on between a ‘historical reality’ and ‘a reality of facts’? […]
There are also those who retreat to a different mode of truth. An English novelist convinced that the primal scene in Freud’s case history of the wolf man never happened argued that it nevertheless possessed ‘a different, deeper kind of truth.’ There are still others: those who appear willing to dispense with truth altogether in view of the moral grandeur of the Freudian vision. This too has its analogies in the history of Soviet apologetic. André Malraux once argued ‘Just as the inquisition does not detract from the fundamental dignity of Christianity so the Moscow Trials do not detract from the fundamental dignity of communism.’ It is my impression that no sooner has it been made impossible for Freudians to maintain that Freud’s discoveries are true in the sense in which they were advanced and taken, than they will discover that they possess a ‘a fundamental dignity’.
In other words, it’s not a science, it’s a faith.
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