Wittgenstein and Freud meet in heaven and, after some time discussing what Vienna was like in the early part of the twentieth century, they get down to business. Wittgenstein goes first. With the slightly ironic, knowing smile that denizens of heaven tend to adopt when talking about earthly things, he starts to talk:

“Well, Sigmund, I know you achieved many great things in your writings, but I am sure you will not want me to embarrass you by talking about them. Instead, I will focus on aspects of your thinking that seem to me to be wrong or not quite right. To start with, it is interesting that while you are tremendously keen to differentiate the way you think about the mind from the way philosophers do, in fact, it seems to me that your approach is actually still very influenced by their views. For example, your concept of pre-consciousness is a solution to a problem that would not exist if one thought about consciousness in a less traditional way. I suppose it does not really matter and, of course, you moved away from this concept in the course of your writings, but it does illustrate the way in which (particularly early in your career) you seem to be building an annexe to a ramshackled building rather than recognising that the whole building would be better off demolished. I might add that you always seemed to have had a strong hankering to reduce the mind to the brain and, although you seem to give this up explicitly, even towards the end of your life there still seems to be a certain amount of – what shall I say – ambivalence?
I know that, like me, you had a certain scepticism about progress, but it seems to me that in some ways you were still rather uncritical in your belief in it – not to mention, your rather dismissive attitude to primitive peoples. Of course, the most striking example of your belief in progress is your passionate commitment to science. Along with that, you seem to have a strange attitude to facts and theories. You seem to think that given enough data and careful enough observation, the correct concepts and theories will inevitably emerge. As long as the scientist sticks to the facts, nothing can go wrong! In a way this seems rather paradoxical because one of your great achievements is showing how anything can be interpreted in an almost indefinite number of ways. How odd then that you should sometimes write as if our account of the mind will be correct if only we do not let theory blind us to the facts. When it comes to meta-psychology, you seem to lose your sense that there are many different ways in which something could be seen or said. That leads me on to a rather more important point. I do worry that your focus on science and scientific truth impacts on the power relation between the analyst and the patient. Frankly, I don’t like the idea that there is one scientific truth about the patient’s experience and that it is the analyst who knows this truth best and whose task is to help the patient accept emotionally as well as intellectually the correctness of this account. I know that in practice your work with your patients was much more a joint exploration, but it is certainly an aspect of your work that worries me.”

Freud smiles and takes a reflective puff on his cigar.

“Well, Ludwig. Some interesting comments. I won’t respond to them, and I will pay you the same compliment you paid me and not embarrass you by talking about your achievements. Instead let me share with you some of my thoughts on your work. One of the things I find fascinating about your work (both the early and the later stuff!) is that you combine a desire to take a really strong position with a desire to be neutral and to say nothing anyone can disagree with. You are as it were a conciliatory extremist – you want to tell your opponent that he is totally wrong, but you also want to reassure him that you are not really disagreeing with him and certainly that nothing you have said should upset him. Perhaps it is not altogether by chance that you earlier used the word “ambivalence”. More generally, I see in your work a desperate wish to avoid emotion and to focus on a pure world of thought which is as far as it is possible to be from human suffering. You would rather talk about conceptual relations than human relations, and although you are driven to continually talk about pain and whether pain can be known and shared, you don’t want to engage with the real difficulties of what this involves. You fear that people’s words will somehow contaminate the deepest things, so you want to protect those things but you don’t want them to stay permanently and irrevocably private. They are in principle shareable even if you can never imagine being able to share them. In a way, you always seem to want to bracket off what is most important – paradoxically for you philosophy (which you devoted most of your life to) seems never to be about the most important things. I know we are now friends, but frankly you seem to set limits to your own thinking and then when you reach those limits, you lapse into mysticism or a kind of “who-knows” acceptance of religion. I know from my work and from my own experience how difficult it is to talk about things, but surely what we shared was a belief in the power of thought to help us unravel apparently insolvable problems and to find a way of saying what it seemed impossible to say? You wanted to show the fly the way out of the flytrap, but why not admit it is not really about flies and that the places we find ourselves in are rather more frightening and harder to escape from than flytraps?”

Wittgenstein looks at Freud and ponders for a while. The two men then wander off amicably together – probably going to the “flicks” or the interesting new exhibition at the museum of archaeology.

