Like the linguists’ equivocal sentence “flying planes can be dangerous”, this book’s subtitle is ambiguous (ironic in a work championing semantic clarity). On one reading it is about Wittgenstein’s method for doing psychotherapy. Although it is true that he was interested in Freud and offered numerous scattered (mostly critical) comments on psychoanalysis (see Bouveresse 1995), Wittgenstein had no psychotherapeutic method: His method (actually, methods) was a therapy for philosophy. What John Heaton, a London psychiatrist and psychotherapist, has done, then, is to take a philosophical method and set it in a psychotherapeutic context: “Talking cures of various kinds seem to help people who are confused and suffering. I will use Wittgenstein’s work to clarify what may be going on in such cures.”  (viii — unless noted, page numbers refer to Heaton’s book). However, Heaton does more than use Wittgenstein’s method to clarify psychotherapy: he uses it as a model.

As might be expected, a substantial part of Heaton’s book is devoted to describing and explaining Wittgenstein’s method, and that is not easy. It is complex, elusive, paradoxical, ambiguous, generating in over more than half a century a huge secondary literature full of experts’ controversies and alternative interpretations (see for example  Schroeder, 2006; Candlish and Wrisley, 2010; Williams, 1999; Stern, 1995). Understanding it is further complicated by drastic differences between Wittgenstein’s early and later work. The former is sometimes characterized as the “picture theory of language” phase, the latter as the “use” or “ordinary language” era. In his first period he published the hugely influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — a forbiddingly difficult, abstrusely logical-formal, compressed work that has been endlessly analyzed and debated; even its point has remained controversial.

The later work is in important ways drastically different in content and style — now colloquial, aphoristic, obscure, paradoxical, ambiguous, informal. The major changes are in Wittgenstein’s conception of language and concomitantly in his method. In its own way this work, too, has proven to be highly problematic, and it, too, continues to be widely debated and analyzed. Yet — and this is the crux of my review — it also implicitly retains certain key features or values of the Tractatus, and it is those that raise the question of whether Wittgensteinian therapy is a satisfactory model for psychotherapy.

On the whole, Wittgenstein’s familiar basic position, common to both the early and later work, is that philosophy’s traditional perennial issues, problems, paradoxes actually are pseudo-problems, pseudo-issues raised and perpetuated by linguistic confusions and misconceptions and by setting inappropriate goals, and that accordingly the (therapeutic) solution is to identify, analyze and remove these confusions. As Heaton puts it, Wittgenstein

thought that the aim of philosophy and [philosophical!] therapy was radically different from empirical science. They were practices that should not be based on doctrines, theses and theories. There should be no hierarchies of more or less fundamental concepts. Dogmatism was to be avoided. He sought to show how philosophical problems require therapy as they arise because we are easily bewitched by language…. [quoting Wittgenstein:] “Human beings are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e. grammatical confusions. And freeing them from these presupposes extricating them from the immensely diverse associations they are caught up in. One must, as it were, regroup their entire language.” (viii, 141)

As I have indicated, Wittgenstein’s conception of the nature of the linguistic problems, indeed of the very nature of language itself, changed drastically from his early to his later work; so did his conception of the curative process. Nevertheless, the two eras share this key position: Wittgenstein, although employing two entirely different strategies, insists on removing issues pertaining to mental processes and states, to “what was going on in a person’s mind” — the domain of the mental. Philosophy should deal only with the mental’s other. Although in his private life Wittgenstein was intensely preoccupied with and tortured by personal psychological issues (the realm he often called “the ethical”), and although he didn’t deny the existence or importance of one’s inner life, as a philosopher he in effect fled from this domain in both his early and later work —  but using two different avoidant strategies  (Berger 2011, 25-27).

In the early period he used rigid compartmentalization. He simply explicitly excluded the “non-factual” (i.e., “non-scientific”, non-verifiable, “psychological-ethical”) subject matter and phenomena) from philosophy, for example in his famous Tractarian pronouncement “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (less stodgy in German: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen”), maintaining that “what can be said at all can be said clearly”. Thus in philosophy, for Wittgenstein propositions about, say, religion, ethics, aesthetics, the mystical, do not have meaning (i.e., aren’t tangible, verifiable), and they are in that sense nonsensical.

In his later work he accomplished the same avoidance via a quite different defensive strategy. He either projected the inner onto the external world, deflating and trivializing it by attending only to its tangible, publicly observable and confirmable outer manifestations (behaviors, actions, interactions, goals, language use ), or else made contradictory, paradoxical, obscuring remarks about it — for example, saying about pain that while it isn’t a something, neither is it a nothing. He was explicit and emphatic about his lack of interest as a philosopher in that realm  (155-57; 130-32; 165-72). For example, he asked “What can it mean to speak of ‘turning my attention to my own consciousness’? This is surely the queerest thing there could be…. The inner is a delusion” (156-57; 169); he “was more interested in the use of language than in solitary introspection” (156). He did not deny that persons had experiences, but believed that their consideration belonged in psychology, not philosophy (Schroeder 2006, 145).

