Wittgenstein and Freud

Jonathan Lear, who died in September 2025, was relentlessly curious about the human condition. His curiosity led him to become a philosopher and then a psychoanalyst – a very rare combination. His thinking was constantly evolving and would no doubt have continued to do so if he had not died at the relatively early age of 76. In this post, I look at a book he published in 1990 when he was still essentially a philosopher. In a second post, I will look at two books he wrote after qualifying as a psychoanalyst. Lear believed that the most appropriate (indeed, loving) way of building on Freud’s work was to develop it. He was never afraid of disagreeing with Freud and often suggested that he did not fully understand the nature of his own discoveries. Lear on Freud is always interesting, but it is often at least as much Lear as Freud.

Love and its Place in Nature is a bold book, particularly for an Anglo-Saxon philosopher. Not only does it reinterpret Freud, but it questions scientific orthodoxy, insisting that we recognise love as one of the most powerful forces in nature. Lear sees Freud’s greatest achievement as developing “a science of subjectivity” that provides a counterweight (and ultimately a challenge) to the objective sciences that explain natural phenomena. Lear claims that human reality is structured by subjectivity and that, if we are to understand human existence, we need to understand subjectivity. This may seem a welcome response to a scientific view of reality that leaves no space for free will and for the human. But the notion of subjectivity, which Lear places at the heart of his book, is deeply problematic. In practice, he is leading a fightback by one aspect of Cartesian dualism (immaterialism) in the face of the triumph of the other element (materialism). But the correct response to Descartes is neither to champion one element of his dualism nor to seek to balance them. It is to recognise that the mind/matter split is confused and to reject it.

So, what does Lear mean by “subjectivity”? To a large extent, he just assumes we know what it is. After all, aren’t subjective experiences the essence of human life? Well, no. Human life consists of interacting with the world and with other people. It is about doing and saying things, not about some mysterious succession of inner experiences. Obviously, our thoughts, feelings and intentions matter, but they do so in the context of our interaction with other people. They are part of our life with others. What is terrible about death is not that our private cinema show comes to an end, but that we can no longer do the things we like to do and be with the people we love. Life is not something that goes on “inside our heads”. Even the use of the word “subjectivity” here is misleading. If it is true that I am sad, then this is objectively true. My friends may point out all the good things in my life, but they would be no help if they insisted that my sadness was subjective and that objectively everything was fine. What I need from them is support, not a rejection of any attempt to understand how I feel. After all, people may have lots of good things and still be sad. Maybe they are struggling with the fact that all the good things come to an end. “Objectively”, that does, indeed, seem a sad thought.

Lear’s focus on subjectivity is derived from Descartes and his successors. They held that consciousness was the essence of human life and consisted of ideas and impressions. Their modern counterparts have the same basic view, but, rather than talking about mental representations, they talk about mental states. For example, Lear refers (with apparent approval) to the (misleading) Davidsonian claim that human action is caused by a combination of desire and belief. But there are signs that Lear is not fully comfortable with this model. He suggests that “the meanings, emotions and desire alive in a person’s soul play a crucial role in determining who that person is” (LPN pg4). This poetic sentence is a strange mishmash of ideas. Not only does it refer to “meanings” which are not an item on the standard philosophical list of mental states, but it refers to the soul, a concept that is somewhat at odds with the “mental states cause human action” view of the world. Lear’s interest in who we are marks a further break, since the standard Anglo-Saxon philosophical model is about explaining what human existence consists in, not about exploring metaphysical questions about who we are or what our lives might mean.

Lear saw Freud’s development of a science of subjectivity as the first element of his revolution. The second element was his discovery of an archaic mode of functioning of the mind. In Lear’s view, Freud over-rationalised this discovery. He was wrong to suggest that the Unconscious consists of repressed thoughts and desires; rather it is a form of mental functioning that precedes the more sophisticated, conceptualised form. Our (adult) stream of consciousness contains ideas that obey the rules of logic, but the proto-ideas of the Unconscious are loosely defined and merge into each other unpredictably. Dreams are not thoughts presented in a misleading form. They are the mind operating in its original mode. When we interpret dreams, we transform them, but this is an appropriate thing to do because this primeval mental effervescence aspires to the state of thinking. According to Lear, the archaic mind is based on “thing representations” (concrete, imagistic representations) and drifts from one representation to another based on vague similarity. When we link thing-representations to word-representations, this disciplines the former, fulfilling their potential and making them suitable for conceptual thinking. Our subjectivity is transformed – the swirl of proto-ideas and proto-emotions metamorphoses into thoughts and feelings.

