strong and apparently cogent objection. The analyst Charles Hanly for example objects that arrangements of the facts of hysteria would not have added anything to the understanding of its genesis This is so, but is it all there is to be said? Not all of Freuds interpretations were of hysterical symptoms. Is there in other cases an alternative context? One which invites us to clarify without explaining as Monk puts it (1990, 511). When is this the appropriate context in a enquiry which ostensibly addresses diagnostic and explanatory issues? The task this question sets us is the difficult one of determining when a hypothesis trumps a further description and when a further description can only be trumped by a further, further description. We sometimes appear to be confronted by a choice between explanation without understanding and understanding without explanation. An existential psychotherapist, Rollo May maintains (in the International Encyclopedia of Social Science entry on existential psychology) that psychoanalytic explanation precludes understanding of that which it explains (May 1968). What might have induced him to say this? I think similar considerations were at work as those, which moved Wittgenstein to deny that an hypothesis as to his condition would confer peace or calm on someone troubled by love (GB 123). Even if we take calm/peace to refer to the relief of intellectual perplexity rather than to spiritual tranquillity we can still see what would prompt someone to dismiss the pertinence of hypotheses: & & There were an insufficient number of convolutions in the Frankenstein monsters brainthus it is argued in James Whales film, a life of brutality, violence and murder. "Something about me that explains everything" says Bob Mitchum of a childhood trauma he has repressed in Raoul Walshs Pursuedthe first Freudian western.

There is a tendency to think that of these two explanations only the invocation of the missing wrinkles in the monsters brain necessarily fails to render the phenomenon explained perspicuous. But Wittgensteins remark on the lovetroubled one can be construed to imply that repressed childhood traumas are as incapable of conferring genuine understanding as brain wrinkles since they are no less external, i.e., not immanent to the current experience of the subject. This may seem an arbitrary restriction on what can count as an explanation and both brain wrinkles and infantile traumas ought to count as providing it. But although explanations as externalthat is, as transcendent to the self-awareness of the subjectas cerebral idiosyncrasies or infantile traumas may sometimes be what the context calls for there is a demand that they nevertheless fail to meet. They cannot confer the kind of perspicuity which results when the explanatory revelation is continuous with pre-reflective awareness, something analogous to the successful attempt to recall a momentarily forgotten name (Wittgensteins analogy) or recapturing the momentarily forgotten purpose which took us from one room to another. Thus it was the fact that the causes invoked by psychoanalysis were not immanent to the experience explained which moved those in the phenomenological tradition to deny them the capacity to render the condition of the subject intelligible to him. On

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occasion, clarity about my feelings as to what befell me and the view I should take of its putative consequences matters more than what these really were: who or what I blame more than who or what was really to blame. And these would seem to be matters that a-causal, a-hypothetical discourse might be adequate to. It was the same externality as that to which existential therapists object, which incited Wittgenstein to describe Freud as doing something immensely wrong in his interpretation of the flowery dream (LC 23). Suppose that in the search for self-understanding we confined ourselves to what Wittgenstein chastised Freud for failing to confine himself to in his dealing with the flowery dreamer. What would we lose if we abandoned hypotheses for further descriptions? States of mind which are troubling can take us in either of two directions, that of determining their causal origins or that of articulating more fully their troubling or perplexing aspects. This latter enterprise, which is characteristic of Wittgenstein, constitutes a banalisation of Freuds procedure though it has compensating merits. The implication of Wittgensteins criticism of Freuds dealings with the flowery dreamer are that we should confine ourselves to doing what Freud did when he explained what made a joke funny and eschew what he was doing when he told the flowery dreamer that her dream was bawdy even though she did not recognize it as such. We can easily imagine that taking the conversation with the flowery dreamer in the direction of the passionless marriage implicit in some of her remarks might be for her a more illuminating course than determining the unconscious antecedents of the image of the flowering branch, however diagnostically profitable this latter might be. It must be conceded however that to adopt such a course would mean abandoning many of the traditional diagnostic goals of psychopathology. The Prerogatives and Limits of Banalisation Rush Rheess suggestion that someones bewilderment at the sort of person he turned out to be might be assuaged by the same means as those which would enable him to formulate what he felt as he listened to Mozarts Requiem (1971, 23) may seem extravagant but there is a way of reducing its apparent extravagance. Our selffeeling has unarticulated, occluded formal relations which may be brought into focus and illuminated in the way in which a felicitous further description illuminates an aesthetic experience. There are occasions when my life and the self that lived it stand to me like those experiences which Wittgenstein felt seemed to be saying something and set him the task of discovering what it was that they were saying (BB 185). Suppose that for these experiences we substitute that peculiar and yet familiar intentional object, ones own self. The self we are attempting to fathom need not figure as merely an explanandum the antecedent conditions of which we are in search of but as a complex intentional object whose aspects we are striving to discriminate and articulate and towards which we are trying to clarify our feelings. We dont only have a need to know why or how we became the particular person we are but also for a deeper or more comprehensive grasp of in what this particularity consiststhe elucidation of our self-feelingsomething which a knowledge of its unconscious determinants or organic causes cannot confer. The problem that the person I have

