Freud's theoretical imagination

Résumé du document

When we discuss Freud's 'psychoanalysis as a human science', it is very tempting to rush for a definition as to what human science is, that is, a definition that could encompass the different ways of doing history, the various ways of doing sociology, psychology, etc. You understand by now that there is no such definition and we can be glad there is no such thing. There is a short step from definition to exclusion, and Freud himself did a lot a defining and excluding. What we can do however, is try to understand Freud's special way of 'doing science' and this is what we are going to do. In a letter to his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess dated February 1st 1900, Freud wrote something that announces Freud's relationship to established science and to the institutional keepers of orthodoxy was going to be somewhat difficult, "I am actually not a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador, an adventurer if you want it translated, with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort".

Extraits

[...] In other words, it means that the unconscious is not equipped with a test of historical reality so that in the unconscious, there is no difference between historical truth and a fiction cathected (invested) with affect. The changes that affected theory had considerable consequences on the way Freud described his way of doing science. To describe his work, Freud added a metaphor to those already mentioned. He compared analysis to a chess game. Such metaphor is not new for Freud. He had used it in his Studies on Hysteria (1895) and alluded to an unconscious intelligence that the analyst must overcome. [...]

[...] When one thinks of the institutional consequences of one's works, such a reference is not anecdotic. Freud never held a tenured university position and think what happened to Galileo! Freud was not content to stress the importance of subjectivity in scientific activity. He thought that his discovery of the unconscious was an onslaught on positivism. At times, such a posture verges on provocation. In his new introductory lecture on “Anxiety and Instinctual he wrote that theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology”. [...]

[...] Freud's works have always been at odds with the prevailing thoughts of his time. Today, the prevailing mood makes Freud's thought sounds like a testimony of a forgotten world: our intellectual and cultural diet is very different from a time when the average honnête homme could read the classics in the original language, was thoroughly conversant with Goethe and Shakespeare and believed in the lofty ideals of humanism. can wonder to what extent truth, as a mental category, may not depend on an intellectual system and on material and social life”. [...]

[...] Another reference to this human faculty will help us draw a provisional conclusion about it. It is taken from Freud's text on Moses and the origins of monotheism: thought has upheld its liberty to discover dependent relations and connections to which there is nothing corresponding in reality; and it clearly sets a very high value on this gift, since it makes such copious use of it both inside and outside of science” (52). Such a quotation points to two different directions: first, it seems to suggest that Freud believed that truth is a matter of correspondence with reality. [...]

[...] Freud implicitly relies on a historical model, that is, the model provided by positivistic history. Freud's reliance on the historical model is largely illustrated by his early description of the unconscious as archives and of his work as consisting in a search for a missing document. The object of analytic inquiry is something to be found, there seems to be no need for a process of interpretation. The same positivistic mood prevails over historical practice as defined by Ranke. Ranke is the historian who asserted that the role of history was to find things they really happened”. [...]