Love and Its Place in Nature

Abstract

JONATHAN LEAR: Love and Its Place in Nature. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1998,243 pp., $12.50 (paper), ISBN 0-300-07467-0. Early in his career, Freud claimed that he had no interest in philosophy. Yet, later, in his works on culture and society, he admitted that at heart he had always been philosopher and explorer, not physician, or even able scientist. Freud's latent love affair with philosophy has not been lost on humanities scholars. They have joined the analytic ranks as theorists and practitioners. Jonathan Lear, the author of Love and Its Place in Nature, trained in philosophy, is member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and practicing analyst, trained at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. The subject of Lear's provocative essays is the philosophical implication of Freudian Psychoanalysis. He starts with the thesis that delineation of the vicissitudes of human individuation is the major contribution of psychoanalysis to knowledge; and dependent on the success of this pursuit, it will survive or not. Lear promotes his thesis by examining several of Freud's texts in more or less chronical order to show that psychoanalysis developed in large part as attempts by Freud to address discrepancies that arose as he sought to explain his clinical data in light of his previous theoretical assumptions. Central to these efforts, according to Lear, were Freud's continual attempts to demonstrate that the human mind unceasingly strives for self-understanding. Inappropriate behavior, as such, is due not to inappropriate emotions, but because the individual's difficulties in selfawareness have led to directing his emotions to inappropriate people. Emotions were conceived by Freud as a framework through which the world is viewed (p. 47), packaged with its own justification (p. 49). Consequently, Freud's therapeutic methods, according to Lear, are efforts to enable the patient to change the type of responsibility he characterologically assumes for his emotions. The problem with Lear's examination is that he fails to notice the unfortunate counterpoint to psychoanalysis' concern with individuation-social irrelevance and lack of attention to moral responsibility. In other words, psychoanalysis' most serious error is the notion that the psyche is located within the encapsulated self, removed from deteriorating social world-which leads to lack of responsiveness to social and community responsibilities of analytic patients. Of no less concern to this reviewer are number of Lear's contentions that characterize analytic inquiry as act of generosity and compassion (he regards Interpretation as an act of Love, p. …