Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 4 (XI)

The fourth chapter of Love and its Place in Nature, “Interpretation and Transformation” — the book’s shortest — reexamines the case of “Little Hans” for the light it throws on “infantile wishes.” Lear effectively does here for “proto-desires” what he has just done for the “proto-beliefs” contained in archaic mind’s “emotional orientation.”

Both are necessary. Recall that, for Lear, the “intelligibility” of dreams and other unconscious phenomena approximates that of action. The latter — action qua action — implies both desire and and belief. On this analogy, then, something “like” an elementary desire and belief ought to be identifiable in our object. The joint presence of the pair, however latent, is a condition of possibility for “interpretation” — provided that we think, as Freud and Lear do, that analytic interpretation discloses a “rational” mind where the irrational seems to prevail.

In the third chapter, Lear emphasized the essentially orientating function of emotions: they are not, pace Freud, mere dischargeable quanta of psychic energy, but incline the dreamer in particular “ideational” directions. That is to say: even archaic emotions “make sense” of themselves by generating ideas, rationalizations, “beliefs” — albeit according to the laws of primary process. The successful dream interpretation imputes to the adult dreamer such infantile “proto-beliefs” as, for instance: father’s love for me is jeopardized by my intimacy with mother; or the arrival of a sibling will diminish the amount of love I receive — hence dispatching the sibling will restore the lost situation — yet I will be punished if I eliminate the rival. Such “conceptuality,” while hardly explicit to the child — or the child’s adult descendant, archaic mind — is nonetheless presupposed by an “emotion” like jealousy, which presses for meaningful expression (note bene: not “discharge) in whatever manner, and with whatever resources it is able. Analysis done well can escort the proto-beliefs embedded in these emotions, via decipherment, into fully fledged “beliefs” — whereupon they may admit of conscious affirmation, rejection, or some other action. But no resolution like this would be possible, were it not that emotions are so-constituted from the start.

But what can we say, by analogy, of the “counterpart” to archaic mind’s proto-beliefs — namely, its proto-desires or, in Freud’s idiom, “wishes”? These latter are infantile precursors to the mature adult’s conscious — and consciously endorsable — desires. To repeat: we will recognize the rationality of archaic mind, after the pattern of action, when it manifests something approximating beliefs and desires. Freud’s case history of Little Hans, Lear claims, presents “the infantile wish as it exists in the infant’s soul” (98).

I repeat: in order to redeem its “scientific” promise, analysis must locate proto-desires in addition to proto-beliefs — some inchoate aim. One without the other would not suffice for interpretation and its “rationality seeking” agenda. Just as an action will seem unintelligible — not fully “action" at all — if it expresses a belief but no desire related to that belief (‘Why is she doing that? To what end?’), likewise, the infantile world-orientation is only really accessible to us once we’ve identified its “wish.” But how, Lear wonders, should we go about making this identification? And what, epistemically speaking, entitles us to postulate such an item which, if anything, appears to be less determinate, and more deeply buried, than the infant’s proto-beliefs?

The case history of Little Hans, Lear writes, indicates “what is involved in making a psychoanalytic interpretation of a symptom, fantasy or dream in terms of infantile wishes” (103). In this “material” — in case histories generally, as in less exemplary forms — “Freud had two related phenomena to work with: the transformation of little Hans’s emotions and the development of his fantasies” (103-4). In other words, the interpretation of wishes will depend upon a record of diachronic movement and unfolding in the child’s mental life, some of which “responds” to Freud’s own analytic interventions. (Thus Lear implies, without saying so explicitly, that a synchronic inventory or snapshot of the child’s mental life would not provide the necessary basis for wish-attribution.) The vicissitudes of Hans’s emotions and fantasies are “indexed” to episodes in the boy’s “outer” life — including, later on, the analysis itself. (In fact, the question of whether these interventions amount to a proper “analysis” is difficult to answer. Notoriously, Freud did not treat Little Hans directly, but through the intermediary of the boy’s father.)

Freud believed that the “wishes” expressed in dreams, discernible through analysis, are vestiges of infantile experience that remain part of the adult unconscious. If this claim is true, though, then we ought to be able to observe these infantile wishes in the child him- or herself in their relatively undiluted purity. There is a freshness and immediacy to the emotional expressions of children that is lacking in adults, who are supposedly well past the phase of repression which separates them from their own childhood mental lives. Nonetheless, we meet here with problems of “communication” that challenge even a dedicated, impartial “observer.” And Lear explicates some of these problems in the remainder of the chapter.

For example, Hans is famously preoccupied with both his own “widdler” and all the other “widdlers” he observes or infers in others: in father and mother, in his sister, in other children, in animals — indeed, in anything “animate.” Lear shows that, in fact, there is no viable basis for Freud’s conviction that Hans has made a “mistake” in his undiscerning applications of this concept. For calling these applications mistaken presupposes that Hans possesses something like a determinate, crystallized concept that could match, or fail to match. its object. In those instances where we seem to be in a position to verify this assumption — ‘But don’t you notice that your sister doesn’t have a “widdler”?’ — we may well simply be correcting his concept, rather than its erroneous application. We’d have no reliable way of determining which has occurred. If afterwards Hans no longer assigned a “widdler” to his younger sister, this could be taken as evidence either that he was persuaded, through closer scrutiny, that she did not possess the “organ” (about whose concept he was never in doubt), or that his very concept of a widdler had been revised, “disciplined” by the pedagogical intervention of his parents” (98-103). “There is…a severe limit to the extent to which anyone can go native in a tribe that consists of one three-and-a-half-year-old speaker” (103).

It follows that, even in childhood, when infantile wishes are ostensibly in full flower, they are not directly, undisguisedly available to analysis, but must be “reconstructed” from the data supplied both by the child’s outward behavior and through his intrinsically-ambiguous communications. These communications are ambiguous, again, because the child’s language reflects “concepts” that are still inchoate and very far from the adult’s successor-concepts.

I will take up some of these issues in the next entry.