Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul

Abstract

JONATHAN LEAR: Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998,345 pp., $35.00, ISBN 0-674-45533-9. rationale for bringing this book to the attention of psychotherapists is definitely the presence of chapter two, which was first published in New Republic, December 1995, under the horrendous tide of The Shrink Is In. In the book it is titled On Killing Freud (Again). I first saw this article in New Republic and was so impressed by it that I requested permission to reprint it when I was the editor of the Bulletin of the American Society of Psychoanalytic Physicians, but the magazine wanted so much money for permission to reprint that our little Bulletin could not afford it. All psychotherapists will gain by reading Lear's outstanding, erudite, and beautifully written defense of Freud and of psychoanalysis and his discussion of its place as we go into the 21 st century. Lear's is the best short response to the numerous mindless fanatic Freud-bashers that clutter up the popular literature today. rest of the book presents professional philosophical discussions enlightened by some of Freud's psychoanalytic concepts, such as internalization, externalization, sublimation, and so forth. It is scholarly, and unless the reader has some background in Plato, Aristotle, and Wittgenstein, it can be difficult to appreciate the subtlety of the author's arguments. As he writes, his book is attempt to bring some life into two activities which lie at the heart of our humanity (p. 3), that is, psychoanalysis and philosophy. Most of the chapters contain clever and sophisticated readings of rather well-known classical Greek texts, which Lear no doubt has been teaching about for years in his position as a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago where he is a John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor. He has previously published on Aristotle and on philosophical approaches to Freud's psychoanalysis. He has interesting things to say about the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, Plato's Republic and Symposium, the writings of Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, and others. Most of the chapters in this book have been published elsewhere in a variety of journals, ranging from the International Journal of Psychoanalysis to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. At times his writing becomes rather dense, especially in chapter five, that has the enticing title Restlessness, Phantasy and the Concept of Mind, an attempt to blend psychoanalytic with philosophical notions in quite an original way. There is in chapter seven an interesting and unusual interpretation of Plato's Symposium, which Lear considers to be both a tragedy and a comedy. Readers unfamiliar with that dialogue will have trouble following Lear's clever interpretation of it. This chapter was apparently not reprinted from another publication, and I found it to be the most original part of the book. …