Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXII)
The final chapter of Love and its Place in Nature, “Radical Evaluation,” summarizes Lear’s interpretations in a way that throws light both on Freud’s “revolution” and the permanent convergence of psychoanalysis and philosophy. The “I,” Lear repeats,
is essentially a product of a “good enough” — loving and so lovable — world;
must “incorporate” its drives, if it is going to develop; and
does not admit of third-personal, detached, external observation and explanation, so constituted is it by “love” — a force which, wherever it is active, precludes such a perspective
This last proposition — (c) — is particularly significant. What may appear as detached — say, the “neutral” clinician’s ex cathedra interpretation regarding the patient’s mental life — is in reality, upon the sort of examination conducted by Lear, a mediated expression of that same mental life. Interpretation is not imposed from the outside upon an object, archaic functioning, with an independent destiny; the analyst’s “concepts” are instead the realization, the terminus of that functioning in a unity of two minds.
According to Lear, one casualty of these results is the doctrine of “nihilism” allegedly promulgated by Nietzsche, glossed as follows:
“Both [Nietzsche and Freud] were master diagnosticians of unconscious motivation, but the conception of man’s place in the world implicit in Freudian psychoanalysis is just the opposite of the nihilism that flows from Nietzsche’s work. For simplicity, let us say that nihilism is the view that things in the world have value solely in virtue of being valued by humans. Nihilism portrays a world in which value is contingent, arbitrary, capricious” (184).
Now, as a reading of Nietzsche’s use of the term, this is questionable. As a rule, in Nietzsche’s writings, “nihilism” designates, not a theoretical position he is advocating, but the pervasive cultural malaise he is diagnosing — one he associates with disorientation, despair, alienation, etc, and which he refers (especially) to modernity’s rolling deracination of traditional sources of authority. (Ironically, the legacy of Judeo-Christian morality — a far cry from “the view that things in the world have value solely in virtue of being valued by humans” — is itself one of several culprits in Nietzsche’s account.) The view Lear has in mind, on the evidence, might be better named “subjectivism.” But even with this revision, I think Nietzsche is best left out of the story. There are passages in Nietzsche, certainly, that reflect Lear’s attribution — the ex nihilo self- and world-creation of the aesthetic genius — but the notorious innovator of philosophical “genealogy” was hardly a stranger to the world-responsiveness of mind, or history as it actually occurred, hence to the constraints that an era or psychological environment places on the the free “spontaneity" of mind. This strikes me as one of Lear’s rare lapses in precision when discussing the history of philosophy.
With these qualifications in place, let us return to Lear’s argument. Psychoanalysis undercuts the viability of “subjectivism” inasmuch as it stipulates certain “objective” conditions of subjectivity. (To be sure, the idiom of “objective” assessment has by this point in Lear’s argument an equivocal ring to it.) These conditions of mind are not simply “external” prerequisites of human life — such as oxygen, sunlight, nutrition, and the like. Lear is suggesting, I take it, that not only must a world exist, and with certain specifiable proprieties, in order for a “mind” to emerge; this world must also bear intrinsic value and meaning, antecedent to the mind’s own investments, since this is a condition of any investiture at all. So:
“From the perspective of Freudian psychoanalysis, it is not that humans make the world lovable by investing it with their love; it is because the world is lovable that humans can develop into creatures capable of loving it. Since the form of the world forms the human mind, there are constraints on what form the world can have if there is to be a human mind” (184-5).
As we discussed in the last entries, an “I” is in its innermost structure a more or less successful identification with, and internalization of, a “good enough” environment. In the complete absence of such an environment, no “I” could emerge (at least with the characteristics Freud distinguishes in it), since an utterly unlovable, unloving world would supply no traits with which to “identify” — and the I, again, is finally nothing apart from an accumulation of such identifications with (lost) love-objects.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 6 (XXI)
We have been reviewing the mechanism of “identification” in Lear’s account, and its significance in constituting the “I.” In particular, we have conceived identification as a response to, and compensation for, loss. To summarize: the It (id) experiences a loss — of the love-object — and the I (ego), by identifying with this lost object, offers itself up as a “lovable” substitute to the bereaved It. Again, in Freud’s words:
“When the I assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the it as a love-object and is trying to make good the its loss by saying; ‘Look, you can love me too — I am so like the object’”(163)
But what exactly makes this I “lovable” to the It? In other words: would any of the I’s identifications (with the lost love-object) suffice for the purposes of It-pacification? Or is something specific required? These questions bring us around to the central aspect of identification, hence the next ingredient in Lear’s account. Generally speaking, the complex object with which the I identifies — namely, the parent — is basically (albeit not infallibly) “loving.” He or she for the most part ministers to the infant’s needs or “drives” as they arise, inevitable frustrations notwithstanding, so that among the “traits” assimilated by the emerging I, this “loving responsiveness” looms large.
