Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 3 (IX)

We have reviewed Lear’s suggestion that “dreams are like actions” (71). In particular, “action is by its nature meaningful” (72) and so, too, are dreams — and precisely by virtue of some property or properties they share with action. Lear names two such properties: “desire” and “belief.”

Action, of course, is self-evidently both sustained by desire (for some “end”) and constrained by belief (regarding the “context” of that action). But these ingredients, or at least their analogues, also figure in dreams. “Just as an action is the attempt to satisfy desire under the constraint of belief, so a dream is the attempt to gratify a wish under the constraint of censorship” (73). Inasmuch as a dream evinces these analogues of action, then, it merits for Lear designations such as “meaningful,” “intelligible,” and (after a fashion) “rational.”

Yet before we reconstruct Lear’s treatment of dreams, let us pause a moment and ask: is this an acceptable way of describing “action?” Though Lear does not illustrate his position in just this way, we might consider the following example. I acknowledge someone’s bodily movement as a proper “action” — hence rational — if I can say something like: ‘She is walking to the pantry in order to retrieve something to eat.’ For in that case, provided there is no conflicting evidence, I can realistically attribute to the actor a “desire” (for food) and a “belief,” or several (say, that the pantry is stocked with food, or is likely to be). By contrast, a movement that did not seem motivated, or undertaken “for the sake of” an end (at least on some description), or that did not seem responsive to beliefs about the world, or both — this movement would be difficult to classify as “action” at all, rather than a “occurrence” of some kind. (The latter would be “rational” only in the sense reserved for the impersonal, mechanical workings of law-governed nature.)

Lear is suggesting, I think, that a dream may, on its face — at the “manifest” level — appear to both the dreamer and the analyst (for whom it is recounted) as would an irrational bodily “movement,” concerning which neither motives nor beliefs could be identified. On their surface, dream and movement alike are meaningless, irrational in every respect apart from the pseudo-rationality of blind succession. But analytic interpretation discloses both the latent “wish” (proto-desire) and censoring “conviction” (proto-belief) of the dreamer communicated by that dream; and together, the presence of these items certify the proper meaning and rationality of the dream.

Our prospects of discerning cogent, determinate “wishes” or “convictions” in dreams seem dim, initially, since dream-experience is typified by disjointedness, inconsistency, fluctuations, and instability. In fact — though Lear does not take up this thread — one might suppose that the proper analogy is not with actions lacking any discernible desire or belief, but with those that appear chaotically overloaded with many desires and beliefs that contradict both themselves and one another. Such an anarchical, “psychotic” action, were it patterned after dreams as we know them, might for instance express a “desire” for excitement or human connection, but also — a moment later or even at the same time — for stasis and solitude; just as it might express the “beliefs” that it is at the moment both day and night. Here again, though, we’d have difficulty identifying such quasi-actions as meaningful or rational.

Once again, in an argumentative gesture that is by now familiar, Lear claims that the “facts” of analytic practice violate some of Freud’s own theoretical systematizations, the notorious “metapsychology.” In particular, in this case, the identification of wishes as proto-desires, and censorship as proto-belief, encourages a “developmental” schema, marked by continuity and immanent growth, rather than a “dichotomous” theory that leaves necessary connections imponderable.

In this vein, the chapter’s middle section contains Lear’s criticism of Freud’s “pleasure” and “reality” principles as descriptions of psychological functioning. (This distinction is famously codified in Freud’s “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning.”) Lear’s main objection, it seems, is that these principles are so incommensurable with each other at the level of form, it is obscure why one should ever develop into the other. More concretely, Lear questions the logical coherence of an organism that hallucinates originally in order to gain pleasure. This must be a “function” it acquires later since, to begin with, the organism “wishes,” not for the hallucination of the satisfaction it has in fact received — say, at the mother’s breast — but rather, as Lear puts it, “for the real thing” (82).

