ABSTRACT
The author, who has been working for some years on the concept of 'figuration', proposes in this chapter to shed light on an essential aspect of Freud's epistemology—that of its being closely linked with inner experience. Canestri's paper discusses Freud's method of investigation and the significance to be attributed from this point of view to the presence of themes and reflections about Judaism in Freud's writing.
'Freud's writings', writes Canestri, 'have the merit of corresponding, usually, to the patients' own words. They preserve, to a great extent in some cases, substantial evidence of the processes giving rise to these accounts. They function as constructs that repeat [Wiederholt], in their "becoming", the motivational processes that oriented the author, the repressions and the returning of repressed object that conceded to hypothesis, and sometimes to myth and fiction, the place due to the supposed truth of what had been repressed, so following the rigid logic of deforming tendencies [enstellenden Tendenzen] that are constantly at work.' In this sense, the presence 118of Jewish fantasies in Freud's writings, like some of his rash Investigations In other areas of the subject, may be re-Interpreted, apart from the results obtained in the specific field being dealt with, as 'figurations' and 'exemplifying constructs' of a logic of research founded on the hybridization of scientific elaboration and literary elaboration, of speculative inclinations and merciless factual criticism, of reasoning and imagination, scientific reason and scientific Imagination, the logic of discovery and the logic of justification: a synthesis that could be given the name, as the author concludes, of Lakatos's term, 'heuristics'.
[ED.]
