Psychoanalysis and Ethics The Necessity of Perspective 1st Edition Black

Full download ebooks at ebookmeta.
com
Psychoanalysis and Ethics The Necessity of

Perspective 1st Edition Black
https://ebookmeta.com/product/psychoanalysis-and-ethics-the-
necessity-of-perspective-1st-edition-black/
OR CLICK BUTTON
DOWLOAD NOW
Download more ebook from https://ebookmeta.com

More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1st

Edition Benyamini
https://ebookmeta.com/product/lacan-and-the-biblical-ethics-of-
psychoanalysis-1st-edition-benyamini/
Climate Crisis Psychoanalysis and Radical Ethics 1st

Edition Donna M. Orange
https://ebookmeta.com/product/climate-crisis-psychoanalysis-and-
radical-ethics-1st-edition-donna-m-orange/
The Ethics of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. A Conversation

about Living in Joy Yehuda Israely
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-ethics-of-lacanian-
psychoanalysis-a-conversation-about-living-in-joy-yehuda-israely/
Psychoanalysis History and Radical Ethics Learning to

Hear 1st Edition Donna M. Orange
https://ebookmeta.com/product/psychoanalysis-history-and-radical-
ethics-learning-to-hear-1st-edition-donna-m-orange/
The Contingency of Necessity Reason and God as Matters
of Fact 1st Edition Tritten
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-contingency-of-necessity-
reason-and-god-as-matters-of-fact-1st-edition-tritten/
Speculating on the Edge of Psychoanalysis: Rings and

Voids (The Lines of the Symbolic in Psychoanalysis
Series) 1st Edition Pablo Lerner
https://ebookmeta.com/product/speculating-on-the-edge-of-
psychoanalysis-rings-and-voids-the-lines-of-the-symbolic-in-
psychoanalysis-series-1st-edition-pablo-lerner/
Occultism and the Origins of Psychoanalysis 1st Edition

Maria Pierri
https://ebookmeta.com/product/occultism-and-the-origins-of-
psychoanalysis-1st-edition-maria-pierri/
Ethics Matters Ethical Issues in Pragmatic Perspective

Rescher
https://ebookmeta.com/product/ethics-matters-ethical-issues-in-
pragmatic-perspective-rescher/
The Human Difference Animals Computers and the

Necessity of Social Science Alan Wolfe
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-human-difference-animals-
computers-and-the-necessity-of-social-science-alan-wolfe/
‘Psychoanalysis and Ethics aims to overcome a split in psychoanalytic thinking and
training that arose, as David M. Black puts it, from the contingent fact that Freud
lacked a philosophical base on which to consider the hugely important questions
of ethics. In fact, human life is ethical life, and it essentially includes the struggles,
frustrations, furies and tremendous joys of putting ethical life into words. Through
subtle readings of Dante, as well as Melanie Klein, Hans Loewald, Donald Win-
nicott and many others, Psychoanalysis and Ethics revives our understanding of
allegorical thinking and its power. This book is passionate and thought-provoking,
rigorous and imaginative.’
Jonathan Lear, Committee on Social Thought, the University of Chicago
‘Few books so generously provide a rich and nuanced conceptual scaffolding to

help us to push open new doors in our thinking. This is one of those rare books.
Masterful in his integration of philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis and literature,
David M. Black has instantiated the “necessity of perspective” through his inter-
disciplinary approach to ethics. In the morally challenging times we live in, this
book is essential and rewarding reading, not only for psychoanalytic clinicians and
academics, but also for anyone interested in ethics – it is a book that I am sure I
will return to many times.’
Alessandra Lemma, fellow, British Psychoanalytic Society and visiting
professor, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London; author of First
Principles: Applied Ethics for Psychoanalytic Practice
‘David M. Black has made an extraordinary individual contribution to psycho-

analytic writing over many years. He approaches psychoanalysis from a unique
combination of experiences and trainings in which he has been deeply immersed:
religion, philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, literature – most recently the mam-
moth project of translating and writing commentaries on Dante. His voice is very
much his own, and he approaches any subject with this very broad set of references,
which infuses his writing with a particular quality of contemplation and vitality. I
always look forward hungrily to receiving his latest psychoanalytic contribution.’
Francis Grier, editor-in-chief, International Journal of Psychoanalysis; training
analyst and supervisor of the British Society of Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis and Ethics
Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective is an attempt to look

deeply into the relationship between psychoanalysis and ethics, and in particular
into the failure of traditional psychoanalytic thinking to recognise the foundational
character of ethical values.
In recent years, partly because of the climate crisis, the need for an “ethical
turn” in our thinking has been recognised with increasing urgency. Using different
historical lenses, and with special reference to the thought of the philosopher Em-
manuel Levinas and pioneering American psychoanalysts such as Hans Loewald
and Stephen Mitchell, the author discusses the perspectives needed in addition to
those of science if the facts of “psychic reality” are to be more adequately recog-
nised. In particular, this book emphasises the importance of a coherent account of
the role of ethics in shaping the development both of the individual and of society.
Psychoanalysis and Ethics is essential reading for those concerned for the im-
portance of ethics in psychoanalytic practice and theory, and more widely for those
seeking to understand the place of ethics and religion in psychological development.
David M. Black is a Scottish writer and psychoanalyst, author of Why Things

Matter: The Place of Values in Science, Psychoanalysis and Religion and editor of
Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or Collaborators? In
2022, his translation and commentary on Dante’s Purgatorio received the Ameri-
can National Translation Award for Poetry.
The New Library of Psychoanalysis
General Editor: Anne Patterson

The New Library of Psychoanalysis is published by Routledge Mental Health in
association with the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London.
The purpose of the book series is:
to advance and disseminate ideas in psychoanalysis amongst those working in psy-

choanalysis, psychotherapy and related fields
to facilitate a greater and more widespread appreciation of psychoanalysis in the
general book-reading public
to provide a forum for increasing mutual understanding between psychoanalysts
and those in other disciplines
to facilitate communication between different traditions and cultures within psy-
choanalysis, making some of the work of continental and other non-English
speaking analysts more readily available to English-speaking readers, and in-
creasing the interchange of ideas between British and American analysts.
The New Library of Psychoanalysis published its first book in 1987 under the
editorship of David Tuckett, who was followed by Elizabeth Bott Spillius, Susan
Budd, Dana Birksted-Breen and Alessandra Lemma. The Editors, including the
current Editor, Anne Patterson, have been assisted by a considerable number of
Associate Editors and readers from a range of countries and psychoanalytic tra-
ditions. The present Associate Editors are Susanne Calice, Katalin Lanczi and
Anna Streeruwitz.
Under the guidance of Foreign Rights Editors, a considerable number of the
New Library books have been published abroad, particularly in Brazil, Germany,
France, Italy, Peru, Spain and Japan. The New Library of Psychoanalysis has also
translated and published several books by continental psychoanalysts and plans
to continue the policy of publishing books that express as clearly as possible a
variety of psychoanalytic points of view. The New Library of Psychoanalysis has
published books representing all three schools of thought in British psychoanaly-
sis, including a particularly important work edited by Pearl King and Riccardo
Steiner, ‘The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941-45’, expounding the intellectual
and organisational controversies that developed in the British psychoanalytical
Society between Kleinian, Viennese and ‘middle group’ analysts during the Sec-
ond World War.
The New Library of Psychoanalysis aims for excellence in psychoanalytic pub-
lishing. Submitted manuscripts are rigorously peer-reviewed in order to ensure
high standards of scholarship, clinical communications, and writing.
For a full list of all the titles in the New Library of Psychoanalysis main series as
well as both the New Library of Psychoanalysis ‘Teaching Series’ and ‘Beyond the
Couch’ subseries, please visit the Routledge website.
Psychoanalysis and Ethics
The Necessity of Perspective
David M. Black
Designed cover image: Saint Jerome in His Study, Antonello da
Messina © The National Gallery, London
First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2024 David M. Black
The right of David M. Black to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-58834-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-58835-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-45167-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003451679
Typeset in Times New Roman

by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents
Acknowledgements x
1 Introduction 1
2 The working of values in ethics and religion 9
3 Jonathan Lear: Heir to a different legacy 33
4 Who founded Buddhism? Notes on the psychological

action of religious objects 42
5 Dante’s two suns: The psychological sources of the

Divine Comedy 62
6 Dante, duality, and the function of allegory 79
7 Freud and idealisation 91
8 The transcendent in everyday life 106
9 Religion as the affirmation of values 119
10 Levinas’ re-basing of religion 132
Index 148
Acknowledgements
Almost all of the chapters in this book appeared first as papers in journals. I am
grateful to the editors and publishers of the following journals for permission to
reprint revised versions of the papers listed:
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis: for permission to reprint Chapter 2,

