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During the Freud wars of the ′90s, Jonathan Lear's voice stood out for its eloquent defense of Freud's enduring importance for our culture. In the essay, “On Killing Freud (Again),” which originally appeared in 1995 in the New Republic (and was reprinted in Open Minded [1998]), Lear makes the case passionately but not heatedly that psychoanalysis—far from being marginal—is consistent with the deepest thinking in Western culture because of its refusal to neglect, deny, or soften human suffering. The commitment to the unconscious, according to Lear, gives psychoanalysis a distinctive understanding of the limits of self-knowledge and the inevitability of self-deception. Lear's avoidance of the use of technical language in explicating psychoanalysis to nonpsychoanalytic readers is especially noteworthy.
It is in this context that Lear also makes the bold proposal that psychoanalysis is a necessity, rather than a luxury, to a democratic society. Lear has not developed this idea as far as I am aware, and others seem to have overlooked it; yet, it has become even timelier now that we have new cause to reflect on issues concerning tolerance and freedom in a democratic society. One can only hope that Lear's intriguing idea might be taken up for further discussion and debate.
Lear always has been captivated by common themes in ancient Greek philosophy and psychoanalysis, and a number of essays in Open Minded grappled with these two perspectives. In Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life, which was originally delivered as the Tanner Lectures at Cambridge University, Lear meditates on Aristotle and Freud, both comparatively and individually. One can summarize the overall argument easily enough: psychoanalysis cannot be assimilated into ethics merely by acknowledging the unconscious as an obstacle to our aspiration to be virtuous. As Lear sees it,