page_title: Love and Its Place in Nature
section_title: Summary
hierarchical_section_title: Love and Its Place in Nature / Summary
caption_attribution_description: English: Photographic portrait of Sigmund Freud, signed by the sitter ("Prof. Sigmund Freud")
context_page_description: Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis is a book about psychoanalysis by the philosopher Jonathan Lear, in which the author discusses the importance of love in Freudian theory.
  The book received positive reviews, praising it as an accessible discussion of psychoanalysis. Commentators noted that Lear revised Freud's psychoanalytic theories and compared his views to those of the psychotherapist Alfred Adler.
context_section_description: Lear argues that Sigmund Freud's creation of psychoanalysis involves "three related elements whose significance we have only begun to understand: a science of subjectivity; the discovery of an archaic form of mental functioning; the positing of Love as a basic force in nature." He believes that the form of mental functioning discovered by Freud is difficult to recognize because of the way in which it is expressed in dreams, acts such as slips of the tongue, and physical phenomena and symptoms that do not initially appear mental in nature. He argues that interpreting this type of mental functioning through expressing it in more familiar terms can potentially transform it, maintaining that this occurred during Freud's work with hysterics. Lear argues that Freud recognized love as a "basic developmental force in nature", and that if love is a "basic force in nature" then "our conception of nature must be transformed." He discusses the physician Josef Breuer's treatment of his patient Anna O. and the way in which it led to the development of psychoanalysis.
  He maintains that most criticisms and defenses of psychoanalysis are irrelevant, giving as an example the philosopher Adolf Grünbaum's arguments in The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984). He describes Grünbaum's account of Freud as tendentious. He credits Grünbaum with effectively criticizing the philosopher Paul Ricœur's Freud and Philosophy (1965) and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas's Knowledge and Human Interests (1968). However, he adds that, despite what is often assumed, Grünbaum's arguments "do not undermine the more general possibility of a causal hermeneutic account of human motivation."
caption: Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis
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