Freud on His Head

...It is precisely because psychoanalytic interpretation "stands in a developmental relation to its archaic forebears, Lear submits, that "it can exert some influence over them...

...Lear decides at the very outset to "set aside the death drive," adding therapeutically that "there is something healthy about doing this...

...He contends that "Freud knew there wasn't a shred of psychoanalytic evidence for the death drive...

...Lear, however, does not stop there...

...Psychoanalysis is at its core committed to the process of individuation," he writes, "and it will flourish or wither depending on the value we place on the individual and the development of individuals in society...

...Lear, though, "prefers to speak of 'love' rather than 'eros' to avoid the pitfall of using a non-English term to muffle the intensity of Freud's thought...

...The Adlerian theory is characterized less by what it asserts than by what it denies," he scornfully wrote in 1914...

...Lear's denial of the death drive similarly reveals as much about his interpretation of Freud's thought as his postulation of love as the basic force in nature...

...Interestingly, when he urges grassroots support for the psychoanalytic way ofthinking, Lear switches from the Aristotelian idiom to the rhetoric of a liberal American politician...

...As the author himself acknowledges, "love has become almost taboo within psychoanalysis...

...Relying on Freud's clinical descriptions—"so rich that they provide us with the material to develop better conceptualization of what Freud was doing than he could provide for himself— Lear traces the master's thought from its origins in the Studies on Hysteria (1895...

...Moreover, Lear overlooks the fact that the Enlightenment idea of a being endowed with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness can scarcely be squared with Freud's pessimistic image of man...

...In place of this supposed urge to return to a more primitive state, Lear posits a ubiquitous upward thrust, "a basic developmental force...

...In its "most primitive activities," heargues, archaic mind aspires to consciousness and self-understanding: "It is as though archaic 'thinking' is a developmental process en route toward expression in terms of concepts and judgments...

...Consequently, Freud was wrong to denigrate archaic mind and to see unconscious thought processes solely as a distorting force...

...In the Freudian scheme, wish gives rise to fantasy, he points out, whereas desire leads to action...

...In other words, psychoanalysis, as originally conceived, was actually an elaboration of a hysteric's hunch...

...Still, to propose that "self consciousness is implicit in even the most primitive unconscious mental processes" does little to clarify relations between parts of the psyche that Freud tended to conceive as radically distinct...

...Lear, previously the author of two books on Aristotle, is a philosophy professor at Yale and a clinical associate of the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis...

...Pontalis' reliabledictionary of Freudian concepts is "love, genital...

...Rather, this Aristotle scholar goes on to Hellenize Freud by endowing the unconscious with something like an Aristotelian desire to know...

...If Lear tends to err on the side of cheeriness, he does write lucidly and his book is a provocative one...

...But his pitch is a touch demagogic in suggesting that to oppose psychoanalysis is tantamount to being against individual development...

...Although unconscious mental processes may in some cases eventually be brought into consciousness, that hardly means this was their aim from the start...

...Indeed, students of the mind have grown less and less able to speak about "love" or "nature" with a straight face...

...Freud taught that our motives are frequently even more obscure to ourselves than they are to others...

...of which archaic mind and the science that understands that mind are both manifestations...

...Thus the original psychoanalytic idea that catharsis can cure hysteria is "a conceptual expression of the hysterical state of mind," according to Lear...

...And psychoanalysis does not so much overcome the patient's resistance to the uncovering of unconscious wishes as "help direct and complete a process of mental development...

...Freud saw repression as a fundamental fact of mental life, while in Lear's hopeful view even the unconscious—which he calls "archaic mind"—strives toward selfunderstanding...

...He can also be rigorous, as when he usefully observes that contemporary Freud critics—especially the tendentious French—have blurred the distinction between "wish" and "desire...

...His theorizing, recently extended in poststructuralist and deconstructionist directions, has cast a shadow of doubt on the ideas of love, nature and the individual...

...In the book's most interesting chapter, Lear argues that psychoanalysis was born when a patient, Anna O., fantasized a "theory" about the rehabilitative effects of what she called "the talking cure...

...When one of Freud's disciples, Alfred Adler, strayed from the flock, the stern father of psychoanalysis reacted with contempt...

...contributor, "Wall Street Journal' Jonathan Lear deserves admiration for his audacity in calling his philosophical reconstruction of psychoanalysis Love and Its Place in Nature instead of something that would be more fashionable these days—say, "Sex and its Displacement in Culture...

...The bleakness of Freud's vision is radically toned down here, and some of the author's formulations, such as "subjectivity is upwardly mobile," settheFreudianmodel of thepsycheonitshead...

...Just as enlightened missionaries have sometimes rightfully discerned progressive elements in "primitive" religions, Lear is perhaps justified in viewing archaic mind as less than wholly irrational...

...His erudite and densely argued explication draws heavily on the biological myth Freud introduced during the latter half of his career in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920),whereerosbecomesabasic principle behind all human drives...

...To hear a man with such impressive credentials invoke the notion of love is reassuring—at least at first...

...the only entry under "love" in J. Laplanche and J.B...

...Now along comes Jonathan Lear proclaiming that we are able to become individuals by virtue of our natural capacity to love...

...One does not have to be either a doctrinaire Freudian or a deconstructionist to suspect that this happy gospel is too one-sided to be true, wish and desire notwithstanding...

...Freud and Josef Breuer converted her "chance observation" into a theory of catharsis...