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In his recently reissued Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (originally published in 1990 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Jonathan Lear performs a great service for non-philosophers. This closely reasoned, elegant, and ultimately radical reconstruction (is this the opposite of deconstruction?) of Freudian theory situates the founder of psychoanalysis within the history of theorizing about the human mind. Lear argues that interpretation itself is a reflection of the basic force of love, and indeed his book is a most loving reinterpretation and constructive critique of Freud. In my view, it is not an exaggeration to characterize psychoanalysis as the opposite of soul murder, and Jonathan Lear offers an account of why this is so.
It is beyond the scope of this brief review to do justice to Lear's argument. Perhaps it is fair to say that his point of departure is the observation that “love has become almost taboo within psychoanalysis” (p. 15). He is by and large correct, although I have seen some papers on the salutary role of love creep onto the programs at some recent analytic meetings (for instance J. & K.K. Novick, 1998). Kernberg (1995) and Gabbard (1996) have also written on the subject of love. It has been my experience that analysts are generally comfortable talking about sex and aggression, but that whenever one speaks of love in a case presentation the question about where the aggression is immediately follows. Without, I hope, doing exactly what Lear has predicted and I have just bemoaned, I would have very much appreciated it if Lear had included in this volume a preview of his conception of aggression, promised for a later work. I would be curious to see whether he understands aggression to be essentially a breakdown product and whether he would agree with Ian Suttie's comment: “Earth hath no hate but love to hatred turned, and hell no fury but a baby scorned.” (1935, cited in Bacal, 1987)