Wittgenstein and Freud

Psychoanalysis has three aspects. Firstly, it is a body of knowledge about human beings based on the belief that the individual’s account of what they do and feel needs to be supplemented (and sometimes corrected) by an account of reasons that the individual is reluctant to acknowledge but that are evident in their behaviour and apparent to others. Secondly, it is a therapeutic method that seeks to help individuals resolve unsatisfactory aspects of their lives by helping them to recognise aspects of themselves that they are not prepared to recognise. Thirdly, it is a set of values about the right way for people to live, a vision of what human flourishing involves. Fused together, these three aspects make psychoanalysis the distinctive enterprise it is, but could they be split apart? In particular, could you accept the body of knowledge but reject the therapeutic approach and associated values? Or could you accept the body of knowledge and that it has therapeutic applications but reject the values? 

Let’s start by considering psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge. Human beings have mastered the world through their commitment to finding (causal) explanations for why things happen as they do. But they have devoted at least as much effort (if not more) to understanding each other. This is about understanding people as people, and what someone says about their thoughts, feelings, and actions plays a central role in our attempts to understand them. But we do not just rely on what they say. Rather we put together what they say and what they do (including such things as facial expression, manner etc) and sometimes we detect contradictions. They claim to be sorry for what they had done, but we do not believe their apology is genuine. They claim that what they did was an accident or a joke, but it is clear to us that the negative consequences of their behaviour were indeed the reason why they acted as they did. When we reject someone’s account of their actions, sometimes we believe that they are trying to deceive us. On other occasions, we believe that they are deceiving themselves. They sincerely offer reasons for their actions, but (in our view) the real reasons are ones they are not prepared to recognise.

These points are truisms about our language game of reasons, and their implications for how we should understand ourselves have been explored by countless writers (e.g. Shakespeare, George Elliott) and philosophers (e.g. Plato, Nietzsche). What is and (was new) about psychoanalysis is the commitment to exploring human nature systematically on the basis of the idea that people are split – that while they readily acknowledge some of their reasons for action, thoughts and feelings, there are other reasons that they struggle to acknowledge but which are necessary if we are fully to understand them and why they do what they do. Rather than trying to understand everything someone does as the expression of a more or less coherent personality, we need to recognise that most of our feelings have an element of ambivalence and that the thoughts we are happy to acknowledge to ourselves and to others are far from being the only ones detectable in our behaviour. This new approach (expressed via the concept of the Unconscious) has yielded a wide range of insights into human behaviour and generated a substantial body of knowledge that enables us to give fuller, more convincing accounts of the reasons people do what they do.

This new approach to understanding human nature (and the body of knowledge that it has generated) originated in efforts to help people overcome what today would be described as mental health issues. The assumption was that if people came to understand themselves better, this would reduce or eliminate the issues they were struggling with. But this is an assumption. It might have been (or might be) the case that “making the unconscious, conscious” has no significant impact on the individual and offers no therapeutic benefit. This may seem counter-intuitive. It is tempting to claim that insight must be transformative, but there is no “must” about it. The patient may acknowledge that they are sabotaging their lives due to an unconscious sense of guilt, but they may continue to sabotage their lives even when they know they are doing this. One could say that more work is needed (so the insight is emotionally as well as intellectually accepted), but it is possible to hold that in some or indeed a large number of cases the patient may be unable to change whatever the analyst does to help them know themselves better. In short, someone could accept the body of knowledge generated by the psychoanalytic approach to human nature, but think that psychoanalytic therapy has little value or is only effective in a highly limited set of circumstances (patients of a certain age, and/or with a certain type of problem, and/or undertaking therapy in particular favourable circumstances, some of which may be beyond the control of both patient and therapist). They would see psychoanalysis as being useful in understanding many aspects of human behaviour, but they would not see this knowledge as being of much help to people who want to change how they behave.

What about the values that underlie the therapeutic practice of psychoanalysis? Psychoanalysts try to help their patients accept the truth about themselves, and the assumption is that doing this will enable them to lead better lives. But what does “better” mean? It does not necessarily mean happier – it means richer, more authentic, more coherent. It will be a life where the individual’s actions and experiences make more sense to them. This claim reflects that idea that it is better to live with the truth than to live a lie. But other views and values are possible. Perhaps things would have been better if Jocasta and Oedipus had never found out that they were mother and son. One could imagine a therapist who accepted the insights of psychoanalysis but rejected its values. They would work to understand why the patient was unhappy with their life, but then be open to helping the patient in whatever way they choose. If the patient wants a comfortable life, they might help them strengthen their defences or find more socially acceptable ways of indulging their drives etc. We may be shocked by such an approach, but this just underlines the attraction of the values underlying psychoanalysis. Similarly, one might try to argue that this sort of approach would not really maximise the patient’s happiness, but the word “really” here is an attempt to smuggle back in the “right” values. If happiness is measured in scores on an “are you happy with your life?” questionnaire or a “did therapy work for you?” questionnaire, then maybe a “no difficult truths” approach to therapy would outperform the more challenging approach of psychoanalysis.

I think this discussion illustrates why the triple helix fits together so well together. But it also shows that it could be broken apart. Either because you were much more pessimistic than analysts are about the possibility or likelihood of people being able to change. Or because you did not believe that it was always better for the individual to face up to difficult truths. Neither option seems as noble as the psychoanalytic approach, but they are real possibilities. Maybe even psychoanalysts sometimes embrace them, concluding that change is not possible or that the individual would find the truth too hard to bear.