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Jonathan Lear is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and also a practising psychoanalyst. He has written two books on Aristotle and important essays on Wittgenstein and he uses the work of these two philosophers to give an interpretation of salient themes in Freud, keeping close to his texts. His work is therefore hermeneutic rather than natural scientific and is a working through of Freud's texts showing how psychoanalysis can unfold from its own conflicts. Rather than trying to preserve an assumed literal truth and just repeating it, which is to keep it under omnipotent control, Lear shows how we must destroy the object. It is in the refinding that it can be used creatively. We can only genuinely love that which is outside our omnipotent control.
Lear argues that Freud's great discovery is not of the unconscious but of an archaic level of mental functioning. Archaic thinking is an early stage of a developmental process on the way towards expression in terms of concepts and judgements. Archaic thought is not thought in the ordinary sense. The point of archaic thought is not to express a wish's demand but to satisfy it. It is a concrete, imagistic representation of