On October 9, I reposted a lovely essay by Daniel Oppenheimer about Jonathan Lear, the University of Chicago philosopher and psychoanalyst who died of cancer on September 22 at the age of 76. When I shared it with my subscribers, I said that I might try to write something of my own about Lear and why his writing and thinking were so important to me.
This post is my attempt to do that. It is necessarily somewhat idiosyncratic to me, focusing on the first book of Lear’s that I read—because that’s the one that hit me the hardest, like a lightning bolt. He went on to write on many other topics, and I usually learned from and appreciated those. But it’s Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (originally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1990) that left the greatest mark on me, beginning immediately after I first read it, 21 years ago.
That was a rough time for me. About four years before that, I had decided to abandon the pursuit of a tenure-track position teaching political philosophy and immediately thrown myself into finding a job as a writer or editor at a center-right magazine or newspaper. I published a lot of essays and book reviews over the following nine months, but I hadn’t managed to land a position with a steady income. I’d never felt more lost and adrift. In the depths of my despondency, I woke up one morning in the early fall of 2000, dreading another day of staring at my email inbox as I waited for a job offer to materialize, and came to an absurdly impulsive decision: I would convert to Catholicism.
That came as quite a shock to my (cradle Catholic) wife, my secular-Jewish father and brother, and … myself. The mystery deepened as I went through with the conversion, was offered and took a job at First Things magazine under a prominent Catholic priest and conservative public intellectual, and then, over the next few years, found myself diverging rather sharply with the editorial stance of the journal and failing to find spiritual sustenance in my new ecclesiastical home.
By the time I bought and began reading Lear’s book (after reading a brilliant essay of his in The New Republic) in 2004, I felt even more lost and adrift than I’d been when I resolved to leave academia. Why had I converted to a religion I didn’t believe in? Why had I signed up to contribute to an ideological program about which I always felt deeply ambivalent and now increasingly opposed? I didn’t understand any of it. It was as if I’d spent years as a spectator passively observing my own life and decisions. Someone was choosing to do these things, but it didn’t feel like me.
Reading Lear taught me many things—about the human mind and condition, and about myself. In my despair, I’d begun a course of therapy a few months before, but until I read Lear, it was going nowhere. Lear spoke the language of classical philosophy and interpreted Freudian psychoanalysis in those terms. That helped me to understand, for the first time in my life, the point of undergoing therapy—and to understand how difficult and wrenching it could be, because it’s an effort of subjectivity to grasp itself as an object of examination.
What follows in this post are a series of extended quotes from the opening chapter of the book, along with some of my own comments on what Lear has to say there. I offer them as a tribute to one of the deepest American thinkers of the past few decades, as an introduction to his thought for those who might be tempted to dive deeper on their own, and as a demonstration of how to practice humanism at a high level. Civilization always needs more of that. We may need more of it than usual today.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Notes from the Middleground to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.