But this introduces a striking stipulation into the account we have been piecing together. Again, the newly-shapen “I” must be lovable to the “It” in order successfully to replace the lost love-object. Yet this means: to really be worthy of the Its affections, the I must embody precisely the original object’s “loving-responsiveness” as that was directed toward the It with its drives.
The last chapter prepared us for this logical convergence of the “lovable” and the “loving”: a lovable world is a loving world — only a loving world is finally lovable. Now, however, this convergence becomes the intra-psychical desideratum of mental health. For a successful identification — and all Is are allegedly products of more or less successful identifications — creates a rather specific self-relation. In particular, the self (as I, “ego”) loves itself (as It, “Id”), in this way winning the love of that It (formerly bestowed upon the love-object, now lost):
“But if we consider what it is about the world that the drives love, it would seem to be the parents’ organized, loving responsiveness to the child’s needs. A successful identification in a good-enough world ought thus to be more than just the taking in of a love-object. The emerging I ought to embody a loving, responsive relation to (the) it’s drives. For that is what it would be to identify with the love-object. That is how love tends toward higher unities in human life” (169)
Neurosis, by contrast, reflects a failure to achieve this type of identification, hence some version of disharmony between I and It, trait and drive. Whichever of the love-object’s traits are assimilated, however the I reforms itself, the It will not find that I lovable, will not be pacified, if that I lacks the one trait which imparts value to all others: namely, the trait of loving the It, with its bundle of spontaneous urges, impulses, needs.
Thus far, Lear has discussed only two of the agencies found in Freud’s structural model — the “It” (id) and the “I” (ego). He now describes the origin and development of the third agency, the super-ego, beginning with its conceptual precursor, the “Ideal I” (ego-ideal):
“One might say that both the I and the ideal-I differentiate themselves out of a prior, less differentiated I-state which might be called the idealized proto-I” (167)
This less differentiated, idealized proto-I, the infant’s normal mentality, does not sharply distinguish between fantasy and reality — among other dichotomies honored by the well-adjusted adult. More specifically, the infant perceives no sharp difference between what it would like to be and what it is — a difference imposed only later by secondary-process thinking. In Lear’s telescopic formula: “‘Fantasy’ is a term we use in higher-level conceptualization to describe mental activity that itself does not distinguish between fantasy and reality” (172).
This could not be otherwise, if only for chronological reasons. After all, the less complex infant mind “identifies” with the more complex adult mind (in the nature of things) well before it is equipped with any of its “fantasied” traits. How could an infant identify with these imponderably sophisticated traits, if not by means of the “magical” thinking that asserts: “I am, somehow, what I now aspire to be”? Once “in motion,” the development of mind sifts out the “I” proper from fantasied representations, including the “ideal-I” (ego-ideal). Before this self-polarization, however, neither the “I” nor the “ideal-I” exist as discrete agencies.
Yet by the same token, these agencies can only be instituted simultaneously: a self must posses both or neither, since being an “I” at all involves continuously distinguishing what one is, one’s reality, from fantasied self-representations such as the ideal-I one would like to be, bearing all the (as yet unrealized) traits and capacities implied by one’s identifications.
Let us linger a moment over the tragedy, or at least the poignancy of this insight: the division of “is” from “ought” is a condition of outgrowing the infant’s “idealized proto-I” and thence having an “I” at all. “The sense of distance, of falling short of what I might be, is thus not an accident: it lies at the hear of the I’s existence” (167). It seems that this unsurpassable distance of an I from its ideal-I can only be felt as dissatisfying, at best, and at worst an intolerable agony. Lear himself distinguishes gradations: “In a pathological case the sense of distance will be overwhelming…But in a good-enough world, the gap between I and ideal-I will not be too great” (167-8). (I examined this thought in my commentary to Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. There I quoted Freud’s conjecture that, whenever the postulated “distance” between “I” and “ideal I” is overcome, so that critical self-monitoring is suspended entirely, it is mania that results: “[I]t cannot be doubted that in cases of mania the ego and the ego ideal have fused together”(82).)
