Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 4 (XII)
Lear is now reviewing Freud’s account of “Little Hans” in Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy. In particular, Lear identifies some of the epistemological difficulties raised by the treatment of a boy whose “concepts” are neither directly accessible to adult observation nor in themselves fully determinate. Little Hans’s use of the term “widdler” is only the most notorious instance of this phenomena.
These difficulties call for some amount of inferential, “reconstructive” work — that is, interpretation of the externals of Hans’s life — if Freud is going to identify the infantile “wishes” pervading the boy’s inner life. Hence his outward emotional trajectory led from
an initial, outward-looking cheerfulness, through
a period of shyness, to
a diffuse anxiety, and finally to
a particular phobia
On the basis of these observable changes, Freud hypothesizes an “internal” economy of wishes, whose fates — whose satisfactions and frustrations — are manifested in those external changes. Predictably, Freud theorizes that an intense affection for the mother, and its subsequent repression, are effectively responsible for these changes. So, in the idiom of “wishes”: “[R]epression transformed his longing into a voracious anxiety capable of swallowing up Hans’s emotional life” (104, my italics).
Now Lear’s “developmental” reading, as he has taken to calling it, complicates Freud’s idea of the “path” from unconscious to conscious. For according to Freud’s official account, a higher organization is achieved when the “thing-representation” of archaic mental life is “linked with an appropriate word-representation” (105). But as Lear argues, Freud’s own case history suggests that considerably more is involved than “the attachment of a word to a thing-representation” (106). It is not as though archaic mental phenomena — associative, imagistic, self-contradictory — are in any condition simply to be “labeled” by the determinate, discrete, mutually-exclusive, and fixed concepts borne by words. Before any such “attachment” can be established, the anarchy of primary-process must itself be called into some kind of order. “The thing-representations themselves must be disciplined so that a word can legitimately be applied” (106). Hence what is finally entailed in making an unconscious thought a conscious one is “the acquisition of a concept” (106). That is, the unconscious thought lacks more than a “word,” to which it can be externally attached; as yet it lacks the conceptual form that would enable that application.
Little Hans’s development exhibits, among other things, “the incorporation of a concept at the level of both word and thing” (106). In fact, his horse-phobia illustrates precisely an attempt to achieve this higher psychical organization — with mixed success, of course. The phobia imparts a concept to Hans’s diffuse, free-floating anxiety — anxiety originating in recently repressed Oedipal longings and threats. Anxiety, “fear of an unconceptualized object” (107), contracts in phobias into fear-proper: a particular object or class of objects. (One may subsequently “manage” this fear by, for example, avoiding the object; whereas anxiety überhaupt admits of no such management.) This emotional shift from anxiety to fear, pace Freud’s own picture of emotion-as-discharge, signals a new world-orientation. Horses now “show up” for Hans as objects to fear; his experience is re-organized accordingly.
Again, Freud himself interprets that, while the anxiety is initially connected with Hans’s father, repression prevents Hans from becoming fearful of the “proper” object. (Horses become consciously admissible “receptacles” for another fear that is in itself determinate.)This theorization implies that Hans’s “fear of the father” (108) is a tidy and determinate — albeit unconscious — thought-content, which could simply be “transferred onto horses” (109). Thus it is one and same fear, at one time of a father-object, at another of a horse-object. This, in any case, is the official line: “Repression consists in sundering the idea of the father and attaching the emotion to another object” (109).
Though Freud’s topic is no longer Breuer, hysterics, and cathartic method, the wording of these descriptions suggest a return of sorts. For if Hans’s psychic dilemma really were as Freud reconstructs it, it would follow that the boy had erroneously displaced one and the same quantum of psychic energy — his fear — from father to horse. And the phobia could be resolved by “discharging” the emotion onto its appropriate object.
But we have seen that Lear rejects this model, and why. If Lear’s conception of emotional development is correct, though — if, in particular, the path from unconscious content to conscious idea involves more than external attachment but, beyond this, the incorporation of a concept — then we must explain the narrative of Hans, too, along different lines. This theoretical revision will affect our view of repression, as well. Lear writes:
“On the developmental model…that which would have resolved itself into fear of the father is prevented from doing so. Repression consists in inhibiting this process of resolution and in promoting the wrong sort of conceptualization” (109).
