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.
Open Minded: Working Out The Logic Of The Soul. By Jonathan Lear. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998, 342 pp., $35.00.
In some of his most illuminating essays, Freud wrote as a social critic, observing broad cultural tendencies from a point of view that was simultaneously detached and compassionate, discerning of human frailty, and not very hopeful. A few other psychoanalysts have from time to time assumed this prophetic role—for example, Wilhelm Reich in his saner early years, Bruno Bettelheim, and Erik Erikson. But beyond the professional journals, most psychoanalysts these days are silent.
Jonathan Lear is an eloquent exception. In these essays he takes on the Freud-bashers, traditional philosophy, and psychoanalysis.1 “Every profession in its heyday—and psychoanalysis was no exception—tends to be seduced by it own wishful self-image and to make claims for itself that it cannot ultimately sustain,” inevitably inviting attack and revisionist criticism (p. 18). Freud himself, no one now doubts, made serious mistakes in both theory and practice. Philosophy perpetuates a myth of rationality. And the Freud-bashers, in giving the unconscious a brush-off, are making a mistake of oedipal dimensions. The “oedipal” tragedy in Sophocles' play was not that Oedipus married his mother and killed his father, Lear remarks in the essay titled “Knowingness and Abandonment: An Oedipus for Our Time.” It lay rather with his pretense to be a self-made man, his presumption that rational knowingness is all. Whether we call the unknown “Fate” or “the unconscious,” tragic consciousness in any culture consists in the recognition that human beings live their lives, as Lear puts, it, “in the intersection of two realms of meaning” (p. 53). This is what the Freud-bashers deny.