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

We left off with Lear’s idea that emotions are proto-conceptual orientations towards the world that make sense of one’s situation — in however undeveloped or wrongheaded a manner. This idea will be familiar to readers of 20th century philosophy. (There are strains of it in pragmatism’s “know how” and Heidegger’s “moods,” to name just a couple examples.) This is how Lear, having returned to its original provenance in Aristotle, puts the idea:

“Emotions are, by their nature, attempts at a rational orientation toward the world. Even an archaic expression of emotion is an archaic attempt at rationality. It is the germ from which a rational orientation may grow” (51)

When I feel an emotion, I do not experience it “in a vacuum.” To feel anger, in the proper sense, just is to have some rudimentary grasp of “cause” and “purpose,” i.e. the basic furniture of any conceptual framework. I feel anger — if I do feel it — towards a specific object, because I have (I imagine) been wronged, unfairly or maliciously treated. Further, to feel anger is also to entertain, however obscurely, the general course of action responding to that understanding: it logically induces a desire to “make good” on the wrong.

[This use of the term “emotion” may seem tendentious. After all, people do commonly report experiences of a-conceptual emotion: say, that they feel “irritable” without knowing why — perhaps upon waking up. Lear might respond: precisely these exceptions prove the rule. They are evidence only of the occasional “neurotic” disconnect between an emotion bearing conceptual significance and a consciousness that is unable, because unwilling, to recognize its conceptuality.]

The “rationality” of emotions runs even deeper than this, though. “[A]n emotion does more than orient the individual to the world: it comes packaged with its own justification” (49). That is, to feel an emotion is not merely to have some intuitive understanding about its cause, its object, and the consequences one happens to desire in reaction; it is also to accept some warrant for the emotion. Emotions compel us. They implant a conviction regarding their appropriateness, which extends to the views and desires they reliably generate. To really feel anger is to have a title for that anger, to believe it is directed at the right object, for acceptable reasons, and that the reaction it inspires in me is merited by the facts of the situation.

In the midst of an emotional experience, of course, all of this is merely implicit, unarticulated; hence the expression, “proto-” conceptual. The causes, consequences, and justifications to which someone in the grip of emotion is implicitly committed may then be “elicited”: we may press the person to give discursive form to all the claims that underlie and shape that emotion — whereupon he or she may be struck precisely by the incoherence of the implicit framework. Perhaps “object” and “desire” do not fit neatly with one another; or perhaps there is a discrepancy between the intensity of the emotion, the magnitude of the stakes purportedly involved, and the features of the actual situation.

What matters is that, whatever the eventual fate of the framework, (which may indeed suffer conscious refutation), it nonetheless remains the origin of any conceptual orientation at all, and a continuing condition of possibility for it. To phrase this point now in the language we used in the last entries: emotions are not blind “quantities” upon which we externally impose a conceptual framework drawn from another, autonomous source. Rather, there is no conceptuality at all, except as a development, modification, and perhaps correction, of the “framework” originating, finally, in and as emotion. (As an extreme example of a dualistic account, consider Kant and the discrete “springs” of judgment in concepts and intuitions, in his theoretical system; or laws and interests, in his moral theory.)

The bearing of Lear’s alternative, Aristotelian view on our understanding of catharsis is perhaps already clear enough. If emotions carry with them justifications, a title to rationality, it plausibly follows that when they fail to provide these desiderata — upon inspection, that is, they do not seem justified, reasonable, motivated, and the like — it will be distressing. For in this situation, a proto-conceptual content pressing for conceptual form will find its development obstructed. I then feel emotions that do not seem to make sense: I cannot locate their objects and causes; they compel some beliefs that contradict other, important beliefs I hold; or I am puzzled by the “behaviors,” if any, toward which the emotions are driving me. The “relief” provided by catharsis, on this reconstruction, is irreducibly epistemic: the restoration of emotional-conceptual coherence to a psychic situation afflicted by incoherence.

