Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 1 (III)
Let us conclude our discussion of Lear’s introduction to Love and its Place in Nature. In the last entry I quoted a passage reflecting a certain conception — a manifestly “teleological” one — of psychoanalytic interpretation in the clinical setting. On this view, an interpretation develops
“naturally out of the archaic “thinking” it interprets. A good interpretation represents the end of a developmental process which begins with archaic attempts to “say the same thing.” The interpretation allows the mind to understand, at the level of a conceptualized judgment, what it has been trying to say all along, in more primitive ways” (8)
This frank Aristotelianizing of Freud, the (seemingly) least Aristotelian of thinkers, is prefigured in the epigraph to Lear’s book — by Aristotle — and it is carried out by frequent reference to Aristotle later on. “Mind” is accordingly pressing all the while toward self-expression, including via “archaic mental function,” and reaches its telos only in self-knowledge. And while this teleology certainly conflicts with Freud’s considered view of psychoanalytic science — the positivistic theory — his “discovery” entails just such a framework.
Thus Freud himself, to be sure, conceived psychoanalysis “as simply uncovering a hidden thought” (9), as is congruent with “the image of science as discovering an independently existing reality” (9). Nonetheless, analytic practice suggests a conatus governing mind, from its most opaquely primitive communicative efforts to the most sophisticated and self-transparent. Indeed, mind itself demands an “interpretation” as the necessary, final phase in its own struggle for self-knowledge. (That this interpretation is actually a provision of the analyst and not the analysand is as yet immaterial to Lear’s argument. Nonetheless, this quintessentially relational or intersubjective achievement is still the terminus of self-intelligibility towards which mind instinctively propels itself.)
We now have some provisional understanding of the first two elements in Freud’s revolution:
the paradoxical “science of subjectivity” that flouts Freud’s own, 19th century ideal of science; and
the conception of “archaic mental functioning” — accessory to this science —which locates mind in precisely those occurrences that seem most recalcitrantly non-mental
But we have in addition begun to appreciate a third element: “the positing of Love as a basic force in nature” (3). For Lear’s explication of psychoanalysis as a practice facilitating the immanent telos of mind — whose elemental struggle for self-knowledge is brought by interpretation to completion — makes the entire process essentially an expression of love. The clarification of this striking idea comes later in the chapter, only after the meaning of love in its “enlarged” sense is reviewed. It emerges in the midst of a discussion of individuality and individuation — ideals whose intrinsic value psychoanalysis presupposes. “An individual is, among other things, constituted by the pursuit of the meanings by which he does or might live. Psychoanalysis is at its core committed to the process of individuation” (22). The aim of individuality just is the developmental process we have described. And the allegiance of psychoanalysis to this process finally just is an expression of love. In other words, this is the form love naturally assumes at this level of reality:
“Precisely because the individual is a psychological achievement, it is not a given…But for an individual to come into existence, his archaic expression of subjectivity must be integrated with the rest of his life. An individual comes to be not by abolishing archaic life, but by taking it up into a higher level of organization. Freud…came to recognize this development as a manifestation of love within the human arena.” (23)
Later in the book, Lear will elaborate on this enlarged conception of love as a natural “force,” primordial and ubiquitous. And he will elucidate both more prosaic types of human affection, as well as the science and art of psychoanalysis, as proper “manifestations” of this same force. In this chapter Lear only gestures towards these elaborations. Freud, we are told, “came to recognize a basic developmental force in nature. This force, which he called love, permeates the animate world and tends toward the development of ever higher and more complex unities” (12).
There is little doubt, in fact, that Lear construes mental functions such as conceptualization and interpretation as per definition expressions of just this force. This position is conveyed by a number of characteristically self-reflexive formulations, for example: “The very activity of coming to understand love is itself a development, a unification, an act of love” (13). And lest the reader suppose that only interpretations directed at love are also instances of love, Lear writes a moment later: “This books is an interpretation. As such, it is an act of love” (15). (We might compare Lear’s proposition here with a contrasting view within psychoanalysis — namely, that interpretations are, or at least can be, acts of aggression.)
There are weaker and stronger versions of this claim. These are, Lear writes, the “manifest” and “latent” content of Freud’s famous assertion that psychoanalysis “is a cure through love” (27). We ought not only to receive this mot at face value, as a statement about the temperamental requirements of an effective analyst: “emotional engagement” and “emphatic understanding” (27). At least potentially, says Lear, Freud’s words imply a sweepingly dramatic characterization of the status that psychoanalysis enjoys in the eons-long saga of life coming to self-knowledge, and self-reconciliation, via greater and greater states of complexity, unity, and individuation.