Stephen Mitchell

The sense of uniqueness is the centerpiece of romantic passion in Western culture. There is no one else like the beloved, the lover believes: “We were made for each other.”

Does Romanticism offer an escape from the “real” world (grasped by Enlightenment rationality) into an unreal, illusory world? Or does Romanticism provide an opening into a deeper experience, the more “real” underpinnings of experience?

Nevertheless, with the waning of confidence that science itself will generate wisdom, the last several decades have witnessed a partial swing back toward a Romantic sensibility, in movements like existentialism, spiritualism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism, with all their offshoots. The common thread running through all these movements is a belief that rationality and objectivity, although good and useful for many purposes, may not be the exclusive or even the best route to engaging our world. This has particular relevance for the question of what brings another person alive for us as an object of love and desire.

Imagination is the handmaiden of desire. What makes someone desirable is idealization, an act of imagination that highlights the qualities that make that person unique, special, out of the ordinary.

“Reality testing is far more than an intellectual or cognitive function. It may be understood more comprehensively as the experiential testing of fantasy—its potential and suitability for actualization—and the testing of actuality—its potential for encompassing it in, and penetrating it with, one’s fantasy life. We deal with the task of a reciprocal transposition.” Here reality is tested not to eliminate from it unrealistic infantile fantasies, but to probe it for sites in which one can locate and cultivate fantasies.

The experience of beauty, Scarry is suggesting, entails a transcendence of ordinary reality.

Healthy self-experience requires a certain episodic idealization of the self, a romancing of the self, as a source of vitality and creativity.

The central implication of the “uncertainty principle” developed by the physicist Werner Heisenberg is that one cannot ascertain and describe both the velocity and the position of an electron at the same time. To determine its velocity is to change its position. To determine its position is to alter its velocity. Learning about something in the external world requires interacting with it, and that interaction has an impact on, changes, the thing one is studying. This is certainly true of knowledge of selves, one’s own or another’s.

Knowing oneself is a complicated business, because knowing one version of oneself can be a defense against knowing and being surprised by other versions of oneself. Thus, in contemporary psychoanalytic terms, knowing oneself is much less a goal to be achieved than a process to be immersed in.

lover’s idealization tends to be more fertile when the qualities chosen correspond to ways in which the beloved enjoys idealizing herself.