Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 2 (IV)
In the last entry, we concluded our discussion of Chapter 1 of Love and its Place in Nature. Chapter 2 of Lear’s book, “Catharsis: Fantasy and Reality,” begins with the memorable lines: “Subjectivity is upwardly mobile. The meanings and memories that shape a person’s outlook on the world do not lie dormant in the soul; they are striving for expression” (29). Lear evoked this teleology in the last chapter with his description of “archaic mental functioning” as the first, necessarily crude effort of mind to “say” what it feels and knows. His notion of psychoanalytic interpretations as termini of this effort belongs here as well: an interpretation brings the archaic expressions of mind to self-transparency and, at the same time, transforms them in that very acknowledgement. When the unconscious “message” is finally received at the conscious level that until then repelled it, that particular instance of archaic mental functioning is rendered otiose.
So the “meanings and memories” of the quoted lines — which “do not lie dormant” but instead constantly press for “expression” — are precisely the items propelled through increasingly articulate stages, from the most “archaic” and figurative to the conceptual “here and now” of analytic interpretation. “Catharsis” designates the final phase of a successfully realized trajectory: subjective relief and objective transformation in behavior. There is no need for a paralyzed leg, say, to communicate a memory or meaning that has been taken up into conceptual utterance; hence that now-redundant piece of archaic mental functioning ceases.
When the analysis “cures,” when it is “mutative,” then catharsis is involved — at least on some, perhaps revised understanding of the term. I have included this qualification because, for much of the chapter, Lear is describing an influential picture of this mechanism that he considers a distortion — namely Freud’s. The view of catharsis established jointly by Freud and Breuer, and codified in their Studies on Hysteria, turns finally on a metaphor of “discharge” which, for Lear, clouds what is genuinely apt in the concept.
The metaphor is not innocent. Just this misplaced concreteness surrounding the idea of catharsis is allegedly responsible for great mischief in Freud’s later metapsychology. The fantasy of discharge, taken literally and systematized into theory, leads to all sorts of incoherences. Long after the method of cathartic discharge per se became questionable even to Freud (46), his system remained saturated with an error that, Lear argues, presupposes exactly that fantasy.
Specifically, it inspired in Freud the idea of an initially indeterminate, mobile, and measurable quantum of “psychic energy” (39) that can take one form, then another — an “underlying something” that, owing to the mechanism of “conversion,” may be “expressed sometimes mentally, sometimes physically” (39). The postulate of psychic energy is thus less an answer to some empirical question, the solution to some puzzling observation, than an ad hoc attempt to fortify the fantasied image of catharsis as discharge. (40) Once discharge is accepted as the legitimate description of cathartic experience, one is virtually compelled to posit some persisting “substance” that can be discharged — instead, that is, of “damning up” the psyche, or finding inappropriate “outlets” in unconsciously-sustained behaviors.
Eventually, Lear ventures another view of catharsis that, he argues, does not share this weakness. (He does not go as far as claiming it has no basis in fantasy or metaphor.) “Once one abandons the idea that catharsis is a discharge of psychic energy, it begins to look as though catharsis is a conscious unification of thought and feeling” (46). In a moment I will return to this alternative conception — one grounded, it turns out, in a reading of Aristotle’s theories of emotion and dramatic catharsis. In the meantime, let us recount Lear’s explanation of the “discharge” model in Freud’s development, its meaning, as well as its perceived deficiencies: both its internal, conceptual incoherences and its failure to accurately reflect clinical experience.
What led Freud and Breuer to describe the cathartic relief and recovery in their hysterical patients — most famously Anna O. — with the medico-scientific concept of “discharge?” As Lear shows us, when reconstructed in a non-tendentious way, the characteristics of catharsis do not in the main evoke this concept. Here are the essentials:
the patient is brought to a hypnotic trance state
with the help of the analyst’s inducements, she recovers a repressed memory of some “difficult” episode in her life
she talks about and, in so doing, “re-experiences” that episode in a now moderated form
most significantly, perhaps, she consciously experiences the “emotion” that should originally have accompanied the recollected episode, but which — in the event — was not felt, or felt improperly
finally, once the offending memory is recovered, and the relevant emotion — originally absent — is felt in its undiluted intensity, the patient’s “symptom” disappears.
