Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 6 (XIX)

Two chapters remain in Lear’s book — two chapters in which to draw together all the preceding materials and produce an answer to the question, ‘What is love, considered as a force in nature?’ Lear has at each step infused the Freudian letter with Aristotelian spirit, and in a way that challenges not only the traditional self-understanding of psychoanalysis, but an entire conception of science. We have by now some handle on two of the three aspects of Freud’s “revolution,” as Lear outlined them in the book’s Introduction:

1. The uncanny notion of “archaic mental functioning,” which expands mind’s arena and thus mind itself;

2. The program for a “science of subjectivity” in which neither “science” nor “subjectivity" bear clear, uncontroversial meanings. (What is science when the “observational” standpoint is relativized or outright abandoned? And what is a “subjectivity” that embraces archaic mental functioning? — Indeed, what can we grasp of a “subjectivity" that is not a scientific “object” — that is, something which can under no circumstances and by definition be “objective?”)

But what are we to make, really, of the claim — by the Learian Freud or the Freudian Lear — that

(3) Love is a natural force?

Lear has removed “archaic mental functioning” from the positivist realm of dichotomy, discharge, partes extra partes, and restored it to its rightful place on a teleological path that culminates — or fails to culminate — in that “gesture of love” called interpretation.

For Lear, the practice of psychoanalysis furnishes the conditions — secures the “holding” environment — in which anything in “mind” naturally pressing for self-understanding may receive a hearing. This, too, demands and evinces love. All of the analytic props, techniques, and activities serve the same telos. These serve the “catharsis,” the emotional re-orientation, that permits whatever has been split off from awareness — ideas, wishes, emotions themselves — to speak in a conceptual language these items have never possessed.

But in these descriptions, the concept of love seemed to have mainly a metaphorical application. The “unifications” carried out spontaneously in healthy psychological development, and by analytic insight in cases where that development has stalled or decomposed, are evidence of “love,” perhaps — but only in some artificially expanded sense of the term. In any case, I considered this an appropriately skeptical reaction to the argument emerging in earlier chapters, including in the Introduction.

But in the last chapter Lear began to connect these early intimations of love in psychoanalysis with certain of Freud’s speculative flights, in his late writings, to construct a transcendental figure. Love is elevated from its traditional status — nearly an embarrassment to psychoanalytic austerity — to a logical condition of possibility for anything like human experience.

Let us rehearse the main steps of Lear’s transcendental account:

1. To “have” a world is — so the argument runs — to establish a libidinal investment in it; to lack this investment is to have no world, no sanity.

2. This investment does not occur automatically, any more than the “I” whose investment it is. These are achievements.

3. The condition of possibility for these achievements — the upsurge in an “I” of “love” for a “world” — consists in an antecedently “lovable” environment.

4. But such a “lovable” environment is finally, we are now told, a sufficiently loving environment.

A “good-enough world” — lovable, because loving — is the stimulus, or perhaps the “summons” (as Fichte famously put it) that effects the I’s indigenous power or “force.” Love as a natural, “objective” force finds and activates itself in the “subject,” even as the subject:

“The individual, he [Freud] realizes, cannot be understood other than as a response to certain forces that permeate the social world into which he is born” (156).

We would like now to know more about this world, how it’s constituted, and how exactly it structures the emergent “I,” or accounts for its characteristics. At this place, Lear turns to Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” — purportedly the text in which just these essential connections are drawn: “Psychic structure, Freud realizes, is created by a dialectic of love and loss. The structure of the mind is an inner recreation of the structure of the loved world” (160). According to the essay, “Identification…was the normal process by which an I comes to be” (160), or again, “the most primitive form of psychic response to a loved world” (161).

But I will end with a brief quibble. I have already discussed this area of Freud’s thinking — the nature and function of “identification” — in my own commentary on “Mourning and Melancholia,” as well as in other places. While Freud eventually seems to recognize the positive, non-pathological function and value of identification — in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and in the Ego and the Id — my sense is that, pace Lear, the “Mourning” essay only indicates this mechanism’s negative value. In other words, in this place Freud indicates that “identification” is only put into action where normal “mourning” fails and pathological “melancholia” arises.