Lear’s penultimate chapter now draws to a close on the goal of a clinical analysis, or of a human life more broadly. “My task, as a would-be individual, is to…make the It and my super-I my own” (178). But this task of dis-alienation — retracting into oneself what appears most external — presupposes an antecedent, constitutive “expulsion.” The I comes about piecemeal, from out of the undifferentiated “swirl,” by rejecting (above all: repressing) whatever is incompatible with its emerging “identity” (identifications): the “not Is” of It and super-I.
Afterwards, via either healthy development or, failing this, analytic intervention, the self-alienated mind of the neurotic (hypostasized by Freud as a natural fact), may suspend or dissolve its internal divisions. Here Lear blames the well-documented conditions of conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis for the Freudian “misconception that the soul has discrete parts” (174-5). In fact, Lear suggests, the mutual-estrangement of the sectors of mind characteristic of some neuroses is codified, in classical psychoanalysis, as a universal feature of mind: “before concluding that the soul does have parts, one ought to consider that this configuration is a manifestation of illness” (175).
Lear now concludes, in some elegantly symmetrical formulations, that the self (under the “I” aspect) must re-admit the It and the super-I together, since the alienation of one invariably parallels that of the other. They are, figuratively speaking, equidistant from the I. The needed “transformations” — the softening of the super-I and the acceptance of the Id — “are of a piece” (175). As Lear puts it: “It is because of a harsh super-I that the drives are so violently repressed. With the integration of the super-I into the I, there is new room to incorporate the It as well” (175).
In the next entries, I will discuss the final chapter of Love and its Place in Nature.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 6 (XX)
Lear is interested in the concept of identification, not as “a neurophysiological process,” but as a “psychological act” (161) — with the resonances of first-personal perspective, and (after a fashion) free spontaneity suggested by this phrase. “I do not reflect the world, I devour it” (161). The first, ur-identification, “narcissistic identification,” is the basis upon which all subsequent “hysterical identifications” (162) rest. For this original identification constitutes the I as something discrete, “for whom” a world, too, emerges as separate.
But Lear’s descriptions of this ur-identification are paradoxical, and I would like to take a moment to sharpen this paradox. On the one hand, out of their undifferentiated diffuseness, identification establishes the “I” and “world” as distinct items, imparting to each a structure and complexity they formerly lacked. On the other hand, this same identification also signals a recognition of the world’s externality — indeed, constitutes a compensatory reaction to that recognition. (Hence identification is also a strategy to overcome the unwelcome discrepancy between “I” and “loved-object,” the need and its satisfaction.)
Simply put, the paradox is that the “dichotomy” of I and world is both the premise and product of identification. We may soften somewhat the edges of this paradox by distinguishing between phases:
The original frustration of a separate world: ‘The breast is independent, does not automatically manifest in response to my “omnipotent” wishes.’ Such externality is merely implicit or, in Hegel’s words, “in itself,” an sich. It registers only brute separation — that the world is separate, not how. There is a form, but as yet no content, to the “I” and its opposed “world.” This intuition is the “premise,” in response to which the compensatory act of identification has any sense at all.
At the same time, however, the “narcissistic identification” (162) catalyzes the I’s development. Indeed, this act confers on the formal, empty “I” whatever structure or determinacy it is ultimately going to possess.
Lear’s gloss on this paradox — a “dialectic,” he writes, “of development…fueled by love and loss” (163) — contains but does not, I don’t think, resolve it: “I become an I in response to the fact that there is a separate world that is not identical with me” (163).
(To belabor a moment longer our paradox, we might quibble with Lear’s phrasing: does not the “fact” of a “separate world” presuppose, indeed, simply name the “I” purportedly built upon only afterwards out of compensatory identifications? In my view, Lear would require something like the distinctions between phases or moments — in-itself and for-itself, implicit and explicit, form and content — to address this quibble.)
In any case, Lear puts the I’s subsequent development this way: “I identify with the world because I am not identical with it. I take the world in, and thus constitute myself, as compensation” (163). (The language of “compensation,” we will note in passing, carries a tragic implication. For it means that the traits that distinguish the I both from the world and from other I’s — say, the warmth of mother, the self-discipline of father — are each of them products of frustration.)