What seems to matters most is that the events recollected under hypnosis “were not lived properly” (31). Thus:
“When Anna O. Discovered the dog drinking out of the glass she did not express her disgust because she wanted to be polite. That unexpressed disgust seemed to take up residence in her: and it became responsible for the generalized disgust of drinking.” (31)
Already, I would observe, we have begun to leave the realm of non-tendentious “observation” and entered that of inference. That the original event was improperly experienced, and that catharsis under hypnosis consists in rectifying the original discrepancy separating the event from its appropriate affective witness — this is surely less a neutral enumeration of "the facts” than a strong theory of mental illness. (We might compare other places in which Freud recounts the innovation and development of psychoanalytic method — particularly in its early, “catharsis” phase.)
In any case, how did “discharge” become the favored way of picturing a therapeutic procedure that as yet has no obvious connection to it?
“Since the expression of the emotion was therapeutic, it was natural for Freud and Breuer to conceive of their method as a type of discharge. Before the treatment the emotion persisted “inside” the patient, causing the hysterical symptom; the treatment consisted in expelling this “foreign body.” (33)
The concept of “expression” is operative here. According to a typical, imagistic use of the word, the process of expression involves converting an “inner” into an “outer.” To our analogizing habit of thinking, just as
an infection or foreign body residing in one’s corporeal interior, compromising one’s health, must be “discharged,” brought to the surface and expelled by medical intervention, similarly,
the “emotion” that corresponded to the original, traumatic event but which was not, or not properly, “expressed” at that time, is lodged in the self as an alien entity.
Thereupon this un-metabolized entity interferes with the patient’s normal functioning, finding subterranean paths of release in symptoms that afford only partial satisfaction, until it is finally “discharged” or “expelled” by the cathartic method. By this means, the “inner” is made definitely “outer” where, of course, it no longer “damns up” psychic functioning.
In the next entry, I will discuss Lear’s critique of this image.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 1 (III)
Let us conclude our discussion of Lear’s introduction to Love and its Place in Nature. In the last entry I quoted a passage reflecting a certain conception — a manifestly “teleological” one — of psychoanalytic interpretation in the clinical setting. On this view, an interpretation develops
“naturally out of the archaic “thinking” it interprets. A good interpretation represents the end of a developmental process which begins with archaic attempts to “say the same thing.” The interpretation allows the mind to understand, at the level of a conceptualized judgment, what it has been trying to say all along, in more primitive ways” (8)
This frank Aristotelianizing of Freud, the (seemingly) least Aristotelian of thinkers, is prefigured in the epigraph to Lear’s book — by Aristotle — and it is carried out by frequent reference to Aristotle later on. “Mind” is accordingly pressing all the while toward self-expression, including via “archaic mental function,” and reaches its telos only in self-knowledge. And while this teleology certainly conflicts with Freud’s considered view of psychoanalytic science — the positivistic theory — his “discovery” entails just such a framework.
Thus Freud himself, to be sure, conceived psychoanalysis “as simply uncovering a hidden thought” (9), as is congruent with “the image of science as discovering an independently existing reality” (9). Nonetheless, analytic practice suggests a conatus governing mind, from its most opaquely primitive communicative efforts to the most sophisticated and self-transparent. Indeed, mind itself demands an “interpretation” as the necessary, final phase in its own struggle for self-knowledge. (That this interpretation is actually a provision of the analyst and not the analysand is as yet immaterial to Lear’s argument. Nonetheless, this quintessentially relational or intersubjective achievement is still the terminus of self-intelligibility towards which mind instinctively propels itself.)
