Criticism as self-analysis

In a way having oneself psychoanalysed is like eating from the tree of knowledge. The knowledge acquired sets us (new) ethical problems; but contributes nothing to their solution.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1980: 34)

Symptoms of psychoanalysis

Freud in Cambridge is a book about the milieux in and through which ideas resonate for some people, and not for others. In my discussion here, I want to focus on John Forrester and Laura Cameron's suggestion that the key variable shaping different thinkers’ openness to psychoanalysis was a personal disposition towards self-analysis. This theme bears on wider questions of how to think about the purposes of analysis, broadly conceived, in what Lacan (1977: 73) once called the ‘conjectural sciences’.

As Forrester and Cameron note, the attraction of psychoanalysis in the first part of the 20th century lay in its status as both theory and practice – as ‘a revolutionary science of the human subject of knowledge, passion and action’, and as ‘a therapy of the neuroses’ (p. 186). The question of quite how to understand the relationship between these two aspects of psychoanalysis is dramatized most clearly perhaps by the difficult relationship between Freud's thought and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which Freud in Cambridge considers at some length (pp. 334–57). In picking up on Forrester and Cameron's suggestion that this relationship may be overdue some reconsideration, I presume that the contrast between Theory and Therapy raises the question of what sort of thing ‘analysis’, as a general figure for practices of criticism, is in the wake of the specific case of psychoanalysis. Does analysis involve revealing hidden depths and exposing causes? Does it involve deciphering? Or is analysis better thought of in terms of making associations, and of translating and de-translating (cf. Laplanche, 1992: 170–1)? These questions have renewed pertinence because psychoanalysis has been so central in defining a paradigm of critique as a generalized ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ that is itself now subject to critical reappraisal (see Felski, 2015). Thinking of analysis as a way of bringing into the open, or rendering up to consciousness, what is usually backgrounded is a conventional practice in the sciences of the mind, as well as a standard model of critique as a process of debunking exposure (see Barnett, 2019). And it is here that considering anew the relationship of Wittgenstein's thought to that of Freud is illuminating, given the importance that is given to certain streams of ordinary language philosophy in accounts of ‘post-critique’ (e.g. Moi, 2017).

Freud in Cambridge is, amongst other things, a book about processes of discipline formation in the first part of the 20th century. It traces the ways in which thinkers that were receptive to psychoanalytical ideas helped to shape the development of anthropology, English, philosophy, and psychology at the University of Cambridge. It also speculates on why it was that no discipline of psychoanalysis per se emerged. Psychoanalysis functioned as a ‘transitional catalyst’ in processes of discipline formation (p. 298), providing resources for those concerned with carving out a space for particular models of close reading or for cross-cultural comparison.

Freud offered his own thoughts on how psychoanalytical themes moved through institutionalized spaces (Freud, 1961[1925]). He presented psychoanalysis as the third ‘blow’ to the ‘universal narcissism of men, their self-love’ (Freud, 1955[1917]: 139). Freud proposed that Copernicus’ cosmological displacement of the earth from the centre of the universe and then Darwin's biological displacement of humans from the centre of nature had humbled man in relation to the external world. However, these intellectual blows still allowed man to maintain a sense of being ‘supreme over his own mind’ (ibid.: 141). It was Freud's own work on the unconscious that finally demonstrated that the ‘the ego is not master in its own house’. The account of unconscious mental processes was, Freud claimed, ‘a severe blow to human self-love’ (Freud, 1961[1925]: 221).

The implication of Freud's immodest assessment of the importance of his own work is that the resistance to psychoanalysis was the effect of a certain sort of displeasure it provoked; it had emotional and passionate sources, not merely intellectual ones. It is an argument that takes on a new significance in light of Forrester and Cameron's claim that ‘those who look for the influence of psychoanalysis often look for the wrong signs and symptoms’ (p. 308). Rather than simply looking for traces of this or that theoretical proposition in the work of a scholar, they propose that ‘the distinctive mark of an enthusiastic reception of Freud's work would always be self-analysis’ (p. 298). It was psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice of self-analysis, rather than as a received body of explanatory wisdom, that most resonated with the lead characters of Freud in Cambridge, many of whom demonstrated a recurring fascination with making sense their of their own dreams. (It should be said that almost all of these characters are men. It is an interesting question, not one really pursued with any vigour in Freud in Cambridge, to ask what sort of masculinity it was that lent itself so readily to the kind of unravelling self-reflection involved in psychoanalysis).