But what is the I, exactly? Following Schelling, Hegel called nature “petrified intelligence.” For Freud, the “I” is similarly the petrification of libido, for it preserves in its characterology a record of lost love-objects. “Libidinal energy has been transformed into psychic structure” (165), so that “one might thus think of psychic structure as structured love” (165).
What exactly are we to make of this imagery? Developmentally, a primordial unity is dispersed: the breast I initially fancied a part of me — a function of my will — is experienced in its painful separateness, its “independence.” How does one rectify this loss of a love-object? Freud’s answer is, roughly speaking, the distinctions contained in the structural model itself: among the agencies of mind, it is the “It” (i.e. the id) that feels the loss. By contrast, the “I” is able to incorporate traits of the lost object to placate this grief-stricken “It.” [Lear insists on restoring to the Latinate “ego” and “id” their colloquial forms — a well-meaning decision that nonetheless insistently stalls the reader — this reader, in any case — most familiar with the technical translations.]
Hence the “It” can be consoled. It is to an extent prepared to accept — in the absence of the lost object — another object, a substitute, that is sufficiently similar. And this capacity constitutes precisely the psychological mechanism we are after: by reforming itself on the pattern of the lost object — by altering its own character — the “I” is able to offer to the (undiscerning, magical-thinking) “It” just such a substitute. “By fashioning itself after a lost love, the I offers itself [to the It] as dependable compensation for a fickle world” (163).
Lear quotes a passage from the Ego and the Id containing a wonderful image (one that I have considered in another context):
“When the I assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the it as a love-object and is trying to make good the it’s lost by saying; ‘Look, you can love me too — I am so like the object’(163)
And a moment later, Lear quotes an equally evocative image from the same text: “the character of the I is a precipitate of abandoned object-investments (164), so that this I “contains the history of those object-choices” (164). Lear even seems to be pushing Freud a step further: the I is simply the history of its — lost, frustrated — object-choices.
Thus, to return to our central questions: Why does Freud believe that the “I” of today indexes the “I’s” of yesterday? How does the present conserve the past? Lear must have something like the following chain of reasoning in mind:
Psychological growth issues from identification — the I assumes capacities and traits of the more complex “objects” it mirrors
But there is nothing to spur these acts of identification until the perceived “unity” between loving-self and loved-object is fragmented — I am made to realize, by frustration, that mother and I are not actually “one,” so I “incorporate” her as a permanent item in my internal world
It follows that loss explains growth and its particular pattern
The I gradually becomes the object[s] it loses — via mimicry, emulation, internalization, self-shaping, enculturation, i.e. all the devices of identification. For only this “mourning” procedure enables it to overcome these losses, persuades the injured party — the “It” agency — that either no loss has occurred or, at least, having occurred, has perforce been rectified. (We must again bracket the philological objection I made in the last entry: at the time of “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud seemed to pathologize identification as a mechanism, not of mourning, but precisely of melancholia.) To summarize, when Freud writes that “the character of the I is a precipitate of abandoned object-investments” (164), that this I “contains the history of those object-choices” (164), he must mean something like: ‘Scrutinize the character and biography of any person, and you will find that the structure of his or her “I” — traits, tendencies, capacities — is (as a totality) the result of identifications with lost objects, and precisely as compensations for these losses.’
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 6 (XIX)
Two chapters remain in Lear’s book — two chapters in which to draw together all the preceding materials and produce an answer to the question, ‘What is love, considered as a force in nature?’ Lear has at each step infused the Freudian letter with Aristotelian spirit, and in a way that challenges not only the traditional self-understanding of psychoanalysis, but an entire conception of science. We have by now some handle on two of the three aspects of Freud’s “revolution,” as Lear outlined them in the book’s Introduction:
The uncanny notion of “archaic mental functioning,” which expands mind’s arena and thus mind itself;
The program for a “science of subjectivity” in which neither “science” nor “subjectivity" bear clear, uncontroversial meanings. (What is science when the “observational” standpoint is relativized or outright abandoned? And what is a “subjectivity” that embraces archaic mental functioning? — Indeed, what can we grasp of a “subjectivity" that is not a scientific “object” — that is, something which can under no circumstances and by definition be “objective?”)
But what are we to make, really, of the claim — by the Learian Freud or the Freudian Lear — that
(3) Love is a natural force?
