Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 5 (XVIII)

In the remainder of chapter 5, Lear begins to provide content to the position anticipated schematically in the Introduction and signaled in the book’s tantalizing title, Love and its Place in Nature. We may quote several lines that indicate the flavor of this newly won content:

“[It] is a condition of there being a world that it be lovable by beings like.” (142)

“Sex thus metamorphosed into love…human sexuality is an incarnation of love, a force for unification present wherever there is life.” (147)

“In his treatment of pathologies of sexual experience, Freud happened onto a force which, as his research developed, expanded beyond anything one could easily recognize as sexual.” (148)

For Lear, one important feature of this emerging concept — love as a natural force — seems to be its internal tension. This tension follows, not from love’s opposition to a separate force (say, the death drive), but from its own, self-contradictory impulsions. What sort of tension has Lear identified? In which antithetical directions is love pulled?

Lear accepts at face value Freud’s reference to Plato’s Symposium and looks there for a theoretical elaboration that Freud himself intimates without specifying. And he writes: “Love pulls us in two directions” (148-9), which correspond in a rough way to regression and progression, towards the undifferentiated and the differentiated, to the earlier (past) and the later (future).

What exactly does Lear have in mind here?

On the one hand, love for Freud names the unsurpassable yearning to recover what has been lost, “a tendency to return to earlier stages at which we have received gratification and love” (149). The pensée that, at the level of archaic mental functioning, all finding is a refinding confirms this regressive aspect. Subsequent love-objects appeal to the lover with the promise to restore the original, undiminished bond that, in the event, they can for logical reasons only “approximate.” Per definition, after all, these subsequent love-objects are not the original.

This first trend, then, is “love’s pull toward the primitive” (150) — toward, in the case of an individual, relations that dissolve the boundary separating self from other, in an effort to recover “the original intimate bond…between an infant not-yet-I and a mother-world” (150). An adult-in-love plunges back into that inchoate, undivided state he left only reluctantly and for which he never once stops yearning. And in the case of groups, too, this regressive pull is discernible, albeit on a much greater scale: “An erotic tendency for society to regress to a primitive, undifferentiated mob” (150) — one of those disturbing explananda treated in Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. From this standpoint, love — when consummated — consists in a renunciation of achievements painstakingly attained by the I: separation, differentiation, individuation, even reality-testing to a degree. (In Civilization and its Discontents, as I pointed out in the previous entry, Freud groups adult romantic relations together with psychosis.)

But on the other hand, and strikingly, “love…also pulls us in the opposite direction” (150). Not only, that is, does love draw mind backwards, towards recovery, restoration, and the abolition of psychic achievement; love also “fuels human development and pulls us toward higher, more differentiated unities” (150). Here again Lear departs from Freud’s own self-understanding: Freud himself treats love under its progressive aspect as “a brutally natural unifying force” (151), disregarding — even repudiating — its psychological existence. Indeed, for Freud, the increasingly “differentiated” unities accumulated through love are best grasped as “substitute” satisfactions, accepted only when, and because, “the backward-running path of regressive satisfaction” (151) is obstructed by repression.

What is the “first-personal aspect” (151) of love in its progressive sense? What is its “quality” or, again, what is it — as Lear provocatively asks — that “lovers are trying to do” (151)?

“When it is manifested in humans, love is…a psychological force. So there must be something that it is like for the human who is striving to unify…[I]f humanly incarnated love is a psychological force, there must be something the he is trying to do” (151)

Lear notes in passing that, given the repeated identification of libido with Platonic Eros, it is “strange…that Freud did not try to capture the point of love within human life” (152) — strange, too, we might add, to encounter in the book’s last chapters such a frank statement of the massive lacuna Freud must fill in.

(If, that is, Freud does not even “try” to discern love’s point, it is harder to see how anything “implicit” in his writings can add up to a Freudian idea of love. Moreover, we might demand some explanation for Freud’s “oversight” in this area.)

Freud ought to have taken a greater interest in this question, Lear suggest, since by the middle 1920’s (in the “Economic Problem of Masochism”) he’d virtually conceded the inadequacy of purely “quantitative” accounts of libido and so “ultimately undermines his mechanistic model of the mind” (152). Freud is led by observation and inference to an appreciation of the “qualitative factor” (152) without, however, searching for this factor in the only location is can be found, namely, “in the lover’s experienced relation with the object of his love (152-3). And this “experience” — whatever the physiological scaffolding — is not, we have seen, that of “discharge” directed toward some impersonal object, the latter conceived as “a mere receiver or inhibitor” (153) with essentially arbitrary qualities. “Love is not just a feeling or a discharge of energy, but an emotional orientation to the world” (153). And, importantly: “That orientation demands that the world present itself to us as worthy of our love” (153).