We now have some provisional understanding of the first two elements in Freud’s revolution:
the paradoxical “science of subjectivity” that flouts Freud’s own, 19th century ideal of science; and
the conception of “archaic mental functioning” — accessory to this science —which locates mind in precisely those occurrences that seem most recalcitrantly non-mental
But we have in addition begun to appreciate a third element: “the positing of Love as a basic force in nature” (3). For Lear’s explication of psychoanalysis as a practice facilitating the immanent telos of mind — whose elemental struggle for self-knowledge is brought by interpretation to completion — makes the entire process essentially an expression of love. The clarification of this striking idea comes later in the chapter, only after the meaning of love in its “enlarged” sense is reviewed. It emerges in the midst of a discussion of individuality and individuation — ideals whose intrinsic value psychoanalysis presupposes. “An individual is, among other things, constituted by the pursuit of the meanings by which he does or might live. Psychoanalysis is at its core committed to the process of individuation” (22). The aim of individuality just is the developmental process we have described. And the allegiance of psychoanalysis to this process finally just is an expression of love. In other words, this is the form love naturally assumes at this level of reality:
“Precisely because the individual is a psychological achievement, it is not a given…But for an individual to come into existence, his archaic expression of subjectivity must be integrated with the rest of his life. An individual comes to be not by abolishing archaic life, but by taking it up into a higher level of organization. Freud…came to recognize this development as a manifestation of love within the human arena.” (23)
Later in the book, Lear will elaborate on this enlarged conception of love as a natural “force,” primordial and ubiquitous. And he will elucidate both more prosaic types of human affection, as well as the science and art of psychoanalysis, as proper “manifestations” of this same force. In this chapter Lear only gestures towards these elaborations. Freud, we are told, “came to recognize a basic developmental force in nature. This force, which he called love, permeates the animate world and tends toward the development of ever higher and more complex unities” (12).
There is little doubt, in fact, that Lear construes mental functions such as conceptualization and interpretation as per definition expressions of just this force. This position is conveyed by a number of characteristically self-reflexive formulations, for example: “The very activity of coming to understand love is itself a development, a unification, an act of love” (13). And lest the reader suppose that only interpretations directed at love are also instances of love, Lear writes a moment later: “This books is an interpretation. As such, it is an act of love” (15). (We might compare Lear’s proposition here with a contrasting view within psychoanalysis — namely, that interpretations are, or at least can be, acts of aggression.)
There are weaker and stronger versions of this claim. These are, Lear writes, the “manifest” and “latent” content of Freud’s famous assertion that psychoanalysis “is a cure through love” (27). We ought not only to receive this mot at face value, as a statement about the temperamental requirements of an effective analyst: “emotional engagement” and “emphatic understanding” (27). At least potentially, says Lear, Freud’s words imply a sweepingly dramatic characterization of the status that psychoanalysis enjoys in the eons-long saga of life coming to self-knowledge, and self-reconciliation, via greater and greater states of complexity, unity, and individuation.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 1 (II)
We have been rehearsing the elements of that “revolution” which Lear credits to Freud — particularly those elements designated by the expressions “a science of subjectivity” and “archaic mental functioning.” At the end of the last entry, we raised the question of criteria: on what basis does psychoanalysis interpret neurotic “symptoms” — hysterical somatization, say, or obsessional rituals — as manifestations of mind, however “unconscious?” The answer, we suggested, will provide a “criterion” at once epistemological and clinical. On the one hand, it will entitle us to identify the presence of mentality — intentions, motivations, wishes — in ostensibly non-mental phenomena. On the other hand, it will isolate the mechanism of psychological growth. What is this criterion?
Before addressing Freud’s innovation, let us consider a more conventional position. (Here I deviate from Lear’s own way of framing his account. But it seems he must have something like the following in mind.) Under normal circumstances, our criterion for the mind’s self-recognition in bodily movements and utterances seems a straightforward matter. We view a particular episode as “mental” — lifting an arm, say, or calling a friend — if, and only if, it seems consciously to originate in an “act of will,” intention, design, and to reflect them. In these instances I suppose, correctly or not, that the mental, geistige qualities of the occurrences are directly accessible, in the links I identify between conscious initiation and its consequences. Of course, certain plans may fail to materialize, in whole or in part. I may intend to take a particular subway line to work, but I am unable because it is not running that day — or perhaps I mistakenly board the wrong one. But my actions are still intelligible as my actions, as reflecting mentality, since they follow from accessible intentions that, in these scenarios, simply fail. I must then revise my intentions to adapt to a reality that restricts them in some way.