These distinctions matter, for Lear, because we want a self-consistent way of characterizing the “infantile wishes” ostensibly at the root of dreams (in addition to all neurotic productions), that is commensurable with the adult “desires” they eventually become, or fail to become. So long as we conceive wishes as essentially wishes for hallucinated pleasure — rather than acquiring this function at a later stage — we will be unable to make sense either of its development into desire, or of the adult’s attitude to these repressed wishes as they emerge in the dream.

To see why this is so, Lear takes from Freud’s writings the example of an adult dreamer who is disconcerted by a dream, the latent content of which conveys a “wish” — conserved, untouched, from childhood — for the death of a loved-one:

[T]he horrified reaction of an adult to his dream can be explained as the reaction of the emotional-desiring part of the adult toward the childhood wishes that live on unconsciously in his soul. But while the mature adult does not desire the death of a loved one, even though he continues to harbor an infantile wish, it does not make sense to claim that the horrified reaction is toward a wish aimed at a hallucination. The horrified reaction is toward a wish for the real thing. (84)

From the start, then, the infant’s “wish” — however inchoate, obscure, and fantastical — aims at something beyond hallucinated satisfaction. It is “directed onto the world from the beginning of mental life” (84).

Now, Lear does not deny that infant experience, and later the unconscious, are indeed characterized by many of the features, activities, and pressures Freud ascribes to “primary process” and collects under the rubric of the “pleasure principle.” Lear accepts that so-called archaic mental functioning is and remains associative, imagistic, figurative, disrespectful of logic (especially the principle of non-contradiction), and so on. In fact, Lear’s reading depends on the recognition of these elements. What he nevertheless insists upon, as against the letter of Freudian metapsychology, is the spirit of “immanent” unfolding implicit in analytic practice and even, occasionally, in Freud’s own reflections:

The point is only that the transition from primary to secondary process lies on a developmental continuum of mental functioning. The concrete images of primary process may be preconceptual, but they are also protoconceptual. They are that from which concepts emerge. (84-85)

Above all, Lear’s postulate of love as a natural force retroactively confers a Freudian imprimatur on the revisionist, Aristotelian reconstruction he undertakes.

I will say more about this developmental “continuity” in the next entry.

Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 3 (VIII)

The middle chapters of Lear’s book continue his revisionist reading of Freudian psychoanalysis. Not only does Lear reconceive “catharsis,” the mutative cure, in accordance with Freud’s tripartite revolution in human self-understanding; he now proceeds to treat the “theories” of dreams, interpretation, sexuality, and love along the same lines — once again, exploding the classical metapsychology on behalf of analytic practice, observation, and experience.

In Chapter 3, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Lear examines the quintessential domain in which “mind,” after Freud, beings to “see itself at work” (69), that is, under the aspect of “archaic mental functioning.” We canvassed this theme at some length in our discussion of the Introduction, so I will simply insert a reminder: Freud’s revolution consisted partly in mind’s “discovery” of itself in areas, and at levels, it had never thought to look — indeed, where it had vigorously resisted looking. Freud identified mind, as Lear puts it, “among the flotsam of dreams, physical symptoms, slips of the tongue” (71). This raised the more properly philosophical question of criteria: how will we know that a particular process, episode, or “occurrence” is in fact a manifestation of mind — archaic mind — when no such thing is evident to conscious mind? Psychoanalysis answers that an alteration in that very “process,” in response to interpretation, provides the required evidence that it was an instance of minded “behavior,” after all.

Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Lear suggests, established the still-unsurpassed prototype for all subsequent approaches to archaic mind. “[I]t is here that Freud begins to understand what is in the unconscious and how it works” (70). In the broadest sense, psychoanalysis identifies the covert “rationality” in what seems to defy that categorization, in the putatively “irrational.” This is what mind’s self-recognition in its “others” involves in practice. And to show that a “happening” such as a dream bears an unsuspected rationality is to attribute to it a meaning. Thus “every dream has a meaning” (71), an “intelligibility” (71), and so — in some respect we will need to clarify — a “rationality.”