According to this revised understanding, catharsis consists, not in the blind discharge of an emotion that is itself bereft of concepts, but rather in the “conscious unification of thought and feeling” (46). The qualifier “conscious” is crucial, it appears, in this new paradigm. After all, it is not as though the repressed “feeling” has no thought-like content at all; Lear’s whole point is that thought does not need to be imparted to emotion “from the outside,” because conceptuality belongs immanently to emotion, which only becomes “what it is” when it reaches explicit, discursive form. In other words: to say that catharsis occurs when thought and feeling are consciously united is not to say that the two were tidily separate before that catharsis — a dichotomy Lear deemed unintelligible. Rather, it is to suggest that the sort of unconscious unity between thought and feeling compellingly achieved by archaic mental functioning, which is consciously disavowed, must be allowed to reach its self-appointed “end” in an interpretation. Hence our question now is not, ‘How does consciousness establish a connection between two items that are by nature of different kinds?’ It is instead, ‘How can the mind be brought to recognize their inseparability in its own symptoms — the non-recognition of which, indeed, is the central cause of the symptoms’ persistence?’

But these reflections, especially the theme of “recognition,” bring us to the second area of Aristotle’s thought that interests Lear. From the idea of emotion-as-orientation — and catharsis as a “rectification” of an orientation that is logically out of sorts — there is a natural link to a more properly Aristotelian concept of Katharsis. What is definitive of the theater-goer’s experience, as Freud himself says, is a peculiar “sympathy at a distance.” One temporarily identifies with the bold, courageous, uninhibited exploits of a hero, secure in the knowledge that someone else suffers. The hysteric, in fact, is brought by analysis to the same “balance of proximity and distance (54) in her attitude, and this, too, constitutes his or her “catharsis.” Only the object of this attitude, of this sympathy at a distance, is not the character represented on the stage, but rather her own self — that is, her own, split-off emotional constellation.

The complexity introduced by this “reflexive” view makes it unwieldy, but it is consistent with the theory of emotions Lear has just recounted. If emotions are, generically, ways of “orienting” oneself, then what is at stake in mutative therapy, cathartic change, is one’s emotional orientation specifically towards oneself: towards, say, one’s disavowed desires, or ideas, or even “emotions” themselves. The implicit question is whether one’s attitude towards these contents — an attitude that formerly consisted in unyielding rejection, denial, “repression” — can be converted to one of recognition, understanding, compassion, even “forgiveness.” This is effectively to “take up a position of sympathy and distance reminiscent of the engaged spectator in the theater” (58) — “sympathy,” because the patient compassionately identifies with the traumatic experience, accepts that it was and is herself that suffered; “distance,” because the “re-experiencing” of the episode is undergone with the simultaneous awareness that it belongs to the past, and that she is in fact no longer the same person who suffered it.

Only some such re-orientation in one’s attitude toward the “terrible idea” (58), hitherto repressed, allows viable “access" to it. In this way, Lear specifies further the model of catharsis he proposed earlier, namely, the “conscious unification of thought and emotion.” For the precondition and substance of this unification now appears to be an emotional reorientation, through all the psychoanalytic “supports” (including environmental ones), that can allow such a rapprochement, “bringing the terrible idea into consciousness” (57) by gradually reforming the attitude that precluded its surfacing.

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

In the last entry, we described several of Lear’s objections to a certain conception of emotional catharsis: namely, one linked to the metaphor of “discharge.” In particular, Lear emphasizes two problems:

1. The discharge metaphor presupposes the very dichotomy — between mind and body — that Freud’s discovery of archaic mental functioning obviates. The notion of a mental quantum that may, or may not, be “converted” into bodily expression is unintelligible.

2. The notion of a dischargeable item’s “quantifiability” contradicts the facts of clinical observation. Were there really some finite amount and intensity of “strangulated affect”; and were this quantity really “discharged” via the patient’s neurotic symptoms; then eventually that affect would expend itself, and would in the meantime gradually diminish. But this is exactly not what occurs.

