Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul [Hardcover]

Jonathan Lear (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 29, 1998

Freud is discredited, so we don't have to think about the darker strains of unconscious motivation anymore. We know what moves our political leaders, so we don't have to look too closely at their thinking either. In fact, everywhere we look in contemporary culture, knowingness has taken the place of thought. This book is a spirited assault on that deadening trend, especially as it affects our deepest attempts to understand the human psyche--in philosophy and psychoanalysis. It explodes the widespread notion that we already know the problems and proper methods in these fields and so no longer need to ask crucial questions about the structure of human subjectivity.

"What is psychology?" Open Minded is not so much an answer to this question as an attempt to understand what is being asked. The inquiry leads Lear, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, back to Plato and Aristotle, to Freud and psychoanalysis, and to Wittgenstein. Lear argues that Freud and, more generally, psychoanalysis are the worthy inheritors of the Greek attempt to put our mindedness on display. There are also, he contends, deep affinities running through the works of Freud and Wittgenstein, despite their obvious differences. Both are concerned with how fantasy shapes our self-understanding; both reveal how life's activities show more than we are able to say.

The philosophical tradition has portrayed the mind as more rational than it is, even when trying to account for irrationality. Psychoanalysis shows us the mind as inherently restless, tending to disrupt its own functioning. And empirical psychology, for its part, ignores those aspects of human subjectivity that elude objective description. By triangulating between the Greeks, Freud, and Wittgenstein, Lear helps us recover a sense of what it is to be open-minded in our inquiries into the human soul.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Freud once defined psychoanalysis as an impossible profession. What he meant, explains Jonathan Lear, is that "professionalization" is by its very nature a codification of standards, a mandating of stock responses--we already know the answers, professionals tell us, now give us a problem to solve. For Lear, psychology (literally, in Greek, "working out the logic of the soul") is much more open-ended, a quality it shares with philosophy. The two disciplines, he writes, "share the same fundamental question, posed by Socrates: in what way should one live? ... To live openly with the fundamental question is to avoid assuming that there are any fixed answers which are already given."

In a fascinating reevaluation of Oedipus Tyrannus, Lear proposes that Oedipus's problems were not, in the Freudian sense, oedipal--after all, Oedipus doesn't know that he's killing his father and marrying his mother, so it doesn't necessarily make sense to claim that he's acting on or even possesses those desires. What Oedipus does do, consistently, is behave as if he knows the answers before the questions have even been asked, and thus fundamentally misunderstands the questions. Similarly, Freud bashing is usefully understood not as an attempt to "kill" the grand old man of psychoanalysis and attain his power but as a failure to recognize that Freud's legacy lies not in any offered "solutions," but in a methodology of asking questions--a methodology that has in many ways already moved beyond Freud. "The point of psychoanalysis," Lear tells us, "is to help us develop a clearer, yet more flexible and creative, sense of what our ends might be." He makes useful connections between Freud's ideas and those of "acknowledged" philosophers, particularly the ancient Greeks and Wittgenstein, that do as much to revitalize philosophy as they do to relegitimize psychoanalysis. --Ron Hogan

Review

"Based upon a fresh understanding of the Freudian unconscious, Lear presents a startling, new, and profound view of human nature and society, which allows him to move between the intrapsychic and the 'object' world in just the way we have desperately needed. It explains the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis in a clinically convincing fashion. It solves the riddle of what is new and what is old in the transference, and how the two are mediated. It makes practical use of Freud's larger, frequently dismissed, metapsychological hypothesis. Most exciting of all, it stands along as a Freudian alternative to what has come to be known as 'the social construction of reality,' doing equal justice to the public and the private, and showing how Man's creativity implies its own tragic, biological and psychoanalytic constraints. As sophisticated philosophically as it is psychoanalytically, this book offers analysts an extremely rare opportunity to see their concerns in the light of the great philosophical tradition rather than simply as challenged by momentary philosophical fashions (though the recent 'linguistic turn' is also incorporated in Lear's broad sweep.) It is a revelation to watch Lear bring out the psychoanalytically relevant meaning of the classics. Lear's combined macroscopic and microscopic portrait of Man is in the great tradition of Loewald and Ricoeur." (Lawrence Friedman, M.D., Cornell University Medical College )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 356 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (May 29, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674455339
• ISBN-13: 978-0674455337
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #832,900 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lear is asking us to think -- nothing more., March 19, 1999

