Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXV)
In our last discussion, we considered Lear’s argument that psychological freedom must consist in something beyond a mere “harmony” between first- and second-order desires. It is not enough, pace Harry Frankfurt, that my various first-order impulses have been “reformed” until they are expressions of my second-order “will,” because the latter — built up out of the I’s identifications — may itself simply reproduce some unelected, and potentially coercive, early environment. Paradigmatically, perhaps the adult’s “will” simply duplicates the will of the patients who shaped it in early childhood. And to compound the problem, as I suggested in the last entry: even someone who grows consciously into a stark repudiation of his original “identifications” may well still be unconsciously gripped by them.
Hence Lear’s critique left us with a question: how would we know when a “process of differentiation” has occurred, such that a particular adult will has not simply reproduced its early environment (positively or negatively)? What exactly does differentiation look like, in the concrete?
Intriguingly, to answer this question, the first place that Lear directs our attention is not to the “ideal-I” (ego-ideal), or any “boot strapping” procedure that could ensure our second-order desires are more than dogmatically-held reproductions of our parents’ wills. (A consideration of this possibility comes a bit later in Lear’s account, at 204-211.) Before that, we find initial orientation closer to home: namely, in our archaic mental functioning — precisely the substrate, frequently repelled from awareness, of our first-order desires.
This, of course, overturns the traditional conception of freedom represented in Frankfurt’s view: the understandable preoccupation with dominating, from above, all unwelcome, unruly impulses until they accord with one’s autarchic “will.” These impulses, we might suppose, have no intrinsic authority; rather, their authority depends upon a will that (unilaterally) invests them with it. Yet Lear now suggests that psychological development in the direction of true autonomy — assisted, where stalled, by psychoanalysis — must emphasize something else: “It is crucial to the process of individuation that I incorporate this other mindedness [i.e. archaic mental functioning] as part of myself” (194). And again:
“Given the background condition of a good-enough world, a well-endowed human will by his very nature tend to individuate. Psychic health is achieved not by abolishing the It [Id], but by taking it up into the differentiated unity of the I” (196)
Why extend recognition to this mindedness, though? — that is, beyond the danger that, in refusing this recognition, archaic mind does not simply vanish but goes underground, finding “subterranean” channels for gratification? This danger would not in itself indicate the intrinsic value or authority of these desires — only their necessity for psychological functioning. What, after all, has this recognition and “incorporation” of our drives to do with our central problem: individuation as the differentiation from one’s early environment, particularly the “will” of one’s parents?
There is more than one approach to these concerns. A standard answer might be to say that there is manifestly no autonomy, or limited autonomy, in a self-occluded human being, or in a soul driven unaware by desires “behind its back.” One longstanding criterion of freedom is that I know why I behave as I do. If I do not understand my actions at all, or if I misunderstand them — believing, say, that they spring directly from my will, when in reality they are disguised expressions of wishes I do not consciously acknowledge — then my freedom is to that extent questionable.
But I want to explore another answer, one that is not explicit in Lear’s account but which can be constructed out of claims he does make. One’s “will” is initially a product of one’s identifications; an approximation of the parents’ attitude to oneself, as experienced and interpreted in infancy. Hence my relation to my desires recapitulates my parents’ relation to them: the desires they accepted and valued become crystallized part of my “core” self. These are the desires, in other words, which are subsequently felt as acceptable expression of my “will.”
By contrast, the desires the parents did not accept — because they provoked irritation, anger, or anxiety in the parent — become for me, minimally, the sorts of first-order desires I overrule in my actions and would like, if possible, to eradicate entirely; and, in more extreme cases, repressed desires that have been banished from awareness, so disturbing are they to the idealized, self-validating I have internalized from my parents.
But once we have accepted something like this picture, it is a short and natural step to the idea that
“differentiation” from one’s environment, i.e. from the “messages” one has pre-reflectively absorbed from parents (and other important figures), and
“incorporation” of one’s desires, especially in the form of those archaic drives repelled from consciousness,
are finally two faces of a single process named “individuation.”
I will develop this idea in the next entry.