In fact, as Lear now insists, no expression of emotion — of any magnitude — will offer the patient relief so long as it is inappropriate, or does not follow from a kind of authentic self-recognition. Hence something apart from a finite “quantum” of undischarged affect is surely at issue. At this point Lear wonders:

“Why is it that the truth cures? Why is it that only the genuine emotional response directed onto the right object is successful in discharging the pent-up psychic energy? This question cannot be answered in quantitative terms. So long as one continues to think of an emotion as being (or as being produced by) a quantity of displaceable energy, it will remain mysterious why only the appropriate emotional response has a cathartic effect” (45)

The significance in this context of irreducibly qualitative predicates like “appropriate,” "genuine,” and “true” simply cannot be explained on the quantitative assumptions of the discharge metaphor. A patient may experience the “greatest” possible emotions, of every sort, without it making the slightest difference to his or her symptomology, or degree of suffering. What does matter is evidently the shift in reflective orientation that coincides with an emotional experience bearing the predicates above. It is finally this deficiency in the discharge model — broadly, its inability to explicate conceptual development in terms of quantitative, “economic” magnitudes —that opens the space for Lear’s alternative. (In another context — “The Economic Problem of Masochism” — Freud himself acknowledges an irreducibly “qualitative” ingredient of experience.)

[Here I will say a couple of things about Lear’s general interpretive strategy, in passing. It is characteristic of this strategy that the Freudian theory is corrected on behalf, not of some rival paradigm, but of Freudian practice: the very materials brought to light by the original observations. The qualities of cathartic experience evident in the case histories, upon which Freud himself insisted, are precisely the data that defy the metaphor of discharge.

Another methodological point: while Lear himself does not frame his approach in just these terms, it strikes me that — broadly speaking — he intends to show that the tidy dichotomies that define so many of Freud’s conceptualizations are undermined by the very “revolution” he inaugurated. This occurs at the level of psychoanalytic practice, observation, and — let us say — “intuitive understanding.” We have just described two illustrations of this approach, both in connection with the problematic image of discharge. On the one hand, the dichotomy between mind and body presupposed by the postulate of a quantum of energy that “may or may not” express itself — mentally or physically — is undermined by the evidence of archaic mental functioning that Freud himself accumulates. This functioning evinces the unity of mind and body at the most fundamental levels. On the other hand, the dichotomy of conceptual “quality” and emotional “quantity,” and the explanation of catharsis solely through the latter, which are natural consequences of the discharge theory — this dichotomy, too, is invalidated by psychoanalytic practice, that is, the inbuilt “qualities” of cathartic experience itself.]

To return now to Lear’s argument, and in light of these methodological observations, let us put our question in a slightly different way: what sort of account honors the inseparability of thought and emotion, or illuminates the documented cases of catharsis as something beyond discharges of emotional quanta — an explanation that now appears to explain very little?

Lear’s alternative view of catharsis, congruent with Freud’s tripartite revolution, is grounded in a “return” to Aristotle. We may note the irony that, to make sense of the most modern of revolutionaries, Lear enlists the most doctrinaire imaginable of thinkers, at the least in the Occidental world. In fact, Aristotle’s authority went virtually uncontested in medieval thought and was only deposed, finally, in the early modern era by the analogous “revolution” associated with Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes.

More specifically, Lear re-articulates the experiences of hysteria chronicled by Breuer and Freud with categories drawn from Aristotle’s discussions of

1. the emotions, in the Rhetoric, and

2. “Katharsis” in the experience of tragic performance, in the Poetics. (In fact, in the second case it is actually Freud who, in quite another context, alludes to Aristotle’s theory of drama in making psychoanalytic sense of human behavior.)

From the Rhetoric, Lear draws the insight — substantiated by psychoanalytic practice, if not theory — that emotions are essentially orientations, inseparable from concepts, beliefs, and justifications, through which we make sense of ourselves and the world. This immediately yields a crucial result: we need not by troubled by the puzzling disconnect between a blind, quantitative emotion and its independent conceptualization if, from the first, emotions are irreducibly conceptual — in however inchoate a form. From the Poetics, Lear draws ideas that restore to cathartic experience the epistemic-recognitive aspects obscured by the discharge model.

In the next entry, I will discuss each of these accounts.