Lear’s treatment of “meaning” and “rationality” as cognates has enough of a philosophical pedigree that he does not detain himself substantiating his approach. We might, nonetheless, quibble with such an undeveloped assertion. Certainly there are traditions — say, religious ones — in which this identity is far from self-evident. Nor, on roughly opposite grounds, do naturalistic scientists suppose that, in their search for “rationality” in nature, they are also uncovering its “meaning.” Particle physicists, too, discovers a “rationality” in nature, an intelligibility and lawfulness in the transactions of objects, though it might not occur to them or anyone else to adduce this as evidence of nature’s “meaning” or “mindedness.” We seem unlikely to find traces of mental functioning, archaic or otherwise, in such a “rational” order. (Though others, for instance Hegel, appear even here to develop contrasting views.)

The Freudian criterion for rationality in dreams, and in other happenings of the sort, must accordingly be more stringent than this. It would not suffice, for Freud’s ambitious claims, to locate in dreams a “lawfulness” analogous to that of heavenly bodies or of atoms. One could imagine a “discovery” that dreams evince the same sort of lawfulness, regularity, and even predictability definitive of other processes in “blind,” inanimate nature. (Perhaps, before long, experimental sleep research will postulate some such physiological regularities.) But these hypotheses would not finally touch the “meaning” of dreams in any but the thinnest, most metaphorical sense. We may speak, say, of science yielding the “meaning” of particle “behavior.” This animistic language is a conceit, however, and the responsible scientist will stop short of supposing the theory has located mental functioning in that domain, and for good reason.

What then is the stringency of Freud’s identification? What sort of rationality do dreams covertly possess, such that they also qualify as meaningful — in a way, moreover, that planetary motions do not? Unsurprisingly, the rationality at issue is one characteristic of human behavior, and therefore will involve such items as desires, emotions, intentions, objects, aims, and the rest. Actions that we recognize as meaningful, as redolent of mind — that is, as actions at all, rather than merely natural “happenings” — manifest exactly this repertoire. In fact, according to a typical way of thinking, action is rational only when it includes these elements, and in proportion to to their mutual harmony. (Aristotle, for example, links intelligent action to the “mean”: having the appropriate feeling, to the appropriate degree, in the appropriate situation, and so on.) To be sure, Lear’s claim is analogical; dreams are not literally actions. Rather, “dreams are like actions” (71), inasmuch as — like dreams — “action is by its nature meaningful” (72).

It follows that, if dreams, too, are meaningful, it is by virtue of some property or properties they share with action. The specific properties that interest Lear, in this connection, are “desire” and “belief.” Action — when intelligible as action — is propelled by a desire (the satisfaction of which is sought) and constrained by belief (regarding inter alia the circumstances in which action unfolds). The absence of either ingredient will vitiate the action’s appearance of rationality. A human movement which seemed neither to follow any imputable desire, nor to reflect (or respond to) beliefs about reality, would not register as “action” at all — let alone as action meriting the designation “rational.”

Now, both of these ingredients figure in dreams, too — or at least approximations of them. “Just as an action is the attempt to satisfy desire under the constraint of belief, so a dream is the attempt to gratify a wish under the constraint of censorship” (73). Or again: “The dream, then, is like an action: it is an attempted gratification of a wish under the constraint of certain sorts of beliefs” (74). According to Lear, censorship itself — which prevents the dreamer from recognizing the nature of both the wish and the conflict over it — represents a package of “beliefs, hopes and values” (73), a full “outlook” that constrains the realization of the dream’s wish. The dream is therefore “meaningful,” “intelligible,” and (after a fashion) “rational,” inasmuch as it approximates properties we expect of “action” that merits these designations. Accordingly, analytic interpretations disclose rationality in dreams, rendering them intelligible as expressions, at the “manifest” level, of a “latent” level bearing just these properties.

In the next entry, I will develop and illustrate these ideas.

Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 2 (VII)

We left off with Lear’s idea that emotions are proto-conceptual orientations towards the world that make sense of one’s situation — in however undeveloped or wrongheaded a manner. This idea will be familiar to readers of 20th century philosophy. (There are strains of it in pragmatism’s “know how” and Heidegger’s “moods,” to name just a couple examples.) This is how Lear, having returned to its original provenance in Aristotle, puts the idea:

“Emotions are, by their nature, attempts at a rational orientation toward the world. Even an archaic expression of emotion is an archaic attempt at rationality. It is the germ from which a rational orientation may grow” (51)

When I feel an emotion, I do not experience it “in a vacuum.” To feel anger, in the proper sense, just is to have some rudimentary grasp of “cause” and “purpose,” i.e. the basic furniture of any conceptual framework. I feel anger — if I do feel it — towards a specific object, because I have (I imagine) been wronged, unfairly or maliciously treated. Further, to feel anger is also to entertain, however obscurely, the general course of action responding to that understanding: it logically induces a desire to “make good” on the wrong.

[This use of the term “emotion” may seem tendentious. After all, people do commonly report experiences of a-conceptual emotion: say, that they feel “irritable” without knowing why — perhaps upon waking up. Lear might respond: precisely these exceptions prove the rule. They are evidence only of the occasional “neurotic” disconnect between an emotion bearing conceptual significance and a consciousness that is unable, because unwilling, to recognize its conceptuality.]

The “rationality” of emotions runs even deeper than this, though. “[A]n emotion does more than orient the individual to the world: it comes packaged with its own justification” (49). That is, to feel an emotion is not merely to have some intuitive understanding about its cause, its object, and the consequences one happens to desire in reaction; it is also to accept some warrant for the emotion. Emotions compel us. They implant a conviction regarding their appropriateness, which extends to the views and desires they reliably generate. To really feel anger is to have a title for that anger, to believe it is directed at the right object, for acceptable reasons, and that the reaction it inspires in me is merited by the facts of the situation.

In the midst of an emotional experience, of course, all of this is merely implicit, unarticulated; hence the expression, “proto-” conceptual. The causes, consequences, and justifications to which someone in the grip of emotion is implicitly committed may then be “elicited”: we may press the person to give discursive form to all the claims that underlie and shape that emotion — whereupon he or she may be struck precisely by the incoherence of the implicit framework. Perhaps “object” and “desire” do not fit neatly with one another; or perhaps there is a discrepancy between the intensity of the emotion, the magnitude of the stakes purportedly involved, and the features of the actual situation.

What matters is that, whatever the eventual fate of the framework, (which may indeed suffer conscious refutation), it nonetheless remains the origin of any conceptual orientation at all, and a continuing condition of possibility for it. To phrase this point now in the language we used in the last entries: emotions are not blind “quantities” upon which we externally impose a conceptual framework drawn from another, autonomous source. Rather, there is no conceptuality at all, except as a development, modification, and perhaps correction, of the “framework” originating, finally, in and as emotion. (As an extreme example of a dualistic account, consider Kant and the discrete “springs” of judgment in concepts and intuitions, in his theoretical system; or laws and interests, in his moral theory.)

The bearing of Lear’s alternative, Aristotelian view on our understanding of catharsis is perhaps already clear enough. If emotions carry with them justifications, a title to rationality, it plausibly follows that when they fail to provide these desiderata — upon inspection, that is, they do not seem justified, reasonable, motivated, and the like — it will be distressing. For in this situation, a proto-conceptual content pressing for conceptual form will find its development obstructed. I then feel emotions that do not seem to make sense: I cannot locate their objects and causes; they compel some beliefs that contradict other, important beliefs I hold; or I am puzzled by the “behaviors,” if any, toward which the emotions are driving me. The “relief” provided by catharsis, on this reconstruction, is irreducibly epistemic: the restoration of emotional-conceptual coherence to a psychic situation afflicted by incoherence.

