Wittgenstein and Freud

The U.S. philosopher and psychoanalyst, Jonathan Lear, saw human beings as restless animals, whose defining trait was the uncontainable nature of their desire. No utopia that we can imagine will ever fully satisfy us – we will always want more. Lear’s interest in our irrepressible urge to transcend ourselves was already apparent in the first of his books we looked at, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). It is developed further in the books we shall consider in this post – Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life (2000) and Freud (2005, revised edition 2015). In both books, Lear continues his dialogue with Freud, exhibiting both an increasing tendency to challenge him and an increasing capacity to be inspired by him.

The starting point for Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life is the issue of how we should live. Lear hopes that psychoanalysis can help us devise a more humane ethics, one that recognises who we really are and offers a better compromise between our desires and the needs of society. This hope is not based on the claim that Freud discovered new scientific truths. In Lear’s view, psychoanalysis is best seen not as a new area of knowledge, but as a revelation about a disturbing aspect of human nature. He seeks to illustrate his point by examining an argument put forward by Aristotle. This is a fascinating choice, given how down-to-earth Aristotle is. How is Lear going to conjure up the paradoxical claims he loves from someone whose work is so firmly grounded in biology and in common sense?

At the start of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that all human action aims at a good and that the good has rightly been described as what everything aims at. As Lear points out, this claim does not work – Aristotle moves from the idea that every activity aims at a specific good to the claim that there is an ultimate good that all activities aim at. Lear does not treat this as a mistake. Rather he sees it as an attempt to introduce a new idea into our lives: the idea of a good that is not sought as a means but is an end itself. This idea serves as the foundation of Aristotle’s ethics, and he presents it as something no one should question. This is a seduction, an attempt to trick us into thinking that a system can be complete and have a rock solid foundation. Aristotle “injects a special use of an enigmatic signifier into our lives, and he puts it forward as something which ought to be an explanatory end-of-the-line” (HDRL, p. 22). His idea of the ultimate good appeals to us, but its meaning cannot be grasped. It seems to provide a foundation, but this is a fantasy. Our search for explanations will never come to an end.

Aristotle claims that we should orient our lives towards the ultimate good. If we cultivate the virtues, our lives can be coherent and, at the end of our lives, we can recognise that we have lived a good life. Lear rejects this seductive proposal. He thinks that any vision of this sort is misguided and confining. It limits us to one set of possibilities when human possibilities are (or should be) endless. Furthermore, he claims that Aristotle himself is not satisfied with his system. Towards the end of his essay, he throws a curveball, suddenly suggesting that an active life based on the virtues only provides second-rate happiness. It seems that the truly happy life is based on contemplation. This form of life reflects what is best in us (our divine intellect), but, more importantly, it is self-sufficient, whereas the life of virtue depends on us having opportunities to exercise the virtues. This new offer also does not work for Lear. A life that lacks for nothing is a life beyond desire – but the only thing beyond desire is death. So, what does Lear think Aristotle’s strange argument really amounts to?

Lear thinks Aristotle is trying to be realistic and to recognise that even the happiest life has disappointment built into it. If we compare ourselves to the gods, we are forced to recognise that they have it better than us. At best, we, mortals, can enjoy a limited form of happiness. But there is an upside to our mortality. We will always have something more to strive for. The fantasy of emulating the gods and enjoying a life of contemplation spurs us forward and helps us to understand why we are not satisfied. Paradoxically, “human happiness involves keeping happiness at a safe distance. It shouldn’t be too far away or we’ll get discouraged, but if it gets too close, we’ll start to feel some discontent with it and fantasize another happiness, lying just beyond the current horizon” (HDRL, p52). 

Lear detects the same sort of dynamic in Freud. He thought he had provided a complete account of human nature based on the pleasure principle and on its offspring, the reality principle. He thought his account explained the limited amount of happiness available to creatures with an id, an ego and a superego. But the trauma of the first world war called this into question. Veterans relived their traumas in their dreams, but these dreams did not satisfy repressed instinctual impulses. They were not wish fulfilments. Freud’s response was to argue that when the mental system is overwhelmed by external stimulus, it moves beyond the pleasure principle and tries to create the anxiety that would have prompted it to take action and avoid being subject to excessive stimulation. But it is too late to be anxious. So, the veterans find themselves blocked, compulsively repeating the trauma that undid them.