The Working of Values in Ethics and Religion; Chapter 4, Who Founded Bud-
dhism? and Chapter 5, Dante’s Two Suns;
Psychoanalytic Inquiry: for permission to reprint Chapter 8, The Transcendent in
Everyday Life;
the British Journal of Psychotherapy: for permission to reprint Chapter 3, Jonathan
Lear; Chapter 7, Freud and Idealization; and Chapter 9, Religion as the Affirma-
tion of Values;
Raritan: for permission to reprint Chapter 6, Dante, Duality, and the Function of
Allegory;
Earlier versions of several papers were first given as lectures. Chapter 9 was first
presented at a conference on Psychoanalysis and Philosophy at Senate House,
University of London in October 2014. Chapter 6 was presented at the “Psy-
chology and the Other” Conference in Boston in September 2021. Chapters 4,
6 and 8 were first presented at Scientific or Applied Section meetings of the
British Psychoanalytic Society. All these chapters have been influenced by the
ensuing discussions.
I owe more debts than I can remember to friends and colleagues, who read these
chapters or with whom I discussed these issues. I think in particular of David Bell,
Michael Brearley, Robert Chandler, Bob Chisholm, Elizabeth Cook, Francis Grier,
John Herdman, Martha Kapos, Richard Rusbridger, Jerry Sokol, Harvey Taylor
and Sally Weintrobe. Some of the chapters are interdisciplinary, requiring a reach-
ing out to adjacent intellectual territory. Richard Gombrich and Kemmyo Taira
Sato were both kind enough to read and comment on Chapter 4, which examines
a particular thread in the history of Buddhist thought (though I take sole respon-
sibility of course for its conclusions). With Giovanna di Ceglie, Matt Hoffman
and my wife, Juliet Newbigin, I spent many hours reading and discussing Dante’s
Acknowledgements xi
Divine Comedy, often from a psychoanalytic angle. And I owe a special debt to
Sarah Richmond, who commented very helpfully on several of the chapters that
engage with larger philosophical themes.
I dedicate the book to the memory of June Broadhurst, who died while it was
in preparation. A friend and later a colleague for over half a century, her honesty,
attentiveness and total lack of pretension contributed much to convincing me of the
importance and efficacious reality of ethical seriousness.
DMB
September 2022.
Chapter 1
Introduction
The essays in this collection are probably best thought of as free-standing, but they
circle somewhat obsessively around a few related themes. Central to them all is the
thought that psychoanalysis, when Freud founded it, had no adequate philosophical
base from which to consider the hugely important questions of ethics.
This, in the late nineteenth century, was unremarkable. The triumphs of sci-
ence, including Darwin’s account of the evolution of species, and the formula-
tion by Helmholtz and others of the law of the conservation of energy, seemed
at the time to carry all before them. It seemed as if Descartes’ dream was about
to be fulfilled: that the dominance of the thinking mind could render humankind
“the masters and possessors of Nature” (Descartes 1997, 111). Unnerving as that
formula sounds to many of us today, this was the dream of Enlightenment think-
ing; its echoes are present in many of Freud’s early formulations of psychoanalysis.
The hypersensitive Nietzsche, so alert to ethical issues that in retrospect he seems
a sort of philosophical litmus paper, both recognised the power of the scientific vi-
sion and recoiled from the ethical void that accompanied it. He first embraced the
idea of a Superman, whose exuberant self-assertion would “laugh above abysses,”
untouched by the suffering of others, unappalled by life’s total absence of meaning
in a merely mechanistic universe; shortly afterwards, he embraced a beaten horse,
burst into tears and went quietly mad. The sociologist Max Weber, psychologically
more robust but aware of similar issues, spoke of the effects of capitalism, of what
he called the “tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order;” it was bound,
he said, to “the technical and economic conditions of machine production which
today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism.”
In a famous image, he said that concern for external goods should lie on the shoul-
ders “like a light cloak;” under capitalism, however, it had become an “iron cage”
(2003, 187). He spoke of nature becoming “disenchanted” as the understandings of
science prevailed over all others.
Both these thinkers in their different ways were responding to the loss of a vision
of the world and human life derived from the stories told by religions – humanly
meaningful, however mythological – and their replacement by a mechanistic pic-
ture of the world based on rational science: one in which the existence of the world
and of life were ultimately “random” and without purpose, and in which, when
DOI: 10.4324/9781003451679-1
2 Introduction
things were not random, they were governed implacably by the laws of cause and
effect: a “heartless world,” as Marx succinctly summarised it, and a purely me-
chanical one.
Viewed from the first quarter of the twenty-first century, and with awareness
of the gathering dangers of populism and the ever-enlarging threats to the Earth’s
climate and biodiversity, the ethical failures of the past century and a half are all
too apparent. Even Communism, benign in its initial formulation, where it became
powerful became dominated by class-hatred and the love of power. Fascism was
well described by Walter Benjamin as representing the triumph of a false “aesthet-
ics” over ethical and human values; neo-liberalism represented the triumph of a
similar aesthetic fantasy, this time one of power and unrestrained free markets –
unrestrained competition, perhaps modelled on a Hobbesian misreading of Dar-
win. As the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe recognised in the 1950s
(Anscombe 1958), followed by Alasdair MacIntyre in the 1980s (MacIntyre 1981,
1988), the ordinary language of ethics remained in use, but it was becoming in-
creasingly hollowed out by the inability of science to give meaning to the idea of
intrinsic value: we retained the traditional vocabulary of ethics, but the words were
becoming empty shells. Why should we be “good” or concerned for justice, kind-
ness or truth-telling? What force have these requirements? And in psychoanalysis,
the superego, someone else’s values imported into the psyche, could offer no route
to a true “conscience,” whereby a person recognises in his or her own right the
commanding power of ethical values.
This ethical failure, accompanied by the ever more dazzling achievements of
technology, now threatens humanity and the Earth’s ecosystems with catastrophe.
At the same time, in the past few decades, there has been an increased awaken-
ing to the problem. As far back as 1959, Erik Erikson wrote: “In some periods of
his history, and in some phases of his life-cycle, man needs … a new ideological
orientation as surely and as sorely as he must have air and food” (Erikson 1959,
20). I believe the present is such a period. Donna Orange (2020, 120) has spoken
of an “ethical turn” in the work of intersubjective and relational psychoanalysts
in the United States. Such a development necessarily demands a re-thinking, a
radical new dialogue of psychoanalysis with philosophy. Among philosophers I
have mentioned Anscombe and MacIntyre, two well-respected figures in Anglo-
American philosophy; many others have contributed valuably to new ethical think-
ing, including Thomas Nagel, Charles Taylor, Mary Midgley and Ronald Dworkin
(whom I discuss at more length in Chapter 10); these have not in general been much
discussed in psychoanalytic contexts. Most valuable of all, I think, is the French
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, a Jew and Holocaust survivor, whose profound
insights have increasingly been recognised in the English-speaking world, and very
clearly, more recently, by Donna Orange and some of the analysts she refers to.
Levinas stands in the tradition of Husserl and Heidegger, with both of whom he
studied. I give a summary account of his life in Chapter 10. His phenomenology,
the prioritising of direct experience over theoretical understanding, allowed him
to make an important move: he declared that ethics was “first philosophy,” that
Introduction 3
ethical insight, derived from a perception of “the other” in all his or her alterity,
recognised something that was prior to “ontologies” such as those that underpin
the natural sciences. Levinas rarely mentions psychoanalysis explicitly, but he was
surely contrasting his own view with the goal of Freudian psychoanalysis when he
wrote (in his characteristically difficult and idiosyncratic prose): “The I endowed
with personal life, the atheist I whose atheism is without wants and is integrated
in no destiny, surpasses itself in the Desire that comes to it from the presence of
the other” (1969, 62). When we experience that Desire, when we recognise the
command of ethics, when, seeing “the face of the Other,” we become aware of our
obligation of responsibility, we are seeing, he said, a truth that is primary and not
to be argued with. Throughout his career, Levinas returned again and again to this
crucial insight, forever deepening, enlarging and strengthening it.
It was the discovery of Levinas’ thought that enabled me to move on from my
own earlier writings on these matters (Black, 2011), which were still impeded by
the over-valuation of science in the Freudian tradition (virtually unquestioned when
I trained in London in the 1980s). I think now that that tradition needs to be stood
on a different philosophical foundation, a phenomenological base, as the American
psychoanalyst Hans Loewald showed a path to doing, and as has increasingly been
recognised since by recent psychoanalysts, in America especially. This is not a
repudiation of science, but a recontextualising of it in relation to ethics. I discuss
Loewald at more length in Chapter 2: a profoundly respectful and careful psycho-
analytic thinker, with a background in philosophy, his influence has increasingly
penetrated the world of American psychoanalysis through the work of, among oth-
ers, Stephen Mitchell, Jonathan Lear and Joel Whitebook.
In addition to ethics, these essays return repeatedly to themes of religion: how
to understand it and how to conceive its importance, despite the fact that many
of the stories that religions tell are undoubtedly, to use Freud’s word, “illusion.”
Levinas used to say, jokingly, that his goal in philosophy was to translate the Bible
into Greek. He meant that his goal was to translate the profound, idiosyncrati-
cally phrased, local insights of a particular religion – in his case, Judaism – into
the universal language of philosophy. (“At no moment,” he said, “did the Western
philosophical tradition in my eyes lose its right to the last word” [1985, 24].) This
“translation” continues to be a project of great importance, and my discussion here
of religious themes – in my case usually Christian or Buddhist – is intended as a
contribution to it. The full implication of such a translation remains to be seen, but
it is likely to be very far-reaching: it implies that religious objects can be under-
stood as ultimately “allegorical” in nature – that far from being merely “illusion”
they have a perfectly recognisable function, from a social and ethical point of view,
which is educational. Emotional and ethical education has traditionally been one
of the central functions of religions; the discrediting of religion, in the eyes of so
many educated people in our society, has resulted in an enormous void in our think-
ing which, until recently, has gone almost unnoticed. “Allegory,” as I discuss the
term in two essays here, Chapters 5 and 6, does not imply “illusory;” it implies that
what is being spoken of cannot be wholly encompassed by the language used to
4 Introduction
refer to it. It holds open a door to deeper and further meaning – ultimately to what
Levinas called “infinity.”
By the same token, the scope of ethics is enlarged. What Levinas meant by ethics
is something rather different from what concerned Aristotle. Levinas is concerned
with something deeper, which provides the necessary perspective from which “Ar-
istotelian” virtues and ethical decisions can be addressed. In Chapter 5, discussing
Dante’s Divine Comedy, I suggest that Dante, when he felt the need to introduce
two very different guides, Virgil and Beatrice, as he negotiated the three realms of
the afterlife, was grappling, probably quite consciously, with this issue. As the phi-
losophers Ronald Dworkin and Peter Singer also argue (quoted here in Chapters 9
and 10), it is not ultimately possible to separate from ethics the issue of “meaning-
fulness,” which is so profoundly important when one seeks to assess one’s own or
another person’s history and life-choices.
The individual essays

Franz Rosenzweig disliked introductions, which he described as the hen’s clucking
after she has laid her egg. I shall try to keep my comments brief therefore as I indi-
cate in a little more detail the specific content of the individual essays included here.
Chapter 2: The Working of Values in Ethics and Religion. This essay sets out the
basic shape of the issues by reviewing the history of internal objects in British and
American psychoanalysis. It attempts to show how the initial standpoint of psycho-
analysis on the base of natural science (as understood at the end of the nineteenth
century) rendered the nature of internal objects, their power to organise the psyche
and the question of the commandingness of the values they represent, impossible
to address adequately. More recently, a more phenomenological approach and, par-
ticularly, the thinking of American psychoanalysts such as Loewald, Roy Schafer,
Stephen Mitchell and Jonathan Lear have opened up new possibilities. The fact that
different ethical values may be incommensurable, and that some are more com-
manding than others, requires a recognition of hierarchy within the psyche. The
notion of “allegorical objects” is briefly introduced.
Subheadings: Introduction
“Internal objects”: Freud to Winnicott
Hans Loewald
Some implications of the phenomenological nature of internal objects
Organisation implies hierarchy
Ethical values and allegorical objects
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Jonathan Lear: heir to a different legacy. This chapter is a review es-
say on a collection of papers by the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear,
Wisdom won from Illness (Lear 2017). It focuses on some of Lear’s central themes,
in particular on the role of interpretation and the question of what really makes for
Introduction 5
psychological development in an analysand. Also, linking with the themes of the

previous chapter, it discusses the “different legacy” for psychoanalysis that Lear
describes, deriving from the thought of Hans Loewald and enabling psychoanalysis
to be set on a more secure philosophical basis than that of Freud’s understanding
of science.
What makes a developmental difference?
Irony
The thought of Hans Loewald
Chapter 4: Who Founded Buddhism?. This chapter considers the psychological

pressures shaping the development of a religion. Taking Buddhist history as an
example, it considers what were the psychological pressures that shaped the very
remarkable development of Buddhist thought from the initial Enlightenment of
the historical Buddha, Gautama Siddhartha, as he sat under a peepul tree, to the
apparently very different vision of the Japanese Pure Land Buddhist schools in
the twelfth century CE. The explicit recognition by Buddhism that its religious
objects are always “mental constructs” is shown to have had a central place in
making this development possible. The emphasis is on the psychoanalytically
understandable pressures which shaped the evolution of the religion, and which
increasingly pushed for a “silent” (unformulated) part of Buddhist experience to be
foregrounded and formulated explicitly.
The Buddha’s Enlightenment
The Mahāyāna
The Buddha Amitābha
The effectiveness of religious objects
Allegorical objects
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Dante’s Two Suns. This essay looks further into the notion of allegory
and attempts to understand its working by way of one of its most famous examples.
It discusses a central idea in Dante’s Divine Comedy: that human life requires two
very different value systems, spoken of by Dante in Purgatorio using the metaphor
of “two suns,” both of which are sources of light or sources of authority in their
own right. This idea is allegorised further in the role of Dante’s two guides, Virgil
and Beatrice, and is present very directly in his preoccupation with the dualities
of Christianity and classical thought, Pope and Emperor, contemplation and activ-
ity (and many others). In this essay, it is illustrated in some detail by reference to
Dante’s account of his meeting in Purgatory with the poet Statius. The picture of
Statius is an elaborate fiction: Dante presents Statius, a pagan Roman epic poet,
as having secretly become a Christian convert, and moreover claims that he did
6 Introduction
so inspired by elementary misreadings of the non-Christian poet, Virgil. This sur-