According to this revised understanding, catharsis consists, not in the blind discharge of an emotion that is itself bereft of concepts, but rather in the “conscious unification of thought and feeling” (46). The qualifier “conscious” is crucial, it appears, in this new paradigm. After all, it is not as though the repressed “feeling” has no thought-like content at all; Lear’s whole point is that thought does not need to be imparted to emotion “from the outside,” because conceptuality belongs immanently to emotion, which only becomes “what it is” when it reaches explicit, discursive form. In other words: to say that catharsis occurs when thought and feeling are consciously united is not to say that the two were tidily separate before that catharsis — a dichotomy Lear deemed unintelligible. Rather, it is to suggest that the sort of unconscious unity between thought and feeling compellingly achieved by archaic mental functioning, which is consciously disavowed, must be allowed to reach its self-appointed “end” in an interpretation. Hence our question now is not, ‘How does consciousness establish a connection between two items that are by nature of different kinds?’ It is instead, ‘How can the mind be brought to recognize their inseparability in its own symptoms — the non-recognition of which, indeed, is the central cause of the symptoms’ persistence?’

But these reflections, especially the theme of “recognition,” bring us to the second area of Aristotle’s thought that interests Lear. From the idea of emotion-as-orientation — and catharsis as a “rectification” of an orientation that is logically out of sorts — there is a natural link to a more properly Aristotelian concept of Katharsis. What is definitive of the theater-goer’s experience, as Freud himself says, is a peculiar “sympathy at a distance.” One temporarily identifies with the bold, courageous, uninhibited exploits of a hero, secure in the knowledge that someone else suffers. The hysteric, in fact, is brought by analysis to the same “balance of proximity and distance (54) in her attitude, and this, too, constitutes his or her “catharsis.” Only the object of this attitude, of this sympathy at a distance, is not the character represented on the stage, but rather her own self — that is, her own, split-off emotional constellation.

The complexity introduced by this “reflexive” view makes it unwieldy, but it is consistent with the theory of emotions Lear has just recounted. If emotions are, generically, ways of “orienting” oneself, then what is at stake in mutative therapy, cathartic change, is one’s emotional orientation specifically towards oneself: towards, say, one’s disavowed desires, or ideas, or even “emotions” themselves. The implicit question is whether one’s attitude towards these contents — an attitude that formerly consisted in unyielding rejection, denial, “repression” — can be converted to one of recognition, understanding, compassion, even “forgiveness.” This is effectively to “take up a position of sympathy and distance reminiscent of the engaged spectator in the theater” (58) — “sympathy,” because the patient compassionately identifies with the traumatic experience, accepts that it was and is herself that suffered; “distance,” because the “re-experiencing” of the episode is undergone with the simultaneous awareness that it belongs to the past, and that she is in fact no longer the same person who suffered it.

Only some such re-orientation in one’s attitude toward the “terrible idea” (58), hitherto repressed, allows viable “access" to it. In this way, Lear specifies further the model of catharsis he proposed earlier, namely, the “conscious unification of thought and emotion.” For the precondition and substance of this unification now appears to be an emotional reorientation, through all the psychoanalytic “supports” (including environmental ones), that can allow such a rapprochement, “bringing the terrible idea into consciousness” (57) by gradually reforming the attitude that precluded its surfacing.

Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 2 (VI)

In the last entry, we described several of Lear’s objections to a certain conception of emotional catharsis: namely, one linked to the metaphor of “discharge.” In particular, Lear emphasizes two problems:

1. The discharge metaphor presupposes the very dichotomy — between mind and body — that Freud’s discovery of archaic mental functioning obviates. The notion of a mental quantum that may, or may not, be “converted” into bodily expression is unintelligible.

2. The notion of a dischargeable item’s “quantifiability” contradicts the facts of clinical observation. Were there really some finite amount and intensity of “strangulated affect”; and were this quantity really “discharged” via the patient’s neurotic symptoms; then eventually that affect would expend itself, and would in the meantime gradually diminish. But this is exactly not what occurs.