Freud tries to cover over this issue – initially, via the idea of a compulsion to repeat. But Lear disagrees. He accepts that there is a compulsion and that this generates repetitions, but he rejects the idea of a compulsion to repeat. In his view, the excessive stimulus leads the mind to disrupt itself, and every time it seeks to defend itself against this disruption, the same thing happens again. The veterans try to find meaning in this disruption, but it has no meaning and the attempt aborts. Freud misses this because he is not prepared to accept that mental activity can lack a purpose. Like Aristotle, he is hooked on teleology, and this leads him to move from the compulsion to repeat to the death drive. The manifest content of life is a striving for growth, but the latent content is a striving for death. While Aristotle invokes happiness as an enigmatic signifier, Freud invokes death. 

Lear criticises Freud for looking for a principle beyond the pleasure principle. In his view, this reflects that fantasy that our desire can be contained. If we want to appreciate the fullness of life, the full range of our possibilities, we need to examine different attempts to subsume human striving under a principle and see how they fail. This can help us find acceptable ways of living without a principle. But we have to abandon the attempt to explain the mind’s self-disruptiveness. For Lear, it is essential to human life that there is a remainder to life, something that is not captured in life as we have so far experienced it. This creates a pressure to capture that beyond, but instead we need to accept and live with that pressure. “To live with human possibility, one has to tolerate a peculiar kind of theoretical anxiety: the willingness to live without a principle. Only then can we begin to grasp the peculiar possibility of possibilities that human being opens up” (HDRL, p.165)

This is exciting stuff, but what should we make of it? Lear is a masterful rhetorician and his arguments are always thought provoking, but it is not always easy to know exactly what his claims are based on or how to assess their truth. Does the human mind really disrupt itself? Is it really the case that we can never be fully happy? Translated into ordinary language, these grand claims do reflect some aspects of human life, but it is not clear what follows from them. What does it mean “to live without a principle”? Why should problems with Freud’s theory of the mind have implications for how we live our lives? Beneath the impressive rhetoric, it seems that Lear wants to encourage an openness to life and a wariness about fixed “answers”. This may be admirable, but it is not necessarily the only or the deepest account of human nature that one might be interested in.

Lear’s book on Freud is intended as an introductory text, so it is more restrained than the book we have just discussed. As ever with Lear, it is lively and thought-provoking. In the 2015 edition, Lear focuses on Freud’s fundamental rule – that the analysand must say whatever comes into their mind, without censorship or inhibition. He claims that it was an empirical discovery that people cannot do this. They are unable to present themselves as they are, only as they would like to see themselves or as they think others want to see them. Characteristically, Lear puts a metaphysical gloss on this. He sees it as proof that something within the free flow of self-consciousness disrupts it. He hopes that, if we recognise this aspect of our being, we might be able to develop a fuller account of human flourishing because, unlike Plato and Aristotle, we will be able to flesh out what is involved in developing an integrated, harmoniously functioning psyche. Furthermore, the route to this integration involves applying the fundamental role. “As analysands become aware of the flow of their self-conscious minds, they become increasingly able to change their minds directly through their own self-conscious activity” (F, p. xvi).

The above may seem unproblematic, but it is worth noting two points about Lear’s approach to mind. Firstly, he uses the concept of self-consciousness in a radically ambiguous way. Sometimes he uses it in connection with the Cartesian picture of consciousness – it is the flow of thoughts and feelings that we (supposedly) know via introspection. In this sense, a perception, a thought, a feeling or a memory are all aspects of our self-consciousness. But he is not interested in self-consciousness in this sense. He is interested in how we think about ourselves. This has nothing to do with our ability to say what we can see or what we think about Donald Trump or what we are currently feeling in our right leg. Secondly and relatedly, his way of talking about the human mind places us in a passive role. It is the mind that disrupts itself rather than people who behave in contradictory ways or have ambivalent feelings. Similarly, it is consciousness that fails to flow freely; rather than people having difficulty being honest with others (or, indeed, with themselves). If analysands come to understand themselves better, this is not because they become better at introspection. It is because they become more prepared to accept aspects of themselves they were previously not prepared to recognise. 