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turned out to be presents need not take the form Why have I become thus-andthus? But rather What is this thus-and-thus that I have become? In the first of the Introductory Lectures Freud speaks of the information required by the analysis as concerning what is most intimate in his mental life, everything that as a socially independent person he must conceal from other people and beyond that everything that he will not admit to himself (191617, 18). It is precisely the subjects attempts to evince this aspect of his intimate mental life, which answer to Wittgensteins a-causal, self-clarificatory, further description account. What would an analysis conducted along Wittgensteins a-causal, nonexplanatory lines look like? It would confine itself to those items in Freuds list, which a father confessor would expect his penitent to be conversant with, e.g., those matters that he attempted to conceal from othersthings ill done or done to others harm. These rarely require dream interpretation or free association for their discernment. What is wrong with this mode of banalisation of Freuds procedure is not its lack of candour as to its deviation from psychoanalysis proper but its lack of candour as to its explanatory limitations. Developmental Questions and the Limits on the Explanatory Power of Further Descriptions In his essay Disposition and Memory Stuart Hampshire speaks of the discovery that a memory of something in the past has been continuously the reason for inclination and conduct, unknown to the subject and without his having been aware of the memory as a memory (1982, 85). Hampshire seems to be invoking the strictly Freudian claim to uncover episodes occluded rather than immanent. But if we banalise Hampshires thesis we can easily supply plausible instances. It is said that Prosper Merime imputed his austere reserve to a childhood episode when on being rebuked by his parents he broke into tears and was mocked by them for it. From that moment he resolved never to so expose himself by displaying his feelings. We need not suppose that this resolve was continuously in mind but only that if he were reminded of it he might become aware of the influence of the episode in a more intimate way than that in which the properly repressed episode is acknowledged to have exerted its influence on the authority of the evidence produced by the analyst. This phenomenon of something being continuously the reason without the subjects continuous awareness, though recognizable in retrospect, is analogous to one described by Wittgenstein in connection with logical grammar: When formulating a rule we always have the feeling; that is something you have known all along. We can do only one thingclearly articulate the rule we have been applying unawares (WVC). Cant this notion of following a rule unawares be extended to our lives in general? May we not, in living, have been following rules, which need only be clearly articulated for some of the characterological and behavioural perplexities, which beset us to be resolved? But sometimes a banalised version of discovering the unconscious of this kind which confines us to the already known via a fuller recall of our evanescent reveries and ruminations may not cover the case as neatly as it did Merimes.