In fact, as Lear now insists, no expression of emotion — of any magnitude — will offer the patient relief so long as it is inappropriate, or does not follow from a kind of authentic self-recognition. Hence something apart from a finite “quantum” of undischarged affect is surely at issue. At this point Lear wonders:

“Why is it that the truth cures? Why is it that only the genuine emotional response directed onto the right object is successful in discharging the pent-up psychic energy? This question cannot be answered in quantitative terms. So long as one continues to think of an emotion as being (or as being produced by) a quantity of displaceable energy, it will remain mysterious why only the appropriate emotional response has a cathartic effect” (45)

The significance in this context of irreducibly qualitative predicates like “appropriate,” "genuine,” and “true” simply cannot be explained on the quantitative assumptions of the discharge metaphor. A patient may experience the “greatest” possible emotions, of every sort, without it making the slightest difference to his or her symptomology, or degree of suffering. What does matter is evidently the shift in reflective orientation that coincides with an emotional experience bearing the predicates above. It is finally this deficiency in the discharge model — broadly, its inability to explicate conceptual development in terms of quantitative, “economic” magnitudes —that opens the space for Lear’s alternative. (In another context — “The Economic Problem of Masochism” — Freud himself acknowledges an irreducibly “qualitative” ingredient of experience.)

[Here I will say a couple of things about Lear’s general interpretive strategy, in passing. It is characteristic of this strategy that the Freudian theory is corrected on behalf, not of some rival paradigm, but of Freudian practice: the very materials brought to light by the original observations. The qualities of cathartic experience evident in the case histories, upon which Freud himself insisted, are precisely the data that defy the metaphor of discharge.

Another methodological point: while Lear himself does not frame his approach in just these terms, it strikes me that — broadly speaking — he intends to show that the tidy dichotomies that define so many of Freud’s conceptualizations are undermined by the very “revolution” he inaugurated. This occurs at the level of psychoanalytic practice, observation, and — let us say — “intuitive understanding.” We have just described two illustrations of this approach, both in connection with the problematic image of discharge. On the one hand, the dichotomy between mind and body presupposed by the postulate of a quantum of energy that “may or may not” express itself — mentally or physically — is undermined by the evidence of archaic mental functioning that Freud himself accumulates. This functioning evinces the unity of mind and body at the most fundamental levels. On the other hand, the dichotomy of conceptual “quality” and emotional “quantity,” and the explanation of catharsis solely through the latter, which are natural consequences of the discharge theory — this dichotomy, too, is invalidated by psychoanalytic practice, that is, the inbuilt “qualities” of cathartic experience itself.]

To return now to Lear’s argument, and in light of these methodological observations, let us put our question in a slightly different way: what sort of account honors the inseparability of thought and emotion, or illuminates the documented cases of catharsis as something beyond discharges of emotional quanta — an explanation that now appears to explain very little?

Lear’s alternative view of catharsis, congruent with Freud’s tripartite revolution, is grounded in a “return” to Aristotle. We may note the irony that, to make sense of the most modern of revolutionaries, Lear enlists the most doctrinaire imaginable of thinkers, at the least in the Occidental world. In fact, Aristotle’s authority went virtually uncontested in medieval thought and was only deposed, finally, in the early modern era by the analogous “revolution” associated with Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes.

More specifically, Lear re-articulates the experiences of hysteria chronicled by Breuer and Freud with categories drawn from Aristotle’s discussions of

1. the emotions, in the Rhetoric, and

2. “Katharsis” in the experience of tragic performance, in the Poetics. (In fact, in the second case it is actually Freud who, in quite another context, alludes to Aristotle’s theory of drama in making psychoanalytic sense of human behavior.)

