On Reading & Rereading Freud’s - Specialized Research AI at MIT

On Reading & Rereading Freud’s
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

Steven Marcus

I am going at least at ½rst to write autobiographi-

cally. My justi½cation for doing so is that I regard
my experience as relatively typical and hence as
bearing some fraction of non-negligible, if perhaps
oblique, interest. I ½rst read Freud sixty-½ve years
ago. I was eighteen years old, and the occasion
arose in what was then offered in my intellectually
conservative college as a new course. The subject
was in the humanities, and it consisted of works
selected from some of the many masters of mid-
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature
and thought. Included among them were such ½gures
as Melville, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Henry
and William James, George Bernard Shaw, D. H.
Lawrence, Joyce, Proust, and Kafka. Inserted some-
where in the second half of the chronological list
was Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,
which he originally delivered between 1915 and
1917.1 Hence the context in which Freud was pre-
sented, and presented himself, to my largely bewil-
dered late-adolescent sensibility was that of Western
cultural, intellectual, and literary modernism. It was
an advantage, I believe, to have read him for the
½rst time among other immensely distinguished
minds, writers who were in the course of radically
departing from what had been generally accepted
as canonical forms, conceptions, and conventions
of representation–and of norms and values, includ –
ing the values of civilization and of life itself.

Part of this advantage of reading and experiencing
Freud as one cultural preeminence among others was

STEVEN MARCUS, a Fellow of the
American Academy since 1974, is
the George Delacorte Professor
Emeritus in the Humanities at
Columbia University. His books
include Dickens, from Pickwick to
Dombey (1965), The Other Victorians:
A Study of Sexuality and Pornography
in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England
(1966), Engels, Manchester, and the
Working Class (1974), and Freud and
the Culture of Psychoanalysis: Studies
in the Transition from Victorian Hu –
manism to Modernity (1984).

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123

On
Reading &
Rereading
Freud

to “place” him so to speak in a speci½c
community of grand creative purposes.
To take up one week after another such
realizations as “Bartleby the Scrivener”
and “Billy Budd,” A Sentimental Education,
Notes from Underground, Portrait of a Lady,
Women in Love, The Varieties of Religious
Experience, Beyond Good and Evil, Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man, Swann’s Way, The
Trial, and so on was in point of fact to set
oneself up for regular spiritual violence–
for being repeatedly knocked over the head
and simultaneously observing the ground
disappear beneath one’s feet. In this set-
ting and company, Freud appeared as nei-
ther an oddity nor an anomaly. (Another
element in these favoring circumstances
had to do with the instructor who had de –
vised this innovative course of reading.
He was a youngish, very intelligent, genial,
and ironic professor of English and com-
parative literature who made no bones
about his wholehearted recognition of the
power and genius of modernism, but who
would from time to time temper his
admiration by reading to the class a par-
ticularly choice passage from Flaubert or
Dostoevsky or Freud and then pointedly
ask, “Doesn’t this shock you? Do you
really believe what it proposes? Can you
imagine yourself speaking or behaving like
this?”–in effect attempting to solicit
from us relatively undefended responses
to the radical existential and moral chal-
lenges that modernism represented.)

As for the reading of Freud himself, it
was anything but a simple matter. In the
½rst place, he shared with the other emi-
nent modernists a radical skepticism about
overt moral claims and protestations of
shock, innocence, and propriety raised by
both social institutions and individuals. He
was suspicious of rationalizing or ex cul –
patory explanations of behavior and be –
liefs, even as he seemed to exemplify the
extension of reasoned observation into
the other-than-rational sectors of our ex –

istence. Among the heirs to the Enlight-
enment, he was at the same time a partic-
ipant in the crisis of reason in which mod –
ernism in literature, culture, and thought
has continued to occupy a historically
exemplary place. He founded a discipline
that he af½rmed, and that af½rmed itself,
as a science while occupying itself with
the other-than-rational, the more primi-
tive, childish, marginal, and dysfunctional
manifestations of mental life. He under-
took to investigate certain encrypted and
occulted operations of the mind; but he
did so outside the clinic and the laboratory,
outside of the university and academic
psychology, outside of test scores and sta-
tistics, and either outside or on the mar-
gins of certain communal, professional-
ized, and generally settled protocols of
hierarchy and respectability.

But there was something else that was
peculiar about this ½rst acquaintance with
a text by Freud. As I was reading along, I
found myself repeatedly pausing and for
a moment inwardly remarking, “Oh, this
really seems to be true! It is true!” Or at
another stage, “This is something like
truth,” if not the truth. And simultaneously
I had a virtually physical sensation-per-
ception-feeling that my mind was turn-
ing, or being turned, although I was unable
to articulate the direction of the move-
ment. It was certainly not an entirely con-
scious or entirely continuous succession
of mental (and quasi-physical) events. Nor
was I concerned at the time with un der –
standing it. It did not belong, however, to
an order of experience that one has very
often in an intellectual life. I myself have
had it on only four other occasions: be fore
Freud, when I ½rst read Plato and Shake –
speare; and a year or two later when I
read, again for the ½rst time, Dickens and
Wordsworth. However, these later read-
ings had the advantage of being already
mediated by or ½ltered through the vivid,
indelible deposit left behind by the expe-

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rience of the ½rst three. That is to say: the
effects were organic, cumulative, devel-
opmental, and at the same time no more
than fragmentarily conscious. Moreover,
this reading, like the others I have referred
to, seems to have worked in such a way as
to stimulate me to read other texts more
coherently, with what appeared to be
½rmer grounding. Such enabling was, in
part, by way of preparing in my youthful
mind an embedded and preconditioning
context of qualities and references, a
range of verbal, affective, and conceptual
markers, soundings by which I might
grope my way along in the obscure, the
less than fully perspicuous universe, of
written articulations. To my youthful sen –
sibility, the experience of reading such spe-
cial masterpieces seemed to recruit them
as personal auxiliaries and stabilizers. They
appeared to help me maintain what even-
tually turned out to be a quite factitious
sense of equilibrium and proportion as I
eagerly, uncomprehendingly, and appre-
hensively staggered through one after an –
other world-creating and world-annihi-
lating intensity of literary-cultural imagi-
nation.

