Oxford Handbooks Online: Imagination and Reason, Method and Mourning in Freudian Psychoanalysis

Imagination and Reason, Method and Mourning in Freudian Psychoanalysis
Oxford Handbooks Online

Imagination and Reason, Method and Mourning in
Freudian Psychoanalysis
Jonathan Lear
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
Edited by Richard G.T. Gipps and Michael Lacewing
Print Publication Date: Feb 2019 Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind

Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198789703.013.20
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter begins with a consideration of transience and mourning as a way of thinking
about what a failure of imagination might be. It then considers why the ‘fundamental
rule’ of psychoanalysis is truly fundamental: not only for psychoanalytic method, but also
for understanding why Freudian psychoanalysis is of philosophical significance. The
fundamental rule opens up a new meaning of speaking one’s mind. The chapter argues
that the psychoanalytic method is a deployment of reason, properly understood. For it is
that activity of mind through which reason comes to an understanding of the mental
activities—the thinkings—of non-rational and unconscious parts of the human psyche. It
thus illuminates Socrates’ claim in the Republic that reason ought to take the lead in
organizing human life because it has insight into the whole psyche. The chapter examines
what it is for the unconscious to function as a fate.
Keywords: imagination, reason, method, mourning, psychoanalysis, fate, melancholia, fundamental rule
Jonathan Lear
On Transience
IN November 1915, Sigmund Freud published an article on the fleeting nature of all
things—ourselves included. The paper, ‘On Transience’, records ‘a summer walk through
a smiling countryside in the company of a taciturn friend and of a young but already
famous poet’. The countryside was smiling, but neither poet nor friend smiled back.
The poet admired the beauty of the scene around us but felt no joy in it. He was
disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would
vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour
that men have created or may create. All that he would otherwise have loved and
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admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its
doom.
(Freud 1915b: 305, my emphasis)
Freud thought the poet was right about the transience of the world. He rejected as
wishful the idea that there must be some eternal ground lying behind the beautiful
appearances. He nevertheless thought that something was going importantly wrong in
the poet’s reflective evaluation of the situation. The sense of transience, Freud thought,
ought to increase the value and joy in our experience. But, what really impressed Freud
about this conversation was that his arguments with his companions seemed to go
nowhere. Reason did not really seem to engage. (p. 222)
My failure [to convince them] led me to infer that some powerful emotional factor
was at work which was disturbing to judgement, and I believed later that I had
discovered what it was. What spoilt their enjoyment of beauty must have been a
revolt in their minds against mourning. The idea that all this beauty was transient
was giving these two sensitive minds a foretaste of mourning over its decease;
and, since the mind instinctively recoils from anything that is painful, they felt
their enjoyment of beauty interfered with by thoughts of its transience.
(Freud 1915b: 306, my emphasis)
In Freud’s view, his companions’ imaginations leapt forward to an imagined future in

which everything that mattered was destroyed; and then that image was used to attack
the capacity to take joy in present beauty.
But what is wrong with that? Usually we use the phrase ‘failure of imagination’ to mean
the person is not being imaginative enough; but in this case Freud seems to think his
companions were being too imaginative, and imaginative in the wrong sort of way. But
what about this imagining makes it the wrong sort of way? It cannot simply be leaping
ahead to the future in order to inform the present. A similar imaginative leap could be
used to enhance the sense of joy in the light of beauty’s transience—and, in Freud’s view,
this would be an altogether healthy imaginative move. Nor can their problem be simply
that their imaginings brought them a wistful lack of joy in the world’s beauty. The failure
does not consist simply in a failure to produce pleasure—though pleasure and pain may
be involved in explaining the psychodynamics. What makes this revolt a failure, in
Freud’s opinion, rather than just a movement of imagination is that it disturbed his
companions’ judgement. Basically, the movement of imagination is disturbing the proper
function of reason in two related ways. First, his companions are thoughtfully and
reflectively drawing the wrong conclusion about the meaning of transience. Second, they
are unresponsive to the salient conditions that ought to be the basis for changing their
minds.
Freud says that what is going wrong is ‘a revolt in their minds against mourning’. It is not
clear what this means. He is no doubt drawing on our familiar experiences of mourning,
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and perhaps ideas are percolating that will emerge a couple years later in his essay
‘Mourning and Melancholia’; but Freud could not simply have meant a passing
psychological state. For, he is trying to account for an organized way of life. The young
poet and the taciturn friend were not fleeing mourning a particular dead loved one.
Rather, the ‘revolt’ showed up in a stable way of life: a resolute refusal to take joy in the
world’s beauty (ostensibly due to its transience). Freud suggests a dynamic psychological
account of how this works: a ‘foretaste’ of mourning triggers a ‘recoil’ from painful
feelings. Still, what he is trying to explain is not an isolated psychological response, but a
stable, character-like formation: this is how the poet lives with the beauty of the world.
From Freud’s perspective, it is actually a character-deformation: the poet and his friend
are not living well with respect to the world’s beauty.
But then what would living well with transient beauty consist in? Freud says that our
sense of the transience of the world’s beauty ought to increase the joy we take in it
(Freud 1915b: 305-306). Now if what is getting in the way of this response is a revolt
(p. 223) against mourning, this would suggest that a healthy response—joy in transient
beauty—would be an unfettered exercise of a healthy and developed capacity to mourn.

This may at first seem like a strange conclusion. After all, don’t we think of mourning as
the response to the death of a loved one? To be sure, this is the paradigm; but Freud
seems to be suggesting that we take this paradigm and think outwards from it. By way of
analogy, consider Aristotle’s virtue of courage. The paradigm is on the battlefield, risking
one’s own life to protect the polis, Athens. But then as we reflect on the myriad occasions
in life that require us to take a stand, to take some personal risks for a higher cause, we
see that this condition of the psyche, courage, may be deployed at almost any moment in
life. Although Freud’s line of reasoning is not explicit here, it seems to take a similar turn.
If we consider the broad structure of human life it seems to be marked by vulnerability to
loss and separation. Not only do our loved ones die, it can happen that we outgrow our
friends or they outgrow us. When things are going well we leave our own childhoods
behind, at least, up to a point. Our relations to teddy do not remain the same. At the heart
of human development is a capacity to bid adieu. It is in the spirit of Freud’s writing to
treat this capacity as a capacity to mourn broadly construed.
We do not yet know the marks and features of mourning when it is used in this broad
sense. We have thus far isolated it via paradigm cases and an invitation to expand our
conception of it in certain directions. But it is clear that for Freud the capacity to mourn
is an important aspect of living well with the transience of things. And since we ourselves
are transient beings living in a world of transient beings, it would seem that the capacity
to mourn (broadly understood) is a virtue or a human excellence in Aristotle’s sense. For
what it is for creatures like us to live well is to live well with transience, separation, and
loss—and Freud is isolating a psychic capacity whose function is to do just that.
So if mourning broadly understood is a form of living well it seems as though we might

have a standard by which we can judge imaginative life in terms of better and worse. Are
there distinctive forms of imagining that characterize failures to mourn? Are there forms
of imagining that distort one’s view of the world and thus get in the way of one’s attempt
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to live a meaningful life? Does failure to mourn disfigure reason in its proper activities? It
would seem so if it is the task of reason to distinguish appearance from reality about the
most fundamental matters. And if so, is there anything to be done about this? In my
opinion, one needs psychoanalytic insight to be able to address these questions. And one
needs a philosophical outlook to grasp their deeper significance.
The Fundamental Rule

When I talk about the need for psychoanalytic insight I do not mean to refer to any
particular dogma or theoretical claim. Rather, I am interested in insights that come to
light from psychoanalytic activity according to its characteristic method. That method is
structured by what Freud called the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis. The rule is
simple (p. 224) to state: say whatever it is that comes to mind without inhibition or
censorship.1 Freud was right that the fundamental rule is fundamental to psychoanalysis.
But it is fundamental to psychoanalysis because it establishes a special arena for reason
and imagination to meet and interact.
The injunction to say whatever comes to mind without inhibition or censorship gives us
one sense of what we might mean by the free flow of self-conscious thinking. But it is an
unusual sense. The analytic situation as structured by the fundamental rule both
facilitates and enjoins a certain spontaneity of mind. A person is encouraged to let her
mind wander wherever it will go and simply to say out loud whatever comes next. This is
obviously not the ‘freedom’ of rational thinking in the familiar sense, of thinking
according to the constraints of logos. Indeed, with the fundamental rule, the normal
constraints of logos are ruled out as a reason for not speaking. But the situation is more
complex than just the encouragement of this form of spontaneity. It is not merely that the
analysand is saying out loud what is coming to mind, but analysand and analyst are also
listening together to what is being said and not said. The analysand in particular is
apperceptively attending to the movements of her thought, but it is a special mode of
apperception.2 On the one hand, the attention being paid is informed by logos in the
familiar sense that the person is attuned to what makes more or less sense; but, on the
other hand, the person is freed of the normal responsibilities that usually attend
apperceptive consciousness. There is no burden to explain or defend what ‘I think’—
certainly, not in a reasonable account. As a result, the analysand is freed to develop a
capacity to attend to the workings of her own mind; a capacity that tends to be
underdeveloped when one focuses on the flow of rational thought. The analytic situation
then is not a moment in which irrationality is promoted for its own sake. It is more like a
Sabbath moment in which the familiar constraints of rationality—the inhibition and
censorship of ‘silly’ or ‘bad’ thoughts, the giving of reasons and so on—are encouraged to
take a rest (Lear 2016). The overall aim is the development of one’s rational capacity—in
the sense of one’s capacity to distinguish appearance from reality, both about the world
and about oneself. In this sense the fundamental rule encourages a teleological
suspension of the rational for the sake of the rational.
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In effect, the analytic situation as structured by the fundamental rule sets up an intimate
space for reason and the workings of the imagination to meet and interact in fine-grained
detail. As the analysand lies down and attempts to ‘free associate’, the associations tend
of their own accord to become looser, at least by the standards of ordinary conscious
thought. It is not an accident that in such an environment, analysands tend to remember
their dreams. Dream memories come to mind because the analytic situation becomes
dreamy.
It is a surprising and remarkable empirical discovery that no one can follow the
fundamental rule. As Freud said, ‘there comes a time in every analysis when the patient
(p. 225) disregards it’ (Freud 1913: 135n). In my experience that time comes almost
immediately and recurs throughout the analysis. This means that the fundamental rule
gives occasion for analyst and analysand to attend together both to the mind’s
spontaneous wanderings and to the internal resistance to any such opportunity. Attending
to both makes possible a very rich and textured understanding of a person’s imaginative
life (including fantasy) and of how that imaginative life intersects with her self-conscious
understanding.
And so, while the fundamental rule does encourage the free flow of self-conscious
understanding in the sense of a self-conscious sense of the mind’s spontaneous
wanderings, it also facilitates the freedom of self-consciousness in the deeper sense of the
development of a capacity of mind. That is, psychoanalysis is the development of a
psychic capacity to attend to the imaginative workings of one’s own mind as well as to
internal efforts to disrupt them, and then to thoughtfully and effectively intervene simply
through the self-conscious thinking one is doing. One develops a capacity of mind to
change the structure of one’s mind, immediately and directly, through the very
understanding that brings about the change. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall try
to make this claim clear.
Unconscious Fate
We are in a position to formulate a thought that is not explicitly in Freud, though there
are suggestions of it throughout his work. The thought is this: even at the level of the
unconscious our being is an issue for us. Unbeknownst to us for the most part, our
imaginations are actively thinking through what kind of creature we are and what kind of
world we inhabit. Issues of transience and omnipotence, power and vulnerability have
long been on our minds, but in a manner that we do not easily recognize. Freud showed
that this imaginative thinking has a peculiar form: a form that justifies us in
conceptualizing it as a form of thinking, albeit one not constrained by the normal
demands of rationality. If we are to come to grips with how our imagination works, we
need to understand how ontological debate is possible at the level of the unconscious.
Freud saw that repetition was a hallmark of neurotic modern life—and he took that to be
a hallmark of modern life. People were caught up in unhappy-making routines, often
stretching far back in life, with myriad variations. And modern society did not have any
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particular interest in undoing such structures. He tried to think through what this could
mean.
Let me give a clinical vignette. Ms M—a professional in a large corporation—came into

analysis because of persistent feelings of anger, irritation, and frustration. She and her
partner would fight regularly, and she would also feel frustrated and angry at work, with
friends and family. Outwardly she was successful at her job, though she did get into
unspoken feuds with colleagues. She would, as she put it, make ‘passive-aggressive
moves’ in which she would struggle with people while pretending just to be doing her job.
Similarly, with her partner: she was managing to stay in the relationship, but it was
(p. 226) regularly threatened by struggles, unacknowledged and acknowledged. Typically,
some imagined third party was involved. So, for example, Ms M’s partner has an old
girlfriend with whom he remained friends. This was an occasion for Ms M to form angry
fantasies about that relationship. She would express her fury in small gestures—like
leaving dirty dishes in the sink—that could be denied if challenged. And if a fight did
break out, Ms M would assume the posture of the pure voice of objective reason,
wondering out loud why her partner was getting so angry. This would enrage him further,
and Ms M would secretly enjoy his frustration. There is much to be said about this case,
but I want to consider the broad structure. Freud focused on repetition—and that is how
it appears when one looks consciously at the phenomena—but he also had the genius to
recognize that the unconscious is a mode of imaginative life that has its own form.3
One of the hallmarks of unconscious mental functioning is timelessness. It is important to

understand what this means. There are of course remarks in Freud that suggest that
memories of events from long ago persist in the unconscious and continue to have a
causal effect. But there is a deeper meaning, a claim about the temporality of
unconscious thinking. From the timeless perspective of the unconscious, there is no such
thing as repetition. There is no same again. From an unconscious perspective there is just
timeless perdurance: a tenseless the same. In this way, the unconscious functions like a
fate.4
The idea that we experience our unconscious as fate is sometimes not that far from
conscious awareness. People may enter analysis with an inchoate worry that they are
somehow destined never to have an intimate relationship, for example; or, that they will
never quite express the creativity of which they are capable. Freud showed that in an
important sense they are right.
In the case of Ms M, the fate was that life shall be frustrating. This fate hung timelessly
over her life—and uncannily informed the daily events of which Ms M was consciously,
temporally aware. (In Aristotelian terms, it functioned like a formal and final cause.) Ms
M was painfully, angrily aware of life’s frustrations; yet unaware of how active she was in
shaping her life to fit this fate. She would focus on real-life slights; but she also would
construe ambiguous moments so as to trigger her sense of frustration. Occasionally she
would surreptitiously provoke colleagues to stand in her way. In her imagination she
would set up triangles: one person purportedly favouring another over Ms M. So on those
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occasions when she was blocked in some way, she would feel defeated in a competition.
She did not realize she was doing this. But having succeeded in arousing opposition, she
would then be filled with rage and fantasies of revenge. It was as though Ms M lived
inside a geodesic dome of frustration and anger that she mistook for the world.5 (p. 227)
The dome was made up of petite triangles—shaped around two others—made up of
rivalry, frustration, anger, and revenge. They each looked like discrete problems, but they
had a similar shape and together they made up a world. That is, although there was no
conscious overall act of will, Ms M’s mode of living otherwise took the form of a resolute
refusal to take joy in the beauty of the world.
Freud also said of the unconscious that it was indifferent to contradiction.6 The point is
not that the unconscious allows us to believe contradictions because the beliefs reside in
different parts of our mind.7 Rather, our unconscious imaginings are basically not
troubled by contradictory evidence. Ms M was adept at passing over things that were
seemingly ‘going right’ in her life. And she was creative in interpreting these apparently
good events as mere appearance. That is, she was adept at creating and maintaining a
false appearance–reality distinction. To put it in philosophical terms, her imagination
distorted her capacity for reason. Sometimes she would subvert an event that was going
her way. For example, she would on occasion instigate a fight—all the while thinking it
was her partner who spoiled things. The fight would excite her, though it left her feeling
angry, frustrated, and alienated from her partner.
Now, the point about these unconscious fates is that they are akin to a philosophical claim
about our finite condition. That life shall be frustrating: We are creatures who consciously
recognize that we are not omnipotent, that we inhabit a world that to a significant extent
exists independently of us, that we have desires and longings that we are unable to
satisfy. From this perspective, fate seems like a claim about who we are and what is
possible for us. It is as though the unconscious is working in a philosophical direction—
what is it like to be the finite creatures we are?—only it lacks reason.
The irrationality consists not just in the unconscious’ imperviousness to contradictory

evidence, but in its unrelenting insistence. These two features of unconscious mental
functioning—timelessness and indifference to contradiction—help establish an
imaginative a priori. Ms M’s imagination sustained a teleological structure that
interpreted all of life’s unfolding events in its terms: namely, that life shall be frustrating.
This imaginative a priori is further facilitated by forms of unconscious imaginative

thinking Freud discovered and called primary process; in particular, displacement and
condensation. In primary process almost any association can be made, based on
similarities in sound, smell, touch, contiguity in time or space, or the merest contingency.
This means that virtually anything can be drawn in to symbolize life’s teleological
structure as destined for frustration. If she dreams of a door, for example, it quickly
becomes a door she cannot go through—‘shut, shut out, shut in, alone’—the imaginary
meaning of a life summed up in a seemingly benign image.
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(p. 228) Melancholia

It might at first be surprising that this unconscious fate-like structure—that life shall be
frustrating—is basically an ego strategy. It is a mode of living through which Ms M
expressed her understanding of herself as a finite creature. Certainly, it came as a
surprise to Freud—and it came relatively late in his career—that the unconscious could
not be equated with the repressed. The ego regularly works in ways of which we are
unaware—and to which we are deeply resistant to finding out. But we are not here
dealing with repression and the repressed.
. . . we find ourselves in an unforeseen situation. We have come upon something in

the ego itself which is also unconscious, which behaves exactly like the repressed
—that is, which produces powerful effects without itself being conscious and
which requires special work before it can be made conscious … we must admit
that the characteristic of being unconscious begins to lose significance for us. It
becomes a quality which can have many meanings …
(Freud 1923: 15–18)
What I think Freud means by this last statement is that the characteristic of being
repressed may no longer be the primary concern of those aspects of unconscious mental
functioning that emerge for us in psychoanalysis. We need to grasp how these fate-like
ego strategies work. For Ms M, the insistence on life’s frustration had almost the opposite
of its official meaning. It was a way of taking control. The world could not inflict
frustration on her because, in fantasy, she would get there first, and inflict it on herself.
By insisting upon frustration, Ms M protected a hidden sense of invulnerability. This came
out in dreams and daydreams of being all-powerful: able, for instance, to rip out the heart
of an opponent and devour it or shred her enemy with sabre-like fingernails. The
frustration and anger that Ms M consciously felt covered over omnipotent fantasies of
revenge. She also felt omnipotent when, in a fight, she took up the position of
unemotional reason looking down objectively on her opponent: wondering out loud in an
‘unemotional voice’ why his problem would get him so upset.
Rather than focus on the content of Ms M’s fantasies, consider their structure: one level
of unconscious ego inflicts a fate that life shall be frustrating, and a level of unconscious
fantasy wishfully expresses omnipotence. This broad-scale structure has many variants
and I suspect it is not unusual in contemporary urban bourgeois life. It is an unhappy-
making solution, but one compatible with managing the social and work demands of
readers of the New York Times (or the Guardian). Within the psyche of the high-
functioning neurotic there is in some sense an ongoing ontological conflict: one side
insisting on the person’s finite nature, the other claiming omnipotence. In Ms M’s case,
the conflict culminates in a standoff in which Ms M expresses both her sense of finiteness
and her sense of omnipotence in an unhappy but triumphant compromise of frustration.
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I want to characterize this overall psychic structure—unconscious claims of omnipotence

set over against unconscious insistence on the fated disappointment of a (p. 229) finite
creature—as melancholic. Not melancholic in the familiar sense of a particular
psychological state, mood, or emotion, such as depression, though, of course, such
emotions might be part of this melancholic structure. This ‘melancholia’ should be
understood broadly as the unhealthy counterpart to the ‘mourning’ (see Freud 1917) I
mentioned at the beginning. It is a psychic configuration that makes mourning
impossible. I want to say that it is a stuck insistence that the world be, in this case, a
frustrating place. But what does it mean to be stuck? It cannot mean simply that a person
insistently brings everything back, again and again, to the same idea. Think of creative
hedgehogs, like Plato, Dostoyevsky, or Proust.8 Think of those joyous saintly figures who
are able to bring each human experience back to the idea that humans are created in
God’s image; or of Kierkegaard’s claim that purity of the heart is to will one thing; or of
Bob Dylan’s claim that all his songs end by wishing his listeners good luck.9 Just because
of repeated insistence, we do not thereby think of them as stuck. For the same reason, it
is not sufficient for being stuck that one is living with an imaginative a priori that tends
one to experience things in certain ways, tends one’s reason down certain paths. Such
imaginative direction may be internal to one’s creative flourishing.
Ms M is stuck because she is stuck in falsity—and in two related ways. First, in Ms M’s
case reason has not merely been influenced by imagination, it has been subverted by it.
Her capacity thoughtfully to distinguish appearance from reality has been distorted, so
that she has become adept at interpreting any purported successes as mere appearance.
She similarly interprets apparent failures immediately as a real-life basis for frustration.
She is stuck in a false conception of reality. And any attempts at further reflection only
feed through this short-circuited loop. Second, she is stuck in a false understanding of
self and world because she is unknowingly entangled in a poor solution to psychic
conflict. She repeatedly experiences the world as frustrating because, almost
unbeknownst to her, her imagination is taken up with childish fantasies of omnipotence.
These fantasies of course present significant challenges in adult life. If they are not
worked through and modified through further imaginative work, they threaten to break
through in demands and claims that disrupt one’s position in the social world. They can
drive one crazy. The ‘solution’ that Ms M hit upon—probably early in life—is to cover over
those fantasies with an omnipotent insistence on life’s frustrations. So the falsity here is a
false understanding of oneself, and a false sense of where one’s frustration is coming
from.
This is, I think, what Freud means when he says that the neurotic is withdrawn from
reality. Ms M cannot experience the variety of life’s events—and thus their liveliness—
because she has already interpreted them in the frame of frustration. All other beings are
and must be frustrating beings. In this way, a largely unconscious ontological stance is
held in place by a conflicted, but fairly stable psychological formation. And although Ms
M may exercise imaginative creativity in enforcing this world view, it is wearying (p. 230)
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always to be brought back to the telos of frustration. In this sense, melancholia,

understood as an ontological stance, is a failure of imagination.
Transference
Freud came to see that these forms of imagining attempt to structure the entire analytic
situation. He called this phenomenon transference, and said of it:
. . . transference is itself only a piece of repetition, and the repetition is a

transference of the forgotten past not only on to the doctor but also on to all the
other aspects of the current situation.
(Freud 1914: 151, my emphasis)
As is well known, Freud had an interest in the repetition of forgotten scenes from the
past. But there is also in his work a strain of thinking that the significant repetition is not
so much of a past scene, but the re-enactment of a past form of imaginative life. The
purported past scene—whether or not it actually happened—functions as symbolic
representation of this imaginative form of life. The best way to understand this, I think, is
not in terms of repetition or reproduction, but as the self-maintaining imaginative activity
of an unconscious teleological structure.
In his first serious reflection on transference—in the aftermath of his painful failed
treatment with the patient known as Dora—Freud said that dealing with transference was
‘by far the hardest part of the whole task’:
It is easy to learn how to interpret dreams, to extract from the patient’s

associations his unconscious thoughts and memories and to practice similar
explanatory arts: for this the patient himself will always provide the text.
Transference is the one thing the presence of which has to be detected almost
without assistance and with only the slightest clues to go upon . . .
(Freud 1905: 116–17)
There are, I think, two reasons Freud found dealing with transference so difficult. First,
in transference there is a weird undertow in which the analyst is pulled by the currents of
another person’s imagination. One finds oneself in the midst of an intermingling of
subjectivities that still needs to be better understood. And it is especially difficult to grasp
what is happening if, as with Freud, one’s self-image is of a doctor taking an objective
stance towards a patient whose subjectivity is over there, firmly inside the patient.
Second, it is emotionally demanding to be drawn into a melancholic imaginative
structure. One is assigned a rigid role, and one can come to feel that if it were up to the
analysand, one would be stuck there forever.
It is Freud’s genius to recognize that the way to get unstuck is to learn how to play with
the transference. Freud put it this way:
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The main instrument … for curbing the patient’s compulsion to repeat and for
turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference.
We (p. 231) render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the
right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as a
playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in
which it is expected to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts
that is hidden in the patient’s mind. Provided only that the patient shows
compliance enough to respect the necessary conditions of the analysis, we
regularly succeed in giving all the symptoms of the illness a new transference
meaning and in replacing his ordinary neurosis by a ‘transference-neurosis’ for
which he can be cured by the therapeutic work. The transference thus creates an
intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition
from one to the other is made.
(Freud 1914: 154, my emphasis)
I would like to take seriously the idea that working with the transference consists in
analyst and analysand learning to play together. I will give a brief clinical vignette that
illustrates what I mean by this, and then discuss why it matters. I hope to show how play
is an imaginative activity of special philosophical and psychological significance.
After a few years of analysis, Ms M became more aware of her tendency to feel frustrated
and angry with colleagues and friends, and with her partner. She was weary of it, but she
also felt despondent about ever breaking out of the cycle. She still had angry feelings, she
still had vengeful fantasies, but she was now able to notice them consciously in the
moment, and keep them to herself rather than just act them out. In that way, Ms M felt
her life was much less self-destructive than it had been: she was still in her relationship,
for example, rather than having one more explosive break-up. But she continued to feel
frustrated and angry.
In the transference, Ms M was regularly angry with me: for my silences, for what she
experienced as my spare analytic comments (which I experienced as a friendly but
definite analytic stance). She experienced me, at least at times, as withholding from her,
and accused me of being a ‘silent, passive-aggressive type, just like my mother’. This was
not all she felt towards me, but these angry feelings of frustration would recur. It also
made her angry when I pointed out that she was using our analytic relation to set up a
situation of frustration. She would then turn her anger on herself: she must not know at
all how to do analysis. She said she felt helpless and confused. In the transference I
became a parent who would not come to her aid, and left her ‘in the crib with dirty
diapers’. And yet, there was also something unreal about all this for her. It was as though
she was starting to wake up to the dream-like status of her waking life. This was a sign
we were in the ‘intermediate region’ Freud talked about.
Ms M became ever more frustrated with me in my other roles as a professor and as a

public speaker. She felt blocked from my classes and imagined I had a very good time
with my students. She had read my books and was frustrated she couldn’t learn from me
Page 11 of 21

what I was thinking now. One day she mentioned that she had seen a notice that I would
be giving a lecture in Chicago. She moved quickly on, to talking about a frustration in her
work situation. It was as though bare mention was enough. I drew her attention to the
brevity of her mention—and asked her if she might have felt the need to move away from
it. She became angry with me for bringing it up. But she did say that if I hadn’t said
anything, she would have interpreted that as me tacitly giving her permission to go. Now
(p. 232) that I had brought it up, that must mean I did not want to her to go. Either way I
was giving her a hint about what to do.
This led to a wealth of associations from childhood. She had spent much of her youth
sneaking around looking for clues, afraid to state her desire openly. In her pre-teens her
mother had become worried about Ms M gaining weight and had put her on a diet. Ms M
would sneak around for food. My not speaking much reminded her of not being fed. If she
got caught—or if she refused to eat the ‘disgusting’ food her mother did give her—she
would be sent to the basement as punishment. It is there that she remembers having her
first violent fantasies of revenge. So, in the moment I was the fantasy mother—in the
playground of the analytic situation. In asking her about her brief mention of my
upcoming talk I had caught her sneaking around. And, by supposedly giving her hints that
she shouldn’t go I was forcing her on a diet, keeping her ravenously hungry, preventing
her from being fed by me outside the confines of the analytic situation.
But though the feelings were strong, we could both feel we were in an intermediate zone,
an arena in which the reality or unreality of events is held in a weird kind of abeyance.
Ms M circled through many associations but came back to her experience of me getting
in the way of her coming to my lecture. A voice welled up from deep inside her, a plaint: ‘I
have never heard you speak!’
I said, ‘Can you hear me now?’ (My comment was earnest but as I hope you can see, also
playful. My mind had associated to a well-known mobile phone ad in which the person
repeatedly tests whether there is still a communicative link.) I do not want to exaggerate
the efficacy of any single moment and I cannot say with absolute confidence what
happened. But this seemed to me a significant moment. Ms M was at first taken aback,
slightly shaken. She laughed, she sighed, she fell silent, her body relaxed. After a moment
she said, ‘Yes, I can hear you now’.
Ms M began to draw links between various meanings of I have never heard you speak!
The official voice of the ego was the voice of frustration and complaint: because she was
in analysis with me, she was prevented from going to hear me in a lecture or a classroom.
But Ms M had been in analysis long enough that when she paid attention, she could hear
another voice just below the surface: a voice of omnipotent, victorious triumph. I have
never heard you speak! That is, ‘I have absolute, unassailable right to go whether you like
it or not!’ But then there was also a voice of dawning recognition. I have never heard you
speak! That is, ‘I have spent this time hearing you in a false role, speaking indirectly to
me passively denying me permission’. It was also a voice of mourning: ‘I have spent these
years in analysis so busy listening for clues whether you endorse what I am saying or
Page 12 of 21

whether you deny me permission that I have only dimly heard your analytic voice—which
you have been speaking all along’.
It would take a paper of its own to explain what happened in the analysis to make it
possible at this later stage for Ms M to hear my comment ‘Can you hear me now?’ as
something other than just another frustrating remark. That is all it would have been or
could have been in the opening phase of the analysis. We should have to describe how
working together Ms M and I created a ‘playground’ in which Ms M felt safe enough to
play. In particular, she felt safe enough to ‘play’ with me as being someone other than a
frustrating figure in her life.
This is crucial: playing is playing with ontology. It is a different way of being with
(p. 233)
the being of things. In his discussion of child’s play, the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott
famously introduced the terms ‘transitional object’ and ‘transitional phenomena’ to
describe a child’s play with, say, a teddy bear. Play, according to Winnicott, provides a
resting place from the standard tasks of distinguishing subjective from objective, inside
from outside, me from not-me. In play the issue of whether teddy is part of me or not—
whether, for instance, teddy simply knows what I am thinking or I simply know what he is
thinking—is left in abeyance. It is the ontological status of the teddy that is played with.
This kind of play is precious to our living; and Winnicott suggests that, with children,
‘good enough’ parents have an intuitive sense to protect the play space.
Of the transitional object [that is, teddy] it can be said that it is a matter of
agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: ‘Did you
conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?’ The important point is
that no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated.
(Winnicott 1982: 12)
In a ‘good-enough’ environment children have freedom to play with the issues of their
being and the being of things around them; for example: Is teddy part of me? Or: Is teddy
up to me? But they are able to do so because, with the help of a parental, supporting
environment, certain defining questions are left unasked. To ask them is to dissolve the
play space.
The analytic situation is a recreation in adult life of a play space. Analysts are sometimes
caricatured as not saying very much; but one benign way to understand this is in terms of
a reluctance to ask the questions that would inevitably bring play to an end. As we have
seen, Ms M was able to start playing with me as a figure in her life. In particular, were
there other ways of hearing me say ‘Can you hear me now?’ It was the play that put her
in a position where she could then effectively ask a question about the frustrating figure
who would not let her go to the lecture. Was that figure really located over there, in me?
Or was it a figment of her imagination? It was play in the analytic space that enabled her
to raise imaginative possibilities—and then gingerly try them out: questions about the
manner of her being and the manner of mine.
Page 13 of 21

In learning to play, Ms M was building up a significant psychological capacity. For as she

linked these different meanings together, she was doing more than playing with words.
These meanings were voices inside Ms M’s psyche expressing different outlooks, each of
which was hers. By going back and forth between them she was in effect linking these
voices together, bringing them into a different form of communication. This was an
exercise in Ms M’s developing capacity to integrate her psyche, precisely through her
self-understanding that this was what she was doing. Ms M’s playfulness was itself an
integrating act.
This immediate and direct efficacy of psychoanalysis has not been sufficiently
appreciated. To put it in psychoanalytic and philosophical terms: the ego can develop
itself by developing a practical capacity with respect to its own functioning. This is a
startling accomplishment: not just the capacity to change how one’s mind functions, or
even to change it on the basis of conscious understanding of how it functions, but to be
able to (p. 234) change it immediately and directly through the efficacy of self-conscious
thinking itself. On this occasion, when Ms M says, ‘I can hear you now’, she is actually
creating the condition of hearing me. This is a remarkable power: the capacity for self-
consciousness to take up and practically influence the workings of the whole psyche via
its understanding of those workings. We need to understand much better than we do how
this all works. In particular, what does influencing the workings of the whole psyche
consist in? We typically see in such moments a move in the direction of wholeheartedness
—as though the person’s emotional life and will are coming together. But how does this
work? It seems to me that we still lack an adequate answer.
Psychoanalysis as Human Reason

I believe we have reason to think of this psychic activity as a development and
manifestation of human reason. It is practical reason applied to the mind’s own workings.
My inspiration for this thought is due to Socrates. In the Republic, he argues that it is
appropriate for reason to rule the psyche because it is truly wise and exercises foresight
on behalf of the whole soul.10 Of course, we should be attentive to historical context, and
not simply assume that Socrates is somehow speaking timeless, transcendent truths.
However, there is a choice of historical contexts in which one might locate Socrates’
dictum. I would like to suggest that we locate his remark not only in the local context of
the ancient Athenian polis, but also in the broader historical context of human logos-
making.
Socrates says it is appropriate for reason to rule. The Greek is to logistikon, which
literally refers to our capacity to exercise and deploy logos. Our capacity for logos is a
shared human capacity in which we attempt to react to reality by giving an account of it
in language, an account we try to make adequate, one to which we hold ourselves and
each other answerable, one which requires us to take responsibility even for the norms of
adequacy. It is in terms of this logos-making capacity that we try to formulate a
distinction between truth and appearance, both about the world and about ourselves. The
Page 14 of 21

development of a capacity for logos-making is an historical development, but it has come

to be internally linked with what it means to be human. That is, the capacity of logos-
making has ontological implications. We can imagine circumstances in which our capacity
for logos atrophied but sexual reproduction continued. I suppose one would say that the
biological species survived, but there would be a crucial sense in which we human beings
would go out of existence.
Now Socrates says it is appropriate for reason to rule, but we should not be
(p. 235)
constrained by a caricature of ruling. It is easy to have an image of reason as a benign,

reasonable but firm monarch sitting in the throne room deciding which desires pounding
at the gates shall be let across the drawbridge into the castle. But the Greek verb archein
suggests more generally taking the lead, functioning as a principle or starting point,
lending form. Socrates’ claim, understood in its broadest context, is that our capacity for
logos ought somehow to take the lead when it comes to the workings of the whole human
psyche. In particular, our capacity for logos-making ought to take the lead with respect to
the workings of the non-rational part of the soul. It ought to be able to lend creative
direction to the imaginative workings of our soul. The appropriateness of to logistikon
taking the lead depends on the claim that it is wise (sophia) and that it has foresight
(promethêian) on behalf of the whole soul. That is, our capacity for logos-making has
legitimacy only when it is actually moving in the direction of getting things right with
respect to the whole soul.
I want to read Socrates and Plato as speaking beyond themselves. I see them as laying
down constraints on what an adequate account of reason will turn out to be. To
understand what reason is we need to figure out what the appropriate relations are
between our logos-informed capacity to understand and the (non-logos-constrained)
imaginative workings in our soul. What would it be for our capacity for logos to be wise
and exercise foresight with respect to our imaginations? It seems to me that
psychoanalysis is the attempt to work out what those appropriate relations are, in the
therapeutic context of actually encouraging the development of those relations (not
simply understanding theoretically what they should be). So understood, psychoanalysis
is itself an exercise of human reason.11 It is the activity of listening to the imaginative
voices, the promptings and workings of the non-rational soul, and engaging them
effectively with logos-informed understanding.
For Socrates in the Republic and Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics one of the central
questions, if not the central question, was how reason, to logistikon, could exercise
appropriate influence over the non-rational part of the soul. This is a question for which
they could only provide a partial answer. I believe psychoanalysis ought to be understood
as taking up that heritage and opening new paths for providing an answer.
Page 15 of 21

Mourning the Loss of Omnipotence

It is, I think, an unusual insight, not one we could have anticipated in advance, that this
power of self-consciousness to transform the mind requires the development of the
capacity to mourn, in the sense that Freud used in his essay ‘On Transience’. I said
earlier that when Ms M entered analysis her overall psychic structure was melancholic in
the (p. 236) sense that it was stuck, rigid, and life-flattening. It showed itself in a stuck
form of living. Melancholic psychic structures are unhappy-making, but at the same time
it is difficult to let go of them. The process that Freud called working-through is a
mournful process. As we saw with Ms M, the moment of saying ‘Yes, I can hear you’ had
something wistful about it, as though gaining the capacity to hear in less rigid ways was
at the same time letting go of a familiar way of life.
Mourning is essentially an imaginative activity. In effect, we learn to play with death. In

the paradigmatic case at the graveside, the death of a loved one is a time of grief. But in
mourning our imaginations get busy. We are full of memories of the loved one, full of
thoughts like, ‘what would he say if he were here?’, full of daydreams of how we will go
on under the benign aura of his lasting influence. And we are full of playful fantasies—
some conscious, some unconscious—in which he lives on inside us, in which we can hear
him speak or he can hear us. For Freud, a healthy way of saying goodbye is learning how
to play with our lost loved one. Mourning, broadly understood, is the playful way of
leaving in abeyance the lostness of the lost one. It is in such play that we work out how to
be as a transient being in the company of other transient beings.
In ‘On Transience’, Freud suggests we expand our conception of mourning—take it

beyond the paradigm case of loss of a loved one and apply it more broadly to the
structure of human life in general. One way of viewing Ms M’s analysis is that in it she
learned how to mourn her own omnipotence. That is, she learned how to play with its
demise. And, because in this case we are dealing with structuring fantasies, learning how
to play with the death of one’s own sense of omnipotence is the same activity as allowing
omnipotence to die. And as Ms M no longer has to deal with the threats of omnipotent
fantasies breaking through, she can ease up on her need to cover them over with an
unrelenting insistence on frustration. Mourning is the way we bid adieu to a melancholic
psychic structure that has hitherto held us captive. In this way we again open ourselves
up to life. For example, instead of forever facing false structures of frustration we open
ourselves up to the genuine risks and corresponding joys of transient life. The question of
how we are to be with our own unconscious is thus revealed as a question of how we are
to be.
An Unusual Meal
Let me conclude with a clinical example that illustrates this point. About four months
before the end of her analysis Ms M came in and reported a dream she had the night
before.
Page 16 of 21

I had to give a presentation. It has music in it. I wanted to make Thai food—that’s
somehow connected to the music. I’m excited about it. I have a recipe. I am going
to go shopping for the ingredients. It will be spicy. Then later in the dream I’m
anxious that I’m not prepared.
She comments that she is excited by the idea of making music and Thai food. She
(p. 237)
is not an expert, but is really interested in it. But she is anxious that as she goes shopping
for ingredients she might not be able to find her way back. Then she asks:
Why Thai food? The word ‘Thai’ could be significant, it has to do with a connection
to music, but that is not clear.
She continues, ‘I can’t believe in the dream how much I’m enjoying my life’.
Then she says something that surprises me: ‘I can see the Thai dish in front of me. But it
is one someone else made. I have to get the things to make my own.’ This is the first time
I have heard about another person, so I ask her, ‘There is someone else who has already
done it?’ She says yes, and then after a pause says ‘I wonder whether you think that is
you, and all I am going to do is copy you’. I say, ‘What do you think?’ She said, ‘It feels
like my idea. I can bring the Thai food into my presentation and connect it to the music. It
feels right.’
This was the second time she said that she could connect Thai food to the music. So I
said: ‘You seem to think that Thai food would tie things to the music’. She responded, ‘The
Thai food is a tie—it could tie everything together—though I don’t know how it will work
out exactly. I have to go far away for the ingredients, but the food will be interesting,
spicy, taste good, be unfamiliar to me.’ She also wondered whether this would make a tie
between the two of us, after the analysis ended. She would have to go off on her own to
find her own ingredients and put them together.
I do not think it is too much of a stretch of the imagination to hear this as a dream-like
comment on the end of the analysis. In her youth, she had been kept on a strict food
regimen by her mother and this had led, in her own mind, to terrible feelings of
frustration and anger; to sneaking and peeking; to hidden gluttony and purging; to
getting caught and punished and having violent fantasies of revenge. In the dream, this
structure is opened up. She is going to be able to make, eat, and present an exotic new
dish—Thai food. It is not something with which she is familiar, but she is excited by the
prospect. It feels fresh and new; a challenge. She has some anxiety that she might get
lost as she looks for the spicy ingredients, but that does not dampen her sense of
excitement.
And then through the loose associations of primary processes of the unconscious, Thai
food is linked to tie-food. A heap of meanings are condensed into that image. In the
dream, Ms M ties Thai food together with making music. She ties that together with her
capacity to make a new kind of public presentation. The dream seems to be summing up
Page 17 of 21

the meaning of the analysis for her in dream-like terms. The analysis has fed her. But it
has fed her with a capacity to make her own tie-food. She can now make music for others.
We can see the truth of the dream demonstrated in the analytic session. As Ms M
associates, she is able to tie her dream to her conscious thoughts about her dream. She is
able to put her dream into logos-filled conscious thoughts that tie together in unusual
ways the rational and non-rational parts of her soul. All of this—the dream and the later
analysis of it—are playful and mournful anticipations of the end of the analysis. Ms M is
(p. 238) anticipating the end, trying to sum it up as a way of getting ready to say goodbye.
She is dealing with the transience of the analysis itself. Notice how lacking her goodbye is
in the familiar structure of frustration and anger. This means that Ms M is not just
mourning the end of the analysis, she is saying goodbye to a way of life that had for so
long been her way of life. It is by thinking through her life in a psychoanalytic manner,
interweaving reason and the imaginative workings of the non-rational parts of her soul,
that she has been able to undo its false structure. This is the activity of reason taking
appropriate lead of the whole soul. And note the imaginative hopefulness here for a
future that cannot yet be comprehended. This open-ended hopefulness is integral to the
willingness to give up hitherto imprisoning structures, however comfortable they once
were. And it is a joy Ms M can now experience in the transience of life.12
References
Berlin, I. (2013). The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Davidson, D. (1982). ‘Paradoxes of irrationality’. In R. Wollheim and J. Hopkins (eds),

Philosophical Essays on Freud (pp. 289–305). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Engstrom, S. (2009). The Form of Practical Knowledge: A Study of the Categorical

Imperative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vols 4–5.
London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1905). ‘Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria’. In J. Strachey (ed. and

trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol.
7 (pp. 7–122). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1910a). ‘Five lectures on psycho-analysis’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 11 (pp. 9–
55). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1910b). ‘The future prospects of psycho-analytic therapy’. In J. Strachey (ed.

and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. 11 (pp. 141–151). London: Hogarth Press.
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Freud, S. (1912). ‘Recommendations to physicians practicing psycho-analysis’. In J.

Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12 (pp. 111–120). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1913). ‘On the beginning of treatment’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12 (pp.
123–144). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1914). ‘Remembering, repeating and working-through’. In J. Strachey (ed. and

trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol.
12 (pp. 147–156). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1915a). ‘The unconscious’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard
(p. 239)
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14 (pp. 166–215).
Freud, S. (1915b). ‘On transience’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14 (pp. 305–307). London:
Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1917). ‘Mourning and melancholia’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14 (pp.
243–258). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1923). ‘The ego and the id’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard
Freud, S. (1925). ‘An autobiographical study’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard
Freud, S. (1969). ‘Das Unbewußte’. In M. Bonaparte, A. Freud, E. Bibring, W. Hoffer, E.

Kris, O. Isakower (eds), Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 10. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag.
Lear, J. (2015). Freud, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge.
Lear, J. (2016). ‘The Freudian sabbath’. In J. Kreines and R. Zuckert (eds), Hegel on
Philosophy in History (pp. 230–247). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lear, J. (2017). Wisdom Won From Illness: Essays in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mann, T. (1937). ‘Freud and the future’. In Essays of Three Decades. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf.
Pippin, R. (2014). Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology

of Spirit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Plato (2003). Platonis: Rempublicam, ed. S. R. Slings. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Plato (2004). Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Rödl, S. (2007). Self-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Winnicott, D. W. (1982). ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena’. In Playing and

Reality (pp. 1–25). New York: Routledge. (p. 240)
Notes:
(1) See Freud 1913: 134–5; Freud 1900: 101–2; Freud 1910a: 31–2; Freud 1925: 40–1;
Freud 1910b: 144; Freud 1912: 115. I discuss the importance of the fundamental rule in
Lear 2017: 1–49.
(2) I discuss this mode of apperception in Lear 2016. See also Pippin 2014.
(3) ‘To sum up: exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process (mobility of
cathexes), timelessness, and replacement of external by psychical reality—these are the
characteristics which we may expect to find in processes belonging to the system Ucs.’
Freud 1915a: 187.
(4) For a thought-provoking discussion of fate in psychoanalysis, see Mann 1937: 3–45.
(5) See also the case of Ms A, in Lear 2017: 11–29. The broad-scale difference was that
Ms A’s world was one of disappointment and resignation; Ms M’s was one of frustration
and rage, passive aggression, and emotional explosions.
(6) The German is Widerspruchlosigkeit. See Freud 1969: 286.
(7) This is the route Davidson (1982) took and the problem he set out to solve. The
solution is ingenious but I have argued (Lear 2015: 29–60) that it is not adequate to the
psychological phenomena that show up in psychoanalysis.
(8) See Berlin (2013) for an account of the use of this phrase.
(9) ‘Is there anything in addition to your songs that you want to say to people?
—Good luck.
—You don’t say that in your songs.
—Oh, yes I do, every song tails off with ‘Good Luck,—I hope you make it.’
(‘Bob Dylan Gives Press Conference in San Francisco, Part II’, Rolling Stone, 20 January
1968).
(10) Plato (2003, 2004), Republic 441e. I use the English words ‘soul’ and ‘psyche’
interchangeably as translations of the Greek word ‘psyche’. And thus by ‘soul’ I mean
basically what Aristotle meant: that the soul is the principle of life in a living being.
Page 20 of 21

(11) See Engstrom 2009; Rödl 2007.
(12) I would like to thank Matthew Boyle, Gabriel Lear, Anselm Mueller, Edna
O’Shaughnessy, and the editors of this volume for comments on a previous draft; and
Isabela Ferreira for copy-editing and comments.
Jonathan Lear
Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, USA
Page 21 of 21

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Print Publication Date: Feb 2019 Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind

Abstract and Keywords

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

(Freud 1915b: 305, my emphasis)

(Freud 1915b: 306, my emphasis)

In Freud’s view, his companions’ imaginations leapt forward to an imagined future in

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

beauty—would be an unfettered exercise of a healthy and developed capacity to mourn.

So if mourning broadly understood is a form of living well it seems as though we might

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

The Fundamental Rule

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

Let me give a clinical vignette. Ms M—a professional in a large corporation—came into

One of the hallmarks of unconscious mental functioning is timelessness. It is important to

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

The irrationality consists not just in the unconscious’ imperviousness to contradictory

This imaginative a priori is further facilitated by forms of unconscious imaginative

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

(p. 228) Melancholia

. . . we find ourselves in an unforeseen situation. We have come upon something in

(Freud 1923: 15–18)

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

I want to characterize this overall psychic structure—unconscious claims of omnipotence

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

always to be brought back to the telos of frustration. In this sense, melancholia,

. . . transference is itself only a piece of repetition, and the repetition is a

(Freud 1914: 151, my emphasis)

It is easy to learn how to interpret dreams, to extract from the patient’s

(Freud 1905: 116–17)

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

(Freud 1914: 154, my emphasis)

Ms M became ever more frustrated with me in my other roles as a professor and as a

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

was giving her a hint about what to do.

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

(Winnicott 1982: 12)

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

In learning to play, Ms M was building up a significant psychological capacity. For as she

Psychoanalysis as Human Reason

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

development of a capacity for logos-making is an historical development, but it has come

constrained by a caricature of ruling. It is easy to have an image of reason as a benign,

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

Mourning the Loss of Omnipotence

Mourning is essentially an imaginative activity. In effect, we learn to play with death. In

In ‘On Transience’, Freud suggests we expand our conception of mourning—take it

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

Davidson, D. (1982). ‘Paradoxes of irrationality’. In R. Wollheim and J. Hopkins (eds),

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