Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious by Jacques Bouveresse translated by Carol Cosman. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1995,  xx + 143 pp., $19.95.

Wisdom is something I would never expect from Freud. Cleverness, certainly; but not wisdom.

Freud predicted that philosophers would never take psychoanalysis seriously but would endlessly point out the inferiority of its subject matter. In general, his prediction has been correct, but not for the reasons he expected. Philosophers of every stripe, from Sartre and Merleau Ponty through Grünbaum, have been impatient with and dismissive of Freud's claims that psychoanalysis is an empirical science. It may therefore seem unsurprising, and scarcely worth a book, that Ludwig Wittgenstein, seen by many as the most important of 20th-century philosophers, should have offered a similar critique.

But Wittgenstein was always surprising, and this book amply repays close study by anyone seriously interested in philosophy or psychoanalysis. The first surprise, for anyone who does not know Wittgenstein's work or background well, is that he was fascinated by psychoanalysis and often called himself a “disciple” or “follower” of Freud. His critique has a quality of disappointment in someone he thought could have done much better, a creative thinker who failed in the discipline of careful thought. The second is that Wittgenstein's critique was directed to the ways in which he thought Freud misunderstood or misrepresented his own project of interpretive understanding and created instead a popular mythology with a powerful attraction. Wittgenstein grew up in Freud's Vienna, where psychoanalysis was a constant topic of conversation and a matter of fierce attachments (Freud had analyzed Wittgenstein's sister). Where Freud often complained of the resistance his ideas met, Wittgenstein observed that attributing one's problems