In some measure these occasions resem –
bled what has been described as “the shock
of recognition,” but in some measure only.
The recognition was not altogether a rec –
ognition. I was not quite the slave boy in
Plato’s Meno, who under the suggestive
prodding of Socrates “remembered” his
geometry. I discovered later on a closer
analogy in the Introductory Lectures. It oc –
curs in Freud’s discussion of slips of the
pen and misreadings. In the latter in –
stance, Freud observes, “What one is going
to read is not a derivative of one’s own
mental life like something one proposes
to write” (70). For me, however, this ini-
tial reading of Freud had what I have to
suggest was the pseudo-effect of making
me feel, at least in a certain weak measure,
as if the text were, so to say, deriving and

shaping itself in some weird dimension
from my own mental life. I was not in the
least delusional; not for a moment did I
think that I was the source of such in –
sights or memorable formulations. To this
extent, at the same time, I did resemble
Socrates’s slave boy. To rearrange the terms
of the discourse, and to borrow a well-
known insight, it was as if this magisterial
work by Freud, in common with other
modernist masterpieces, was reading me.
Though they as a rule found me a less than
engrossing subject, they awakened in me
a peculiar inkling or suspicion that I, too,
was somehow and in some way a text to be
read, interpreted, explained, perhaps even
turned into a narrative account. Freud
himself, I began primitively to conceive,
was a great reader, one of the cleverest ever.
And his readings, along with my misread-
ings and readings of others might in some
alternative understanding be in fact de –
rivatives of a common mental life.

How then did I respond to this experi-
ence as a whole? How did I integrate it into
my rudimentary graspings of the world?
The truth is of course that I didn’t integrate
it and that I had virtually no consciously
organized intelligence of my experience
as a whole. It floated there as a huge unas-
similated block of personal, literary, and
cultural presentiments, a kind of textual
iceberg, nine-tenths below the surface, to
which I only dimly sensed I was going to
return.

One further passage hints at how this
event came to work its suggestiveness on
me. It occurs in Lecture XXVII, on “Trans –
ference.” Freud is discussing how “intel-
lectual insight” is not strong enough or free
enough to ½ght through the unconscious
resistances that favor a repetition of the
failed solution to an inner conflict by
means of repression. Indeed, what turns
the scale for the patient “is simply and
solely his relation to the doctor. . . . [I]t
clothes the doctor with authority and is

Steven
Marcus

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143 (1) Winter 2014

125

On
Reading &
Rereading
Freud

transformed into belief in his communi-
cations and explanations” (445f). At this,
I now recall, my own resistances were
mobilized; all the hard-won autonomy of
an eighteen-year-old was quickly brought
to bear. Who is this Svengali? I remember
saying to myself. Who has authorized this
self-arrogation? As if he expected such a
rebuke from his interlocutors, Freud goes
on to repeat what he has just asserted. “In
the absence of such a transference, or if it
is a negative one, the patient would never
even give a hearing to the doctor and his
arguments.” My ruffled feathers began to
settle down. Freud then goes on to state,
“In this his belief or faith is repeating the
story of its own development; it is a de –
rivative of love and, to start with, needed
no argument.” Once again I registered this
sentence with virtual or quasi-physical
ani mation; it was as if I had turned or been
turned in another geographical direction,
or as if a new actual perspective had be –
gun to materialize. In this moment of a
sudden ampli½cation of insight and deep –
ening of understanding, what had ½rst
manifested itself as an alteration of the
external visual ½eld continued to reveal
itself as, in addition, an accession from
within. Suspended in inner space, I con-
tinued reading:

Only later did he allow . . . [such arguments]
enough room to submit them to examina-
tion, provided they were brought forward
by someone he loved. Without such sup-
ports arguments carried no weight, and in
most people’s lives they never do. Thus in
general a man is only accessible from the
intellectual side too, insofar as he is capable
of a libidinal cathexis of objects; and we have
good reason to recognize and to dread in the
amount of his narcissism a barrier against
the possibility of being influenced by even
the best analytic technique. (446)

One of the things that had happened was
that reading Freud’s Introductory Lectures

within the frame or context of modernist
literature, and in a certain sense as litera-
ture, had provided considerable latitude
for responses that were not primarily
intellectual or exclusively cognitive: the
experience of this reading, I realized quite
a bit later, was at least as much quasi-
transferential as it was intellectual. It was
by no means un-rational, but neither was
it distinctively rational much less ratio-
nalistic in the understanding that it fol-
lowed standard or rigorous procedures of
logicality.

Freud drove home this point again on
the same page, when he veered off into
his own intellectual past and brought in
Bernheim, hypnotism, and suggestion/
suggestibility: “it must dawn on us that
in our own technique we have abandoned
hypnosis only to rediscover suggestion in
the shape of transference” (446). So this
descendant of the Enlightenment did
preserve in his practice an imp of Svengali-
like “influence,” if not his mysti ½cation.
And it then began gradually to dawn on
me, a young student of literature, that
interpretation and suggestion are af½liated
and contiguous, and that they are for both
practical purposes and in principle insep-
arable. All interpretations contain ele-
ments of suggestion. They are by in ten tion
components of an agreed upon verbal ex –
change between two subjectivities. In psy –
cho analysis the two agents do not stand
on an equal footing of authority, al though
the relation between them is none theless a
collaborative construction. But at this
juncture I will break off my recollected
account, for I realize that especially in
these last several statements I am certainly
conflating later reflections and readings
into a layered and excessively co herent
narration of what was at the time a mem-
orable and complex but existentially in –
choate series of graspings, clutchings for
connections and intelligibilities, along
with random dissociations during which

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the circuits of my system of mental light-
ing flicked on and off.