The situation is starkly different, however, in episodes of so-called “archaic mental functioning.” Here no “connections” of the ordinary kind are directly accessible to the mind — connections, that is, between itself and its purported manifestations. The hysteric may introspect, search her heart at length, and yet fail to find any “desire” for — let along a concrete “intention” to induce — the paralysis that has stricken her limb. Measured by the “conventional” criterion, then, the phenomenon in question is assuredly not mental: it precludes “mind’s self-recognition in otherness,” to use a Hegelian phrase.
Yet as we indicated above, psychoanalysis supplies another criterion for identifying the mentality of these occurrences. With the aid of this criterion, we can verify that, appearances notwithstanding, the paralysis in the limb is indeed “permeated” by mind. This is what Lear writes:
“The answer lies in the fact that recognition tends to have a transformative effect…[I]nterpretation not only explicates the primitive mental activity, it can transform it…It is the responsiveness of this archaic mental activity to the mind’s own attempt to understand it that lends credibility to the idea that what we have here is a form of mental functioning.” (7)
To put the claim into more structured, criterial language: mind has successfully recognized itself in a seemingly non-mental process when its “interpretation” alters that process. The process’s responsiveness to a certain type of conceptuality shows that it was never below the threshold of mind, after all. (Lear must have Freud’s “Constructions in Analysis” essay partly in mind here.)
In this way, Freud establishes an ontological continuity between archaic mental functioning and the consciousness that “grasps" it with an effective interpretation. Again, this continuity complicates the methodological paradigm accepted by Freud the “natural scientist.” For on Lear’s account, the analytic interpretation is never a conceptual judgment applied externally by a detached “observer” to an independent, antecedently determinate “object.” On the contrary:
“A more compelling picture is to see the interpretation as growing naturally out of the archaic “thinking” it interprets. A good interpretation represents the end of a developmental process which begins with archaic attempts to “say the same thing.” The interpretation allows the mind to understand, at the level of a conceptualized judgment, what it has been trying to say all along, in more primitive ways” (8)
This “developmental process” implies an organic “teleology” of sorts, according to which mind strains from the first toward a self-expression that is finally redeemed in self-knowledge. In the next entry, I will say more about the kind of psychoanalytic teleology Lear has in mind, and its connection with the overarching theme of the book, namely, the meaning in analysis of love.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 1 (I)
In this series of entries, I will reconstruct the main lines of argument in Jonathan Lear’s fascinating book, Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis.
In Chapter 1 of Love and its Place in Nature, Jonathan Lear identifies three elements of Freud’s “revolution,” whose theoretical consequences were allegedly unappreciated — both by Freud himself and his followers. And Lear names some of the obstacles blocking such an appreciation. The revolution included “[1] a science of subjectivity; [2] the discovery of an archaic form of mental functioning; [3] the positing of Love as a basic force in nature” (3, bracketed numbers mine).
(These elements are related, Lear tells us, meaning — I gather — that the examination of any one of them will evoke the others. So, realizing the program of a “science of subjectivity,” as Freud does — in observation and reflection — will entail recognizing “archaic mental functioning” in that subjectivity, as well as love as the prime-mover in its healthy, individuating development.)
