The Irish poet W. B. Yeats is known to have been fascinated by things most difficult but not impossible. He would have loved Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. The difficulty and the fascination both relate to the fact that Lear is constantly interweaving philosophical knowledge with psychoanalytic knowledge. Lear believes that there is a deadness in both psychoanalysis and philosophy that he wants to liven up.

This book is about the reader's getting an education. In particular, she will discover the parallels between ancient Greek philosophy, especially that of Socrates and Plato, and the psychoanalytic thinking of the twentieth century. Both philosophy and psychoanalysis, states Lear, are “activities which lie at the heart of our humanity” (3) Both fields resist unchanging standards in view of the fact that they share the same fundamental question posed by Socrates: In what way should one live? Lear demonstrates his own capacity to “get an education” by presenting us with a very scholarly book.