Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXIV)
Having insisted, psychoanalytically, on the I’s derivation from its world — in Adorno’s words, “the preponderance of the object,” the subject’s radical dependence on the object — Lear now brings a critical perspective to the philosophical discussion of freedom.
Specifically, Lear critiques the account of free will famously developed by Harry Frankfurt, whose criterion of freedom is a certain “harmony of the soul.” On this view, I am “free” if and when my “first-order” and “second-order” desires “harmonize” — that is, when I have and act upon only those desires (impulses, inclinations, and the like) that I endorse, that I want to have and enact. When there is disharmony — for instance, a person is overcome by compelling first-order desires, say, nicotine cravings, that he or she does not want — there is no freedom. (I am in these sorts of situations unfree, in the sense that I do not recognize my impulses and the actions they precipitate as mine, as expressions of my will, but as instead somehow alien to that will.
In light of his forgoing reflections, Lear finds this conception of freedom incomplete — such a harmony of the soul is perhaps a necessary, but hardly a sufficient condition of a robustly free will. It is not enough that my first-order desires are brought into line with my second-order desires; those second-order desires must themselves possess certain qualities, if they are to constitute a free will. To motivate these additional qualities, Lear invites us to consider the following possiblity:
“Suppose…one’s values or “higher order” desires have been instilled in one in an unreflective, coercive way. Even if one is able to make one’s “lower order” desire march in step, there is a sense in which one’s whole harmonious will is an expression of enslavement to external coercive forces. One cannot tell what freedom a person enjoys just by considering the structure of his soul in this way.” (188)
Such a psychological possibility shows why harmony of the soul is not on its own sufficient: while both my desires and the behaviors that issue from them may indeed comport with my “will” — I feel and do precisely what, upon reflection, I want to feel and do — it is unclear whether or not that will is really mine at all. Thus the manner in which this will is assimilated, and later maintained, counts a great deal; an assimilation that is “coercive,” or even merely “unreflective,” would vitiate freedom.
Hence we cannot reliably determine whether a soul is free on the basis only of its “internal” harmony or disharmony, that is, without some knowledge of its “external” relations. If Lear’s earlier claim about psychoanalysis is correct, and the I emerges and develops by means of identifications, then we must suppose that every I’s “second order” desires — at least originally and for some time after — are internalizations, as an “ego ideal,” of the most important trait or traits in the infantile environment. This includes above all the parental attitude, loving or not, to oneself — specifically one’s drives, needs, or “first order” desires.
But so long as my ontological core — my idealized self-conception or second-order desires — are simple precipitates of this early experience in an unchosen environment, I am in a crucial respect not free. For even if I succeed in “shaping” myself and my life pattern, such that my daily inclinations comport with my “will,” that is, my basic self-conception — nevertheless, why call this will mine, rather than the will of my parents’, or more accturately, my childishly-distorted perception and assimilation of their will? What if my attitude to my first-order desires is still — well into adulthood — a rough approximation of my parents’ attitude to these same desires, which initially it unquestionably was? Of such a will, we might say that it is “free” of internal impulses that would encumber its higher-order self-determination; but we cannot plausibly say (at least without additional knowledge) that it is free of its environment.
“Since the human soul is a psychological achievement, a response to and differentiation from the world, the fundamental issue cannot be merely internal harmony, but whether one has made one’s soul one’s own.” (188)
It follows that, from Lear’s perspective, even a harmonious soul — perhaps, after a point, especially a harmonious soul — lacks the all-important quality of “self-ownership,” inasmuch as it cannot or will not reflectively make itself its own.
This achievement of self-ownership, reminiscent of Kant’s account in “What is Enlightenment?” and by no means a “given” in normal development, is essentially what Lear seems to mean by “individuation.” And we cannot know whether a soul has individuated, has achieved or even attempted self-ownership, until we have a sense of its reflective distance from the unelected identifications of its origin. The qualifier “reflective” is important: someone who grows into a stark repudiation of his original identifications may well still be unconsciously gripped by them, meaning no genuine distance has yet been reached. For a soul to qualify as self-possessed and so really “free,” then, “a process of differentiation must have occurred so that there is a point in distinguishing the person from the environment” (188).
