Introduction

How to Read Freud

Before entering my "Essay to Understand Freud" I would like

to explain how it was written and how it should be read.
What I propose is not an interpretation on a single level but
rather a series of readings each of which is both completed and
corrected by the following one. Because of the great distance
between the first and last readings it may seem that the initial
interpretation has been retracted, but such is not the case. Each
reading is essential and must be preserved.
Let me explain what I mean by this procedure. I will first
say something about the two main divisions of this study, which I
have called an "Analytic" and a "Dialectic," and then about the
movement of the "Analytic" itself.
1. With a view toward a dialectic between conflicting
hermeneutics, I first wrote a separate study dealing solely with the
Freudian interpretation. I call this separate interpretation an Analytic
because of the mechanical and external nature of its opposition to
all the other interpretations. How is the Analytic, taken as a whole,
connected with the Dialectic?
The relation between the Analytic and the Dialectic
answers to the central difficulty raised in the Problematic. In my
introductory presentation of Freud I regarded him, along with
Marx and Nietzsche, as one of the representatives of reductive
and demystifying hermeneutics. In this view I was guided by a
taste for extremes; I saw Freud as having a precise place in the
hermeneutic debate, opposed to a nonreductive and restorative
hermeneutics, and in league with other thinkers who wage a
combat comparable to his. The whole movement of this book
consists in a gradual readjusting
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of that initial position and of the panoramic view of the battlefield

governing it. In the end it may seem that in this indecisive combat
Freud is nowhere because he is everywhere. That impression is
correct: the limits of psychoanalysis will finally have to be
conceived not so much as a frontier beyond which exist other points
of view, rival or allied, but rather as the imaginary line of a front of
investigation which constantly advances, while the other points of
view filter through the dividing line. In the beginning, Freud is one
combatant among many; in the end, he shall have become the
privileged witness of the total combat, for all the opposition will be
carried over into him.
We will first come across his allies, now no longer alongside
him but within him. The issues raised by Nietzsche and Marx will
gradually be seen to rise to the heart of the Freudian question as
questions of language, ethics, and culture. The three interpretations
of culture that we usually set side by side will encroach upon one
another, the question of each becoming the question of the other.
But the greatest change in the course of these successive
readings will concern Freud's relationship to what is most opposed
to him, namely, a hermeneutics of the sacred. I first wanted to
become involved in the liveliest opposition, in order to give myself
the widest range of thought. At the start, in an interpretation of
psychoanalysis completely governed by Freud's own
systematization, all opposition is external; psychoanalysis has its
"opposite" outside of itself. This first reading is necessary; it serves
as a discipline of reflection; it brings about the dispossession of
consciousness and governs the ascesis of that narcissism that
wishes to be taken for the true Cogito. Hence this reading and its
harsh schooling will not be retracted but rather preserved in the
final reading. It is only in a second reading, that of our
"Dialectic," that the external and completely mechanical opposition
between the contending points of view can be converted into an
internal opposition, with each point of view becoming in a way its
opposite and bearing within itself the grounds of the contrary point
of view.
The basic reason for not going directly to the dialectical view
lies in our concern for a discipline of thought. First we must do
justice
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to each point of view separately; we must adopt, so to speak, their