Lear has removed “archaic mental functioning” from the positivist realm of dichotomy, discharge, partes extra partes, and restored it to its rightful place on a teleological path that culminates — or fails to culminate — in that “gesture of love” called interpretation.
For Lear, the practice of psychoanalysis furnishes the conditions — secures the “holding” environment — in which anything in “mind” naturally pressing for self-understanding may receive a hearing. This, too, demands and evinces love. All of the analytic props, techniques, and activities serve the same telos. These serve the “catharsis,” the emotional re-orientation, that permits whatever has been split off from awareness — ideas, wishes, emotions themselves — to speak in a conceptual language these items have never possessed.
But in these descriptions, the concept of love seemed to have mainly a metaphorical application. The “unifications” carried out spontaneously in healthy psychological development, and by analytic insight in cases where that development has stalled or decomposed, are evidence of “love,” perhaps — but only in some artificially expanded sense of the term. In any case, I considered this an appropriately skeptical reaction to the argument emerging in earlier chapters, including in the Introduction.
But in the last chapter Lear began to connect these early intimations of love in psychoanalysis with certain of Freud’s speculative flights, in his late writings, to construct a transcendental figure. Love is elevated from its traditional status — nearly an embarrassment to psychoanalytic austerity — to a logical condition of possibility for anything like human experience.
Let us rehearse the main steps of Lear’s transcendental account:
To “have” a world is — so the argument runs — to establish a libidinal investment in it; to lack this investment is to have no world, no sanity.
This investment does not occur automatically, any more than the “I” whose investment it is. These are achievements.
The condition of possibility for these achievements — the upsurge in an “I” of “love” for a “world” — consists in an antecedently “lovable” environment.
But such a “lovable” environment is finally, we are now told, a sufficiently loving environment.
A “good-enough world” — lovable, because loving — is the stimulus, or perhaps the “summons” (as Fichte famously put it) that effects the I’s indigenous power or “force.” Love as a natural, “objective” force finds and activates itself in the “subject,” even as the subject:
“The individual, he [Freud] realizes, cannot be understood other than as a response to certain forces that permeate the social world into which he is born” (156).
We would like now to know more about this world, how it’s constituted, and how exactly it structures the emergent “I,” or accounts for its characteristics. At this place, Lear turns to Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” — purportedly the text in which just these essential connections are drawn: “Psychic structure, Freud realizes, is created by a dialectic of love and loss. The structure of the mind is an inner recreation of the structure of the loved world” (160). According to the essay, “Identification…was the normal process by which an I comes to be” (160), or again, “the most primitive form of psychic response to a loved world” (161).
But I will end with a brief quibble. I have already discussed this area of Freud’s thinking — the nature and function of “identification” — in my own commentary on “Mourning and Melancholia,” as well as in other places. While Freud eventually seems to recognize the positive, non-pathological function and value of identification — in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and in the Ego and the Id — my sense is that, pace Lear, the “Mourning” essay only indicates this mechanism’s negative value. In other words, in this place Freud indicates that “identification” is only put into action where normal “mourning” fails and pathological “melancholia” arises.
Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 5 (XVIII)
In the remainder of chapter 5, Lear begins to provide content to the position anticipated schematically in the Introduction and signaled in the book’s tantalizing title, Love and its Place in Nature. We may quote several lines that indicate the flavor of this newly won content:
“[It] is a condition of there being a world that it be lovable by beings like.” (142)
“Sex thus metamorphosed into love…human sexuality is an incarnation of love, a force for unification present wherever there is life.” (147)
“In his treatment of pathologies of sexual experience, Freud happened onto a force which, as his research developed, expanded beyond anything one could easily recognize as sexual.” (148)
For Lear, one important feature of this emerging concept — love as a natural force — seems to be its internal tension. This tension follows, not from love’s opposition to a separate force (say, the death drive), but from its own, self-contradictory impulsions. What sort of tension has Lear identified? In which antithetical directions is love pulled?
Lear accepts at face value Freud’s reference to Plato’s Symposium and looks there for a theoretical elaboration that Freud himself intimates without specifying. And he writes: “Love pulls us in two directions” (148-9), which correspond in a rough way to regression and progression, towards the undifferentiated and the differentiated, to the earlier (past) and the later (future).
What exactly does Lear have in mind here?