But how will we know when such a “process of differentiation” has occurred? Indeed, what exactly does such differentiation look like, in the concrete? I will take up these questions in the next entry.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXIII)
A Quibble
Lear continues his criticism of subjectivism, now extended to embrace the central tendency of modern philosophy. For such a view is implicit in all attempts to know the “self” in abstraction from its history and, by extension, the “world” in which that history unfolds.
Hegel famously critiques this subjectivistic tendency in Descartes, Locke, and Kant. Each essentially supposes — as an unexamined “presupposition” — that the faculty-of-knowing, cognition, may somehow be examined, viz. “known,” in advance of knowing-proper — that is, of the nominal “objects” both of metaphysics and natural science. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit suggests that this subjectivistic standpoint has a particular history, one that sprung logically out of the collapse of other standpoints. Moreover, Hegel claims this development of the soul’s “structure” is inseparable from a parallel development of the wider social world.
Now, my friendly criticism of Lear’s book thus far is that it scants this history-of-a-world as relevant to his “history-of-an-I.” One would not imagine, from his language of “good-enough” environments — ones that either do or do not provision the conditions of I-hood, that are either lovable or not — that, in the West, the structure of the self has radically changed since Ancient Greece. (A commonplace in the modern humanities is that the “individual” — its peculiar reflective, conscientious structure — really appeared only in the modern era.)
To be sure, Lear’s account is not obviously incompatible with this enlargement of focus. He might argue, as he periodically hints in the Introduction and this concluding chapter, that it is only in the modern ear that
I’s emerge that are explicitly committed to the values of self-reflection, individuation, and free self-determination, precisely because it is only now that
a sufficiently loving and lovable, “good enough” world (on a culture-wide scale) has crystallized to condition this “I”
In other words, only now is there a social-cultural-political “environment” offering this range of lovable identificatory objects (values, traits, capacities, myths…), and not merely “parental figures,” who are often enough simply ambassadors of this wider environment, unreflectively transmitting its substance to the next generation.
Hence we might begin with an “I-history,” both empirical and transcendental: both the development of a particular, concrete person, from infancy to adulthood, in a particularly family, in a particular time and place; and the universal structure of the “I,” construed (in Hegel’s words) as a shape-of-consciousness. But we would then “restore” this I-history to its proper context of “world-history” — again, at empirical and transcendental levels of analysis.
If Lear is prepared to go this far, however, I would also ask that he correct another impression his book has made on this reader: namely that the “histories” in question are to be plotted on some kind of a continuum (even a quantitative one — Lear’s ostensible opponent!) running from lesser to greater lovability, from worse to “good-enough” to best worlds. For this conception blurs and weakens the “logic” of these histories and the more differentiated transformations undergone by both “I” and “world.”
Naturally, Lear might complain that I am unfairly critiquing him for not being Hegel — for failing to develop his argument in directions that are far removed from his task in this book. But my point is that Lear’s book itself, implicitly, already gestures in just these directions, without, however, acknowledging the implications.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXII)
The final chapter of Love and its Place in Nature, “Radical Evaluation,” summarizes Lear’s interpretations in a way that throws light both on Freud’s “revolution” and the permanent convergence of psychoanalysis and philosophy. The “I,” Lear repeats,
is essentially a product of a “good enough” — loving and so lovable — world;
must “incorporate” its drives, if it is going to develop; and
does not admit of third-personal, detached, external observation and explanation, so constituted is it by “love” — a force which, wherever it is active, precludes such a perspective
This last proposition — (c) — is particularly significant. What may appear as detached — say, the “neutral” clinician’s ex cathedra interpretation regarding the patient’s mental life — is in reality, upon the sort of examination conducted by Lear, a mediated expression of that same mental life. Interpretation is not imposed from the outside upon an object, archaic functioning, with an independent destiny; the analyst’s “concepts” are instead the realization, the terminus of that functioning in a unity of two minds.