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A reconstruction of our developmental history which takes us beyond what we can be brought to recall can teach us what we once were, if not how we became what we now are. The more we learn of our child natures and experiences the more intelligible our later life becomes. We may then feel ourselves to have had to a large extent the life appropriate to such a nature as our early historythough beyond recallreveals ours to have been. A reconstruction of a persons childhood may thus reveal that there is less novelty than at first appears in the makeup of the adult. Albert Schweizer used to baby-sit Sartre, who was a cousin, and relates that the infant Sartre would habitually urinate while in his pram though given ample opportunity to urinate while out of it. Schweizer saw something emblematic in thisEven at that age Sartre was still Sartrethough he leaves it to us to work out the exact points of analogy between big Sartre and little Sartre. But though there are those who may find certain traits or activities of the adult Sartre rendered less surprising when they learn of his infantile obstinacy with respect to his soiling activities this will not have been due to an arrangement of what they already knew but through what Dilthey calls the roundabout way of understanding. The Explanatory Value of the Past and Diltheys Round About Way of Understanding The answer to our explanatory perplexities may lie in experiences which we cannot be said to know even in the wide sense of their ultimately figuring as memories, i.e. in episodes beyond the power of anamnesis and only reconstructible through the testimony of third parties. This is an analyst, Leslie Farber, speaking of his attempt to understand his own life: As I survey this pastness that belongs to me alone, that is life-so-far...what I long to find is something thematic in the moving parts. (1976) Proust speaks in a similar connection of the most permanent and intimate part of me; the lever whose incessant movements controlled all the rest and of his longing for a fuller understanding of this most intimate part. These desires for self-understanding could readily lend themselves to an ahypothetical, back of mindedness, bersicht construal but this may not yield the perspicuity which is sought. If a procedure which restricts itself to the arrangement of what we already know is not adequate to the task of finding something thematic in the moving parts, the lever whose incessant movements controlled all the rest, might not Diltheys round about way of understanding be so? Dilthey writes: What once we were, how we developed and become what we are, we learn from the way in which we acted, the plans we once adopted, the way in which we made ourselves felt in our vocation ... from old dead letters, from judgments on us which were spoken long ago (1962, 71). Dilthey is asking us to consider those features of our past to which we stand as a biographer might. Wittgenstein tells us that someone troubled by love would not be consoled by an explanation. Consider Hobbess poignant observation concerning love that those fare better in it that cared less than those that care more. Though we are likely to have played both roles in our time let us imagine that we were consistently among those that cared more: Is seeking an explanation in what we do not already know necessarily misguided? We can see why someone would have no interest in the

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neural correlates of his infatuation (as Margalit observes [1992, 314]).5 But it is not obvious why an explanation, which attempted to demonstrate the similarities between his current love object and his childhood ones, might not have been greeted as pertinent. Suppose there was an overlap of which the love-troubled one was oblivious between the terms in which he described his current love object and those in which he described his past ones. Might not pointing this out to him have ameliorated his perplexity, if not his anguish? There is another way in which the external, roundabout way of understanding may enlighten us. Even though developmental revelations do not take the form of uncovering episodes that confer perspicuity on the characterological conundrums that beset us, as they did on Merimes reserve, uncovering a non-perspicuous cause may yet resolve an empirical hermeneutic issue by foreclosing it. If someone is discovered to have been pushed we need no longer speculate as to why he jumped. It must be conceded that there are entire classes of problems which lie beyond the power of anamnesis to resolve. There are certain changes in our life-mode of which there can be no perspicuous experiential account. For example, only the invocation of hidden physiological processes can explain why the male child passes from comparative unresponsiveness to womens bodies to obsessive interest in them. And why with advancing age this interest wanes. The psychiatrist, Richard Hunter (the co-author of The Madness of George the Third) maintained that Patients and relatives confuse the history of their illness with what they think made them ill (1973, 19). Were this shown to be so would not a great advance in self-understanding have occurred? When Yeats wrote: Mere growing old that brought chilled blood / this sweetness brought, he was contemplating an explanatory hypothesis. Where was the error in this? The Past as Cause Versus the Past as Psychological Fixed Star There is also a non-explanatory invocation of the past, a sorting out of ones feelings about some past episode rather than an attempt to trace its repercussions. The memory of a past episode may have a suggestiveness to be pondered and elucidated and not just causal consequences to be assessed. A familiar instance of the use of the past to elucidate rather than explain the present is that of Marcel in La Recherche, repeatedly adverting to his mothers good night kiss to make a point about his feelings for Albertine. For example he explains his alarm at the prospect of being left by Albertine by invoking an analogous alarm occasioned by a separation from his mother. Of course there could have been a causal relation between his feelings about Albertines goodnight kiss and those about his mothers many years earlier, but Marcels concern was to register and convey those feelings and not to venture a causal explanation of them. By contrast, when Marcel traces the fatal decline of his will to the new regimen of indulgence
5

