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Jonathan Lear is an established, prolific psychoanalytic author whose works attempt to reformulate various aspects of Freud's legacy into contemporary relevancy. He brings with him the atypical quality of philosophical scholarship, a direction he began early in his career while studying philosophy in Cambridge.1 His text, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, is a creative outcome of this period. He later grapples with such basic philosophical ideas with regard to other psychoanalytical contexts (Lear , 2000). The present paper is no exception.
In ‘Technique and final cause in psychoanalysis: Four ways of looking at one moment’, Lear introduces the Aristotelian concept of ‘final cause’ and attempts to incorporate the ‘spirit’ of its significance into his present thesis. He argues that the final cause (the ultimate goal of psychoanalysis) is freedom, although particularly understood within different ideological approaches. He concludes that this idea provides the only unity for psychoanalytic technique amongst the different approaches he examines in this paper. He carefully considers one analytic moment from the psychoanalytic technical perspectives of Paul Gray, Hans Loewald (who was his long term mentor), contemporary Kleinians and Jacques Lacan. How well he manages to avoid reifying these traditions in the abstracted format of a professional journal is almost less compelling then the cogent conceptualizations of freedom that he gracefully extracts from these four core approaches. His elucidation of the particular traditions is absorbing, well articulated, and accessible as he masterfully interweaves the threads of his central arguments throughout his persuasive conceptual and methodological analyses. Gray, Lear concludes, argues for a freedom of reflection. Loewald emphasizes a freedom to allow possibility for new possibilities essentially linked to mourning. Kleinians offer a freedom to think by tracking the massive disruptions of projective