I have chosen this personal anniversary

year as an opportunity to revisit this for-
midable work and to test myself against it
once more. There can be no doubt that
this historic text has become a different
phenomenon and, more pertinently, a
different experience. It and I have both
changed. It is, for example, a different text
because of what Freud wrote subsequently
in the twenty years that followed its ½rst
publication. It is also different because of
what has taken place in the world histor-
ically, in developments in psychoanalysis
itself (in whose history it occupies a non-
trivial place), in the varied influence that
it (as part of psychoanalysis itself ) has
exerted on Western culture and society,
along with the global changes in both sci-
ence and culture that have extended
across an interval of sixty-½ve years. I,
too, have changed along with this book. I
read more slowly and deliberately than I
once did, and my responses have lost
some of their youthful extravagance. And
of course I have read more Freud along with
other things. Rereading the Introductory
Lectures today, I was ½rst alerted by what I
recall was an earlier impression, an im –
pression that others have also commented
on. There is an ease and general elegance
in Freud’s style and habit of exposition
and his deployment of argument that seem
unique. From the outset he imagines,
projects, and incorporates his audience (or
readers; today the two are one) into the
flow of discourse. In a clearly Socratic
maneuver, he anticipates their skeptical
doubts and querulous objections by insert-
ing them into the organic movement of
his disquisition. It is almost as if the reader
himself were a participant in the carefully
constructed theatrical scene. One easily
tends to forget that an academic lecture is
also a piece of theater, and that Freud’s

original interlocutors (as well as subse-
quent readers) had the double experience
of imagining and hearing themselves being
represented mimetically in the very dis-
course that was at the same moment being
launched directly at them. In addition to
the superiority entailed in periodically
informing the audience that he already
knew all about what they were thinking,
Freud tries periodically both to disarm
them and to take them into camp by con-
fessing to and complaining about his own
inadequacies. He is appropriately modest,
but only sub specie aeternitatis.

Freud’s predisposing habit in this text
(and elsewhere) tends to reveal itself
through expressions and ½gures of move-
ment. The lectures themselves constitute a
connected series; accordingly, Freud fre-
quently begins by recapitulating or retra-
versing the course he has most recently cov –
ered. Such rehearsals, however, are not as a
rule simple repetitions; they tend, rath er, to
be imaginative paraphrases. In these intro-
ductory transitions, as well as in the body
of each lecture, Freud regularly in troduces
new terms and variables, alters perspectives
and emphases without warning, and some-
times abruptly shifts the level of abstraction
that his argument has been maintaining.
The motion or move ment in question is
only intermittently straightforward or lin-
ear. It tends to ½gure as a spiral, perhaps a
corkscrew, turning in arcs that simultane-
ously alter the plane or level at which his
discourse is functioning. Such windings,
adjustings, and retrospective re wordings
are evidently allied to Freud’s regular and
reiterated confessions to the au dience that
he has fallen short, that he is inadequate to
the challenge, the great task that he has set
for himself. Perhaps it might be less cir-
cumspect to call them pseudo-confessions,
because one of the indisput able results of
these rhetorical strategies is to ratchet up
the reader’s intimation of the inordinate
complexity of what Freud has in mind.

Steven
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143 (1) Winter 2014

127

On
Reading &
Rereading
Freud

Sometimes, however, the opposite is the
paradoxical outcome. For example, when
he is nearing the end of the lecture on
“Wish-ful½llment,” Freud steps back, as
it were, to deliver a truly conclusive con-
clusion (224). The one “indispensable” ele-
ment in a dream is an unconscious wish
for whose ful½llment the dream is given
its particular form. “A dream,” he stipu-
lates, “may thus be any sort of thing in so
far as you are only taking into account the
thoughts it represents–a warning, an
intention, a preparation, and so on; but it
is always also the ful½llment of an uncon-
scious wish.” A dream, he continues, is a
group of mental representations, “trans-
lated into the archaic mode of thought by
the help of an unconscious wish and
transformed to ful½ll that wish.” This “one
characteristic, the wish-ful½llment,” is
“invariable.” (Emphases have been added
in the preceding sentences.) Skepticism,
moderation, restraint and intellectual
tact, scienti½c and scholarly evenhanded-
ness have all gone out the window. Freud
is at this moment of development in his
argument delivering himself of utter-
ances that are universal, absolute, dog-
matic in their certainty, and on the face of
it incredible. I can imagine a member of
the original audience silently demurring:
you must mean “most dreams” or “many
dreams” or “dreams as a rule.” You don’t
allow for the mere possibility that a dream
can exist without a wish-ful½llment in
and behind it. Not even one? After all,
this isn’t geometry or elementary physics.
And anyhow, who are you to address the
universe with such presumption? More-
over, Freud was at other moments suf –
½ciently instructed in the philosophy of
science. According to contemporary phi –
losophers, he was aware of problems
entailed in the framing of hypotheses and
duly resourceful and competent when it
came to theory construction.2 Indeed, in
the lectures on parapraxes he directly ad –

dresses the subject: “It would be a mistake
to suppose that a science consists entirely
of strictly proved theses, and it would be
unjust to require such a degree of proba-
bility.” Genuine scientists, he remarks, are
able “to ½nd satisfaction in these approx-
imations to certainty . . . and pursue con-
structive work further in spite of the ab –
sence of ½nal con½rmation” (51). And he
insists repeatedly that he is not asserting
that “every single slip that occurs has a
sense. . . . It is enough for us if we can point
to such a series relatively often. . . . It is in
general true that only a certain propor-
tion of the errors that occur in ordinary life
can be looked at from our point of view”
(60; emphasis in original).

When it comes to dreams, however,
Freud will not budge; he rejects any sug-
gestion short of certainty and refuses to
give his interlocutors a millimeter of lati-
tude. To the question of why must all
dreams contain at their core a wish and
its ful½llment, he can only reply: “I don’t
know why they shouldn’t. I should have
no objection. As far as I’m concerned it
could be so. There’s only one detail in the
way of this broader and more convenient
view of dreams–that it isn’t so in reality”
(222). That may be charming in its candor,
but it is still not terribly helpful; and it is
not the manner in which Freud custom-
arily either contends or deals with critical
probings, especially when his own pro-
posals have caused them to be brought
forward. It is not conducive in persuading
his audience to sustain its willing suspen-
sion of disbelief, for that is indeed among
the range of requirements that his grand
idiom of discourse includes. My reading of
these passages is supported, I believe, by
how Freud concludes this section of the
lecture. He turns to address the audience/
reader directly:

I can understand all this very clearly; but I
cannot tell whether I have succeeded in

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making it intelligible to you as well. And I
also have dif½culty in proving it to you.
That cannot be done without carefully ana-
lyzing a great number of dreams . . . [and it]
cannot be convincingly represented with-
out what is coming later. It is impossible to
suppose that, since everything is intimately
interrelated, one can penetrate deeply into
the nature of one thing without being con-
cerned oneself with other things of a similar
nature. (224)

In the ½rst place, Freud seems at this point
to be addressing himself almost as much
as he is his audience. He is quite aware
that he has been less than entirely convinc-
ing. Since in the situation he has conjured
up “everything is intimately interrelated,”3
and since it is not feasible to represent
this “most critical and important point”
without reference to what is coming later,
both parties in this projected scene seem
to be caught up or bound in a process from
which there is in principle no egress. Both
analyst and analysand are engaged in
scampering around a hermeneutic circle
until one or both are exhausted, bored, or
satis½ed suf½ciently to cry out: Basta!
Time out! Or, more familiarly, our time is
up; we’ll continue with this in our next ses –
sion. The whole and the parts in the end-
less flux and reciprocity of interpreting a
sacred or great historical text or an indi-
vidual human utterance or association
perpetually occupy the foreground of our
focused attention.