According to Lear, hysterics are suffering from a relapse into this archaic mode of mental functioning. For them, vomiting (discharging) is a form of thinking. The role of therapy is to help them transition to a more sophisticated form of functioning where their lives are transformed from a succession of loosely-linked images and inexplicable physical actions into a series of thoughts and nameable emotions. Freud describes their treatment as cathartic: the talking cure discharges the “strangulated affect” and enables the hysteric to resume a normal life. But, for Lear, this is wrong. It is an expression of Anna O’s concrete thinking that her doctors misguidedly took at face value. At this point, Lear turns to Aristotle. This helps him escape the stream-of- consciousness way of thinking about the mind. It also enables him to move the debate towards Freud’s final Eros vs Thanatos conceptual scheme. Lear argues that emotions are not just affects or mental states, they are ways in which we orient ourselves to a world. The problem with the hysteric is their orientation towards their inner world. “The hysteric is so afraid of his own desires that he represses them… [and tries to] treat these desires as alien to himself” (LPN pg53). Therapy is not about discharge, it is about emotional development. It is about coming to love all parts of yourself.

The third element in Lear’s version of Freud’s revolution is the recognition of love as the most powerful force in nature. “Here is one way to link the idea of science of subjectivity with the idea that archaic mind is what this science is about: posit a basic development of force in nature of which archaic mind and the science that understands that mind are both manifestations. The transition from archaic mental activity to a mature understanding of that activity may then itself be viewed as a manifestation of this developmental force” (LPN pg97).

Lear supports this conclusion with an interpretation of Freud’s evolving views on sex. Freud focussed on the sex drive from the start of his work on nervous illness, but, as Lear rightly points out, what made this drive so attractive to him was its foundation in biology. It helped support his basic model where drives create excitations and these generate work for the mind whose role is to use and manage these excitations. In fact, the sex drive completely overshadows the other drive in Freud’s early model which is the self-preservative drive. Freud recognised this in On Narcissism: an Introduction, where he blurred the distinction between the two drives by suggesting that the libido initially invests the ego (primary narcissism) and then the external world. Lear welcomes the move away from the biological concept of sex towards the psychological concept of love, but he criticises Freud for suggesting that there is an ego (or an I) from the start of life. In his view, there is only a proto-I (just as there are proto-ideas and proto-emotions). So, how does the “I” come into existence?

Lear’s story is all about love. What is initially an undifferentiated field becomes an “I” and a world. This is not two events, but one. The field needs two poles to crystallise, so there is no “I” without the world and no world without the “I”. Furthermore, this transformation is powered by love. The world only exists because we love it. Love is our orientation towards the world, but for that orientation to be  possible, the world must be lovable, and it can only be lovable if it too is permeated with love. If we did not receive love from the world (if it was not a loving world or at least a world that was good enough at loving), we would not become stable selves and we would not inhabit a stable world. The mind would never get beyond the primitive mode of functioning where loosely connected images followed each other and bursts of affect manifested themselves in proto-emotions and random bodily actions.

But there is more to love’s transformation than this. In Mourning and Melancholia Freud recognised the existence of an inner world that we can orient towards. Initially, we populate this world with our care-givers via identification. Our minds operate on an archaic basis – the infant’s wish to be the father/mother leads to the belief that it is the father/mother. We get much more out than we put in from identification because we identify with more developed beings. If we have loving parents, the gap between the “I” and the ideal “I” is bridgeable – we can come to love our super-ego. But we also need to show some love to our id. Unlike hysterics, we need to accept responsibility for our drives, recognising what we have done and who we are. “It is through love that the boundaries of the soul are redrawn so that what once were taken to be forces of nature, I now recognise as my own active mind” (LPN pg177).

This is a wonderful story, but it does not seem very scientific. Isn’t the objective truth that our drives cause our actions? Perhaps it is necessary for our emotional development that we believe that it is love that makes the world go round, but surely this is not objectively the case? Doesn’t the objective trump the subjective? Bravely, Lear claims that it does not. He rejects what he claims is the traditional philosophical solution. Accepting that there are two views – the external view (that natural forces drive my action) and the internal view (that I am active and responsible for my actions) – but claiming that we have to stick to the internal view if we want to live a normal life. The external view is correct but we have to ignore it. This is unacceptable to Lear. He claims that Freud’s final Eros/Thanatos framework rejects the possibility of an external viewpoint that denies love. “Love is a basic natural force, and so the perspective of natural science must be one that includes love” (LPN pg181).

