Freud and the Human Sciences

“What we employed you to find out is why people take him [Freud] so seriously” Figure 1. What the detective finds is that the language, concepts, and categories of psychoanalysis are not just attributes of our everyday contemporary cultural experience but are internal to such experience itself. That is to say, in the words of the savvy detective, buying into the conceptual foundations of psychoanalysis does not require an explicit affirmation of principles but is instead inextricably bound up with our perceptions of ourselves, of others, and of things in the world (“frankly I don't give a damn, but facts are facts and ids are unconscious”). It is not just that psychoanalysis has become part of our culture (an anthropological claim that one might make about any number of things that we spend a significant amount of time talking about). Instead, Freud's redescription of the subject and its relation to a set of social or historical formations should be conceived as having achieved a kind of formal systematic coherence that has both set up completely new laws for the production of statements in the human sciences and become an indispensable cultural form.

Consider briefly the following passage from a popular late twentieth century divination book on the interpretation of dreams:

Taking the dream journey has always made a significant difference in peoples' lives. We can live at the surface or we can go very deeply into our experience to find meaning. To live at the surface is to participate in life without any reflection, having babies, turning out productive work, worrying about issues…. These experiences are real. No one can doubt them, but at the same time they often appear reenacted in dreams. This we call the inner life, as contrasted with the outer life … Reality is where we go from potential to actual. In Dreamwork we bring the potential inherent in the symbol to life. This grounds the symbolic experience in the everyday concrete world… Dreams always tell the truth