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For a long time I've wondered how one might reconcile two seemingly disparate approaches to the unconscious: that of Freud and that of Proust. Now comes an interesting approach that might possibly move toward such a reconciliation, but one that may well involve some serious rethinking and reorientation. One of the pleasures of intellectual growth is divesting oneself of various prejudices of one's youth, such as that Puccini's music is just gorgeous schmaltz, Horowitz and Rubinstein were merely mindless technicians, Tchaikovsky's music just lush romanticism. It may also be that we will have to come to terms with some thinkers regarded, at least by the more positivistic among us, as “undisciplined mystics”: Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Jaspers, even Merleau-Ponty. These thinkers may yet have much to say to us.
There has been a mythological and distorted notion of psychoanalysis (to which psychoanalysis has itself often contributed) in which it is regarded as a discourse capable of expressing—without residual—the truth. This ingenuous, deterministic vision of psychoanalysis has had its proponents. Some may once have thought of psychoanalysis as an exquisite instrument to delve into the past of a human being, an instrument that allowed one to recover an individual's past wie es eigentlich gewesen ist—as it actually was. But even Freud, the determinist, the positivist, the arriviste would-be scientist, who at times seemed to think he had truth by the tail, gave up at certain points, for he not only acknowledged the biological bedrock, the uncanny, the inscrutable, the limits of analyzability, interminable analysis, and the tentative nature of his theories, but was even tempted by parapsychology and phylogenetic explanations.