Imagine the following conversation:
A: I was thinking the other day about Casement.
B: Oh yes.
A: I think the way he was treated was terrible.
B (looking puzzled): what do you mean? (suddenly understands) oh you mean Roger Casement the Irish Nationalist and poet? I thought you meant Patrick Casement the psychoanalyst.
So what was involved in B’s thinking that his friend was talking about Patrick Casement when he was really talking about Roger Casement? Presumably it was something that happened at the moment Casement was first mentioned – perhaps an image flashed briefly through B’s mind? But B doesn’t mention an image and although sometimes when someone mentions a name, an image does flash through our minds, it does not always happen. Furthermore, an image wouldn’t really get us very far, even if B did report one. We might ask: was it an image of a seated or a standing Patrick Casement? And if someone suggests that perception of the image was so fleeting that this question is inappropriate, we might well ask: so how could B be so sure the image was of Patrick Casement if he only saw if for a split second?

These Wittgensteinian reflections should leave us a bit puzzled about how we use language in this area – what is going on when we confidently explain what we meant? Or when we explain that we thought someone meant one thing when it later turned out they meant something else? The reference to the past seems to be essential – after all, we are interested in what the person thought/meant at the time because it is this that explains what they said next or how they reacted etc. My understanding of Wittgenstein is that it is misguided to look for something else to justify the individual’s claim that that was what he mean or what he thought the other person meant. There is no mental event distinct from the individual’s explanation.

Furthermore, in terms of brain states Wittgenstein would be highly sceptical about there being any change in the brain that corresponds to B thinking that A meant Patrick Casement when A actually meant Roger Casement. I don’t think Wittgenstein would be totally dogmatic on this – in the sense that if people do want to analyse what happens in people’s brains in these sort of situations, then they can of course do so and maybe some interesting results will emerge. However, one would have to be careful interpreting the results. Suppose we did develop a machine that in these situations was able to give 100% accurate information on what the listener took the speaker to mean. So in our example the machine on the basis of some kind of brain scan would indicate that Casement had initially been understood as Patrick Casement and then when we question B he would confirm this.

It is difficult to see quite how this might work really, but perhaps if we imagine that all this happens in one hundred years time, we can try to ignore any misgivings we might have. The interesting question, however, is what would happen if after a million “correct” results (i.e. results that agreed with what the human subject said) the machine yielded a conclusion that differed from what the individual said? Of course, the individual might be lying (they hate machines or want to cause problems or think they will become famous) but lets imagine that the individual is being totally sincere. What do we say then: “you may have thought that you mistook my mention of Casement for a reference to Roger Casement, but actually you did understand me correctly and just did not realise it”?

This seems clearly wrong and in a clash between the machine and a sincere human being, I don’t think we would have much choice but to back the human being. Maybe the brain scan malfunctioned or maybe the correlation we thought we had found is actually not as strong as we thought. Philosophically, the more important point is that what we are interested in is the individual’s account of his thoughts. It is not that we put up with his account in default of something more reliable or because we cannot get direct access to the real thing (the actual mental event/the brain state change). Rather his words are all we have, need or want.

Interestingly, psycho-analytic or other more sophisticated accounts can give us a reason for suspending or modifying the usual language game. In the clash I imagined between the machine and the speaker, I said we would definitely go with the speaker’s account, but what if one could come up with a more elaborate account which would explain why (while being sincere) the speaker was still mistaken? Suppose, for example, B felt very guilty about his role in the recent death of a freedom fighter. Might that encourage us to agree with the machine that he did momentarily think of Roger Casement, but that he blanked that idea from his mind because of all the difficult emotions the name thus understood would conjure up for him?

It is always sad to see a blog where the blogger has run out of steam and this may well be what this site looks like (or even is!?). The truth of the matter is that this site signalled my wish to get back to thinking and writing about things and that has not changed even if my productivity has fallen to zero. In fact, as may have been obvious, I have become very interested in psycho-analysis and I hope that at some point I will get round to writing a good book on Wittgenstein and Freud. There is certainly a lot to be said there, since a lot of what Freud writes is scarily bad from a Wittgensteinian point of view and yet he was very clearly onto something. It would be nice to show Freud fans that Wittgenstein can bring some useful clarity and to show Wittgenstein fans that psychoanalysis is not just an “abominable mess”. Anyway, in the meantime I do not have the time and energy to go back to Wittgenstein in the way I had hoped, so I fear that this post may be it for some time (or even indefinitely). However, hopefully that won’t mean that I have given up thinking about things. And one day if my brain has not gone soggy, I hope I will have something to share

Before Freud, the idea of unconscious thoughts and feelings would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but today such ideas have permeated deep into our culture. The games we play with these concepts, however, are far from clear. If I do not know my unconscious thoughts, who does and how do I find out what they are? If my unconscious does all sorts of thinking I am unaware of, is it possible that it has worked out a proof of Goldbach’s conjecture or a sure-fire way of making money on the stock-market? Probably not, but who is to say? [Read more...]