From the ALWS archives: A selection of papers from the International Wittgenstein Symposia in Kirchberg am Wechsel

1. Recognizing the obvious

In order to compare Wittgenstein's and Freud's methods of healing, a preliminary remark on the analogy of structure between their respective conceptions of language is necessary. For both authors, speech is based on a dual pattern, on a complementary pair of opposite principles. Indeed, a parallel can be drawn between the Wittgensteinian distinction between saying and showing and the Freudian distinction between manifest content and latent content (or speech and symptom). The two authors are aware that all that is expressed in language is not necessarily said, but can also show itself; and that, correlatively, understanding the spoken content of an utterance does not guarantee that all the dimensions of its sense have been grasped. Both thinkers are interested in what happens within language but exceeds the reach of language itself, in what language exhibits or betrays but does not tell. In Freud's case, this elusive element coincides with the presence, in a conscious utterance, of unconscious meanings that are unintentionally manifested - shown - by the speaker. In Wittgenstein's works, the unsaid dimension of language is first identified with its logical form (1922), and then, more generally, with its grammar rules (1953): we understand spontaneously the sense conveyed by the sentences of ordinary language, but we are not necessarily conscious of the rules which govern their formation, however visible they are.

This is where linguistic troubles may intervene. Both authors believe that language becomes a prey to diseases when its second dimension (what is not told but shown) passes unnoticed. Philosophical confusions appear when grammar rules are overlooked, despite their perspicuity; similarly, neuroses come from the blindness to unconscious desires that show on the surface of conscious words. Wittgenstein and Freud explore this puzzling paradox: the second dimension of language, like the object of Dupin's quest in E. A. Poe's The purloined letter, is all the more easy to miss as it is open to view. The most evident is also the most difficult to see; or, in Wittgenstein's own words: "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.)" (1953, §129)² Accordingly, as counterintuitive as it may sound, a therapy of speech must consist in learning to see the obvious³. It implies taking a different look at language - what Wittgenstein calls an "Übersicht" (1953 § 92, 122) - so that what was repressed may be expressed (Freud) and so that we may "pass from a piece of latent nonsense to something that is patent nonsense" (Wittgenstein, 1953, § 464). All that is required to lift neurotic symptoms or to solve a philosophical problem is to pay sincere attention to what we say, in order to see what has always been visible, yet unseen. In philosophy, for instance, as soon as the ordinary, perspicuous grammar rules whose neglect provoked conceptual muddles are laid bare, these confusions vanish in an instant illumination that is closely akin to the dazzling feeling of evidence in the Freudian lifting of repression. Recognising the obvious is enough to "show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle" (1953, § 309). Thus, just as the task of the psychoanalyst confines itself to listening carefully, for the later Wittgenstein, philosophy should restrict itself to a close study of our "language games" and to their description. As he says, "Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. - Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us" (1953, §126).

Wittgenstein's and Freud's therapeutic methods are closely akin in that they both aim at a vision of the obvious. Hence, both authors could be described as "phenomenologists of speech": they pay an extreme attention to what we actually say, in its literalness. Their way of healing linguistic diseases involves a passive attitude of responsiveness to what already exists, rather than positive acts. This may help to understand Wittgenstein's provocative claim that philosophy "may in no way interfere with the actual use of language" and "leaves everything as it is " (1953, § 124). In order to cure speech illnesses, there seems to be nothing to do, but only things to see.

2. Is therapeutic speech a performative use of language?

This first approach to Wittgenstein's and Freud's therapeutic methods raises more problems than it solves. Indeed, it conflicts radically with another conceivable point of view, according to which their therapeutic use of language is a performance.

The speech of the therapist, philosopher or psychoanalyst, cannot be described only in terms of passivity and receptivity. It must also be regarded as a genuine action, for it is a particularly relevant example of J. L. Austin's performative utterance (1962). Wittgenstein and Freud "do things with words": their speech does not, or not only, elaborate a theory of therapeutic devices, but constitutes the therapeutic intervention itself. For Wittgenstein, the main task of the philosopher is to give explicit verbal expression to conceptual muddles; similarly, the purpose of the psychoanalyst is to obtain from the patient a complete account of his symptoms. But putting the diseases into words is in neither case a preliminary to healing them; it is in itself the method of healing. Whereas in medical science, accurate description of the manifestations of illnesses is needed before any therapeutic act is attempted, as a neutral, purely constative precondition for action, for Wittgenstein and for Freud, description is action. Thus, to adapt Austin's words, "The uttering of the [account of the disease] is, or is part of, the doing of an action, which (…) would not normally be described as, or as 'just', saying something" (1962, p. 5); namely, the action of alleviating the disease in question.

Freud was conscious as early as in the Studies on Hysteria that his method rested on the performative power of language. He reports that he "found (…) that each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words." (p. 6) The proceeding was christened "talking cure" by one of Freud and Breuer's first patients, Anna O.: she meant by this name that wording the symptom and its genesis was removing it, so that the cure resided in the talking; talking was acting.

In the Wittgensteinian analysis of conceptual disorders, the performative dimension of language is no less obvious. Philosophical problems are solved simply by "looking into the workings of our language" (1953, § 109): it is by describing carefully our entanglements in our own grammar rules, and by subsequently remembering these rules, that we disentangle ourselves. Thus Wittgenstein, like Austin, undermines "an age-old assumption in philosophy - the assumption that to say something (…) is always and simply to state something." (Austin, 1962, p. 12) In (or by) saying what he says, the philosopher-therapist does something: his conceptual investigations suffice to produce a sudden liberating effect, such that "the philosophical problems should completely disappear" (1953, § 133). The efficiency of mere words in the treatment of philosophical illnesses confirms Wittgenstein's insistent claim that "Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity" (1922, 4.112). As he says: "What I want to teach you isn't opinions but a method. (…) I don't try to make you believe something you don't believe, but to make you do something you won't do" (quoted by R. Rhees). The speech of the philosopher, if a genuinely therapeutic one, is always a performance. This feature seems to conflict with the neutrality and passivity implied in Wittgenstein's description of philosophy as "leaving everything as it is". Does his method of healing consist in seeing something, or in doing something? In Wittgenstein's case, this ambivalence is only an apparent one, for doing something does not involve introducing anything new within language, but only achieving a conversion of the look we take at it. Hence, it is not incompatible with the idea that healing language illnesses comes down to seeing the obvious.

In Freud's case however, the tension between action and the mere vision of what is already there is a really problematic one: psychoanalytic speech is performative in a more radical sense than in Wittgenstein's philosophy. In his late publications (e.g. 1937), Freud expresses the idea that the search for the patient's repressed thoughts and memories does not so much consist in recollecting as in reconstructing them. Rather than a description of what already exists, i.e. an avowal, the expression of the unconscious is a creative act. Hence, there is a real ambiguity in Freud's thought as to whether therapy consists in uncovering a meaning that has always been open to view, or in building a radically new one. This is where Wittgenstein and Freud diverge, since the performative efficacy of the former's remarks is in no way that of a construction. On the contrary, Wittgenstein's therapeutic method rather consists in the destruction of our linguistic "houses of cards" (1953, § 118). Accordingly, his look at Freud's method of healing by means of constructions, rather than strict descriptions, is a highly critical one, to the point that he includes psychoanalysis's ingenious elaborations within the range of language diseases as mythologies. Freud's and Wittgenstein's performative uses of language prove to be of two very different kinds: the former speaks to do something, the latter to undo something. Does that mean that Wittgenstein is one step ahead Freud in what makes their modernity and their usefulness for all future philosophy, i.e. their common struggle against fantasy and illusion?