Vienna C grew up in the Josefstadt district, a short walk from the university, in a family that treated Wittgenstein the way some families treat a difficult uncle: argued about at dinner, secretly admired. He read the Tractatus at seventeen for the wrong reasons, to seem serious, and kept reading it for the right ones, chasing the line where it ends, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," for the next decade of his life. His doctoral work took him to Cambridge, Wittgenstein's own adopted home for nearly two decades, where he wrote his first dissertation on the later Wittgenstein's turn from the Tractatus's picture theory of language toward the language-games and "meaning as use" of the Philosophical Investigations. A fellowship at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich pulled him sideways into depth psychology, not away from philosophy of language but deeper into it: Jung's individuation looked to him like the same problem Wittgenstein had, a self trying to find words adequate to something that keeps exceeding them. A last stretch in Boston, close to where William James spent his career at Harvard, gave him his second doctorate, in narrative psychology, built on James's "stream of consciousness" and the stories a mind tells to hold itself together. He was recruited to IACS specifically for the space between these three men, which nobody else on the faculty was standing in.
IACSInt'l Academy for Consciousness Studies