In an essay on Wittgensteins Remarks on Frazer Avishai Margalit writes that someone who is suffering the pains of love is more likely to find satisfaction in understanding his situation through reading about the sorrows of Werther than through an explanation about the endogenous opiates that mediates his addiction. He goes on to argue that a compulsive gambler might nevertheless find more satisfaction in reading about the opiates mediating his addiction to gambling that in a literary evocation of that addiction. (1992, 314).

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initiated on the night he disobeyed his mothers order and insisted on staying up until she bestowed her kiss (a black date in the calendar), we have understandable misgivings as to his authority for pronouncing on such a momentous developmental issue. I may be authoritative as to whether I live my life like an unprepared schoolboy fearful that he may be called on before the period ends. But not as to the extent that my apprehensive nature is due to an occasion when as a schoolboy I underwent the trauma of being called upon unprepared and publicly humiliated. Explaining and evincing/evoking are distinct enterprises. If someone comes to feel that there is in his relation to his wife something of his relation to his mother this cannot be made any more the case by tracing it to his infantile relation to his mother or any less the case by failing to. A remark of Roy Schafers in Language and Insight (1978) illustrates the confusion between these two epistemically distinct tasks with respect to the past, assessing its repercussions or possessing it more fully. Schafer writes: Trauma is given meaning by its victim: analysts promote insight into the profoundly disturbing sense that the analysand has given to the traumatic event. This obscures the difference between a past episode as a putatively pathogenic cause with repercussions to be assessed and a past episode as an intentional object of reminiscence with a nature to be elucidated. It is only if our concern is with what Wittgenstein calls the correct expression of the patients feeling that they have epistemic authority with respect to it. Thomas Nagel is among those who are unwilling to concede this limitation on introspection and reflection, for though he speaks of the aim of analysis as causal knowledge he also speaks of its distinctively inner character and holds that it is a matter of the patients own self-understanding and is essentially perceptual (1994). Faculties it has not Pleased our Creator to give us Kierkegaards famous observation that Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backwards is excessively sanguine. There are important aspects of our livesinfatuations and disenchantmentsthat are no more amenable to being understood backwards than they were forwardsas incomprehensible viewed retrospectively as they were surprising and unforeseeable. Scepticism as to the likelihood of attaining to reconstructions which will resolve the narrativeexplanatory puzzles that beset us in this area, is not unreasonable though sometimes too total. Dr Johnson said of a particularly intractable counterfactual issue of this kind that its resolution required faculties it has not pleased our creator to give us. This is a sentiment which we are often tempted to when frequenting the puzzles presented by biographies or psychoanalytic case histories. When is it justified? One case where it seems justified and seems to have a representative character is providedthough inadvertentlyby Wittgenstein himself. He asks us to imagine that on an occasion on which he was walking along a riverbank with a friend, Taylor, the friend extended his arm pushing Wittgenstein into the river. Wittgenstein asks under what conditions we would say that Taylor deliberately, though unconsciously, pushed Wittgenstein into the river. He asks us to