Lear’s strange picture of mind distorts his account of what happens in an analytic session. He suggests that “as the analysand tries to speak her mind, she in effect establishes a membrane across which hitherto unconscious thoughts can pass into self-conscious awareness” (F, p. 14). This is a weird way of putting it. What Lear is really interested in is the way a pattern that the individual is unaware of can distort their lives. For example, someone’s life may be based on the unconscious idea that they are an unloved child. This idea structures the roles of the people they encounter and their responses to those people. When in the course of analysis they recognise that they have been following this script their whole life, there is a chance they will be able to break from it. This is an interesting perspective on the analytic process, but it has nothing to do with any membranes or with becoming a better observer of processes within one’s head. The individual moves from not recognising something to recognising it – to that extent, they become aware of something they were not previously aware of. But it is mystificatory to see this as a result of observing a quasi-physical process where something moves from the murky realm of the unconscious to the world of consciousness.

As a psychoanalyst, Lear is interested in patterns He suggests that the intrusions of the unconscious in our normal lives have a fractal quality. In the example above, the “I-am-an-unloved-child” pattern expresses itself in the individual’s close relationships, but also in their interactions with strangers, in the way they dress, etc. It also comes out in their dreams. Lear illustrates this point by exploring a dream from The Interpretation of Dreams – Freud’s botanical monograph dream. Lear notes how Freud’s associations to the dream bring out the central issue in his life, which is showing his father that he will amount to something. The dream contains material related to his achievements and its inclusion in his Magnus Opus reiterates the same message – I have achieved something. But his father died before he had the dream and published his book. Unconsciously, he does not think his father will ever recognise his achievements. Lear suggests that this pattern was in Freud’s unconscious but that he himself never came to recognise it. Instead, he acted it out – sometimes playing the role of the son (Meynert, Breuer), sometimes playing the role of the father (Jung, Ferenczi). His self-analysis generated insights, but without an analyst he was not able to work them through.

At the end of the book, Lear returns to the fundamental rule, but he remains caught in a strange form of Cartesianism. He claims that “in the psychoanalytic situation, the interface is so intimate between self-conscious awareness and the irruptions and movements of the unconscious that it becomes possible for the analysand to become aware immediately and directly of the efficacy of her own self-conscious thought” (F, p. 212). This is fair enough if it means that analysis encourages the individual to think more deeply about what they do and why they do it. But it is misleading to suggest that progress is about improving the analysand’s attentiveness to some mysterious cinema show in their mind. Lear suggests the individual can directly appropriate this unconscious activity, but what he is actually talking about is the individual coming to recognise certain aspects of their own behaviour. He says a cruel super-ego can mellow in the course of an analysis. But this does not involve the analysand observing their cruel superego via introspection and learning how to control it. Rather it involves them learning something about how they relate to themselves and seeing if they can change this. Lear rightly focuses on the essence of psychoanalysis which is personal change, but he presents this in a very misleading form.

Lear ends by praising psychoanalysis as a practical, poetic exercise of reason. He claims that it was “an empirical discovery of some magnitude…that the unconscious is not a teeming cauldron of atomic wishes but an astonishingly organized and unifying imaginative activity, often focused on fundamental problems of human existence” (F, p.213). This is an unhelpful way of presenting things. Psychoanalysis is about trying to understand people better, so it was inevitable that it was going to bring us face to face with the issues that matter most to people. The concept of the unconscious was developed as a way of trying to explore what really worries us, and, of course, that is going to include (or indeed focus on) the “fundamental problems of human existence”.

Unfortunately, Lear seems locked in the idea of the unconscious as something external to us. “The unconscious is not properly thought of as lacking a capacity, but as possessed of poetic, creative capacities of its own. The unconscious has its own form of mental activity. We are, I think, at an early stage of understanding what a thoughtful engagement of reason with the non-rational part of the soul could be. Psychoanalysis gives us the best insight we yet have into what it would be for thoughtful self-consciousness to take the non-rational part of the soul into account” (F, p213). But our unconscious is us. Lear is right that we have a lot to learn about ourselves, and he is also right that we will always have more to learn about ourselves, but it is a pity that he never managed to shake off the philosophical confusions that stuck to his thinking, despite his brilliance and despite his practical experience of helping patients grow.