Psychopathology, Metaphysics

In his essay “Différance” (1982), Derrida lists Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger as having made the most powerful contributions to the general effort of understanding how metaphysics “programs” all thought. This effort, sometimes called “deconstruction” by Derrida, involves both teasing out the philosophical implications of even the most purportedly anti-philosophical thought, and opening other kinds of thinking through such analysis. In their various ways, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger shared an understanding that metaphysics assumes consciousness present to itself to be unquestionable. Their respective challenges to the self-evidence of consciousness are what made them all challenge metaphysical thinking as such. Inevitably, as Derrida has shown on many occasions, such challenges themselves also blindly repeat metaphysical modes of thought. Derrida reads Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger in order to gain new understanding from the tension points at which anti-metaphysical thought also repeats metaphysics.

The major thrust of this essay is to demonstrate how such an approach clarifies the practice of psychoanalysis. From very early on, Freud understood that his clinical investigations of neurosis and its treatment demanded “a psychology of a kind for which philosophers have done little to prepare the way” (1896, 219). Philosophy could not prepare the way precisely because of its stress on consciousness. Such a limitation had to put Freud's venture in a “deconstructive” relation with philosophy, if the new kind of thought necessary to understand psychopathology was to become possible. Freud's intuition that he could find in Nietzsche “words for much that remains mute in me” (letter of February 1, 1900; 1985, 398) emphasizes the necessity of conceptualizing clinical concerns and the general delimitation of philosophy together. But Freud seems to have left this question only at the