08 Stefan Misinterpretations+ +the+Relationship+of+Ludwig+Wittgenstein+With+the+Work+of+Sigmund+Freud

Psychoanalysis of grammatical misinterpretations :the relationship of Ludwig Wittgenstein with the work

of Sigmund Freud1

Stefan Majetschak, Kassel

Abstract

Wittgenstein’s relationship with the works of Sigmund Freud, manifest in nu-merous remarks in his “Nachlass”, can only be described as ambivalent. His re-marks alternate between admiring absorption and intense rejection of Freud’sthoughts. Scholars have often chosen Wittgenstein’s critical reading of Freudas a subject of inquiry. They have considered far less, however, the extent towhich Wittgenstein approached and incorporated Freud’s ideas in a positiveway. This article will show that – at least in the work of the thirties – Wittgen-stein’s positive approach to Freud is evident in his conception of philosophicaltherapy, which was modelled on and incorporated some of the basic assumptionsof psychoanalytic treatment.

1 This article has benefitted from a period of research which the author was able tospend in March 2007 at the Wittgenstein Archives of the University of Bergen,Norway. I wish to express my gratitude to the Wittgenstein Archives, especiallyits Director Dr. Alois Pichler, for granting me access to the electronic version of“Wittgenstein’s Nachlass”. Sections of the “Nachlass” are quoted in these notesaccording to the number of the manucript or typescript and page numbers.All translations of Wittgenstein’s remarks, which are not yet published in theEnglish language, are mine.The English version of this article includes a few slight revisions of its German

predecessor, which was published under the title “Psychoanalyse der grammati-schen Mißdeutungen: �ber die Beziehung Ludwig Wittgensteins zum Werk Sig-mund Freuds” in: Alois Pichler, Herbert Hrachovec (Eds.): Wittgenstein and thePhilosophy of Information. Proceedings of the 30. International Ludwig WittgensteinSymposium Kirchberg am Wechsel. Austria 2007. Volume 1, Frankfurt, Paris, Lan-caster, New Brunswick 2008, 37–59.

1. The ambivalent relationship with Freud

It is usually difficult to determine precisely and interpret satisfactorilyWittgenstein’s relationship with the philosophical or literary texts thathe read – sometimes agreeing with them and sometimes not – as sourcesof inspiration for his own thought. Even if in his writings he explicitlynamed the authors with whom he had occupied himself, he frequentlyneglected to cite titles, let alone provide specific references to passagesin the manner of academic citation. Occasionally he dispensed with nam-ing any names at all, even when he had a source text in front of him thatprovided him with ideas. Vagueness of this sort with respect to his read-ings is the reason why questions about the concrete way in which authorsand texts influenced his thought can hardly be decided with philologicalcertainty. And this is further complicated by the fact that the “seed” thatfell on his “soil” grew, in his own estimation, differently from the way itwould have grown “in any other soil”, with the result that a factual ideacan often be quite unrecognisable (CV, 42e).

The situation in respect of Wittgenstein’s relationship with the workof Sigmund Freud is no different. It is known from Rush Rhees’ conver-sation with Wittgenstein, however, that Wittgenstein occupied himselfwith Freud on more than one occasion between 1919 and the late 40s(cf. LC, 41–52), and that he was familiar at least with The Interpretationof Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1900), The Psychopathology of EverydayLife (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, 1901) and Jokes and their Re-lation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten,1905).2 He might also have been familiar with the basic concepts of Stud-ies of Hysteria (Studien �ber Hysterie, 1895), written by Freud togetherwith Josef Breuer, which was included in the Vienna family library ofthe Wittgensteins. Furthermore he might have been acquainted withsome aspects of the techniques of psychoanalytic treatment from conver-sations with his sister Margarethe, who had been a patient of Freud.3

Those familiar with the writings of Freud and Wittgenstein will probablybe able to observe similarities between the two in writings other thanthose named above.4 But irrespective of all of these facts: whatever

2 cf. Bouveresse 1995, 4.3 cf. McGuinness 1981, 27 and Bouveresse 1995, 4.4 e. g. it might be observed that the Nestroy-Motto “�berhaupt hat der Fortschritt

das an sich, daß er viel grçßer ausschaut als er wirklich ist”, used by Wittgensteinto preface the late version (TS 227) of the Philosophical Investigations, is used

Stefan Majetschak152

texts of Freud may have been known to Wittgenstein, the questions ofhow he was influenced by his reading of Freud, what he valued inFreud and what he rejected might never be ultimately clarified, sincehis relationship with Freud – as Bouveresse has pointed out – appearsto be intrinsically ambivalent.5

The ambivalence of this relationship, reflected in statements rangingfrom an admiring reception to the most vehement rejection of Freud’sideas, which characterises almost all of Wittgenstein’s remarks aboutFreud, is expressed once again in a late letter which he wrote to his friendand pupil, Norman Malcolm, on the 4th December 1945. This is whathe writes (originally in English language) about his reading of Freud:

I, too, was greatly impressed when I first read Freud. He’s extraordinary. –Of course he is full of fishy thinking & his charm & the charm of the subjectis so great that you may easily be fooled.He always stresses what great forces in the mind, what strong prejudiceswork against the idea of psycho-analysis. But he never says what an enor-moues charm that idea has for people, just as it has for Freud himself.There may be strong prejudices against uncovering something nasty, butsometimes it is infinitely more attractive than it is repulsive. Unless youthink very clearly psycho-analysis is a dangerous & a foul practice, & it’sdone no end of harm &, comparatively, very little good. (If you think I’man old spinster – think again!) – All this, of course, doesn’t detract fromFreud’s extraordinary scientific achievement. Only, extraordinary scientificachievements have a way, these days, of being used for the destruction ofhuman beings. (I mean their bodies, or their souls, or their intelligence). Sohold on to your brains. (GBW)

In this passage, among other things, pyschoanalysis is deemed to be “adangerous & a foul practice”, which can be resisted only by extremelyclear thinking. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein states that Freud’s “extraordi-nary scientific achievement” is unaffected by harmful practices of thissort. This passage will doubtless come as a surprise to those familiarwith Wittgenstein’s remarks elsewhere about Freud’s work. For if bythat “dangerous & foul practice” Wittgenstein means psychoanalyticaltherapy, this statement runs counter to many other of his remarks, inwhich he disputes Freud’s “scientific achievement” by criticising – aswill be touched on briefly in Part II – Freud’s ontology of the uncon-

twice by Freud as well. Here in the formulation: “Every step forward is only halfas big as it looks to be at first.” cf. Sigmund Freud, “The Question of Lay Anal-ysis. Conversation with an impartial Person” (1926) and “Analysis terminableand interminable” (1937), in: Freud 1974, vol. 20, p. 193 and vol. 23, p. 228.

5 cf. Bouveresse 1995, 14 and 20.

Psychoanalysis of grammatical misinterpretations 153

scious and the epistemological claim of psychoanalysis to be a scientifictheory, yet nevertheless emphasises his appreciation of the general ideaof psychoanalytic therapy. He seems to have seen psychoanalytic therapy– and it is my intention to demonstrate this in Part III – at least for sometime during the thirties as a model for his own understanding of philo-sophical therapy. If this is the case, the estimation of Freud communicat-ed in letter form to Malcolm is the only one of its kind in Wittgenstein’swritings.

2. Criticism of Psychoanalytical Theory

Wittgenstein’s criticism of psychoanalysis as a scientific theory about theunconscious regions of the human psyche has already been addressed sooften that here it is enough to recall briefly the basic objections. Theserefer principally to Freud’s recurrent claim “to be scientific”. But as Witt-genstein puts it and some of his commentators highlighted likewise6,“what he gives is speculation – something prior even to the formationof a hypothesis.” (LC, 44) In fact, Freud gained his basic ideas and in-sights into the so-called “mechanisms” of the human soul by using meth-ods that would not even remotely satisfy our standards of scientific pro-cedure in the natural sciences, since his approach was not based on quan-titative and experimental studies, but rather on qualitative interpretationsof conversations with his patients in the course of the treatment. Thismeans, for example, with regard to his theories about infantile sexuality,which caused a sensation at the time, that he – as he himself admits –acquired his insights “by inferring the content of sexual childhoodfrom analyses of adults – that is to say, some twenty to forty yearslater.”7 But memories of long past events, which neurotic and hystericalpatients undergoing psychoanalytical treatment claim to have, wouldscarcely be taken as empirical evidence for scientific theories aboutchild sexuality. On the contrary, theories based on such questionabledata would probably not even be regarded as reasonable hypotheses.Measured by our usual criteria for the scientific basis of a theory, Freud’sclaims are actually no more than mere speculation.

When Freud – using such dubious evidence – attempts to interpretthe psychological laws that supposedly consciously and unconsciously un-

6 cf. Bouveresse 1995, 22 ff., H.R. Fischer 1987, 122 f., and Kroß 2006, 86.7 Freud, “Lay Analysis”, 214.


derpin the utterances and actions of his patients, he succumbs further-more from an epistemological point of view to a permanent “muddle”(L, 39) of causes and reasons.8 Scientific theories, intent on examiningcausal connections, normally deal with causes, and “the investigation ofa cause is carried out experimentally” (L, 40), as Wittgenstein puts it.In the humanities or everyday-life discourses, however, we are mostlyconcerned with reasons for somebody’s intentional acts, e. g. when some-one provides information about the motives for his conscious actions, and“the investigation of a reason entails as an essential part one’s agreementwith it” (ibid.). Experimental procedures here are unimportant, because ifone wants to discover a person’s motives, the only thing one can do is toask what reason the person has or whether the person agrees to a suggest-ed reason. Because Freud in his studies permanently confounds causesand reasons and, for example, operates with the concept of the causal ef-fectiveness of unconscious motives9 (i. e. reasons) while discussing thequestion of what determines the manifest forms of slips or dreams, theverification and falsification conditions for his analyses become unclear.For it is by no means clear when and on the basis of what evidenceone is to consider a statement about causally effective, unconscious mo-tives as correct or true. Although causal connections between unconsciousmotives and manifest forms of dreams or slips are maintained, in this casethere is no possibility at all of experimentally testing such claims. Aboveall, our usual everyday criterion for the legitimacy of such claims aboutthe motives of a person – viz. the person’s agreement – is not always per-mitted by Freud. According to Wittgenstein, sometimes Freud “says[that] the right solution, or the right analysis, is the one which satisfiesthe patient” (LC, 42), namely, one with which he agrees or which re-moves his problem. But “sometimes he says that the doctor knowswhat the right solution or analysis […] is, whereas the patient doesn’t :the doctor can say that the patient is wrong.” (ibid.) With regard to Freu-dian analyses, which operate with the conceptually extraordinarily confus-ing construct of causally effective unconscious reasons, one can merely saytherefore that the analysis that appears to be correct or true to the analystis the one that is taken as factually correct or true. Independent tribunalsof verification or falsification for such analyses do not in fact exist. Andfor this reason the claims of Freud, which are essentially immune to ob-