By tracing the relations between subjecting oneself to ‘the anguish and the satisfactions’ of interpreting one's own dreams and trying to shape new objects and subjects of knowledge, Forrester and Cameron throw established traditions of thought into new light. For example, they reconsider the significance of I. A. Richard's ‘practical criticism’, which shaped the nascent field of English literary criticism for half a century (pp. 296–313). Practical criticism emerges as an exemplar of the wider theme of how psychoanalysis functioned as a ‘catalytic element’ (p. 360) in the formation of new fields of scholarship. In Freud in Cambridge, Richards appears as the consummate institution builder, who drew inspiration from Freud to develop a model of reading as a sustained practice of self-analysis by the reader. For Richards, Forrester and Cameron argue, ‘the practice of criticism puts the entire personality of the reader to the test: it is only through the experience of one's own failures and misreadings, of exposing one’s own stock responses and inhibitions, that the achievement of an adequate reading is possible’ (p. 299). The lack of attention to history, context, and authorial intention for which Richards’ paradigm would be subsequently bemoaned was, on this account, an example of a much more widely shared structure of feeling: ‘Like to so many of the first uses of psychoanalysis in the early 1920s, its applications were first and foremost self-analytic’ (p. 308).

Richards’ approach to literary study also illustrates a principle that, according to Forrester and Cameron, helps to account for affinities between psychoanalysis and various other traditions of thought. This is the concern with ‘seeking to find remedies in the exposure of aberration, of mistakes, of the ordinary and ubiquitous human error – not, make no mistake, just plain error, but, in the spirit of psychoanalysis, motivated error’ (p. 313; emphasis added). In so far as psychoanalysis is concerned with the injunction ‘Know thyself’, then Freud's significance lies in suggesting that this requires attending to ‘our whims, our aberrations, our phobias and fetishes’ (Lacan, 1977: 174). And the idea that the path to truth lies in the analysis of error is what connects Freud's work to themes inflected by Wittgenstein's vision of philosophy, amongst others (see also Talcott, 2019).

In considering the relationship between Wittgenstein's later philosophy and psychoanalytical themes, it is important to keep in mind that Wittgenstein is one of the central figures in the development of the post-Fregean commitment to ‘working out a non-psychological treatment of the mind’ (Diamond, 1991: 5). On this view, the task of philosophy is to provide an account of the Mind, rather than the empirical study of people's minds. The overriding imperative is to avoid treating the significance of words or utterances in isolation, thereby reducing their meaning to inferred mental images and acts. Avoiding psychologism is a concern also shared by phenomenology. Husserl's project involved the effort to develop an eidetic psychology, ‘a reflective effort by which we clarify the fundamental notions which psychology uses constantly, through contact with our own experiences’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 58). Forrester and Cameron's discussion of Wittgenstein and Freud is helpful in indicating that this widely shared project of finding ways of talking about the self in non-psychological ways did not necessarily entail the complete dismissal of psychoanalysis. What both psychoanalysis and the philosophy that emerged around Wittgenstein's work share is a claim about the importance of description as a distinctive form of analysis, in contrast to experimental and causal modes of explanation (see also Orford, 2012). By following a train of thought in Freud in Cambridge on Wittgenstein's relationship to Freud's ideas, I want to elaborate a little further on the significance of this commitment to description as a mode of analysis.

Discerning family resemblances

The discussion of Wittgenstein's relation to Freud's ideas in Freud in Cambridge is really a contribution to debates about how Wittgenstein's own work has been interpreted. It is a model more generally for thinking about the intersubjective dynamics of intellectual discipleship, mentoring, and reputational curation. Wittgenstein's interest in psychoanalysis was not merely an intellectual matter, but was wrapped up in his own dilemmas about being a philosopher, and the attraction of pursuing an alternative vocation as a psychiatrist or a doctor (see Monk, 1990: 356–7). Forrester and Cameron suggest that in using his own dreams as ‘an occasion for criticizing Freud’, Wittgenstein developed a deeper and more profound engagement with Freud than was common amongst other philosophers of the time (p. 337).

