The unconscious being unknowable, how can the psychoanalyst be certain that the memory he recovers with the help of hypnosis is real, or that his interpretations of the patient’s free associations are correct? How, in other words, can his theories be validated? The patient’s assent or dissent cannot be trusted in this regard since the theory predicts that he or she will “resist” the unveiling of the repressed, as illustrated by the “Dora” case. The scientific controversy that is the analytic cure cannot come to a conclusion since it takes the form of an analysis of resistance to analysis, more specifically, of an analysis of patients’ positive or negative transference onto the analyst. Even a confirmation by the patient of the analyst’s interpretations is not going to settle the matter since it might be yet another ruse of transference resistance. In the end, it is the analyst who decides whether the interpretation – and the theory behind it – is correct or not. Hence the crucial importance in psychoanalytic theory of Freud’s “self-analysis,” since it – and it only – guarantees that the founder initially gained unfettered access to the unconscious.

After the biological turn of the Fliess years, the key word in psychoanalysis is no longer “trauma” but “drive.” The ultimate cause of neurotic disorders is no longer to be found in an external accident but in internal, hereditary instincts that repeat, in a compulsive and reflex way, the history of life and the species. As a result, everything that was previously described in terms of neuro-physio-psychological conflicts (desire/defense, will/counter-will, repression/return of the repressed, etc.) is henceforth interpreted as expressing conflicts between biological drives: sexual drive (reproductive instinct)/ego drive (self-preservation instinct); object (erotic) libido/ego (narcissistic) libido; and finally, life drive/death drive, Eros/Thanatos. Freud’s metapsychology is a speculative metabiology.

Freud very quickly complemented his psychobiology with a sociobiological theory of culture and society. As early as 1897, he rooted the psychological phenomenon of repression (shame, disgust) in what he called a “primary,” “organic” repression that corresponded in the history of the species to the adoption of the erect stature and the abandonment of the oral-anal-urethral zones as sources of sexual excitement. To this biological origin of the civilizing process, Freud added in Totem and Taboo the murder and cannibalistic incorporation of the “primal father,” an event supposed to account at the collective, phylogenetic level for the prohibition of incest, and at the individual, ontogenetic level for the “decline” of the Oedipus complex during the latency phase of the libido and the corresponding emergence of an internal “superego.” The whole development of culture is thus viewed by Freud as a constant recapitulation and commemoration of this guilt-producing event whose unconscious memory is imprinted in the “archaic heritage” of the human race and transmitted compulsively through the generations, in conformity with Lamarck’s theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics.

What kind of discourse was Freud’s psychoanalysis? A typical late-nineteenth-century positivist, Freud claimed that it is was a scientific, empirical psychology based on the always revisable observation of clinical data and distinguished it sharply from the a priori, meta-physical “speculations” of philosophy. Except that the ultimate object of psychoanalysis, the unconscious, is by definition beyond consciousness and therefore also beyond observation. So what distinguishes Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretations and “constructions” from philosophical speculations? In the end, what distinguishes his “metapsychology that leads behind consciousness” from a metaphysics? This is the question that this book attempts to answer by following Freud’s way of thinking, step by step and as closely as possible to the texts.

Freud is not the first to have admitted the existence of unconscious psychic processes. Since the discovery of the reflex function of the spinal cord, many researchers had speculated that this reflex action also extended to the higher areas of the nervous system. For these psychophysiologists, reflex action is the very foundation of psychic activity, and consciousness (the ego) emerges from a background of unconscious automatisms that it inhibits, delays, and represses. Freud inherited this notion from Charcot who postulated that hysteria and hypnosis were a regression to this “unconscious cerebration” caused by a “traumatic shock.” This was the starting point of Freud’s initial theorization of the “psychical apparatus” as well of his first attempts at a therapy of the neuroses: psychical activity is governed by unconscious “primary processes” that tend towards an immediate “discharge” but are slowed down by the “secondary processes” of the conscious ego; the psychotherapy of the neuroses aims at bringing the unconscious part of the mind under the control of the conscious by lifting the pathogenic repression that caused the “dissociation” of the traumatic memory.

We asked in the introduction whether Freud was a philosopher rather than a scientist. The answer must now be “yes,” despite Freud’s many protests to the contrary. Frank Sulloway describes Freudian psychoanalysis as a cryptobiology, meaning that it is a biological theory presented in the form of psychology. It should be added that this cryptobiology is even more profoundly a cryptophilosophy, a speculative philosophy of nature built from evolutionary postulates borrowed from the biology of the time and placed on clinical material in an entirely a priori way to guarantee the internal coherence of the system Freud was building.

Starting from the mid-1890s, Freud assumed that the trauma whose memory was repressed by neurotics was of a sexual nature. More specifically, he claimed to obtain from his patients’ memories of sexual abuse suffered in early childhood at the hands of an adult pervert, most of the time the father. In late 1897, he abandoned this “seduction theory,” having realized, he said, that his patients’ memories were in fact fantasies expressing an infantile sexual wish to be fondled by a parent. This reversal, which marks the beginning of Freud’s theories about infantile perverse sexuality and the Oedipus complex, was due to his adoption of his friend Wilhelm Fliess’ speculations regarding biorythms, themselves based on Ernst Haeckel’s “biogenetic law”: the individual development (ontogenesis) of an organism recapitulates the development of the species (phylogenesis). Hence Freud’s theory of the various stages (oral, anal, phallic, etc.) of libidinal development, which was not based, as he claimed in the “Little Hans” case, on an empirical investigation of children’s sexuality but on purely speculative (and since then debunked) biological assumptions.

This chapter is based on the proposition that translation is about the extension of one language by another, not about the provision of a replacement text; translation is not about interpretation but about inhabitation. The chapter critically reviews different perspectives on interpretation, particularly those supplied by the diachronic and synchronic, by universality and totality, by the signifier and the signified. Our meanings are always just beyond us, in intentions to mean. The chapter goes on to consider the status of je/I in speech and the nature of linguistic performance. It ends with a short reflection on translation’s perturbational effects on language.