Wittgenstein and Freud

What questions are generally a terrible starting point in philosophy (“what is Time?” “What is consciousness”) because they suggest that what we need to do is identify the kind of thing that is in question, whereas the real issue is to get a clearer understanding of the concepts involved. One way of doing this in relation to the concept of the Unconscious is to start from a passage in Winnicott’s popular writings where he introduces this idea for the layperson. He suggests that the difficulty of recognising the existence of feelings that are unconscious has been “the great stumbling block in scientific inquiry into human affairs”. But he claims that people have always known about the unconscious because “they knew what it was like, for instance, to feel an idea come and go, to recover a lost memory, or to be able to call on inspiration, whether benign or malign”. 

These claims are completely misguided. When an idea pops into my head, it makes no sense to ask: “where was the idea before it was in my head?”. To argue that, since the idea was not present in my consciousness (an unhelpful way of saying: I had not yet thought of the idea or was no longer thinking about it), it must have been in my unconsciousness is to build confusion on confusion. Similarly, my ability to remember something I had forgotten does not demonstrate that the memory must after all have been somewhere in my mind – if not in the conscious part, then in the unconscious part. This might be described as a type of “concrete thinking”. It treats ideas and memories as if they were physical objects and the mind as if it were a physical location. But the fact that ideas occur to people and that they forget and then remember things are truisms about human life – we do not have to postulate some mysterious mental place which contains everything someone might ever think or say or remember. This just dresses up our everyday reality in a confused and confusing way.

Winnicott continues by praising Freud’s courage in discovering unconscious feelings. It is odd, however, that a scientific discovery should be seen as requiring courage – did Newton require courage to discover gravity or Watson and Crick courage to discover DNA? So, why was Freud’s discovery courageous? Winnicott explains, “once we accept the unconscious, we are on a path which sooner or later takes us to something very painful – the recognition that however much we try to see evil, beastliness and bad influence as something outside ourselves … in the end, we find that…these are in human nature itself, in fact, in ourselves”. Winnicott seems to recognise that, rather than discovering some entity people had long been vaguely aware of, Freud challenged our view of ourselves. We pride ourselves on how we differ from other animals. We do things for reasons and we are able to think about the options open to us. We know our minds and we know ourselves – perhaps not perfectly but pretty well. Freud challenges this belief. Like Nietsche, he suggests that we are not knowers of ourselves. Unlike Nietsche, however, he goes on to offer a detailed account of why and how this is so.

Winnicott moves on to examine a specific topic – influencing and being influenced. He takes as his starting point a baby’s relationship with its mother at feeding time and he suggests that “parallel with the ordinary physiological feeding there is a taking in, digesting, retaining, and rejecting of the things and people and events in the child’s environment”. He notes that some babies are unsatisfied and that there are mothers who urgently wish and wish in vain for their food to be accepted. He suggests that adults may be in similar states in relation to other people. A person may feel empty and fear both this feeling of emptiness and the extra aggressive quality that this emptiness puts into their appetite for contact with other people. Perhaps the person has lost a good friend or something else valuable or has some more subjective cause for feeling depressed. Such a person may have a hunger to find a new object to be filled with. Conversely, someone may have a great need to give, to fill people up. They need to prove to themselves that what they have to give is good, and this need is independent of anyone else’s need to be fed.

Winnicott’s emphasis on the analogy with feeding and with being fed again treats mental processes as similar to physical processes. This time, however, his concrete approach is illuminating rather than confused. The focus on bodily processes emphasises the idea that our actions can be driven by needs we do not understand or are not aware of. Someone may say: “I was just looking for some advice” or “I just wanted to be helpful”, but Winnicott’s analogy suggests there may be factors involved that go beyond this seemingly rational interaction. The first person may be driven by a hunger to fill an emptiness in them, while the second may have an overpowering need to give. His analogy can help us understand why the person who is hungry to be filled will not be satisfied by a useful piece of advice kindly offered even if consciously that is what they thought they were seeking. Insofar as their unconscious wish is for something more, offers of advice or encouragement will leave them unsatisfied, perhaps even angry that the other person is fobbing them off with empty trifles. Conversely, the person with an intense need to feed will not be satisfied when someone acknowledges their contribution as interesting. They want their contribution to be acknowledged as “the” thing and want the other person to become dependent on them in the way that a baby at the breast is dependent on its mother. Winnicott’s analogy reminds us of the reason-defying intensity of the emotions we sometimes feel. The empty person may experience a need that feels impossible to satisfy, while the would-be feeder may feel like a childless mother surrounded by women happily feeding their children. In likening our mental processes to bodily processes, Freud and Winnicott are seeking to counter our wish to see ourselves as more rational than we really are. They want us to acknowledge that, although we can think and make choices, we have more in common with other animals than we like to think.