prising and seemingly arbitrary fiction opens a door to reflection on some of the
psychological subtleties of Dante’s thought.
The meeting with Statius
The attraction of classicism to Dante
Dante’s personal qualities
The larger project
Discussion
Chapter 6: Dante, Duality and the Function of Allegory. This essay is a further
discussion of the dualities in Dante’s thought, particularly in relation to Virgil’s
meeting the limit of his understanding at the top of the Terraces of Purgatory, and
Dante’s very carefully described re-meeting with Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise.
It suggests that one of the functions of the two guides is to represent two different
sorts of love which it is necessary in a fulfilled human life to encounter; these had
become problematic for Dante himself following the death of his mother in his
early childhood.
The structure of Purgatory
A second world of values
Allegory and the logic of Incarnation
Conclusion: wider implications
Chapter 7: Freud and Idealisation. A review essay of a book by Joel White-

book: Freud: an intellectual biography (Harvard UP, 2017). This chapter discusses
the persistent problem of idealisation in the psychoanalytic world, and its relation
in particular to the “legend” of Freud’s life, deriving partly from Freud himself
and partly from disciples such as Ernest Jones. This tendency to idealisation has
often made it difficult to think clearly about psychoanalytic ideas and has inhibited
the freedom of psychoanalytic thinkers to move into new territory. Whitebook’s
biography shows clearly the roots of this idealisation in Freud’s personal history.
The originality of Whitebook’s biography
Freud and women
Freud and science
Jewishness and religion
Conclusion
Chapter 8: The Transcendent in Everyday Life. This chapter, the first of three
offering a discussion of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, relates in particular
Introduction 7
to the use of his thought by the psychoanalysts Viviane Chetrit-Vatine and Eyal
Rozmarin. Levinas typically presents his ethical thinking in a way that makes no
mention of the subject’s personal history: this essay attempts to show how from
a psychoanalytic point of view ethical sensitivity and personal history necessar-
ily form part of a single picture. It suggests too that the “transcendent” values of
obligation and responsibility, which Levinas recognises with so much subtlety, far
from being exotic, are a familiar if rarely acknowledged part of everyday experi-
ence, both in ordinary life and in the consulting room.
The notion of value
Emmanuel Levinas
Matricial space
Case example: Emily
Discussion
Conclusion
Chapter 9: Religion as the Affirmation of Values. This chapter attempts to answer

the question: what is the social importance of religion? Why is it facile to sup-
pose that “growing out of religion” (Winnicott’s phrase), and replacing religion by
rational thought and the “reality principle,” the alleged achievement of Freudian
psychoanalysis, is a development that entails no significant social or psychological
cost? Using in particular the thought of Martin Buber, Levinas and Ronald Dwor-
kin, this essay suggests that a crucial social function of religions has been edu-
cational: to provide ways to single out, to remember and to affirm (though not to
create) the foundational ethical values that are recognised in the “epiphanic” direct
experience that Levinas describes.
Background: psychoanalysts on religion
Emmanuel Levinas
Developments in analytic philosophy: objectivity of values
The function of religions
Chapter 10: Levinas’ Re-basing of Religion. Emmanuel Levinas described his

understanding of religion in one of his two principal books, Totality and Infinity
(1961). This essay attempts to follow his account in some detail and to compare
it with Freud’s picture of religion in The Future of an Illusion (1927). Freud’s
picture, like that of most subsequent psychoanalytic theorists, emphasised the role
of religious “objects,” figures such as gods, angels or bodhisattvas, or purported
spiritual realities such as the career of the soul in the afterlife, which are different in
different religions. Such “objects” are notably absent from Levinas’ account. The
essay goes on to consider the significance of this absence. It suggests that Levinas’
account opens up a deeper perspective in which to perceive the true importance
8 Introduction
religions may have for the life of the individual, and for society more largely, which
may be hard to recognise when the emphasis is on their “objects.”
Emmanuel Levinas: a brief outline of his life
Levinas’ account of religion
Discussion
Conclusion
References
Anscombe, G.E.M. (1958). Modern moral philosophy. Philosophy 33: 124.
Black, D.M. (2011). Why Things Matter: the Place of Values in Science, Psychoanalysis and
Religion. New York, NY and London: Routledge.
Descartes, R. (1997). Discourse on the Method (1637). In E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross
(trans) Key Philosophical Writings. Ware: Wordsworth Editions.
Erikson, E. (1959). Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. London:
Faber and Faber.
Lear, J. (2017). Wisdom Won from Illness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trs. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh,
PA: Duquesne UP.
Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and Infinity. Trs. R.A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP.
MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue. London and New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
MacIntyre, A. (1988). Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth and Co.
Orange, D. (2020). Radical Ethics. In Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics: Learn-
ing to Hear 120. New York, NY and London: Routledge.
Weber, M. (2003). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904). Trs Talcott
Parsons. New York, NY: Dover Publications.
Chapter 2
The working of values

in ethics and religion
Introduction
The triumphs of science in the nineteenth century (of which Darwin’s theory of
evolution and Helmholtz’s law of the conservation of energy may stand as iconic
instances) created a profound division within philosophy. Was its task to become
the loyal servant of all-conquering science, pointing out the implications of what
science discerned, and policing the frontiers of sound science and rational argu-
ment, or did it still have a separate and more fundamental role in creating a “world-
view” within which the sciences would have, of course, a respected place, but in
which they would not be the dominant partner?
To accept the first of these paths was to accept “positivism,” a word meaning
broadly the belief that only science and what can logically be derived from sci-
entific findings can be the ground of truth: it involved accepting materialism and
rationality, and rejecting metaphysics, idealism and religion. Darwin implicitly, and
Helmholtz and Freud’s teacher Ernst Brücke explicitly, accepted this position; it
became the basis of Viennese “logical positivism” in the 1920s, and though it then
lost prestige in the world of analytic and ordinary language philosophy, it remains
the default assumption, probably, of most scientists and many ordinary educated
people in the West. When Freud spoke of the scientific Weltanschauung, in his view
the Weltanschauung of psychoanalysis, positivism was what he had in mind. Joel
Whitebook (2004, 106) has said that it is “simplistic” to describe Freud as a posi-
tivist, and it’s true that Freud’s writings are hugely rich, often metaphorical, and
frequently speculative. Nevertheless, the nineteenth century materialist conception
of science was the authority to which Freud returned, and to which he made his
ultimate appeal. When, writing on religion, he concluded resonantly: “Our science
is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give
us we can get elsewhere” (1927, 56), he gave virtually a definition of positivism.
For thinkers concerned for subjectivity, values and “meaningfulness,” positiv-
ism was problematic. Nietzsche’s madman’s perceptive and alarmed response
(1882) (“Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? …
God is dead”) influenced a generation; the pioneering sociologist Max Weber la-
mented the “iron cage” in which rationality would increasingly encase us (1904).
DOI: 10.4324/9781003451679-2
10 The working of values in ethics and religion
A creative counter-argument came from the phenomenologists: Brentano, Husserl

and Heidegger, each the pupil of his predecessor, built on the fundamental Kantian
insight that knowledge is dependent, not only on “what is the case” but also on
the nature of the receptive capacities of the knower.1 What could be known about
these capacities was, of course, also subject to the same restriction. Subjectivity, a
puzzle to the positivist, could in the phenomenological picture be given a central
role as the terrain in which all experience, including scientific research and logical
reflection on its implications, takes place and is encountered.
If the philosophical precursor of the phenomenologists was Kant, the precursor
of positivism was Descartes. Descartes’ division of reality into mind and matter
authorised, as he said, the project of “rendering ourselves the masters and posses-
sors of Nature” (1637, 111), nature now being conceived as mindless res extensa,
extended stuff. By the end of the nineteenth century, this project looked to many to
be well along on the road to completion (Peat 2002, x). The American physicist Al-
bert Michelson wrote: “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical
science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the pos-
sibility of their ever being supplanted … is exceedingly remote” (1903, 25). (His
remark reads ironically nowadays: as we now know, the revolutions of relativity
and quantum physics were about to contradict it emphatically.)
But Descartes’ argument also made the notion of “ourselves” problematic. The
cogito, in the first person singular, authorises only a single person to be the subject:
“I” think, therefore “my” existence as a thinking subject is assured – but if this is my
one certainty then, as the philosopher John Macmurray (2004) pointed out, others,
including “you,” can only be on the far side of a dividing line. The Cartesian universe
can only be a solipsism (or perhaps, puzzlingly, a plurality of solipsisms). Descartes
glimpsed this difficulty, and he brought in God as a good demon to guarantee the truth
of our perceptions; but if one takes the logic of the cogito seriously it can only leave
God in the same position as “you” – outside the magic space of the unique thinker.
On the whole, the nineteenth century scientists, such as Darwin, Helmholtz and
Charles Lyell, didn’t feel a need to concern themselves with such issues; their findings
could be plausibly presented in the everyday language of a shared external reality.
But when we arrive at psychoanalysis, the lurking problem in Descartes’ formulation
emerges to haunt us. I, the thinking scientist, may look out on a mindless material
world, governed by the laws of a mechanical Nature; and while you, standing beside
me, do the same, we speak in harmony. But if I turn to look at you, our tune fails. If “I”
am the unique thinker of whose existence I can be certain – and nature is only mind-
less mechanism – “you,” who have clearly as Darwin has shown emerged as part of
nature, can only be perceived by me as mindless mechanism; I am returned, e ither to
solipsism, or, if I am sufficiently resolute in my pursuit of logical consistency, to the
heroic declaration that I too, really, am mindless mechanism, and my subjectivity is
illusion: ultimately, there can be no subjects. The gates of Weber’s “iron cage” clang
shut behind me. (I’m not certain that it’s actually possible to believe this last position,
but consistent behaviourists, for example, are compelled to think they do.)
This then was the ambiguous intellectual weather into which Freud launched
the ship of psychoanalysis, which to the end of his life he declared to be a science.
The working of values in ethics and religion 11
This present chapter reflects on the fact that, in the modern era, neither philoso-
phy nor psychoanalysis has been able to furnish an adequate account of a basis for
the compelling power of ethics to motivate decision, or to recognise the values
without which humanity is unlikely to survive. Psychoanalysis itself, as a therapy,
is necessarily an ethical activity, but along with the other sciences it has lacked a
base in its theory from which the importance of ethics could be understood. Its ethi-
cal seriousness, always present, derived from elsewhere, from medical ethics, the
wider culture, implicit religious values and so forth.
This lack of a proper base has been true as well of much recent Western philo-
sophical thinking about ethics. It’s not that we lack the names for the necessary
values, but we can give no account of what grounds them, and they have to a
large extent lost their “efficacy” or power to command. The philosopher Alasdair
MacIntyre went so far as to compare our current use of ethical language to the use
of the word taboo in eighteenth century Polynesia: people remembered that certain
things were taboo, and they acted accordingly, but they no longer had any story to
tell of why they were taboo, and their traditions were easily overthrown (MacIntyre
1981, 129–31). Something similar presumably was the case with the “ordinary de-
cent Germans” in the 1930s who succumbed so readily to the allure of Hitlerism.
MacIntyre’s own solution was to turn back to what he saw as the founding tradition,
the Catholic Christianity of Aquinas. I shall argue here that, for most of us, the intel-
lectual discrediting of traditional religions, inevitable when religion is construed as
a matter of “beliefs,” has deprived values of this grounding; there remains, however,
another sort of thinking which may give more access to the necessary quality of ef-
ficacy. This thinking I shall call “allegorical.” It has deep roots, and it can be found
in certain modern thinkers – I am especially aware of Martin Buber and Emmanuel
Levinas – but it has been weakening in the West ever since the rise of individualism
and “nominalism” in about the fourteenth century. So I shall attempt to describe it
as well by referencing the work of an explicitly allegorical thinker, namely, Dante.
Psychoanalysis has the potential to contribute importantly to this discussion,
which calls for both philosophical and psychological input. This is particularly be-
cause of its notion of “internal objects”, and its increasing recognition of their role
in organising the psyche. I shall begin this essay therefore with a brief sketch of
their history, suggesting that the understanding of them has tended to change from
a notion of “internalised others” (as in Freud’s account of the superego) to a more
phenomenological picture in which they work to organise the mind in the moment
of their occurrence and any relation they may have to external “others” is second-
ary. I am influenced in this account by the theories of Hans Loewald, Roy Schafer
and Stephen Mitchell in particular.
“Internal objects”: Freud to Winnicott

