Roy
Harris
Online
Integrating Freud
Is it possible to construct an integrationist reading of Freud? The obvious point of contact would be between (i) Freud’s doctrine of the unconscious mind and its manifestations in linguistic performance, and (ii) the integrationist tenet that the meaning of a sign arises from the contextualized integration of particular activities in the communicational process.
Freud himself seems to have had no difficulty in accepting the popular version of the language myth current in his day; but, arguably, he ought to have realized that it did not square at all with his own teachings on the subject of parapraxis (Fehlleistung). In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1st edn 1901) he discusses numerous examples of ‘functional breakdown’ in the production of speech and writing, but his first mention of the topic seems to be in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess of 1898.
The first instance that appears to have focussed Freud’s attention on the subject was one occasion in conversation, while travelling in Dalmatia, when he found himself unable to remember the name of the artist who painted the famous frescoes in Orvieto cathedral. Instead of Signorelli, the names which came to mind (but which he knew to be incorrect) were Botticelli and Boltraffio. The explanation of this ‘misremembering’ is discussed at length in the first chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (‘Forgetting of proper names’).
The utter triviality of the episode and the fact that nothing at all
‘depended on it’ make it, for Freud, of the utmost significance,
as bearing out his contention that every mental event has a cause. There
must not only have been a reason why he ‘forgot’ the name
Signorelli, but also reasons why the names Botticelli and Boltraffio came
to mind instead, even though they were known to be wrong.
Freud’s explanation is that in the conversation immediately preceding
his failure to recall the name Signorelli, he remembered telling his travelling
companion an anecdote about the attitude of the Turks living in Bosnia
and Herzogovina towards doctors. The Bosnian Turks, according to a colleague
of Freud’s who practised in the region, always had great respect
for their doctor (whom they addressed as ‘Sir’ [‘Herr’]),
combined with resigned acceptance of fate. If nothing could be done for
a sick person, they would say: ‘Sir, what is there to be said? If
he could be saved, I know you would have saved him.’
Freud also remembered a second anecdote about these Turks, which he had decided not to tell his travelling companion, because it concerned the high value placed on leading an active sexual life. A third component of Freud’s explanation, although he did not recall it at the time, was that a few weeks previously, while staying at the village of Trafoi in the Tyrol, he had received the news that one of his patients suffering from an incurable sexual disorder had committed suicide.
By connecting these three items, Freud arrived at the following explanatory account. The name Signorelli had been ‘forgotten’ because the first two syllables form the Italian equivalent of Herr, which is also homophonic with the first syllable of Herzogovina, which in that context was associated with the suppressed anecdote about the Turks. The two ‘substitute’ names, Botticelli and Boltraffio, were selected because both begin with syllables similar to the first syllable of Bosnia, and the end of Boltraffio sounds like Trafoi. Thus underlying these substitutions (paramnesia) lay repressed thoughts about death and sex.
The logic of this explanation is bizarre, to say the least. It is difficult to see why Signorelli should be suppressed when Herr and Herzogovina had already been ‘allowed’ in the preceding conversation, since the ‘substitutes’ for Signorelli likewise evoked connexions with the ‘forbidden’ place names Bosnia (because of the sexual proclivities of the Turks of that region) and Trafoi (because there Freud had learnt of the death of his patient).
Freud chooses to ignore some obvious features of the case; e.g. that Botticelli rhymes with Signorelli, and that although Botticelli and Boltraffio were the ‘wrong’ artists, they were not wildly inappropriate choices. (All three were well-known Italian painters and almost exact contemporaries.)
However, the general point relevant here is that, according to Freud, contextualization may involve mental activities which do not spontaneously rise to the level of consciousness, but which nevertheless determine the selection of a sign. In this context, for whatever reason, Botticelli and Boltraffio were candidate substitutes for Signorelli. Furthermore, in order to explain the paramnesia, the incident has to be contextualized not only by reference to the immediately preceding (apparently unconnected) conversation, but to a quite unrelated incident some weeks before. If such disparate circumstantial factors can affect the selection of a sign, it seems obvious that they can also influence the interpretation of a sign. From an integrationist perspective, there is nothing implausible in principle in any of this. There may well be unconscious mental activities involved in any integrational process. What is interesting is that Freud fails to see the consequences that his explanation has for the theory of proper names. His account is clearly based on the traditional reocentric assumption that the name stands proxy for its (real-life) bearer. What would fit Freud’s scenario better, however, is the psychocentric alternative that Russell was to propose a few years later, to the effect that names are ‘abbreviations for descriptions’ (Russell 1918: 200). Freud might have taken this one stage further and added that the descriptions involved are not just overt and conscious descriptions of the kind Russell had in mind (e.g. Aristotle means ‘the pupil of Plato and tutor of Alexander’), but may foreground associations to which the speaker would not consciously attach much importance. Accordingly, in certain contexts, the name Botticelli may mean e.g. ‘the Italian Renaissance painter whose name is somewhat similar to that of the artist who painted the frescoes at Orvieto’.
If someone says ‘Botticelli painted the frescoes at Orvieto’, we are perhaps tempted either to think that he is very badly informed about art history, or else to say, condescendingly, ‘Of course, he means Signorelli’. But he may not ‘mean Signorelli’ at all. Nor, indeed, must he ‘mean Botticelli’ either – at least, not what his interlocutor means by Botticelli.
REFERENCES
Freud, S. (1901), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans.
A. Tyson, Harmondsworth, Penguin,1971.
Russell, B.A.W. (1918), The Philosophy of Logical Atomism. Repr.
in Logic and Knowledge, ed. R.C. Marsh, London, Routledge, 1992, pp.177-281.