And this last rider, finally, unites Lear’s psychological desideratum for grasping love (our perception of the object’s “worthiness” of love as a necessary part of what the experience is “like”) with the main, transcendental argument he has begun to unfold (regarding the conditions of possibility for any experience at all). This “worthiness” in and of the world, the object, the beloved — “what it is about the world that, in our eyes, justifies our love” (153) — is precisely “the qualitative factor that needs to be captured” (153).

In fact, Lear does put a point on this quality, specifying what it is that, in the generic lover’s view, makes the world “lovable.” And the answer, when finally hear it, should not surprise us at all. Indeed, Lear’s answer has the sound of something inevitable: “[W]hat it is for the world to be lovable is for it to be loving” (154). A “loving” world — hence a “good-enough world” (154), in Lear’s Winnicottian turn —is what must be described. Such a world, finally, is the condition of possibility for the development of the (loving) I — the self-integration and self-differentiation through which it passes on the way to constituting those “greater unities” Freud describes.

Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 5 (XVII)

We are attempting to make sense of primary narcissism, a phase of psychic development characterized by “libidinal investment” überhaupt. We’ve suggested that the language of “ego”- or “I”-investment (in contrast to “other”-investment) fails really to apply to this libidinal phase, since — psychologically — no distinction between “I” and “other” yet obtains. We must instead per impossibile envision, in Lear’s words, “a relatively undifferentiated field…from which an I and a distinct world for that I will emerge” (136). What are we to make of this?

Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents famously examines the so-called “oceanic feeling,” together with its genetic derivation — according to Romain Roland, the psychological mainspring of religious life. The “feeling” in question is precisely that of the I’s “unity” with a world no longer experienced as separate. The “boundaries” that ordinarily define the adult’s experience of self and other, inner and outer, are to some degree suspended. (For Freud, the experience of falling in love should be grasped along similar lines.) While disclaiming the presence of this oceanic feeling in himself, Freud allows for its existence in others. And he speculates it is either a substratum that endures, undiminished, alongside “higher” psychical organization, or — in cases where it is for a time more fully surpassed — an original state to which some persons may “regress.”

(Lear himself does not draw the connection between this description and Freud’s discussions of mental life under the jurisdiction of the “pleasure principle,” in “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” Totem and Taboo, “Negation,” and other pieces. But there, too, Freud insists on the same feature of archaic mental functioning: the non-recognition of any distinction between inter alia wish and reality, thought and deed, or — in some ways — inner and outer. I imagine that, after criticizing Freud’s notion of the pleasure principle and its relation to the reality principle, Lear would prefer to ignore it altogether. It does suggest, however, that Freud’s comments on the oceanic feeling represent less a mature volte-face regarding primary narcissism than — at least on Freud’s own view — a consistent elaboration of it.)

To begin, Lear simply swallows the paradox: while there is initially no “I” or “world” per se (for both emerge only out of some antecedent act), nonetheless, the finished article, an “I” in relation to a “world,” may still be explained as the result of libido-investment. The initial “investment,” if we continue with this sort of language, is somehow impersonal: after all, it generates the very “person” or “I” which otherwise, and subsequently, disposes over that libido.

In any case, once we have simply accepted something like the “relatively undifferentiated field” of primary narcissism as the infant’s original state, we may ask: how ultimately does a distinct and integrated “I” collect itself out of this field? Or, as Lear writes: “Once psychoanalysis sees that the I is a psychological achievement…it cannot help but ask what that achievement consists in” (137).

There follows an account that in philosophy would be called “transcendental” or “grammatical,” for it concerns the conceptual conditions of possibility for such items as an “I,” a “world,” and their relation. According to Lear’s reconstruction, Freud’s concept of love implies just such transcendental sweep, even while neither Freud himself nor post-Freudian thought have followed through on these implications.

What are the transcendental conditions, then? What is necessarily  and universally involved in an “I” having any “world” at all? “[A] world exists for us because we invest it with sexual energy” (137) — this is the Freudian thesis. In a sense, Lear argues, short of a possible libidinal investment, the world could not exist.