instructive exclusiveness. Next we must account for their
opposition; we must do away with convenient eclecticisms and
posit all the oppositions as external. We will try to maintain this
discipline of thought; hence we will enter psychoanalysis from its
most demanding side, its systematization, which Freud called his
"metapsychology."
But our "Analytic" is not a self-enclosed reading on a
single level; from the beginning it is oriented toward a more
dialectical view, according to the movement from the more
abstract to the more concrete that sustains the series of readings.
I use the word "abstract" not in the vague and improper sense,
according to which an idea is abstract when it is without basis in
experience, detached from facts, "purely theoretical," but in the
precise and proper sense. The topographic theory and its
conjoined economics are not abstract in the sense of being remote
from the facts. In the sciences of man, "theory" grounds the facts;
the "facts" of psychoanalysis are set up by the theory in Freudian
language, by the "metapsychology"; theory and facts can only be
confirmed or invalidated together.
In what sense, then, is the Freudian "topography" abstract?
In the sense that it does not account for the intersubjective nature
of the dramas forming its main theme. Whether it be the drama of
the parental relation or the drama of the therapeutic relation itself,
in which the other situations achieve speech, what nourishes
analysis is always a debate between consciousnesses. Moreover, in
the Freudian topography that debate is projected onto a
representation of the psychical apparatus in which only the
"vicissitudes of instincts" within an isolated psychism are
thematized. Stated bluntly, the Freudian systematization is
solipsistic, whereas the situations and relations analysis speaks of and
which speak in analysis are intersubjective. Therein lies the abstract
character of the first reading we propose in Part I of the
"Analytic." That is why the topography, adopted at first as a
necessary discipline, will gradually come to be seen as a provisional
level of reference which will not be abandoned but surpassed and
retained. Gradually, within the "Ana-
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lytic" itself, the reading of Freud will become enriched and inverted
into its contrary, until the moment is reached when it will speak at
times in the manner of Hegel.
The main stages of the movement that carries the Analytic
toward its Dialectic are as follows. In a first cycle, entitled
"Energetics and Hermeneutics," we will set forth the basic
concepts of analytical interpretation. This study, properly
epistemological in nature. will center on the metapsychological
papers of the years 1914-17; in the investigation we will be guided
by one question: What is interpretation in psychoanalysis? This
inquiry must precede any study of cultural phenomena, for the
rights of that interpretation as well as its limits of validity depend
exclusively upon the solution of this epistemological problem. This
first group of chapters, which will follow fairly closely the historical
order of the constitution of the first topography (unconscious,
preconscious, conscious) and the gradual introduction of the
economic explanation, will place us before an apparent dilemma: by
turns we will see psychoanalysis as an explanation of psychical
phenomena through conflicts of forces, hence as an energetics; and
as an exegesis of apparent meaning through a latent meaning,
hence as a hermeneutics. At issue in Part I will be the unity of
these two manners of understanding; on the one hand we will see
that the only possible way for psychoanalysis to become
"interpretation" is by incorporating the economic point of view into
a theory of meaning; on the other hand the economic point of view
will appear to us to be irreducible to any other by reason of what we
will call the unsurpassable character of desire.
The second cycle, entitled "The Interpretation of Culture,"
will begin the movement by which Freud extends his central ideas
to wider areas. Freud's entire theory of culture may be regarded as
a merely analogical transposition of the economic explanation of
dreams and the neuroses. But the application of psychoanalysis to
esthetic symbols, ideals, and illusions will have repercussions
calling for a revision of the initial model and the schema of
interpretation discussed in Part I. This revision is expressed in the
second topography (ego, id, superego), which is added to the first
without suppressing it. New relations will be revealed, essentially
those
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concerned with other persons, which only cultural situations and

productions can bring to light. In the course of these chapters, then,
we will begin to discover the abstract and especially the solipsistic
character of the first topography; this will prepare the way for a
confrontation with the Hegelian exegesis of desire and of the
reduplication of consciousness in self -consciousness, a topic that
will occupy us in the "Dialectic." Here too, however, dreams will
be a model at once surpassed and unsurpassable, like the
emergence of desire in Part I; hence the theory of illusion, at the
end of Part II, will appear as a repetition of the starting point at
the peak of culture.
A third and last cycle will be concerned with the final
reworking of the theory of instincts under the sign of death. This
new instinct theory is of far-reaching significance. On the one hand
it alone enables us to complete the theory of culture by placing this
theory within the field of the struggle between Eros and Thanatos.
By the same token it enables us to carry to its completion the
Freudian interpretation of the reality principle, which functions
throughout as counterpole to the pleasure principle. However, in thus
completing the theories of culture and reality the new theory of
instincts does not limit itself to questioning the initial dream model:
it upsets the topographical starting point itself or, more precisely,
the mechanistic form in which the topography was first stated. This
mechanism, whose basic hypothesis about the functioning of the
physical apparatus we present at the beginning of Part I, was never
entirely eliminated from the later presentations of the topography; it
resists being integrated into an interpretation of meaning through
meaning and renders precarious the connection between energetics
and hermeneutics that we present in Part I; it is fundamentally
challenged only at the level of this final theory of instincts. But the
paradox is that the final development of the theory marks the return
of psychoanalysis to a sort of mythological philosophy, the emblems
of which are the figures of Eros, Thanatos, and Ananke.
Thus our Analytic progresses, by successive self-surpassing,
toward a Dialectic. That is why these chapters should be read as
successive strata or episodes in which understanding, by advancing
from the abstract to the concrete, changes meaning. On a first and
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more analytical reading, Freudianism reduces its opposition as

something external to itself; on a second and more dialectical
reading, it embraces in a certain manner what it seemed to exclude
through reduction. I expressly ask the reader, therefore, to suspend
his judgment and to engage in moving from a first understanding,
which has its own criteria, to a second understanding, in which the
opposing thought is heard in the texts of the master of suspicion
himself.