According to Lear, one casualty of these results is the doctrine of “nihilism” allegedly promulgated by Nietzsche, glossed as follows:
“Both [Nietzsche and Freud] were master diagnosticians of unconscious motivation, but the conception of man’s place in the world implicit in Freudian psychoanalysis is just the opposite of the nihilism that flows from Nietzsche’s work. For simplicity, let us say that nihilism is the view that things in the world have value solely in virtue of being valued by humans. Nihilism portrays a world in which value is contingent, arbitrary, capricious” (184).
Now, as a reading of Nietzsche’s use of the term, this is questionable. As a rule, in Nietzsche’s writings, “nihilism” designates, not a theoretical position he is advocating, but the pervasive cultural malaise he is diagnosing — one he associates with disorientation, despair, alienation, etc, and which he refers (especially) to modernity’s rolling deracination of traditional sources of authority. (Ironically, the legacy of Judeo-Christian morality — a far cry from “the view that things in the world have value solely in virtue of being valued by humans” — is itself one of several culprits in Nietzsche’s account.) The view Lear has in mind, on the evidence, might be better named “subjectivism.” But even with this revision, I think Nietzsche is best left out of the story. There are passages in Nietzsche, certainly, that reflect Lear’s attribution — the ex nihilo self- and world-creation of the aesthetic genius — but the notorious innovator of philosophical “genealogy” was hardly a stranger to the world-responsiveness of mind, or history as it actually occurred, hence to the constraints that an era or psychological environment places on the the free “spontaneity" of mind. This strikes me as one of Lear’s rare lapses in precision when discussing the history of philosophy.
With these qualifications in place, let us return to Lear’s argument. Psychoanalysis undercuts the viability of “subjectivism” inasmuch as it stipulates certain “objective” conditions of subjectivity. (To be sure, the idiom of “objective” assessment has by this point in Lear’s argument an equivocal ring to it.) These conditions of mind are not simply “external” prerequisites of human life — such as oxygen, sunlight, nutrition, and the like. Lear is suggesting, I take it, that not only must a world exist, and with certain specifiable proprieties, in order for a “mind” to emerge; this world must also bear intrinsic value and meaning, antecedent to the mind’s own investments, since this is a condition of any investiture at all. So:
“From the perspective of Freudian psychoanalysis, it is not that humans make the world lovable by investing it with their love; it is because the world is lovable that humans can develop into creatures capable of loving it. Since the form of the world forms the human mind, there are constraints on what form the world can have if there is to be a human mind” (184-5).
As we discussed in the last entries, an “I” is in its innermost structure a more or less successful identification with, and internalization of, a “good enough” environment. In the complete absence of such an environment, no “I” could emerge (at least with the characteristics Freud distinguishes in it), since an utterly unlovable, unloving world would supply no traits with which to “identify” — and the I, again, is finally nothing apart from an accumulation of such identifications with (lost) love-objects.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 6 (XXI)
We have been reviewing the mechanism of “identification” in Lear’s account, and its significance in constituting the “I.” In particular, we have conceived identification as a response to, and compensation for, loss. To summarize: the It (id) experiences a loss — of the love-object — and the I (ego), by identifying with this lost object, offers itself up as a “lovable” substitute to the bereaved It. Again, in Freud’s words:
“When the I assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the it as a love-object and is trying to make good the its loss by saying; ‘Look, you can love me too — I am so like the object’”(163)
But what exactly makes this I “lovable” to the It? In other words: would any of the I’s identifications (with the lost love-object) suffice for the purposes of It-pacification? Or is something specific required? These questions bring us around to the central aspect of identification, hence the next ingredient in Lear’s account. Generally speaking, the complex object with which the I identifies — namely, the parent — is basically (albeit not infallibly) “loving.” He or she for the most part ministers to the infant’s needs or “drives” as they arise, inevitable frustrations notwithstanding, so that among the “traits” assimilated by the emerging I, this “loving responsiveness” looms large.
