Vico in the Consulting Room

Dear Editor

I was delighted to read Donald Phillip Verene's article, ‘Freud's Consulting Room Archaeology and Vico's Principles of Humanity: A Communication’, in the BJP 13(4), in which he considered some of the intellectual connections between these two original thinkers. I hope that what I add is taken in the spirit in which I intend, namely enthusiasm.

Vico is part of my thinking, and his links with Freud find their expression within my consulting room. In 1728 Vico wrote his Autobiography, and what was revolutionary and original about this work was that he believed that the history of ideas was to be found in the development of the ideas of an individual. He demonstrated his theory of mind in the very writing of his Autobiography. In the consulting room I believe that one of the tasks is to find a way in which the individual can come to know his or her own mind through writing (figuratively) their autobiography. If an individual can come to understand how their beliefs have come about, and trace the development of these beliefs, then something else happens within the mind. Vico was the first Western philosopher to distinguish between two concepts of knowing, which he called the ‘verum-factum’ principle. Put very simply, he suggested that the only knowledge that we could claim to be ‘true’ was to be found within the mind of man. ‘The rule and criterion of truth is to have made it. We can know nothing that we have not made.’ He then went on to say that we do not have such criteria for our knowledge of the natural world for that has been created by God. Now where Vico's ‘verum-factum’ principle impinges upon what happens in the consulting room is that, as the individual ‘writes’ his psycho-biography, the individual indeed comes to know that what is within his or her own mind is self-created. At that moment the terrifying fantasies become part of the creative imagination.

I believe that Vico's theory of mind is truly revolutionary, and moreover that he is one of the fo