From the Rhetoric, Lear draws the insight — substantiated by psychoanalytic practice, if not theory — that emotions are essentially orientations, inseparable from concepts, beliefs, and justifications, through which we make sense of ourselves and the world. This immediately yields a crucial result: we need not by troubled by the puzzling disconnect between a blind, quantitative emotion and its independent conceptualization if, from the first, emotions are irreducibly conceptual — in however inchoate a form. From the Poetics, Lear draws ideas that restore to cathartic experience the epistemic-recognitive aspects obscured by the discharge model.

In the next entry, I will discuss each of these accounts.

Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 2 (V)

We have been examining Lear’s account of the “cathartic method” in Freud’s early thinking and, in particular, its problematic interrelation with the metaphor of “discharge.” In fact the medical backgrounds of Freud and Breuer would have disposed them to just this idiom. They “speak of the memory of trauma as a “foreign body” that continues to have a toxic effect on the patient, and it was the function of traditional medical catharsis to expel foreign bodies” (34).

But here Lear observes that, even if one accepts the image of a “foreign body” as a legitimate way to represent a repressed memory and its (strangulated) affect, a different metaphorical resolution — not discharge — would seem more logical. After all, on any cogent description, the repressed memory and unsung emotion are “foreign” only to consciousness, which has defensively refused to acknowledge them as authentic parts of itself. A cathartic method that rectified this situation, or which induced consciousness to avow the disavowed, can hardly be conceived as that entity’s “expulsion.” For this would amount only to confirming its “foreign-ness,” its status as something “other” to consciousness, and so compounding the original defensive distortion.

Lear now volunteers a metaphor that more accurately reflects the fundamentals of the cathartic procedure, and in particular one that captures the desideratum of acknowledgment:

“But if a memory’s remaining without citizenship in the land of consciousness is the basis for considering it a “foreign body,” then the metaphor of “foreign body” should not suggest discharge, but an opening up of the borders. For it is only by welcoming the foreign body into consciousness, by granting it citizenship, that its toxic effects are overcome” (34)

Nonetheless, discharge will stubbornly suggest itself as an appropriate model for emotional expression, not only to doctors of Freud’s era, but to everyone. “One reason for conceiving catharsis as a discharge is that it is natural for humans so to conceive of the expression of the emotions” (34-35). This universal “fantasy,” says Lear, will indirectly shape the theory constructed to grasp observed experience.

As it happens, it was a patient, Anna O., who instituted this metaphor in the course of her self-reflections. What was for her a natural, albeit imprecise way of speaking about her catharsis was taken at face value. That is, the “fantasy” of catharsis-as-discharge contoured all subsequent analytic thinking about it:

“Although Breuer reported that Anna O. “aptly described” his therapeutic procedure as a “talking cure” and only “jokingly” referred to it as “chimney-sweeping,” this “joke” worked is way into the theoretical formulation of catharsis…Catharsis was experienced by Anna O., at some level of her experience, as a discharge. But even if that is, for her, what happened, why should one assume that is what happened to her?” (35)

Or again, the Freudian “theory of catharsis was not describing a real emotional process so much as a fantasied conception of that process” (35). Ultimately, Freud and Breuer “rendered the fantasy of emotional discharge, which we all tend to share, into a conscious theory” (36).

This “fantasy” subsequently inflects Freud’s exposition of later psychoanalytic innovations, such as his theories of phobias and “transference.” There are traces of the discharge metaphor — indeed, more than traces — in the notion that, say, a certain quantum of “loving” ideas, wishes, and feelings, which properly belong to some childhood constellation as an unrealized potential, is in the therapeutic setting “transferred,” inappropriately, onto the analyst. And it is there, as well, in the proposal that a fear belonging originally to an unacceptable, then repressed idea, can subsequently attach itself through association to a tenuously-related object, such as spiders. For Freud, these neurotic strategies “redirect” the repressed quantum, rather than securing its needed “discharge” (42). And this is to say: the entire evolution of Freud’s “drive theory” is entangled with this fateful metaphor of discharge.