8 This aspect of Wittgenstein’s criticism of Freud has been emphasized especiallyby Bouveresse 1995, 69 ff., Cioffi 1998, 206 ff., and H.R. Fischer 1987, 110 ff.

9 Appropriate passages in Freud’s work are compiled by H.R. Fischer 1987, 111 ff.


jection, can not be esteemed to be scientific propositions for – followingthe relevant critical arguments advanced by Popper, to which Wittgen-stein’s considerations are tangential – we require scientific propositionsto be if not verifiable, then at least falsifiable.10

But that is not enough: in the course of his criticism, Wittgensteinnot only banishes many pseudo-scientific theorems of psychoanalysis tothe realm of speculation, but he also questions the entire ontology ofthe unconscious, the very precondition on which psychoanalysis isbased, by disputing as a matter of principle that Freud discovered underthe name of the “unconscious” a hitherto unnoticed region of thehuman psyche, whose internal laws can be examined scientifically. Actual-ly, Wittgenstein thinks he is able to show that it is precisely the centraltheory of the unconscious that is “not satisfactory” (L, 39) in Freud.Of course, he knows very well that “Freud does claim to find evidence”for the existence of the unconscious “in memories brought to light inanalysis” of his patients. (LC, 43) As a connoisseur of Freud, he alsoknows that in his writings Freud more than once says “people whodeny the sub-conscious really cannot cope” inter alia “with posthypnoticsuggestion” (L, 39), which according to Freud “tangibly demonstrated theexistence and mode of operation of the mental unconscious” and did so“even before the time of psycho-analysis”.11 Posthypnotic suggestion – thephenomenon that someone in the state of being awake does things sug-gested during hypnosis that for him are inexplicable – cannot be ex-plained unless one presupposes an active unconscious in the state ofbeing awake. But neither the reference to the memories of the Freudianpatient nor the phenomenon of posthypnotic suggestion can win overWittgenstein for Freud’s Theory of the Unconscious.

In a lecture from 1932/33 Wittgenstein points out that, what “Freudsays about the subconscious sounds like science, but in fact is just a meansof representation. New regions of the soul have not been discovered, as hiswritings suggest.” (L, 40) Rather, in Wittgenstein’s view, Freud did nomore than introduce a new ‘language-game’ – a new means of represen-tation – that describes the phenomena by using the word ‘unconscious’,normally used as an adjective, with the definite article ‘the’, thus myste-riously making ‘the unconscious’ appear to be the subject of a psychicevent. If we, for example, normally say to somebody that the reasonfor his actions is “unconscious”, according to Wittgenstein this is merely

10 cf. H.R. Fischer 1987, 122 f.11 Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious”, in: Freud 1974, vol. 14, p. 168 f.


a “way of speaking” (ibid.). It does not of course mean that the reason ispresent in any sense in someone’s unconscious, as in a container, merelythat he is not explicitly aware of it, i. e. self-consciously knows it at thetime of the action, but is perhaps later willing to admit that this orthat was his reason. In an ordinary sense one can, for example, thereforesay about a person: “When he lost the umbrella, he was unconscious ofreally wanting to be rid of it.” And one can say this indeed without thuscommitting oneself to any psychoanalytical theory of the causal efficiencyof ‘the unconscious’. Or, to take another example, one might in an equallymundane sense say of a person: “He wanted unconsciously to kill his fa-ther”, and it is possible that the person who really endangered the life ofhis father through his actions is later willing to admit this. But Freud’sidea was to represent a fact which we would describe in the everydaysense in the sentence: “He wanted unconsciously (that is, unknowingly)to kill his father”, by means of a formulation such as, “His unconsciouswanted him to kill (or wanted to make him kill) his father”.12 Thus heintroduces a new mode of representation, in which the adjective “uncon-scious” has been substantivised, moved to the subject position in the sen-tence and suddenly appears as the mysterious subject of an unconsciousintention. But this substantivised “unconscious” is of course, as Wittgen-stein sees it, “a hypothetical being” (ibid.), of whose ontologically inde-pendent existence and effectivity Freud is unable to produce any evi-dence. Because Freud, however, believes that his mode of representationis enlightening for the understanding of the human psyche, he tries topersuade his readers and patients to accept this new mode of representa-tion – and with it a new view of the behaviour and psychic reaction ofpeople.