The crux of Wittgenstein's worry about Freud's work lay in the temptation to ‘offer explanations’ of mental events (p. 340). Forrester and Cameron suggest that Wittgenstein's distinction between reasons and causes lay at the centre of this suspicion of psychoanalysis: he tended to see psychoanalysis as perpetually susceptible to mistaking an account of reasons for an account of causes. The question of whether the reasons people give for their own actions can be considered to be the causes of those actions is a persistent theme in analytical philosophy. It goes to the heart of debates about whether or not human action can be adequately grasped from a naturalistic perspective modelled on scientific reasoning (see Malpas, 2011). For Wittgenstein, the temptation to think of reasons as causes followed from misunderstanding the grammar of psychological expressions (Geach, 1988: 153–5). There is an asymmetry between the first- and third-person indicative of psychological verbs: the third-person point of view we adopt on the experiences and mental states of others is based on observation, whereas the first-person point of view one has on one's own experiences and mental states is not. Taking the latter kind of account as a form of third-person explanation is to mistake what that kind of account is actually doing. Forrester and Cameron's discussion of this theme shows how Wittgenstein was using Freud as an interlocutor, to help elaborate his own vision of what philosophy could and could not aspire to do. In cautioning against thinking of psychoanalysis as providing scientific, experimentally based explanations, he was not dismissing it, but rather making a claim on how to properly interpret it. Wittgenstein saw Freud's work as a means of providing redescriptions of mental events, and therefore as having an affinity with his own view of philosophy: ‘There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place’ (Wittgenstein, 1953: no. 109).

Forrester and Cameron anchor their discussion of the relation of Freud's work to Wittgenstein's, and therefore to the emergence of analytical philosophy more broadly, around the theme of philosophical analysis as a form of therapy. Wittgenstein drew the analogy between philosophy and therapy quite explicitly. He proposed that there was not a singular philosophical method, ‘though there are indeed methods, like different therapies’ (1953: no. 133). The significance of this claim should be placed in the context of Wittgenstein's own sense of himself as belonging to a broader family of ‘Jewish thinkers’, along with Freud, amongst others, whose work influenced him primarily by encouraging him to invent new similes (Wittgenstein, 1980: 18–19). The purpose of inventing new similes, he proposed, was to contribute to a ‘work of clarification’ (ibid.: 19). And the idea that philosophical analysis was a means of clarifying mistaken views of the mind was, in turn, associated with the claim that when undertaken with ‘courage’, this would make certain traditional philosophical problems disappear (ibid.). Here, then, lies the importance of the therapeutic analogy in Wittgenstein's thought: philosophical analysis involves the clarification of problems, and ‘this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear’ (1953: no. 133; emphasis added).

What most irritated Wittgenstein was the risk ‘that a too hasty and unreflective endorsement of the analogy of the removal of neurotic symptoms and philosophical problems leads one to expect the problem symptom to vanish quickly’ (p. 353). And as Forrester and Cameron also note, Freud himself was keen to avoid the very same implication in interpretations of his work. However, there does seem to be a strongly corrective, even curative, sense implied by Wittgenstein's idea of making problems disappear by clarifying them as misuses of language. It is this prescriptive aspect that was developed with the emergence of so-called ‘therapeutic positivism’ in the 1930s (p. 354). But it is also a feature of resolutely un-positivistic strands of ordinary language philosophy. Forrester and Cameron show how Wittgenstein's suggestive allusions to the idea of philosophy as a form of therapy generated different responses amongst key acolytes of his thought, and therefore in the formation of a canon of analytical philosophy, where any suggestion of similarity between philosophical analysis and psychoanalytical investigation was seen as something to resist and deny. Wittgenstein's reading of Freud was based not on contemptuous dismissal of the sort that characterized mid-20th-century high positivism, but on the proposition ‘Be careful, yes, but don't underestimate or denigrate the psychoanalytic project itself’ (p. 355). By contrast, ‘fighting off the influence of Freud’ (p. 345) became a central concern for an institutionalized model of philosophical analysis as a means of cleansing ourselves of errors, a model in which identifying the cause of the philosophical problems in the misuse of language became the very means of dissipating those symptoms (p. 347).

In closing their discussion of the formative relationship between analytical philosophy and psychoanalysis, Forrester and Cameron propose that more recent ‘therapeutic readings’ of Wittgenstein's philosophy are shaped less by a sharp differentiation from psychoanalysis and more by an effective repression of any mention of Freud or psychoanalysis at all (pp. 355–7). The shift is evident, they suggest, in the way in which the work of the American philosopher Stanley Cavell is invoked in these more recent therapeutic readings. Forrester and Cameron observe that in authoritative appeals to Cavell's interpretation of Wittgenstein, Freud disappears: ‘Cavell's Wittgenstein stands in for Wittgenstein's Freud’ (p. 356). But in Cavell's own treatment of Wittgenstein's work, Freud is very much a presence (see Cavell, 2004: 282–300). Cavell's view of the close similarities between Freud and Wittgenstein is quoted at length with approval in Freud in Cambridge (pp. 356–7). But the discussion of what is at stake (for philosophy or psychoanalysis) in his account is not elaborated further. The question that is left hanging by Forrester and Cameron's discussion is why, beyond a simple accounting of intellectual influences, what Cavell (2004: 294) called ‘the crossing of paths in Freud and Wittgenstein’ actually matters.

