John Farrell (2007) puts forward a more critical exploration of what he takes to be Freud’s problematic opposition between, ‘the repressive, detached outlook of the scientist and the passionate interest of the artist’ (245). Like Blass, Farrell identifies the figure of Leonardo da Vinci as Freud’s scientific hero for whom enquiry takes the form of passion (245), and more broadly, points up the centrality of Eros in Freud’s hope for a ‘passionate science’ (250). Farrell identifies narcissism as the integral theoretical construct that grounds the work of the intellect under the aegis of Eros. He observes that in the narcissistic stage of psychic development, ‘thought has not separated itself from fantasy’ (which is to say that the pleasure principle has not given way to the reality principle). Thus, by highlighting the narcissistic root of intellectual activity, Freud ‘endowed all of humanity with a state of being, located in the infantile past, in which thought and desire are one’ (249). I should add that, in my view, it is not simply that this narcissistic stage is a necessary developmental hurdle to be transcended by the achievement of object-love, but rather that the narcissistic formation of early infancy continues to haunt the possibilities of intellectual organisation. Farrell’s pointing to the importance of narcissism for an understanding of the relation between Eros and the work of the intellect will prove productive to our discussion, particularly when we come to focus on Freud’s theorising of infantile sexuality below. The problem that Wissbegierde poses for the order of the instincts—can there be a desire to know that exists independently of the sexual instincts? — is implicitly challenged by the theory of narcissism. Yet crucially, the theory of narcissism was not fully established throughout the period in which Freud’s thought on the research instinct was most pronounced (1908-1915). One of the many significant contributions which Freud’s theory of narcissism makes to the metapsychological project is that, ‘it reveals the roots of Logos in Eros without reducing the one to the other’ (Alford, 1998). Thus I am suggesting that, although the theoretical infrastructure was not yet in place, Freud’s treatment of Wissbegierde anticipates a reading of the integration of Eros and Logos that is introduced more explicitly in his Narcissism paper of 1914.
I have made a précis of Blass’s and Farrell’s accounts of Freud’s integral positioning of passion in the field of scientific investigation for two reasons. Firstly, they highlight a crucial qualification to the idea that Freud’s most significant cultural legacy has been to democratise artistic genius. It is widely regarded that by illuminating the extraordinary operations of the unconscious, Freud has gifted a poetic faculty to the ordinary man. The attraction of this ‘psychoanalytic gift to culture’ cannot be overstated.5 ((Harold Bloom, Lionel Trilling, Philip Rieff, Richard Rorty, Adam Phillips are among those whose different investments in this reading of Freud’s cultural legacy are particularly strong. ))Through positioning as central to Freud’s cultural legacy the figure of the researcher alongside the more familiar and culturally approved figure of the artist, Blass and Farrell remind us that Freud embeds within his model of the mind the activity of research alongside the creativity of art. Whether via the primary and passionate placement of Wissbegierde as an independent instinct (Blass), or via the permanent trace of the narcissistic unity of thought and desire (Farrell), an alliance between imagination and enquiry is forged which restores to the figure of the researcher a status which might ultimately challenge the culturally upheld distinction between science and art. The second reason for referring to these two accounts is to open the way for my own thoughts on the notion of Wissbegierde, which will look to the hermeneutic work of analysis itself to suggest an alternative way in which care and research might coalesce in the activity of psychoanalysis. As suggested, research for Freud is not exclusively the activity of the scientist. Freud is equally assured in speaking of the researches of historical man, the analyst, and of course the child. Indeed, in their readings of the Leonardo study both Blass and Farrell demonstrate how the genealogy of genius—artistic or scientific—is located by Freud in the proto-typical researches of childhood. Bearing in mind the time period in which Wissbegierde was a key term in Freud’s writings (1908-1915), we may expect his contemporary work on the subject of childhood and child-analysis to prove instructive to this topic.
In the remainder of this paper then, I shall take as my focus Freud’s case-history of Little Hans (1909b) in order to consider the interplay between the research projects of the child and those of the analyst(s), and I should state upfront that I will be as concerned with the structure of the analysis as the detail of the case. My presentation of Little Hans’s interest to the concept of Wissbegierde will also draw from Freud’s open letter of 1907 ‘The Sexual Enlightenment of Children’; his paper of 1908 ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’; and an amendment made to his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1915. Taken together, Freud’s writings on infantile sexuality of this period (i.e. the Wissbegierde period) demonstrate both how the site of childhood was gaining stature as an object of scientific research, and how the figure of the child was itself being situated as a paradigmatic researcher. Moreover, these complementary papers reveal something of Freud’s ethical recommendations on childhood as a cultural problem (i.e. childhood as a phenomenon that poses questions for the subjects of parenting, education, reform, therapeutics, and so on).