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

By Jonathan Lear

Book Overview

"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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300074670
• ISBN13: 9780300074673
• Release Date: February 1999
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

stunning

An important development of Freud's ideas, which goes far beyond standard misunderstandings in a way that is wholly justified by Freud's later works. Lear, a philosopher, is a remarkable thinker in his own right. The theme of this book is nothing less than the way that the discoveries of depth psychology pose an unavoidable challenge to our prevailing scientific ways of thinking about self and world. The needed revision would not be a lapse into softheadedness but a science of the human psyche which would do justice to the subject. To understand love, theoretically and in practice, is to accept a vision of rationality and a view of the world that the most progressive thinkers -- those who have accepted the legacy of psychoanalysis -- have just begun to sketch. Lear, who is at the forefront of such thinkers, has written a cogent and loving book which can be read by the specialist or by anyone interested in a topic which is of concern to each of us.