Wittgenstein and Freud

Psychoanalysts often attribute complex thoughts and feelings to babies, but since babies cannot speak and have a limited behavioural repertoire (compared to children and adults), this seems ridiculous. This objection resonates strongly with Wittgensteinians, who emphasise that inner processes stand in need of outward criteria. They may also note that Wittgenstein himself called into question a deaf-mute’s claims that he had thoughts about God and the world before he was able to use language.

“Ballard writes: “It was during those delightful rides, some two or three years before my initiation into the rudiments of written language, that I began to ask myself the question: how came the world into being?”—Are you sure—one would like to ask—that this is the correct translation of your wordless thought into words? And why does this question—which otherwise seems not to exist—raise its head here? Do I want to say that the writer’s memory deceives him?—I don’t even know if I should say that. These recollections are a queer memory phenomenon,—and I do not know what conclusions one can draw from them about the past of the man who recounts them.” (Philosophical Investigations, para 342).

If Wittgenstein is right about Ballard, doesn’t this also rule out the claims that psychoanalysts make?

Let’s start with the comments on Ballard. Wittgenstein is not ruling out the possibility of Ballard making any claims about what he experienced before he could use language. His objection is to claims about thoughts, particularly thoughts that involve sophisticated concepts. It is this that raises the issue of how Ballard can be sure he is correctly translating his wordless experiences into thoughts. (Another way of highlighting the problem would be to note that he seems to be claiming that he used certain concepts before he had even acquired them). It is also significant that his claims cannot be linked to his behaviour at the time. No one observing him at the time would have had a basis for thinking: he is probably wondering how the world came into being. His claim hangs in the air, and it is hard to know what to do with it.

If Ballard had said that before he could communicate, he had really enjoyed riding around the countryside, this would be unproblematic. He is reporting what he felt, and we can link his statement to his actions and reactions at the time. What if he had said: “I felt happy to be alive”? This would be more problematic. A language user can choose between saying “I feel really happy” and saying “I feel happy to be alive”. In the latter case, they may say more about why they feel happy to be alive or they may just say that this specific phrase uniquely expresses what they feel. In either case, their account of what went on inside them is bound up with their ability to use language. So, it would be puzzling if someone claimed to have had thoughts/feelings of this kind before they could speak. It is the ability to speak that provides the behavioural complexity which makes it possible to attribute the complex thoughts or the experience defined by this verbal expression to the individual. This point can be underlined by considering what we say about animals, for while we can (and do) attribute simple thoughts and experiences to them (she wants to eat, she misses her owner), we do not attribute complex thoughts to them. When we see a dog chasing a ball, we might think: “That dog is wonderfully alive”, and no one would dispute that the dog is happy, but it would make no sense to say: “the dog is thinking: I am glad to be alive!”. If the dog acquired the power of speech and claimed to have had this thought, it would be hard for us to take this claim seriously. We might say to the dog: how can you be sure that you were not just very happy? Or we might just say: how strange that you (now) want to make this claim.

So, what about the claims made by psychoanalysts? Here, the key point is that their claims are made as part of an attempt to understand and explain the way the individual currently lives their life and the way they have lived it up to that point. From this perspective, it is somewhat paradoxical to suggest that their claims lack criteria. The criteria include: how the individual relates to the analyst in the consulting room; how they relate (and have related) to other people; how they react (and have reacted) to certain types of situation etc. If there is a problem, it is not so much the  lack of criteria as the difficulty of organising this vast body of material and linking it to possible experiences the individual may have had as a baby. This is a challenging enterprise, but it does not seem (to me) to be an incoherent one. If someone’s relationships with other people have always been characterised by an extreme sensitivity to intrusion, this would seem to provide a reasonable basis for claiming that at some very early point in their lives they felt intruded on. This does not involve claiming (a la Ballard) that as a baby they thought: “I am being intruded on”; rather it involves attributing to the baby an early experience (of intrusion) that had wide-ranging ramifications. Furthermore, one could use evidence from the life of the individual (or evidence from the observation of babies in general) to try to pin down when this experience occurred.

But what about the extremely complex – one might even say florid – theories that psychoanalysts develop? Well, as long as their claims are translatable into some kind of consequences, I do not think they can be rejected as meaningless (although one can, of course, reject them as fanciful, implausible or simply wrong). Winnicott and Klein tell very different stories about what babies experience, but their different stories make a huge difference in how the past and present behaviour of individuals is understood. The Winnicottian claim that some babies have an early and traumatic experience of feeling dependent is not a contentless hypothesis and contrasts with the Kleinian claim that a baby’s early negative experiences are inevitable. Of course, the evidence for the Winnicottian claim is complex and requires judgement, but this is true in relation to many of the claims we make about other people’s experiences. If I claim that my friend’s expression of regret was genuine, I cannot provide straightforward evidence for my claim, and it may be impossible for me to convince you that I am right, although sometimes later events may convince you. If you question my judgement, I may point out that I have known my friend for forty years. This does not, of course, provide any evidence for my claim, but it highlights the importance of judgement based on personal experience. Infuriatingly, older people may say to younger people: you do not have enough experience of people to be able to make a judgement in this sort of extremely difficult case. Obviously, this does not mean we have to accept what psychoanalysts say (particularly since they disagree!), but it does mean that we cannot reject their claims simply on the basis that they are not supported with clear evidence everyone can easily agree upon.

What about the strange claims that patients and analysts make about what happens in the consulting room? A patient may experience a terrible sense of abandonment and links this to the start of their life, perhaps claiming to have remembered what they experienced as a baby. An analyst may experience something and claim that this gives them an insight into how the patient related to their mother as a baby. Aren’t these claims at least as strange as Ballard’s? They are certainly very unusual, and people may disagree about their significance. Some may treat them simply as the expression of experiences in the here and now, i.e. the patient felt like a baby whose mother had abandoned it, while the analyst felt like a mother lacking any connection with the baby in front of her. But these experiences may also be seen as reflecting the continuation in the patient of feelings (and relationships to others) that first occurred at the start of their lives. Furthermore, even if this sort of occurence prompts or reinforces hypotheses about an individual’s experiences as a baby, the justification for these claims is provided by evidence about the way the individual’s life unfolded up to and including the present day. So, whether or not we agree with specific claims about what a baby experienced (or what babies in general experience), I don’t think we can treat such claims as meaningless or reject the putative experiences as parts of a pseudo-mechanism unconnected to anything else. Psychoanalysts do attribute complex experiences to babies, but the attribution rests on the complex but real consequences they claim those experiences had.