ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein’s remarks about Freud amount to no systematic or reasoned criticism of psychoanalysis. Their origin alone explains this. They occur in the course of notes made by Rhees on conversations, or else are scattered through Wittgenstein’s own notebooks at points where he was talking about some general topic – symbolism or myth or science – which also has connections with Freud. (The latter, now printed in Culture and Value (C&V), are more fully authentic and more strikingly expressed and I draw slightly more on them, but readers of Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics (LCA) will not find the picture essentially changed.)
Wittgenstein told Rhees that he first read Freud sometime after 1919. In 1940 he still regarded himself as a disciple or follower of Freud, a claim that has been found surprising, but which I hope to make more plausible. His reading seems to have been in the interpretative works from before the First World War: he quotes the Psychopathology of Everyday Life and (above all) the Interpretation of Dreams. But he will have known a good deal more simply by osmosis. A small example is that Studies in Hysteria was to be found in the libraries of his family and he seems to have formed some idea as to its contents, as appears from the following entry in a 1939 notebook:
I believe that my originality (if that is the right word) is an originality belonging to the soil rather than to the seed. (Perhaps I have no seed of my own.) Sow a seed in my soil and it will grow differently than it would in any other soil.
