An extremely gripping and philosophically compelling exposition of Freud’s major psychoanalytic theories.

Lucid and straightforward intro to Freuds basic concepts and themes, although it might be somewhat simplified and not in depth enough. Love how Lear ties Freud's theoretical categories into clinical reality and more significantly ethical considerations. My major problem would be his last chapter on Freud's critique of morality and religion. His critique of Freud's critique is okay, but not how he asserts too much of himself and shifts the problem onto HIS problem rather than Freud's.

Brief, informative, well-written.

The most striking choice in this book is its title. There is no biography of Freud because Freud is a "philosophical" introduction, which is to say it's an ideography. Removing the man from the equation has its benefits. Lear's ability to unroll the structure of Freud's thinking so to, if not vindicate, make less ridiculous, ideas like the Oedipus Complex is admirable. Even more admirable is his willingness to sort ideas by utility. And by blending psychoanalysis into his Aristotelian commitments to virtue ethics, he transforms Freudian ideas into a fundamental tenet of being - “humanity…is not a biological given, but an ethical task” and this humanity can be achieved through the "conversation that...can structure the psyche" that is Psychoanalysis.

Of course an obvious problem appears when you tie anyone's "humanity" (an essentialist & definitionally anthropocentric concept) to an "ethical task," especially when your subject is the theories of a bourgeois doctor whose career was built on the neuroses of the well-to-do. This is not made any better by Lear following this up by warning that there are "currents alive in [our] culture that so valorize comfortable lives." Quite a statement from a tenured philosophy professor at a college whose community area, Hyde Park, is both racially and economicaly segregated.

There are intragroup debates about certain ideas Lear espouses like defining the unconscious as a non-conceptual structure that attacks thinking in itself (e.g. anxiety as a childhood adaptation to prevent thinking about such-and-such) as opposed to a kind of brain's brain with its own rationality (inspired by Wilfred Bion per Nell Boulton, but idk). And Peter Gay questions Lear's choice to exclude history. Despite Lear's tethering of Freud to Nietzsche, Gay says, Freud is far better understood as influenced by Plato if only because he was a Viennese elite with all the cultural preoccupations and biases of one. Ignoring this contingency allows Lear to elide Freud's "seriously questioned notions about female psychology."

But while a lack of historical depth and professional disagreements are fine, I do feel they miss that the book is working to show how, "from the perspective of the philosophical tradition," "self-consciousness constitutes as the creatures we are" and that "psychoanalysis is located at the core of our humanity, for it really only enjoins one activity: to allow self-consciousness to unfold spontaneously of its own accord." My concern with Freud is Lear's pairing a radical Nietzschean social critique and an Aristotelian pursuit of "rational animality." If the foundation of psychoanalysis is the harnessing of the unconsciousness' impulse for creative repetition "at the level of self-conscious awareness," and the one activity our humanity enjoins is "allowing" self-consciousness to "unfold," it's unclear to me where the kinds of radical agency found in Nietzsche fit in. What is the relationship between civilization and its discontents?

Which is the irony of Lear's most striking choice in this book. Lear dismisses Freud's metaphysics, but the shape of his dismissal reminds us of the block that Freud stumbled into elitist cynicism on. In the same vein I think of Byung-Chul Han's Topology of Violence that tries to do the opposite, claiming Freud's concepts are outdated, having been replaced by a transparency-obsessed burnout society full of "achievement-subjects." Instead of a society whose outcasts are banished by structures of power (homo sacer), it's a society whose incasts are banished by their commitment to that structure (homo liber). Think Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. I think Lear and Han are optimistic and trying to move beyond Freud. They think we lived in that demarcated space, and I think we live in history.

این کتاب رو چند وقت پیش خوندم و به تمام زیربناهایی که از روانکای آموخته بودم سازمان خوبی داد، دیدگاه فلسفی به فروید داشت و به نظرم هر روانکاوی می‌بایست مطالعه کنه.

Lear states that his purpose in this book is to give a "philosophical" introduction to Freud's thought. I anticipated that this would involve analyzing Freud's implicit metaphysical assumptions, or connecting his ideas to issues in philosophy of mind, etc. Lear does none of that. This rather feels like a summary of Freud's key ideas; there is no philosophical explication of their broader significance, or philosophical argument for their legitimacy. Some of my dissatisfaction comes from this violation of expectations.

The rest of my dissatisfaction stems from my attitudes toward Freud's ideas themselves. I've been suspicious of Freud's work, and was hoping that reading Lear's understanding of Freud (Lear, as a philosopher whose work I admire) would change my mind. It did not. Reading this book affirms my sense that Freudian psychoanalytic theory is very much like a religion. It provides a seemingly comprehensive framework to understand our human nature and to explain our experiences. But its principles are reductive and ungrounded, as much as the principles in any given religion are. The hype over and acceptance of psychoanalytic theory is perhaps due to the same factors that contribute to the acceptance of religions. Their explanations offer guidance and meaning to the most confusing and painful areas of experience.

