Book Review: Wittgenstein and Psychoanalysis

At first glance Wittgenstein's philosophy does not fit easily into the existential tradition, though Gordon Bearn's recent Waking to Wonders: Wittgenstein's Existential Investigations has shifted some boundaries. Nor is the Austrian philosopher formally linked to the phenomenological school, though few have been more rigorous than Wittgenstein in their attempts to stay with experience and avoid theorising. As he put it 'we must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place'. While Platonists and behaviourists have also laid claim to his memory, he remains stubbornly his own man. Like Heidegger, he did not believe that we could come understand the world in terms of some imagined meta-theory, but only through the 'simple' fact of human embodiment. His route was a rigorous examination of everything that we said and did. On this journey we were constantly 'bewitched by language'. Frequently we allow ourselves to be lulled by the Sirens of science into making statements about the world which generally reflected nothing but a need for satisfying theories.

While a distrust of 'theory' is an obvious point of contact with many existential writers, Wittgenstein's rejection of it is much more radical than most existentialists. Theories, schools of thought, formal philosophies, could all attract his scorn. For him they tended to kill direct engagement with a problem. Belong to a school, and before long you're saying 'but it must be this way'. For Wittgenstein, such a claim merely identified the point at which the speaker had given up thinking.

In Wittgenstein and Psychoanalysis John Heaton encapsulates Wittgenstein's own method of thinking by showing us his engagement with the work of Freud. Wittgenstein was one of the few philosophers who studied Freud's writing, applied it to himself and his dreams, and offered a critique of some key points. The consequence is a challenge to Freud's way of thinking (it must be the unconscious, castration anxiety, etc.) more profound than the many of the recently published, high profile attempts at demolishing the foundations of psychoanalysis.

Heaton's brief book is no Cruise missile. He does not assemble an army of facts to destroy the citadel blow by blow. Instead, with a simplicity and clarity of writing that should be the paradigm for such work, he lays Wittgenstein's charges against the foundations and asks us to stand back and watch. The effect is illuminating.

Heaton demonstrates something more important than the claim that many psychoanalysts are not doing what they say they are doing. He shows that they couldn't do it anyway. Some of their key ideas are shown to be rooted in sand, in ways of thinking and talking that confuse metaphor with fact. Too often psychoanalysis seeks a bottom line that simply isn't there, nor could be. Words like 'cause' and 'reason' are often conflated in a search for knowledge, and much confusion exists around what it is possible to know. As much of psychoanalysis (and many other therapies) is based on supposed conflicts between what we know, and what we do not know, the matter of what it is possible to know is so often overlooked. Here it isn't.

Along with discussions on knowledge, Heaton brings Wittgenstein's ideas to bear on the subjects of free association, ritual, dreams, theory, and the self, which demonstrate the essential quality of his subject's thought. Each section brings its own challenges to conventional wisdom, and reminds us to think a little more carefully about how the world 'must' be. For psychotherapists of any persuasion, this book is the ideal introduction to Wittgenstein's engagement with psychology. As he put it, 'anything that can be said, can be said clearly. For these qualities alone it cannot be too strongly recommended. Alas, it is constrained in size by the format of the series, and the reader is left wanting more. Hopefully, the wait will not be too long.

Mike Harding