EDITORIAL by J. A.

A lie of Freud? Note on the article Über den Gegensinn der Urworte
Armand Zaloszyc

Here is therefore an article, “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” (1910), where Freud thinks to find in the work of the linguist Karl Abel, on the question of the representation of opposed contents, a confirmation of the concept according to which “expression of the thought in the dream [would have] a regressive, archaic character”.

It is ‘by chance’, Freud tells us, that he read this Gegensinn der Urworte,  published in 1884 – an affirmation that has somehting of a surprise: a chance? Perhaps so but it is not without being called by a necessity. What sort of necessity is it about? I leave the question open for the time being but, once these texts are read, it is clear that it is about the decisive question, that is to say, about the question that decides the very existence of this little text of Freud, of it having a place in the theoretical context of psychoanalysis.

We cannot fail to be  even more surprised at reading the note that Freud adds to this subject in his ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ (G.W., p. 323) where he writes: “I found in a work of K. Abel […] a fact, surprising to me, but confirmed by other linguists […]”. But Benveniste assures us “that no qualified linguist, neither in the time when Abel wrote (there were some already in 1884), nor since then, has chosen this Gegensinn der Urworte in his method or conclusions”. Well then? Would this be a lie of Freud?

It is in a text of 1956, published in the number 1 of the review La psychanalyse, and taken up in his Problèmes de linguistique générale, entitled Remarques sur la fonction du langage dans la découverte freudienne, that Benveniste undertakes a critique, from the point of view of linguistics, of Karl Abel’s study on the opposed meanings in the primitive words. He leads this critique by the detail, taking up the greater part of examples quoted by Freud, in order to conclude that one cannot give any “credit to the etymological speculations of Karl Abel that seduced Freud”.

But let’s follow closely the amazing construction of Freud’s article. He quotes first, ‘by way of introduction’, a passage from his “Interpretation of Dreams” where he “presents an observation arising from the analytical research that did not yet find an explanation: ‘The way in which the dream expresses the categories of opposition and of contradiction is particularly striking: it does not express them, it seems to ignore the “not”. It excels to reunite the contraries and to represent them in a single object. It also often represents any element by its contrary of such kind that one does not know if an element of a dream, susceptible to contradiction, betrays a positive or negative content in the thought of the dream’”. And Freud adds that it is in reading, therefore ‘by chance’, the book of Karl Abel, that had “led [him] to understand this singular tendency that the elaboration of dreams has”. After this, the whole article consists in long textual citations of Karl Abel’s views till the time to conclude in agreement with what happens in the dream and with what happens in ‘the evolution of language’.

What remains from this agreement once the disagreement from the ‘qualified linguists’ has arisen? The “masterly rectification led to the false way”, as Lacan said, “where Freud engaged in the question in the philological field” – does it intimate to us of a simple abandonment as an error with regard to the qualified truth, that is to say, the truth that can be here qualified as rational?

We can imagine Freud (1910) venturing in the random presentations of an equivocal linguist. But is it not the contrary that happens? From philological science, already old, Freud qualifies and confirms, as he can, this – for many – still hazardous psychoanalytic theory. A confirmation of what does he find in Karl Abel? Of what he makes emerge as logic of the equivocation of the signifier. But in the mystified form of historical anteriority, of an archaic or primitive state, of the preformed mechanism, of the regressive state where the original is precisely the mode of operation of the structure.

A mystification that is properly linked to the dominant theoretical device, to the field where Freud is polemical, where psychoanalysis must take back and turn the arms that it forged for its exclusive use against this dominant rationality, and where, from thereon, the dream, the slip, the different formations of the unconscious can only appear (since all the same ‘it does not stop to exist’) in the dominated position: as monotonous mechanism and, to take up again Lacan’s expression, [as] “risen from the depths,  primitive, […] that would rise to a superior level of consciousness” or to a universal rationality.

We can then rectify the presentation of Freud’s article: it is not the lie [mensonge] but the dream [songe] where the distorted desire of Freud, that must be interpreted, would be accomplished. It is not the philology of Karl Abel that explains the theory of Freud but the theory of Freud that discovers the truth of ‘philological speculations’ of Karl Abel and of Freud himself.

 
Translated by Bogdan Wolf

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