It is precisely this that Freud, according to Wittgenstein, does con-stantly in his psychoanalytical interpretations. “If you are led by psy-cho-analysis to say that really you thought so and so or that really yourmotive” for an action unconsciously “was so and so, this is not a matterof discovery, but of persuasion”, according to Wittgenstein, in his lecturesof the summer of 1938. (LC, 27) It succeeds then, not because it couldpoint in some sense to independent evidence that speaks in favour of thecorrectness of the interpretation offered, but because the psychoanalyticalrepresentation paints a particular image of people – “the picture of peoplehaving subconscious thoughts” –, which “has a charm” for many andmakes it acceptable. (LC, 25) “An image”, as Wittgenstein knew

12 Bouveresse 1995, 33.


can be fascinating in itself and force itself upon us quite independently ofrightness or wrongness. So an image is devised by psychoanalysis, and itwould be interesting to explain its power through considerations similar tothose of psychoanalysis. (MS 163: 69)

It evokes the “idea of an underworld, a secret cellar” (LC, 25) of thehuman soul. This suggests that something “hidden, uncanny” (ibid.) ismade responsible through this image for the manifest occurrence thatwe see. One is invited to see the world from the point of view that every-thing is other than it seems at first sight; and this perspective is astonish-ingly attractive for people. “In the end,” writes Wittgenstein with somepsychological acumen, “you forget entirely every question of verification”of such claims and “are just sure it must have been like that.” (LC, 27)But of course nothing is proved by an image of this sort.

Freud very often thought he was able to adduce the myths of man-kind as proof of his theories. Indeed, he even thought that “it becamepossible to understand mythology and the world of fairy tales” throughhis theories.13 But instead of explaining the myths of mankind, Freud, ac-cording to Wittgenstein, did “something different. He has not given a sci-entific explanation of the ancient myth. What he has done is to pro-pound a new myth.” (LC, 51) With his speculative theory of the uncon-scious and of the psychic categories Id, Ego, Super-Ego (Es, Ich, �ber-Ich)as expounded in The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es) of 1923, he in-troduced an effective and – like all mytholgical systems – empirically in-controvertible system for describing and interpreting the human psyche.According to Wittgenstein, one “must have a very strong and keen andpersistent criticism in order to recognize and see through the mytholgythat is offered or imposed on one.” (LC, 52) Since Freud is keenly per-ceptive and ingenious, when he describes psychic phenomena with hismeans of representation, one is only all too easily induced “to say, ’Yes,of course, it must be like that.’” (ibid.) Few readers, as is well known,have the intelligence to resist it; and so

Freud’s fanciful pseudo-explanations (just because they are so brilliant) per-formed a disservice.(Now every ass has these pictures within reach for ’explaining’ symptoms ofillness with their help) (CV, 62e / my emphasis)

13 Freud, “Lay Analysis”, 211.


3. Psychoanalytic techniques of treatment and philosophicaltherapy

If one considers Wittgenstein’s criticism of the theoretical foundations ofpsychoanalysis, especially his dispute with its central concept of the un-conscious, to its full radical extent, it is really surprising that he doesnot condemn Freud’s theory utterly as unscientific mythology, but occa-sionally even emphasises that “there is an extraordinary amount in whathe says” (DB, 21) Remarks such as these, together with the above-men-tioned letter to Malcolm and the information provided by Rhees thatduring a certain period he considered himself a “disciple” and “follower”of Freud (LC, 41), are responsible for the fact that Wittgenstein’s rela-tionship with Freud does not appear to be clearly negative and dismissive,but – as emphasised at the beginning – rather ambivalent. Indeed, as Iwill try to point out in the next part, for a few years the basic idea of ther-apy in psychoanalysis appears to Wittgenstein as a model for solvingproblems in philosophy.

The basic concept of psychoanalytical therapy, i. e. the main idea ofthe technique of psychoanalytical treatment – which Wittgenstein consid-ered as the “original seed of psychoanalysis” – “was due to Breuer, notFreud” (CV, 42e), as Wittgenstein correctly supposed. And Freud wasthoroughly willing to admit this. The revolutionary “discovery of Breuer’s[…] which he” – as Freud candidly conceded – “shared with no one”,14

referred to the character of the neurotic symptoms investigated by Freudand Breuer, using the example of hysteria, and this discovery made it ap-pear reasonable to introduce the concept of the unconscious for the firsttime into a theory of the human psyche. In fact, Breuer discovered twothings. First, that the following can be maintained: “every time wecome upon a symptom we can infer that there are certain definite uncon-scious processes in the patient which contain the sense of the symp-tom.”15 Neurotic symptoms, according to Breuer, can generally be inter-preted as ‘descendants’ of unresolved, usually repressed traumatic experi-ences, conflicts or urges, which are considered to be necessarily “uncon-scious in order that the symptom can come about. Symptoms are neverconstructed from conscious processes.”16 Second, he recognised from

14 Sigmund Freud, “Fixation to Traumas – The Unconscious” (1916/17, 1933), in:Freud 1974, vol. 16, p. 279.

15 ibid.16 ibid.


his therapeutic practice: “as soon as the unconscious processes concernedhave become conscious, the symptom must disappear.”17 Altogether,these two insights opened up an “approach to therapy, a way of makingsymptoms disappear. […] The discovery of Breuer’s” continued to be“the foundation of psychonanalytic therapy”, which Freud in particularsubsequently developed. As he himself puts it: “Our therapy works bytransforming what is unconscious into what is conscious, and it worksonly in so far as it is in a position to effect that transformation.”18

