Wittgenstein and Freud

Freud was attracted to philosophy, but also irritated by it. Not only did it never seem to get anywhere, but it treated human beings as essentially rational, which was in stark contrast to the way people actually behaved. This approach was clearly not the way forward. As with everything else, the way to establish the truth about human nature was through scientific investigation. What was needed was a detailed account of the causal mechanisms that underlie our experiences and our actions. Freud tried to do this in his early, unpublished work, Project for a Scientific Psychology. But his attempt to replace our psychological concepts with a physiological account was unsuccessful. So, he changed tack. Instead of trying to avoid the idea of the Inner, he accepted the traditional philosophical account of consciousness, but argued that it needed to be supplemented with an account of the Unconscious, which he claimed was the real force shaping our inner world. This laid the basis for a new intellectual enterprise, but a somewhat strange one. Psychoanalysis was unlike any other natural science, but it was also not philosophy. It was something halfway between the two. But is that really possible?

Freud’s attack on philosophical accounts of the Inner was, in some ways, too radical and in others, not radical enough. He was right to challenge the Cartesian model of the mind, but he failed to recognise just how incoherent this model is. He made the game-changing claim that feelings could be unconscious as well as conscious, but his development of the Unconscious was held back by the link with its twin, consciousness, which he understood in traditional terms. Rather than clear up the mysteries of the Inner world, he created an even more mysterious realm containing all sorts of psychic processes that had never been dreamed of. A centuries-old house of philosophical confusions was updated with scientific-sounding basements and extensions, but the different elements fitted together badly and didn’t form a stable building. Freud championed free association, but avoided the issue of free will. He emphasised the empirical nature of his work, but spent a lot of time engaged in what looked like armchair philosophical speculation. Had he broken with philosophy, or was he just doing it in a new way?

One way of underlining the similarities between philosophy’s approach to the mind and that of psychoanalysis is to examine the views of the distinguished Kleinian analyst, Roger Money-Kyrle, as set out in his book, Man’s Picture of His World (pub. 1961). Money-Kyrle offers a detailed account of how our inner world develops, taking as his starting point what philosophy had established. Referencing Hume and Mach, he suggests that what we call the world is simply a thought-model of possible experiences. Using memory images, the raw materials of experience – sensations of colour, sound, hardness, taste and smell – are built up into a picture of an “external world.” Different bits of sense data come to be associated with each other as “objects”, which are then thought of as permanent. These are organised in a space-time framework that is an extension of the specious present, a slightly longer duration than an instantaneous “now”, since our experience includes perceptions of movement (“the object moved from there to here”). Later, we come to distinguish between objects that are animate and those that are inanimate. In this way, philosophy yields a three-stage process. The infant starts in a state of subjective monism. It moves to a stage of naive realism in which there are objects, some of which may be seen as “animatistic”, i.e. imbued with some form of life force. Finally, the infant reaches the stage of dualism, where most objects are seen as inanimate, but some are seen as containing minds with thoughts and feelings like its own.

Money-Kylie believes psychoanalysis can add a lot of detail to the philosophical framework. He suggests that existence in the womb is probably experienced as tranquil, although it may include moments of anxiety. The pressure on its developing body may give the foetus a rudimentary sense of form, but nothing is felt to exist beyond that. It experiences birth as a disaster. The paradise of the womb is exchanged for hell, since initially, all bodily sensations are experienced as uncomfortable or painful. Experience consists of a buzzing confusion of sensations, with the newborn having lost any sense of bodily form it may once have had. There is also a new sensation – a feeling of suffocation.  At this point, there is no distinction between sensation and memory or phantasy. Psychoanalysis also endorses the philosophical conclusion that there is no distinction between ideas and impressions. The contents of the mind are all of the same sort, whether they are sensations, memories of sensations or phantasies of sensations. There is no sense of time or space. Everything that exists is in the present, and nothing that is not present exists.

