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

Lear is interested in the concept of identification, not as “a neurophysiological process,” but as a “psychological act” (161) — with the resonances of first-personal perspective, and (after a fashion) free spontaneity suggested by this phrase. “I do not reflect the world, I devour it” (161). The first, ur-identification, “narcissistic identification,” is the basis upon which all subsequent “hysterical identifications” (162) rest. For this original identification constitutes the I as something discrete, “for whom” a world, too, emerges as separate.

But Lear’s descriptions of this ur-identification are paradoxical, and I would like to take a moment to sharpen this paradox. On the one hand, out of their undifferentiated diffuseness, identification establishes the “I” and “world” as distinct items, imparting to each a structure and complexity they formerly lacked. On the other hand, this same identification also signals a recognition of the world’s externality — indeed, constitutes a compensatory reaction to that recognition. (Hence identification is also a strategy to overcome the unwelcome discrepancy between “I” and “loved-object,” the need and its satisfaction.)

Simply put, the paradox is that the “dichotomy” of I and world is both the premise and product of identification. We may soften somewhat the edges of this paradox by distinguishing between phases:

  1. The original frustration of a separate world: ‘The breast is independent, does not automatically manifest in response to my “omnipotent” wishes.’ Such externality is merely implicit or, in Hegel’s words, “in itself,” an sich. It registers only brute separation — that the world is separate, not how. There is a form, but as yet no content, to the “I” and its opposed “world.” This intuition is the “premise,” in response to which the compensatory act of identification has any sense at all.

  2. At the same time, however, the “narcissistic identification” (162) catalyzes the I’s development. Indeed, this act confers on the formal, empty “I” whatever structure or determinacy it is ultimately going to possess.

Lear’s gloss on this paradox — a “dialectic,” he writes, “of development…fueled by love and loss” (163) — contains but does not, I don’t think, resolve it: “I become an I in response to the fact that there is a separate world that is not identical with me” (163).

(To belabor a moment longer our paradox, we might quibble with Lear’s phrasing: does not the “fact” of a “separate world” presuppose, indeed, simply name the “I” purportedly built upon only afterwards out of compensatory identifications? In my view, Lear would require something like the distinctions between phases or moments — in-itself and for-itself, implicit and explicit, form and content — to address this quibble.)

In any case, Lear puts the I’s subsequent development this way: “I identify with the world because I am not identical with it. I take the world in, and thus constitute myself, as compensation” (163). (The language of “compensation,” we will note in passing, carries a tragic implication. For it means that the traits that distinguish the I both from the world and from other I’s — say, the warmth of mother, the self-discipline of father — are each of them products of frustration.)

But what is the I, exactly? Following Schelling, Hegel called nature “petrified intelligence.” For Freud, the “I” is similarly the petrification of libido, for it preserves in its characterology a record of lost love-objects. “Libidinal energy has been transformed into psychic structure” (165), so that “one might thus think of psychic structure as structured love” (165).

What exactly are we to make of this imagery? Developmentally, a primordial unity is dispersed: the breast I initially fancied a part of me — a function of my will — is experienced in its painful separateness, its “independence.” How does one rectify this loss of a love-object? Freud’s answer is, roughly speaking, the distinctions contained in the structural model itself: among the agencies of mind, it is the “It” (i.e. the id) that feels the loss. By contrast, the “I” is able to incorporate traits of the lost object to placate this grief-stricken “It.” [Lear insists on restoring to the Latinate “ego” and “id” their colloquial forms — a well-meaning decision that nonetheless insistently stalls the reader — this reader, in any case — most familiar with the technical translations.]

Hence the “It” can be consoled. It is to an extent prepared to accept — in the absence of the lost object — another object, a substitute, that is sufficiently similar. And this capacity constitutes precisely the psychological mechanism we are after: by reforming itself on the pattern of the lost object — by altering its own character — the “I” is able to offer to the (undiscerning, magical-thinking) “It” just such a substitute. “By fashioning itself after a lost love, the I offers itself [to the It] as dependable compensation for a fickle world” (163).

Lear quotes a passage from the Ego and the Id containing a wonderful image (one that I have considered in another context):

“When the I assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the it as a love-object and is trying to make good the it’s lost by saying; ‘Look, you can love me too — I am so like the object’(163)

And a moment later, Lear quotes an equally evocative image from the same text: “the character of the I is a precipitate of abandoned object-investments (164), so that this I “contains the history of those object-choices” (164). Lear even seems to be pushing Freud a step further: the I is simply the history of its — lost, frustrated — object-choices.

Thus, to return to our central questions: Why does Freud believe that the “I” of today indexes the “I’s” of yesterday? How does the present conserve the past? Lear must have something like the following chain of reasoning in mind:

  1. Psychological growth issues from identification — the I assumes capacities and traits of the more complex “objects” it mirrors

  2. But there is nothing to spur these acts of identification until the perceived “unity” between loving-self and loved-object is fragmented — I am made to realize, by frustration, that mother and I are not actually “one,” so I “incorporate” her as a permanent item in my internal world

  3. It follows that loss explains growth and its particular pattern

The I gradually becomes the object[s] it loses — via mimicry, emulation, internalization, self-shaping, enculturation, i.e. all the devices of identification. For only this “mourning” procedure enables it to overcome these losses, persuades the injured party — the “It” agency — that either no loss has occurred or, at least, having occurred, has perforce been rectified. (We must again bracket the philological objection I made in the last entry: at the time of “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud seemed to pathologize identification as a mechanism, not of mourning, but precisely of melancholia.) To summarize, when Freud writes that “the character of the I is a precipitate of abandoned object-investments” (164), that this I “contains the history of those object-choices” (164), he must mean something like: ‘Scrutinize the character and biography of any person, and you will find that the structure of his or her “I” — traits, tendencies, capacities — is (as a totality) the result of identifications with lost objects, and precisely as compensations for these losses.’

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