The word object has been over-used in psychoanalytic history. As far back as 1891,
in his monograph On the Conception of the Aphasias, Freud described a version
of an internal object. He wrote: “A word … acquires its meaning by being linked
to an ‘object-presentation’ … [which is] a complex of associations made up of the
greatest variety of visual, acoustic, kinaesthetic and other presentations” (Freud

1891, 213). This “object-presentation” is very close to what he would later call
a “thing-presentation,” the unconscious content which is made conscious when
linked to a word-presentation (“hyper-cathected”) (1915, 201–2). A great deal of
psychoanalysis is foreshadowed in this conception alone.
Soon after, the word object acquired another use in Freud’s theory of drives, which
have both an aim (the “removal of excitation”) and an object, the person or thing by
which that aim can be attained (1933, 96). Freud took as given a one-person starting
point: “primary narcissism” was our natural state, from which our drives impelled
us, and on which society impinged; we sought to rid ourselves of the resulting exci-
tations. In such a picture, a person’s goals can only be the satisfaction of the aims of
his or her drives; other people are of value, positive or negative, insofar as they are
objects of, or objects impeding, that satisfaction. For this reason, it became habitual
in psychoanalysis to refer not to “self and others” but to “ego and its objects.”
Later, when Freud wrestled to understand the emotions involved in such complex
matters as mourning, conscience, “civilisation” and religion, the one-person stand-
point became increasingly difficult to maintain. “Identification” (internalisation of
the external “object”) allowed for increasing complexity. The ego “as altered by the
object” could then itself become an object for the ego “as critical agency” (Freud
1917, 249). In The Ego and the Id, he said he hadn’t realised how “common and
typical” such identifications were: he suggested that the whole character of the ego
was built up from them (1923, 28–9).
This account of a part of the ego, “altered by the object,” developed into one
sort of internal object, the intrapsychic representative of a real, external other. The
critical agency too, later named the superego, was recognised as created also by
identifications; it came to be understood as another sort of internal object, formed
by identification with what was called a “part-object,” in this case the “voice” and
valuations of another person, and adopted to avoid the penalties and painful guilt-
feelings that would otherwise afflict the individual. Education and personal devel-
opment came to be seen as a complex sequence of identifications and rejections of
identification, with the result if all went well of creating a rich and relatively stable
“inner world” of internal objects.
If we ask what sort of a thing an internal object is, however, we are left with sev-
eral puzzles. For example, an internal object (whether whole object or part object)
exists only as what it is to the subject. No one else has access to it. Whatever its
origins, unlike an ordinary object in the physical world, it has in the moment of its
occurrence no other reality by reference to which the subject’s experience can be
contradicted or corrected. It has no independent substrate of which continuity can
be predicated.
If, through experience with a parallel external (“real”) object, the internal object
is changed, there is then a different internal object. The paradoxicality of this for-
mulation is I think an inescapable consequence of using the language of “internal
objects.” It has to do with the fact that nouns (“substantives”) are suited to the
nature of external objects but not to internal ones. Roy Schafer once suggested
that, if we are not to continue “to subordinate new ideas to old solutions” (1976, 7),
psychoanalysis needed to develop an “action language” for the inner world in
which substantives were replaced by verbs and adverbs. He was recognising the
confusion created by speaking of internal objects in language appropriate to ex-
ternal objects, which do indeed have persisting “substance” independent of their
phenomenal appearance to the subject. But, alas, there is no such action language,
and we are left with a problem that has deep roots in philosophical history: what is
the relation of continuity to what is subjective? Faced with this problem, both Bud-
dhism and David Hume quite independently concluded that ultimately there was no
enduring “self” at all. But this too is unsatisfactory. Ethical activity – for example,
promising – and psychoanalysis, with its account of personal development, can-
not dispense with the notion of a continuing subject. I think at present we have no
good solution to this difficulty. In this paper, I shall refer to this quality of internal
objects – that they don’t endure but can only be replaced by, so to speak, different
editions – as their “phenomenological nature.”
Freud, always marching to more than one drummer, never wholly gave himself
up to the picture of “internal objects” (he never let go of the “drives,” and beyond
them some prospective material foundation in neurobiology), but some of his fol-
lowers, particularly those influenced by Melanie Klein, took it very much further.
Klein, an extraordinarily gifted intuitive thinker, without formal scientific training
(she had trained as a nursery-school teacher) adopted many of Freud’s hypotheses –
Oedipus complex, death drive, superego, internal objects – as if they were givens.
She went further than any previous analyst in imagining the experience of the baby,
pushing Freud’s concepts back to very early stages of development, but also boldly
departing from Freud’s thought in important ways. In particular, she thought that
babies were object-related from birth (there was no primary narcissism). For her,
the fundamental form of unconscious mentation was phantasy involving internal
objects, and this was the case from birth and even pre-natally.
When her ideas were challenged from within the British Society in the 1940s,
Marjorie Brierley, one of the acutest thinkers in the Society, criticised Klein’s use
of internal objects as failing to clearly distinguish concepts from percepts. Work
with patients, said Brierley, is rightly “done with percepts,” in the language of im-
mediate experience, including the language of internal objects; but theory should
be done in the different language of generalisation and abstraction:
Melanie Klein lays herself open to misunderstanding in her generalizations by a

choice of terms too close to her specific source material. Thus, in the expression
‘whole object’ she uses the word ‘whole’ to distinguish a person-object from an
organ- or part-object. But she also uses the term ‘whole’ in the sense of undam-
aged or intact to distinguish it from the object which a child in a certain state of
anxiety feels to be in pieces. Now it is quite possible to think of a person being
dismembered but it is not possible to conceive of a mental object being literally
shattered – one cannot take a hammer to a mental object.
(Brierley 1942, 109)
This is a perceptive criticism, and it comes from the scientific side of the argu-
ment. But Klein, theoretically less sophisticated than Brierley, and working more
spontaneously and often with child patients, was moving almost unawares away
from Freud’s world of nineteenth century science, and in particular away from
the automatic assumption that “the body” was the prime foundational reality of
“the person.” The abandonment of primary narcissism had profound philosophical
consequences: it meant that “persons” could begin to be thought of as essentially
social beings, and not primarily, as in Descartes’ model, as solitary egos in separate
bodies looking out onto the world. Brierley could see that Klein was moving away
from “science,” as understood by Freud; what neither she nor Klein could see was
that Klein was moving in a potentially coherent direction, towards the more phe-
nomenological world in which personal life is lived.
Klein’s segue away from Freud stimulated other thinkers, notably Ronald Fair-
bairn and Donald Winnicott, to go further. The British scholar Kate Forbes-Pitt
discusses an early unpublished paper by Fairbairn (1930) in which he examined the
repeated dualisms in Freud’s drive theory, and suggested, very boldly at the time,
that they sprang from Freud’s allegiance to theory rather than to observation. Freud
always needed two sets of drives, said Fairbairn, because he needed to account for
his theory of repression (Forbes-Pitt 2018). Attempting to find a more coherent
theory of drives, Fairbairn moved on to an account of libido as having as its central
goal relationship with others rather than drive-satisfaction.
Fairbairn was an unusual figure in psychoanalysis. A Scot who had studied Di-
vinity at Edinburgh, and then fought throughout the First World War, he remained
a lifelong Christian. Following the war, he retrained as a psychiatrist and then as
a psychoanalyst, remaining in Edinburgh and outside the formal structures of the
British Psychoanalytic Society. He became a notably independent thinker. Rela-
tional psychoanalysts (Greenberg & Mitchell 1983, Grotstein & Rinsley 1994;
Mitchell 2000) have recently brought him centre-stage in psychoanalytic history
by recognising that he was the pioneer of “a radically different, relational theory of
mind” (Mitchell 2000, 104), central both to attachment theory and to the American
relational schools.
Strongly influenced by Klein, and wanting to simplify the complexities of
Freud’s thinking, Fairbairn postulated one drive, libido, and one goal, human re-
lationship. He conceived growth in terms not of genitality but of the move from
infantile to mature dependency (Scharff 2005). Pleasure and avoidance of unpleas-
ure remained important but were no longer primary. Mitchell saw this picture as
still struggling with past formulations but spoke with admiration of its originality.
“Fairbairn, Sullivan, and other architects of the relational model were redefining
the nature of the human psyche as fundamentally social and interactive. Fairbairn
was suggesting that object-seeking is not the vehicle for the satisfaction of a spe-
cific need, but is the expression of our very nature, the form through which we
become specifically human beings” (Mitchell 2000, 106). He was “among the first
to intuit that the establishment and maintenance of relationships with others is as
fundamental to the nature of the human organism as breathing oxygen” (107).
That is well put and captures Fairbairn’s crucial insight. He was perhaps the
first major psychoanalytic thinker to identify explicitly the key weaknesses in
Freud’s theory, the elimination of subjecthood in favour of objectivities (which
followed from Freud’s adoption of the standpoint of reductive materialism), and
the s eparation of drive from “object” in the psychoanalytic sense. Fairbairn himself
wanted to base his theory on the newer scientific developments, in relativity and
quantum physics, which had succeeded the mechanistic physics of Helmholtz; he
thought that psychoanalysis had failed to keep abreast of the implications of these
developments. He was impressed by the inseparability of energy and structure in
the quantum conception of matter and proposed that the psyche is similarly a “dy-
namic structure,” “oriented towards outer reality, and thus determined by a reality
principle from the first” (1946, 140).
Fairbairn took an important step towards central issues, but by taking physics
as his model, he continued to objectify the subject. He failed to address the central
problem of post-Cartesian thought, described by John Macmurray as a confusion
of the logical dualism of subject and object – the fact that “experience” logically
implies an “experiencer” – with the metaphysical dualism of mind and matter, in
which both terms name objective “things” (in Descartes’ language, material res
extensa and immaterial res cogitans) (Macmurray 2004).
This distinction, between logical and metaphysical dualism, which may at first
sight look off-puttingly technical, is in fact the avenue to something extremely far-
reaching. It allows us to say that though our fundamental nature may be subjective,
this need not imply the existence of a distinct “soul” (Seele in Freud’s language) or
“mind” (in the language of anglophone psychoanalysis). It is perhaps what Bud-
dhism recognises with its no-self teaching, and it sheds light on what Roy Schafer
was seeing when he suggested (1976) that psychoanalysis should be done in a
language of verbs rather than nouns. But ordinary grammar and ordinary language
compel us to speak in ways that imply metaphysical dualism – that the mind is
a separate entity – and to use non-ordinary language, like Heidegger, inevitably
introduces a whole new raft of alternative misleading assumptions. So I think the
best solution is to continue to use ordinary words and grammatical structures, but
warily, and occasionally drawing attention to the traps they set for us. That is what
I shall attempt to do in this book.
For the sake of brevity, I shall mention only in passing the hugely important
contribution of Donald Winnicott. His recognition that “there is no such thing as
an infant” (1960), expressed a truth that directly contradicts the notion of primary
narcissism; it implies the crucial, inescapable importance of the reciprocity of re-
lationship with another subject – not “object” – in our earliest experience. At the
same time, by wording it as a paradox, almost as a joke, Winnicott avoided having
to face the full implication of his departure from Freudian orthodoxy. When, speak-
ing of his idea of the “transitional object,” he said that the child has an “illusion”
that is not to be questioned, he continued to speak, like Freud, as if the truth of
objective observation is the final truth: as if the external “fact” is the real truth, and
the “internal object” of experience is “illusion,” with the overtones that that word
inescapably carries of unreality or deceptiveness. He had adopted the word “illu-

