Family Resemblances and Family
Trees: Two Cognitive Metaphors
by Carlo Ginzburg
6. Thus far I have approached composite portraits and
family trees as distinct, unrelated historical phenomena—which they
were, with one possible, relevant exception. Freud, who (as I said) was
familiar with Galton's experiments in photography and used them to
clarify dreamwork, married Jacob Bernays's niece, Martha. In a letter
to his fiancée Freud referred admiringly to Jacob's memory. 49 A selection of Jacob Bernays's
letters—a significant gesture of Jewish pride, issued in Breslau in
1932 —was dedicated to Freud, whose financial support had made the
publication possible. 50
Freud's lasting devotion to a prominent member of his
wife's family may have been also related to an intellectual debt. The
expression "cathartic method," used by Freud and Breuer in their Studies
on Hysteria,, has been tentatively connected to Bernays's work on
Aristotle. "I should be surprised," Momigliano commented, "if Bernays'
famous memoir on Aristotle's Katharsis [interpreted in medical,
rather than moral terms] was unknown to Freud in his formative years." 51 To extend this remark to
Bernays' much more technical paper on the textual transmission of
Lucretius may seem unsound. But there are reasons to assume that Freud
might have been interested in both the subject matter and the method of
Bernays's dissertation. Readers of The Interpretation of Dreams
will recall a long quotation from Lucretius's poem on the close
relationship between dreams and the concerns of waking life. 52 Freud must have been deeply
sympathetic with Lucretius' materialistic theory of knowledge, his
unsentimental approach to sex and death, and his scathing criticism of
religion. Moreover, Freud's comparison between dreams and half-erased,
interpolated, corrupted texts evokes textual criticism. 53 "It seems to me," Freud wrote in a famous
passage, acknowledging his debt to the writings of Giovanni Morelli,
the Italian connoisseur, "that his method of inquiry is closely related
to the technique of psycho-analysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine
secret and concealed things from unconsidered or unnoticed details,
from the rubbish heap, as it were, of our observations." 54 Bernays's textual criticism and its use
of gaps and mistakes as clues might have elicited a similar comment.
7. Freud seems to invite us to explore the
convergence between family resemblances and family trees on a
morphological level as well. It would be easy to find examples of
family trees that could be regarded as translations, made in a kindred
spirit, of Galton's composite portraits (fig. 8). 55 The opposite move—that is, to translate
family trees into an equivalent of Galton's images—would require an
additional effort. But if we could transfer the pages of a given text
onto a set of transparent screens we would obtain, rather than a stemma
codicum, a composite portrait of a text. Computers have transformed
this wild hypothesis into a possibility. The slow improvement of
artificial translators shows that some built-in competence can be
achieved. But we are still far away from the "`artificial philologist'"
who would be able to distinguish correct readings from mistakes (G, p.
48 n. 18).
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