Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 4 (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. While disclaiming the presence of this 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 4 (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 4 (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 4 (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.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 4 (XIII)
In Chapter 4, as we’ve seen, Lear extends his psychoanalytic “revisionism” into new areas — those that pertain especially to psychic growth, healthy and deviant. Not only are emotions and ideas fundamentally inseparable, as we found in Lear’s critical accounts of cathartic method and, in still greater detail, dream interpretation. (Each of these techniques presuppose, in practice, just this “inseparability.”) We now see that, in the analytic treatment of Little Hans, Freud’s practice encourages a similar approach to wishes, which likewise develop through phases of increasing determinacy, complexity, sophistication.
The Oedipal wishes embedded in Hans’s early emotional-ideational experiences only later, in analysis, assume the form of an interpretation, something like, ‘Hans wants to possess his mother and eliminate his father.’ Again, it is precisely characteristic of primary-process wishes, in contrast to adult desires, that they do not possess this form, even as they strain towards it. From the perspective of the child Hans, these “wishes” are no more conceptually-solidified than the “anxiety” their incohate recognition stirs in him.
Freud divines the identity of Hans’s wishes, we saw, by observing the boy’s emotional development and — in analysis — the growth of his fantasy-life. The latter allows sounder, more definitive inferences, based on both experience and communications concerning it. Analysis encourages the uninhibited expression of these fantasies, which, in such an environment, assume increasing complexity, differentiation, and finally — Lear implies — a coherence that verges on the conceptual. Once Hans’s fantasies reach a certain level of integration, and no sooner, they become candidates for interpretation, that is, concepts proper.
So Lear cites a particularly “triumphal” Oedipal fantasy of Hans as a turning point in his analysis. This was “a fantasy that allowed an alternative conceptualization” (110), so that “Freud’s interpretation offered Hans a set of concepts with which he could understand his own productions” (111). In the fantasy, Hans encounters a big giraffe and a crumpled giraffe — father and mother — and “re-possesses” the crumpled giraffe from the big one, who, upset by Hans’s actions, nonetheless ultimately accepts defeat. The fantasy, says Lear, “virtually presents itself in conceptual form (111). Again, Freud is now positioned to offer, and Hans prepared to receive, the Oedipal concepts toward which his fantasy-life is striving. “When the formulations of archaic mind get close to a secondary-process expression, Freud gives his interpretation” (111). Lear continues:
“The interpretation offers Hans an alternative set of concepts with which to understand his infantile wishes, it offers an opportunity of linking concepts to the archaic wishes, and it offers Hans the opportunity to transform his emotional relationship to those wishes.” (111)
This transformation of the way Hans “emotionally relates” to objects, particularly the contents of his own mind, signals the cathartic reorientation described in the second chapter. Once analysis establishes a suitably nurturing environment, the patient may begin to approach formerly inadmissible, intolerable, and frightening materials in the spirit of “identification at a distance” characteristic of cathartic experience. One may, specifically, assume an emotional attitude of compassion and curiosity toward these materials, rather than fear and aversion. And these dreaded materials include, preeminently, the wishes that Hans has never permitted to develop into articulate, transparent form. This underlying emotional reorientation is, in Hans’s case, a precondition of his ultimate preparedness to receive Freud’s interpretation:
“For this to be possible, Hans must transform the emotional relation in which he stands to his own wishes. He no longer fears his oedipal wishes; he can acknowledge and accept them. This allows the wishes themselves to develop in form and content: that is, to move in the direction of becoming desires.” (112)
For Lear, Freud’s metapsychology leaves “idea” and “emotion” mutually-estranged and arbitrarily-conjoined. Yet for Lear these items are mutually dependent: the idea simply is the expression of the emotion at some stage of its growth and inner articulation. (In other places, I have connected this mutual dependence to the Hegelian idea of “speculative identities.”) The same sort of critique applies to “wishes” per se, which are not finally “distinct” from
the adult’s desires into which they turn, or
the emotional orientation which they ground, or, again,
the “thinking” mind, which uninterruptedly makes sense of them
The “interpretation” phase of an analysis, when successful, elicits conceptual form from the restless expressions of the infantile “wish” just as surely as it does from the emotional orientation. In cases of neurotic deviation, distortion, or interruption, both emotion and wish struggle as aspects of archaic mind to communicate themselves to a consciousness whose false integration depends on repelling those communications. They may take somatic, bodily form, or clothe themselves in the fabric of dream and fantasy, in the hopes of being heard via primary process language. And analysis establishes an emotional and ideational climate in which hearing is possible.
Not only do the first expressions of archaic mind become more intelligible with greater exposure and familiarity, though; these expressions themselves acquire greater self-consistency and clarity — the qualities of secondary-process — as time passes. No longer entirely insensible to these communications, consciousness permits them this development, and even — with the analyst’s help — extends to archaic mind a sophisticated conceptual vocabulary in which to speak. Thus Freud gives Hans “a set of concepts with which to think about his wishes” (113). Once again, though, these concepts are not merely “imposed” from above upon an commensurable material — “wishes” — compounded of radically different, non-conceptual “substance.” On the contrary: “The wishes themselves absorb this conceptualization and thus enter into commerce with secondary-process thinking” (113). So runs Lear’s account of “wishes” in Chapter 4.