If, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud recommended one should ‘shrug his shoulders’ in front of ‘the utterance of philosophers’ which assures that ‘consciousness is an indispensable characteristic of what is psychical’ (Freud, 1900, p. 612), in his correspondence he gave a more radical diagnostic of philosophy: ‘I believe that one day metaphysics will be condemned as a nuisance, as an abuse of thinking, as a survival from the period of the religious Weltanschauung.’7 Until his very last work, Freud would attack philosophy on the basis that ‘the majority of philosophers (…) declare that the idea of something psychical being unconscious is self-contradictory’ (Freud, 1940a [1938a], p. 158). However, I believe this main reproach of Freud’s contains another one, which would be addressed to the formalism of philosophy. A type of philosophical writing would cover and hide unconscious modes of thinking, which are precisely the ones that both a psychoanalytic and a poetic writing aim to express.
When he describes the dream-work, Freud compares the function of secondary revision to the one ‘which the poet maliciously ascribes to philosophers: it fills up the gaps in the dream-structure with shreds and patches’ (Freud, 1900, p. 490). The poem to which Freud alludes is Heinrich Heine’s Die Heimkehr. Freud quotes it again in the New Introductory Lectures to criticise the outrageous pretention of philosophical systems that aim to propose an absolutely coherent picture of the universe: