Reserve on one point

If Freud only wanted to be a moralist (or a healer, it comes down to the same thing), I would be better able to tolerate certain disappointments that his doctrine gives me: this is where it comes to the proper movement of his thought.

*

A young girl's obsession is to carefully prevent the pillow from touching the wood of her bed. Now, Freud first notices that the wood is, for this young girl, male and the pillow female - then, that the wood represents her father and the pillow her mother - finally, that secretly in love with this father, she imagines herself by separating the pillow from the wood performing a magical action, capable of preventing her parents from uniting.

GOOD. Freud, however, reveals to the young girl, or leads her to discover this thought: incest, jealousy. Immediately the obsession disappears; her darkness alone held her together.

(I admit without reservation, while there is time, that psychoanalysis cures. However, it seems that docility is here subject to fashions; and the attachment of patients to their manias or obsessions - this attachment that Freud knows how to describe - could lead them, before long, to discover against this psychoanalysis a system of defense precise and as universal as the singular symbolic words with which they use them all, not having learned them).

*

This is, barely simplified, the typical case of Freudian observation. What does it prove? That the pillow, the wood of the bed, says Freud, can be explained by the previous thought of incest; they are the language that this repressed thought holds.

However, let us now observe the young girl and Freud with the same detachment that Freud did the young girl. This young girl, undoubtedly, treated according to the psychoanalytic method, gradually manages to compose the idea of ​​her incestuous love. This idea, for Freud, abstract and formed in advance, is only imperceptibly extracted from his obsession and the form of the materials of this obsession. It is not a question of incest in general, but of his incest and such that he first makes her aware of his embarrassment, his horror, the wood and the pillow. It is an incest which is a progress of this wood and this pillow, which presupposes them, which is explained by them, far from explaining them. When Freud, however, says that it was with the idea of ​​incest that everything began, what is he doing, placing his own idea, learned and abstract, in the young girl - and wanting a real process of thought to resemble the explanation discovered by a scientist.

Besides, where can you discover this idea? “In the unconscious,” answers Freud. That’s saying little. From the point of view of thought which knows itself and thinks itself (should we have to speak like this?), the pillow explains incest, not incest the pillow. And the snakes, balloons, or cutlasses in dreams could well account for the rod, not the rod of snakes, balloons or cutlasses.

*

— But, said the psychoanalyst, the young girl is cured?
— And can we not be healed as well by the progress of a current idea as by the return of a hidden idea?
— But since so many dreams and delusions express the same concerns?
— The whole thing is to know whether they express them in the sense in which we say that a word expresses a thing, or in the sense in which we say that it expresses a thought. It was possible to admit that low blood pressure led to remorse - and, if you like, that remorse reflected this blood pressure: it would not have been necessary to conclude that there was hidden somewhere in the mind an idea of blood pressure. Don't let a play on words fool us.
— But what if it was useful for healing for the young girl to admit having had, to begin with, the idea of ​​incest?
— No doubt. If Freud only wants to be a moralist, or a healer, I keep silent. Besides, I refuse to choose between the two explanations. Only, they are both possible, I am worried to see that Freud does not see them; I would prefer that he did not stubbornly consider his patients to be misguided scientists.

Finally we can also suppose, without improbability, that the impartial and complete idea of ​​the rod or incestuous love is the least shared thing in the world, that it is more difficult for man to imagine this love than a pillow, and this rod than the snakes, balloons, knives and other objects of the same shape, which the world lends us.

(Text published in Le Disque Vert, 2nd year, 3rd series, 1924, dedicated to Freud and Psychoanalysis)