Philology

Abstract

By now, our discussion has given rise to a backlog of only partially answered questions. Let us try to make some of them explicit. If psychoanalysis was at its inception so much concerned with language, what were its relations with those sciences whose explicit aim was the study of language? A reading of any psychoanalytic work of Freud’s — a dream-analysis, a case-history — would convince us of the great seriousness and importance attached to a playing with words, to plays on words, to the veering off of meaning that every analysis reveals. Was this preoccupation something to do with Freud’s own individual make-up, his own mental bent? Was it something peculiar to him that allowed all these clevernesses? One answer would perhaps be that all ‘that’ is a necessary consequence of the nature of the unconscious, so that we can attribute the uncomfortable preponderance of what has to do with words over what has to do with things to the hegemony of the unconscious that the first psychoanalyst was the first to discover. Or are we to look elsewhere for the capacity to perceive as significant such irresponsible playing with words?

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth and things are the sons of heaven.

Dr Johnson¹

How can man be the subject of a language that for thousands of years has been formed without him, a language whose organization escapes him, whose meaning sleeps an almost invincible sleep in the words he momentarily activates by means of discourse, and within which he is obliged, from the very outset, to lodge his speech and thought, as though they were doing no more than animate, for a brief period, one segment of that web of innumerable possibilities?

Michel Foucault (1966/70) p. 323