Again, it is not as though the phobic Hans possesses a fully-determinate “concept” — something like, ‘I am afraid of my father’ — with the merely formal qualification that this conceptual self-understanding is “unconscious” rather that “conscious.” Nor is it the case that the (relatively conceptualized) self-understanding Hans does consciously enjoy — ‘I am afraid of horses’ — simply reflects the “transfer” of a determinate fear from the “right” to the “wrong,” symbolically-associated object.
Rather, the original situation — given Freud’s own understanding of primary process — is that Hans’s fear of his father was proto-conceptual. Repression precisely obstructed this fear’s articulation into the right sort of conceptual, conscious, and appropriately-directed form. Indeed, it is for just this reason that the imagistic, indeterminate fear could articulate itself through the associative links of Hans’s eventual phobia. As Lear puts it: “But it is not that the conscious idea of a horse is substituted for the unconscious idea of the father. Rather, for Hans’s unconscious, there is no significant difference between fathers and horses” (109). An analysis, finally, would usher this fear into a form it has never actually assumed: namely, that “concept” provided by a sound interpretation. Strictly speaking, Hans neither consciously nor unconsciously “fears his father” — in that conceptual form — until interpretation “realizes” it for him.
We will conclude our discussion of Chapter 4 in the next entry.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 4 (XI)
The fourth chapter of Love and its Place in Nature, “Interpretation and Transformation” — the book’s shortest — reexamines the case of “Little Hans” for the light it throws on “infantile wishes.” Lear effectively does here for “proto-desires” what he has just done for the “proto-beliefs” contained in archaic mind’s “emotional orientation.”
Both are necessary. Recall that, for Lear, the “intelligibility” of dreams and other unconscious phenomena approximates that of action. The latter — action qua action — implies both desire and and belief. On this analogy, then, something “like” an elementary desire and belief ought to be identifiable in our object. The joint presence of the pair, however latent, is a condition of possibility for “interpretation” — provided that we think, as Freud and Lear do, that analytic interpretation discloses a “rational” mind where the irrational seems to prevail.
In the third chapter, Lear emphasized the essentially orientating function of emotions: they are not, pace Freud, mere dischargeable quanta of psychic energy, but incline the dreamer in particular “ideational” directions. That is to say: even archaic emotions “make sense” of themselves by generating ideas, rationalizations, “beliefs” — albeit according to the laws of primary process. The successful dream interpretation imputes to the adult dreamer such infantile “proto-beliefs” as, for instance: father’s love for me is jeopardized by my intimacy with mother; or the arrival of a sibling will diminish the amount of love I receive — hence dispatching the sibling will restore the lost situation — yet I will be punished if I eliminate the rival. Such “conceptuality,” while hardly explicit to the child — or the child’s adult descendant, archaic mind — is nonetheless presupposed by an “emotion” like jealousy, which presses for meaningful expression (note bene: not “discharge) in whatever manner, and with whatever resources it is able. Analysis done well can escort the proto-beliefs embedded in these emotions, via decipherment, into fully fledged “beliefs” — whereupon they may admit of conscious affirmation, rejection, or some other action. But no resolution like this would be possible, were it not that emotions are so-constituted from the start.
But what can we say, by analogy, of the “counterpart” to archaic mind’s proto-beliefs — namely, its proto-desires or, in Freud’s idiom, “wishes”? These latter are infantile precursors to the mature adult’s conscious — and consciously endorsable — desires. To repeat: we will recognize the rationality of archaic mind, after the pattern of action, when it manifests something approximating beliefs and desires. Freud’s case history of Little Hans, Lear claims, presents “the infantile wish as it exists in the infant’s soul” (98).
I repeat: in order to redeem its “scientific” promise, analysis must locate proto-desires in addition to proto-beliefs — some inchoate aim. One without the other would not suffice for interpretation and its “rationality seeking” agenda. Just as an action will seem unintelligible — not fully “action" at all — if it expresses a belief but no desire related to that belief (‘Why is she doing that? To what end?’), likewise, the infantile world-orientation is only really accessible to us once we’ve identified its “wish.” But how, Lear wonders, should we go about making this identification? And what, epistemically speaking, entitles us to postulate such an item which, if anything, appears to be less determinate, and more deeply buried, than the infant’s proto-beliefs?