Moreover, I think Freud's ideas can flourish only in the individualistic, narcissistic, capitalist culture of our day. It would baffle people from communalist cultures how one could think it is a good idea to talk and think about ourselves - without thinking about the broader world, history, and our communities - for hours on end. Criticisms of self-help culture are pretty much applicable to Freudian psychoanalysis, from the understanding of psychoanalysis that Lear's book has left to me.

Let me give some examples and summarize some parts of this book. Freud believes that there is an unconscious that has dispositions, very much like our conscious dispositions. The difference is that the unconscious's dispositions are not targeted at specific individuals or events; they are more general emotional impulses. In contrast, our dispositions and attitudes are directed at particulars. Moreover, the unconscious is fundamentally sexual. If this view on the structure of the mind is appealing, I think it is because it captures the fact that we can have mental states that do not have particular propositional or conceptual content. But one does not need to posit a second agential force inside ourselves, distinct from our own, (let alone a force that is sexual in nature) to account for this fact. We can just posit that there is a range of kinds of dispositions and experiences we are capable of; some are conceptual, and others are not. I think a more useful framework for understanding this fact is that there are conceptual and non-conceptual elements of most mental states. We can examine mental states in terms of these two kinds of aspects; there is no need to posit a second agent or personality is the source of all the non-conceptual elements.

Freud, moreover, believed that the act of interpreting our dreams gives us insight into the unconscious. This seems like a load of nonsense. If the ways we interpret something shed light on the non-conceptual, emotional drives that back up and color our experience, evaluating our interpretations of anything, not just dreams, should do the trick with letting us understand our emotions. Freud does not provide any convincing argument for his claim that the contents of dreams are all hyper significant, reflecting our desires and fears. The competing thesis is that the contents of dreams are quite random, or re-hashing of imagery and experiences from our lives; the support for this is that songs and images can get stuck in our heads for reasons totally unrelated to our desires and fears (e.g., the song is simply catchy). Freud's approach to dream analysis is tantamount to the affirmation of forming conspiracy theories about anything we wish, without requiring actual facts or evidence to support such theories.

Freud also proposes the reality principle, the pleasure principle, and the death drive. He thinks that our experience is ontogenetically originally driven by the pleasure principle; we seek out pleasure, and understand reality in such a way as to promote the attainment of pleasures (e.g., an infant hallucinates the mother's breast, because this gives pleasure, and the infant believes that the breast actually exists in doing this). It is a cognitive achievement to let the reality principle structure our experience; the reality principle simply refers to our sensitivities to how the world actually works, independently of our needs and pleasures. Why do we need this elaborate positing of fundamental psychic 'principles'? It is commonsense that we seek out pleasure, and this disposition influences the beliefs we form and the ways we go about the world. There are many different, fine-grained psychological explanations that could be offered to examine this in detail. The 'explanation' of these two principles is both reductive, and doesn't actually offer much explanatory power; it doesn't help us understand the psychological mechanisms that are going on, whose manipulation could help us intervene on our experience.

The most insightful point of psychoanalysis, which Lear keeps up as a theme running throughout the chapters, is about the nature of psychological healing. Healing does not happen when we form the correct beliefs, or make discoveries that explain out pasts. Rather, healing happens when we are engaged in our pathological behaviors live-time, have this behavior disrupted (e.g., by reflecting and self-awareness; by a psychoanalyst), and then change our route activity and complete the behavior in such a way as to give it a new form. But this point is not unique to psychoanalysis. Behaviorist approaches in psychology focus and expand on this point. Moreover, William James, who preceded Freud by half a century, makes this point in his analyses on the nature of habit.

I might not be doing Freud justice for how innovative and important his ideas are. Maybe I can be critical of him because the conceptual resources to which I have access are already influenced and enhanced by Freud's discoveries about the existence of the unconscious. But at Freud's time, his points were momentous, and before him no one thought about psychological dynamics between the unconscious and conscious. But that simply isn't true. Philosophers for a very long time have talked about the force of emotion and impulse, and the disconnect between those and reason. Moreover, philosophers have known about unconscious processes and mechanisms, and posited how they structure our conscious experience (Hume, Kant). I set out hoping to have my mind changed about Freud, to see his importance. But with all the charity I can muster, I think his insightful/correct points have already been made by other thinkers preceding him, and his misleading/incorrect points are nicely disguised and are believed in religiously by too many.

I'm writing this all out because writing reviews helps me remember my reading experience; but also because I think Freudian ideas are positively destructive and unhelpful, and I wish for people to be more critical towards him. The ideas are destructive in that the explanatory entities that are posited to account for our experiences are all located inside one's psyche. When Freud understands that the individual's relationships to others shape one's development, he acknowledges these relationships only as, or in the form of, an internal, psychological structure the individual possesses, a structure that she imposes on the world. There is no mention of politics, culture, or history, and how these fundamentally shape the possibilities of relationships and experiences.