These thoughts, the seed of all later psychoanalysis, were taken uppositively by Wittengenstein. When it was a matter of this basic ideaof psychoanalytical therapy, he was even willing to accept Freud’s conceptof the unconscious, which – as we have seen – he had criticised sharply inanother context. In fact, one might even say that the basic idea of psycho-analytical therapy was the main model of Wittgenstein’s own understand-ing of philosophical method, of his idea of philosophy as a form of ther-apy for conceptual confusion (cf. PI 133), as he developed it in the mid-dle and later period of his thinking. Actually, Wittgenstein, who had beenfamiliar with Freud’s work since 1919, even emphasises that the unmis-takable “analogy” between the psychoanalytical therapy concept and hisown method was “no coincidence” (D, 71). Thus, as the psychoanalysttries to remove neurotic symptoms by uncovering and making consciousthe underlying repressions, Wittgenstein’s philosophcal therapy tries inthe same way to solve philosophical problems by making conscious theunconsciously effective “false analogy” (BT, 409) which is at the rootof any problem of philosophy. The “entanglement” of thinking in“false analogies”, on the basis of superficial similarities in the grammarof linguistic expressions, lead us mistakenly to suppose that theremight be similar analogies between the objects and processes in theworld; and this is precisely – according to Wittgenstein’s view in his mid-dle and later periods – what can be regarded as the actual “morbus phil-osophicus” (MS 110: 86 f.). If, for example, we become entangled in sucha false analogy and let our thinking unconsciously be guided by the ideathat verbs such as “to think, “to know” or “to mean” indicate processes ina similar way to verbs such as “to travel”, “to run” or “to build”, we willalso be tempted to say that the former indicate “internal processes” andthe latter external processes. But this way of seeing will always be disturb-ing, because we are hardly able to capture such “inner processes” with our

17 ibid.18 ibid., 280.


everyday language, and it is this point of view precisely that constitutesthe illness of which Wittgenstein would like to cure philosophical think-ing by making the philosophically confused aware that they are being un-consciously guided by false analogies.

In a remark from October 1930 Wittgenstein explicitly mentions thesimilarities between his philosophical method and the psychoanalyticalcure for the first time, emphasising that it is “a main activity of philoso-phy to warn against false comparisons” in the above mentioned sense:

To warn against (the) false [comparisons/similes] which underlie our form ofexpression – without our being at all aware of this.I believe here our method resembles that of psychoanalysis, the purpose ofwhich also is to make the unconscious conscious and thus harmless, and Ibelieve that this resemblance is not purely external. (MS 109: 174)

What Wittgenstein states here has of course been noted from time to timeby some of his interpreters.19 But it was Gordon Baker who tried to pointout in two late essays that a close comparison with Freud’s method, atleast for several years, represented a source of Wittgenstein’s own meth-odological concept – for the period between the beginning of the compi-lation of the Big Typescript (TS 213) around 1930 and the writing of TS220, a so-called early version of the Philosophical Investigations from 1937or 1938.20 In 1938 an explicit remark on this subject appears for the lasttime in Wittgenstein’s papers. “What we do is much more akin to psycho-analysis than you might be aware of” (MS 158: 34), Wittgenstein oncenoted in this year. Baker is therefore right to maintain that there is an ex-plicit analogy between psychoanalysis and philosophy for this limited pe-riod only. But elsewhere he further suggests that one might perhaps evensay that Wittgenstein’s concept of philosophy is modelled on that ofFreud in his entire later work.21 And if he is also right with this secondclaim, this raises new questions concerning Wittgenstein’s understandingof philosophy in the later versions of the Philosophical Investigations after1938, which I would at least like to address at the end of this article.

19 cf. e. g. Bouveresse 1995, 8–11; K.R. Fischer 1987, 95; Hrachovec 2005, 85 f. ;and Kroß 2006, 87–89.

20 According to Gordon Baker “there was a definite phase of Wittgenstein’s think-ing in which a close comparison with Freud’s methods informed his own concep-tion of philosophical investigation. This phase extended over several years, at leastfrom the composition of BT [= TS 213, The Big Typescript, S.M.] to the writ-ing of PPI” [= TS 220, S.M.]. Baker 2006, 155.

21 cf. Baker 2006, 219.


As a matter of fact one has to admit, however, that explicit referencesto analogies between psychoanalysis and Wittgenstein’s concept of a phil-osophical therapy are only to be found in the writings that date from1930 to 1938. During these years Wittgenstein goes so far as to describewhat he does philosophically as “psychoanalysis of gramatical misinter-pretations” (MS 145: 58). The clearest remarks on such analogies areto be found in the so-called Dictation for Schlick (Diktat f�r Schlick)from (most probably) 1932, written down by Friedrich Waismann, andin a major section of the Big Typescript (BT, 406–435) entitled Philoso-phie. In the Dictation for Schlick Wittgenstein writes, as in the passageabove, cited from MS 109:

Our method resembles psychoanalysis in a certain sense. To use its way ofputting things, we could say that a simile at work in the unconscious ismade harmless by being articulated. And this comparison with analysiscan be developed even further. (And this analogy is certainly no coincidence)(D, 69 f.).

