Wittgenstein and Freud

Sometimes we find it difficult to express our feelings. They seem almost impossible to put into words. “I cannot describe it to you, you would need to experience it yourself”. But perhaps we should try harder. To some extent, saying you cannot describe your experience is a cop out. Generally, there are lots of things we can say about our “indescribable” feelings. We can say whether the feeling was pleasant or unpleasant, whether it lasted a long or a short time, whether it left us in a calm or agitated state etc. In the right context and with the right person, we may actually want to talk about our “indescribable” feelings at length. As we talk, we may connect with the other person, and they (and we) may feel that they understand what we experienced. The two of us may even conclude that we have both had the same “indescribable” experience – how on earth is that possible?

The biggest problem here is our tendency to misinterpret the Inner/Outer picture, which is built into our psychological concepts. This picture differentiates between our feelings and their expression, highlights the special position of the individual in relation to their own feelings, and allows for a (deliberate or non-deliberate) discrepancy between the feeling and the individual’s expression of it. So far, so good. But philosophers (and others) have taken this picture literally and treated our expressions of our feelings as descriptions of an inner world. These descriptions are treated as essentially the same as descriptions of the physical world – with the minor (!) difference that the latter relate to a reality we share, whereas the former relate to a world that no one else can ever experience.

As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made clear, this approach is deeply confused. We have a privileged status in relation to the expression of our experiences because the experiences are ours, not because we have special access to an inner reality, which we can (if we wish) accurately describe to others. Philosophers talk a lot about introspection, but generally, we don’t introspect when we express our thoughts and feelings – we just say what we think and feel. When in special circumstances we do “look inward”, this does not involve trying to describe private inner objects. It involves reflecting on our feelings and taking a stance on what we really feel. Is it really him that I am angry at or am I angry with myself but don’t want to admit it? Is my excitement at my new job genuine or am I just changing jobs to distract myself from other issues in my life? Introspection – or less confusingly reflection – is an important part of human life, but it is not about meticulously examining a private inner space.  In fact, “introspection” is often best done with a friend.

The best way to gain clarity here is to consider the role that language plays in relation to our inner life. Philosophers have tended to approach this issue abstractly, puzzling over how it is possible for one conscious being to communicate their experiences to another. But it is much better to focus on what actually happens when we learn to speak. As well as teaching us words to describe the world around us, our parents teach us how to recognise the feelings of others and how to express our own feelings. They tell us that they are happy (or sad); they point out other people that are happy (or sad) and they say to us things like “you seem happy (sad) today, is that right?”. Via countless interactions of this kind, we gain mastery of our psychological concepts, applying them to others and using them ourselves. As we grow up, our interaction with others (and with books etc) helps us finetune our use of these concepts and introduces us to more sophisticated ones (e.g. bliss, despair). But none of this has anything to do with accurately describing conceptually private objects inside other people or inside ourselves.

Sometimes we complain about the limitations of language, but it is the power of language that enables us to have the complex inner lives we do. The fact that language has no defined limits means the same is true of our inner world. We can and do use our psychological concepts in relation to non-language users (for example, our pets), but the limits on their ability to express their feelings impose limits on the complexity of the feelings that we can attribute to them. We may know that our dog is sad, but we cannot suggest that it is weighed down by reflections on life’s ephemeral nature. Our dog may have lost its zest for life, but there is no scope for attributing despair to it – because despair involves expressing (or at least being able to express) certain kinds of thoughts. The fact that animals cannot use complex language means there is no scope for them having an inner world with the complexity of a character in a Virginia Woolf novel.

We learn the rules of our psychological concepts, but our relationship to language enables us to go far beyond the rules we have learnt. When someone says: “I feel as if I am being watched”, this is not because someone has taught them how to identify this feeling or shown them examples of what people who are experiencing this feeling look like. The person simply gives expression to their feeling and it is the way that they express the feeling that gives it its specificity. They take a concept we use in describing the world (X is watching Y) and use it to express a feeling (“I feel as if Peter is watching me even though I know he is dead”). When people say things like that, we do not urge them to examine their inner reality in case they have misdescribed the feeling and it is actually the feeling that Paul is watching them or the feeling they are about to get a migraine. No, we respond to the feeling they have expressed, trying to understand what it means to them. Maybe we have never had a feeling like that or may we have. Someone may say: I felt like that when my partner died – I know exactly what you mean.

In a letter to Freud, the French writer, Romain Rolland, highlighted a feeling he thought often underlies religious belief. He described it as “a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded”, a “feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole”. Freud said he had never experienced this “oceanic” feeling, and he argued that if such a feeling does exist, it is the remnant of something experienced in early infancy before a baby can distinguish between itself and the world. Leaving aside the issue of whether Freud’s explanation is correct, this discussion illustrates what happens when we talk about such feelings. What Rolland said gave Freud a sense of his experience, but Freud was sceptical about Rolland’s account. We might say that he did not really know what Rolland was talking about. But Rolland’s words resonate with some people who say: “Yes. I have had that experience or something very similar”. Whether or not they had the same experience depends on whether they use the same words to express it (to “describe” it). 

Language plays a central role in the expression of our inner life, but we also express our feelings in other ways, e.g. in our facial expressions, in gestures and in what we do. Artists express their feelings in their chosen medium, and even mere mortals may sometimes use colours or sounds or movements to convey their feelings to others. On such occasions, we may say that words are inadequate, forgetting that language too can be used artistically, so that poetry, like music, can express the inexpressible. But, of course, not all of us are poets. Whatever the medium, the point is that this sort of communication is not based on teachable rules. We make a gesture (in colours, in sounds, in words), and our gesture resonates with some people (means something to them), but leaves others cold. We can teach people to use words like happy and sad and we can show them what people who are happy and sad do, but we cannot teach people what it feels like to be reborn or to feel that the light has gone out of your life. If we have never had these experiences, we may have a sense of what they mean to those who use these words, but we won’t be able to say: I know exactly what you mean. I have had that experience myself.

The early Wittgenstein wrote: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should remain silent. But he was wrong. We can share our deepest and most personal experiences, and other people will sometimes understand what we say. But there are no guarantees. We are more in touch with some people than with others. We make a gesture and with some people it resonates and with others, it does not.