The first half of the chapter describes these elements and their “paradoxes,” the characteristics of each that — owing either to Freud’s manner of articulating them or to some more intrinsic difficulty — pose such challenges to our common sense. The very phrase “science of subjectivity” appears to contain contradictory pieces. On the conventional understanding, and indeed on Freud’s, science is in essence objectifying: its content is perforce an object. If and when a science, so construed, applies itself to an item such as “subjectivity” — which per definition stipulates that it is not, can never be, an object — one expects the result to defeat the aim. Subjectivity is then explained, not qua subjectivity, but as the classified, law-governed “object” into which the scientific machinery converts it. In order for anything like a true “science of subjectivity” to exist, then, a model of science must be developed that accommodates the features constitutive of subjectivity, which do not admit of positivistic objectification.
Among these features Lear includes its irreducible first-person orientation and — perhaps another way of stating the same point — the inseparability of a person’s “identity” from such things as “meanings, emotions and desires” (4). The problem is only compounded, of course, by Freud’s additional discovery that these meanings, emotions, and desires, which are constitutive of subjectivity, are to a substantial degree not directly accessible to the very person whose possession they are; they are unconscious. In fact, these unconscious items only become available to consciousness “through a peculiar human interaction” (4), psychoanalytic treatment, that itself violates the traditional strictures of scientific method as Freud himself envisioned it: objectivity, passivity detachment, and the like.
How can we sustain this positivistic ideal of science, whose “object” demands the undiluted apprehension of a mind-independent reality, through an interaction whose object depends on the minds of both participants — neither of whom, for this reason, can credibly be called mere “observers”? How does one preserve the model of independence between knower and known when both the practice and the theory of psychoanalysis stipulates their unsurpassable interdependence? (Lear studied under Hans Loewald, from whom precisely these questions seem to be taken over.)
In fact, writes Lear, “the idea of a science of subjective reality is so new that we do not have any fixed model to which it should conform” (6). In this science, the mind is its own object, and so its efforts to study that object “in itself” are futile. And this object, in this arena, is discovered only in the process of its transformation. Or perhaps: to credibly discover this object just is to transform it.
In psychoanalysis, then, “mind is trying to grasp its own activity” (6). And again: “The reality that mind is trying to capture is mind itself, and in its attempt to understand itself, mind does not leave itself unaltered” (11). On their own, these phrases seem to restate the philosophical desiderata of German Idealism, particularly those of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. After all, one definitive side of the German idealist program was the demonstration that whatever appears “other” to mind, Geist — everything from the natural objects of science, to other human beings, to the laws that govern communities — are upon analysis expressions or “externalizations” of mind itself. The Phenomenology, in particular, inventories all the objects, activities, customs, and institutions that embody ourselves, and in which we can recognize — or fail to recognize — that embodiment.
(Actually, notwithstanding the occasional reference, Lear’s primary frame of reference is not German idealism, but Aristotle (many of whose ideas, of course, were taken up by the German idealists). I think the absence in this book of more direct engagement with Hegel, especially, was a missed opportunity.)
Though Lear does not say this explicitly, we can evidently interpret Freud’s “revolution” as in part an attempt to deepen or radicalize this German idealist thesis. Recall the second plank of this revolution: the discovery, namely, of an “archaic level of mental functioning that is, at first, so alien as to be unrecognizable” (6). At this archaic level Freud will place a number of phenomena, ostensibly redolent of mind, which Hegel had not thought to conceive as “others” of spirit — items that, after a phase of denial and resistance, we are brought to acknowledge as manifestations of our very selves. Famously, Freud invites us to recognize mind in the sorts of (frequently bodily) processes we are least disposed to look for evidence of it. “The unconscious wish is expressed in dreams, in slips of the tongue, in symptomatic acts, in a paralyzed leg, a false pregnancy, an irritable bowel” (6-7).
But what evidence does psychoanalysis adduce that these processes are manifestations of mind? — that they are not strictly speaking “processes” but activities, after all? “How is the mind to recognize itself in, say, an act of vomiting?” (7). The answer to this question supplies a success-criterion for both the epistemological and therapeutic viability of psychoanalysis. In other words, this criterion, when met
demonstrates the presence of mentality — intentions, motivations, wishes — in ostensibly non-mental phenomena, and
isolates the mechanism of psychological growth.
What is this criterion? I will take up this question in the next entry.
Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924) (VI)
We are continuing our account of the opening sections of “Economic Problem” — in particular, a thorny paragraph that reflects a number of obscurities and ambiguities in Freud’s position. At this point, Freud infers from his reflections to the following result:
“In this way we obtain a small but interesting set of connections. The Nirvana principle expresses the trend of the death instinct; the pleasure principle represents the demands of the libido; and the modification of the latter principle, the reality principle, represents the influence of the external world.”
Once again, the simplicity of Freud’s formulations conceal a certain amount of complexity. To what “connections” do the foregoing reflections entitle us, really?
[I will not speak in this entry of the third “connection,” namely, the development of the pleasure principle into the reality principle under the impact of frustration. This is the well-known theme of “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) and — apart from its relative cogency — is fairly independent of Freud’s concerns in “Economic Problem.” I will focus instead on the other two propositions.]
First: “The Nirvana principle expresses the trend of the death instinct.” Of the two, this “thesis” poses less difficulty. We saw above that the Nirvana principle “belongs” to the death drive, that is, it expresses the characteristic lawfulness of this “power.” Hence the “function” that Freud had from early on attributed to the mental apparatus — keeping “excitations" to the lowest possible point — instantiates the death drive, the universal biological trend of reversion to an inert, inorganic condition.
Second: “the pleasure principle represents the demands of the libido.” Our real difficulties begin here. Freud’s intention, of course, is to establish a transparent symmetry. The two principles — the Nirvana and pleasure principles — would accordingly express between them the lawfulness of the two drives. In the first case, we said, this connection seems acceptable enough: the excitation-discharging mental apparatus at least evinces a “kinship” with the death drive, inasmuch as it thereby tends to “conduct the restlessness of life into the stability of the inorganic state” (414). (And early on — say, at the time of “Drives and Their Fates” (1915) — Freud’s only “third-personal” principle was just this “constancy” principle.)
But the relation of the pleasure principle to libido or Eros is not nearly so simple. Or rather, more precisely: the relation between the two items — the principle and the drive — might be equally simple, if we really knew what Freud meant by either. His meaning is far from clear, however. Consider the following points:
The “pleasure principle,” while affording some kind of regular apprehension of our “economics" — states of inner excitations — does not necessarily “map on” to anything quantitative. That is, pleasure and pain do not depend directly on the amounts of inner stimulation, but on some “quality” they share. (Perhaps, Freud volunteers, these feelings register the special “rhythm” in the rise and fall of excitations, rather than the excitations per se.) In any case, if only owing to this uncertainty, we cannot possibly make sense of Freud’s second proposition — “the pleasure principle represents the demands of the libido” — as we did with the first. To be sure, we can say that, whatever it is, the pleasure principle serves Eros. But with regard to the very thing we want to know most — namely, the relation of the pleasure principle to its seeming antipode, the Nirvana principle — we are seemingly in the dark.
In fact, our entitlement to the term “antipode” in the present context is itself doubtful. For the Nirvana principle and pleasure principle are not necessarily at cross-purposes. Indeed, as we have repeatedly observed, until the time of this essay, Freud felt no real need to distinguish them at all. In many, perhaps the majority of cases, pleasure does coincide with a "reduction of tension” — the “aim” towards which the death drive and its Nirvana principle tend, as well. Freud underscores this ordinary coincidence in the very next sentence: “None of these three principles [i.e. the “Nirvana,” “pleasure,” and “reality” principles] is actually put out of action by another. As a rule they are able to tolerate one another, although conflicts are bound to arise occasionally from the fact of the differing aims that are set for each” (415).