The case history of Little Hans, Lear writes, indicates “what is involved in making a psychoanalytic interpretation of a symptom, fantasy or dream in terms of infantile wishes” (103). In this “material” — in case histories generally, as in less exemplary forms — “Freud had two related phenomena to work with: the transformation of little Hans’s emotions and the development of his fantasies” (103-4). In other words, the interpretation of wishes will depend upon a record of diachronic movement and unfolding in the child’s mental life, some of which “responds” to Freud’s own analytic interventions. (Thus Lear implies, without saying so explicitly, that a synchronic inventory or snapshot of the child’s mental life would not provide the necessary basis for wish-attribution.) The vicissitudes of Hans’s emotions and fantasies are “indexed” to episodes in the boy’s “outer” life — including, later on, the analysis itself. (In fact, the question of whether these interventions amount to a proper “analysis” is difficult to answer. Notoriously, Freud did not treat Little Hans directly, but through the intermediary of the boy’s father.)
Freud believed that the “wishes” expressed in dreams, discernible through analysis, are vestiges of infantile experience that remain part of the adult unconscious. If this claim is true, though, then we ought to be able to observe these infantile wishes in the child him- or herself in their relatively undiluted purity. There is a freshness and immediacy to the emotional expressions of children that is lacking in adults, who are supposedly well past the phase of repression which separates them from their own childhood mental lives. Nonetheless, we meet here with problems of “communication” that challenge even a dedicated, impartial “observer.” And Lear explicates some of these problems in the remainder of the chapter.
For example, Hans is famously preoccupied with both his own “widdler” and all the other “widdlers” he observes or infers in others: in father and mother, in his sister, in other children, in animals — indeed, in anything “animate.” Lear shows that, in fact, there is no viable basis for Freud’s conviction that Hans has made a “mistake” in his undiscerning applications of this concept. For calling these applications mistaken presupposes that Hans possesses something like a determinate, crystallized concept that could match, or fail to match. its object. In those instances where we seem to be in a position to verify this assumption — ‘But don’t you notice that your sister doesn’t have a “widdler”?’ — we may well simply be correcting his concept, rather than its erroneous application. We’d have no reliable way of determining which has occurred. If afterwards Hans no longer assigned a “widdler” to his younger sister, this could be taken as evidence either that he was persuaded, through closer scrutiny, that she did not possess the “organ” (about whose concept he was never in doubt), or that his very concept of a widdler had been revised, “disciplined” by the pedagogical intervention of his parents” (98-103). “There is…a severe limit to the extent to which anyone can go native in a tribe that consists of one three-and-a-half-year-old speaker” (103).
It follows that, even in childhood, when infantile wishes are ostensibly in full flower, they are not directly, undisguisedly available to analysis, but must be “reconstructed” from the data supplied both by the child’s outward behavior and through his intrinsically-ambiguous communications. These communications are ambiguous, again, because the child’s language reflects “concepts” that are still inchoate and very far from the adult’s successor-concepts.
I will take up some of these issues in the next entry.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 3 (X)
We concluded the last entry with Lear’s critical account of one, infamous dichotomy in Freud’s thinking: namely, between the “pleasure” and “reality” principles. In particular, Lear critiques the putatively stark separation between the modes of thinking characteristic of each: so-called “primary” and “secondary” process. He writes:
“The point is only that the transition from primary to secondary process lies on a developmental continuum of mental functioning. The concrete images of primary process may be preconceptual, but they are also protoconceptual. They are that from which concepts emerge.” (84-85)
With this qualification in place, we are free to regard adult desires and beliefs as attempts, more or less successful, to impart mature, conceptual form to their infantile ancestors: “wishes” and — as I will call them — “convictions” (93-94). (Lear himself does not give the concept this name, or any, but continues to describe it as a “proto-belief.”) Such wishes and convictions, subject to the laws of primary process law, will seem “strange” when examined from the adult standpoint, whose conscious desires and beliefs have meanwhile been called into some kind of explicit, logical order. Nonetheless, they will never be so strange that, with enough analytic attention, they cannot be deciphered as intelligible precursors of the adult orientation. This is because, as we have said, the in-built conatus of these inchoate bits of infantile experience — archaic mental functioning — is just towards the self-clarifying terminus finally reached in psychoanalysis, which delivers the needed interpretation.