This stream of experiences, this “world”, is initially all bad. The experiences are unpleasant, and the frustrations they engender lead to rage, which permeates the sensations, making them persecutory. But before long, goodness appears. Initially, in the form of the first breath that relieves from suffocation. But this is a short-lived comfort and is quickly taken for granted. The role of supreme comforter is reserved for the breast, which is perceived as a pattern of smell, taste and touch. But this pattern comes and goes. So, it is split into a good breast, associated with feelings of love, safety and life and a bad breast, associated with hate, danger and death. The bad breast (and the destructive impulses it arouses) are disowned and separated off, although at this stage not as a permanent object, since there is no concept of time (or space). The bad object becomes an internal persecutor inside the body, but separate from the self. The same process occurs in relation to the anus. So, the first permanent objects (in any inner world) are the bad breast and bad faeces. Developing the idea of a good object is harder, since the breast is beyond the infant’s control, which leads to immense rage and envy. When the infant manages to overcome these emotions, the breast is recognised as an external object.  The world is still monistic (no ideas/impressions distinction), but it has three parts – the self and the good and bad breast “objects” (sets of experiences), seen as split off and located outside (external persecutor) or inside the body (internal persecutor).

Initially, the infant reacts so intensely to all of the patterns in its stream of experience that it cannot distinguish a fantasy of the breast, a memory of the breast and an experience of the breast. It is unable to get beyond this concrete thinking in relation to objects that arouse persecutory feelings, but when an object starts to arouse depressive feelings, it becomes possible for the infant to recognise it as separate. If it can develop the capacity to mourn, it can have ideas as well as impressions. It can treat an established pattern of experiences as a symbol and use it to represent something initially thought of as lost but then as temporarily absent. According to Money-Kyrle, bad objects are the first to become separate/external and good objects the first to become permanent. In this way, the child passes from monism to realism. It is now surrounded by a world of substances, but the objects are animatistic, since they have the child’s own good and bad feelings projected into them. What allows the child to move beyond this stage is the acceptance of responsibility. This enables the child to use its capacity for symbolic thought in relation to itself. Until this happens, the child’s own inner world and that of others is closed to it. The final stage is reached when the child starts to project whole sentiments, aspects of its personality, into things. If it identifies with these (animate) things, it can, as it were, observe itself from the outside. It recognises that other people have an inner world and this enables it to become self-conscious, i.e. able to stand back from its stream of consciousness and take itself as an object of thought.

Money-Kyrle tells a beautifully detailed story, but if the philosophical tale is nonsense, the psychoanalytical version is nonsense on stilts. Both accounts attribute sophisticated thoughts and feelings to the infant (and to the foetus), while failing to recognise that inner states stand in need of outward criteria. They arise from the belief that this is how things must be, rather than any evidence as to how they actually are. One way of bringing out the absurdity of the resultant account is to shift from humans to animals. Do puppies have difficulty differentiating between sensations, memories of sensations and fantasies of possible sensations? Do they too have split internal objects? And do they have to learn to mourn before they can recognise a stick as an object? The problem here is starting from the stream-of-experiences view of consciousness. Instead, we need to recognise that our psychological concepts (seeing something, recognising something as an object previously encountered, feeling pain, surprise and anxiety, etc) pick out complex patterns in the behaviour of living things. We say that an infant has “found its feet” because it starts to do all sorts of things it had not previously done. It is these outward criteria that justify the new set of claims we make (“look at the joy she is getting from moving her toes”). These claims link outer and inner with the outward criteria providing the basis for saying that the infant is having new experiences. As the baby develops, its behaviour exhibits increasingly complex patterns, and we apply increasingly sophisticated psychological concepts to it. The baby’s “inner” world develops as its behaviour becomes more complex. A major boost to the complexity of the baby’s inner world (to our ability to attribute complex experiences to it) occurs as it learns to speak and starts to use language in more and more sophisticated ways. Unless a living entity can use a language, it makes no sense to attribute to it the complex experiences that are characteristic of adult human life, although we may still attribute to the entity the (varying) levels of consciousness we attribute to animals and, for example, see it as being capable of experiencing pain.