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imagine that Taylors analyst persuades him that an unconscious animus was as work, though Taylor sincerely denies having pushed Wittgenstein in and insists it was an accident. Wittgenstein takes too complacent a view of the resolvability of the puzzle by asserting that both accountsTaylors and his analystscould be true. This is to give too authoritative a status to Taylors sincere denial that he pushed Wittgenstein in. The analysts account and Taylors could not both be true. Taylor could not continue to give his self-exonerating answer after he had been persuaded of the truth of the analysts explanation. What would be consistent with the truth of the analysts account that Taylor unconsciously pushed him in is a further description of the apprehension and dismay Taylor experienced at the sight of Wittgenstein floundering in the water. What is not consistent with the analysts account is Taylors statement that it was an accident. And attempting to decide which of these was the case tempts us to invoke Johnsons dictum. Even if Taylor confessed to a subliminal feeling of satisfaction at seeing Wittgenstein floundering in the water this would not resolve the issue since this post hoc relish is perfectly compatible with the drenching having been the outcome of an unintentional movement on Taylors part.6 Paul Steinberg, an Auschwitz survivor, wonders of some of his less admirable character traits whether they were the work of the camp or the result of a motherless childhood bereft of tenderness. Both Perhaps (2002, 161). But that there are such explanatorily intractable phenomena does not warrant abandoning the hope for empirical explanation. In his review of a biography of Virginia Woolf, P. N. Furbank expresses scepticism about causal explanation in biography. He invokes Wittgensteins view on the irrelevance of causal hypotheses in aesthetics and argues that this objection can be extended and that it is arguable that biographers (like historians) might do well to eschew causal explanations in general (1998). This is too sweeping. We can occasionally rise above pure guesswork. When a bullfinch sings like a canary I am entitled to suspect that it was reared with canaries. And when I confirm that it was raised with canaries, scepticism as to the connection, though possible, is wanton. Something analogous is sometimes available in the case of humans. The problem is that there are no explicitly formulated rules which will enable us to determine when an homology is good enough to warrant the imputation of a causal relation between two discreet bits of behaviour widely separated in time. The judgment whether the degree of homology is sufficient to warrant an imputation of causal connection is often pretty subjective and so we are left with our rival intuitions. Even the subject himself may feel compelled to take this view. Jean Genets brusque reply to an interviewer who asked what difference it would have made to his development had he not been incarcerated for thieving at an early age was: Ask God. I have no idea.

Candidates for Dr. Johnsons dictum are not uncommon Freuds wolf man was unable to resolve himself on the question whether his sisters childhood seduction of him influenced his neuroses and all his later relations with women. But must that necessarily have such consequences? Perhaps it also happened to other little boys and had no effect. I dont know... (Obholzer 1982, 37).

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However the unlikelihood of discovering cogent causal relations between the past and future of particular individuals is not in itself sufficient ground for abandoning empirical enquiry for a more elaborate expression of self-feeling. We can sometimes find good grounds for imputing certain adult vicissitudes to certain early influences. There was an investigation into the relation between marital breakdown and the position of the spouses in their familys sibling structure. If I may Micawberize the result: A man with a sister older than himself marries a woman with a brother younger than herself. Result: harmony. A man with a sister younger than himself marries a woman with a brother younger than herself. Result: discord. What possible objection could there be to undertaking enquiries of this kind? What in the context of Freud or any other therapist or biographer could preclude the search for comparable data? Dr Johnsons dictum must not be resorted to too mechanically. Thematisation: The Intrinsic Value Placed on the Correct Expression of Feeling But the value of an analysis need not depend on diagnostic success. Analysands often testify that their analytic hours had a value for them independent of any ulterior explanatory outcome. One spoke of her gratitude at the succinct way in which her therapist had summed up her predicament. Stephen Mulhall comments on this mode of gratification: A human being in a state of deep despair may come across Marlowes line in Dr. Faustus (perpetual cloud descends) and acknowledge it as a uniquely appropriate articulation of the state of mind in which he finds himself (1990, 67). But articulating a state of mind and leaving it at that is not always as innocuous and appropriate. It can slip into the synaesthetic inanities D. H. Lawrence mocked in certain modernist novels: Is my aura a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot blacking or is it myrrh and bacon fat and Shetland tweed? asks every character and when the answer comes it is none of these, it is abysmal chlorocoryambasis, the audience quivers all over, and murmurs: thats just how I feel myself. (1936, 517) The gratification and relief attendant on uniquely appropriate articulation is not sought only with respect to painful or traumatic matters (as in the Ancient Mariners and till my ghastly tale is told, this heart within me burns.) Oliver Sacks comments on an encephalitis patient in remission who responded to Sacks question: Whats it like being the way you are? in terms which make explicit the intrinsic value which may be found in thematisation: Again and again, with his penetrating descriptions, his imaginative metaphors, or his great stock of poetic images, Mr. L. would try to evoke the nature of his own being and experience (1976, 242). The desire to record or express what its like being the way you are is entertained by many whose situation is not as extreme and dramatic as Mr Ls. Robert Graves wrote a poem (The Cool Web of Language) about the baleful effects of inarticulacy and the beneficent powers of utterance extending them beyond the abreaction of the strictly traumatic (A cool web of language winds us in /