By this point, moreover, Lear is positioned to challenge another dichotomous doxa of Freudian theory: the claim that ideas, but not emotions, can be made unconscious through repression. That is, “emotions must be conscious” (88), or “we must in some way be aware of an emotion when it is occurring” (88). As Lear sees it, Freud arrives at this result by restricting the meaning of emotion to the patent physiological feeling that announces it. (One is conscious, for instance, of an elevated pulse.)
But once emotions are construed as vehicles of “world-orientation,” Lear infers, hence undercutting any clear separation between idea and the emotion bearing that idea, then a fortiori the construction of a “repressed” idea alongside an “unrepressed” emotion makes little sense. As an ontological matter, there is only the emotional-orientation. In non-neurotic conditions, this orientation may achieve a high degree of “ideational” coherence and conscious explication; or it may neurotically stall in its development, confined to archaic self-expression, which will assuredly strike consciousness as a strange “not-I.” At no stage, however, will emotion and idea separate into discrete “entities,” one of which — but not the other — submits to repression.
Along these same lines, Lear criticizes Freud’s use of a “soldering” metaphor, mobilized both in the theory of dreams (91) and of sexuality (131). In both contexts, Freud’s metaphor rests on a single, untenable assumption: that one item (an idea; a love-object) may be arbitrarily “soldered together” with another item (an emotion; a sexual drive) that has no intrinsic connection with it. In fact, Freud’s practice indicates just the opposite. While the connections (in both dreams and sexual life) may seem bizarre from the standpoint of secondary-process, there is nothing “arbitrary” about them when situated in their proper context. They are, in fact, the best expressions of meaning attainable by archaic mental functioning, given the “merely" associative, imagistic resources at its disposal.
Thus the adult dreamer, with secondary-process sophistication, supposes the dream “emotion” and “idea” have been arbitrarily soldered together — since, for example, in his dream “fear” is felt in a “situation” in which, logically, it is out of place. But interpretation reveals that, on the contrary, the “idea” of that situation is (for the dreamer) a perfectly appropriate expression of the emotion in question. For it follows an associative semantic chain built unerringly by archaic mind.
In other words, emotion and idea alike must submit to repression because they are inseparable even in thought. To say that an idea has been made unconscious, as Freud officially teaches, is just to say that the emotion which ought to reach expression as that idea — or: the full emotional orientation of which the idea is one semantic ingredient — has been waylaid at a more archaic level, where it “expresses” itself in its native tongue, in the grammar of primary process, in those “ideas” it can articulate.
“What analysis does, them, is to rescue the rationality of an emotion” (90) — a rationality clothed in primary-process garb, to whose patterns the more integrated mind is generally obtuse. This way of stating things makes sense. After all, how could analysis or interpretation function at all, if its “latent” object (emotion, drive, etc.) were not logically expressed, however crudely, in the “manifestations” investigated? Analysis can only “get started” because “an emotion and its appropriate idea do constitute an indissoluble organic unity” (91).
A dream in which an emotion really were arbitrary connected, “soldered together” with an idea that in no conceivable way merited that emotion, would be uninterpretable, by definition. To be sure, dream connections may seem arbitrary in this way. For example, someone may dream of being attacked by a bear, and yet — in the dream itself — feels the “inappropriate” emotion of delight. But the premise of a Freudian interpretation is that, appearances notwithstanding, the idea of a bear attack is — in some figurative way — the appropriate, even “logical” expression of the felt delight. The correct interpretation will depend, of course, on this hypothetical dreamer’s associations to the episode. Perhaps it will emerge that he is “delighted” because he identifies with the powerful, attacking bear; or because the bear is a symbol of caring, protection, or humor; or because the bear is, more specifically, an infantile representation of a parent, or amalgam of important figures, whose aggressive “seduction” is desired.
What matters is that, beginning from the “pointer” (91) provided by an emotion, we may reasonably ask: in what way is the purportedly mystifying “idea” or “manifest content” in truth an appropriate, reasonable expression of that emotion? “[W]hen analysis penetrates deeper…it finds an underlying unity. It reveals that the emotion is always attached to its appropriate idea” (91). The same premise holds for “all cases of repression” (90), as in phobias, where the intensity of aversion and fear may be out of all logical proportion to its object — say, a harmless spider. Beginning from just this intense emotion, though, we examine the ways in which the spider “idea” is its apt, primary-process expression.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 3 (IX)
We have reviewed Lear’s suggestion that “dreams are like actions” (71). In particular, “action is by its nature meaningful” (72) and so, too, are dreams — and precisely by virtue of some property or properties they share with action. Lear names two such properties: “desire” and “belief.”
Action, of course, is self-evidently both sustained by desire (for some “end”) and constrained by belief (regarding the “context” of that action). But these ingredients, or at least their analogues, also figure in dreams. “Just as an action is the attempt to satisfy desire under the constraint of belief, so a dream is the attempt to gratify a wish under the constraint of censorship” (73). Inasmuch as a dream evinces these analogues of action, then, it merits for Lear designations such as “meaningful,” “intelligible,” and (after a fashion) “rational.”
Yet before we reconstruct Lear’s treatment of dreams, let us pause a moment and ask: is this an acceptable way of describing “action?” Though Lear does not illustrate his position in just this way, we might consider the following example. I acknowledge someone’s bodily movement as a proper “action” — hence rational — if I can say something like: ‘She is walking to the pantry in order to retrieve something to eat.’ For in that case, provided there is no conflicting evidence, I can realistically attribute to the actor a “desire” (for food) and a “belief,” or several (say, that the pantry is stocked with food, or is likely to be). By contrast, a movement that did not seem motivated, or undertaken “for the sake of” an end (at least on some description), or that did not seem responsive to beliefs about the world, or both — this movement would be difficult to classify as “action” at all, rather than a “occurrence” of some kind. (The latter would be “rational” only in the sense reserved for the impersonal, mechanical workings of law-governed nature.)
Lear is suggesting, I think, that a dream may, on its face — at the “manifest” level — appear to both the dreamer and the analyst (for whom it is recounted) as would an irrational bodily “movement,” concerning which neither motives nor beliefs could be identified. On their surface, dream and movement alike are meaningless, irrational in every respect apart from the pseudo-rationality of blind succession. But analytic interpretation discloses both the latent “wish” (proto-desire) and censoring “conviction” (proto-belief) of the dreamer communicated by that dream; and together, the presence of these items certify the proper meaning and rationality of the dream.
Our prospects of discerning cogent, determinate “wishes” or “convictions” in dreams seem dim, initially, since dream-experience is typified by disjointedness, inconsistency, fluctuations, and instability. In fact — though Lear does not take up this thread — one might suppose that the proper analogy is not with actions lacking any discernible desire or belief, but with those that appear chaotically overloaded with many desires and beliefs that contradict both themselves and one another. Such an anarchical, “psychotic” action, were it patterned after dreams as we know them, might for instance express a “desire” for excitement or human connection, but also — a moment later or even at the same time — for stasis and solitude; just as it might express the “beliefs” that it is at the moment both day and night. Here again, though, we’d have difficulty identifying such quasi-actions as meaningful or rational.
Once again, in an argumentative gesture that is by now familiar, Lear claims that the “facts” of analytic practice violate some of Freud’s own theoretical systematizations, the notorious “metapsychology.” In particular, in this case, the identification of wishes as proto-desires, and censorship as proto-belief, encourages a “developmental” schema, marked by continuity and immanent growth, rather than a “dichotomous” theory that leaves necessary connections imponderable.
