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

We have seen that Lear criticizes Freud for failing to honor his own distinction between physiological drive and psychological drive-representative. Particularly with regard to libido, this conflation occasionally leads Freud to answer properly first-personal, psychological questions in essentially third-personal, physiological ways — say, with reference to an organism’s “function” vis-à-vis the species.

This objection is continuous with Lear’s critical attitude toward’s Freud’s model of science more generally, familiar to us since the book’s introduction. (For a similar critique, see the “Therapeutic Action” essay by Loewald, Lear’s mentor.) Lear reiterates that Freud “characterized its [sexuality’s] aim from an observational stance” (128). And third-personal observation, even when successful on its own terms, must exclude the first-personal aspect — that is, precisely the psychological aspect, the ostensible “object” of observation.

Yet once our interest is restricted to the drive’s “psychical representative,” and only that, we can no longer omit from our theoretical picture its “appearance” to the mind whose drive it is. The meaning of our hypothetically correct observations and inferences must still answer to the standpoint in question, whether that standpoint is openly communicated to us by sophisticated adults, or signaled non-verbally by an infant’s behavior.

Now, the specific bit of infantile behavior that initially piqued Freud’s interest here was thumb-sucking: an action that simulated the infant’s gratification at the breast but, on the other hand, had plainly detached altogether from the latter’s “nutritive,” hence self-preservative function. In short, thumb-sucking announced the presence in the child of a drive distinct from “survival.” “Thumb sucking cannot be occurring for the purpose of self-preservation. The aim of the re-creation [i.e. of the infant-at-breast situation] must differ from the aim of the prototypical act” (128).

On this basis, Lear continues, Freud characterizes thumb-sucking (and infantile sexuality generally) as “auto-erotic,” meaning self-directed. Yet is Freud entitled to canvas the sexual situation of the child in these terms? To a third-person observer, one viewing things “from the outside,” it is clear enough that the infant’s actions are indeed self-directed: unquestionably, he sucks his thumb. Freud also stipulated, however, that one’s “sexual object” is “the person (or thing) from whom sexual attraction proceeds (129), which in this context begs an obvious question: who or what is the thumb-sucking infant’s “sexual object?” Undoubtedly the final authority concerning the identity of this object can be none other than the infant himself, for whom his thumb per se presumably exerts no special “sexual attraction” at all. If, then, thumb-sucking does announce an independent drive, separate from self-preservation, which can plausibly be called “sexual” — and Lear follows Freud this far — nonetheless, according to Freud’s own stipulations, the meaning of this drive, psychology’s sole object, cannot be established “from an external point of view, in abstraction from the psychic significance it has for the infant” (129). Such an external approach “gives us no clue as to the mental representation which constitutes the drive” (129).

But once again, Freud simultaneously flags the “psychological” significance of these same activities, as against their third-personal and finally physiological significance. The infant at the breast “incorporates” the sexual object, psychologically, in a way that parallels the physiological “incorporation” of nutrition (129). Accordingly, “the child experiences feeding as a taking in of the breast, the mother, the mother’s comfort” (129). This “experiencing” — the child’s “taking up” or assimilation of the object — is irreducibly phenomenological. Further, it constitutes the prototype with respect to which all subsequent love-relations are experienced. This is what Freud says in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (129, quoted by Lear). (Plato’s doctrine that all knowledge is recollection, all cognition recognition, receives here a naturalistic turn.)

What matters in this idea, the condition of possibility for an adult “refinding” the original bond in some new setting, with a different person or thing, is the significance for the infant of the breast (130). This breast-as-psychic-representation — the narrow “object” of the sexual drive — cannot adequately be captured by an “external” observation, i.e. one for which the object is first the breast, then the thumb. On the psychological plane entailed by conceptions of drive as psychical-representative, the “object” can only ever be the object-as-incorporated by the mind, which confers on this complex a significance it otherwise lacks. “The earliest object of the sexual drive cannot be the mother’s breast tout court; it must be the mother’s breast as psychologically experienced by the infant” (130).

Not the object per se — say, the thumb, or later, the sexual fetish — but the psychologically-metabolized object is our concern. Freud’s descriptions of thumb-sucking as “auto-erotic” implicitly violates these strictures. For it suggests that the sexual drive is really self-directed, abstracting altogether from the object’s “for consciousness” aspect or moment (as Hegel would state things). In fact, infant re-discovers in thumb-sucking the original, erotic situation, the bond with the mother. (By contrast, an activity that was genuinely auto-erotic would be an unlikely place to recover this (simulated) satisfaction.) The language of auto-eroticism, in this context, precisely suggests an activity of “finding,” and not at all the “refinding” that Freud insists it is. “And yet,” Lear writes, “if the ‘auto-erotic’ is to be erotic, one must see the ‘auto’ as mere façade” (130).

The external, third-personal approach that Freud allows himself here will eventually lead him to conclusions regarding sexuality that roughly mirror his official account of emotions. Just as, according to the official account, dreams, neuroses, and phobias “detach” emotions from their appropriate ideas and thence “solder” them onto ideas without any intrinsic relation to them, here too Freud claims that the sexual drive bears no necessary relation with any “object” — original or otherwise. Here too the sexual drive — pointedly so in neurotic cases — may be “soldered” onto objects in a way that verges on the completely arbitrary.

But as Lear once again argues, this appearance of “independence” or detachability of sexual drive from object only arises from that “external” perspective psychoanalysis must disclaim. From the perspective of archaic mental functioning, on the contrary, there is nothing the least bit “arbitrary” about the connection between drive and object. To the infant at the breast, to the nominally “auto-erotic” thumb-sucking child, and later to the adult (neurotic or healthy), the “object” is one and the same. True, when measured against secondary-process criteria of cogency and literalism, the object is at each stage entirely different, which demonstrates their mutual externality. Yet by the associative lights of primary-process thinking, the “latest” love-object is the most natural, even unavoidable embodiment of the prototype: the “finding” really is a “refinding” (131). Again: “There is a sense in which the sexual drive never abandons its object” (131). The “observational stance” that Freud assumes, whenever he speaks in his scientific voice, “cannot see…that in all his wandering among sexual objects, there is a sense in which the person has never left home” (132).