Moreover, since we proceed under the
assumption that “everything is interre-
lated,” it is virtually as if we were playing
chess in an unspeci½ed multiplicity of di –
mensions. And ½nally our perplexity is fur-
ther enhanced by the circumstance that we
cannot in the present comprehend matter
of considerable pertinence without refer-
ring to a future (in the evolving analytic
situation) that we cannot know or ade-
quately foretell. We are for this interval
proverbial dogs in pursuit of our own tails.

143 (1) Winter 2014

I have brought forward this material to
help characterize the less than linear, the
irregular, the restless and mobile quali-
ties in Freud’s style of enquiry and expo-
sition. Even when, as here, he seems to be
temporarily floundering around, when he
is locally inconsistent and advances in –
compatible formulations, something of
more than usual interest is going on. De –
spite his scienti½c aspirations and con-
victions, he also seems to have come into
the world with the unconscious purpose
of living with the undecidable and irre-
solvable. He is among the royalty of the
kingdom of Aporia. He once remarked to
the effect that although something is a
contradiction, this constitutes no imped-
iment to its existence. Part of his achieve-
ment has to do with the circumstance that
he was one of those few outstanding minds
who was able to juxtapose and accommo-
date this peculiar style of thinking, which
one ½nds mostly among creative writers
and artists, with the central traditions of
Western civilization and with the leading
ideals of the Enlightenment.

I will adduce another passage that bears
usefully on this constellation of tenden-
cies. It occurs at the opening of Lecture
XXIV, the ninth of thirteen discussions of
the neuroses. Freud once again shifts per-
spectives and addresses his audience di –
rectly:

I am aware that you are dissatis½ed. You pic –
tured an “Introduction to Psycho-anal ysis”
very differently. What you expected to hear
were lively examples, not theory. . . . [I]n –
stead I gave you long-winded theories, hard
to grasp, which were never complete but
were always having something fresh added
to them; I worked with concepts which I
had not yet explained to you; I went from a
descriptive account of things to a dynamic
one and from that to . . . an “economic” one;
I made it hard for you to understand how
many of the technical terms I used meant
the same thing and were merely being

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129

On
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Freud

interchanged for reasons of euphony; I
brought up such far-reaching conceptions as
those of the pleasure and reality principles
and of phylogenetically inherited endow –
ments; and far from introducing you to
anything, I paraded something before your
eyes which constantly grew more and more
remote. [. . .]

Why did I not begin my introduction to the
theory of the neuroses with what you your-
selves know of the neurotic state. . . . Why
did I not lead you step by step from an
understanding of the simpler everyday
forms to . . . [their] enigmatic, extreme man –
ifestations? (378)

This passage and what follows is, in my
judgment, more winning, more persuasive
and resonant than its predecessors. Like a
considerable number of Freud’s more
arresting scienti½co-pedagogical moments,
it seems addressed almost as much to him –
self, or to the winds, or to the gods on
Mount Olympus as it does to what was
once an actual audience. It is a bit late in
the day, he realizes, to examine the prob-
lem that the second half of these discus-
sions (or Part III as he names it) is as a
mode of expository discourse disjunctive
from the ½rst. There are very few interpo-
sitions of illustrative stories to help the
audience along. Instead his listeners and
readers have to follow by themselves the
implicit narrative lines, the curves, angles,
tangents, backtrackings, and hiatuses of
theoretical argumentation. More over, the
theory being quasi-systematically ex –
pounded is itself in a perpetually un –
½nished and incessant state of change; it
is open-ended, fragmentary, unpredictably
evolving, organismic. Its complex and
polysemous character (along with the exi-
gencies of coherent expression) has also
induced him to interpolate new concep-
tual elements before he has had a chance
to explain what they are. He has without
warning shifted the terms of his account

from one substantive register or category
to another. Still worse, he has made things
less than intelligible for his audience by
throwing out a baffling array of different
technical terms while using them to mean
the same thing and interjecting some of
them apparently solely “for reasons of
euphony.” Who is this “projector,” this
self-confessing intellectual swindler and
con man?

But he is still not quite ½nished with his
self-arraignment. He has bartered speci½c
and concrete analyses for experience–
remote and quite dubious speculations–
on such matters, for example, as phyloge-
netically inherited mental capacities. In
fact, the very idea of an “introduction to
psycho analysis” has gotten lost in the shuf –
fle while he has been spending time pa –
rading back and forth on one or another
of his numerous hobby-horses.

Indeed . . . I cannot even disagree with you.
I am not so enamoured of my skill in expo-
sition that I can declare each of its artistic
faults to be a peculiar charm. I think myself
that it might have been more to your ad –
vantage if I had proceeded otherwise; and
that was, indeed, my intention. But one can –
not always carry out one’s reasonable
intentions. There is something in the ma –
terial itself which takes charge of one and
diverts one from one’s ½rst intentions. Even
such a trivial achievement as the arrange-
ment of a familiar piece of material is not
entirely subject to an author’s own choice;
it takes what line it likes and all one can do
is ask oneself why it has happened in this
way and no other. (379)

He concurs in the silent complaint of his
auditors: his expository capacities are not
transcendent; his analytic knowingness
cannot transform in½rmities in procedure
and execution into charming idiosyn-
crasies. Indeed that was not his original
plan, which somehow miscarried, despite
all his “reasonable intentions” to the

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contrary notwithstanding. “Something in
the material itself,” he suggests, overcame
his conscious purposes, usurped his con-
ceptual autonomy, and diverted his ex –
pository account into unanticipated and,
from the audience’s perspective, obscure
channels of theoretical meanderings.
Even trivialities such as how to rephrase
entirely familiar material manages, at least
in part, to circumvent “an author’s own
choice.” The material in question goes
ahead in its own way, and one can only “ask
oneself after the event why it has hap-
pened in this way and no other.”