In this vein, the chapter’s middle section contains Lear’s criticism of Freud’s “pleasure” and “reality” principles as descriptions of psychological functioning. (This distinction is famously codified in Freud’s “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning.”) Lear’s main objection, it seems, is that these principles are so incommensurable with each other at the level of form, it is obscure why one should ever develop into the other. More concretely, Lear questions the logical coherence of an organism that hallucinates originally in order to gain pleasure. This must be a “function” it acquires later since, to begin with, the organism “wishes,” not for the hallucination of the satisfaction it has in fact received — say, at the mother’s breast — but rather, as Lear puts it, “for the real thing” (82).
These distinctions matter, for Lear, because we want a self-consistent way of characterizing the “infantile wishes” ostensibly at the root of dreams (in addition to all neurotic productions), that is commensurable with the adult “desires” they eventually become, or fail to become. So long as we conceive wishes as essentially wishes for hallucinated pleasure — rather than acquiring this function at a later stage — we will be unable to make sense either of its development into desire, or of the adult’s attitude to these repressed wishes as they emerge in the dream.
To see why this is so, Lear takes from Freud’s writings the example of an adult dreamer who is disconcerted by a dream, the latent content of which conveys a “wish” — conserved, untouched, from childhood — for the death of a loved-one:
[T]he horrified reaction of an adult to his dream can be explained as the reaction of the emotional-desiring part of the adult toward the childhood wishes that live on unconsciously in his soul. But while the mature adult does not desire the death of a loved one, even though he continues to harbor an infantile wish, it does not make sense to claim that the horrified reaction is toward a wish aimed at a hallucination. The horrified reaction is toward a wish for the real thing. (84)
From the start, then, the infant’s “wish” — however inchoate, obscure, and fantastical — aims at something beyond hallucinated satisfaction. It is “directed onto the world from the beginning of mental life” (84).
Now, Lear does not deny that infant experience, and later the unconscious, are indeed characterized by many of the features, activities, and pressures Freud ascribes to “primary process” and collects under the rubric of the “pleasure principle.” Lear accepts that so-called archaic mental functioning is and remains associative, imagistic, figurative, disrespectful of logic (especially the principle of non-contradiction), and so on. In fact, Lear’s reading depends on the recognition of these elements. What he nevertheless insists upon, as against the letter of Freudian metapsychology, is the spirit of “immanent” unfolding implicit in analytic practice and even, occasionally, in Freud’s own reflections:
The point is only that the transition from primary to secondary process lies on a developmental continuum of mental functioning. The concrete images of primary process may be preconceptual, but they are also protoconceptual. They are that from which concepts emerge. (84-85)
Above all, Lear’s postulate of love as a natural force retroactively confers a Freudian imprimatur on the revisionist, Aristotelian reconstruction he undertakes.
I will say more about this developmental “continuity” in the next entry.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 3 (VIII)
The middle chapters of Lear’s book continue his revisionist reading of Freudian psychoanalysis. Not only does Lear reconceive “catharsis,” the mutative cure, in accordance with Freud’s tripartite revolution in human self-understanding; he now proceeds to treat the “theories” of dreams, interpretation, sexuality, and love along the same lines — once again, exploding the classical metapsychology on behalf of analytic practice, observation, and experience.
In Chapter 3, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Lear examines the quintessential domain in which “mind,” after Freud, beings to “see itself at work” (69), that is, under the aspect of “archaic mental functioning.” We canvassed this theme at some length in our discussion of the Introduction, so I will simply insert a reminder: Freud’s revolution consisted partly in mind’s “discovery” of itself in areas, and at levels, it had never thought to look — indeed, where it had vigorously resisted looking. Freud identified mind, as Lear puts it, “among the flotsam of dreams, physical symptoms, slips of the tongue” (71). This raised the more properly philosophical question of criteria: how will we know that a particular process, episode, or “occurrence” is in fact a manifestation of mind — archaic mind — when no such thing is evident to conscious mind? Psychoanalysis answers that an alteration in that very “process,” in response to interpretation, provides the required evidence that it was an instance of minded “behavior,” after all.
Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Lear suggests, established the still-unsurpassed prototype for all subsequent approaches to archaic mind. “[I]t is here that Freud begins to understand what is in the unconscious and how it works” (70). In the broadest sense, psychoanalysis identifies the covert “rationality” in what seems to defy that categorization, in the putatively “irrational.” This is what mind’s self-recognition in its “others” involves in practice. And to show that a “happening” such as a dream bears an unsuspected rationality is to attribute to it a meaning. Thus “every dream has a meaning” (71), an “intelligibility” (71), and so — in some respect we will need to clarify — a “rationality.”
