A case for Lear

Introduction

Wisdom Won from Illness (2017) is Jonathan Lear’s second book of essays, 15 papers written between 2002 and 2015. The title comes from a 1936 lecture by Thomas Mann written for Freud’s 80th birthday (Lear 1990, xiii). Lear has used the phrase before: “Freud … began from pathology, from the failure of the world or the human to be good enough. Psychoanalysis, in that sense, is a wisdom won from illness” (1990, 157). Later he suggests: “Plato’s psychology, like Freud’s, is ‘wisdom won from illness’” (1998, 238). It seems this phrase has grown on Lear over the years and finally earned a titular place.

Although the essays in Wisdom (2017), as in his first collection (Lear 1998), are excellent value for people interested in getting to know Lear’s ideas, they also present to the reader a significant demand for work. They span a very wide range, beginning with a Platonic-Nietzschean view of the relationships between sickness, health and humanity in the title essay, and including integrations of Aristotle and Freud, Lear’s distinctive concept of irony, Plato’s psychology, a study in comparative technique and termination, concepts of love and the soul that Lear has been working out for decades, elaborations of Loewald, and an

interesting turn towards literature and its relationship to ethics. Although it is not possible to show just how all this has come together in his most recent volume, it is, I think, feasible to show some of the major themes within Lear’s now substantial body of work, which may help the reader interested in following his unabashedly complex, challenging and multidisciplinary thinking.

In a 1996 essay on the work of Hans Loewald, Lear comments on Loewald’s reading of Freud and suggests: “Every good interpretation is as much a critique as an explication” (1998, 125). In this review essay on the work of Lear I will try to keep this, as well as other interpretive principles, in mind while reflecting on 10 books spanning nearly 40 years, from 198