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

We have been examining Lear’s account of the “cathartic method” in Freud’s early thinking and, in particular, its problematic interrelation with the metaphor of “discharge.” In fact the medical backgrounds of Freud and Breuer would have disposed them to just this idiom. They “speak of the memory of trauma as a “foreign body” that continues to have a toxic effect on the patient, and it was the function of traditional medical catharsis to expel foreign bodies” (34).

But here Lear observes that, even if one accepts the image of a “foreign body” as a legitimate way to represent a repressed memory and its (strangulated) affect, a different metaphorical resolution — not discharge — would seem more logical. After all, on any cogent description, the repressed memory and unsung emotion are “foreign” only to consciousness, which has defensively refused to acknowledge them as authentic parts of itself. A cathartic method that rectified this situation, or which induced consciousness to avow the disavowed, can hardly be conceived as that entity’s “expulsion.” For this would amount only to confirming its “foreign-ness,” its status as something “other” to consciousness, and so compounding the original defensive distortion.

Lear now volunteers a metaphor that more accurately reflects the fundamentals of the cathartic procedure, and in particular one that captures the desideratum of acknowledgment:

“But if a memory’s remaining without citizenship in the land of consciousness is the basis for considering it a “foreign body,” then the metaphor of “foreign body” should not suggest discharge, but an opening up of the borders. For it is only by welcoming the foreign body into consciousness, by granting it citizenship, that its toxic effects are overcome” (34)

Nonetheless, discharge will stubbornly suggest itself as an appropriate model for emotional expression, not only to doctors of Freud’s era, but to everyone. “One reason for conceiving catharsis as a discharge is that it is natural for humans so to conceive of the expression of the emotions” (34-35). This universal “fantasy,” says Lear, will indirectly shape the theory constructed to grasp observed experience.

As it happens, it was a patient, Anna O., who instituted this metaphor in the course of her self-reflections. What was for her a natural, albeit imprecise way of speaking about her catharsis was taken at face value. That is, the “fantasy” of catharsis-as-discharge contoured all subsequent analytic thinking about it:

“Although Breuer reported that Anna O. “aptly described” his therapeutic procedure as a “talking cure” and only “jokingly” referred to it as “chimney-sweeping,” this “joke” worked is way into the theoretical formulation of catharsis…Catharsis was experienced by Anna O., at some level of her experience, as a discharge. But even if that is, for her, what happened, why should one assume that is what happened to her?” (35)

Or again, the Freudian “theory of catharsis was not describing a real emotional process so much as a fantasied conception of that process” (35). Ultimately, Freud and Breuer “rendered the fantasy of emotional discharge, which we all tend to share, into a conscious theory” (36).

This “fantasy” subsequently inflects Freud’s exposition of later psychoanalytic innovations, such as his theories of phobias and “transference.” There are traces of the discharge metaphor — indeed, more than traces — in the notion that, say, a certain quantum of “loving” ideas, wishes, and feelings, which properly belong to some childhood constellation as an unrealized potential, is in the therapeutic setting “transferred,” inappropriately, onto the analyst. And it is there, as well, in the proposal that a fear belonging originally to an unacceptable, then repressed idea, can subsequently attach itself through association to a tenuously-related object, such as spiders. For Freud, these neurotic strategies “redirect” the repressed quantum, rather than securing its needed “discharge” (42). And this is to say: the entire evolution of Freud’s “drive theory” is entangled with this fateful metaphor of discharge.

We now have before us the meaning of catharsis-as-discharge, as well as some of the reasons that have recommended this “fantasy.” Let us now ask: what exactly makes “discharge” insufficient as a metaphor for grasping catharsis — apart, that is, from its exclusion of “acknowledgement” from its semantic orbit, as well as its air of “misplaced concreteness” more generally? For surely metaphorical language is unsurpassable for psychoanalysis in its attempts to describe the mind: there simply does not seem to be any way of grasping metal phenomena without appealing to the non-mental sphere. Hence this metaphorical status cannot itself count against “discharge,” since it will hold equally of whichever alternative metaphor — “fantasy” — Lear proposes in its stead. (To anticipate, Lear’s eventual alternative formula for catharsis, “a conscious unification of thought and feeling” (33), is plainly as “metaphorical” an idea as any.)