But this introduces a striking stipulation into the account we have been piecing together. Again, the newly-shapen “I” must be lovable to the “It” in order successfully to replace the lost love-object. Yet this means: to really be worthy of the Its affections, the I must embody precisely the original object’s “loving-responsiveness” as that was directed toward the It with its drives.
The last chapter prepared us for this logical convergence of the “lovable” and the “loving”: a lovable world is a loving world — only a loving world is finally lovable. Now, however, this convergence becomes the intra-psychical desideratum of mental health. For a successful identification — and all Is are allegedly products of more or less successful identifications — creates a rather specific self-relation. In particular, the self (as I, “ego”) loves itself (as It, “Id”), in this way winning the love of that It (formerly bestowed upon the love-object, now lost):
“But if we consider what it is about the world that the drives love, it would seem to be the parents’ organized, loving responsiveness to the child’s needs. A successful identification in a good-enough world ought thus to be more than just the taking in of a love-object. The emerging I ought to embody a loving, responsive relation to (the) it’s drives. For that is what it would be to identify with the love-object. That is how love tends toward higher unities in human life” (169)
Neurosis, by contrast, reflects a failure to achieve this type of identification, hence some version of disharmony between I and It, trait and drive. Whichever of the love-object’s traits are assimilated, however the I reforms itself, the It will not find that I lovable, will not be pacified, if that I lacks the one trait which imparts value to all others: namely, the trait of loving the It, with its bundle of spontaneous urges, impulses, needs.
Thus far, Lear has discussed only two of the agencies found in Freud’s structural model — the “It” (id) and the “I” (ego). He now describes the origin and development of the third agency, the super-ego, beginning with its conceptual precursor, the “Ideal I” (ego-ideal):
“One might say that both the I and the ideal-I differentiate themselves out of a prior, less differentiated I-state which might be called the idealized proto-I” (167)
This less differentiated, idealized proto-I, the infant’s normal mentality, does not sharply distinguish between fantasy and reality — among other dichotomies honored by the well-adjusted adult. More specifically, the infant perceives no sharp difference between what it would like to be and what it is — a difference imposed only later by secondary-process thinking. In Lear’s telescopic formula: “‘Fantasy’ is a term we use in higher-level conceptualization to describe mental activity that itself does not distinguish between fantasy and reality” (172).
This could not be otherwise, if only for chronological reasons. After all, the less complex infant mind “identifies” with the more complex adult mind (in the nature of things) well before it is equipped with any of its “fantasied” traits. How could an infant identify with these imponderably sophisticated traits, if not by means of the “magical” thinking that asserts: “I am, somehow, what I now aspire to be”? Once “in motion,” the development of mind sifts out the “I” proper from fantasied representations, including the “ideal-I” (ego-ideal). Before this self-polarization, however, neither the “I” nor the “ideal-I” exist as discrete agencies.
Yet by the same token, these agencies can only be instituted simultaneously: a self must posses both or neither, since being an “I” at all involves continuously distinguishing what one is, one’s reality, from fantasied self-representations such as the ideal-I one would like to be, bearing all the (as yet unrealized) traits and capacities implied by one’s identifications.
Let us linger a moment over the tragedy, or at least the poignancy of this insight: the division of “is” from “ought” is a condition of outgrowing the infant’s “idealized proto-I” and thence having an “I” at all. “The sense of distance, of falling short of what I might be, is thus not an accident: it lies at the hear of the I’s existence” (167). It seems that this unsurpassable distance of an I from its ideal-I can only be felt as dissatisfying, at best, and at worst an intolerable agony. Lear himself distinguishes gradations: “In a pathological case the sense of distance will be overwhelming…But in a good-enough world, the gap between I and ideal-I will not be too great” (167-8). (I examined this thought in my commentary to Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. There I quoted Freud’s conjecture that, whenever the postulated “distance” between “I” and “ideal I” is overcome, so that critical self-monitoring is suspended entirely, it is mania that results: “[I]t cannot be doubted that in cases of mania the ego and the ego ideal have fused together”(82).)