sion” from Freud, but it failed to catch his true meaning; using another paradoxical
phrase, he once spoke of “the substance of illusion” (1951, 230) in an attempt to
escape the trap he had set for himself.
By using the word “substance,” Winnicott was gesturing towards the fact that,
to the subject, the internal object is a true object, a phenomenological object in
the moment of its occurrence; this is true regardless of how the object may appear
in other recensions of its reality. But by saying “illusion,” he simultaneously ex-
pressed a prejudice in favour of the scientific, objective viewpoint. This prejudice
prevented him from claiming the full significance of what he was recognising. Per-
ceptions, if “illusions,” are by definition unreliable and should be subordinated to
their other recensions (objective description, others’ viewpoints): they are rightly
dealt with by recognising them as illusion and by conforming to the perception of
others. But “substance,” of course, implies reality. By using the phrase, “the sub-
stance of illusion,” Winnicott was using a paradox to hold on to a fact for which he
didn’t have a sufficiently developed vocabulary.
Winnicott’s paradoxes are very important. They were ways of holding on to
insights that couldn’t be clearly formulated in the existing vocabulary of psychoa-
nalysis. In many ways, they were like the “anomalous observations” that Thomas
Kuhn described (1962), which accumulate when an established scientific paradigm
is approaching its end, but the new paradigm has not yet found its own formulations.
Hans Loewald
The British analysts I have mentioned all with varying degrees of discomfort
accepted the scientific assumption that there is one sort of truth and one reality
principle, and therefore anything that seems to conflict with it can only belong in
a subordinate position as “illusion,” “phantasy,” “projection” and so forth. The
American psychoanalyst Hans Loewald, who had studied in Freiburg with Hei-
degger before undertaking medical and psychoanalytic training, brought a more
philosophical approach to the phenomenological nature of internal objects. At
the start of his paper “On Internalization” (1973), he repeatedly emphasises how
changing one’s “viewpoint” shows one a different world: a viewpoint that starts
from evolutionary biology sees a different world from one that starts with Buddhist
introspection. (He is too subtle to label his viewpoints, which I am crudely doing
here for the sake of brevity.) “Objects are not givens,” he says very clearly (1971,
127): no one viewpoint has a monopoly on truth. Roy Schafer’s emphasis that
narrative is “inevitably” the “mode in which truth and reality are presented” is an
important enlargement of this thought (1992, xiv–v).
Heidegger came out of the second response of philosophy to the challenge of
science at the end of the nineteenth century. He was and remains a controversial
figure. By joining himself to the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, and giv-
ing the central place not to scientific “knowledge” but to “experience,” Heidegger
kept open the possibility for philosophy of giving a more adequate account of
subjectivity. Lawrence Friedman in an excellent essay has asked: “Is there a use-
able Heidegger for psychoanalysts?” He identified a central failure in Heidegger’s
extraordinary and virtuosic attempt to create a new language appropriate to a phe-
nomenological stance, namely, that Heidegger portrays “world” as “something
subjective,” but without the subjectivistic concept of ‘subject’ which the state of
“being in the world” erases …. “the ambiguous term Dasein finesses this question
by serving as the carrier of human meaning while being neither subject nor object”
(Friedman 2016, 619).
Heidegger trained first as a theologian. George Steiner (1991, 63) remarked
that one can often make surprising sense of Heidegger’s difficult statements about
“being” if one substitutes the word “God.” But by using Sein (being) and Dasein
(existence), Heidegger avoided the more personal words: “God” and “I”; Friedman
captures well the resulting ambiguity and air of evasion. No approach that remem-
bers to take seriously the personal nature of psychological development can dis-
pense with an account of subjects and objects; our personal development depends
on interaction with others, and we apprehend others both as subjects “like our-
selves” and as “objects” whom we treat instrumentally. How we conceive, and how
we handle, this complicated ethical fact is difficult, but the fact itself is irreducible.
Nevertheless, Loewald’s background in Heidegger studies was helpful to him
when he became a psychoanalyst and addressed the issues of the internal world.
His picture of childhood development, influenced by Margaret Mahler, has much
in common with Winnicott’s, and he shared Winnicott’s recognition that the adult
social world of culture, politics, art and religion – Freud’s “civilisation” – could
not be adequately accounted for in terms solely of drives and the management of
drive anxieties. Towards the end of his life, Loewald reformulated Freud’s drive
theory in a way that avoids metaphysical dualism. Instead of speaking of biological
stimuli impinging on a pre-existing “psychic apparatus,” he spoke of “interactional
biological processes that find higher organisation on levels which we have come to
call psychic life” (Loewald 1978, 208).
Loewald recognised that what was truly original in Beyond the Pleasure Prin-
ciple (Freud 1920) was not the introduction of the death drive, a variant of the
constancy principle that Freud had derived from Fechner, and that had been a com-
ponent of Freud’s thought ever since his early days as a neurologist (Sulloway
1979, 66–7), but was the introduction of Eros, a force making for integration. Joel
Whitebook writes: “This means that, rather than ‘getting closer to a state of rest’,
with ‘higher ego organisation’ … there is more life”(Whitebook 2004, 105 – the
quotations are from Loewald). (We may note the important idea of “higher organi-
sation”, a phrase frequently used by Loewald.) Jonathan Lear writes:
Loewald is a hedgehog, not a fox. Although he takes up many aspects of the

psychoanalytic experience, it seems to me that he is always trying to answer a
single question: ‘what would it be to take seriously the thought that within the
human realm love is a developmental force?’
(Lear 2017a, 178)
With Loewald, more than with any previous psychoanalytic thinker, psychoa-
nalysis became able to step away from its initial base in medicine and the natu-
ral sciences, and to stand on a richer and more complex base in philosophy.
This is the paradigm shift that Winnicott’s use of paradox prefigured. To say
this is in no way to disrespect science, but to recognise that the “phenomeno-
logical” nature of the internal world makes it a different sort of thing from the
shared objective world that science describes so successfully – not a replace-
ment of it, as Heidegger perhaps thought, but different from it and requiring
a different approach to language if we are to grasp it appropriately. Stephen
Mitchell says:
In his quiet, undramatic fashion, Loewald … transformed the basic values guid-
ing the analytic process, substituting meaning for rationality, imagination for
objectivity, vitalization for control.
(Mitchell 2000, 25)
And Jonathan Lear writes: “… one of the joys of Loewald’s writings is that he
offers a different choice of inheritance.”
(2017b, 193)
It would be interesting to detail the ways in which Loewald’s thought went on

to permeate the new thinking in the American relational schools, and also in in-
dependent thinkers such as Lear himself. But the crucial point of this summary
history of internal objects is now made: that, at least in some corners of the psy-
choanalytic field, their nature had gradually changed, under pressure of clinical and
other experience, from Freud’s initial picture of internalised external objects to one
of phenomenological objects with a distinctive reality of their own.
Some implications of the phenomenological