Acknowledging the limits of analysis

The implication of Forrester and Cameron's argument about Cavell's account of Wittgenstein as the inspiration for a vision of philosophy as therapy is twofold: not only may Wittgenstein be misinterpreted when the reference to Freud disappears, but so too is Cavell. Important sources of insight into Freud's significance are thereby doubly repressed. Forrester and Cameron endorse Cavell's presentation of Wittgenstein's work as ‘a project of self-knowledge’ (p. 356). The key lesson of their discussion is that reading Wittgenstein without the reference to Freud lends ‘therapy’ a kind of corrective or curative sense, one that is at odds with Wittgenstein's own vision. Nevertheless, if this is what the analogy with therapy does not mean, it still leaves open the question of what it does imply. According to Cavell, Wittgenstein's writing is like Freud's because it is ‘deeply practical and negative’, and like Freud's, ‘it wishes to prevent understanding that is unaccompanied by inner change’ (Cavell, 1976: 72). In light of this observation, perhaps the best reason for restoring to view, via Cavell, the relationship between Wittgenstein's later thought and Freud's work is to emphasize the difficulties involved in ‘working through’ problems (see Freud, 1957[1917]). The difficulties are not amenable to the simple application of an analytical technique of one sort or another. By pursuing this theme a little further, we might begin to draw into view the force and limits of any form of clarifying redescription. To do so, I want to consider two further moments where Freud is invoked by Cavell to support his distinctive vision of the tasks of a philosophy that is oriented towards an appreciation of ‘the ordinary’.

On Cavell's account, the similarities (though not identities) between Freud and Wittgenstein revolve around the degree to which both are concerned with recalling something that we already know and yet which often remains unnoticed (see also Dinishak, 2014). The associated shift in perspective is not driven by the aim of curing people of symptoms or misconceptions by providing a knowledge-full account of the causes of their troubles. It is aimed, rather, at opening up to scrutiny the forms of attachment that help to account for the resistance to self-knowledge. In elaborating on this similarity in the concerns of the two thinkers, Cavell (2004: 293–4) claims that Freud's own allegory of analytic technique ‘oddly matches a fundamental claim Wittgenstein makes for his philosophy’. In ‘On Psychotherapy’, Freud (1953[1905]: 260) explains his reasons for abandoning hypnosis, or ‘suggestive’ techniques, by invoking a famous contrast drawn by Leonardo da Vinci between painting and sculpture. Painting ‘applies a substance – particles of colour – where there was nothing before, on the colourless canvas’, whereas sculpture ‘takes away from the block of stone all that hides the surface of the statue contained in it’. Freud proceeds to contrast hypnotic technique, which superimposes a suggested meaning, and analytic technique, which ‘does not seek to add or to introduce anything new, but to take away something, to bring out something’ (ibid.: 261). On Cavell's reading, by eschewing the idea of adding anything new through analysis, Freud's account converges with Wittgenstein’s (1953: no. 89; emphasis added) claim that his aim is ‘to understand something that is already in plain view’. Accordingly, Cavell posits a similarity between Freud's view of analysis and that of Wittgenstein, on the grounds that Wittgenstein also ‘seeks to remove something (a temptation, a picture, an illusion of making sense) that meets with resistance’ (Cavell, 2004: 294).

If, then, Cavell finds a shared commitment in both Freud and Wittgenstein to recalling to mind what is already evident, then it is crucial to note that the fundamental similarity he posits is the emphasis upon the difficulties that lie in the path of any such clarification. To underscore what it is that Cavell thinks Freud helps to bring out in the work of philosophers of the ordinary, it is worth considering the similarities that he identifies between Freud and the work of J. L. Austin. Austin is easily read as providing a strongly prescriptive, corrective view of the task of philosophical analysis as curing people of misunderstandings, although this is a view of his work that Cavell is keen to resist. Cavell suggests that in their interest in everyday error, failed actions, and slips, Freud and Austin ‘have something to learn from each other’ (Cavell, 2005: 213). He is not arguing that Freud and Austin are doing the same thing: ‘Freud's vision of the human is of a field of significance whose actions express wider meaning than we might care to be questioned about’, whereas Austin's analysis of puns and excuses and verbal missteps reveals a vision of ‘the human as a field of vulnerability whose actions imply wider consequences and effects and results – but narrower meaning – than we should have to be answerable for’ (ibid.: 214). In Cavell's characterization of the different emphases of their respective projects, it is Freud who exposes the human subject to troubling possibilities, whereas Austin appears to be more concerned with reassuring and protecting the subject from untoward burdens. What the two thinkers have in common, according to Cavell, is ‘a sense of human beings in their everyday existence as not quite alive to themselves, or not awake to their lives’ (ibid.: 214). In drawing these two otherwise markedly different thinkers together, Cavell seems to acknowledge the degree to which Austin is a little too keen to interpret this resistance to self-knowledge as a symptom of complacency. Cavell's attraction to Freud's work, one might suppose, is that he finds therein an explicit recognition that the resistances to self-knowledge may be much more strongly held than Austin seems to suppose, and therefore less easily disposed of than the rhetoric of clarification might suggest.

