Jonathan Lear, Love and it's place in nature and Open minded: working out the logic of the soul

It's not hard to imagine why Love and Its Place in Nature (now in a second edition, with a new preface by the author) has, in the decade or so it has been in print, received less attention from the philosophical community than it deserves. Its subtitle announces it as a "A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis," and Freud is thought of by most analytic philosophers as the icon of a discredited orthodoxy, or in any case as the purveyor of a doctrine too esoteric and self-contained to be of interest to anyone who is not already a Freudian. They should not have been deterred. Lear's treatment of Freud is not particularly orthodox: it purports to present psychoanalysis psychoanalyzed, a view which stands to Freud's as the successful analysand's self-interpretation stands to the complaint with which, years before, he first walked into his analyst's office. Freud provides Lear with a way of raising and thinking through a range of important but generally neglected issues, an