Here too the analogy between both methods can be seen in the fact thatunconsciously effective similes are uncovered by philosophy in a way sim-ilar to that in which unconcious traumatic experiences are brought tolight by psychoanalysis, and philosophical problems are therefore madeto disappear when one becomes conscious of their sources in the sameway that neurotic symptoms disappear by a similar psychoanalytical pro-cedure. As already mentioned above, it is also clear that the analogy is nocoincidence, and since Freud’s writings were published earlier than Witt-genstein’s, this can only mean that Freud’s basic ideas of treatment in-spired, indeed as Baker says ‘informed’22 Wittgenstein’s understandingof philosophical method. And finally one must explicitly stress that thecomparison of both methods is in no way reduced to the one commonbasic idea, but continues even further.

But what are further analogies between both approaches to therapy?Wittgenstein does not mention them explicitly, but anyone familiar withhis and Freud’s work will quickly find parallels. A second analogy, whichcan be adduced after the raising to consciousness of unconscious factors,is surely that both approaches are not especially interested in the forma-tion of theories: neither an appropriate theory of the unconscious in thecase of Freud nor a theory of language or meaning in the case of Witt-genstein.23 “The aim of the treatment” for Freud is “the practical recov-

22 cf. footnote no. 20.23 cf. also E. Fischer 2006.


ering of the patient, the restoration of his ability to lead an active life andof his capacity for enjoyment”,24 which have been curtailed by acute neu-rosis. Likewise Wittgenstein too does not aim at theory formation, but atdissolving problems that arise from unconsciously-held false analogies.“As I do philosophy”, he remarks,

its entire task is to shape expression in such a way that certain worries dis-appear.[…]The problems are solved in the literal sense of the word – dissolved like alump of sugar in water. (BT, 421)

It should be noted that this is philosophically, as Wittgenstein says, “theentire task”, and no more! And if philosophical therapy can achieve this,it can arrive at “thoughts at peace. That is the goal someone who philos-ophises longs for” (CV, 50e), as he says pointedly in a later remark of1944.

A third analogy is evident: namely both psychoanalysis and Wittgen-stein’s therapy presuppose for the achievement of this goal the coopera-tion, or at least the ability to cooperate, of the patient.25 For Wittgensteinthis is true, because nobody can be compelled to an insight into falseanalogies that inform his thinking. This is just the same in psychoanalysissince the analyst cannot force anyone to admit repressions. Rather eachperson has to arrive at the insight by himself, which is why Wittgensteinwrites in the Big Typescript, that the “work on philosophy is actually closerto working on oneself ” than to working at material questions: “On one’sown understanding. On the way one sees things.” (BT, 407) If anyone isnot capable of or prepared for this work, Wittgenstein cannot rescue himfrom his conceptual confusion.

There is a fourth parallel with regard to the means used in philosophyand psychoanalysis. Both offer their patients, in their respective conversa-tions, interpretations that uncover certain false analogies, in which theconceptually confused is entangled, or that make the conflicts suppressedby the neurotic clear to him. And thus the parallel between philosophyand “psychoanalysis” is that “the result of the analysis (philosophical orpsychoanalytical) requires the acknowledgement of the person analysed”(MS 156a: 56; cf. BT, 410). Independently of the acceptance on the partof the patient, there are no criteria in either area for the correctness of the

24 Sigmund Freud, “Freud’s Psycho-analytic Procedure”, in: Freud 1974, vol. 7, p.253.

25 cf. Freud, ibid. 254.


interpretations submitted. Wittgenstein writes in the Big Typescript, “wecan only prove that someone made a mistake”, viz. is entangled in afalse analogy, “if he (really) acknowledges this expression as the correctexpression of his feeling. For only if he acknowledges it as such, is itthe correct expression” (ibid.). Only when he spontaneously reacts tothe interpretation offered with something like, “Yes, really! What ismeant by words such as ‘to think’, ‘to know’ or ‘to mean’ I have alwaysimagined to be internal processes, because words such as ‘to travel’, ‘torun’ or ‘to build’ indicate external processes. But this analogy is false !”,only then can the interpretation be considered correct and as solvingthe problem. With an expression of this kind, “what the other person”then “acknowledges is the analogy I’m presenting to him as the sourceof his thought”. (ibid.) And only then will the philosophical problemor neurotic symptom possibly disappear.

Because there are no criteria for interpretations that lead to successfultherapy, the conversation strategies used philosophically and psychoana-lytically are both to be characterised more as forms of persuasion thanof argumentative conviction. What the psychoanalyst often uses is – asFreud candidly admits – influence, suggestion.26 And in this respect,there is another – fifth – analogy between philosophical therapy and psy-choanalysis, since Wittgenstein is said to have claimed in a 1938 lecture,“what I’m doing is also persuasion” (LC, 27) in an attempt to change the“style of thinking” (LC, 28) of those who are blinded by false analogies.

