Psychoanalysis and Deduction

by Stefano Guerra
Translated by Simona Fedeli

I have been reflecting upon the relationship between Holmes and psychoanalysis for many years. I am a psychoanalyst and I am obviously expected to talk about the investigation inquiry as, as a matter of fact, people mainly consider psychoanalysis as an investigation inquiring process.

I should tell you many anecdotes of my life in which I played the Sherlock Holmes role, but I prefer talking about the differences, instead of similarities, between the psychoanalyst and the Consulting Detective.

I first need a short excursus on the several psychoanalysts' interpretations of the psychological aspects of Holmes.

In his last essay "The strange case of Mr H", published on the Mystfest Catalogue, Argentieri asserts that had Holmes been a Freud's patient he should surely have been an obsessed one, maybe a ciclotymic or an hysterical one. He goes on analysing Sir A.C.Doyle and his father's false madness and explains the extreme rationality of the first by the fare illness of the second.

Who is A.C.Doyle ? A figurehead ? Nobody cares about it.We are working on other matters.

I prefer the analysis which considers Holmes as a teen-ager, the eternal teen-ager who never grows up. He is a teen-ager in his investigation method and in his friendship with Watson : in this friendship there are no women as they are not yet arrived. Naturally they hover the necessity of being adults and the necessity of being subordinate (we know this aspect of Holmes behaviour).

To grow up usually means to choose and to choose means to give up fantasy and ideals. That is why we like Holmes so much : we identify ourselves in the teen-ager who has not yet choosen.

We, psychoanalysts , have also studied Holmes from the methodological point of view. Thanks to Carlo Ginzburg and his essay of 1979 we have relized that there is a relationship between Holmes methodology and the psychoanalytic and reviewer ones. According to Ginzburg, psychoanalysts use the circumstantial evidence paradigm. The author of the Holmes stories, Freud and Giovanni Morelli ( a famous art-critic pen-named Lemoier) each representative of the above mentioned methods, were doctors and all of them considered the circumstantial evidence moreimportant than the whole problem to be solved. According to Holmes it is sufficient to observe little details which he and nobody else knows and the mystery can be easily solved.

Actually science has proven that if one does not know what to observe, one does not really observe anything. Therefore the real problem is to point first our attention on what must be observed and then consider how we can obtain the same conclusions which Holmes reaches to. Moreover the attention of scientists has pointed out Holmes ipotetic congectural method. Marramao, in his essay, states that the relation between the events is ipothetical and not necessary ( Aristotele docet ). According to the famous example, going inside a room in which there is a table with a pouch on and many beans near it, I can only suppose that the beans had been inside the pouch but I cannot be as sure as I had seen someone taking them out or done it by myself.

It is Holmes method a guessing one ? Why does he and nobody else always guess the right things ? Why does Holmes think on circumstances which nobody else thinks about ?

This is the most interesting aspect of Holmes whole methodology. Marramao defines Holmes method as an old, positivist and anarchic one in which a rigid order , between meanings and words, exists. According to Marramao the modern scientist method does not respect this space-time continuum and allows details which do not belong to this scheme.

According to me, anyway, it is Holmes creativity the main key to understand the use we can do of his methodology inside the modern scientist thinking.

Holmes very often gets angry with Watson because he does not observe things properly. In SILV (Silver Blaze) Holmes finds a match in the mud. Inspector Gregory observes that it should have been impossible to find it if one had not looked for it . Holmes answer is : " It was invisible...I only saw it because I was looking for it". He imagined it should be there. Therefore Holmes bluffs : he does not only observe : he looks for details. He looks for the match because he has imagined the happened events and he can do it because he is not bound to a certain way of thinking.

The psychoanalyst method seems to be better than the Holmes one, as Freud proved. When Freud taught to his pupils they found difficult to understand his words. He spoke of "infantile sexuality", "Edipo complex" but they covered their eyes as a refusal to see..." If you do not want to see the things in front of you , I will use a device : I will psychoanalyse you." This is Freud solution : the analysts are analysed. They have been taught to see inside themselves what Freud saw and, after, have learnt to see these things outside.

On the contrary Holmes has never been a teacher. He has never understood Watson's difficulties. Why ?

Corsellini says it is because the relax, the house, the arm-chair . It is a fact : Holmes, as Dupont by Poe did, yelds to knowledge and imagination through abstraction, through the absence of links with reality. In this way he enters another world ( nothing to do with drug addiction ). Reflection allows him to go into the creativity world.

The last difference between the psychoanalist method and the investigation inquiring one is the link to reality : even if he images the solution of the problem, Holmes is always obliged to verify this theorema with reality. He always must check if the imagined solution is really true . As a consequence Holmes relation with reality is stronger than the psychoanalyst 's one. In fact when we have created a wonderful story together with our patients ; when the patients are satisfied with the beautiful story we have told them , or they have told us, or have told together, the game is over. We do not need reality.