This is not the ½rst occasion on which
Freud has commented on the associative
and logically discontinuous, the inconti-
nent preconscious and even unconscious
tendencies of his scienti½c and creative
thinking. He includes them as a relevant
agency in even his most abstract concep-
tualizations, and attributes to them both
peremptory and inscrutable powers of will
and insight. As far back as 1898, Freud
took deliberate notice of it. He seems to
have sent some draft pages of material per-
tinent to The Interpretation of Dreams to
Wilhelm Fliess. In the letter that accom-
panies them he remarks, “It was all writ-
ten by the unconscious, on the well-known
principle of Itzig, the Sunday horseman.
‘Itzig, where are you going?’ ‘Don’t ask
me, ask the horse!’ At the beginning of a
paragraph I never knew where I should
end up.” That this kind of proceeding
should with some regularity eventuate in
actual new discoveries about the human
mind, discoveries that can in turn be en –
listed in the service of science and truth,
is almost unheard of and virtually unprec –
edented. The material itself has elements
in it that are outside of personal and logi-
cal control. It is in the nature of the case
that it is diversionary and follows its own
other-than-conscious course, which can-
not be ascertained beforehand. Freud is
offering himself in both instances as an

illustration of how even highly sequen-
tial discourse can be influenced in form
and structure as well as in thematic sub-
stance by currents of mental activity that
are not accessible (at that moment) to in –
spection and examination. He is treating
himself as if he were an Other, as if he were
no more than merely one more writer, a
novelist, a dramatist, a critic, or even a
psychoanalyst. He is also implicitly solic-
iting the reader to treat him as if he were
in fact no more than merely one more
writer. In this passage there is an uncom-
mon blending of authenticity and audacity,
and Freud succeeds in transforming what
was expressed in the ½rst place as a formal
error of composition, accompanying a loss
of discursive consistency and coherence
to better account. What began as a self-
arraignment has been transformed in the
course of its interpretative articulation into
an apologia as well.

Freud’s notice of the diversionary ten-

dency of both the material he deals with
and his own particular manner of collab-
orating with that tendency returns us to
certain locutionary constellations in this
work. They have to do with suggestions,
notions, images, intimations, metaphors,
and other imaginative projections of
move ment, of motion through space. This
is, to begin with, especially pointed in the
applicable scenes for such discourse. The
lecturer and his audience or auditor; the
writer and his reader; the psychoanalytic
dyad and its setting–they are all in good
part characterized by utterances combined
with types and degrees of stillness and
attentiveness. The lecturer speaks, and the
auditors try to listen responsively and well,
not simply to listen. The reader strains
silently to read as well–that is to say, as
openly and yet alertly–as he can. The
patient or analysand tries to listen, per-
ceive, and report on the silent verbal and
visual mental presentations that appear

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143 (1) Winter 2014

131

On
Reading &
Rereading
Freud

in some semblance of serial succession in
his deliberately relaxed and unfocused
consciousness. And it is the psychoana-
lyst’s turn to listen well and then respond,
optimally, in an appropriately elucidatory
way. But the accent throughout falls on the
movements of thought and feeling, while
both collaborators remain relatively mo –
tion less. This idea of moving along per-
meates the local life of Freud’s discourse.
I can on this occasion call attention to a
limited number of instances. Freud favors
such expressions as “we might direct our
interest elsewhere and enquire” (32). And
he will often follow such a suggestion by
stopping to state: “But before carrying
out this intention I should like to invite
you to follow me along another track”
(36). He will frequently change direction
in trailing or tracking a quarry or leading
a hunt. Commenting on slips of the
tongue he mentions the influence of
sounds, the similarities of words and the
“familiar associations” they arouse.

These facilitate slips of the tongue by point –
ing to the path they can take. But if I have a
path open to me, does that fact automatically
decide that I shall take it? I need a motive
in addition before I resolve in favor of it and
furthermore a force to propel me along the
path. (46)

He takes overt pleasure in choosing and
setting the vectors along which his dis-
course will move. For example, he opens
his ½rst lecture on dreams by mentioning
how, historically, both neurotic symptoms
and dreams were both linked and found
to have a sense or meaning. “We will not,
however, follow this historical path, but
will proceed in the opposite direction”
(83). And he begins the next lecture by
remarking, “What we need, then, is a
new path, a method which will enable us
to make a start in the investigation of
dreams” (100). This new path or method
entails in the ½rst instance making a

number of assumptions as matters of faith
and good will. If you can make this mod-
erate leap, he continues, “you can follow
me further” (101). Although Freud’s man –
ner of dealing with his auditors in these
lectures is in general Socratic, the mise-en-
scène that he silently constructs as one of
the frames for his discourse is peripatetic.
Moreover, the surface that he traverses
with his interlocutors is not the evened
stones of the Lyceum, but something
rougher and less worked and worked over.
Indeed, he continues, he has had no in –
tention of presenting “a smooth account
with all the dif½culties carefully con-
cealed, with the gaps ½lled in and the
doubts glossed over. . . . I wanted to show
you our science as it is, with its uneven esses
and roughnesses, its demands and hesita-
tion . . . [its] dif½culties and incomplete-
nesses” (102). In addition he has “laid
down premises” that underlie the entire
jerry-built undertaking, “and if anyone
½nds the whole thing too laborious and
insecure, or . . . is accustomed to higher
certainties and more elegant deductions,
he need go no further with us. . . . in this
quarter he will ½nd impassable the precise
and secure paths which he is prepared to
follow.” We are at this moment climbing
in the Alps; and one of the attractive fea-
tures of this entire cautionary traverse is
that it applies with equal pertinence to both
parties in the psychoanalytic joint effort.
At this point, it should be noted that,
among other things, the path that Freud
invites us to follow is also linked to the epic
path pursued by Dante.

Nel mezzo del cammin de nostra vita
mi retrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita

One comes to oneself in the course of a
journey, but only after one has been con-
founded in darkness and discovered that
the straight way has been lost. The path is
perilous, and one needs a guide and com-

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panion to usher one into and through this
enigmatic, terrifying, and undiscovered
world.

