I just finished reading Frank Summers in January’s issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology. His paper, “Psychoanalysis: Romantic not Wild” was a great survey of the Romantic movement around the late 18th century. Romantics dismissed the neoclassical/enlightenment idea of a single ideal that all should strive for: instead they favored allowing the totality of the person (reason, emotion, desires, etc.) to develop and grow into its own potential.
Similarly, Freud and tons of post-Freudian (and non-Freudian) psychoanalytic movements focus on allowing the individual to reveal himself or herself and gradually grow in their own personal direction. Summers provides an explanation of the Romantic movement, evidence of its influence in Freud’s methods (but perhaps not his theories, according to Summers), and three clinical examples.
Summers observation is particularly relevant for that awkward stage when we feel caught in the land between to opposites and we are waiting for the third way of being to present itself. “In this dilemma,” Summers writes, “the quandary of two unpalatable positions, that owe can cash in on our romantic heritage . As we have seen, desire, interest, passion, and values all contain an imaginative component . . . . Pointed towards the future desire includes a trjectory for what can and might be.”
As an example, we are presented with the case of a patient who recognized that she often loudly and vocally imposed her desires upon others. She realized that her behavior habit was not helpful in her relationships, but initially she could only see the opposite behavior, being a doormat of sorts, as the only other option. Instead, by focusing on her values, desires, etc. the patient found a new third way of existing: listening and acknowledging others while still expressing her own side of things. “Her most fundamental new way of being was the freedom to determine when and how to deploy her aggression an exercise her empathy.”
Summers is spot on with his conclusion that analysis functions at its best when it is “in line with one of the great traditions of the humanities, the romantic concept of the highest good, Bildung, the realization of self-potential.”
Thanks for the enjoyable article!