Nonetheless, this book is written quite clearly, and is well organized. I'd recommend it for readers who want an introduction to Freud's central ideas. But do not expect a philosophical take or analysis of these ideas; and take caution in one's evaluation of them. Lear does not provide any resources to help us evaluate Freud; he states that he largely agrees with psychoanalytic theory. So his writing can make it difficult to critically evaluate Freud, or at least does not aid in providing a critical lens.

فروید
نوشته جاناتان لیر
ترجمه مجتبی جعفری و علی‌رضا طهماسب

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جاناتان لیر، دانش آموخته فلسفه از دانشگاه شیکاگو است. او که به گفته خود سالیان زیادی مشغول مطالعه آثار فروید است، با نگرشی فلسفی به مبانی نظری تئوری روانکاوی و با تاویلی مناسب از آراء فروید، و به دور از قضاوت های ارزشی فردی، به نگارش این کتاب همت گمارده و در راستای ویراستی دیگر از کتاب دیباچه ای نیز برای خوانندگان فارسی زبان نگاشته است.
ترجمه خوب کتاب و مبانی نظری آن، آن را به کتابی مورد توجه برای علاقه‌مندان به مطالعات انسانی تبدیل کرده است‌ و برای دانشجویان روانشناسی و فلسفه، مطالعات اجتماعی و دیگر رشته های علوم انسانی مفید و آموزنده است.
جاناتان لیر خود را موافق و یا مخالف آراء فروید ندانسته و همانطور که مترجمان نیز اذعان داشته اند، بر آن بخش از «ناعقلانیت انگیخته»، که در روانکاوی مورد توجه قرار می‌گیرد، تمرکز کرده است.
او در کنار مفاهیم پایه روانکاوی، همچو اخلاق و صداقت، به انتقال، رویأ، ناهشیار و میل جنسی می‌پردازد و در کنار مسائلی سازه محور در مبانی روانشناسی، همچو نشاط و افسردگی، به تأویل فلسفی خود پایبند مانده و مفاهیم فرویدی روانکاوی را در چهارچوبی مبرهن، جمع آوری و در این کتاب به چاپ رسانده است.
او برای نگارش این کتاب، چند کتاب به قلم خود فروید، به همراه منابعی از تاریخ روانشناسی و همچنین تاریخ فلسفه را نیز مورد بررسی دقیق قرار داده است و برای مطالعات بین رشته ای توصیه می‌شود.

باید توجه داشته باشید که وقتی چیزی را نقل می‌کنید، افکار گوناگونی به ذهنتان می‌رسد که بنا بر ملاحظات خاصی می‌خواهید آنها را کنار بگذارید. وسوسه می‌شوید به خود بگویید که این یا آن موضوع بی‌ربط است، یا اساسا اهمیتی ندارد، یا بی معنی است، پس نیازی نیست گفته شود. هرگز به این ملاحظات تن ندهید و حرفتان را بزنید_در حقیقت، دقیقا چون از گفتنش احساس ناخوشایندی دارید، باید حرفتان را بزنید. بعدها پی می‌برید و می‌فهمید که چرا این یگانه قاعده‌ای است که باید از آن تبعیت کنید. پس هرچه به ذهنتان خطور می‌کند بگویید. طوری عمل کنید که انگار مسافری هستید نشسته در کنار پنجرهٔ واگن قطار و چیزی را که در بیرون می‌گذرد برای کسی که درون واگن است توصیف می‌کنید.
در آخر، هرگز فراموش نکنید که قول داده‌اید کاملا صادق باشید و چیزی را به صرف آنکه، به هر دلیلی، گفتنش برایتان ناخوشایند است، از قلم نیاندازید. «فروید» در باب مبانی نخست روانکاوی.

در پناه خِرد.

A very readable story about Freud's work and its importance for philosophy.

Insightful exploration of Freud's contributions to human thought. At times a bit dry as the approach is of an analytic philosophical nature, but for the most part doesn't get too bogged down in arguments. I disagree with some of Lear's analysis of later Freud's thought, but appreciate that he felt bold enough to disagree in good faith.

Listened to the audiobook and it was excellently performed. The accent for quotations of Freud was always entertaining.

I’m definitely biased since I had to read this for a class but, it does the trick. If you want a readable and understandable intro to Freud then this works perfectly.

This is a to be recommended summary of the major tenets of Freud’s thoughts.

Refreshing to read this balanced account against all the recent Freud bashing.

Yes mistakes were made but Freud gave us some great insights for our journey towards our understanding of our psyche

And this book underlines the primal importance of the free association attitude underlying psychoanalysis

Great overview of Freuds beliefs and a little into who he was as a person. The most educational, and arguably most challenging part, was the structure of the psyche (Id, Ego, and Superego).

Overall, if you are looking for a book of generality/constructed Freudian ideas, this is a great start.