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.
At one point in his recent collection of essays, Wisdom Won from Illness, Jonathan Lear tells a story from Plato's Phaedrus. The Egyptian god Theuth, having invented writing, is boasting of his invention. King Thamus rebukes him. Your invention, he says, will create forgetfulness in your hearers’ souls: ‘they will be the hearers of many things and will have learned nothing’; they will ‘have the show of wisdom without the reality’ (Phaedrus 275, Jowett trans.).
Jonathan Lear shares King Thamus's anxiety. His central question, which he addresses from many angles, is: how do our words become truly meaningful to us, so that they ‘make a difference’ and help us with our development; and, correspondingly, what happens when nothing happens, when we go through a performance of words or actions and nothing is changed? He is haunted by the comment of the Crow (Native American) chief, Plenty Coups, who told the history of his people until 1884, the year they were compelled to abandon their nomadic way of life as buffalo hunters and adopt a settled life on a reservation. ‘After that’, said Plenty Coups, ‘nothing happened’. The Crow survived. What does ‘happened’ mean in that sentence?
Lear has written a whole book about the crisis of the Crow (Lear, 2006), and he returns to it in one of the essays here. It is hard not to hear the plight of the Crow as a parable with profound resonances for the modern world: what happens to our sense that life is meaningful, when we lose the deep embodied metaphors in which meaningfulness has traditionally been conveyed in our culture?
Lear is unusual among psychoanalytic writers in that he trained first as a philosopher, with a speciality in classical Greek philosophy. He continues to be fully immersed in both disciplines, and is currently both a practising psychoanalyst and a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He occupies therefore an interdisciplinary position that is particularly relevant to our current needs, whe