Wittgenstein and Lacan Reading Freud

The author compares Lacan’s reading of Freud (which follows an essentially Hegelian-Heideggerian paradigm) with the apparently opposite—and substantially negative—remarks by Wittgenstein on Freud: the author highlights some surprising convergences and congruities between these two highly different approaches. In fact, both Wittgenstein and Lacan embody a “linguistic turn” in latter 20th century thought, which took place both in analytic philosophy and in so-called Continental Theory. In particular, Wittgenstein and Lacan share an anti-psychological and anti-cognitivist view in a broad sense: both reject the idea that a scientific knowledge of the mind is possible. In that perspective, psychoanalytic activity has nothing to do with the technological application of a scientific theory to a special object (mind): it is rather a practice (a linguistic game in Wittgenstein, an ethical praxis for Lacan) which has the same nature of its object: every subject, in interpreting her own experience through language (which is always public according to Wittgenstein, always the Other’s according to Lacan), alienates and represses this primal experience, the event (tuche) of which the psychic processes are at once the repetition and the loss.