On the one hand, love for Freud names the unsurpassable yearning to recover what has been lost, “a tendency to return to earlier stages at which we have received gratification and love” (149). The pensée that, at the level of archaic mental functioning, all finding is a refinding confirms this regressive aspect. Subsequent love-objects appeal to the lover with the promise to restore the original, undiminished bond that, in the event, they can for logical reasons only “approximate.” Per definition, after all, these subsequent love-objects are not the original.
This first trend, then, is “love’s pull toward the primitive” (150) — toward, in the case of an individual, relations that dissolve the boundary separating self from other, in an effort to recover “the original intimate bond…between an infant not-yet-I and a mother-world” (150). An adult-in-love plunges back into that inchoate, undivided state he left only reluctantly and for which he never once stops yearning. And in the case of groups, too, this regressive pull is discernible, albeit on a much greater scale: “An erotic tendency for society to regress to a primitive, undifferentiated mob” (150) — one of those disturbing explananda treated in Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. From this standpoint, love — when consummated — consists in a renunciation of achievements painstakingly attained by the I: separation, differentiation, individuation, even reality-testing to a degree. (In Civilization and its Discontents, as I pointed out in the previous entry, Freud groups adult romantic relations together with psychosis.)
But on the other hand, and strikingly, “love…also pulls us in the opposite direction” (150). Not only, that is, does love draw mind backwards, towards recovery, restoration, and the abolition of psychic achievement; love also “fuels human development and pulls us toward higher, more differentiated unities” (150). Here again Lear departs from Freud’s own self-understanding: Freud himself treats love under its progressive aspect as “a brutally natural unifying force” (151), disregarding — even repudiating — its psychological existence. Indeed, for Freud, the increasingly “differentiated” unities accumulated through love are best grasped as “substitute” satisfactions, accepted only when, and because, “the backward-running path of regressive satisfaction” (151) is obstructed by repression.
What is the “first-personal aspect” (151) of love in its progressive sense? What is its “quality” or, again, what is it — as Lear provocatively asks — that “lovers are trying to do” (151)?
“When it is manifested in humans, love is…a psychological force. So there must be something that it is like for the human who is striving to unify…[I]f humanly incarnated love is a psychological force, there must be something the he is trying to do” (151)
Lear notes in passing that, given the repeated identification of libido with Platonic Eros, it is “strange…that Freud did not try to capture the point of love within human life” (152) — strange, too, we might add, to encounter in the book’s last chapters such a frank statement of the massive lacuna Freud must fill in.
(If, that is, Freud does not even “try” to discern love’s point, it is harder to see how anything “implicit” in his writings can add up to a Freudian idea of love. Moreover, we might demand some explanation for Freud’s “oversight” in this area.)
Freud ought to have taken a greater interest in this question, Lear suggest, since by the middle 1920’s (in the “Economic Problem of Masochism”) he’d virtually conceded the inadequacy of purely “quantitative” accounts of libido and so “ultimately undermines his mechanistic model of the mind” (152). Freud is led by observation and inference to an appreciation of the “qualitative factor” (152) without, however, searching for this factor in the only location is can be found, namely, “in the lover’s experienced relation with the object of his love (152-3). And this “experience” — whatever the physiological scaffolding — is not, we have seen, that of “discharge” directed toward some impersonal object, the latter conceived as “a mere receiver or inhibitor” (153) with essentially arbitrary qualities. “Love is not just a feeling or a discharge of energy, but an emotional orientation to the world” (153). And, importantly: “That orientation demands that the world present itself to us as worthy of our love” (153).
And this last rider, finally, unites Lear’s psychological desideratum for grasping love (our perception of the object’s “worthiness” of love as a necessary part of what the experience is “like”) with the main, transcendental argument he has begun to unfold (regarding the conditions of possibility for any experience at all). This “worthiness” in and of the world, the object, the beloved — “what it is about the world that, in our eyes, justifies our love” (153) — is precisely “the qualitative factor that needs to be captured” (153).
In fact, Lear does put a point on this quality, specifying what it is that, in the generic lover’s view, makes the world “lovable.” And the answer, when finally hear it, should not surprise us at all. Indeed, Lear’s answer has the sound of something inevitable: “[W]hat it is for the world to be lovable is for it to be loving” (154). A “loving” world — hence a “good-enough world” (154), in Lear’s Winnicottian turn —is what must be described. Such a world, finally, is the condition of possibility for the development of the (loving) I — the self-integration and self-differentiation through which it passes on the way to constituting those “greater unities” Freud describes.