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one end of it round the patient's neck, and the other in the smoke of the fire [so the
two pieces are alike but have also been in direct contact]. As the vervain dries up in
the smoke, so the tumor will also dry up and disappear.”
This most interesting technique also guarantees that the doctor will collect his
fee, as the prescription ends by saying:
“If the patient should afterwards prove ungrateful to the good physician, the man
of skill can avenge himself very easily by throwing the vervain into water; for as the
root absorbs the moisture once more, the tumor will return.” ([3], p. 40)
Wittgenstein noted in his Observations on Frazer's 'Golden Bough': “When I
read Frazer I'm always wanting to say: 'all these processes, these changes in mean-
ing, we still have them before us in our spoken language”'. ([12], pp. 69-70.) But
Frazer himself had already pointed out that the “reasonings” he had described are
“two different and mistaken applications of the association of ideas” and that “the
order to be found in magic is only a generalization or extension by false analogy of
the order in which ideas present themselves to our minds”. ([3]p. 797.)
10.4
The Two Levels of Human Rationality
The associative mechanisms set off in psychotic delirium or magical thinking are
also to be found, to a lesser extent, in many psychic processes that no one regards
as pathological, such as the curiously winding paths of memory.
To demonstrate this we have only to recall the well-worn cliché of Proust's fa-
mous madeleine, the starting point for the long chain of associations we know as
In
Search of Lost Time
. In the opening pages of part one Proust shows how language is
an unfurling of memory. This begins when a perception of the present awakens the
evocation of certain perceptions of the past. Proust's narrator, now an adult, is one
day given a cup of tea with a madeleine by his mother. And when the taste of the
madeleine, soaked in the cup of tea, reaches his mouth, a delicious pleasure invades
him, dissolving his everyday cares and turning him inwards. The process of evoca-
tion has begun. A string of his soul has been plucked. The taste of the madeleine
soaked in tea has acted as a trigger, unleashing a whole chain of associations. His
soul turns in on itself because “that, which he seeks, is also the dark land through
which he must search”. ([9], p. 61.)
And the narrator does not fail to point out that this search is also an act of cre-
ation, in which the taste of the present madeleine revives the mnemic trace of other
madeleines, the ones his Aunt Leonie used to give him when he was a child in Com-
bray. This memory brings with it that of “the old grey house upon the street, where
her room was” (...) “and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all
weathers, the square where I was sent before lunch, the streets along which I used
to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine”.
Once you succeed in unfurling the language of memory a great many things can
come from the taste of a madeleine soaked in a cup of tea. The words fit together
one after the other, the images contained in them calling up other images, and the
