Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 3 (IX)

We have reviewed Lear’s suggestion that “dreams are like actions” (71). In particular, “action is by its nature meaningful” (72) and so, too, are dreams — and precisely by virtue of some property or properties they share with action. Lear names two such properties: “desire” and “belief.”

Action, of course, is self-evidently both sustained by desire (for some “end”) and constrained by belief (regarding the “context” of that action). But these ingredients, or at least their analogues, also figure in dreams. “Just as an action is the attempt to satisfy desire under the constraint of belief, so a dream is the attempt to gratify a wish under the constraint of censorship” (73). Inasmuch as a dream evinces these analogues of action, then, it merits for Lear designations such as “meaningful,” “intelligible,” and (after a fashion) “rational.”

Yet before we reconstruct Lear’s treatment of dreams, let us pause a moment and ask: is this an acceptable way of describing “action?” Though Lear does not illustrate his position in just this way, we might consider the following example. I acknowledge someone’s bodily movement as a proper “action” — hence rational — if I can say something like: ‘She is walking to the pantry in order to retrieve something to eat.’ For in that case, provided there is no conflicting evidence, I can realistically attribute to the actor a “desire” (for food) and a “belief,” or several (say, that the pantry is stocked with food, or is likely to be). By contrast, a movement that did not seem motivated, or undertaken “for the sake of” an end (at least on some description), or that did not seem responsive to beliefs about the world, or both — this movement would be difficult to classify as “action” at all, rather than a “occurrence” of some kind. (The latter would be “rational” only in the sense reserved for the impersonal, mechanical workings of law-governed nature.)

Lear is suggesting, I think, that a dream may, on its face — at the “manifest” level — appear to both the dreamer and the analyst (for whom it is recounted) as would an irrational bodily “movement,” concerning which neither motives nor beliefs could be identified. On their surface, dream and movement alike are meaningless, irrational in every respect apart from the pseudo-rationality of blind succession. But analytic interpretation discloses both the latent “wish” (proto-desire) and censoring “conviction” (proto-belief) of the dreamer communicated by that dream; and together, the presence of these items certify the proper meaning and rationality of the dream.

Our prospects of discerning cogent, determinate “wishes” or “convictions” in dreams seem dim, initially, since dream-experience is typified by disjointedness, inconsistency, fluctuations, and instability. In fact — though Lear does not take up this thread — one might suppose that the proper analogy is not with actions lacking any discernible desire or belief, but with those that appear chaotically overloaded with many desires and beliefs that contradict both themselves and one another. Such an anarchical, “psychotic” action, were it patterned after dreams as we know them, might for instance express a “desire” for excitement or human connection, but also — a moment later or even at the same time — for stasis and solitude; just as it might express the “beliefs” that it is at the moment both day and night. Here again, though, we’d have difficulty identifying such quasi-actions as meaningful or rational.

Once again, in an argumentative gesture that is by now familiar, Lear claims that the “facts” of analytic practice violate some of Freud’s own theoretical systematizations, the notorious “metapsychology.” In particular, in this case, the identification of wishes as proto-desires, and censorship as proto-belief, encourages a “developmental” schema, marked by continuity and immanent growth, rather than a “dichotomous” theory that leaves necessary connections imponderable.

In this vein, the chapter’s middle section contains Lear’s criticism of Freud’s “pleasure” and “reality” principles as descriptions of psychological functioning. (This distinction is famously codified in Freud’s “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning.”) Lear’s main objection, it seems, is that these principles are so incommensurable with each other at the level of form, it is obscure why one should ever develop into the other. More concretely, Lear questions the logical coherence of an organism that hallucinates originally in order to gain pleasure. This must be a “function” it acquires later since, to begin with, the organism “wishes,” not for the hallucination of the satisfaction it has in fact received — say, at the mother’s breast — but rather, as Lear puts it, “for the real thing” (82).

These distinctions matter, for Lear, because we want a self-consistent way of characterizing the “infantile wishes” ostensibly at the root of dreams (in addition to all neurotic productions), that is commensurable with the adult “desires” they eventually become, or fail to become. So long as we conceive wishes as essentially wishes for hallucinated pleasure — rather than acquiring this function at a later stage — we will be unable to make sense either of its development into desire, or of the adult’s attitude to these repressed wishes as they emerge in the dream.

To see why this is so, Lear takes from Freud’s writings the example of an adult dreamer who is disconcerted by a dream, the latent content of which conveys a “wish” — conserved, untouched, from childhood — for the death of a loved-one:

[T]he horrified reaction of an adult to his dream can be explained as the reaction of the emotional-desiring part of the adult toward the childhood wishes that live on unconsciously in his soul. But while the mature adult does not desire the death of a loved one, even though he continues to harbor an infantile wish, it does not make sense to claim that the horrified reaction is toward a wish aimed at a hallucination. The horrified reaction is toward a wish for the real thing. (84)

From the start, then, the infant’s “wish” — however inchoate, obscure, and fantastical — aims at something beyond hallucinated satisfaction. It is “directed onto the world from the beginning of mental life” (84).

Now, Lear does not deny that infant experience, and later the unconscious, are indeed characterized by many of the features, activities, and pressures Freud ascribes to “primary process” and collects under the rubric of the “pleasure principle.” Lear accepts that so-called archaic mental functioning is and remains associative, imagistic, figurative, disrespectful of logic (especially the principle of non-contradiction), and so on. In fact, Lear’s reading depends on the recognition of these elements. What he nevertheless insists upon, as against the letter of Freudian metapsychology, is the spirit of “immanent” unfolding implicit in analytic practice and even, occasionally, in Freud’s own reflections:

The point is only that the transition from primary to secondary process lies on a developmental continuum of mental functioning. The concrete images of primary process may be preconceptual, but they are also protoconceptual. They are that from which concepts emerge. (84-85)

Above all, Lear’s postulate of love as a natural force retroactively confers a Freudian imprimatur on the revisionist, Aristotelian reconstruction he undertakes.

I will say more about this developmental “continuity” in the next entry.