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

Lear now proposes that Freud’s “detachability” thesis — the externality between drive and (essentially arbitrary) object — originated in observations, not of suckling infants, but of psychotic adults. In particular, megalomania and apocalyptic fantasies indicated a truth, for Freud, about the life-spanning mental architecture of all people, from infancy onward. In fact these two aspects of psychosis, seeming opposites, are on Freud’s account products of a single trend: the withdrawal of libido-investment in the world.

So, on the one hand, the psychotic’s “fantasy of world destruction” (132) psychologically represents this withdrawal. From the psychotic standpoint, the world’s diminishing interest and value, no longer “mattering,” looks and feels exactly like that world’s annihilation. By contrast, a person’s “interest” in the world, the latter’s possession of meaning and value for him, reflects his “investing” it with some variable amount of libido. Hence world-interest — mattering — coincides with libidinal investment and does not outlast its revocation.

Yet on the other hand, withdrawn libido nonetheless remains libido: it exists in the same “amount,” so tallying with Freud’s quantitative-economic metapsychology. Only rather than extend outwardly to a world thence animated with interest, this libido changes direction: “It has, Freud speculates, filled up the I” (133). Thus the psychotic undergoing this “action” also becomes inflated with megalomaniacal thoughts and feelings, “a sense of omnipotent power, magical ability, specialness” (133).

Here Freud noticed a more-than-passing resemblance between psychotic megalomania and the infant’s “magical thinking.” In fact, he suggested these are the same states: in withdrawing libido from the world, the psychotic has merely “regressed” to the first, infantile mentality — itself now viewed as proto-psychotic (133).

In Freud’s “On Narcissism,” this assumption becomes the basis for the notion of “an original libidinal investment of the I” (133). Lear himself disputes this as a possible characterization of the infant in anything more than a biological sense. Biologically speaking, in other words, the infant is perhaps an “I,” an individual system. But psychologically, as Freud would be the first to insist, there is no “I” as yet — if by “I” we mean a psychical agency capable of distinguishing an objective, enduring world from itself, or of maintaining some firm hold on the differences between inside and outside, appearance and reality. There is no sound basis for ascribing this capacity to the infant, hence the picture of “an original libidinal investment of the I” is developmentally incoherent. Where there is no “I” at all, there is a fortiori no libido-disposing “I.”

Once the methodological distinction between biological and psychological drives has been restored, though, and we again restrict our attention to the latter, the terms of the discussion will change: “The sexual drive is a psychological force. For a person to be able libidinally to invest in an object, the object must be something for the person. The object must have psychic reality” (134).

Where does this leave the primary narcissism which Freud’s “original libidinal investment of the I” (133) is meant to denominate? In fact, the infant’s relatively undifferentiated experience — at most constituting, Lear writes, a “proto-I” — is in no position to “invest” libido in either itself or another, both of which presuppose a measure of reflective distance from the “investor” in question. But for an infant with no sense of this difference between itself and the world, what could it even mean for it to invest a portion of its native libido in an object “out there?” On this view, no “out there” could even present itself to receive the conjectured investment.

In other words, once Lear’s methodological line is both drawn and observed — once we realize this “sexual drive is a psychological force” (134) — we will recognize that only an “I” that has surpassed some minimal threshold of differentiation and integration, that is strictly speaking an “I” at all, is capable of the libido-investment described by Freud. Only an I for whom an object “exists” or has “psychic reality” (134), including the “object” of its own self — only such an I could establish this “cathexis.”

Lear does not put his argument in just this way, but he seems to be saying — I simplify — that the process or activity of “libido-investment” presupposes the very achievements of integration and differentation Freud employs it to explain.

Freud’s interpretation of psychosis as a regression to the vanishing point of primary narcissism indicates the psychotic has so deteriorated the he has entirely lost possession of the “I” constructed during the whole intervening development. But psychologically speaking, the regression cannot have gone as far as that: “Megalomania must be a libidinal investment of the I. And for that to be possible, the I must represent itself. That is, the I must have psychological reality for itself” (134). The “I” involves, irreducibly, an aspect of self-understanding or, in Lear’s phrase, “self-representation” (135).

If there is such a phase as primary narcissism, then, it cannot be captured in the language of I- (rather than other-) libidinal investment, since psychologically no such distinctions obtain. Nor for that matter could a sexual “drive” in the strict sense exist — an “inner” pressure or excitation — since (again, psychologically speaking) “inner” and “outer” have not yet separated out into distinct domains. There is simply “libidinal investment,” überhaupt, which “permeates a relatively undifferentiated field…from which an I and a distinct world for that I will emerge” (136).

In the next entry, I will try to make sense of this paradoxical picture.