To be clear, this thesis does not mean that every “I” produces the world ex nihilo or that this world enjoys no existence apart from that contingency. Nor does Lear’s argument concern the actions of this or that “I,” or even the actions of all “I’s” in the aggregate. The argument has rather to do with the necessary features of the world, if that world is going to be a world “for us.” “[T]he world of objects, which, after all, really exists, comes to have psychic reality for this emerging I” (137-8). Hence Lear is not troubled here with external world- or thing-itself-skepticism: he accepts the existence, with properties, of a world that becomes — given the necessary psychological development — something “for” the I. This concession does not exclude inferences about the constitution of the world as such; it presupposes them. The condition of any world “for me” is precisely that I have invested it with libido.

Further, I do have such a world — this is the uncontroversial datum of experience upon which transcendental accounts turn. There is a world for me, then, a condition of which is its “reception" of some amount of my libido. But this, Lear now continues, places objective as well as subjective constraints on the resulting structure. Not only, in order to have a world, must I be capable of reposing my libido in it; the world, too, must be so constituted as to absorb that investment. It is not enough that I have “love” with which to illuminate the world; that world must itself be “lovable” in order to be illuminated. And this claim finally applies, not only to the infant’s world, but to any world at all — indeed, even to the “objective” world of the scientist, which no less than the infant’s world must be a world “for us.” The world that could under any conditions exist “must be a world which is a fit object of sexual investment by beings like us” (139).

Certainly, as I suggested above, one might still imagine a world that outlasts every empirical “I” (all of whom may perish, say, in some cataclysm). Yet what is it, exactly, that we imagine in this case? Lear claims: “It is a condition of there being a world that it be lovable by beings like us” (142). That is, “a world that is not lovable (by beings like us) is not a possible world” (142).

Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 5 (XVI)

Lear now proposes that Freud’s “detachability” thesis — the externality between drive and (essentially arbitrary) object — originated in observations, not of suckling infants, but of psychotic adults. In particular, megalomania and apocalyptic fantasies indicated a truth, for Freud, about the life-spanning mental architecture of all people, from infancy onward. In fact these two aspects of psychosis, seeming opposites, are on Freud’s account products of a single trend: the withdrawal of libido-investment in the world.

So, on the one hand, the psychotic’s “fantasy of world destruction” (132) psychologically represents this withdrawal. From the psychotic standpoint, the world’s diminishing interest and value, no longer “mattering,” looks and feels exactly like that world’s annihilation. By contrast, a person’s “interest” in the world, the latter’s possession of meaning and value for him, reflects his “investing” it with some variable amount of libido. Hence world-interest — mattering — coincides with libidinal investment and does not outlast its revocation.

Yet on the other hand, withdrawn libido nonetheless remains libido: it exists in the same “amount,” so tallying with Freud’s quantitative-economic metapsychology. Only rather than extend outwardly to a world thence animated with interest, this libido changes direction: “It has, Freud speculates, filled up the I” (133). Thus the psychotic undergoing this “action” also becomes inflated with megalomaniacal thoughts and feelings, “a sense of omnipotent power, magical ability, specialness” (133).

Here Freud noticed a more-than-passing resemblance between psychotic megalomania and the infant’s “magical thinking.” In fact, he suggested these are the same states: in withdrawing libido from the world, the psychotic has merely “regressed” to the first, infantile mentality — itself now viewed as proto-psychotic (133).

In Freud’s “On Narcissism,” this assumption becomes the basis for the notion of “an original libidinal investment of the I” (133). Lear himself disputes this as a possible characterization of the infant in anything more than a biological sense. Biologically speaking, in other words, the infant is perhaps an “I,” an individual system. But psychologically, as Freud would be the first to insist, there is no “I” as yet — if by “I” we mean a psychical agency capable of distinguishing an objective, enduring world from itself, or of maintaining some firm hold on the differences between inside and outside, appearance and reality. There is no sound basis for ascribing this capacity to the infant, hence the picture of “an original libidinal investment of the I” is developmentally incoherent. Where there is no “I” at all, there is a fortiori no libido-disposing “I.”

Once the methodological distinction between biological and psychological drives has been restored, though, and we again restrict our attention to the latter, the terms of the discussion will change: “The sexual drive is a psychological force. For a person to be able libidinally to invest in an object, the object must be something for the person. The object must have psychic reality” (134).

Where does this leave the primary narcissism which Freud’s “original libidinal investment of the I” (133) is meant to denominate? In fact, the infant’s relatively undifferentiated experience — at most constituting, Lear writes, a “proto-I” — is in no position to “invest” libido in either itself or another, both of which presuppose a measure of reflective distance from the “investor” in question. But for an infant with no sense of this difference between itself and the world, what could it even mean for it to invest a portion of its native libido in an object “out there?” On this view, no “out there” could even present itself to receive the conjectured investment.