Money-Kyrle illustrates how close psychoanalysis can be to philosophy, but how significant is this link? After all, the real work of psychoanalysis happens in the consulting room, and no analyst wastes their patient’s time sharing with them lots of empty philosophical speculation. This is a really important point. The focus on helping people live more fulfilling lives limits the negative consequences of any confused statements that psychoanalysts may make about the Inner. But philosophical confusions do impact their theorising – and not just in its speculation about the early experiences of infants. In fact, the shared starting point creates shared theoretical problems. As the history of philosophy has demonstrated, if one sees the individual as essentially a stream of conscious experiences, it is very hard to get beyond this stream of experiences. There are problems about the reality of the external world, the existence of other minds, the existence of the self, the nature of agency and the possibility of altruism. Traces of all these pseudo-problems are detectable in psychoanalysis. For example, Freud’s claim that all human action is based on an attempt to maximise the individual’s pleasure. Similarly, it is assumed that empathy is based on identification (projecting the self into the other) with the notion of unselfish love or action being seen as problematic. Psychoanalysts do, of course, emphasise the importance of developing a concern for the Other, but they tend to explain this in terms of the self-oriented emotion of guilt. It seems that, once you embrace the subject-object paradigm, there is no escaping the prison of the self. 

But what is the self? This is another issue that philosophers and psychoanalysts both have problems with. The simplest approach is to treat the self as a representation within the stream of our experiences. Since we sometimes think about ourselves (am I really as hard working as I think I am? Am I really committed to my job?), surely this must be right? But while it is easy to explain what is involved in thinking about a physical object, this is much harder to do in relation to the self. In fact, Hume concluded that at least no clear, continued representation of the self existed. One response to this problem is to see the self (as the early Wittgenstein did) as being outside the stream of experiences in the way that the eye is outside the stream of visual perceptions. This “solution” kicks the issue of the self into the realm of things of which we cannot speak. It certainly does not meet the requirements of psychoanalysts, who need concepts they can use with patients in the consulting room. With characteristic directness, Freud took the bull by the horns and put forward his concept of the ego, but the horns melted into thin air as he was forced to conclude that the me (Das Ich) is partly unconscious. Some of his successors (like Kohut) developed complex theories of the self, others ignored the issue, and some (like Winnicott) embraced the philosophical pseudo-solution of declaring it unknowable. None of these approaches helps much with the problem of agency. Here, the default solution is to assume that our wants cause our actions and that science will one day provide a detailed account of exactly what this involves. This still leaves the problem of free will, but recognising the problems their philosophical colleagues have run into in this area, psychoanalysts tend to prefer to leave this issue untouched.

The stream-of-consciousness approach of philosophers creates mysteries about the Inner, but Freud’s amended approach creates similar mysteries about the unconscious. Mirroring philosophers’ claims that the only reality is our stream of experiences, psychoanalysts claim that only psychic reality is real. When Kleinians such as Money-Kyrle make this point, they tend to go even further and emphasise that when the infant introjects, it believes in phantasy that its mother’s breast and father’s penis (later the mother and father themselves) are literally inside them. This is a very puzzling claim. What should we make of the emphasis on the literalness of the phantasy? In my view, it is hard to understand it as being anything other than a desperate plea for the processes they are talking about to be taken really, really seriously. Rather like when someone says: I was so angry that I literally exploded. But non-Kleinian analysts also say mystifying things about the Unconscious. It is like God not only in being outside time and space, but also in not being bound by the law of non-contradiction. What a mysterious thing the Unconscious is! From a Wittgensteinian perspective, however, the unconscious is no more mysterious than consciousness. Rather than being an impossible entity, it is a concept that psychoanalysts (and the rest of us) use to capture the complexities of human nature. To point out that we blame ourselves for things that we “know” are not our fault is to highlight the way that our thoughts and feelings can point in different directions. We are not the rational beings of philosophical myth, and we can and do hold and act on contradictory beliefs. On one (superficial) level, we believe that we are not responsible, while on another, we believe we are.

So, what led Freud to set out on the incredible journey that created the strange science-philosophy hybrid that is psychoanalysis? Why didn’t he stick with his initial idea and focus on a purely scientific (reductive) account of the mind? In part, this was because the science of neurology was only just getting going, so a lack of empirical data created limits on how sophisticated a model you could develop. The more pressing issue for Freud was his need to earn a living as a doctor, and that meant providing treatment to patients. Ironically, the therapeutic imperative has in some ways enabled psychoanalysis to exceed both its parents. Its human focus means it has provided more powerful and more interesting accounts of human nature than the causal accounts of science, and its practical focus means its philosophy-like speculations always have to come back to earth. Even Donald Melzer’s wild claim that the self can become trapped with the body of its inner mother object has to be cashed out in the consulting room. If it does not help distinguish between the different problems that different people face, it is a wheel that turns with no impact and so plays no role in the real work of the psychoanalytical enterprise.