Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis By Jonathan Lear

Jonathan Lear has shown us both Freud`s texts and his subject matter from a new angle of vision, one that renders much recent controversy about psychoanalytic theory irrelevant. For any student of those texts this book is indispensable.—Alasdair MacIntyre

Lear makes one understand how psychoanalysis works not only on the therapist`s couch but also as a condition of being alive. . . . Love and Its Place in Nature not only offers a form of spiritual nutriment for the self, it also defines that self with a clear profundity that few readers will have encountered before.—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

A brief and engaging philosophical perspective on Freudian psychoanalysis. The book is simply written, but important themes are profoundly investigated. . . . An important philosophic reading of Freud.—Don Browning, Christian Century

In this brilliant book, Jonathan Lear argues that Freud posits love as a basic force in nature, one that makes individuation—the condition for psychological health and development—possible. Love is active not just in the development of the individual but also in individual analysis and indeed in the development of psychoanalysis itself, says Lear. Expanding on philosophical conceptions of love, nature, and mind, Lear shows that love can cure because it is the force that makes us human. Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis

Summary ï PDF, eBook or Kindle ePUB free ↠ Jonathan Lear

Scholarly but dense; the arguments often get repetitive and convoluted. It would be more elucidating with a slower and more approachable style. 9780300074673 Let me say this: I am decidedly not a Freudian. I still loved Lear's take on Freud, even when he was too charitable to Freud as an analyst. Despite being assigned only a couple of chapters for a class, I enjoyed it so much I went ahead and took the whole book out from the library. 9780300074673

What I could understand was awesome. 9780300074673 This is a really great book that I almost gave five stars to. People dismiss Freud and psychoanalysis as a whole as quack pseudoscience. Despite a couple of unsatisfying argumentative detours into the peripatetic school (especially on the matter of form), Lear has proven that there is life to be found (and maybe even love?) in engaging with Freudianism. Am I convinced to abandon all my nihilistic tendencies and embrace a view that calls love an element of meaning invested in the basic structure of the world? Maybe not. But, I have been provoked to interrogate all such beliefs. In doing so I might have even been able to aim at a higher unity (how fun!) 9780300074673 This book provided insight into Freud's work and the fundamental connection between psychoanalysis and philosophy. I particularly enjoyed the passages on love, but while this book is worthwhile for one interesting read, I don't think I'll find myself picking it up again. 9780300074673 This is a surprising book. It has three protagonists - science, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Initially, I did not like it very much because I thought the author's philosophical views were rather too dominated by science (for example, he swallows the recent philosophical orthodoxy that reasons are causes and yet if you accept that point, you have little chance of thinking clearly about the mind). However, his love of Aristotle seems to serve as some kind of bulwark against too scientistic an approach to philosophy and then when it gets to psychoanalysis, he is prepared to throw his worship of science overboard and take a radically unfashionable position. So by the end of the book it has become both passionate and interesting. I am afraid I still think the philosophy is not very impressive, but he does give a really interesting interpretation of Freud and of psychoanalysis and I think that makes this book worth reading. One strange thing about it is that while Winnicott is a significant influence on the book, he gets no mention in the main body of the text or in the index - instead he gets a few mentions in footnotes, some recognition in the bibliography and frequent use of the good-enough phrase that he introduced into psychoanalysis. It is not clear why Lear does not want to acknowledge him more generously - I doubt if there is any significant reason for this - it is just a bit odd. 9780300074673 An unsatisfactory book that is contradictory and outlandish in places, this is a work that discusses the author's opinion of, and differences with, Freud's work in psychoanalysis far more than making any effort at clarifying love and its place in nature.

While the author claims that ...the aim of this book is to construct a vibrant conceptual history--an interpretation of the psychic life of the analysand--that helps psychoanalysis to live, he goes on to criticize much of the work conducted in psychoanalysis, Freud's therapies in particular, and offers up that love is a force in nature that lends 'individuation' with hardly any derivation or description of how this may be so. He creates a long record of his objections to psychoanalysis rather than any conceptual or empirically verified history, vibrant or otherwise.

At times confusing, for instance, in his query: Is it possible that the entire debate over individualism, pro and con, proceeds by ignoring the individual?, sweeping: Since a person is significantly constituted by his subjectivity, one cannot legitimately assume that a biological unit, a member of the human species, is an individual, and unwarranted and unsupported: Psychoanalysis has discovered that individuals are not part of the basic fabric of the world, not even of the basic fabric of human society, he goes on to claim that Psychoanalysis is the history of a series of battles fought and refought within the human soul. There appears, to me, to be something rather unnatural in the author's opinions and learning: he offers no clarification or opinion of the soul, and yet claims that therapeutic practice comprises (presumably mental) battles within his undefined soul, attributing such a finding to the very process he is critiquing while claiming to help.

The book does reveal the author's bias toward at least one religion, attributing to it a higher ethical standard, while he debates whether psychoanalysis also may be a religion, and ignores wisdom and advancement in philosophy in other regions of the world. He goes so far as to state, For as long as Philosophy has existed, which, after all, is only twenty five hundred years, ..., revealing inadequacy not only in his research into ancient civilizations, but in his own learning. He conveniently forgets that the history of literature, including the oldest sacred texts, extends more than four millennia into the past.

This is not a book for the lay reader or the erudite researcher. It provides a critique of Freud and the art of psychoanalysis, which, though evidently an inexact science and practice, could be said to have some utility in the world. This work does not, by any stretch of the imagination, help clarify what its title claims; the author nevertheless does approach a glimmer of intuition that love can be a unifying, strengthening aspect that brings about acceptance and harmony among various other attributes that make one human.



9780300074673