Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 1 (I)
In this series of entries, I will reconstruct the main lines of argument in Jonathan Lear’s fascinating book, Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis.
In Chapter 1 of Love and its Place in Nature, Jonathan Lear identifies three elements of Freud’s “revolution,” whose theoretical consequences were allegedly unappreciated — both by Freud himself and his followers. And Lear names some of the obstacles blocking such an appreciation. The revolution included “[1] a science of subjectivity; [2] the discovery of an archaic form of mental functioning; [3] the positing of Love as a basic force in nature” (3, bracketed numbers mine).
(These elements are related, Lear tells us, meaning — I gather — that the examination of any one of them will evoke the others. So, realizing the program of a “science of subjectivity,” as Freud does — in observation and reflection — will entail recognizing “archaic mental functioning” in that subjectivity, as well as love as the prime-mover in its healthy, individuating development.)
The first half of the chapter describes these elements and their “paradoxes,” the characteristics of each that — owing either to Freud’s manner of articulating them or to some more intrinsic difficulty — pose such challenges to our common sense. The very phrase “science of subjectivity” appears to contain contradictory pieces. On the conventional understanding, and indeed on Freud’s, science is in essence objectifying: its content is perforce an object. If and when a science, so construed, applies itself to an item such as “subjectivity” — which per definition stipulates that it is not, can never be, an object — one expects the result to defeat the aim. Subjectivity is then explained, not qua subjectivity, but as the classified, law-governed “object” into which the scientific machinery converts it. In order for anything like a true “science of subjectivity” to exist, then, a model of science must be developed that accommodates the features constitutive of subjectivity, which do not admit of positivistic objectification.
Among these features Lear includes its irreducible first-person orientation and — perhaps another way of stating the same point — the inseparability of a person’s “identity” from such things as “meanings, emotions and desires” (4). The problem is only compounded, of course, by Freud’s additional discovery that these meanings, emotions, and desires, which are constitutive of subjectivity, are to a substantial degree not directly accessible to the very person whose possession they are; they are unconscious. In fact, these unconscious items only become available to consciousness “through a peculiar human interaction” (4), psychoanalytic treatment, that itself violates the traditional strictures of scientific method as Freud himself envisioned it: objectivity, passivity detachment, and the like.
How can we sustain this positivistic ideal of science, whose “object” demands the undiluted apprehension of a mind-independent reality, through an interaction whose object depends on the minds of both participants — neither of whom, for this reason, can credibly be called mere “observers”? How does one preserve the model of independence between knower and known when both the practice and the theory of psychoanalysis stipulates their unsurpassable interdependence? (Lear studied under Hans Loewald, from whom precisely these questions seem to be taken over.)
In fact, writes Lear, “the idea of a science of subjective reality is so new that we do not have any fixed model to which it should conform” (6). In this science, the mind is its own object, and so its efforts to study that object “in itself” are futile. And this object, in this arena, is discovered only in the process of its transformation. Or perhaps: to credibly discover this object just is to transform it.
In psychoanalysis, then, “mind is trying to grasp its own activity” (6). And again: “The reality that mind is trying to capture is mind itself, and in its attempt to understand itself, mind does not leave itself unaltered” (11). On their own, these phrases seem to restate the philosophical desiderata of German Idealism, particularly those of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. After all, one definitive side of the German idealist program was the demonstration that whatever appears “other” to mind, Geist — everything from the natural objects of science, to other human beings, to the laws that govern communities — are upon analysis expressions or “externalizations” of mind itself. The Phenomenology, in particular, inventories all the objects, activities, customs, and institutions that embody ourselves, and in which we can recognize — or fail to recognize — that embodiment.
(Actually, notwithstanding the occasional reference, Lear’s primary frame of reference is not German idealism, but Aristotle (many of whose ideas, of course, were taken up by the German idealists). I think the absence in this book of more direct engagement with Hegel, especially, was a missed opportunity.)
Though Lear does not say this explicitly, we can evidently interpret Freud’s “revolution” as in part an attempt to deepen or radicalize this German idealist thesis. Recall the second plank of this revolution: the discovery, namely, of an “archaic level of mental functioning that is, at first, so alien as to be unrecognizable” (6). At this archaic level Freud will place a number of phenomena, ostensibly redolent of mind, which Hegel had not thought to conceive as “others” of spirit — items that, after a phase of denial and resistance, we are brought to acknowledge as manifestations of our very selves. Famously, Freud invites us to recognize mind in the sorts of (frequently bodily) processes we are least disposed to look for evidence of it. “The unconscious wish is expressed in dreams, in slips of the tongue, in symptomatic acts, in a paralyzed leg, a false pregnancy, an irritable bowel” (6-7).
But what evidence does psychoanalysis adduce that these processes are manifestations of mind? — that they are not strictly speaking “processes” but activities, after all? “How is the mind to recognize itself in, say, an act of vomiting?” (7). The answer to this question supplies a success-criterion for both the epistemological and therapeutic viability of psychoanalysis. In other words, this criterion, when met
demonstrates the presence of mentality — intentions, motivations, wishes — in ostensibly non-mental phenomena, and
isolates the mechanism of psychological growth.
What is this criterion? I will take up this question in the next entry.