ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a set of sketches whose aim will be to cast light upon Ludwig Wittgenstein’s relationship to Freud, to articulate Wittgenstein’s ideas about what madness might be, and to develop his analogy between metaphysics and madness. Wittgenstein believed that madness could be illuminatingly compared and contrasted with normal mistakes. Wittgenstein’s remarks about psychoanalysis, like those of Arthur Schnitzler, are neither voluminous nor systematically developed. Religion is for Wittgenstein the source of color and vitality in life; it is what makes life worth living. For this reason he was anxious not to prejudge the significance of any given development either in society or in individual life. Wittgenstein’s sense of the relationship between language and the world is clearly something to which anyone concerned with the mind should be sensitive. His view that language consists of an interweaving of words and actions is still a radical departure from most views of language.