nature of internal objects
One problem with the psychoanalytic notion of a “reality principle” is that it as-
sumes that we, or someone, is in a position to say what reality is. And it isn’t easy to
put into words the complexity of the world that is implied by saying that the nature
of internal objects is phenomenological. For the subject, the internal object is its
phenomenological presence; but there are many sorts of internal object, and many
of them correspond to objects in the shared external world, and many correspond
to phenomenological objects known to other subjects. (I use the vague word “cor-
respond” to imply “not identical with but to a certain degree resembling.”) And
all these different realities are apprehended by the subject “phenomenologically.”
Science by its techniques of measurement and repeated observation, and by sub-
ordinating the so-called secondary qualities (those dependent on the nature of the
human senses) to the primary ones (those that can be measured), attempts to get as
close as it can to an objective impersonal account of the object; this is useful for
“mastery,” as Descartes saw, but has only a variable relationship to the world the
subject inhabits, the world of experience.
Because the subject by direct experience knows only a phenomenological world,
he/she may also know “objects” that are without material correlates: abstract, re-
membered and fictitious objects are examples. Abstract objects such as numbers
are hugely important but are not particularly the concern of the psychoanalyst.
Objects of memory may have had a material correlate in the past; fictitious objects
may never have had a material correlate and may be private to the individual or
may be shared with others. Sherlock Holmes would be an example of a shared ficti-
tious object. In which category an internal object belongs is often very unclear and
its importance is not dependent on its category. As Donnel Stern writes: “imagined
witnesses can be as effective as real ones” (2010, 114).
These different sorts of internal objects have different functions, but essentially
their function is that they act to organise or give shape to the psyche. It’s a common-
place observation that people are different in conversation with different others, a
formula we might rephrase to say that relating to a different object causes the psy-
che spontaneously to reorganise itself to adapt to the new situation. Of course, this
reorganisation may be resisted (but that then gives rise to another reorganisation),
or the object may be misperceived because of projections, which we call transfer-
ence; or it may come to be perceived differently as a result of experience; in each
case a different “internal object” reorganises the psyche.
(I am aware that in speaking of “the psyche” I am falling back into the language
of Cartesian metaphysical dualism; it might be better to say not “I become differ-
ent” but “I am different” in the presence of different internal objects.)
The ordinary work of psychoanalysis is to bring consciousness to the impacts
of the internal objects that are influencing the subject, so that they can be thought
about and brought into relation with the subject’s values and more general estimate
of his/her reality situation. In psychoanalytic writings, most often interest focuses
on the origin and history of the internal objects that distort the subject’s percep-
tion of his/her present situation – their source in the subject’s history of love, loss,
trauma, parental character etc. In the early days of psychoanalysis, interpretation
of childhood history was possibly over-valued, but it remains extremely helpful
in revealing more accurately the nature and tenacity of the current internal objects
and the affects that allow them to exert their grip on the subject. The nature of the
change that psychoanalysis aspires to cause is a new orientation towards the inter-
nal objects that most deeply shape the psyche. This change, and the introduction
of greater conscious awareness to the relation of subject and internal object, is the
essence of what is described by Loewald’s brilliant metaphor (1960, 248–9) when
he said that psychoanalysis allows one’s “ghosts” to become “ancestors” – enables
one’s internal objects to acquire definition both as deriving from understandable
events and persons, and as locatable in and relevant to particular moments in time
and place.
In this chapter, however, I want to focus on something different, on organisa-
tional hierarchy and the functioning of certain sorts of internal object that have
been a puzzle for psychoanalysis, in particular those that give rise to, or affirm,
ethical values. Freud’s account of conscience, in terms of a “superego,” is one
of the least satisfactory parts of psychoanalytic theory, and much remains to be
thought in relation to it.
It is not only psychoanalysis that has had difficulty in thinking about values. The
tradition within philosophy that gives “science” the central place as our model for
knowledge and for the process of acquiring knowledge has valorised certain philo-
sophical modes – ontology, epistemology – at the expense of ethics. It has typically
diminished the claim of ethics upon us either to personal or aesthetic preference, or
to instrumental usefulness, as in utilitarianism, where the value of the good aimed for
is either treated as self-evident – “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” –
or is again described in terms of personal preference. Such philosophy resembles
Freud’s account of the superego in an important way. Both speak of the claim of eth-
ics from the position of the detached onlooker, seeking to account for something from
the outside, rather than from a position that includes the subject, aware of the power
of the claim from direct personal experience. This detachment is echoed in Freud’s
response in Civilization and its Discontents to Romain Rolland’s attempt to describe
mystical feeling: “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself” (1930, 65). Else-
where and rather similarly, he describes the state of being in love as one in which “a
considerable amount of narcissistic libido overflows on to the object” (1921, 112).
Whether there is something theatrical in speaking with such “objectivity” about
these crucial areas of experience, in which the sense in the individual of sovereign
autonomy is put in question, we need not enquire at this point. But it’s clear that
such a detached stance makes it hard to recognise any situation in which an ethical
claim could have authority over inclination; the cynic has only to say: “that is not
my preference” or “why should I care about that?” and he or she is released from
ethical obligation. The power of the superego, as described by Freud, is the power
of the remembered or fantasised stick or carrot; once recognised in these terms,
there can be no good reason to be governed by it. Similarly the ego ideal, conceived
as the projection into the future of primary narcissism (Freud 1914; Chasseguet-
Smirgel 1985), can only lose its power once it’s perceived as such.
So we need to look first at the organisational structure of the subject, to see if
there can be a basis for hierarchy, before we go on to consider ways in which we
might understand the power of ethical obligation to occupy a commanding position
in such a hierarchy.
Organisation implies hierarchy

Internal objects act by “organising” the psyche. For example, when listening to a
patient, the mind of the analyst is typically organised by the presence of the pa-
tient to exercise a “containing” function: to listen, to reflect empathically on what
is said, to notice features of the communication such as hesitations, emphases,
divergences, inconsistences and so forth. It is organised also by an awareness of
responsibility for boundaries, both of the duration of the session and of appropriate
styles of response. At the same time, every analyst has been a patient, and is aware
of what it’s like to have one’s psyche organised in relation to such a person as a
psychoanalyst, with freedom to be, so to speak, shapeless – inconsistent, rambling,
free-associating as one chooses; forgetful, though only up to a point, of boundaries
and the ordinary restraints of politeness, etc.
Maturing as an analyst is not to leave these roles behind, but to come to feel that
they are less incompatible: one occupies the role of analyst but remains aware of
the reactions one might have if one were in the other role: a “counter-transference”
is not so very unlike a “transference,” but it is thought about, if possible, rather
than enacted. And to mature as a patient, correspondingly, is to develop a capacity
to think more understandingly about one’s reactions, rather than be governed by
them. As we know, “enactments” by the analyst happen, even in the best analyses,
and the skill of the analyst then is to find ways to acknowledge honestly what has
happened and to return to the task of thinking about it. And the challenge to the
patient is to endure such dislocations and return, also, to the task of thinking. If the
work is to continue, appropriate psychic organisation has to be retrievable.
“Thinking” and “reactions” in such a story can only be conceived in a hierarchi-
cal relation. In enactment, reaction has governed thinking; when the enactment is
honestly recognised, thinking can regain the higher position. The peculiar genius
of psychoanalysis is that it doesn’t demand suppression of wayward impulses – it
doesn’t, like some traditional ethical systems, declare certain impulses “bad” or
sinful by definition – but it suggests that the subject will be put on a firmer base
by becoming conscious of the impulse and in some way, including it – integrating
it – in a larger structure. This is what Loewald meant by a “higher organisation.”
What follows “becoming conscious” is, from the strictly psychoanalytic point of
view, only further becoming conscious, but the responsible practitioner is bound to
have misgivings about possible repercussions, if the impulse concerned turns out
to be, say, suicidal, or paedophiliac, or murderous. In the early days, it was said
that patients should not make important life-decisions while in analysis; I recall a
colleague who worked with great skill with a very disturbed adolescent, but then
expressed concern at having uncovered in him terrifying impulses of cruelty.
So the question of what governs what in the psyche is not one about which we
can afford to be casual. It points to an inescapable hierarchy in psychic organisa-
tion, a vertical structure. This is in part a logical necessity. If I desire to commit sui-
cide, and desire also to live, I must, logically, make a choice – but logic alone can’t
guide me to a choice. What guides my choice, in the absence of coercion, is my
psychic organisation, which is ultimately shaped, consciously or unconsciously,
by my internal objects. Any significant life-choice can therefore also be described
as taking responsibility for accepting a certain psychic organisation. We describe
those who are unable to make life-choices securely as “split,” meaning that they are
unable to arrive at such responsibility and acceptance: they are torn, so to speak,
between the claims of competing, and incompatible, internal objects. The follow-
ing case example illustrates the way in which an internal object can organise a
person’s decision.
A patient, Vicky, a doctor in her early 30s, had lived for several years with her
partner, Richard, a civil servant. He was offered an interesting appointment which in-
volved living overseas for several months. Vicky was angry and felt abandoned when
he decided to accept it. During his absence, an older colleague, Gareth, made it clear
to Vicky that he was attracted to her; he asked her out. She came to a session, saying
that she was sorely tempted. Gareth was an attractive man; she was angry with Rich-
ard; she was lonely and sexually frustrated with living alone; what should she do?
She came to the following session, however, saying she had decided to turn down
the possibility with Gareth. “I am angry with Richard,” she said, “and I’d like to get
my own back by having an affair. But the person I want to be wants to make it work”
(i.e. the relationship with Richard) – she decided not to imperil that relationship.
Vicky’s mother had left her father for another man when Vicky was aged seven.
Vicky had become for a time a violent and uncontrollable child. Her father had suf-
fered bewildered grief, and then fallen into a long depression. To use the language
of internal objects, from these experiences Vicky had derived an “ego ideal,” an
ideal internal object, a person who remained steady and could be trusted; she was
choosing to identify with this figure: “the person I want to be.” Such an object
embodies an important value, derived from experience; it is not well described as a
“projection of primary narcissism.”
Ethical values and allegorical objects

If the discussion so far has been coherent, it has supported two notions: firstly, that
internal objects are “phenomenological” in nature, and secondly, that the psyche
has a “vertical structure,” that’s to say that its structure is organised more power-
fully by some internal objects than by others. Traditional psychoanalysis accepts
this idea in the notion of a “superego”; it accounts for moral behaviour by seeing the
ego as obedient to the internalised voices and attitudes of parents and educators; the
superiority and authority of such voices is ultimately based on a memory of having
been small when those others were large.
Such superiority is undoubtedly very real, but our task in relation to it can only
be to “emancipate” ourselves from it (Britton 2003) – to discern what is of value
in those early teachings, and discard the rest. But the phrase “of value” takes us
beyond what the theory of the superego can tell us. What can it mean to say that
something is “of value”?
The word value (cognate with valency, valour, prevail, etc.) is to do with having
strength: what gives values, in particular ethical values, their strength? If ultimately
it is based on the physical size and strength of others, then the idea of the value
of ethics as such, of intrinsic ethical value, is a masquerade. This view has always
been held by some. Classically, it was called cynicism; it was the view of Nietzsche
in some moods, and it has been widespread, in fascism and elsewhere, since the rise
of the belief in materialism in the nineteenth century.
The most psychologically convincing account of intrinsic ethical value comes
not from a psychoanalyst but from a philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. He had an
impressive fore-runner in Kant. In addition to his better known discussion of the

categorical imperative, Kant gives a picture of the spontaneous affective response
to ethical virtue, which he calls Achtung, generally translated respect. He writes:
Fontenelle says: ‘I bow before a great man, but my mind does not bow’. I
would add, before an humble plain man, in whom I perceive uprightness
of character in a higher degree than I am conscious of in myself, my mind
bows whether I choose it or not, and though I bear my head never so high
that he may not forget my superior rank. Why is this? Because his example
exhibits to me a law that humbles my self-conceit when I compare it with
my conduct: a law, the practicability of obedience to which I see proved by
fact before my eyes … Respect is a tribute which we cannot refuse to merit,
whether we will or not; we may indeed outwardly withhold it, but we cannot
help feeling it inwardly.
(Kant 1788, 48)
I have discussed this passage elsewhere (Black 2011, 170) and linked it with
Charles Taylor’s discussion (1989, 341) of “making sense of one’s own moral ho-
rizon.” What unites them is the recognition that, if ethical value is intrinsic, it must
itself evoke an affective response in the subject. There is no other route by which
its power can make itself felt. This claim Levinas brings sharply into focus when
he writes of perceiving “the face of the other.”
Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) was influenced by Martin Buber, and Buber’s
account of a “Thou,” the unique, singling-out, second person singular, stands be-
hind Levinas’ account of the other. Like Loewald, Levinas had studied under Hei-
degger; he had been appalled by Heidegger’s espousal of Nazism. As a Jew, he
was fortunate to survive the Second World War as a prisoner-of-war in a German
military camp (other members of his family were not so lucky).2 Both a Talmud
scholar and a philosopher, he devoted his philosophical energy to understanding,
above all, the nature of responsibility and ethical obligation.
The crucial experience for Levinas is what he describes as seeing “the face of the
other.” This does not mean the physical face – he gives an example from a novel
by Vasily Grossman in which what is seen is the person’s back (Morgan 2007,
1–20) – but something more like the vulnerability, the human reality of the other as
a subject like oneself. Such a perception gives rise to the awareness of responsibil-
ity, which he phrases in the language of the biblical commandment: “Thou shalt not
kill.” He speaks of this obligation using Heidegger’s word, “being”: it comes from
beyond being; it is “transcendent.” He writes:
There is a paradox in responsibility, in that I am obliged without this obligation