We now have before us the meaning of catharsis-as-discharge, as well as some of the reasons that have recommended this “fantasy.” Let us now ask: what exactly makes “discharge” insufficient as a metaphor for grasping catharsis — apart, that is, from its exclusion of “acknowledgement” from its semantic orbit, as well as its air of “misplaced concreteness” more generally? For surely metaphorical language is unsurpassable for psychoanalysis in its attempts to describe the mind: there simply does not seem to be any way of grasping metal phenomena without appealing to the non-mental sphere. Hence this metaphorical status cannot itself count against “discharge,” since it will hold equally of whichever alternative metaphor — “fantasy” — Lear proposes in its stead. (To anticipate, Lear’s eventual alternative formula for catharsis, “a conscious unification of thought and feeling” (33), is plainly as “metaphorical” an idea as any.)

What, then, are the the limitations of the discharge metaphor, specifically? Lear emphasizes two problems, in addition to the one we’ve already cited. First of all, discharge presupposes a sort of separation between the mental and bodily realms that Freud’s own discoveries invalidate. Understood correctly, “archaic mental functioning” reveals that bodily processes are “minded” all the way down. Precisely physiological “happenings” that seem least of all expressive of mind are, upon scrutiny, its most fundamental efforts at self-expression and self-knowledge. In the neurotic, these are “symptoms” that symbolize, communicate, and so on. But for just this reason, the discharge model — which supposes a mental quantum that may or may not be “converted” into bodily form, is unfeasible:

“Freud..was not yet in a position to see that it is a mistake to try to explain the conversion of the mental into the physical. For he did not yet understand that the physical symptom was itself a manifestation of archaic mental functioning. The task, then, is not to explain the conversion of a mental process into a physical symptom, but rather to explain the lack of development of a primitive mode of mental functioning into a conscious, more recognizably mental, expression” (43-44)

The question, in other words, is not whether a repressed constellation of thoughts, feelings, and wishes will express itself — invariably it does. Rather we should ask: how, in what form, and at how distant a remove from conscious recognition, does this constellation express itself?

On the other hand, and second: Freud attempts to “literalize" the discharge metaphor by insisting, at least in principle, on the dischargeable item’s quantifiability. This raises another, serious difficulty, once again in light of Freud’s own observations. As Lear puts it: “Why don’t hysterical symptoms naturally tend to die out?” (44). Even if we accept a version of the premise we have just rejected, and there is in neurotics some convertible quantum of repressed psychic energy that can be expressed physically or not — on those very terms the endurance of neurotic symptoms becomes imponderable. After all, a quantum of any substance is per definition finite. Freud’s insistence on its quantifiability entails as much. So whether it is “discharged” all at once in a single emotional outpouring designated cathartic, or — by contrast — “seeps out” over longer stretches of time, perhaps years, as it is converted into physical symptoms, this finite quantum will eventually be depleted. We will expect its expressions to diminish, even in the absence of any cathartic reckoning, simply from the “economics” involved. “[A] finite quantity of energy…should eventually be discharged in the course of producing and maintaining a somatic symptom” (44). (Lear indicates that the later, dynamic, “structural” model — featuring the id as “a reservoir of psychic energy” (44) partly responds to this conceptual difficulty.)

But of course no such diminishment is necessarily to be found in the neurotic. On the contrary, the very symptoms famously interpreted as epistemically distorted expressions, “conversions,” of the repressed quanta are, if anything, greater and more intense than their potential cathartic “discharge” would be. Phenomena like transference and phobias, which ostensibly involve projecting the quanta onto inappropriate objects, rather than their originally intended recipients, e.g. a loved or feared parent — on the evidence, these phenomena carry an immense discharge. Yet no matter the degree of intensity, or the frequency of repetition, these phenomena do not naturally come any closer to being fully “expended,” nor — what is perhaps the same thing — do the emotions felt offer their bearers relief.

Yet if we accept these criticisms of the “discharge” image, while nonetheless recognizing some version of “cathartic experience,” the question arises: how are we best to conceptualize the latter? Are there perhaps better, less objectionable metaphors?

We will take up these questions in the next entry.