My point in digging a little deeper into Cavell's work is that, if pursued further, Forrester and Cameron's insistence on the centrality of Freud as an interlocutor for Wittgenstein may help us to better discriminate between different interpretations of the purposes of analysis. The idea that problems can be dissolved when they are viewed correctly, by diagnosing the real source of symptoms, is associated both with psychoanalysis and with therapeutic visions of philosophy that draw, however differently, on Wittgenstein's legacy. We are now in a better position to see what the family resemblances between Freud and Wittgenstein discussed in Freud in Cambridge, and drawn out by Cavell, imply for an understanding of the clarifying tasks of avowedly descriptive forms of analysis. Consider the argument of John McDowell (1988: 206–7), one advocate of Wittgenstein's ‘quietist’ view of philosophy, that rather than thinking of philosophy as curing misunderstandings, it just leaves things as they are. McDowell glosses Cavell's interpretation of Wittgenstein to mean that the search for explanations of human actions amounts to a search for ‘a consoling myth’. It is a search that distracts from the acknowledgement of the ordinary experience of living with doubt. The proper purpose of analysis, on this understanding, is not so much to make problems disappear, but rather to help to put them into new perspective (see Conant, 2005). And thinking of psychoanalysis as a practice, and not just a body of theory, reminds us what is involved in any such change of aspect. If there is something hidden by symptoms, it is not hidden in an inner space of the mind, needing to be revealed. Hiddenness is perspectival, and therefore calls for a reorientation that exceeds the scene of analysis itself, a movement that is not secured by the force of description alone (see also Hannah, 2019). After all, one of the core features of any psychoanalytic notion of ‘cure’ is what one might call the temporalization of analysis (see Laplanche, 1992: 168–76). Not only does analysis take time, but it also involves the exercise of a form of ‘waiting and waiting and waiting’ on behalf of the analyst (Winnicott, 1965: 55). This kind of patience indicates the space that separates the analyst from the realization by the subject of analysis of ‘the dimension at stake on the plane of the symbol’ (Miller, 1988: 286). The time of analysis is only one moment in a longer, drawn-out, and unpredictable process. The transformative force of analytical technique in psychoanalysis does not amount to a cure, but just a step in facilitating ‘a possible process’ (Phillips, 1993: xiv). And all that that process involves is producing ‘interesting redescriptions: redescriptions that the patient is free – can bear – to be interested in’ (ibid.: 21).

In short, the force of analysis, whether of the kind envisaged by Freud or of the kind recommended by Wittgenstein, does not lie in the acquisition of a stock of knowledge, or even in the transformative power of subjecting others to the rigours of reflection. Analysis on its own has no transformative power, and therein perhaps lies the real significance of insisting on a ‘merely’ descriptive vocation: it is a means of deflating the idea that knowing things (and imparting knowledge) is in itself enough to change how people act.

In my comments here, I have picked up on the theme in Freud in Cambridge that ideas circulate through resonance and association rather than through direct lines of influence. By pursuing a little further Forrester and Cameron's opening-up of Cavell's strong reading of the similarities between Freud and Wittgenstein, one can see that getting a clear view of things may be easier said than done, but also that it is not quite as important as is sometimes assumed. Thinking through the implications of the associative reading of Wittgenstein's relation to Freud in Freud in Cambridge has helped me, at least, to clarify the degree to which standard models of critical analysis often concern themselves with unmasking the meanings that hold other people in thrall to misconceptions about themselves and the world around them. Freud in Cambridge outlines the attractions of psychoanalysis as a practice of self-analysis, but it also indicates some of the limits of criticism, of others or oneself, as a transformative practice (see also Phillips, 2015). Explanatory or propositional knowledge on their own have no transformative power: ‘The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear’ (Wittgenstein, 1980: 27).