If it is true that the comparison between his philosophical methodand psychoanalysis can be “developed further”, as Wittgenstein emphas-ised in Dictation for Schlick, one cannot exclude the possibility that per-haps many other parallels and similarities between both can also beworked out. I would finally like to point out only one further parallel,which has not been adequately considered even by Gordon Baker andwhich seems to me important for an appropriate understanding of Witt-genstein’s philosophical method as a whole. It is that both in philosophyand in psychoanalysis it is not really the raising to consciousness of theunconscious as such that is decisive for the solution of problems, but rath-er the work of overcoming the resistances that prevent the suppressed frombecoming conscious in both fields. Philosophy and psychoanalysis, there-fore, must both be conceived as enduring therapeutic activities strugglingagainst certain resistances which prevent a person from dissolving hisproblems by independent conscious effort.

26 cf. Freud, “The Dynamics of Transference”, in: Freud 1974, vol. 12, p. 106.


To begin with, within the process of psychoanalytical treatment theovercoming of resistances is crucial, because, as Freud writes, it is ofcourse not the “ignorance” of the suppressed as such that is “in itself[…] the pathological factor” causing a person’s neurosis, but rather “theroot of this ignorance in his inner resistances ; it was they that first calledthis ignorance into being, and they still maintain it now.”27 As forces ofthe human psyche which are complementary to its suppressing ones, wecall “resistances” all those unconscious mental “forces that oppose thework of recovery”28 on the part of the patient and attempt to sustain ex-isting acts of repression during the therapeutic process. Usually they ap-pear in the course of psychoanalytical treatment when the conversationwith or the interpretation offered by the analyst approaches the sup-pressed causes of illness and they thus become evident as forces opposedto consciousness-raising in various ways, e. g. in the claims of the patient“suddenly” not to remember something or to have lost interest in con-tinuing the treatment as a whole. These forces of resistance can also ex-press themselves, for example, in many forms of refusal to accept inter-pretations or in those forms of transference where the patient, as in theso-called transference love,29 tries to divert attention from the core ofthe problem. “The struggle against all these resistances”, Freud stresses,“is our main work during an analytic treatment”.30

Because in Freud’s experience these forces that maintain existing actsof repression are very strong, the mere consciousness-raising of the sup-pressed in the form of a direct confrontation of the patient with a psycho-analyst’s interpretation is not enough to remove the relevant neuroticsymptom of the patient. Even if the analyst were to guess in the first ses-sion of a treament the problems that the neurotic patient had suppressedinto the unconscious and were to present the patient with his interpreta-tion in order to shorten the therapy process, this would not lead to anymitigation of the symptoms. According to Freud, a procedure of this sortmight have just “as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illness asa distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger”31, viz.none at all ! On the contrary, there is a real fear that a therapeutic proce-

27 Freud, “Wild’ Psycho-Analysis”, in: Freud 1974, vol.11, p. 225.28 Freud, “Lay Analysis”, 223.29 cf. Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love”, in Freud 1974, vol. 12, p.

157 ff.30 Freud, “Lay Analysis”, 224.31 Freud, “Wild’ Psycho-Analysis”, in: Freud 1974, vol.11, p. 225.


dure of this sort, which in Freud’s opinion represents a “bad mistake” intreatment32, will merely strengthen the resistances of the patient. There-fore the resistances of the patient are the first thing to be overcome in thecourse of the treatment and this must be done in such a way that he isable to become aware of his repression on his own as he works to getan accurate view of his problem. Only then can Breuer’s original insightbegin to take hold.

For Wittgenstein’s project of removing a person’s anxiety caused byphilosophical confusion, the situation is quite similar. As he sees it, itis of no help in philosophy to directly confront the philosophically con-fused with a false analogy and, for example, to tell openly the person whowants to understand verbs such as “to think”, “to know” or “to mean” asreferring to “internal processes” that he is mistaken. Those who considerthese verbs to refer to internal processes are not likely to be impressed,since in philosophy too it is primarily a matter of overcoming “resistan-ces” (BT, 406)33 that stand in the way of a change of the viewpoint of aconceptually confused person, as Wittgenstein had discovered for himself.Actually, he had experienced the phenomenon of resistance in September1929 as active in his own philosophical writing: “I feel in myself a Freu-dian resistance to finding the truth”, he wrote, since he recognised its ef-fect in his acute dissatisfaction with his own sentences that pointed in thedirection of truth: “When I write a sentence unwillingly,” he notes in thecontext of this self-observation,

with the feeling that it is stupid or repellent to me, it is normally preciselythe sentence that makes a major contribution towards arriving at thetruth. When I feel almost embarrassed to write something down, it is nor-mally something very important. (MS 107: 100)

And this experience with his own philosophical writing caused him, asone may suppose, to say in general in the Big Typescript that the findingof philosophical truth was often confronted by resistances. Independentlyof Freud’s genuine concept of “resistance”, however, he (now) describedthem as “resistance[s] of the will” (BT, 406), because he thought thatthey could be attributed in philosophy to a discrepancy between an “un-derstanding” of the world, which in itself is unproblematic, and thatwhich “most people want to see” in the light of their language and habits

32 Freud, “Lay Analysis”, 220.33 Gordon Baker has also rightly emphasised that Wittgenstein really uses psycho-

analytcal vocabulary when he speaks of “resistances” in the above mentioned pas-sage in a subtitle of the Big Typescript. cf. Baker 2006, 160.


of thought (BT, 406 f.), a discrepancy of which there is no mention inFreud. But despite the justification for the virulence of philosophical re-sistances, which differs from Freud, Wittgenstein remains clearly on theFreudian path when he says that overcoming resistances is the real “diffi-culty of philosophy” (ibid).

