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

In the last entry, we concluded our discussion of Chapter 1 of Love and its Place in Nature. Chapter 2 of Lear’s book, “Catharsis: Fantasy and Reality,” begins with the memorable lines: “Subjectivity is upwardly mobile. The meanings and memories that shape a person’s outlook on the world do not lie dormant in the soul; they are striving for expression” (29). Lear evoked this teleology in the last chapter with his description of “archaic mental functioning” as the first, necessarily crude effort of mind to “say” what it feels and knows. His notion of psychoanalytic interpretations as termini of this effort belongs here as well: an interpretation brings the archaic expressions of mind to self-transparency and, at the same time, transforms them in that very acknowledgement. When the unconscious “message” is finally received at the conscious level that until then repelled it, that particular instance of archaic mental functioning is rendered otiose.

So the “meanings and memories” of the quoted lines — which “do not lie dormant” but instead constantly press for “expression” — are precisely the items propelled through increasingly articulate stages, from the most “archaic” and figurative to the conceptual “here and now” of analytic interpretation. “Catharsis” designates the final phase of a successfully realized trajectory: subjective relief and objective transformation in behavior. There is no need for a paralyzed leg, say, to communicate a memory or meaning that has been taken up into conceptual utterance; hence that now-redundant piece of archaic mental functioning ceases.

When the analysis “cures,” when it is “mutative,” then catharsis is involved — at least on some, perhaps revised understanding of the term. I have included this qualification because, for much of the chapter, Lear is describing an influential picture of this mechanism that he considers a distortion — namely Freud’s. The view of catharsis established jointly by Freud and Breuer, and codified in their Studies on Hysteria, turns finally on a metaphor of “discharge” which, for Lear, clouds what is genuinely apt in the concept.

The metaphor is not innocent. Just this misplaced concreteness surrounding the idea of catharsis is allegedly responsible for great mischief in Freud’s later metapsychology. The fantasy of discharge, taken literally and systematized into theory, leads to all sorts of incoherences. Long after the method of cathartic discharge per se became questionable even to Freud (46), his system remained saturated with an error that, Lear argues, presupposes exactly that fantasy.

Specifically, it inspired in Freud the idea of an initially indeterminate, mobile, and measurable quantum of “psychic energy” (39) that can take one form, then another — an “underlying something” that, owing to the mechanism of “conversion,” may be “expressed sometimes mentally, sometimes physically” (39). The postulate of psychic energy is thus less an answer to some empirical question, the solution to some puzzling observation, than an ad hoc attempt to fortify the fantasied image of catharsis as discharge. (40) Once discharge is accepted as the legitimate description of cathartic experience, one is virtually compelled to posit some persisting “substance” that can be discharged — instead, that is, of “damning up” the psyche, or finding inappropriate “outlets” in unconsciously-sustained behaviors.

Eventually, Lear ventures another view of catharsis that, he argues, does not share this weakness. (He does not go as far as claiming it has no basis in fantasy or metaphor.) “Once one abandons the idea that catharsis is a discharge of psychic energy, it begins to look as though catharsis is a conscious unification of thought and feeling” (46). In a moment I will return to this alternative conception — one grounded, it turns out, in a reading of Aristotle’s theories of emotion and dramatic catharsis. In the meantime, let us recount Lear’s explanation of the “discharge” model in Freud’s development, its meaning, as well as its perceived deficiencies: both its internal, conceptual incoherences and its failure to accurately reflect clinical experience.

What led Freud and Breuer to describe the cathartic relief and recovery in their hysterical patients — most famously Anna O. — with the medico-scientific concept of “discharge?” As Lear shows us, when reconstructed in a non-tendentious way, the characteristics of catharsis do not in the main evoke this concept. Here are the essentials:

1. the patient is brought to a hypnotic trance state

2. with the help of the analyst’s inducements, she recovers a repressed memory of some “difficult” episode in her life

3. she talks about and, in so doing, “re-experiences” that episode in a now moderated form

4. most significantly, perhaps, she consciously experiences the “emotion” that should originally have accompanied the recollected episode, but which — in the event — was not felt, or felt improperly

5. finally, once the offending memory is recovered, and the relevant emotion — originally absent — is felt in its undiluted intensity, the patient’s “symptom” disappears.

What seems to matters most is that the events recollected under hypnosis “were not lived properly” (31). Thus:

“When Anna O. Discovered the dog drinking out of the glass she did not express her disgust because she wanted to be polite. That unexpressed disgust seemed to take up residence in her: and it became responsible for the generalized disgust of drinking.” (31)

Already, I would observe, we have begun to leave the realm of non-tendentious “observation” and entered that of inference. That the original event was improperly experienced, and that catharsis under hypnosis consists in rectifying the original discrepancy separating the event from its appropriate affective witness — this is surely less a neutral enumeration of "the facts” than a strong theory of mental illness. (We might compare other places in which Freud recounts the innovation and development of psychoanalytic method — particularly in its early, “catharsis” phase.)

In any case, how did “discharge” become the favored way of picturing a therapeutic procedure that as yet has no obvious connection to it?

“Since the expression of the emotion was therapeutic, it was natural for Freud and Breuer to conceive of their method as a type of discharge. Before the treatment the emotion persisted “inside” the patient, causing the hysterical symptom; the treatment consisted in expelling this “foreign body.” (33)

The concept of “expression” is operative here. According to a typical, imagistic use of the word, the process of expression involves converting an “inner” into an “outer.” To our analogizing habit of thinking, just as

1. an infection or foreign body residing in one’s corporeal interior, compromising one’s health, must be “discharged,” brought to the surface and expelled by medical intervention, similarly,

2. the “emotion” that corresponded to the original, traumatic event but which was not, or not properly, “expressed” at that time, is lodged in the self as an alien entity.

Thereupon this un-metabolized entity interferes with the patient’s normal functioning, finding subterranean paths of release in symptoms that afford only partial satisfaction, until it is finally “discharged” or “expelled” by the cathartic method. By this means, the “inner” is made definitely “outer” where, of course, it no longer “damns up” psychic functioning.

In the next entry, I will discuss Lear’s critique of this image.