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.