Lear’s penultimate chapter now draws to a close on the goal of a clinical analysis, or of a human life more broadly. “My task, as a would-be individual, is to…make the It and my super-I my own” (178). But this task of dis-alienation — retracting into oneself what appears most external — presupposes an antecedent, constitutive “expulsion.” The I comes about piecemeal, from out of the undifferentiated “swirl,” by rejecting (above all: repressing) whatever is incompatible with its emerging “identity” (identifications): the “not Is” of It and super-I.
Afterwards, via either healthy development or, failing this, analytic intervention, the self-alienated mind of the neurotic (hypostasized by Freud as a natural fact), may suspend or dissolve its internal divisions. Here Lear blames the well-documented conditions of conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis for the Freudian “misconception that the soul has discrete parts” (174-5). In fact, Lear suggests, the mutual-estrangement of the sectors of mind characteristic of some neuroses is codified, in classical psychoanalysis, as a universal feature of mind: “before concluding that the soul does have parts, one ought to consider that this configuration is a manifestation of illness” (175).
Lear now concludes, in some elegantly symmetrical formulations, that the self (under the “I” aspect) must re-admit the It and the super-I together, since the alienation of one invariably parallels that of the other. They are, figuratively speaking, equidistant from the I. The needed “transformations” — the softening of the super-I and the acceptance of the Id — “are of a piece” (175). As Lear puts it: “It is because of a harsh super-I that the drives are so violently repressed. With the integration of the super-I into the I, there is new room to incorporate the It as well” (175).
In the next entries, I will discuss the final chapter of Love and its Place in Nature.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 6 (XX)
Lear is interested in the concept of identification, not as “a neurophysiological process,” but as a “psychological act” (161) — with the resonances of first-personal perspective, and (after a fashion) free spontaneity suggested by this phrase. “I do not reflect the world, I devour it” (161). The first, ur-identification, “narcissistic identification,” is the basis upon which all subsequent “hysterical identifications” (162) rest. For this original identification constitutes the I as something discrete, “for whom” a world, too, emerges as separate.
But Lear’s descriptions of this ur-identification are paradoxical, and I would like to take a moment to sharpen this paradox. On the one hand, out of their undifferentiated diffuseness, identification establishes the “I” and “world” as distinct items, imparting to each a structure and complexity they formerly lacked. On the other hand, this same identification also signals a recognition of the world’s externality — indeed, constitutes a compensatory reaction to that recognition. (Hence identification is also a strategy to overcome the unwelcome discrepancy between “I” and “loved-object,” the need and its satisfaction.)
Simply put, the paradox is that the “dichotomy” of I and world is both the premise and product of identification. We may soften somewhat the edges of this paradox by distinguishing between phases:
The original frustration of a separate world: ‘The breast is independent, does not automatically manifest in response to my “omnipotent” wishes.’ Such externality is merely implicit or, in Hegel’s words, “in itself,” an sich. It registers only brute separation — that the world is separate, not how. There is a form, but as yet no content, to the “I” and its opposed “world.” This intuition is the “premise,” in response to which the compensatory act of identification has any sense at all.
At the same time, however, the “narcissistic identification” (162) catalyzes the I’s development. Indeed, this act confers on the formal, empty “I” whatever structure or determinacy it is ultimately going to possess.
Lear’s gloss on this paradox — a “dialectic,” he writes, “of development…fueled by love and loss” (163) — contains but does not, I don’t think, resolve it: “I become an I in response to the fact that there is a separate world that is not identical with me” (163).