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Retreat from too much joy or too much fear). Thomas Manns Tonio Kroeger also manifests a desire to speak away life and the world: Knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer. What is uttered is finished and done with. If the whole world could be expressed it could be saved (1955, 147). I conclude that there are those for whom thematisation via further description (Wittgensteins correct expression of feeling) facilitates escape from the assaults of experience in general, immersing them in Robert Graves cool web of language and this helps to account for the predilection to eschew empirical enquiry for more adequate or felicitous expression. But all this does not warrant an abandonment of hypotheses for further descriptions. What would? A profound scepticism as to the likelihood of a successful outcome of causal investigationat least with respect to the ideographic problems which beset us whose solution we may feel ultimately compelled to acknowledge require faculties it has not pleased our creator to give us. Peace Without Self-Understanding The anguish of Wittgensteins love-troubled one may have been not only explanation-unassuageable but overview-unassuageable as well. For the most an overview might have done for him was make him better acquainted with what it was he had to reconcile himself to and not necessarily reconcile him to it. Rush Rhees speaks of himself as bewildered at the person he had become. What would we lose if for Rheess epistemic term bewildered we substituted the nonepistemic dismayed? Why should our reaction to the dismaying person we find ourselves to have become necessarily profit from any epistemic advance, whether explanatory or self-clarificatory? Our misunderstood desire might have been neither for knowledge of who is to blame nor a clearer sense of whom or what it is that we blame but rather for the ability to forgo blaming. I am a fool but I am all Ive got reflects a character in a novel I read. This is an enviable attitude and one for the attainment of which it is not only a matter of indifference whether he was born foolish or gradually became so but even whether he can gain a more comprehensive grasp of the forms his foolishness takes, such as an overview might afford. What is required rather is a more charitable relation to his foolishness. What the prospective analysand may be seeking is a secular version of Baudelaires famous prayer: O Seigneur Donnez moi la force et le courage de contempler mon cur et mon corps sans dgot; i.e., Reconcile me to the person I have become and I will forgo both explanatory resolution of the characterological anomalies I present and a comprehensive grasp of their range.

Conclusion Drury tells us that when he was qualifying in psychiatry, he loaned Wittgenstein a psychiatric textbook of which Wittgenstein said that it was an excellent book and that he liked the spirit in which it was written, adding only the proviso dont ever

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let yourself think that all human problems can be solved in this way (1981, 165). The book in question was Sargent and Slaters Introduction to Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry. The books epigraph, taken from Henry Maudsley, gives a succinct account of the spirit in which it was written: The observation and classification of mental disorders have been so exclusively psychological that we have not sincerely realised the fact that they illustrate the same pathological principles as other diseases, are produced in the same way, and must be investigated in the same spirit of positive research. Until this be done, I can see no hope of improvement in our knowledge of them and no use in multiplying books about them. (Sargent & Slater 1944) Of course we can embrace organicist explanations for the wrong reasons. There is more of gravy than of grave about you says Scrooge to Marleys ghost in a dogged attempt to evade the demoralising implications of Marleys visit. Nevertheless we should not in premature despair of objective knowledge as to the contribution of material determinants to our destiny settle for a felicitous evocation of our predicament. We must strive for a more determinate grasp of what we would lose if we confined our discourse to the articulation of worries. Reflection may give us a better view of the phantoms which must be laid, but can reflection always teach us how we came to be haunted or bedevilled? It would have been better if Wittgenstein, when pronouncing on these matters, instead of indulging a generalised disparagement of empirical enquiry, had confined himself to his counsel to Drury, Dont ever let yourself think that all human problems can be solved in this way.

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