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

We concluded the last entry with Lear’s critical account of one, infamous dichotomy in Freud’s thinking: namely, between the “pleasure” and “reality” principles. In particular, Lear critiques the putatively stark separation between the modes of thinking characteristic of each: so-called “primary” and “secondary” process. He writes:

“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)

With this qualification in place, we are free to regard adult desires and beliefs as attempts, more or less successful, to impart mature, conceptual form to their infantile ancestors: “wishes” and — as I will call them — “convictions” (93-94). (Lear himself does not give the concept this name, or any, but continues to describe it as a “proto-belief.”) Such wishes and convictions, subject to the laws of primary process law, will seem “strange” when examined from the adult standpoint, whose conscious desires and beliefs have meanwhile been called into some kind of explicit, logical order. Nonetheless, they will never be so strange that, with enough analytic attention, they cannot be deciphered as intelligible precursors of the adult orientation. This is because, as we have said, the in-built conatus of these inchoate bits of infantile experience — archaic mental functioning — is just towards the self-clarifying terminus finally reached in psychoanalysis, which delivers the needed interpretation.

By this point, moreover, Lear is positioned to challenge another dichotomous doxa of Freudian theory: the claim that ideas, but not emotions, can be made unconscious through repression. That is, “emotions must be conscious” (88), or “we must in some way be aware of an emotion when it is occurring” (88). As Lear sees it, Freud arrives at this result by restricting the meaning of emotion to the patent physiological feeling that announces it. (One is conscious, for instance, of an elevated pulse.)

But once emotions are construed as vehicles of “world-orientation,” Lear infers, hence undercutting any clear separation between idea and the emotion bearing that idea, then a fortiori the construction of a “repressed” idea alongside an “unrepressed” emotion makes little sense. As an ontological matter, there is only the emotional-orientation. In non-neurotic conditions, this orientation may achieve a high degree of “ideational” coherence and conscious explication; or it may neurotically stall in its development, confined to archaic self-expression, which will assuredly strike consciousness as a strange “not-I.” At no stage, however, will emotion and idea separate into discrete “entities,” one of which — but not the other — submits to repression.

Along these same lines, Lear criticizes Freud’s use of a “soldering” metaphor, mobilized both in the theory of dreams (91) and of sexuality (131). In both contexts, Freud’s metaphor rests on a single, untenable assumption: that one item (an idea; a love-object) may be arbitrarily “soldered together” with another item (an emotion; a sexual drive) that has no intrinsic connection with it. In fact, Freud’s practice indicates just the opposite. While the connections (in both dreams and sexual life) may seem bizarre from the standpoint of secondary-process, there is nothing “arbitrary” about them when situated in their proper context. They are, in fact, the best expressions of meaning attainable by archaic mental functioning, given the “merely" associative, imagistic resources at its disposal.

Thus the adult dreamer, with secondary-process sophistication, supposes the dream “emotion” and “idea” have been arbitrarily soldered together — since, for example, in his dream “fear” is felt in a “situation” in which, logically, it is out of place. But interpretation reveals that, on the contrary, the “idea” of that situation is (for the dreamer) a perfectly appropriate expression  of the emotion in question. For it follows an associative semantic chain built unerringly by archaic mind.

In other words, emotion and idea alike must submit to repression because they are inseparable even in thought. To say that an idea has been made unconscious, as Freud officially teaches, is just to say that the emotion which ought to reach expression as that idea — or: the full emotional orientation of which the idea is one semantic ingredient — has been waylaid at a more archaic level, where it “expresses” itself in its native tongue, in the grammar of primary process, in those “ideas” it can articulate.

“What analysis does, them, is to rescue the rationality of an emotion” (90) — a rationality clothed in primary-process garb, to whose patterns the more integrated mind is generally obtuse. This way of stating things makes sense. After all, how could analysis or interpretation function at all, if its “latent” object (emotion, drive, etc.) were not logically expressed, however crudely, in the “manifestations” investigated? Analysis can only “get started” because “an emotion and its appropriate idea do constitute an indissoluble organic unity” (91).

A dream in which an emotion really were arbitrary connected, “soldered together” with an idea that in no conceivable way merited that emotion, would be uninterpretable, by definition. To be sure, dream connections may seem arbitrary in this way. For example, someone may dream of being attacked by a bear, and yet — in the dream itself — feels the “inappropriate” emotion of delight. But the premise of a Freudian interpretation is that, appearances notwithstanding, the idea of a bear attack is — in some figurative way — the appropriate, even “logical” expression of the felt delight. The correct interpretation will depend, of course, on this hypothetical dreamer’s associations to the episode. Perhaps it will emerge that he is “delighted” because he identifies with the powerful, attacking bear; or because the bear is a symbol of caring, protection, or humor; or because the bear is, more specifically, an infantile representation of a parent, or amalgam of important figures, whose aggressive “seduction” is desired.

What matters is that, beginning from the “pointer” (91) provided by an emotion, we may reasonably ask: in what way is the purportedly mystifying “idea” or “manifest content” in truth an appropriate, reasonable expression of that emotion? “[W]hen analysis penetrates deeper…it finds an underlying unity. It reveals that the emotion is always attached to its appropriate idea” (91). The same premise holds for “all cases of repression” (90), as in phobias, where the intensity of aversion and fear may be out of all logical proportion to its object — say, a harmless spider. Beginning from just this intense emotion, though, we examine the ways in which the spider “idea” is its apt, primary-process expression.