Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 2 (VI)
In the last entry, we described several of Lear’s objections to a certain conception of emotional catharsis: namely, one linked to the metaphor of “discharge.” In particular, Lear emphasizes two problems:
The discharge metaphor presupposes the very dichotomy — between mind and body — that Freud’s discovery of archaic mental functioning obviates. The notion of a mental quantum that may, or may not, be “converted” into bodily expression is unintelligible.
The notion of a dischargeable item’s “quantifiability” contradicts the facts of clinical observation. Were there really some finite amount and intensity of “strangulated affect”; and were this quantity really “discharged” via the patient’s neurotic symptoms; then eventually that affect would expend itself, and would in the meantime gradually diminish. But this is exactly not what occurs.
In fact, as Lear now insists, no expression of emotion — of any magnitude — will offer the patient relief so long as it is inappropriate, or does not follow from a kind of authentic self-recognition. Hence something apart from a finite “quantum” of undischarged affect is surely at issue. At this point Lear wonders:
“Why is it that the truth cures? Why is it that only the genuine emotional response directed onto the right object is successful in discharging the pent-up psychic energy? This question cannot be answered in quantitative terms. So long as one continues to think of an emotion as being (or as being produced by) a quantity of displaceable energy, it will remain mysterious why only the appropriate emotional response has a cathartic effect” (45)
The significance in this context of irreducibly qualitative predicates like “appropriate,” "genuine,” and “true” simply cannot be explained on the quantitative assumptions of the discharge metaphor. A patient may experience the “greatest” possible emotions, of every sort, without it making the slightest difference to his or her symptomology, or degree of suffering. What does matter is evidently the shift in reflective orientation that coincides with an emotional experience bearing the predicates above. It is finally this deficiency in the discharge model — broadly, its inability to explicate conceptual development in terms of quantitative, “economic” magnitudes —that opens the space for Lear’s alternative. (In another context — “The Economic Problem of Masochism” — Freud himself acknowledges an irreducibly “qualitative” ingredient of experience.)
[Here I will say a couple of things about Lear’s general interpretive strategy, in passing. It is characteristic of this strategy that the Freudian theory is corrected on behalf, not of some rival paradigm, but of Freudian practice: the very materials brought to light by the original observations. The qualities of cathartic experience evident in the case histories, upon which Freud himself insisted, are precisely the data that defy the metaphor of discharge.
Another methodological point: while Lear himself does not frame his approach in just these terms, it strikes me that — broadly speaking — he intends to show that the tidy dichotomies that define so many of Freud’s conceptualizations are undermined by the very “revolution” he inaugurated. This occurs at the level of psychoanalytic practice, observation, and — let us say — “intuitive understanding.” We have just described two illustrations of this approach, both in connection with the problematic image of discharge. On the one hand, the dichotomy between mind and body presupposed by the postulate of a quantum of energy that “may or may not” express itself — mentally or physically — is undermined by the evidence of archaic mental functioning that Freud himself accumulates. This functioning evinces the unity of mind and body at the most fundamental levels. On the other hand, the dichotomy of conceptual “quality” and emotional “quantity,” and the explanation of catharsis solely through the latter, which are natural consequences of the discharge theory — this dichotomy, too, is invalidated by psychoanalytic practice, that is, the inbuilt “qualities” of cathartic experience itself.]
To return now to Lear’s argument, and in light of these methodological observations, let us put our question in a slightly different way: what sort of account honors the inseparability of thought and emotion, or illuminates the documented cases of catharsis as something beyond discharges of emotional quanta — an explanation that now appears to explain very little?
Lear’s alternative view of catharsis, congruent with Freud’s tripartite revolution, is grounded in a “return” to Aristotle. We may note the irony that, to make sense of the most modern of revolutionaries, Lear enlists the most doctrinaire imaginable of thinkers, at the least in the Occidental world. In fact, Aristotle’s authority went virtually uncontested in medieval thought and was only deposed, finally, in the early modern era by the analogous “revolution” associated with Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes.
More specifically, Lear re-articulates the experiences of hysteria chronicled by Breuer and Freud with categories drawn from Aristotle’s discussions of
the emotions, in the Rhetoric, and
“Katharsis” in the experience of tragic performance, in the Poetics. (In fact, in the second case it is actually Freud who, in quite another context, alludes to Aristotle’s theory of drama in making psychoanalytic sense of human behavior.)
From the Rhetoric, Lear draws the insight — substantiated by psychoanalytic practice, if not theory — that emotions are essentially orientations, inseparable from concepts, beliefs, and justifications, through which we make sense of ourselves and the world. This immediately yields a crucial result: we need not by troubled by the puzzling disconnect between a blind, quantitative emotion and its independent conceptualization if, from the first, emotions are irreducibly conceptual — in however inchoate a form. From the Poetics, Lear draws ideas that restore to cathartic experience the epistemic-recognitive aspects obscured by the discharge model.
In the next entry, I will discuss each of these accounts.