Wittgenstein and Lacan Reading Freud

Abstract

The author compares Lacan’s (whose paradigm is essentially Hegelian-Heideggerian) reading of Freud with the apparently opposite—and substantially negative—remarks by Wittgenstein on Freud: the author highlights some surprising convergences and congruities between these two so different approaches. In fact, either Wittgenstein and Lacan embody a “linguistic turn” in the thought of the second half of the 20th century, which took place both in analytic philosophy and in so-called Continental Theory. In particular, both Wittgenstein and Lacan share an anti-psychological and anti-cognitivist view in a wide sense: both reject the idea that a scientific knowledge of the mind would be possible. In that perspective, psychoanalytic activity has nothing to do with some technological application of a scientific theory on a special object (mind): it is rather a practice (a linguistic game in Wittgenstein, an ethical praxis for Lacan) which has the same nature of its object: every subject, interpreting one’s own experience through language (always public according to Wittgenstein, always the Other’s according to Lacan), alienates and represses this primal experience, the event (tuche) of which the psychic processes are at once the repetition and the loss.

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