You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In a course on listening that I teach at NYU, we begin each year with Freud—the case of Fraulein Elisabeth von R. from Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud 1893-1895). It has become a Baedeker for my students, a guide they can follow as they embark on a journey of psychological inquiry, aided by the exquisite precision with which Freud tracks his own path to discovery and the steps he took in coming to comprehend what were at first mysteries: why Elisabeth suffers great pain in walking and in her own words could not “take a single step forward” (p. 152); why, as he observes along the way, a “group of ideas relating to her love had already been separated from her knowledge” (p. 157); and, lastly, why is it that when Elisabeth claims not to know what is happening to her, in fact she does know (although as Freud notes in the case of Miss Lucy R., she may not know that she knows it (pp. 110-111).
In addition to reading Freud in the first week of the term, we read Piaget's introduction to The Child's Conception of the World (1926), where he argues that only by using a clinical method can we come to know another person's way of conceiving the world. And we read Audre Lorde's essay in Sister Outsider (1984), “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.”
In their early work, both Freud and Piaget forged new methods of investigation—free association and the methode clinique. These were tools that could in fact be used to dismantle the master's house, in part by revealing what women know, including about the masters, and also by exposing the master's house for what it is: a construction of reality rather than the repository of truth.