Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 5 (XIV)

Inevitably, a book written about the idea of “love” in Freud’s thought must take some position on the “enlarged sexuality” he identifies in mental life. “Inevitable,” that is, because Freud notoriously insisted that all love, Eros, of whatever gradation, is grown around a kernel of sexuality. He puts the thought this way in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego: “The nucleus of what we mean by love naturally consists…in sexual love with sexual union as its aim” (29).

In Chapter 5, “What is Sex?”, Lear takes Freud’s metapsychological identification — that sexuality is a “drive” [Trieb] — as an occasion to explore the more basic question, which Freud never resolves to his own satisfaction: what is a drive? Naturally, there is little prospect of our grasping Freud’s view of “sexuality” until we’ve described the stuff of which it is ostensible made, the “type” of thing it is. (For other attempts to address the vexing problem of drives, see my accounts of Loewald’s “Therapeutic Action” essay, Mitchell and Greenberg’s Object Relations, and the opening remarks of Freud’s “Economic Problem of Masochism.”)

At least according to Freud’s early statements, drives are “continuous, internal sources of pressure” (122), distinct from both external stimuli and the fixed “instincts.” But these distinctions, in themselves questionable, are not the objects of either Freud’s or Lear’s conceptual dissatisfaction, which relates instead to the “frontier quality” (122) of drives. That is, drives are situated at the frontier separating the mental and physical: they are, at different moments in Freud’s account, both “psychical representatives” of physiological forces and, also, the physiological forces themselves (122). Hence the human drives — both sexual drives and the self-preservative “ego-drives,” such as hunger — may be conceived both as mental entities and as forces in the body that appear to the mind in this manner.

In fact, Lear does not conclude that Freud was mistaken, either about this “frontier” status or, for that matter, about its metaphysical inscrutability. (There are allegedly good reasons for Freud’s dissatisfaction.) Lear is critical, rather, of Freud’s attempt to handle an essentially philosophical matter as though it were empirical. Perhaps a drive is simply one thing viewed under two aspects — as physiological force or as psychical representative. Nonetheless, a “psychological inquiry” (123) has a place for concepts pertaining only to the latter. This is essentially an epistemic or methodological decision, and needn’t involve — Lear argues — any “metaphysical” commitment regarding the reality of this distinction, one way or the other.

(Whether epistemic and metaphysical commitments can be distinguished so tidily is not a question I will address in this place. Suffice it to say that Hegel, for example, criticized any attempt to establish a “pure” epistemology antecedently to metaphysics — say, in Descartes or Kant — or an epistemology that does not involve metaphysical commitments at every step.)

Whether or not physiological force and mental representative are at root identical is a question that can be bracketed. Physiological concepts can and should be left to biology, while Freudian psychology can and should confine itself to concepts of drive that “manifest” in the only form that could possibly interest us: as mental items. Once isolated from questions of physiological architecture, the concept of drive has an immediate and significant theoretical implication: its “meaning” cannot be merely functional, as its biological counterpart may well be.

Under its purely physiological aspect, in other words, a drive’s meaning may indeed be exhausted by its “function” — either for the individual organism or for the species to which it belongs. But under its mental aspect — as a drive-representative — this drive cannot logically be dissociated from its appearance to its bearer. Again, “if the drive cannot be characterized in psychological terms, it loses its claim to be a psychological concept” (125). (See again, in this connection, Freud’s “Economic Problem of Masochism,” for evidence of a deep puzzle regarding what is objectively “quantitative” and what is subjectively “qualitative” in sensations of pleasure and unpleasure. See also Freud’s tribute to Charcot, which defends the “autonomy” of psychological concepts.)

In fact,, Freud himself often ignores the importance of this distinction, attributing to the sexual drive a “meaning” fixed entirely by its hypothetical function in the life of a healthy organism. Just as the “meaning” of hunger is the “drive for nutrition” (126) — the desideratum without which the organism fails to function — so the meaning of the sexual drive must be predicated, Freud initially reasons, on some conception of a well-functioning organism, whose “aim” this drive advances. Freud imagines that some impersonal aim, corresponding to hunger’s “drive” for nutrition, could be similarly fixed for the sexual drive. As hunger is grasped in terms of “nutritional” ends of self-preservation, the sexual drive is grasped ultimately in terms of species-perpetuation. This, in any case, is Freud’s early position: “The sexual drive is distinguished by its end, or goal. Unlike the I-drives, which function to preserve the individual, the sexual drive functions to preserve the species” (127).)

Now, Lear insists on both the legitimacy and even the necessity of drawing his “methodological” distinction and keeping to the psychological side of things — presumably because Freud himself failed so often to honor it. This chapter shows how Freud mistakenly searched for the uniquely psychological meaning of the sexual drive among concepts found only on the physiological side, that is, in biological knowledge about the human being qua well-functioning creature. In the case of sexuality, Freud supposes — surely justifiably — that “the overall functioning of the human being” (127), no less than other non-human animals, must typically or on average promote the survival of the species. And this claim “gives us a conception of what human sexuality is for” (127), or that end “for the sake of which” the sexual drive operates.

But do these reflections yield the psychological meaning of sexuality construed as a drive-representative — the only object that concerns psychoanalysis? — one that is “manifest” in such diverse phenomena as bodily gestures and pleasures and, in normal cases, the increasing restriction of diffuse bodily satisfactions to specifically genital ones? Plainly, the answer is no. In the next entries, we will review Lear’s alternative conception.