Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, Lance Taylor Peterson Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, translated by Carol Cosman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. xx + 143 pages. Some time ago, America witnessed the arrival on its shores of the so-called French Freud, but at the moment is perhaps still unfamiliar with the existence [End Page 1034] on the horizon of a French Wittgenstein. As the English-speaking analytic philosophers who lay claim to Wittgenstein would probably have little interest in the relationship of their master with Freud, perhaps only a French philosopher like Jacques Bouveresse, answering to the prestige of psychoanalysis in his country, would take up the project. Bouveresse, who teaches at the Collège de France, has over a dozen books to his credit, but the present volume on Freud and Wittgenstein is his first to appear in English translation. On the surface, the book is a fairly quiet, scholarly exercise, certainly providing, as Vincent Descombes writes in his introduction, an “attentive commentary on all the texts in which Wittgenstein mentions Freud . . . and second, a discussion of all the literature on the question (viii).” Yet, as Descombes emphasizes, this book also represents a chance to reassess in a French theoretical context the Lacanian program through Wittgenstein, who is painted as an “anti-Lacan avant la lettre (41).” For this reason, this thin volume might, in addition to clarifying the relationship of two idiosyncratic Viennese thinkers, provide for an English-speaking audience some acquaintance with the changes that have overcome French intellectual life since the eclipse of the maîtres à penser in the early eighties. Indeed, these latter French intellectuals have often been credited with the resurgence of American interest in the work of Freud. Stateside proponents of psychoanalysis, particularly numerous in literature departments, have always been acutely aware of the institutional resistance to Freud within the scientific culture of the university. Within this context, proponents recast Freud’s claim to be “the heroic scientist who imposes revolutionary discoveries by conquering formidable prejudice (13)” by systematically evacuating the scientific status of its theories, yet retaining claims to be discovering a new, uncharted terrain (the “unconscious”) and making the importance of this discovery philosophical (as a critique of the “philosophy of consciousness”). Bouveresse emphasizes, however, Freud’s claim that his discoveries were scientific; and this claim provoked most of Wittgenstein’s sharp critical commentary. Bouveresse recalls that Wittgenstein, exposed to a vibrant Viennese psychoanalytic culture, saw the work of the master quite differently: not as a brave expression of difficult unpalatable truths, but as a seductive way of seeing the world of human affairs that had already laid rhetorical siege to a large audience. This “way of seeing” appropriated the prestige of science without submitting to the trial of hypothesis and theoretical revision. Wittgenstein seconded this criticism of the scientific claims of the doctrine with a philosophical analysis of the master’s thought: Freud was a good place to look for “philosophical mistakes” (51). Bouveresse manages to paint a coherent picture of Wittgenstein’s scattered analyses of these errors. In these analyses, we can see how the contemporary French readers of the later Wittgenstein find a new kind of philosophical analysis: one that corrects errors by making distinctions, rather than deconstructing them. This comedy of errors takes place on two stages. The first is Freud’s philosophy [End Page 1035] of mind and, of course, the role played by the unconscious; and the latter does not fare too well. Bouveresse emphasizes that Freud’s conception of the nature of consciousness (as “the internal perception of ‘objects’ of a certain type”) remained utterly traditional compared to that of Wittgenstein. Far from decentering consciousness, the hypothesis of the “unconscious” amounts to a theoretical sleight of hand, inventing a theoretical entity, a homunculus inside the global subject, whose activities retain all the philosophical problems involved in the description of the actions of traditional subjects. This is the side effect of a mistake that Wittgenstein found often in philosophy: the nominalization of a linguistic expression whose only valid descriptive uses are of the unassuming adverbial kind (“She did it unconsciously”). The introduction of the nominal...