You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is a delight when a writer capable in two fields is able to rub them together to illuminate. It is likely that in each field fresh insights can be produced by the simultaneity, and additionally it is possible that something entirely new will occur between the fields. In my experience this happens more readily during interplay between psychoanalysis and sciences such as anthropology, biology, and developmental psychology. In this volume real excitement is generated by a writer who is a working philosopher and a practicing psychoanalyst, and whose work in each discipline is informed by his dual professional identity.
Work of Plato, Aristotle, Wittgenstein, and others is laid out as an ongoing examination of various psychological issues, including transference, psychic structure, and unconscious conflict. Interwoven with this is the work of analysts, including most prominently Freud and Hans Loewald, Lear's particular mentor. Lear writes well, and one finds oneself in awe, reflecting on early striving and achieving in the ancient inquiries into the nature of the mind.
Some chapters are reprints of earlier publications. Chapter 2 was the elegant defense of Freud and psychoanalysis published in the New Republic a few years ago, in response to the anti-Freud zealots Jeffrey Mason and Frederick Crews, and Adolf Grunbaum and Sir Karl Popper. Lear does his work cogently and powerfully, then proceeds to a statement about the importance of psychoanalytic thought to the functioning of modern society. In his examination of Oedipus there is outlined the sacrilegious character who believes utterly that all “meaning is (immediately) transparent to human reason.” That character deformation not only typifies the Freud-bashers, Lear believes, but also presents a danger to the functioning of the republic, which psychoanalysis is well suited to ameliorate with its focus on the complexity, depth, and darkness of the human mind.
There are two attitudes presented here, one explicit and one