This is perhaps one place at which we feel Freud’s equivocal treatment of the drive concept most acutely. A drive, both in Freud’s early writings and (for the most part) in the present essay, is an inner excitation or stimulus pressing for discharge. But alongside this concept of drive, and rather problematically related to it, is another, “late” concept”: a drive is a “function,” either of unification (Eros) or dissolution (Thanatos). Here we will acknowledge an irony, both of Freud’s self-understanding and the reception of his work. The received wisdom regarding Freud’s intellectual development — propounded, of course, by Freud himself — is something like the following. Initially, Freud only recognized the libidinal and self-preservative drives. Later, however, both of these are folded into Eros, while another “drive” — the mysterious and problematic Thanatos — is “introduced” in opposition to it. Yet as we have been arguing, the reality of this conceptual change is considerably more complicated. In fact, the drive that Freud initially designated “libido,” inasmuch it was essentially regulated by the “constancy” principle, was nothing other than an early iteration of the death drive. Hence the conceptual development was not exactly that the libidinal and self-preservative drives were together counterposed to a new innovation, the “death drive,” forced upon Freud by clinical observation (the “repetition compulsion," for example), and elaborated by biological speculation. Rather the development was something like: a piece of Freud’s original notion of the libido (that piece directly regulated by the constancy principle) was separated off as the “death drive.”
The drive of Eros poses analogous ambiguities. On the one hand, first-personally, this drive may be linked to the “qualities” of “pleasure” and “unpleasure.” (In this case, indeed, “the pleasure principle represents the demands of the libido” — at least as a rule.) On the other hand, though, by this point in Freud’s development he’d ascribed to Eros a third-personal trend. That is to say: if the operation of Eros is subjectively experienced in terms of “pleasure” and “unpleasure,” this same operation is objectively — in reality — one of “unification” or “combination.” . In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for instance, Freud had already identified “the efforts of Eros to combine organic substances into ever larger unities” (42-43); or again, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, “the tendency which proceeds from the libido and which is felt by all living beings of the same kind, to combine in more and more comprehensive units” (118). Finally, in Civilization and its Discontents: “…I was led to the idea that civilization was a special process which mankind undergoes, and I am still under the influence of that idea. I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this” (69). But if this is so, then a number of additional problems arise. For Freud would be obliged to supplement his middle proposition — “the pleasure principle represents the demands of the libido” — with another, along the lines of: “the unification principle [also] represents the demands of the libido.” And now we are left to draw the puzzling inference that the activity of unification and the sensation of pleasure — the aims of Eros — are hypothetically synonymous. I call this puzzling because, again, on the basis of Freud’s position before this text, and to some extent afterwards, one would expect roughly the opposite: that pleasure generally speaking follows from the diminishment of excitation and tension, and emphatically not from their increase. But the idiom of “combination” and “unification” implies something else entirely: not the attempt to reduce tension to the bare minimum, or “to conduct the restlessness of life into the stability of of the inorganic state” (414), but precisely to elicit such tension and so propound “the restlessness of life.”
In view of these ambiguities and questions, it is perhaps unsurprising that, in one of his last pieces, An Outline of Psychoanalysis — published posthumously in 1940 — Freud effectively recants those “connections” stipulated in the paragraph we’ve been examining. He writes:
“The consideration that the pleasure principle demands a reduction, at bottom the extinction perhaps, of the tensions of instinctual needs (that is, Nirvana) leads to the still unassessed relations between the pleasure principle and the two primal forces, Eros and the death instinct” (198).
Here, it seems to me, Freud all but obliterates the distinctions painstakingly drawn in “Economic Problem.” First, the Nirvana and Pleasure principles are once more equated: they both entail the “reduction, at bottom the extinction perhaps, of the tensions of instinctual needs.” (At least Freud raises this idea as a “consideration.”) Second, and even more jarringly, Freud explicitly concedes that the “relations between the pleasure principle and the two primal forces, Eros and the death instinct” are at the time of his writing, that is, in 1938, “still unassessed.”
Such an “assessment," of course, is exactly what Freud appeared to provide in “Economic Problem.” To repeat his words from above: “The Nirvana principle expresses the trend of the death instinct; the pleasure principle represents the demands of the libido.” If in 1938 Freud could write that these same relations were “still unassessed,” it suggests to me that he was no longer satisfied with his statements from 1924, and that he drew back from all of the questions they raised about his drive theory.