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

In the remainder of chapter 5, Lear begins to provide content to the position anticipated schematically in the Introduction and signaled in the book’s tantalizing title, Love and its Place in Nature. We may quote several lines that indicate the flavor of this newly won content:

“[It] is a condition of there being a world that it be lovable by beings like.” (142)

“Sex thus metamorphosed into love…human sexuality is an incarnation of love, a force for unification present wherever there is life.” (147)

“In his treatment of pathologies of sexual experience, Freud happened onto a force which, as his research developed, expanded beyond anything one could easily recognize as sexual.” (148)

For Lear, one important feature of this emerging concept — love as a natural force — seems to be its internal tension. This tension follows, not from love’s opposition to a separate force (say, the death drive), but from its own, self-contradictory impulsions. What sort of tension has Lear identified? In which antithetical directions is love pulled?

Lear accepts at face value Freud’s reference to Plato’s Symposium and looks there for a theoretical elaboration that Freud himself intimates without specifying. And he writes: “Love pulls us in two directions” (148-9), which correspond in a rough way to regression and progression, towards the undifferentiated and the differentiated, to the earlier (past) and the later (future).

What exactly does Lear have in mind here?

On the one hand, love for Freud names the unsurpassable yearning to recover what has been lost, “a tendency to return to earlier stages at which we have received gratification and love” (149). The pensée that, at the level of archaic mental functioning, all finding is a refinding confirms this regressive aspect. Subsequent love-objects appeal to the lover with the promise to restore the original, undiminished bond that, in the event, they can for logical reasons only “approximate.” Per definition, after all, these subsequent love-objects are not the original.

This first trend, then, is “love’s pull toward the primitive” (150) — toward, in the case of an individual, relations that dissolve the boundary separating self from other, in an effort to recover “the original intimate bond…between an infant not-yet-I and a mother-world” (150). An adult-in-love plunges back into that inchoate, undivided state he left only reluctantly and for which he never once stops yearning. And in the case of groups, too, this regressive pull is discernible, albeit on a much greater scale: “An erotic tendency for society to regress to a primitive, undifferentiated mob” (150) — one of those disturbing explananda treated in Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. From this standpoint, love — when consummated — consists in a renunciation of achievements painstakingly attained by the I: separation, differentiation, individuation, even reality-testing to a degree. (In Civilization and its Discontents, as I pointed out in the previous entry, Freud groups adult romantic relations together with psychosis.)

But on the other hand, and strikingly, “love…also pulls us in the opposite direction” (150). Not only, that is, does love draw mind backwards, towards recovery, restoration, and the abolition of psychic achievement; love also “fuels human development and pulls us toward higher, more differentiated unities” (150). Here again Lear departs from Freud’s own self-understanding: Freud himself treats love under its progressive aspect as “a brutally natural unifying force” (151), disregarding — even repudiating — its psychological existence. Indeed, for Freud, the increasingly “differentiated” unities accumulated through love are best grasped as “substitute” satisfactions, accepted only when, and because, “the backward-running path of regressive satisfaction” (151) is obstructed by repression.

What is the “first-personal aspect” (151) of love in its progressive sense? What is its “quality” or, again, what is it — as Lear provocatively asks — that “lovers are trying to do” (151)?

“When it is manifested in humans, love is…a psychological force. So there must be something that it is like for the human who is striving to unify…[I]f humanly incarnated love is a psychological force, there must be something the he is trying to do” (151)

Lear notes in passing that, given the repeated identification of libido with Platonic Eros, it is “strange…that Freud did not try to capture the point of love within human life” (152) — strange, too, we might add, to encounter in the book’s last chapters such a frank statement of the massive lacuna Freud must fill in.

(If, that is, Freud does not even “try” to discern love’s point, it is harder to see how anything “implicit” in his writings can add up to a Freudian idea of love. Moreover, we might demand some explanation for Freud’s “oversight” in this area.)

Freud ought to have taken a greater interest in this question, Lear suggest, since by the middle 1920’s (in the “Economic Problem of Masochism”) he’d virtually conceded the inadequacy of purely “quantitative” accounts of libido and so “ultimately undermines his mechanistic model of the mind” (152). Freud is led by observation and inference to an appreciation of the “qualitative factor” (152) without, however, searching for this factor in the only location is can be found, namely, “in the lover’s experienced relation with the object of his love (152-3). And this “experience” — whatever the physiological scaffolding — is not, we have seen, that of “discharge” directed toward some impersonal object, the latter conceived as “a mere receiver or inhibitor” (153) with essentially arbitrary qualities. “Love is not just a feeling or a discharge of energy, but an emotional orientation to the world” (153). And, importantly: “That orientation demands that the world present itself to us as worthy of our love” (153).

And this last rider, finally, unites Lear’s psychological desideratum for grasping love (our perception of the object’s “worthiness” of love as a necessary part of what the experience is “like”) with the main, transcendental argument he has begun to unfold (regarding the conditions of possibility for any experience at all). This “worthiness” in and of the world, the object, the beloved — “what it is about the world that, in our eyes, justifies our love” (153) — is precisely “the qualitative factor that needs to be captured” (153).

In fact, Lear does put a point on this quality, specifying what it is that, in the generic lover’s view, makes the world “lovable.” And the answer, when finally hear it, should not surprise us at all. Indeed, Lear’s answer has the sound of something inevitable: “[W]hat it is for the world to be lovable is for it to be loving” (154). A “loving” world — hence a “good-enough world” (154), in Lear’s Winnicottian turn —is what must be described. Such a world, finally, is the condition of possibility for the development of the (loving) I — the self-integration and self-differentiation through which it passes on the way to constituting those “greater unities” Freud describes.