In other words, once Lear’s methodological line is both drawn and observed — once we realize this “sexual drive is a psychological force” (134) — we will recognize that only an “I” that has surpassed some minimal threshold of differentiation and integration, that is strictly speaking an “I” at all, is capable of the libido-investment described by Freud. Only an I for whom an object “exists” or has “psychic reality” (134), including the “object” of its own self — only such an I could establish this “cathexis.”

Lear does not put his argument in just this way, but he seems to be saying — I simplify — that the process or activity of “libido-investment” presupposes the very achievements of integration and differentation Freud employs it to explain.

Freud’s interpretation of psychosis as a regression to the vanishing point of primary narcissism indicates the psychotic has so deteriorated the he has entirely lost possession of the “I” constructed during the whole intervening development. But psychologically speaking, the regression cannot have gone as far as that: “Megalomania must be a libidinal investment of the I. And for that to be possible, the I must represent itself. That is, the I must have psychological reality for itself” (134). The “I” involves, irreducibly, an aspect of self-understanding or, in Lear’s phrase, “self-representation” (135).

If there is such a phase as primary narcissism, then, it cannot be captured in the language of I- (rather than other-) libidinal investment, since psychologically no such distinctions obtain. Nor for that matter could a sexual “drive” in the strict sense exist — an “inner” pressure or excitation — since (again, psychologically speaking) “inner” and “outer” have not yet separated out into distinct domains. There is simply “libidinal investment,” überhaupt, which “permeates a relatively undifferentiated field…from which an I and a distinct world for that I will emerge” (136).

In the next entry, I will try to make sense of this paradoxical picture.

Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 5 (XV)

We have seen that Lear criticizes Freud for failing to honor his own distinction between physiological drive and psychological drive-representative. Particularly with regard to libido, this conflation occasionally leads Freud to answer properly first-personal, psychological questions in essentially third-personal, physiological ways — say, with reference to an organism’s “function” vis-à-vis the species.

This objection is continuous with Lear’s critical attitude toward’s Freud’s model of science more generally, familiar to us since the book’s introduction. (For a similar critique, see the “Therapeutic Action” essay by Loewald, Lear’s mentor.) Lear reiterates that Freud “characterized its [sexuality’s] aim from an observational stance” (128). And third-personal observation, even when successful on its own terms, must exclude the first-personal aspect — that is, precisely the psychological aspect, the ostensible “object” of observation.

Yet once our interest is restricted to the drive’s “psychical representative,” and only that, we can no longer omit from our theoretical picture its “appearance” to the mind whose drive it is. The meaning of our hypothetically correct observations and inferences must still answer to the standpoint in question, whether that standpoint is openly communicated to us by sophisticated adults, or signaled non-verbally by an infant’s behavior.

Now, the specific bit of infantile behavior that initially piqued Freud’s interest here was thumb-sucking: an action that simulated the infant’s gratification at the breast but, on the other hand, had plainly detached altogether from the latter’s “nutritive,” hence self-preservative function. In short, thumb-sucking announced the presence in the child of a drive distinct from “survival.” “Thumb sucking cannot be occurring for the purpose of self-preservation. The aim of the re-creation [i.e. of the infant-at-breast situation] must differ from the aim of the prototypical act” (128).

On this basis, Lear continues, Freud characterizes thumb-sucking (and infantile sexuality generally) as “auto-erotic,” meaning self-directed. Yet is Freud entitled to canvas the sexual situation of the child in these terms? To a third-person observer, one viewing things “from the outside,” it is clear enough that the infant’s actions are indeed self-directed: unquestionably, he sucks his thumb. Freud also stipulated, however, that one’s “sexual object” is “the person (or thing) from whom sexual attraction proceeds (129), which in this context begs an obvious question: who or what is the thumb-sucking infant’s “sexual object?” Undoubtedly the final authority concerning the identity of this object can be none other than the infant himself, for whom his thumb per se presumably exerts no special “sexual attraction” at all. If, then, thumb-sucking does announce an independent drive, separate from self-preservation, which can plausibly be called “sexual” — and Lear follows Freud this far — nonetheless, according to Freud’s own stipulations, the meaning of this drive, psychology’s sole object, cannot be established “from an external point of view, in abstraction from the psychic significance it has for the infant” (129). Such an external approach “gives us no clue as to the mental representation which constitutes the drive” (129).

