Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Wittgenstein And Freud
same structure: "I have a history book" and "I have a headache", while a deep grammar
analysis reveals them to be totally different.
4) Family resemblances (Familienähnlicheten) and Galton´s
photographies.
I will lastly refer to what I judge to be the weightiest influence of one of Freud´s ideas
upon one of the essential thoughts in the second Wittgenstein. They both take as a
model Galton´s photographies, and unless one considers this a most improbable
coincidence, it is necessary to admit that Wittgenstein took them from Freud, mostly
because it is not a very notorious topic among Francis Galton´s scientific contributions.
Beyond all other scientific contributions of British born Francis Galton (1822-1919)
in meteorology, eugenics and heredity, it is important to underline, for the topic I am now
considering, the composite photography procedure with the overlapping of different
photographies, because this is what inspired with great results, Freud´s psychoanalytical
theory.
Galton´s composite photography is considered as a model in several places of Die
Traumdeutung. Thus, Freud refers to a dream where the faces of two persons become
mixed. It is a face that --in the dream-- is simultaneously somebody else´s. It is like a
composite photography (Mischphotogaphie) of Galton´s which obtains family
resemblances (Familienähnlichtkeiten) by placing several faces on the same plate. In
this same chapter he refers again to dreams and the Galtonian procedure. Freud admits
he adopted the procedure according to which Galton produced his family portraits
(Familienporträts) by projecting both images one over the other, by means of which the
common features were strongly highlighted and those features which did not coincide
were eliminated, producing a vague image." (op. VI, Die Traumarbeit, A Die
Verdichtungarbeit, 295). In short, the dream activity follows strictly the lines which Galton
used to produce his family portraits, which consisted in making the diverse components
coincide by overlapping them in order to highlight what was common in the images and
eliminating the discordant details.
In order to weigh the scope of this appeal to a strategy used by Galton´s
photography -which is not limited to his analysis of dreams-I will refer to his book about
Moses (Freud b) which was inspired by O. Ranke´s book The Birth of the Hero Myth,
and was applied by Freud to examining the historic and mythical heroes , which acquires
concomitant features in different traditions. All civilized peoples exalted them in many
ways as the object of poetical works, or as legendary kings or as founders of their
religion. Thus, in view of the multiplicity of heroes of different countries (Sargon of
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