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‘I want to say that there is something dead in the profession of psychoanalysis and something dead in the profession of philosophy,’ writes Jonathan Lear, in his preface to this imaginative and intelligent book. ‘This book is above all a response to a sense of deadness: it is an attempt to bring some life into two activities which lie at the heart of our humanity.’
What, then, is this deadness? The deadness of philosophy will be all too familiar to those who have approached the subject in search of wisdom, in search of guidance through the perplexities of life, only to have found instead, in philosophy departments where there appears little street-credible evidence of real life, merely endless ‘talk about talk’. If philosophy begins in wonder, perhaps it ends, as Wittgenstein always suggested, when the philosopher's job becomes tenured.
And how is psychoanalysis dead? Whilst it might be more apparently true that psychoanalysis is a practice, a therapy (unlike philosophy, as Bion rather disdainfully states, ‘intended for use’), it displays its own closed-mindedness. Its deadness shows, perhaps as much as anywhere, in its tendency towards arrogance, in the smug complacency of its ‘knowingness’, and its closure with regard to the philosophical tradition. Lear's analysis of Oedipus, the original self-made man, is instructive here.
A starting point in his analysis might be the ‘embarrassingly simple’ fact that Oedipus is not Oedipal; there is no evidence in the text of any oedipal