A lie of Freud?

Note on the article ber

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 Problmes de linguistique gnrale, entitled Remarques sur la
fonction du langage dans la dcouverte freudienne, that Benveniste undertakes a
critique, from the point of view of linguistics, of Karl Abels 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 lets follow closely the amazing construction of Freuds 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 Abels 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 Lacans 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 Freuds 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