How can these resistances be overcome in practice, for example, in aconversation with somebody philosophically confused, who thinks that asentence such as “The nothing noths” (D, 69) really is a meaningful ut-terance? As we have seen, it clearly makes no sense at all to confront himdirectly with the argument that his sentence – according to the standardsof ordinary everyday speech – is meaningless. This may be true, but theargument, so directly expressed, will tend rather to reinforce his resist-ance. For him the sentence is by no means meaninglesss, but articulates– as he will possibly maintain – a profound, let us say metaphysical, in-sight. Rather, for someone to abandon such metaphysical utterances it isnecessary to confront him with the unconsciously effective similes or falseanalogies that influence his sentences; i. e. “to make a tracing of the phys-iognomy of every error” (BT, 410), so that the conceptually confused per-son can recognise the false simile and acknowledge it as the source of histhinking. Then he will perhaps abandon his resistance. As Wittgensteinexplains in particular in the Dictation for Schlick, in which he moststrongly emphasised the analogous nature of psychoanalysis and philoso-phy, one has, in the face of a sentence such as “Nothing noths” first toask, in order “to do it justice”: “What did the author have in mindwith this proposition? Where did he get this proposition from?” (D,69) And then one may possibly arrive at the answer:

Anyone who speaks of the opposition of being and the nothing, and of thenothing as something primary in contrast to negation, has in mind, I think, apicture of an island which is being washed by an infinite ocean of the noth-ing. Whatever we throw into this ocean will be dissolved in water and anni-hilated. But the ocean itself is endlessly restless, like the waves on the sea. Itexists, it is, and we say: “it noths” (ibid.).

But whatever explanation one finds for an expression like “Nothingnoths”: whoever uses such a sentence does not have to admit that itsform of expression is based on such an image, or in the words of Witt-genstein, such a simile. For how “is it possible to demonstrate to someonethat this simile is actually the correct one?” (ibid.) How can one showsomeone that he was really guided by this image? “This cannot beshown at all.” (ibid.) And so there is no alternative, according to Wittgen-stein, but to continue to try to overcome the resistance of the metaphysi-


cally disoriented and change his point of view. In his exposition in theDictation for Schlick this happens primarily through questions that aremeant to get the metaphysician to give an account of his form of expres-sion himself :

If someone says: “Nothing noths”, then we can say to this, in the style of ourway considering things: Very well, what are we to do with this proposition?That is to say, what follows from it and from what does it follow? From whatexperiences can we establish it? Or from none at all? What is its role? Is it aproposition of science? And what position does it occupy in the structure ofscience? That of a foundation stone on which other building-blocks rest? Orhas it the position of an argument? (D, 73).

And so on. In all these questions Wittgenstein is above all concerned withits resistance-destroying effect and less with the answers in detail. He goeson: “I am ready to go along with anything” (ibid.), whatever the answermay be. “I have nothing against your attaching an idle wheel to the mech-anism of our language,” he says to his metaphysically inclined conversa-tional partner, “but I do want to know wether it is idling or with whatother wheels it is engaged.” (ibid.) According to the answer one canthen decide how and in which direction philosophical therapy can becontinued.

I will now desist from speculating on the question of how Wittgen-stein may have imagined in detail a psychoanalytical approach in philos-ophy, since it is not clear in which writings of what period he himselfwould really have asserted the parallels between language analysis andpsychoanalysis. Can one, for example, say of the whole philosophicalproject that took shape from November 1936 as Philosophical Investiga-tions and lasted to the end of his life, that the activity of philosophicalanalysis is regarded here as similar to psychoanalysis? Answers to thisquestion are difficult and – irrespective of how they come out – alwaysspeculative. The fact is – as mentioned above – that Wittgenstein neverspoke of corresponding analogies in writings after 1938. In reality thelater versions of the Philosophical Investigations are characterised notleast by the fact that Wittgenstein increasingly dilutes general methodo-logical reflections, as we find them in the first half of the Thirties, to suchan extent that his understanding of philosophy remains unclear for areader who knows only the later texts. But at least in one passage ofthe late version of his Investigations one finds the following: “The philos-opher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness” (PI255). And it seems to me fairly improbable that the comparison of phil-osophical activity with the medical treament of an illness, which Wittgen-


stein is looking at in this passage, is now suddenly meant to be a compar-ison with the work of the surgeon, who removes a philosophical problemlike a cancerous tumour. On the contrary, one might well argue that theattending physician here too is still the psychoanalyst. But it would benecessary to find appropriate evidence in the late writings of Wittgen-stein.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Philosophical Investigations. The German Text, with aRevised English Translation. Edited by Gertrude E. M. Anscombe andRush Rhees, Oxford 2001. [= PI]

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–: Dictation for Schlick, in: The Voices of Wittgenstein. The Vienna Circle.Edited by Gordon Baker, London 2003. [= D]


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