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

The middle chapters of Lear’s book continue his revisionist reading of Freudian psychoanalysis. Not only does Lear reconceive “catharsis,” the mutative cure, in accordance with Freud’s tripartite revolution in human self-understanding; he now proceeds to treat the “theories” of dreams, interpretation, sexuality, and love along the same lines — once again, exploding the classical metapsychology on behalf of analytic practice, observation, and experience.

In Chapter 3, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Lear examines the quintessential domain in which “mind,” after Freud, beings to “see itself at work” (69), that is, under the aspect of “archaic mental functioning.” We canvassed this theme at some length in our discussion of the Introduction, so I will simply insert a reminder: Freud’s revolution consisted partly in mind’s “discovery” of itself in areas, and at levels, it had never thought to look — indeed, where it had vigorously resisted looking. Freud identified mind, as Lear puts it, “among the flotsam of dreams, physical symptoms, slips of the tongue” (71). This raised the more properly philosophical question of criteria: how will we know that a particular process, episode, or “occurrence” is in fact a manifestation of mind — archaic mind — when no such thing is evident to conscious mind? Psychoanalysis answers that an alteration in that very “process,” in response to interpretation, provides the required evidence that it was an instance of minded “behavior,” after all.

Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Lear suggests, established the still-unsurpassed prototype for all subsequent approaches to archaic mind. “[I]t is here that Freud begins to understand what is in the unconscious and how it works” (70). In the broadest sense, psychoanalysis identifies the covert “rationality” in what seems to defy that categorization, in the putatively “irrational.” This is what mind’s self-recognition in its “others” involves in practice. And to show that a “happening” such as a dream bears an unsuspected rationality is to attribute to it a meaning. Thus “every dream has a meaning” (71), an “intelligibility” (71), and so — in some respect we will need to clarify — a “rationality.”

Lear’s treatment of “meaning” and “rationality” as cognates has enough of a philosophical pedigree that he does not detain himself substantiating his approach. We might, nonetheless, quibble with such an undeveloped assertion. Certainly there are traditions — say, religious ones — in which this identity is far from self-evident. Nor, on roughly opposite grounds, do naturalistic scientists suppose that, in their search for “rationality” in nature, they are also uncovering its “meaning.” Particle physicists, too, discovers a “rationality” in nature, an intelligibility and lawfulness in the transactions of objects, though it might not occur to them or anyone else to adduce this as evidence of nature’s “meaning” or “mindedness.” We seem unlikely to find traces of mental functioning, archaic or otherwise, in such a “rational” order. (Though others, for instance Hegel, appear even here to develop contrasting views.)

The Freudian criterion for rationality in dreams, and in other happenings of the sort, must accordingly be more stringent than this. It would not suffice, for Freud’s ambitious claims, to locate in dreams a “lawfulness” analogous to that of heavenly bodies or of atoms. One could imagine a “discovery” that dreams evince the same sort of lawfulness, regularity, and even predictability definitive of other processes in “blind,” inanimate nature. (Perhaps, before long, experimental sleep research will postulate some such physiological regularities.) But these hypotheses would not finally touch the “meaning” of dreams in any but the thinnest, most metaphorical sense. We may speak, say, of science yielding the “meaning” of particle “behavior.” This animistic language is a conceit, however, and the responsible scientist will stop short of supposing the theory has located mental functioning in that domain, and for good reason.

What then is the stringency of Freud’s identification? What sort of rationality do dreams covertly possess, such that they also qualify as meaningful — in a way, moreover, that planetary motions do not? Unsurprisingly, the rationality at issue is one characteristic of human behavior, and therefore will involve such items as desires, emotions, intentions, objects, aims, and the rest. Actions that we recognize as meaningful, as redolent of mind — that is, as actions at all, rather than merely natural “happenings” — manifest exactly this repertoire. In fact, according to a typical way of thinking, action is rational only when it includes these elements, and in proportion to to their mutual harmony. (Aristotle, for example, links intelligent action to the “mean”: having the appropriate feeling, to the appropriate degree, in the appropriate situation, and so on.) To be sure, Lear’s claim is analogical; dreams are not literally actions. Rather, “dreams are like actions” (71), inasmuch as — like dreams — “action is by its nature meaningful” (72).

It follows that, if dreams, too, are meaningful, it is by virtue of some property or properties they share with action. The specific properties that interest Lear, in this connection, are “desire” and “belief.” Action — when intelligible as action — is propelled by a desire (the satisfaction of which is sought) and constrained by belief (regarding inter alia the circumstances in which action unfolds). The absence of either ingredient will vitiate the action’s appearance of rationality. A human movement which seemed neither to follow any imputable desire, nor to reflect (or respond to) beliefs about reality, would not register as “action” at all — let alone as action meriting the designation “rational.”

Now, both of these ingredients figure in dreams, too — or at least approximations of them. “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). Or again: “The dream, then, is like an action: it is an attempted gratification of a wish under the constraint of certain sorts of beliefs” (74). According to Lear, censorship itself — which prevents the dreamer from recognizing the nature of both the wish and the conflict over it — represents a package of “beliefs, hopes and values” (73), a full “outlook” that constrains the realization of the dream’s wish. The dream is therefore “meaningful,” “intelligible,” and (after a fashion) “rational,” inasmuch as it approximates properties we expect of “action” that merits these designations. Accordingly, analytic interpretations disclose rationality in dreams, rendering them intelligible as expressions, at the “manifest” level, of a “latent” level bearing just these properties.

In the next entry, I will develop and illustrate these ideas.