Early in his career, Freud ruefully admitted that his case studies read like short stories and lacked the imprint of a legitimate science. Treating him as the subject of an epistemological case study, I diagnose in Freud an unresolved conflict between two competing conceptions of rationality: the Galilean model of the natural sciences and the narrative model appropriate to historical discourse. The procedures and criteria prescribed by the Galilean model could not fulfill the ambitions of psycho…
Read moreEarly in his career, Freud ruefully admitted that his case studies read like short stories and lacked the imprint of a legitimate science. Treating him as the subject of an epistemological case study, I diagnose in Freud an unresolved conflict between two competing conceptions of rationality: the Galilean model of the natural sciences and the narrative model appropriate to historical discourse. The procedures and criteria prescribed by the Galilean model could not fulfill the ambitions of psychoanalysis, yet it was unclear how Freud's stories could be subjected to rigorous tests of accuracy. Can a science of man that proceeds from the interpretation of interpretations possibly qualify as a science; or should we revise our conception of a science of man in light of the need to read behavior as we would a text? This question guides my inquiry into Freud's "abnormal" discourse. The criteria for an adequate interpretation and an explanatory narrative are examined in the context of Freud's Wolf-Man case study. ;After showing how psychoanalysis qualifies as a species of historical explanation, I propose that Freud also contributed to our understanding of how man exists as a uniquely historical being. The experience of reading a narrative offers a clue to how desire and resistance operate in the psyche's search for satisfaction. The formal unity of a plot derives from the fundamentally narrativizing character of desire as the psyche stretches itself between the horizons of birth and death. By showing how narrativizing is consonant with Heidegger's conception of historicality, I attempt to bring Freud's instincts theory within the proximity of a radical hermeneutics. ;I conclude by defending the thesis that the Galilean model of rationality is inadequate as both a method of inquiry and as an account of what makes us human. The psychoanalytic dialogue and its rendering as story ultimately serves the aim of self-knowledge through anamnesis, a moment of reflection that belongs to no particular science but which may elevate the study of man to the level of philosophic inquiry.
