insight and rigoursecurity of subjective identity, but the relation of the subject to knowledge and truth.
in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Freud 1963 [1915]) he offers a positive
view of the problem of interpretation i have identified in dilthey’s psychology, in
which research and analysis disturb the continuity of practice. For Freud, the problem
with which the analyst is presented is that he knows nothing, and that the analysand
knows something but does not know that he knows. This unconscious knowledge is
‘the elephant in the room’ with the analyst and the analysand. What differentiates the
analyst from the analysand is an entirely negative set of attributes – the analyst does
not know something (about the analysand’s unconscious knowledge), and crucially he
also does not believe in something, namely the condition of psychic freedom:
But in general if the dreamer asserts that nothing occurs to him we contradict
him; we bring urgent pressure to bear on him – and we turn out to be right
... once before, i ventured to tell you that you nourish a deeply rooted
faith in undetermined psychical events and in free will, but that this is quite
unscientific and must yield to the demand of a determinism whose rule extends
over mental life.
(Freud 1963 [1915]: 105f.)This ‘determinism of mental life’ affects the analyst and the analysand equally,
but the key difference is that the analyst has already taken a crucial step towards the
acceptance of that determinism, which is what enables them to conduct the analysis.
The analyst operates at the level of the utterance, while the analysand operates at
the level of a narration of self- identity. it is this same narration of self- identity that
prevents the analysand from gaining access to unconscious knowledge. For the analyst,
the determinism of mental life must be conceived of in a materialist fashion, in the same
way that the maximum height of a building is determined by its mode of construction
and by the materials from which it is made. The analysis consists of observing moments
where the materiality or facticity of an unconscious utterance emerges from within the
continuous poetic flow or narrative of self- identity that the analysand produces. in a
Freudian model, the unconscious is a set of anomalous facts that interrupt the fiction
of self- identity. sometimes these unconscious facts might be literal facts as well. For
example, how does knowledge about the price of a particular artwork, or the number of
schoolchildren who are obliged to visit it each year as part of their school curriculum,
affect a fiction of being in control of objects that is possessed by a museum curator?
The stupid and irritating facticity of unconscious thought, on which the free play of
conscious thought snags at every turn, shows that in psychoanalysis, stupidity is not the
opposite of cleverness. instead, the stupidity of unconscious thought is what reveals the
impossibility of ‘being clever’.
This also gives a clue as to how the subjective mandate of the analyst places them
in a particular relationship to knowledge, in which truth is not conceived teleologically
but causally. in the example i have just given, the truth of cleverness is found in
something that causes its fall, and not in its accomplishment. it is this that led Jacques
lacan to assert that in psychoanalysis, ‘truth is only a fall of knowledge’^2 (lacan 1991
[1970]: 216). lacan was keen to situate psychoanalysis as sharing some of the qualities
of the Cartesian cogito, which places certainty within the domain of observation rather