Sigmund Freud and the Origin of Circular Reasoning

Certainly, Fraud...er, Freud, was not the first person in history to engage in circular reasoning. It seems self-evident, however, that he was the first psychoanalyst to do so. I came across what is probably the classic example of his doing this, while I was reading his "Interpretation of Dreams".

In this book, he lays out his theory of dream interpretation, and he also gives examples of analyses of specific dreams, some of these dreams being his own and some being those of patients he has treated. Now, Freud's theory of dreams employs a fundamental principle whereby a dream is the fulfillment of a wish. He declares this to be true of all dreams, even in those where a dream is unpleasant to the dreamer, or otherwise seems to contradict the principle - once the dream has been properly interpreted, a theme of wish fulfillment is inevitably uncovered.

Far be it from me to dispute this based on my own relatively meager knowledge of dream interpretation (though if I were an expert in the subject of dreaming, I'd probably be more likely to go with the more recent "form theory" of dreams rather than what is now called "content theory", which was the basis of Freud's system). But what I find interesting is that in Freud's classic work "The Interpretation of Dreams", he relates to the reader an anecdote of a patient's dream (and its interpretation) which he believes to be another wish fulfillment, but in this case he has to resort to a circular reasoning of sorts to "prove" this to the patient.

To briefly summarize the anecdote: a certain woman patient is skeptical that all dreams are wish fulfillments, and states this to Freud in a session. Then a couple of nights after that session, she has a dream, and the theme of that dream is such that it seems to directly contradict the notion of wish fulfillment - it appears to be diametrically opposed to the fulfillment of a wish. When she goes to see Freud at the next session, she tells him about the dream, and triumphantly exclaims (paraphrasing), "see...I told you a dream is not always the fulfillment of a wish!!". Freud thinks about this for a few seconds, then he tells her "no, you are incorrect - your dream was in fact the fulfillment of a wish: you had recently been disagreeing with me about whether a dream is the fulfillment of a wish, and so your dream represents the fulfillment of your wish that I should be wrong about this!"

Thus circular reason came to be used in a new field, that of psychoanalysis; and thus was another card placed in the ongoing building of Freud's house.