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Jonathan Lear is one of the most subtle and original thinkers in psychoanalysis. So a book by him simply called Freud should attract everyone who is at all psycho analytically minded. They will not be disappointed. This is simply the best introduction to Freud I know, and perhaps illuminating particularly for those who are clinically practiced.
How should I live my life? Lear poses the question at the beginning of this book, and it sets the tone for the rest. Lear sees the psychoanalytic conversation as a moral discourse in the widest sense. In a late chapter in the book, he shows that what Freud calls the reality and pleasure principles are basically ethical in nature. Heeding the reality principle is indispensable to integrity, and it is precisely this which neurosis threatens. The reality principle is linked to virtues in the classic aristotelian sense: habits, or recurrent ways of being, that allow for human flourishing. Neurotic symptoms are also habits, recurrent ways of being, that on the other hand inhibit human flourishing. Lear coins the word ‘neurtue’ to name ‘a psychologically organized orientation that entirely distorts [one's] ability to understand [her] world, and [her] place in it’ (p. 153).
Neurosis, in Lear's view, and, he persuasively argues, in Freud's as well, makes inroads on moral agency, and undercuts one's ability to function as a responsible agent. I think this is right. But I see one difficulty which a moral framing of neurosis might pose for the analyst: it would be easy for her to slip from a moral view to a moralistic view; and that could be a disaster, particularly