How does Heaton transfer or translate this enormously complex, paradoxical twin body of beliefs, positions, methods, proscriptions into a psychotherapeutic context? His rationale and method are based on two chief  premises. He identifies philosophical confusion with psychopathology, and from there it is but a short step to doing the same with the two therapies:

What is called a ‘neurosis’ or ‘psychosis’ is a confused practice (139)…. a failure to make sense of some area of life (115, also 183)…. a person’s being in the grip of a logical paradox (163). Wittgenstein wrote: “A philosophical problem has the form ‘I don’t know my way about”. This is remarkably like a psychotherapeutic problem except that here pain and despair are involved. (viii)…. [again quoting Wittgenstein:] “There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies…. Philosophical clarity will have the same effect on the growth of mathematics as sunlight has on the growth of potato shoots.” This applies equally to psychotherapy (51, 52)…. What is your aim in philosophy? — To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle”. His [Wittgenstein’s] purpose is liberation, as is that of psychotherapy. (214)

Like Wittgenstein’s, Heaton’s conception of therapy is mostly proscriptive, a via negativa (Schroeder 206, 155). For example, one should avoid basing practice on theory, avoid “explanations which depend on dogmatic assumptions” (15, 95), avoid reification. This negativity opens up a space that Heaton fills by applying common sense, cognition, and corrective actions, all in order to clear up semantic confusions in his patients (see his clinical vignettes, 79, 154-55, 161-65, 175-77). Following Wittgenstein’s lead, he, too, largely excludes, deflates, and/or sets aside matters pertaining to the patients’ as well as to the therapists’ inner world. For example, he mostly downplays matters concerning defense and resistance, downplays transference issues (79, 175-77), and ignores the clinically central matter of the therapist’s own analysis or therapy — a matter that “Freud became more and more convinced, was the fundamental necessity for every practicing psychoanalyst” (Rothgeb 1973, 164) Furthermore, Heaton finesses  the daunting, elusive, practically important question of whether his adaptation of  Wittgenstein’s approach is suitable for every potential patient — the “matching” problem (see Berger 1991).

Now, it seems to me that the value The Talking Cure will has for a given clinician will depend crucially on whether this setting of the inner aside is acceptable to that individual, and that is a complex personal matter clinicians must decide for themselves. For me this position is not acceptable; after all, “psychotherapy” does have “psyche” in it and as I see it, the inner must be retained — but appropriately, not scientistically, dualistically. I therefore see the book’s value as quite limited. For a clinician its chief contribution is to call into question the widespread, sanctioned, mainstream mental health practices of gratuitous, otiose, misleading scientistic theorizing and pseudo-researching (finding “empirical support”), and that it challenges these by introducing and drawing on a widely respected, fascinating, complex philosophical critical position. However, clinicians interested in learning about Wittgensteinian critiques and therapy might wish to learn about it from general philosophical texts in the  secondary literature, and then to creatively use what they have learned to develop their own approach (for me, preferably one that did not exclude or trivialize the inner). That certainly would be a daunting and challenging task, but it has been adumbrated in various ways (e.g., Anton 2001; Pylkkö 1998; Tallis 1999; Berger 2011 and 2002); one needn’t start from scratch.

Generalists or others interested in Wittgenstein who also have some interest in psychotherapy will find a good deal that is informative and intriguing in this scholarly work. However, the danger I see for them is that they could easily be misled into believing that a preferred psychotherapy is one that sets aside or trivializes the inner world. Finally, those readers looking primarily for an exposition of Wittgensteinian philosophical therapy would do  better by going to one of the excellent expositions in the secondary literature, such as the examples given earlier. I particularly recommend Schroeder, 2006.

References

Anton, Corey. Selfhood and Authenticity. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY press, 2001.

Bouveresse, Jacques. Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious (translated by Carol Cosman). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Berger, Louis S. Language and the Ineffable: A Developmental Perspective and its Applications. Langham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011.

__________.  Psychotherapy as Praxis: Abandoning Misapplied Science. Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2002.

__________. Substance Abuse as Symptom: A Psychoanalytic Critique of Treatment Approaches and the Cultural Beliefs That Sustain Them. Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1991.

Candlish, Stewart and Wrisley, George, “Private Language”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (editor), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/private-language/>.

Pylkkö, Pauli. The Aconceptual Mind: Heideggerian Themes in Holistic Naturalism. Philadelphia, PA: Benjamin, 1998. 

Rothgeb, Carrie Lee (editor). Abstracts of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. N.Y.:  Jason Aronson, 1973.

Schroeder, Severin. Wittgenstein. Malden, MA:  Polity Press, 2006.

Stern, David G. Wittgenstein on Mind and Language. N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Tallis, Raymond. The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness. Reprint of the 1991 ed., with a new preface.  N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Williams, Meredith. Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning: Toward a Social Conception of Mind. N.Y.: Routledge, 1999.

© 2012 Louis S. Berger