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

We are attempting to make sense of primary narcissism, a phase of psychic development characterized by “libidinal investment” überhaupt. We’ve suggested that the language of “ego”- or “I”-investment (in contrast to “other”-investment) fails really to apply to this libidinal phase, since — psychologically — no distinction between “I” and “other” yet obtains. We must instead per impossibile envision, in Lear’s words, “a relatively undifferentiated field…from which an I and a distinct world for that I will emerge” (136). What are we to make of this?

Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents famously examines the so-called “oceanic feeling,” together with its genetic derivation — according to Romain Roland, the psychological mainspring of religious life. The “feeling” in question is precisely that of the I’s “unity” with a world no longer experienced as separate. The “boundaries” that ordinarily define the adult’s experience of self and other, inner and outer, are to some degree suspended. (For Freud, the experience of falling in love should be grasped along similar lines.) While disclaiming the presence of this oceanic feeling in himself, Freud allows for its existence in others. And he speculates it is either a substratum that endures, undiminished, alongside “higher” psychical organization, or — in cases where it is for a time more fully surpassed — an original state to which some persons may “regress.”

(Lear himself does not draw the connection between this description and Freud’s discussions of mental life under the jurisdiction of the “pleasure principle,” in “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” Totem and Taboo, “Negation,” and other pieces. But there, too, Freud insists on the same feature of archaic mental functioning: the non-recognition of any distinction between inter alia wish and reality, thought and deed, or — in some ways — inner and outer. I imagine that, after criticizing Freud’s notion of the pleasure principle and its relation to the reality principle, Lear would prefer to ignore it altogether. It does suggest, however, that Freud’s comments on the oceanic feeling represent less a mature volte-face regarding primary narcissism than — at least on Freud’s own view — a consistent elaboration of it.)

To begin, Lear simply swallows the paradox: while there is initially no “I” or “world” per se (for both emerge only out of some antecedent act), nonetheless, the finished article, an “I” in relation to a “world,” may still be explained as the result of libido-investment. The initial “investment,” if we continue with this sort of language, is somehow impersonal: after all, it generates the very “person” or “I” which otherwise, and subsequently, disposes over that libido.

In any case, once we have simply accepted something like the “relatively undifferentiated field” of primary narcissism as the infant’s original state, we may ask: how ultimately does a distinct and integrated “I” collect itself out of this field? Or, as Lear writes: “Once psychoanalysis sees that the I is a psychological achievement…it cannot help but ask what that achievement consists in” (137).

There follows an account that in philosophy would be called “transcendental” or “grammatical,” for it concerns the conceptual conditions of possibility for such items as an “I,” a “world,” and their relation. According to Lear’s reconstruction, Freud’s concept of love implies just such transcendental sweep, even while neither Freud himself nor post-Freudian thought have followed through on these implications.

What are the transcendental conditions, then? What is necessarily  and universally involved in an “I” having any “world” at all? “[A] world exists for us because we invest it with sexual energy” (137) — this is the Freudian thesis. In a sense, Lear argues, short of a possible libidinal investment, the world could not exist.

To be clear, this thesis does not mean that every “I” produces the world ex nihilo or that this world enjoys no existence apart from that contingency. Nor does Lear’s argument concern the actions of this or that “I,” or even the actions of all “I’s” in the aggregate. The argument has rather to do with the necessary features of the world, if that world is going to be a world “for us.” “[T]he world of objects, which, after all, really exists, comes to have psychic reality for this emerging I” (137-8). Hence Lear is not troubled here with external world- or thing-itself-skepticism: he accepts the existence, with properties, of a world that becomes — given the necessary psychological development — something “for” the I. This concession does not exclude inferences about the constitution of the world as such; it presupposes them. The condition of any world “for me” is precisely that I have invested it with libido.

Further, I do have such a world — this is the uncontroversial datum of experience upon which transcendental accounts turn. There is a world for me, then, a condition of which is its “reception" of some amount of my libido. But this, Lear now continues, places objective as well as subjective constraints on the resulting structure. Not only, in order to have a world, must I be capable of reposing my libido in it; the world, too, must be so constituted as to absorb that investment. It is not enough that I have “love” with which to illuminate the world; that world must itself be “lovable” in order to be illuminated. And this claim finally applies, not only to the infant’s world, but to any world at all — indeed, even to the “objective” world of the scientist, which no less than the infant’s world must be a world “for us.” The world that could under any conditions exist “must be a world which is a fit object of sexual investment by beings like us” (139).

Certainly, as I suggested above, one might still imagine a world that outlasts every empirical “I” (all of whom may perish, say, in some cataclysm). Yet what is it, exactly, that we imagine in this case? Lear claims: “It is a condition of there being a world that it be lovable by beings like us” (142). That is, “a world that is not lovable (by beings like us) is not a possible world” (142).