Lear offers a three-stage argument. Firstly, the individual (the I) is a response to and a manifestation of a loving, good-enough world. Secondly, the I develops not by abolishing the drives but by incorporating them. And thirdly, since the I (which is at the heart of everything we do including our scientific investigations) is a manifestation of love, there is no external perspective from which this achievement can be assessed (or called into question). Lear argues that both philosophy and psychoanalysis are quests for radical evaluation – searches for values that are not based on an authority outside the self. But they both risk falling into relativism and concluding that no such external viewpoint exists. He thinks that, if we take autonomy as our core value, we can avoid this pitfall. Autonomy is self-validating and is not undermined by the possibility of other viewpoints that reject it. It is the value that makes me who I am and the world I live in endorses this value and helped me to grow into it.

For Lear, radical evaluation does not take place from the outside; rather it too is a manifestation of love. An external perspective does not give us the way things really are. “If love is a basic force, the only objective validation of autonomy must be an internal validation; one that occurs within an outlook that values autonomy” (LPN pg211). Some have claimed that psychoanalysis is not a science, others have derogatively suggested that it is a religion. But, according to Lear,  we need to move beyond our worship of science and our knee-jerk rejection of religion. These categories need to be re-evaluated based on Freud’s discoveries. Our task is “not to locate psychoanalysis in the world but to work through psychoanalysis to relocate ourselves” (LPN pg219 and last sentence of the book).

Lear’s passion is clear and his arguments interesting. He breaks free from the confused sterility of 20th-century Anglo-Saxon philosophy and seeks to confront life’s important issues. But his arguments don’t really work. It is confused to suggest that philosophy is a method for discovering truth, and it is certainly not a way of demonstrating that there is only one way of understanding the world and our lives. Lear moves beyond a Davidsonian view of human action (and of human life), but his contrast between the science of subjectivity and the objective sciences is still a form of Cartesianism. Descartes was wrong to claim that we are immaterial substances, but this does not mean we are machines with a subjective dimension. We are people. We live in the real world, not in our heads. The Descartes-inspired focus on consciousness (or subjectivity) is misguided. There is no scope or no need for a science of subjectivity. Freud’s approach generates many insights into human nature, but these are not insights into the causal factors that underlie human behaviour. His insights have a distinctive basis, but they are more similar to the insights we garner from reading Shakespeare, George Elliot and other greater writers than to what we can learn from the natural sciences (or from scientific psychology).

The other aspects of Lear’s argument are also interesting rather than convincing. The archaic form of mental functioning that he suggests Freud discovered but misunderstood is itself a myth. What is the basis for (or indeed the meaning of) the claim that initially our “thinking” takes the form of images (thing representations) that pass through our minds on a haphazard basis? Similarly, it is misleading to suggest that for hysterics vomiting is thinking. We might (in more conventional Freudian terms) link their vomiting to their refusal to acknowledge some of their thoughts or desires, but this does not justify the claim that their minds have reverted to an archaic form of functioning. The final element in Lear’s argument is the claim that love is a basic form of nature. Lear is ambiguous about whether it is our social world that needs to give us love (and so be lovable) or the world in general. But the wider claim has no real basis, and the narrow claim boils down to the truism that it is difficult for people to develop a mature and stable self if they have little or no experience of loving and being loved. The latter seems a very weak basis on which to challenge the dominant science-based view of the world!

Nonetheless, I am sympathetic to where Lear is coming from. I think he is right to challenge the idea that science can tell us that all values are relative or that human life has no (objective) meaning. But this is not because science needs to find a place for love in its account of nature or because the developmental process that made us who we are means we have to believe in love for fear of cutting off the branch we ourselves are sitting on. Maybe our worship of science has gone too far. I think we do need to recognise its limit and be clear that it has no authority beyond those limits. What science has achieved is amazing and the power of its explanations can certainly lead one to embrace a view of the world in which there is no God, but it would be ridiculous to claim that science has proved there is no God. It has also not proved that there is no such thing as altruism or that Buddhist monks are wrong to worry about treading on insects. Some of the issues that matter most to us are not resolvable via scientific investigation, but that is not a reason for urging scientists to start building love into their explanations of natural phenomena.

Perhaps Lear himself came to recognise this, since his later books put forward different (but related) arguments for taking psychoanalysis seriously. I will look at those in another post.