What, then, are the the limitations of the discharge metaphor, specifically? Lear emphasizes two problems, in addition to the one we’ve already cited. First of all, discharge presupposes a sort of separation between the mental and bodily realms that Freud’s own discoveries invalidate. Understood correctly, “archaic mental functioning” reveals that bodily processes are “minded” all the way down. Precisely physiological “happenings” that seem least of all expressive of mind are, upon scrutiny, its most fundamental efforts at self-expression and self-knowledge. In the neurotic, these are “symptoms” that symbolize, communicate, and so on. But for just this reason, the discharge model — which supposes a mental quantum that may or may not be “converted” into bodily form, is unfeasible:

“Freud..was not yet in a position to see that it is a mistake to try to explain the conversion of the mental into the physical. For he did not yet understand that the physical symptom was itself a manifestation of archaic mental functioning. The task, then, is not to explain the conversion of a mental process into a physical symptom, but rather to explain the lack of development of a primitive mode of mental functioning into a conscious, more recognizably mental, expression” (43-44)

The question, in other words, is not whether a repressed constellation of thoughts, feelings, and wishes will express itself — invariably it does. Rather we should ask: how, in what form, and at how distant a remove from conscious recognition, does this constellation express itself?

On the other hand, and second: Freud attempts to “literalize" the discharge metaphor by insisting, at least in principle, on the dischargeable item’s quantifiability. This raises another, serious difficulty, once again in light of Freud’s own observations. As Lear puts it: “Why don’t hysterical symptoms naturally tend to die out?” (44). Even if we accept a version of the premise we have just rejected, and there is in neurotics some convertible quantum of repressed psychic energy that can be expressed physically or not — on those very terms the endurance of neurotic symptoms becomes imponderable. After all, a quantum of any substance is per definition finite. Freud’s insistence on its quantifiability entails as much. So whether it is “discharged” all at once in a single emotional outpouring designated cathartic, or — by contrast — “seeps out” over longer stretches of time, perhaps years, as it is converted into physical symptoms, this finite quantum will eventually be depleted. We will expect its expressions to diminish, even in the absence of any cathartic reckoning, simply from the “economics” involved. “[A] finite quantity of energy…should eventually be discharged in the course of producing and maintaining a somatic symptom” (44). (Lear indicates that the later, dynamic, “structural” model — featuring the id as “a reservoir of psychic energy” (44) partly responds to this conceptual difficulty.)

But of course no such diminishment is necessarily to be found in the neurotic. On the contrary, the very symptoms famously interpreted as epistemically distorted expressions, “conversions,” of the repressed quanta are, if anything, greater and more intense than their potential cathartic “discharge” would be. Phenomena like transference and phobias, which ostensibly involve projecting the quanta onto inappropriate objects, rather than their originally intended recipients, e.g. a loved or feared parent — on the evidence, these phenomena carry an immense discharge. Yet no matter the degree of intensity, or the frequency of repetition, these phenomena do not naturally come any closer to being fully “expended,” nor — what is perhaps the same thing — do the emotions felt offer their bearers relief.

Yet if we accept these criticisms of the “discharge” image, while nonetheless recognizing some version of “cathartic experience,” the question arises: how are we best to conceptualize the latter? Are there perhaps better, less objectionable metaphors?

We will take up these questions in the next entry.

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.

Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 1 (III)

Let us conclude our discussion of Lear’s introduction to Love and its Place in Nature. In the last entry I quoted a passage reflecting a certain conception — a manifestly “teleological” one — of psychoanalytic interpretation in the clinical setting. On this view, an interpretation develops

“naturally out of the archaic “thinking” it interprets. A good interpretation represents the end of a developmental process which begins with archaic attempts to “say the same thing.” The interpretation allows the mind to understand, at the level of a conceptualized judgment, what it has been trying to say all along, in more primitive ways” (8)

This frank Aristotelianizing of Freud, the (seemingly) least Aristotelian of thinkers, is prefigured in the epigraph to Lear’s book — by Aristotle — and it is carried out by frequent reference to Aristotle later on. “Mind” is accordingly pressing all the while toward self-expression, including via “archaic mental function,” and reaches its telos only in self-knowledge. And while this teleology certainly conflicts with Freud’s considered view of psychoanalytic science — the positivistic theory — his “discovery” entails just such a framework.

