"Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" A Faustian cogito?

Abstract

Much has been written until this day about the sentence Wo Es war, soll Ich werden, which concludes the XXXIst lecture of the "New introductory lectures on sychoanalysis" devoted to the "Dissection of the psychical personality". For almost a hundred years, layer upon layer of translation and interpretation have accumulated to obscure the meaning of this suggestive aphorism. My aim here will be to go back to the Freudian original - a move that although inspired by Jacques Lacan's approach in the 1950s does not take up his interpretative line. Rather, acting in the manner of a restorer carefully cleaning a painting so as to bring out the original colors and background, I will endeavor to remove one by one the accumulated layers of interpretation that have come to obscure the meaning of the Freudian formula. By shedding light on the formula's ambiguities as well as its intertextual echoes (Goethe, Romain Rolland and Ferenczi), I intend to breathe new life into it and demonstrate the depth of meaning attached to it, thus reviving its significance and resonance. Indeed, insofar as the very meaning of psychoanalysis is at stake, these interpretive debates are of concern not only to the Freudian exegete, but to all analysts in their relationship to psychoanalysis and to interpretation and theory. I will argue that the equivocation of Freud-Mephistopheles's formula, which I will refer to as a "Faustian Cogito" or "Faustian Witz", is an invitation to devote ourselves to the never-ending task of reinventing psychoanalysis.