Accordingly, the path is almost never
straight-ahead. At each stopping place or
interval one arrives at wherever one is
going “by shorter or longer detours”
(110). But the path also leads along lines
of resistance and is hence unstable and
variable in length, and a “greater resistance
means that the unconscious material will
be greatly distorted and that the path will
be a long one from the substitute back to
the unconscious material” (117). There is
a passing allusion here to the Labyrinth,
and to the unwinding of Ariadne’s thread
of associations that will lead us backward
to the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull and
all ferocious, unconscious desire. In addi-
tion, another constraint on the forward
movement of Freud’s discussion of dream
interpretation is that for the most part
“one has to give so many explanations . . .
bring up so much material in the way of
associations and memories . . . follow up
so many by-paths, that a lecture about it
would be quite confusing and unsatisfac-
tory” (185). In theory there is no end to
the associative by-paths. By-paths are not
only indirect routes; they tend also to be
rarely used and often overgrown. Like their
successor by-passes, they may also lead us
around a particular area of dense interest
without ever offering us access to it, when
such access was the very purpose behind
our choice of either by-way or by-pass.

In other words, the textual expressions
of movement tend as the lectures proceed
to become increasingly foregrounded.
Regression in the dream-work, for one
obvious instance, is not “only a formal
but also a material” (211) displacement
backward in Freud’s conceptualizations of
space-time. Or at another point he typi-
cally opens a new session by casting a ret-
rospective eye over “the ground we have
covered so far . . . [o]f how . . . we came up

against the distortion in dreams, of how
we thought we would begin by evading it
. . . [o]f how, after that, armed with what
we had learned from that enquiry, we made
a direct assault on dream distortion and,
as I hope, overcame it step by step. We are
bound to admit, however, that the things
we have discovered by one path and by the
other do not entirely correspond” (213).
The ½guration here begins with military
maneuverings–in 1916 how could it not?
–and then shifts back to the idiom of
mountaineering, itself in considerable
part derived from the activities and lexi-
con of warfare. The paths are now plural
and seem not to concur or swing toward
one another. And as happens as a matter
of course in Freud’s expository procedures,
new discoveries “only signify the begin-
ning of fresh enigmas and fresh doubts”
(211). The hesitations can also lead to
stoppages and dead ends. The path can be
blocked–“No Thoroughfare”–the open
road ahead transformed into an immov-
able Stau, a word that visitors from
abroad rapidly learn. One of the terms
Freud enlists to describe such frustrating
and paradoxical experiences, or motion
without movement, or movement brought
up short, of idling in senseless suspension,
is ½xation–not only in the abstract cate-
gories of time and space but along actual
paths of development in individual lives.
As a consequence, as the lectures pro-
ceed, the path becomes increasingly sin-
uous, convoluted and indirect, and Freud
turns to attaching modi½ers to it as it re –
curs in his exposition. The path now tends
to be referred to as “circuitous” or “round –
about.” The interpretation of symptoms
is itself one of such circuitous routes
because it does not seek, in a ½nal resort,
to ascribe forbidden wishes and desires
to present consciousness but to a repressed
and therefore unknown domain of men-
tal activity, the unconscious. In pressing
this strategy, Freud is ½guratively putting

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143 (1) Winter 2014

133

On
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Rereading
Freud

the symptoms into reverse. The “repudi-
ated libidinal trends . . . succeed in getting
their way by certain roundabout paths . . .
or by submitting to some distortions and
mitigations. The roundabout paths are
those taken by the construction of symp-
toms; the symptoms are the fresh or sub-
stitute satisfaction which has become
necessary owing to the fact of frustration”
(350). Freud’s disposition of psychoana-
lytic procedures has mimetic bearings on
what brought our troubles about in the
½rst place. Among much else, it contains
elements of undoing but also of reiterating,
of tautological circling around, of resum-
ing after long interruption, and of con-
tinuously taking up un½nished business.
And just as Dante’s Purgatory reproduces
by mimetic inversion the form and struc-
ture of the Inferno, so the experience of
Freud’s psychoanalysis in terms of mem-
ory and through the transference repeats
through these distorting though unavoid-
able mediums, and by means of mimetic
reflection, refraction, and inversion, the
crooked ways by which we have come to
ourselves–and to be ourselves.

Moreover, as Dante needed Virgil as an
advisor and escort through hell, so Freud
had already invoked that same Virgil in
the epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams,
his own heroic account of a journey un –
derground. In addition, he is offering him –
self as a fused or combined embodiment
of his two epic predecessors, one pagan,
one Christian, and Freud the tertium quid,
related to both but distinct from both–
and, I will add, distinct from us as well.
That distinction is never more palpable
than when we reflect on our own per-
spectival location as we accompany him
along the way. On occasion we are com-
panions strolling with him along the path.
Most of the time, however, we are follow-
ers as he leads the way. Indeed, a sig –
ni½cant part of the enduring experience,
at least for me, of reading this great work

is that Freud is always several steps ahead
of the reader–namely, in the ½rst instance,
to be sure, of me. No matter how often I
consult this text, Freud always beats me
to it. I cannot keep up with him, and I can
almost never anticipate what is beyond
the next turn in the path. It is in vain that
I follow his track as closely as I can, that I
tediously dog his heels; he is reliably there,
just around the corner, on the other side
of the turn, ready to step out and quietly
exclaim “Surprise!”

It is also in this connection plausible to

suggest that Freud enjoys startling and
ambushing his audience. He enjoys occa-
sionally setting them up so he can move
them back several paces. In English we
have an expression called “leading you
down the garden path.” It involves the
deception of another, albeit in a domesti-
cated and civilized setting. Freud is a mas-
ter at this entertaining and slightly insid-
ious game. He is always leading us down
the garden path, luring us circuitously
forward, and then “having us” in the
sense that he has already ½gured out
where we will have to emerge. Some-
times, to be sure, Freud himself cannot ½nd
the way forward and confesses to being
nonplussed–but that simply adds spice
to the exercise.

