Picturing the Freudian Unconscious

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein remarks: “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.” His most obvious point, by now a well-established doctrine, was that, broadly speaking, our knowledge of other minds depends upon (or perhaps even amounts to) our familiarity with bodily behavior. But his remark may also be taken to refer to some facts which Freud, I believe, was the first to make explicit and interpret, viz: first, that we tend, when thinking of our own mind, to form a picture of it; second, that, when we picture it, we picture it as a spatial entity; and third, that the spatial nature of the mind is modelled after the projective spatialization of our own body. (This second interpretation of the remark starts from “the other side”; whereas the first approaches the mind inside, as it were, from outside it, the second considers the mind by looking outside from within it.) Thus, you might say that we tend to re-present our mind to ourselves in terms of an introjected (narcissisically consumed?) body image.

Although both Freud and Wittgenstein recognized the pathology inherent in this introjection and explicitly marked it off as a serious problem, neither seems to have devoted enough attention to the issue. Freud, for example, never completely freed himself from theorizing a crudely spatial (topographical) re-presentation of the unconscious. Nor did he sufficiently appreciate the extent to which our natural tendency to re-present consciousness to ourselves in this manner is symptomatic of a profound, if virtually universal, pathology. (Psychosis, and in particular, schizophrenia, would seem to be the most extreme case of such internalized metaphorical re-presentation.) Indeed, we might even conclude that the topographic notion of the unconscious, insofar as it rests upon this “false” re-presentation, is in its very nature a form of self-deception. And, if we were so to conclude, Freud's theory of mind, his metapsychology, would be seen as an ac