You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-6, which are based on Reading Passage below.

WITTGENSTEIN ON FREUD

Ludwig von Wittgenstein has justly been regarded as one of the major philosophers of the twentieth century, especially for his writings on the philosophy of language and logic. His work on psychoanalysis and criticism of his fellow Viennese, Sigmund Freud, have, however, been generally overlooked.

Wittgenstein is both highly critical of and at the same time greatly admiring of Freud's work. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that he is not critical so much of psychoanalysis as of Freud's claims for it. For Freud, it was essential that his work be regarded as science: that he had developed a new branch of medicine based on scientific principles, having established causal relationships between behavior in childhood and that in adulthood. Wittgenstein, while accepting the usefulness of Freud's methods, disputes that these relationships arc causal, therefore denying Freud's theories scientific validity.

In causal relationships we can at least imagine contradictory cases. For example, I can imagine placing a pan of water on a hot stone and the water freezing (of course I do not expect it to happen, and would be very surprised if it did). With Freud's theory, however, this is not the case. One of the central planks of this theory is the pursuit of hidden meanings in such things as dreams, works of art, even language (the famous 'Freudian slip'). Take the example of dreams. For Freud these are all sexual wish-fulfillments. While it is clear that some are, clearly some at least appear not to be. Freud, however, will not accept any contradiction to his theory, and argues that in these cases the sexual element is camouflaged, or even repressed. This is a strange notion, for how can a dream fulfill a wish if the desire is so disguised that the dreamer does not even recognize it? More importantly, if under no circumstances will Freud allows his hypothesis to be contradicted, how can we verify it? It therefore behoves us to recognize that, despite his assertions, Freud's theories are not causal hypotheses, and thus not scientific.

One might ask, given this analysis, how Freud came to make this mistake, or rather why he believed that his explanations were causal. It is confusion between what we might call the 'depth-grammar' and the 'surface-grammar' of certain sentences. If we say 'the window broke because the stone hit it' we are outlining a causal relationship between the stone hitting the window and the window breaking, this being designated by the word 'because'. However, if we say 'he hit her because he was angry', whilst it may appear that the word 'because' performs the same function, this is not the case. The similarity lies only on the surface; if we look at the depth-grammar we see that in the first sentence 'because' denotes a causal relationship, whereas in the second we are rather talking in terms of motivations, reasons and other non-causal terms. Freud's mistake, therefore, is to believe that both types of sentence are similar: he confuses the surface-grammar.

Despite all this confusion, I have stated that Wittgenstein was highly appreciative of Freud's work, and this is because he essentially reformulates what Freud was trying to do. Freud believed that he was explaining people's behavior, while Wittgenstein suggests that he is re-describing it. To him, Freud is providing a 'picture' of human behaviour which may enable us to make certain connections that other ways of looking would not reveal, and by showing these patterns and connections the method may well have therapeutic value. In this case, although the 'picture' described by Freud's method is not a true one (for by Wittgenstein's arguments it cannot be), nevertheless it is unique, enabling the patient to have insights into their problem that no other method could provide.