More frequently, however, he resorts to a
variety of persuasive manipulations to keep
his audience in tow. For example, in Lec-
ture X, “Symbolism in Dreams,” he puts on
what in 1916 must still have been a virtuoso
performance, including numerous illustra-
tions, mostly of sexual symbolic repre-
sentations, many of them amusing and
some impossible. He also refers to a range
of quasi-anthropological speculations on
the origins and development of human
language, including the hypothetical “pri-
mal language.” In his unswerving adher-
ence to nineteenth-century evolutionary
naturalism, Freud had in this instance been

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himself led astray. For both anthropolog-
ical and theoretical linguistics were about
to abandon historical and evolutionary
paradigms in favor of systematic pursuits
of how all languages and societies function
in a present world–that is to say, from
synchronic perspectives. Why and how
Freud found himself attached to what
would turn out to be anachronistic conjec-
tures drawn from other “scienti½c” disci-
plines is another matter altogether. In any
event, having just completed his high-wire
routine on dream-symbolism, Freud turns
to the audience and asks it a rhetorical
question: why is it that this topic always
entails “the problem of how it can meet
with such violent resis tance in educated
people when the wide diffusion of sym-
bolism in myths, religion, art and language
is so unquestionable. May it not be that
what is responsible is once again its con-
nection with sexuality?” (168f).

Well, maybe so. But there are corollary
considerations as well. The rhetorical
craft iness here is associated with the cir-
cumstance that by the end of this dazzling
display of widespread learning, ingenuity,
and witty associations, the audience is so
fascinated and mesmerized, so as we say
“softened up” that they must be ready to
jump on Freud’s bandwagon while ask-
ing for “more.” In addition, the audience
should be securely “hooked” by the tacit
flattery and equally invidious quality of the
comparison passed before them at the end
of the passage.

In the main, however, Freud prevails in
tracking the circuitous route–“the round –
about path via the unconscious and the old
½xations”–following the libido (another
of his shadow fellow-travelers and guides)
that “½nally succeeds in forcing its way
through to real satisfaction, although the
pleasure attained “is extremely restricted
and scarcely recognizable as such” (360).
If in following the allusive track, as I have
earlier suggested, neurosis is Hell, then

psychoanalysis at its most ef½cacious is
Purgatory. In addition, there is one further
roundabout path that “leads back from
phantasy to reality”–the path, that is, of
art. Freud’s ideal-type of artist is more than
usually oppressed by “excessively power-
ful instinctual needs.” He cannot achieve
their satisfaction. A convergence of nu –
merous capacities and circumstances,
including sublimation and the weakness
of certain repressions, facilitate his access
“to the half-way region of phantasy.” He
“possesses the mysterious power of shap-
ing some particular material until it has
become a faithful image of his phantasy.”
By means of his successful deployment
and exploitation of both artistic means
and unconscious wishes, he elicits plea –
sure, gratitude, and admiration in his au –
dience; and he has “thus achieved through
his phantasy what originally he had
achieved only in his phantasy–honor,
fame, and the love of women” (376f; em –
phasis in original).

This sketchy and curtailed discussion of
one local feature in what may be de scribed
as Freud’s intellectual style is, however,
connected to a larger structural tendency.
From the beginning, Freud’s intention is
to represent the workings of the mind as
a preponderantly connected array or series
of conflicts–images and scenes of cross-
purposes, contradictions, disagreeable
oppositions, even of veritable warfare, and
of enmity, vengeance, and deadly spite-
fulness permeate and crowd the text. Slips
of the tongue represent “a conflict be –
tween two incompatible inclinations”
(62). The dynamic model that constitutes
the substructure of slips, dreams, and neu-
rosis (that is, the actual agenda of these
lectures) is fundamentally conflict-driven.
A wish or desire occurs consciously or not,
and meets with disapproval, censorship,
and rejection; it is barred from expres-
sion, but it nevertheless persists. A com-
promise is struck between the contend-

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143 (1) Winter 2014

135

On
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Rereading
Freud

ing agents; this deal is half-successful
and half-failure and is manifested in the
strange phenomena of slips, dreams, and
neuroses. The dynamics of this interplay
of forces is also evident in the return of
the repressed in a disguised and compro-
mised set of shapes, a regular manifesta-
tion of both internal forces, the wish
itself and that which repudiates it. Neu-
rotic symptoms, dreams, and the like rep-
resent both the repressed impulses and the
repressing intentions; and the compro-
mises are between opposing currents of
mental activity that mutually and concur-
rently interfere with one another. It is a
situation that seems pre-made for a nearly
universal tonality of ambivalence. This
group of overlapping hypotheses consti-
tutes the underlying theoretical structure
of the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
The lines of thinking to which this im –
portant dimension of Freud’s discourse
obtains is often regarded as something of
an offshoot in the mainstream of Western
culture. Despite Freud’s unbending mate –
rialism, naturalism, and realism, his prin-
cipal innovative means of representation
and analysis do not ½nd their sole distinc-
tive af½liations in the styles of intellection
that we sum up by referring to the Enlight –
enment. His ways of dealing with mental
phenomena have more to do with those
½gures represented by a reaction against
the Enlightenment, by the great Romantic
poets, nineteenth-century novelists, and
certain philosophers. Or as the Devil in
William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell robustly declaims, “Without Contrar –
ies is no Progression.”

In addition, there is a particular group of
German cultural-philosophic minds that
Freud can be pertinently associated with:
Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Max Weber.
Each in his own magisterial and unmistak-
able manner and idiom places the con cep –
tions of conflict, opposition, and neg ation
both at the center and along the axes of his

work. Each was post-Enlightenment, not
merely by way of chronology but in the set –
tled conviction that the world, at any rate
the human-social world, does not gather
to harmony or resolve itself into benign
order: there are no choirs of angelic voices.
And whenever two of them, Hegel and
Marx, invoke heavenly music it turns out
to be inauthentic, out of tune, utopian
whistling in the dark, projected into the si –
lent, echo-less future. Considered together
and in company with the great poets and
novelists of the nineteenth and ½rst half
of the twentieth century they make up the
most formidable association of social and
cultural criticism and commentary in and
of Western civilization. In a number of un –
derstandings they constitute among them –
selves a kind of second mainstream in our
culture. They all incline toward the oppo-
sitional and the negative, the subversive,
skeptical, radical, and suspicious, the dia –
lectical and ironic modes of sensibility and
representation. They are anti-reductionist
to a turn and a scandal to positivistic rules
and regulations. They are all masters of
reasoned argument and disputation, the
centers of whose investigations focus upon
the irreducibly un-rational, the contradic –
tory and antagonistic components of in –
dividual, social, and cultural existence.