The concept of the unconscious also challenges our normal language games in relation to the Inner. Typically, the individual’s sincere utterances about their feelings are taken as definitive. When someone talks about their feelings, there is usually no scope for someone else to say: “you are wrong. Let me tell you what you are actually feeling”. Denying any kind of privileged position to the person who has the feelings (or who does something and then explains the reason for their action) would throw our language game of the Inner into confusion. If other people’s accounts of my experience were always treated as on a par with (or superior to) my own, then the connection between me and my experience would start to come apart. Similarly, if other people’s explanations of my actions were always treated as superior to mine, this would undermine the idea that my actions are mine (rather than just pieces of behaviour that happen to involve my body). Wittgenstein emphasises the individual’s special status in relation to their experiences and their actions in order to undermine deep seated conceptual confusions about the Inner, but our language-games have a degree of flexibility built into them. Generally we treat an individual’s statements about their experiences as definitive, but we recognise the scope for self-deception particularly in certain kinds of situation. Although we rarely challenge an individual’s utterances about whether they like someone, where sexual attraction is involved, we often treat denials, even sincere denials, as unreliable. By contrast, the individual’s account of their visual experience is almost always treated as definitive.  Even here, however, there are exceptions. A tennis player may claim that they saw a ball as out, and they may not be consciously lying. If someone suggests they are cheating, they may get genuinely upset. Observing their behaviour including their ardent protestations, we may nonetheless conclude that “on some level” they knew the ball was in.

The concept of the unconscious builds on these possibilities in our language game, extending the notion of self deception beyond its normal application. Rather than the individual’s account of their feelings being generally accepted, it is now systematically questioned. Normally when someone says: “I do not feel angry”, we take their utterances at face value, but a Freudian will want to explore the possibility that this claim is an attempt to repress the individual’s “real” feelings. The concept of the unconscious also challenges our language game of reasons. If someone sincerely says: “I was trying to help”, we would normally accept their account of their action. But the Freudian might argue that the real motive for their action was a desire to put themselves in a superior position to someone who had always looked down on them. Similarly, when someone says that something was a mistake, we typically accept their statement, whereas the Freudian may treat the effect of the mistake as unconsciously intended. The concept of the unconscious enables new explanations (and new types of explanation) and leads to different claims about the world (he is full of unconscious anger vs he is not angry).

So, what should we make of Freud’s “discovery” of the unconscious? As I have tried to show, it is not a normal scientific discovery and certainly not the discovery of a long suspected entity no one had bothered to subject to rigorous examination. On the contrary, in developing his concept of the unconscious Freud offered a new perspective on human behaviour. In a sense he created a new language game (or a significant modification of our existing game).  The problem with these ways of putting it, however, is that they minimise the extent to which Freud was making claims about the correct way of understanding the world. The issue is not whether the unconscious “really” exists (for that again treats it as a physical entity), but whether we believe that people have a reasonably good understanding of themselves that goes awry in certain fairly limited circumstances or, like Freud and Winnicott, believe that we have very distorted understandings of ourselves and often act in ways that are driven by thoughts and feelings that we do not want to acknowledge.

So, what is the unconscious? It is a concept based on the belief that our accounts of our thoughts, feelings and intentions are limited and frequently distorted. It is used to build more sophisticated accounts of human thoughts, feelings and intentions with the aim of providing better explanations of why people do what they do. Its advocates also believe that its use can help people come to a better understanding of themselves, thereby enabling them to lead more authentic and fulfilling lives.