Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt proposes a penetrating study of Freudian thought as seen through the German language. He asserts that Freud’s discoveries depend, much more then we realize, on the very structure of the German language. As the Lacanian formula goes, the unconscious is structured like a language: German. Swimming in this sea, Freud would have recognized its currents.
Freud explored German as practically no one before him had. Both a childhood language – all the roots are recognizable – and a language of concrete space, it reveals all of its own innermost reaches.
The catastrophe was already in the wings, and Freud probed the unconscious as seen through language. He swam in the waters that surrounded him, but he also dove below them, and brought what was hidden to the surface.
Freud reports his characters' monologues like a novelist. He shows what they say, and through them, words take on an efficiency that cuts to the quick of the language’s function, revealing the inner tension and retention.
He attempts to bring to the level of thought that which, in Germany, is about to unleash the irreparable. He gives life to knowledge that could have elucidated a seriously repressed personality.
Were Freud’s discoveries oriented by the grammatical structure of the German language?