Thus Freud himself, to be sure, conceived psychoanalysis “as simply uncovering a hidden thought” (9), as is congruent with “the image of science as discovering an independently existing reality” (9). Nonetheless, analytic practice suggests a conatus governing mind, from its most opaquely primitive communicative efforts to the most sophisticated and self-transparent. Indeed, mind itself demands an “interpretation” as the necessary, final phase in its own struggle for self-knowledge. (That this interpretation is actually a provision of the analyst and not the analysand is as yet immaterial to Lear’s argument. Nonetheless, this quintessentially relational or intersubjective achievement is still the terminus of self-intelligibility towards which mind instinctively propels itself.)

We now have some provisional understanding of the first two elements in Freud’s revolution:

1. the paradoxical “science of subjectivity” that flouts Freud’s own, 19th century ideal of science; and

2. the conception of “archaic mental functioning” — accessory to this science —which locates mind in precisely those occurrences that seem most recalcitrantly non-mental

But we have in addition begun to appreciate a third element: “the positing of Love as a basic force in nature” (3). For Lear’s explication of psychoanalysis as a practice facilitating the immanent telos of mind — whose elemental struggle for self-knowledge is brought by interpretation to completion — makes the entire process essentially an expression of love. The clarification of this striking idea comes later in the chapter, only after the meaning of love in its “enlarged” sense is reviewed. It emerges in the midst of a discussion of individuality and individuation — ideals whose intrinsic value psychoanalysis presupposes. “An individual is, among other things, constituted by the pursuit of the meanings by which he does or might live. Psychoanalysis is at its core committed to the process of individuation” (22). The aim of individuality just is the developmental process we have described. And the allegiance of psychoanalysis to this process finally just is an expression of love. In other words, this is the form love naturally assumes at this level of reality:

“Precisely because the individual is a psychological achievement, it is not a given…But for an individual to come into existence, his archaic expression of subjectivity must be integrated with the rest of his life. An individual comes to be not by abolishing archaic life, but by taking it up into a higher level of organization. Freud…came to recognize this development as a manifestation of love within the human arena.” (23)

Later in the book, Lear will elaborate on this enlarged conception of love as a natural “force,” primordial and ubiquitous. And he will elucidate both more prosaic types of human affection, as well as the science and art of psychoanalysis, as proper “manifestations” of this same force. In this chapter Lear only gestures towards these elaborations. Freud, we are told, “came to recognize a basic developmental force in nature. This force, which he called love, permeates the animate world and tends toward the development of ever higher and more complex unities” (12).

There is little doubt, in fact, that Lear construes mental functions such as conceptualization and interpretation as per definition expressions of just this force. This position is conveyed by a number of characteristically self-reflexive formulations, for example: “The very activity of coming to understand love is itself a development, a unification, an act of love” (13). And lest the reader suppose that only interpretations directed at love are also instances of love, Lear writes a moment later: “This books is an interpretation. As such, it is an act of love” (15). (We might compare Lear’s proposition here with a contrasting view within psychoanalysis — namely, that interpretations are, or at least can be, acts of aggression.)

There are weaker and stronger versions of this claim. These are, Lear writes, the “manifest” and “latent” content of Freud’s famous assertion that psychoanalysis “is a cure through love” (27). We ought not only to receive this mot at face value, as a statement about the temperamental requirements of an effective analyst: “emotional engagement” and “emphatic understanding” (27). At least potentially, says Lear, Freud’s words imply a sweepingly dramatic characterization of the status that psychoanalysis enjoys in the eons-long saga of life coming to self-knowledge, and self-reconciliation, via greater and greater states of complexity, unity, and individuation.