John Stuart Mill Translated by Siegmund Freud1

Because this topic involves influences and associations of ideas, and because that is notoriously imprecise territory, I want at least to start off with a specific date. This is 6 May 1856, and I would like to indicate that this date has a peculiar significance for Freud's pre-analytic work. For 6 May 1856 was the day on which the famous Scottish philosopher Sir William Hamilton died.

There are only two books by J.S. Mill in Freud's library in London. One is the volume of Freud's translations of Mill done for Theodor Gomperz, the editor of Mill's works in German (Mill 1880). I shall return to that later. The other is Mill's An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy. Now, although Freud did not literally translate this book, in a metaphorical sense certain ideas found in it were to be ‘translated’ into Freud's idiom.

Mill's book on Hamilton was published in 1865, but Freud's copy is the 6th edition, published in 1889: he was to use it as part of his background reading for On Aphasia, where he cites it, together with Mill's System of Logic, in part VI, referring especially to the chapter ‘Of the Things Denoted by Names’ in Mill's System of Logic (Freud 1992, p. 122). In the aphasia study Freud is at that point discussing the idea that the word acquires meaning by being linked to an objectpresentation, and this object-presentation borrows its verisimilitude only from an assumed chain of associations. Now these ideas of object- and word-presentation, first presented in On Aphasia, are to recur in ‘The Unconscious’ as the traits differentiating conscious from unconscious mental activity. Hence this philosophical (or linguistic) notion is of vital significance.

What we see here is an interaction between language and consciousness that impinges on one of the 19th century philosophical debates that Mill examines in his book on Hamilton -for example in his discussion of the dispute between Nominalists (who denied general substance and held there was nothin