Lear’s treatment of “meaning” and “rationality” as cognates has enough of a philosophical pedigree that he does not detain himself substantiating his approach. We might, nonetheless, quibble with such an undeveloped assertion. Certainly there are traditions — say, religious ones — in which this identity is far from self-evident. Nor, on roughly opposite grounds, do naturalistic scientists suppose that, in their search for “rationality” in nature, they are also uncovering its “meaning.” Particle physicists, too, discovers a “rationality” in nature, an intelligibility and lawfulness in the transactions of objects, though it might not occur to them or anyone else to adduce this as evidence of nature’s “meaning” or “mindedness.” We seem unlikely to find traces of mental functioning, archaic or otherwise, in such a “rational” order. (Though others, for instance Hegel, appear even here to develop contrasting views.)
The Freudian criterion for rationality in dreams, and in other happenings of the sort, must accordingly be more stringent than this. It would not suffice, for Freud’s ambitious claims, to locate in dreams a “lawfulness” analogous to that of heavenly bodies or of atoms. One could imagine a “discovery” that dreams evince the same sort of lawfulness, regularity, and even predictability definitive of other processes in “blind,” inanimate nature. (Perhaps, before long, experimental sleep research will postulate some such physiological regularities.) But these hypotheses would not finally touch the “meaning” of dreams in any but the thinnest, most metaphorical sense. We may speak, say, of science yielding the “meaning” of particle “behavior.” This animistic language is a conceit, however, and the responsible scientist will stop short of supposing the theory has located mental functioning in that domain, and for good reason.
What then is the stringency of Freud’s identification? What sort of rationality do dreams covertly possess, such that they also qualify as meaningful — in a way, moreover, that planetary motions do not? Unsurprisingly, the rationality at issue is one characteristic of human behavior, and therefore will involve such items as desires, emotions, intentions, objects, aims, and the rest. Actions that we recognize as meaningful, as redolent of mind — that is, as actions at all, rather than merely natural “happenings” — manifest exactly this repertoire. In fact, according to a typical way of thinking, action is rational only when it includes these elements, and in proportion to to their mutual harmony. (Aristotle, for example, links intelligent action to the “mean”: having the appropriate feeling, to the appropriate degree, in the appropriate situation, and so on.) To be sure, Lear’s claim is analogical; dreams are not literally actions. Rather, “dreams are like actions” (71), inasmuch as — like dreams — “action is by its nature meaningful” (72).
It follows that, if dreams, too, are meaningful, it is by virtue of some property or properties they share with action. The specific properties that interest Lear, in this connection, are “desire” and “belief.” Action — when intelligible as action — is propelled by a desire (the satisfaction of which is sought) and constrained by belief (regarding inter alia the circumstances in which action unfolds). The absence of either ingredient will vitiate the action’s appearance of rationality. A human movement which seemed neither to follow any imputable desire, nor to reflect (or respond to) beliefs about reality, would not register as “action” at all — let alone as action meriting the designation “rational.”
Now, both of these ingredients figure in dreams, too — or at least approximations of them. “Just as an action is the attempt to satisfy desire under the constraint of belief, so a dream is the attempt to gratify a wish under the constraint of censorship” (73). Or again: “The dream, then, is like an action: it is an attempted gratification of a wish under the constraint of certain sorts of beliefs” (74). According to Lear, censorship itself — which prevents the dreamer from recognizing the nature of both the wish and the conflict over it — represents a package of “beliefs, hopes and values” (73), a full “outlook” that constrains the realization of the dream’s wish. The dream is therefore “meaningful,” “intelligible,” and (after a fashion) “rational,” inasmuch as it approximates properties we expect of “action” that merits these designations. Accordingly, analytic interpretations disclose rationality in dreams, rendering them intelligible as expressions, at the “manifest” level, of a “latent” level bearing just these properties.
In the next entry, I will develop and illustrate these ideas.