having begun in me, as though an order were slipped into my consciousness like
a thief …. But this is impossible in a consciousness, and clearly indicates that
we are no longer in the element of consciousness.
(1998, 13)
Levinas emphasises that, when we speak of obligation and responsibility, the “sub-
jects” involved – I, you, he, she – are uniquenesses: “… it is no longer a question
of the ego, but of me. The subject which is not an ego, but which I am … is not
a subject in general: we have moved from the ego to me who am me and no one
else” (13–4). The encounter with transcendence, so central to Levinas’ thought, is
characterised by the absolute uniqueness of the ethically significant situation: “the
identity of the subject comes from the impossibility of escaping responsibility”
(14). In my quotation, the word “order” (ordre in French) has “command” as its
primary meaning, but carries also the implication of “organising,” creating order: it
is as if an organising principle “slipped into my consciousness like a thief.”
He goes on to say that responsibility lies deeper than freedom: “the subjectivity
of a subject come late into a world which has not issued from his projects does not
consist in treating this world as one’s project. The ‘lateness’ is not insignificant”
(1998, 122). Levinas’ vision implies a decisive rejection of materialism and of
Descartes’ project of becoming “the masters … of Nature”. My responsibility for
my neighbour, for “the stranger and sojourner”, is one “to which nothing in the
rigorously ontological order binds me – nothing in the order of the thing, of the
something, of number or causality” (1984, 84). This is what Levinas means by say-
ing that the power of obligation is transcendent. And it’s on this that he bases his
claim that ethics is “first philosophy” and is “prior to ontology.”
Levinas’ description of the “epiphany” of ethical responsibility is of a compel-
ling psychological event – “like a shot ‘at point-blank range’” (83). From the psy-
choanalytic point of view, it invites us to ask what sort of object the “face of the
other” is. Though it appears to reference a physical object, it is not that physical
object, and it isn’t a metaphor, since it is part of its nature that it can’t be translated
into literal statement: any attempt to state it literally would be to take it back into
ontology, would make it part of “totality” and not of “infinity” (1969), would de-
stroy its transcendence.
I think, in using this phrase, Levinas is presenting the other to us as what I shall
call an “allegorical object.” The characteristic of allegory is that it presents a value
directly in the form of the object; unlike the characters created by a novelist, these
objects may (or may not) be fictitious, but they are not attempts to imagine a con-
vincing whole-person; allegory conceives objects that embody a single motive or
group of motives. In the hands of a master, like Dante, allegory can be used with
great subtlety as an instrument with which to think about events in the internal
world, and in particular tensions and conflict among values.
As, to many readers nowadays, “allegory” may seem the name merely of an
outmoded literary device, I shall say a few words to introduce it. Allegory in me-
dieval times made possible a carefully thought-out attempt to grasp the structure
of the internal world; it was discussed with great subtlety in medieval philosophy,
not least because it was the model on which the Scriptures were understood. In
particular – as becomes very apparent in Dante’s Purgatorio – it was a way of
thinking that could conceive of Christ’s double nature, both God and man. Two
fundamental forms of allegory were distinguished: one, which came to be known
as “theological,” in which an actual historical event, such as the Israelites’ Exo-

dus from Egypt, was perceived to have a spiritual meaning, and a second, called
“poetic,” in which a fable or mythic story was interpreted as having moral or psy-
chological significance.
I borrow the example of the Exodus from Dante; following the Exodus, he said,
“Judea became holy and free”; similarly, following its exodus from sin, the soul “is
made holy and free in its power.” His example of a “poetic” allegory is Orpheus’
calming of wild beasts by his music, meaning, Dante suggested, that the voice of
the wise man calms those who are governed by passions (Dante 1304/2018, 59).
He references the medieval notion of four levels of meaning in a written text: the
literal, the “allegorical” (meaning emotional or psychological), the moral and the
anagogical or spiritual.
Dante’s own practice is freer than this suggests, but he emphasised that there
must always be a “literal” level, if any of the other meanings are to be conveyed,
just as “it is impossible to reach the interior without first reaching an exterior,” or
as it is impossible to build a house without first laying a foundation. This literal
level is comparable to the use of the case example in a psychoanalytic clinical
paper. It reminds us that whatever generality we may be dealing with, it is encoun-
tered first in a unique particular. And compared with the abstract discourse that is
our favoured mode for presenting theory, in certain respects, if our concern is with
“subjects” rather than “objects,” allegory has an advantage: abstract discourse, un-
less very carefully handled, is always at risk of converting its ethical subjects into
objects – in Levinas’ language, converting unique and situated “me,” a person,
into a generalised object, an “ego.” The allegorical object, by contrast, is always
encountered also as a subject; to properly encounter the allegorical object is to feel
the power of the value the allegorical subject embodies. To properly perceive the
heraldic lion is to experience the appeal of nobility and courage. To see “the face of
the other” is to experience the commandingness of ethical obligation. In allegory,
to see the perception unaccompanied by the affective dynamism is not to see it at
all. In Dante’s Comedy, the Emperor Trajan, speaking with the widow in Purga-
torio X, embodies authority-influenced-by-compassion: we see him changing his
mind in response to the appeal of suffering. That’s who he is: he is an “allegorical
object,” (a subject), without the complexity of an actual person, but nevertheless
entirely individual, in a specific historical context, meeting someone in a specific
predicament.
Kant’s “humble plain man” of upright character is similarly an allegorical ob-
ject: he represents his uprightness, without further complexity, and it’s to this that
Kant responded with Achtung: he “couldn’t help” doing so. If we assume that Kant
was remembering an actual experience, we might say that he met a complex real
person, but the phenomenological internal object he perceived was the allegorical
object he described. Many of the “shades” Dante encounters in the Comedy are of
this sort: real people Dante had met or heard of, but present now as internal objects,
as the vivid allegorical figures he describes. He uses them to create a rich and en-
cyclopaedic picture of human motives.
Developmentally, it’s likely that our first perception of an ethical value happens
when we encounter an “object,” an other who seems to us to embody the value.
Melanie Klein’s account of the infant internalising the mother’s care, kindness,
playfulness and giving to create a “good internal object” is a story of this sort. A
developmental account of conscience (different from “superego”) might speak of
a memory of persons or teachers, not “who were big when we were small,” but
who embodied important values for us – and who now inhabit us as “allegorical
internal objects.” In such a case, the external object has been perceived empirically,
like any other external object – but has also, on a specific occasion, been perceived
“allegorically,” as embodying a value that has power for “me,” a unique subject. If
it is to be effective, this experience needs to make a certain impact on the subject. In
the moment of its occurrence, I may ignore or reject its claim, or I may “forget” it
by moving on briskly to other considerations. Scientific training may encourage
such ignoring or forgetting. The ethical function of religions by contrast has been to
offer systems of thought in which perceptions of particular values are remembered,
affirmed and inter-subjectively validated. (I discuss this further in Chapter 9.)
If we define an “allegorical object” as one that embodies an important value
and is also encountered as a unique “subject” that awakens his/her/its motive in
“me,” then religious objects are best understood as a species or class of allegori-
cal objects. In Christianity, the issue has been confused by the intense preoccupa-
tion with believing in religious objects, “believing” being construed (in the Nicene
creed for example) as refusing to distinguish between objects in the external and
internal worlds. (“Suffered under Pontius Pilate,” for example – plausibly a histori-
cal fact – is set alongside “ascended into heaven,” clearly an allegorical image.)
To be required to “believe” as historically factual things that are incompatible with
one’s rational understanding of how the world works is intimidating and infantilis-
ing, and bound to create psychic incoherence. This emphasis on “believing” is less
present in other religions, for example Judaism (where what is emphasised is more
the observance of certain requirements of behaviour – Levinas used to say: “belief
is not a primary issue”: see Malka 2006, 241), and hardly at all in Buddhism, where
mythological entities are regularly described as “mental constructs.”
Dante contrived largely to avoid this confusion of allegorical objects with
empirical reality by putting his historical figures into an internal psychological
framework, symbolised as the “afterlife.” In this setting, each can be portrayed as
governed by a single dominating passion or conflict and can function therefore al-
legorically. When Freud wrote about religious objects as “illusory” and in conflict
with science (1927), he was influenced by the distracting insistence on “belief” and
failed to recognise that science and religion are dealing with quite different sorts
of object.
To speak of religious objects as allegorical is liberating in several sorts of ways.
It allows them, as Levinas says, to have real and even commanding importance in
the internal world, while dispensing them from needing to compete with science
in accounting for the material universe. It also opens up the possibility of mutual
respect and tolerance among the religions. The theologian Raimon Panikkar used
to say that different religions are like different languages: you can tell the truth
in every language, he said, but the truths you can tell in one language are slightly
different from those you can tell in another (personal communication). Such an
understanding is not possible if stories involving religious objects are insisted on
as literally true.
Some will object that in speaking of the power of ethical and religious values, I
am ignoring the many cases in which such values appear to have no power. This is
a huge topic, but to comment very briefly: it should be acknowledged that to rec-
ognise the power of an ethical value is already an ethical achievement – it requires
a particular “orientation” (to borrow a term from di Ceglie [2013]) towards the
internal object. But if it is to result in ethically appropriate action in the real world,
then there must in addition be a practical reading of the complex external real
object or situation. In the case of my patient Vicky, the relation of the ideal object
to her dilemma was comparatively straightforward, but very often the situation is
much more complicated and ambiguous. And often stances of self-preoccupation
will block access to ethical concern altogether.
I suggest in Chapter 4 that the development of religious objects in one strand of
Buddhist history, leading to the creation of the Japanese Pure Land schools, was
governed by a need to see ever more explicitly stated the crucial importance of a
certain value, namely, love or compassion. With Levinas it is possible to sense a
similar evolution in the history of European phenomenology: Levinas said what
Heidegger had rather spectacularly failed to say. If we wish to extend the idea of
encountering “the face of the other” into the language of affect, we would need to
speak first I think of “sympathy,” the spontaneous capacity by which we recognise
another as a subject and which makes compassion possible (Black 2004). And then
we would also need to speak of the desire for justice.
Levinas would object that such an extension risks undermining his conception:
it re-entangles ethics with ontology and may divert one’s gaze from what is essen-
tial, the command, to something contingent, the affect, which may or may not be
present, and may or may not be fully conscious. Granting this objection, it remains
true that if perception of the “face” gives rise to obligation, it must involve an
affective component. Eyal Rozmarin, who writes well of Levinas from a psycho-
analytic standpoint, has objected to the extremity of Levinas’ ethics, by which he
means the fact that “for Levinas, the basic truth of ethics is that the other comes
first in all senses of the word” (2007, 355). Psychoanalysis, says Rozmarin, “can-
not put me ahead of the other, or the other ahead of me,” because it essentially sees
healthy relating as a matter of “the continuous establishment of a basis where both
can live” (359), characterised by equality and reciprocal ambivalence.
Rozmarin sees as “extremity” what Levinas would see as foundational. Ethics
for Levinas cannot be founded on ambivalence, nor on reciprocity, although it can
of course find expression only in a world of complex and competing values. But if
it is to be the ultimately important thing, then it needs its transcendence and also
its simplicity (see Chapter 7). Melanie Klein with intuitive brilliance recognised
this, in her account of the need of the baby to have an unambiguously good object,
even at the price of splitting both itself and its object to exclude awareness of
the limitations in the real object, the mother, and in the baby’s experience (1946,
1952; see also the discussion in Chapter 4 here). Her developmental account has
no parallel in Levinas, but it opens a path to thinking why, psychoanalytically,
some people may have access to the sort of experience Levinas describes, and
others may be closed to it. Similarly, Levinas’ awareness of a second, more ordi-
nary viewpoint, that of “ontology,” may have a parallel in Klein’s account of the
“depressive position.”
Dante’s allegory does contain a parallel to Levinas’ insight. At a crucial mo-
ment in the Purgatorio, on the Terrace of the gluttonous, Dante meets the poet
Bonagiunta da Lucca. Bonagiunta asks him who he is. Dante responds with a
self-description:
…. I am one who, when Love