Each of them embodies a different con –
½guration of what Max Weber called “the
disenchantment of the world.” Heirs to
the Enlightenment of the West, they all
had thoroughly interiorized the double dis –
enchanting legacy of reason and science.
The Prince kisses an entranced Sleeping
Beauty, and she is delivered from the spell
cast upon her by wicked elders. The touch
of reason liberates us to deal on an equal
footing with religious and social authority,
and even to a considerable pragmatic ex –
tent with nature. By the same token, how-
ever, the world has lost its old magic. It is
no longer under the guidance or the be –
nign interventions of the Deity–much less

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of minor divinities and spiritual entities–
and its wonder-making mysteries have
been drastically diminished. We are alone
with one another in a universe that was
not made for us, which as far as we are
concerned is both purposeless and indif-
ferent. There is no genuine substitute for
the old magic, but in something oddly
analogous to the place it occupied, these
seminally important ½gures have placed
the non-rational and the irrational with all
their contrarieties and irreconcilabilities
in both individual and collective senses.
Their general attitudes toward the other-
than-rational seem to be similar in sus-
tained ambivalence. They recognize it as
an indisposable part of our human exis-
tence. They tend to deplore it in its ex –
cesses, and they equally deplore our also
less than rational efforts to deny it, eradi-
cate it, or divert attention away from it.
They are all cognizant of its demonic pow-
ers, but they are in addition cognizant of
the comparably demonic potencies of what
we commonly take to be the counterforces
of reason, rationality, and rationalization
as we invest these with authority in our
institutions and internalize them in our
individual lives.

In this connection, the history of reason
and disenchantment completes a cycle,
catches up with itself, and hence, like trans –
ference, repeats the story of its own de –
velopment. At one of the notable moments
of its inception it was regarded as sorcery.
The perplexed Meno accuses Socrates of
“exercising magic and witchcraft upon me
and positively laying me under your spell
until I am just a mass of helplessness.” He
compares the effects of Socrates’s appli-
cation of dialectic to the paralyzing touch
of the stingray. “My mind and my lips are
literally numb, and I have nothing to reply
to you.” Reason, logic, and science here put
in an early appearance as another form of
the black arts. In the course of historical
time, they came to be generally af½rmed as

emancipatory white magic, self-inventions
that we are reasonably obliged to exploit.
But also in the same course of that suc-
cessful exploitation, the white magic has
itself revealed that it has its own dark sides.
Freud and the ½gures that I have conjec-
turally placed him among perceive that a
holding action must be undertaken if we
are not to be returned to spiritual darkness
and bondage at higher stages of de vel –
opment. At this time, it remains un cer –
tain whether that holding action will be
effective.

These are a few of the considerations that

I have learned to take into account in my
reading and rereading of Freud, in this
instance for a rereading of the Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis. I ½rst read him
as a modernist writer and a modernist
source of truth. I subsequently learned to
read him as a historical ½gure, whose
writings and personality dominated a sig –
ni½cant era in the development of modern
psychology, medicine, and cultural theory.
I also learned to read him as a clinical in –
novator, who developed a method for help-
ing people to help themselves. In addi-
tion, I also ½rst read him here in the United
States, at a time when he and his institu-
tional creation occupied positions of un –
rivalled influence and cultural authority.
That time is past. Psychoanalysis is no lon –
ger, if it ever actually was, an institution
with a single master theory and many trib –
utary rami½cations and subdivisions. It has
currently devolved, at least in North Amer –
ica, into a plurality of mini-orthodoxies
whose principal similarities sometimes
seem to be their differences with one an –
other. Its aspirations to become a general
psychology have evaporated. Academic ex –
perimental psychology, neuroscience and
the study of the brain, along with cognitive
studies and neo-evolutionary biological
theory have long since gone off on their
own extraordinary courses of discovery. If

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143 (1) Winter 2014

137

On
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Rereading
Freud

there is to be some convergence of these
sciences and psychoanalysis it most prob –
ably will not be a result of developments
in psychoanalysis itself.

In one area, however, Freud and his psy –
choanalytic method continue to prosper.
You can scarcely enter a school or college
in America today without running into a
“counselor.” The same holds true for ur –
ban and suburban communities at large.
These counselors (along with some circu-
lating social workers) are for many intents
and purposes psychotherapists, practicing
without much or any training or certi –
½cation. At the same time, however, em –
pirical studies indicate that some version
of the talking cure, along with appropriate
medication when necessary, seems to be
the most effective means of dealing with
a large range of psychological and devel-
opmental problems. This is no mean feat.
As a rule, people nowadays no longer see
their analysts or visit their shrinks. They
show up at their therapist’s of½ce or check
in for advice with their counselors. How-
ever watered-down a treatment or routine
of this kind may be, it is a version of a good
thing, and considerably better than what
existed before, which was more or less old-
fashioned punitive discipline or, for the
most part, nothing.

In any event, what persists and remains
is Freud as an intellectual and cultural ½g –
ure, a mind of heroic force and scope who
appeared at a special juncture in modern
history. Eminent among the eminent
others I have adduced, he is a permanent
accession to Western culture. He will con –
tinue to be read as far as we can see into
the foreseeable future, or for as long as peo-
ple continue to read–which may not be
forever. His writings possess a special
quality of some works of genius: they
remain continually rereadable, in part be –
cause of their capacity to masquerade as
somehow contemporary with our current
interests and problems, although they do
not thereby lose their particular historical
density either. What I am saying, I suppose,
is that Freud is a classic, that his writings
continue to live by virtue of a conjunction
of certain qualities of singular creative
intensity expressed through an idiom of
compelling and beautiful originality and
inimitable individuality. The thematic and
conceptual spectrum of his work coher-
ently captures, summarizes, and carries
forward a group of themes and problem-
aticalities that remain with us as salient to
life in its individual vicissitudes and to hu –
man life as we collaboratively experience
it as a species with a historical existence.

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endnotes

Author’s Note: I want to thank Patricia Spacks for the idea that rereading is an experience
and a conception that has been underexamined in the study of literature and of written
expression in general.

1 All quotations from and references to the lectures are from The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al., vols. XV and XVI (Lon-
don: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974). Page numbers are noted parenthetically within the main text.
2 See Patricia Kitcher, Freud’s Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary Science of Mind (Cambridge,

Mass.: mit Press, 1992).

3 Freud has already earlier asserted that “everything is related to everything, including small
things to great” (27). In his work as a detective and tracker of clues, this is a reasonable
assumption. But connection by correlation and connection by causality are distinct entities
in which the linkages are of different qualities.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
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