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

We have been reviewing the mechanism of “identification” in Lear’s account, and its significance in constituting the “I.” In particular, we have conceived identification as a response to, and compensation for, loss. To summarize: the It (id) experiences a loss — of the love-object — and the I (ego), by identifying with this lost object, offers itself up as a “lovable” substitute to the bereaved It. Again, in Freud’s words:

“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 its loss by saying; ‘Look, you can love me too — I am so like the object’”(163)

But what exactly makes this I “lovable” to the It? In other words: would any of the I’s identifications (with the lost love-object) suffice for the purposes of It-pacification? Or is something specific required? These questions bring us around to the central aspect of identification, hence the next ingredient in Lear’s account. Generally speaking, the complex object with which the I identifies — namely, the parent — is basically (albeit not infallibly) “loving.” He or she for the most part ministers to the infant’s needs or “drives” as they arise, inevitable frustrations notwithstanding, so that among the “traits” assimilated by the emerging I, this “loving responsiveness” looms large.

But this introduces a striking stipulation into the account we have been piecing together. Again, the newly-shapen “I” must be lovable to the “It” in order successfully to replace the lost love-object. Yet this means: to really be worthy of the Its affections, the I must embody precisely the original object’s “loving-responsiveness” as that was directed toward the It with its drives.

The last chapter prepared us for this logical convergence of the “lovable” and the “loving”: a lovable world is a loving world — only a loving world is finally lovable. Now, however, this convergence becomes the intra-psychical desideratum of mental health. For a successful identification — and all Is are allegedly products of more or less successful identifications — creates a rather specific self-relation. In particular, the self (as I, “ego”) loves itself (as It, “Id”), in this way winning the love of that It (formerly bestowed upon the love-object, now lost):

“But if we consider what it is about the world that the drives love, it would seem to be the parents’ organized, loving responsiveness to the child’s needs. A successful identification in a good-enough world ought thus to be more than just the taking in of a love-object. The emerging I ought to embody a loving, responsive relation to (the) it’s drives. For that is what it would be to identify with the love-object. That is how love tends toward higher unities in human life” (169)

Neurosis, by contrast, reflects a failure to achieve this type of identification, hence some version of disharmony between I and It, trait and drive. Whichever of the love-object’s traits are assimilated, however the I reforms itself, the It will not find that I lovable, will not be pacified, if that I lacks the one trait which imparts value to all others: namely, the trait of loving the It, with its bundle of spontaneous urges, impulses, needs.

Thus far, Lear has discussed only two of the agencies found in Freud’s structural model — the “It” (id) and the “I” (ego). He now describes the origin and development of the third agency, the super-ego, beginning with its conceptual precursor, the “Ideal I” (ego-ideal):

“One might say that both the I and the ideal-I differentiate themselves out of a prior, less differentiated I-state which might be called the idealized proto-I” (167)

This less differentiated, idealized proto-I, the infant’s normal mentality, does not sharply distinguish between fantasy and reality — among other dichotomies honored by the well-adjusted adult. More specifically, the infant perceives no sharp difference between what it would like to be and what it is — a difference imposed only later by secondary-process thinking. In Lear’s telescopic formula: “‘Fantasy’ is a term we use in higher-level conceptualization to describe mental activity that itself does not distinguish between fantasy and reality” (172).

This could not be otherwise, if only for chronological reasons. After all, the less complex infant mind “identifies” with the more complex adult mind (in the nature of things) well before it is equipped with any of its “fantasied” traits. How could an infant identify with these imponderably sophisticated traits, if not by means of the “magical” thinking that asserts: “I am, somehow, what I now aspire to be”? Once “in motion,” the development of mind sifts out the “I” proper from fantasied representations, including the “ideal-I” (ego-ideal). Before this self-polarization, however, neither the “I” nor the “ideal-I” exist as discrete agencies.

Yet by the same token, these agencies can only be instituted simultaneously: a self must posses both or neither, since being an “I” at all involves continuously distinguishing what one is, one’s reality, from fantasied self-representations such as the ideal-I one would like to be, bearing all the (as yet unrealized) traits and capacities implied by one’s identifications.

Let us linger a moment over the tragedy, or at least the poignancy of this insight: the division of “is” from “ought” is a condition of outgrowing the infant’s “idealized proto-I” and thence having an “I” at all. “The sense of distance, of falling short of what I might be, is thus not an accident: it lies at the hear of the I’s existence” (167). It seems that this unsurpassable distance of an I from its ideal-I can only be felt as dissatisfying, at best, and at worst an intolerable agony. Lear himself distinguishes gradations: “In a pathological case the sense of distance will be overwhelming…But in a good-enough world, the gap between I and ideal-I will not be too great” (167-8). (I examined this thought in my commentary to Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. There I quoted Freud’s conjecture that, whenever the postulated “distance” between “I” and “ideal I” is overcome, so that critical self-monitoring is suspended entirely, it is mania that results: “[I]t cannot be doubted that in cases of mania the ego and the ego ideal have fused together”(82).)

Lear’s penultimate chapter now draws to a close on the goal of a clinical analysis, or of a human life more broadly. “My task, as a would-be individual, is to…make the It and my super-I my own” (178). But this task of dis-alienation — retracting into oneself what appears most external — presupposes an antecedent, constitutive “expulsion.” The I comes about piecemeal, from out of the undifferentiated “swirl,” by rejecting (above all: repressing) whatever is incompatible with its emerging “identity” (identifications): the “not Is” of It and super-I.

Afterwards, via either healthy development or, failing this, analytic intervention, the self-alienated mind of the neurotic (hypostasized by Freud as a natural fact), may suspend or dissolve its internal divisions. Here Lear blames the well-documented conditions of conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis for the Freudian “misconception that the soul has discrete parts” (174-5). In fact, Lear suggests, the mutual-estrangement of the sectors of mind characteristic of some neuroses is codified, in classical psychoanalysis, as a universal feature of mind: “before concluding that the soul does have parts, one ought to consider that this configuration is a manifestation of illness” (175).

Lear now concludes, in some elegantly symmetrical formulations, that the self (under the “I” aspect) must re-admit the It and the super-I together, since the alienation of one invariably parallels that of the other. They are, figuratively speaking, equidistant from the I. The needed “transformations” — the softening of the super-I and the acceptance of the Id — “are of a piece” (175). As Lear puts it: “It is because of a harsh super-I that the drives are so violently repressed. With the integration of the super-I into the I, there is new room to incorporate the It as well” (175).

In the next entries, I will discuss the final chapter of Love and its Place in Nature.