A Wound without Pain: Freud on Aphasia

In his talk in honour of Freud’s eightieth birthday, Thomas Mann referred to the understanding of disease as an instrument of knowledge. “There is no deeper knowledge without the experience of disease and all heightened healthiness must be achieved by the route of illness.”1 In line of this sensitive description, I approach Freud’s oft-neglected early work Zur Auffassung der Aphasien. Freud’s work on aphasia (a group of speech disorders in which there is a defect, reduction, or loss of linguistic functioning) is a special case. In it, to use Mann’s terms, it is the “illness” of language that becomes central, and only through it is something essential about language itself revealed. My entry point into the text is precisely this predominance of illness, or more specifically of pain. I examine the relation of pain to language in aphasia, and show that their intersection reveals some essential characteristics of the structure of both pain and language.2 I turn to this early text since it is specifically here that I believe I can find Freud’s most primary and sometimes even “raw” treatment of language. Here is the primary moment in which the conception of language enters his theoretical “picture”, before it became one of the cornerstones of his speech therapy. I seek here to point to the immanent and intimate nature of Freud’s interest in language while deliberately avoiding familiar interpretations such as Lacan’s discussion of language’s function in Freud. Despite the enormous importance of Lacan’s