(To belabor a moment longer our paradox, we might quibble with Lear’s phrasing: does not the “fact” of a “separate world” presuppose, indeed, simply name the “I” purportedly built upon only afterwards out of compensatory identifications? In my view, Lear would require something like the distinctions between phases or moments — in-itself and for-itself, implicit and explicit, form and content — to address this quibble.)
In any case, Lear puts the I’s subsequent development this way: “I identify with the world because I am not identical with it. I take the world in, and thus constitute myself, as compensation” (163). (The language of “compensation,” we will note in passing, carries a tragic implication. For it means that the traits that distinguish the I both from the world and from other I’s — say, the warmth of mother, the self-discipline of father — are each of them products of frustration.)
But what is the I, exactly? Following Schelling, Hegel called nature “petrified intelligence.” For Freud, the “I” is similarly the petrification of libido, for it preserves in its characterology a record of lost love-objects. “Libidinal energy has been transformed into psychic structure” (165), so that “one might thus think of psychic structure as structured love” (165).
What exactly are we to make of this imagery? Developmentally, a primordial unity is dispersed: the breast I initially fancied a part of me — a function of my will — is experienced in its painful separateness, its “independence.” How does one rectify this loss of a love-object? Freud’s answer is, roughly speaking, the distinctions contained in the structural model itself: among the agencies of mind, it is the “It” (i.e. the id) that feels the loss. By contrast, the “I” is able to incorporate traits of the lost object to placate this grief-stricken “It.” [Lear insists on restoring to the Latinate “ego” and “id” their colloquial forms — a well-meaning decision that nonetheless insistently stalls the reader — this reader, in any case — most familiar with the technical translations.]
Hence the “It” can be consoled. It is to an extent prepared to accept — in the absence of the lost object — another object, a substitute, that is sufficiently similar. And this capacity constitutes precisely the psychological mechanism we are after: by reforming itself on the pattern of the lost object — by altering its own character — the “I” is able to offer to the (undiscerning, magical-thinking) “It” just such a substitute. “By fashioning itself after a lost love, the I offers itself [to the It] as dependable compensation for a fickle world” (163).
Lear quotes a passage from the Ego and the Id containing a wonderful image (one that I have considered in another context):
“When the I assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the it as a love-object and is trying to make good the it’s lost by saying; ‘Look, you can love me too — I am so like the object’(163)
And a moment later, Lear quotes an equally evocative image from the same text: “the character of the I is a precipitate of abandoned object-investments (164), so that this I “contains the history of those object-choices” (164). Lear even seems to be pushing Freud a step further: the I is simply the history of its — lost, frustrated — object-choices.
Thus, to return to our central questions: Why does Freud believe that the “I” of today indexes the “I’s” of yesterday? How does the present conserve the past? Lear must have something like the following chain of reasoning in mind:
Psychological growth issues from identification — the I assumes capacities and traits of the more complex “objects” it mirrors
But there is nothing to spur these acts of identification until the perceived “unity” between loving-self and loved-object is fragmented — I am made to realize, by frustration, that mother and I are not actually “one,” so I “incorporate” her as a permanent item in my internal world
It follows that loss explains growth and its particular pattern
The I gradually becomes the object[s] it loses — via mimicry, emulation, internalization, self-shaping, enculturation, i.e. all the devices of identification. For only this “mourning” procedure enables it to overcome these losses, persuades the injured party — the “It” agency — that either no loss has occurred or, at least, having occurred, has perforce been rectified. (We must again bracket the philological objection I made in the last entry: at the time of “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud seemed to pathologize identification as a mechanism, not of mourning, but precisely of melancholia.) To summarize, when Freud writes that “the character of the I is a precipitate of abandoned object-investments” (164), that this I “contains the history of those object-choices” (164), he must mean something like: ‘Scrutinize the character and biography of any person, and you will find that the structure of his or her “I” — traits, tendencies, capacities — is (as a totality) the result of identifications with lost objects, and precisely as compensations for these losses.’