By 

Kyle Partridge ([e-mail]) (Boston, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Hardcover)

Many take issue with Lear's "defense" of Freud, but I see it differently. Lear is not so much defending Freud as he is using the example of Freud-bashing to remind us to continue to question what we think we know about reality. The human tendency is to look for answers, and that is good for us as a species. In our search for order, patterns, and understanding we have learned a great deal about the nature of objective reality (the natural world)...but the basis of scientific pursuit is test and test again; question and question again. There are scientists who continue to refine the measurement of Pi...we don't reach a point where we can simply assume that we know, and we can't interpret the work of Philosophers or Scientists with shallow prejudice and expect to come up with a true understanding of their contributions. Freud's writings are complex and convey a great deal. Many of his ideas were false ones, but that doesn't negate the value of the work he pursued. It doesn't erradicate the value of the questions he asked or the paths he suggested (either through his error or his truth) to others.

The most important aspect of Lear's work; the most profound insight in all of his varied writings comes down to this:

If we want to believe we are right, that we know what is what, then we need not question, think, integrate, or work intimately with complexity. However, if what we care about is the truth; if what we are relentlessly and endlessly pursuing is a scientific, integrated understanding of reality; we must think hard, question everything, and integrate endlessly and joyously -- embracing this, our human challenge.

As Tom Stoppard wrote in _Arcadia_, "It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the same way we came in."

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lear's Magnum Opus! Buy This Book!, October 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Hardcover)

Like "Love and Its Place In Nature," most of this book is a philosophical interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis. But it is more. One chapter is a discussion of the purpose of tragedy (why would anyone want to watch, or read, or even write a tragedy?). The answer is in this book. Another chapter that has very little to do with Freud discusses the tension between the transcendental nature of Philosophy and the brute classifications of "scientific" Anthropology. Is there room for a merging of the two? Lear thinks so. But the hook is in the first chapter, where he launches a full-on aussault on "knowingness." For example we all "know" Clinton committed infidelity and thus we choose to brush it aside or blow it up into some outrageous impeachment crusade. But how do we really "know" what to do? Read Lear's book and you will be surprised, I guarantee you that.

17 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Freud as humanist?, December 30, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Hardcover)

Lear is a philosopher-psychoanalyst. His view of Freud presented in this book is in fact characteristic of most distinguished academics in the humanities, though Lear himself, being a psychoanalyst, has a rather professional axe to grind. In any case, to get a representive view of one side of the Freud wars today, one ought to read him, particularly because Lear is a clear and engaging writer, with the important virtue of honesty. This said, this defense of Freud seems very inadequate. In presenting the traditional humanist image of Freud, Lear waters down and therefore distorts his master. Adorno once said that Freud is at his best when he is most outrageous. I agree. Lear and so many other defenders simply drop what does not seem appealing to common sense. Well, what is left is not Freud at all. The true Freud will always enrage. One may even say that what does not cause outrage in normal people cannot be Freudian thought. The main problem with Lear's interpretation, and with humanist interpretations in general, is a very narrow conception of what Freud was up to. Wollheim and Hopkins, though fellow philsophers, are better in this regard. In understanding Freud, above all it is important to remember that he was a neurologist who spent some 20 years doing research in neurobiology and neuroanatomy, and that he did not simply discard his early views. To ignore the origin, to forget about, so to speak, the childhood of Freud's thought is very unfreudian indeed. I don't think that Lear wants to ignore this on purpose; but he certainly doesn't have the competency to deal with it. A reviewer below pointed out the same problem, though Pinker, or other hip-pop psychologists, is hardly a trustworthy authority. The key is to understand Freud the scientist first, however weird, to us, he may seem as a scientist. The interested reader may wish to take a look at the following books and articles: Oliver Sacks has a new essay on Freud the neurologist which may be a good starting point; Steve Kosslyn wrote something called "Freud Returns"; Marvin Minsky did borrow much in his "Society of Mind"; Pribram and Gill wrote a book on the Project; Changeux's small book on neurobiology is helpful; Israel Rosenfield did good reporting in his book on memory;Dan Alkon also said much of value in his autobiographical book on memory; Joseph LeDoux's new book is suggestive and thoroughly Freudian for those who can understand the implications; and of course finally there are the four books by Gerald Edelman, the nobel-laureate, which provides the foundation for a Freudian neuroscience in the next century. Only then, perhaps, will we truly understand Freud the humanist.