But once again, Freud simultaneously flags the “psychological” significance of these same activities, as against their third-personal and finally physiological significance. The infant at the breast “incorporates” the sexual object, psychologically, in a way that parallels the physiological “incorporation” of nutrition (129). Accordingly, “the child experiences feeding as a taking in of the breast, the mother, the mother’s comfort” (129). This “experiencing” — the child’s “taking up” or assimilation of the object — is irreducibly phenomenological. Further, it constitutes the prototype with respect to which all subsequent love-relations are experienced. This is what Freud says in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (129, quoted by Lear). (Plato’s doctrine that all knowledge is recollection, all cognition recognition, receives here a naturalistic turn.)

What matters in this idea, the condition of possibility for an adult “refinding” the original bond in some new setting, with a different person or thing, is the significance for the infant of the breast (130). This breast-as-psychic-representation — the narrow “object” of the sexual drive — cannot adequately be captured by an “external” observation, i.e. one for which the object is first the breast, then the thumb. On the psychological plane entailed by conceptions of drive as psychical-representative, the “object” can only ever be the object-as-incorporated by the mind, which confers on this complex a significance it otherwise lacks. “The earliest object of the sexual drive cannot be the mother’s breast tout court; it must be the mother’s breast as psychologically experienced by the infant” (130).

Not the object per se — say, the thumb, or later, the sexual fetish — but the psychologically-metabolized object is our concern. Freud’s descriptions of thumb-sucking as “auto-erotic” implicitly violates these strictures. For it suggests that the sexual drive is really self-directed, abstracting altogether from the object’s “for consciousness” aspect or moment (as Hegel would state things). In fact, infant re-discovers in thumb-sucking the original, erotic situation, the bond with the mother. (By contrast, an activity that was genuinely auto-erotic would be an unlikely place to recover this (simulated) satisfaction.) The language of auto-eroticism, in this context, precisely suggests an activity of “finding,” and not at all the “refinding” that Freud insists it is. “And yet,” Lear writes, “if the ‘auto-erotic’ is to be erotic, one must see the ‘auto’ as mere façade” (130).

The external, third-personal approach that Freud allows himself here will eventually lead him to conclusions regarding sexuality that roughly mirror his official account of emotions. Just as, according to the official account, dreams, neuroses, and phobias “detach” emotions from their appropriate ideas and thence “solder” them onto ideas without any intrinsic relation to them, here too Freud claims that the sexual drive bears no necessary relation with any “object” — original or otherwise. Here too the sexual drive — pointedly so in neurotic cases — may be “soldered” onto objects in a way that verges on the completely arbitrary.

But as Lear once again argues, this appearance of “independence” or detachability of sexual drive from object only arises from that “external” perspective psychoanalysis must disclaim. From the perspective of archaic mental functioning, on the contrary, there is nothing the least bit “arbitrary” about the connection between drive and object. To the infant at the breast, to the nominally “auto-erotic” thumb-sucking child, and later to the adult (neurotic or healthy), the “object” is one and the same. True, when measured against secondary-process criteria of cogency and literalism, the object is at each stage entirely different, which demonstrates their mutual externality. Yet by the associative lights of primary-process thinking, the “latest” love-object is the most natural, even unavoidable embodiment of the prototype: the “finding” really is a “refinding” (131). Again: “There is a sense in which the sexual drive never abandons its object” (131). The “observational stance” that Freud assumes, whenever he speaks in his scientific voice, “cannot see…that in all his wandering among sexual objects, there is a sense in which the person has never left home” (132).

Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 5 (XIV)

Inevitably, a book written about the idea of “love” in Freud’s thought must take some position on the “enlarged sexuality” he identifies in mental life. “Inevitable,” that is, because Freud notoriously insisted that all love, Eros, of whatever gradation, is grown around a kernel of sexuality. He puts the thought this way in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego: “The nucleus of what we mean by love naturally consists…in sexual love with sexual union as its aim” (29).

In Chapter 5, “What is Sex?”, Lear takes Freud’s metapsychological identification — that sexuality is a “drive” [Trieb] — as an occasion to explore the more basic question, which Freud never resolves to his own satisfaction: what is a drive? Naturally, there is little prospect of our grasping Freud’s view of “sexuality” until we’ve described the stuff of which it is ostensible made, the “type” of thing it is. (For other attempts to address the vexing problem of drives, see my accounts of Loewald’s “Therapeutic Action” essay, Mitchell and Greenberg’s Object Relations, and the opening remarks of Freud’s “Economic Problem of Masochism.”)

