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Article Excerpt
The relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis has always been a tortured one, going all the way back to Freud's relatively late essay, "The Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)," as to the irrelevance of philosophical thinking in the psychoanalytic situation with his provocative statement that philosophy "has no direct influence on the great mass of mankind [as] it is of interest to only a small number even of the top layer of intellectuals and is scarcely intelligible to anyone else" (p. 161). This chilling observation served to legitimize a legion of subsequent psychoanalysts who found solace in Freud's words for their own dismissal of philosophy's relevance to the psychoanalytic enterprise. I don't think anyone really believes that Freud took his own statement to heart; his dismissal of the academic who Freud believed was lost in an ivory tower, cut off from the everyday passions of "ordinary folk," isn't unlike the attitude most people today share toward the so-called intellectual egghead who is divorced from the practicalities of real life. In that sense Freud could be seen as a man of the people rather than, strictly speaking, anti-philosophical. Freud's own undeniable debt to a host of both classical and contemporary philosophers in the development of his most enduring ideas (e.g., Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle, Brentano, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Montaigne, Spinoza, Kant, John Stuart Mill immediately come to mind) lends a fiction to his statement, but the myth continues to this day, cited by analysts who haven't the slightest interest in or acumen for philosophical thinking. Yet Freud is incomprehensible without an appreciation for his debt to philosophy, for the fundamental questions that continue to concern us about the development of psychoanalytic thinking and practice are philosophical in their nature, even if we don't know it.
Despite the continuing uneasy relationship between these two disciplines, there have been many psychoanalysts since Freud who have not been as cagey about their relationship with and debt to philosophy, including Hans Loewald, the subject of Jonathan Lear's book inspired by Loewald's famous paper, "On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis" (1960). Indeed, Loewald not only relied on philosophy for the development of his psychoanalytic perspective, he was among those rare psychoanalysts who was also philosophically trained and philosophically mindful in his careful reading of Freud's psychoanalytic theories and method. Unlike most philosophically-minded analysts who sprinkle their publications with citations from and references to the philosopher or philosophers with whom they are taken, Loewald's debt to philosophy was a relatively subtle affair. Loewald even resisted coining new terms--a commonplace among analytic authors whether or not they are indebted to philosophy--but chose instead to remain faithful to Freud's basic nomenclature, even if Loewald systematically revised Freud's meaning from the lens of his own philosophical perspective.
As Lear notes, the philosopher to whom Loewald owed so much was Martin Heidegger, with whom Loewald studied in Germany before immigrating to the United States in the aftermath of Hitler's rise to power. Despite Loewald's break with Heidegger after the latter's disturbing affiliation with Hitler's National Socialist Party, it is admirable that Loewald never hesitated to acknowledge his profound debt to Heidegger, without which it is difficult to imagine what Loewald's psychoanalytic perspective would have looked like. Yet, were it not for Loewald's acknowledgement to Heidegger in the preface of his collected Papers on Psychoanalysis (1980) most readers would be hard pressed to recognize any evidence of this debt. Loewald's writing is not striking or apparently innovative in relation to either the terms he emloyees or the theories he puts forward. On the surface of it, his perspective is that of a typical American ego psychologist who, following Freud, conceptualizes his treatment philosophy in relation to libido theory, the structural model comprised of id, ego, and superego, the Oedipus complex and other standard Freudian terminology. In fact, the only extended reference in all of Loewald's writings to Heidegger's philosophy appears in his short book on Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual (1978) where he refers to Heidegger's concept of thrownness (p. 19). Yet Loewald was not uncritical of what he took to be the excesses of the conventional ego psychological perspective, including its fidelity to Freud's theory of instincts, which Loewald rejected in place of what he characterized as a more "relational" perspective (this term was subsequently co-opted by Steven Mitchell for his own, interpersonal-based relational psychoanalysis). Loewald also abandoned the obsession with analysis of resistance that continues to epitomize the conventional ego psychological perspective once he realized that such "monitoring" is antithetical to the kind of phenomenological--and patient--framework that Heidegger advocated (Leavy, 1986).
It is in this context that reading the work of Jonathan Lear is such a pleasure for those analysts who appreciate philosophy and its role in the psychoanalytic process. Like Loewald, Lear is also a philosophically trained psychoanalyst and confesses that much of his debt to his own psychoanalytic perspective derives from informal conversations that he enjoyed with Loewald over a period of six years. In many respects Lear's book is an homage to Loewald's legacy, particularly Loewald's paper on therapeutic action which is cited throughout Lear's study. But as the subtitle to his book implies, it is also a study in irony and its role in the psychoanalytic process. This portion of the book owes less to Loewald than to Plato and Kierkegaard, but it is in reference to Loewald and his relationship with Heidegger that will be of principal interest to the readers of this journal, so I will concentrate the thrust of my commentary on that portion of Lear's examination of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. I am nonetheless also obliged to review the gist of the book as a whole in order to render Lear's references to Heidegger meaningful in the overall context of his argument.
Though Lear is not a phenomenologist and has distinguished himself as a philosopher on the basis of an earlier book on Aristotle, he was apparently inspired (and...
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