Response

I would like to thank Warren for asking me to respond to his very interesting paper and for his encyclopaedic tour of psychoanalysis in search of a bedrock or source to which a symbol might be understood to refer, and to which interpretation might be directed. I notice that there are well over 16 candidates in Warren's inventory.

Rather boringly, I'm afraid, I find myself broadly agreeing with what I think is Warren's conclusion, that there is no bedrock, only a domain of meaning defined by metaphor. I was struck by the quotation from Freud's Outline of Psychoanalysis about the impossibility of knowing ‘what may be supposed to be the real state of affairs’ which must always ‘remain “unknowable”, and about our being unable to free ourselves from the ‘language of our perceptions’. Shortly before I read it, I had quite serendipitously come across a corner of a page of a very old Times Literary Supplement on which I had underlined the following quote from Coleridge's ‘Dejection: an ode’.:

I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life whose fountains are within.

I was wondering if it would be helpful to come at the problem from another angle that would add some support for Warren's conclusions, that any tempting candidate for bedrock reality is by definition debarred whether it be sex, drive, instinct, innate unconscious phantasy or even anything that might be named, such as ‘inchoate experience’.; and at the same time suggest a mechanism whereby it might seem so tempting to insist that one's own particular candidate is that reality. As Warren is predominantly preoccupied with psychoanalytic writers, I will be arguing from psychoanalytic premises.