At least according to Freud’s early statements, drives are “continuous, internal sources of pressure” (122), distinct from both external stimuli and the fixed “instincts.” But these distinctions, in themselves questionable, are not the objects of either Freud’s or Lear’s conceptual dissatisfaction, which relates instead to the “frontier quality” (122) of drives. That is, drives are situated at the frontier separating the mental and physical: they are, at different moments in Freud’s account, both “psychical representatives” of physiological forces and, also, the physiological forces themselves (122). Hence the human drives — both sexual drives and the self-preservative “ego-drives,” such as hunger — may be conceived both as mental entities and as forces in the body that appear to the mind in this manner.

In fact, Lear does not conclude that Freud was mistaken, either about this “frontier” status or, for that matter, about its metaphysical inscrutability. (There are allegedly good reasons for Freud’s dissatisfaction.) Lear is critical, rather, of Freud’s attempt to handle an essentially philosophical matter as though it were empirical. Perhaps a drive is simply one thing viewed under two aspects — as physiological force or as psychical representative. Nonetheless, a “psychological inquiry” (123) has a place for concepts pertaining only to the latter. This is essentially an epistemic or methodological decision, and needn’t involve — Lear argues — any “metaphysical” commitment regarding the reality of this distinction, one way or the other.

(Whether epistemic and metaphysical commitments can be distinguished so tidily is not a question I will address in this place. Suffice it to say that Hegel, for example, criticized any attempt to establish a “pure” epistemology antecedently to metaphysics — say, in Descartes or Kant — or an epistemology that does not involve metaphysical commitments at every step.)

Whether or not physiological force and mental representative are at root identical is a question that can be bracketed. Physiological concepts can and should be left to biology, while Freudian psychology can and should confine itself to concepts of drive that “manifest” in the only form that could possibly interest us: as mental items. Once isolated from questions of physiological architecture, the concept of drive has an immediate and significant theoretical implication: its “meaning” cannot be merely functional, as its biological counterpart may well be.

Under its purely physiological aspect, in other words, a drive’s meaning may indeed be exhausted by its “function” — either for the individual organism or for the species to which it belongs. But under its mental aspect — as a drive-representative — this drive cannot logically be dissociated from its appearance to its bearer. Again, “if the drive cannot be characterized in psychological terms, it loses its claim to be a psychological concept” (125). (See again, in this connection, Freud’s “Economic Problem of Masochism,” for evidence of a deep puzzle regarding what is objectively “quantitative” and what is subjectively “qualitative” in sensations of pleasure and unpleasure. See also Freud’s tribute to Charcot, which defends the “autonomy” of psychological concepts.)

In fact,, Freud himself often ignores the importance of this distinction, attributing to the sexual drive a “meaning” fixed entirely by its hypothetical function in the life of a healthy organism. Just as the “meaning” of hunger is the “drive for nutrition” (126) — the desideratum without which the organism fails to function — so the meaning of the sexual drive must be predicated, Freud initially reasons, on some conception of a well-functioning organism, whose “aim” this drive advances. Freud imagines that some impersonal aim, corresponding to hunger’s “drive” for nutrition, could be similarly fixed for the sexual drive. As hunger is grasped in terms of “nutritional” ends of self-preservation, the sexual drive is grasped ultimately in terms of species-perpetuation. This, in any case, is Freud’s early position: “The sexual drive is distinguished by its end, or goal. Unlike the I-drives, which function to preserve the individual, the sexual drive functions to preserve the species” (127).)

Now, Lear insists on both the legitimacy and even the necessity of drawing his “methodological” distinction and keeping to the psychological side of things — presumably because Freud himself failed so often to honor it. This chapter shows how Freud mistakenly searched for the uniquely psychological meaning of the sexual drive among concepts found only on the physiological side, that is, in biological knowledge about the human being qua well-functioning creature. In the case of sexuality, Freud supposes — surely justifiably — that “the overall functioning of the human being” (127), no less than other non-human animals, must typically or on average promote the survival of the species. And this claim “gives us a conception of what human sexuality is for” (127), or that end “for the sake of which” the sexual drive operates.

But do these reflections yield the psychological meaning of sexuality construed as a drive-representative — the only object that concerns psychoanalysis? — one that is “manifest” in such diverse phenomena as bodily gestures and pleasures and, in normal cases, the increasing restriction of diffuse bodily satisfactions to specifically genital ones? Plainly, the answer is no. In the next entries, we will review Lear’s alternative conception.