breathes in me, I take note, and as I go
mark down in signs what he dictates within.
(Pg XXIV, 52–4)
The parallel is that, in response to attention given to an experience of external en-

counter (with Beatrice, perhaps), a command comes from within, not from without.
Obedience to the command, for Dante, causes him to write poetry; for Levinas,
it results in awakening to “the human dimension” (1984, 86), an achievement as
Levinas understands it and not the mere characteristic of a species. “The human,”
he writes, “is the return … to the capacity to fear injustice more than death, to
prefer to suffer rather than to commit injustice” (85). (He is quoting phrases from
Socrates in the Gorgias.)
Dante also contrived to describe two viewpoints on reality, similar to though not
identical with the two viewpoints of Levinas and Rozmarin, or Klein’s paranoid-
schizoid and depressive positions. He did so in the two guides, Virgil and Beatrice,
whom he found necessary for negotiating the different realms of Inferno/Purgatory
and Paradise (Black 2017). Virgil represents the classical virtues of rationality and
courage, Beatrice the Christian revelation of divine or “transcendent” love. Al-
legory at this level of sophistication is able to comment on itself, and it does so in
Dante’s depiction of the relationship between Virgil and Beatrice, and her unmis-
takably senior position in the hierarchy. (It is she who sends Virgil to Dante’s help;
it is Virgil who guides Dante through many perils to reunite with her.)
As a species of allegorical objects, religious objects are those that embody the
“extreme” or transcendent values. In Dante, ultimately a monotheist, we find a
number of subordinate religious figures, for example Saint Lucy, the patron saint
of eyesight, who embodies clarity of vision (lux = light); Lucy carries Dante bod-
ily to the gate of Purgatory when he is in confusion after escaping from Hell. Lucy
represents the clarity of ethical vision that enables Dante to recognise which of his
motives are damaging to his long-term welfare (“sins”). It is this recognition that
makes possible the repentance of souls in Purgatory. The fact that she carries him
sleeping suggests that this clarity is still unconscious, is still potential, but it will
become conscious as he journeys through the thought-evoking structure of Purga-
tory itself. Beatrice too, though (at one level) an ordinary woman, is also an avenue
to, and avatar of, divine love, and in this she is an allegorical figure like Christ
himself, both god and man.
The ultimate religious allegorical object – “God” – is mentioned many times in
the poem, but as he comes closer, so to speak, the inadequacy of any allegorical
object to represent him becomes clearer, and finally Dante presents him only by the
name of his fundamental energy, love, the source of all valuations. For Dante, all
motives are ultimately versions or perversions of love (Purgatorio XVII) – there
is nothing resembling a death drive – and so the final monotheistic vision is of an
integrated cosmos: the scattered pages of all the universe “bound by love into a
single volume,” and then the supreme concluding vision: “the love that moves the
sun and the other stars” (Paradiso XXXIII, 145).
Conclusion
I shall attempt now to summarise the thesis of this essay. If we speak of internal
objects as “phenomenological” in nature, we are enabled to lessen the vividness of
the distinction between those derived from the material world (everyday “reality”)
and those derived from elsewhere. To the subject, the power of an internal object
has no necessary correlation with correspondence to a material counterpart.
The thesis of this essay is that there is a species of internal objects, described as
“allegorical,” which represent ethical values to the subject. Internal objects tend to
organise the psyche; allegorical objects tend to organise it in a vertical dimension,
in accordance with the value they represent, which is recognised by the subject
when he or she experiences the appeal, the power, of an ethical motive. Allegorical
objects act so as to change, or to tend to change, the subject’s structure of motiva-
tion, something that is never entirely settled, although the gradual process of psy-
chic integration helps it towards a degree of stability.
Certain allegorical objects, like Levinas’ “face of the other,” embody values felt
to be of transcendent (commanding) importance. When such objects are affirmed
and validated in a specific cultural tradition, they are described as “religious.” At
this point, the language of positivist science ceases to be illuminating. If a reductive
nineteenth century materialism is our metaphysics, there can be no “transcendent”
values: the compelling power of such objects can only be attributed to “illusion,”
to some fantasy derivable from sex or power (or, for those who accept the death
drive, to some derivative of aggression). Any “transcendent” ethical claim can only
be illusion; conscience can only be a superego; seeing “the face of the other” may
give rise to affect but cannot give rise to command.
Loewald (and Levinas) offer an alternative vision. But if we are to follow it, it
will not just be a matter of agreeing with one argument rather than another, as one
might decide to be a Kohutian rather than a Kleinian. It will be to recognise that
ethical and religious values raise issues that go beyond the scope of our present
thinking, and that to explore their implications with full seriousness psychoanalysis
will need to enter much further into dialogue with philosophy.
Notes
1 Husserl’s indebtedness to Kant is interestingly discussed by Morgan (2007, 550–2).
2 I give a brief outline of Levinas’ life in Chapter 10.
References
Black, D.M. (2004). Sympathy reconfigured: Some reflections on sympathy, empathy and
the discovery of values. Int. J Psychoanal. 85: 3, 579–96.
Black, D.M. (2011). Why Things Matter: The Place of Values in Science, Psychoanalysis
and Religion. London and New York, NY: Routledge.
Black, D.M. (2017). Dante’s “Two Suns”: Reflections on the psychological sources of the
divine comedy. Int. J. Psychoanal. 98: 6, 1699–717.
Brierley, M. (1942). “Internal Objects” and theory. Int.J. Psychoanal. 23: 107–12.
Britton, R. (2003). Emancipation from the Superego. In Sex, Death, and the Superego. Lon-
don: Karnac.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1985). The Ego Ideal: A Psychoanalytic Essay on the Malady of the
Ideal. Trs. P. Barrows. London: Free Association Books.
Dante (1304/2018). Convivio. Trs. A. Frisardi. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Descartes, R. (1637/1997). Discourse on the Method. Trs. E.S. Haldane & G.R.T. Ross.
In E. Chavez-Arvizo (ed) Descartes: Key Philosophical Writings (1997) 71–122. Ware:
Wordsworth Editions.
Di Ceglie, G.R. (2013). Orientation, containment and the emergence of symbolic thinking.
Int. J. Psychoanal. 94, 1077–91.
Fairbairn, R. (1946). Object-Relationships and Dynamic Structure. In Psychoanalytic Stud-
ies of the Personality (1952). London: Tavistock/Routledge.
Forbes-Pitt, K. (2018). From dualism to dynamism: Fairbairn’s critique of libido theory
1930–1950. British J. of Psychotherapy 34: 1, 95–113.
Freud, S. (1891). Appendix C, The Unconscious (1915) 209–215. SE XIV.
Freud, S. (1914). On Narcissism: An Introduction. SE XIV.
Freud, S. (1915). The Unconscious. SE XIV.
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. SE XIV.
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. SE XVIII.
Freud, S. (1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. SE XVIII.
Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id. SE XIX.
Freud, S. (1927). The Future of an Illusion. SE XXI.
Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and Its Discontents. SE XXI.
Freud, S. (1933). Anxiety and Instinctual Life. Lecture XXXII of New Introductory Lectures
on Psychoanalysis. SE XXII.
Friedman, L. (2016). Is there a useable Heidegger for psychoanalysts? Journal of the Ameri-
can Psychoanalytic Association 64, 3.
Greenberg, J. R., & Mitchell, S. (1983). Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory. Cam-
bridge, MA and London: Harvard UP.
Grotstein, J. & Rinsley, D.B. (1994). Fairbairn and the Origins of Object Relations. Lon-
don: Free Association Books.
Kant, I. (1788/2005). The Critique of Practical Reason. Trs. T Kingsmill Abbot (2005).
Digireads.com.
Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. In Envy and Gratitude and Other
Works, 1946–1963 1–24. London: Hogarth Press.
Klein, M. (1952). Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the In-
fant. In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963 61–93. London: Hogarth Press.
Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago
Press.
Lear, J. (2017a). Eros and Development. In Wisdom Won from Illness. Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard UP
Lear, J. (2017b). Mourning and Moral Psychology. In Wisdom Won from Illness. Cambridge,
MA and London: Harvard UP.
Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity. Trs. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Levinas, E. (1984). Ethics as First Philosophy. In S. Hand (ed) The Levinas Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing.
Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Trs. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh,
PA: Duquesne UP.
Loewald, H. (1960). On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis. In Papers on Psychoa-
nalysis (1980) 221–56. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP.
Loewald, H. (1971). On Motivation and Instinct Theory. In (eds) Papers on Psychoanalysis
(1980) 102–137. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP.
Loewald, H. (1973). On Internalization. In Papers on Psychoanalysis (1980) 69–86. New
Haven, CT and London: Yale UP.
Loewald, H. (1978). Instinct Theory, Object Relations, and Psychic Structure Formation. In
Papers on Psychoanalysis (1980) 207–18. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP.
MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue (3rd ed. 2007). London: Bloomsbury.
Macmurray, J. (2004) The Dualism of Mind and Matter. In E. McIntosh (ed) Selected Philo-
sophical Writings 13–29. Exeter: Imprint Academic.
Malka, S. (2006) Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy. Trs. M. Kigel & S.M. Embree.
(French original, 2002). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP.
Michelson, A.A. (1903). Light Waves and Their Uses. Chicago, IL: Chicago UP.
Mitchell, S. (2000). Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity. Hove and New
York, NY: Routledge.
Morgan, M.L. (2007). Discovering Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Nietzsche, F.W. (1882/1974). The Gay Science. Trs. W. Kaufmann. New York, NY Vintage.
Peat, F.D. (2002). From Certainty to Uncertainty: The Story of Science and Ideas in the
Twentieth Century. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press.
Rozmarin, E. (2007). An other in psychoanalysis: Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of knowl-
edge and analytic sense. Contemporary Psychoanalysis3: 327–60.
Schafer, R. (1976). A New Language for Psychoanalysis. New Haven, CT and London:
Yale UP.
Schafer, R. (1992). Retelling a Life. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Scharff, J. S., & Scharff, D.E. (2005). The Development of Fairbairn’s Theory. In Scharff
& Scharff (eds) The Legacy of Fairbairn and Sutherland. London and New York, NY:
Routledge.
Steiner, G. (1991). Martin Heidegger. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Stern, D.B. (2010). Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated thought, Dissociation,
and Enactment. New York, NY and Hove: Routledge.
Sulloway, F. (1979). Freud, Biologist of the Mind. Basic Books.

Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP.
Weber, M. (1904/2009). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trs. T. Parsons,
ed. R. Swedberg. New York, NY and London: Norton.
Whitebook, J. (2004). Hans Loewald: A radical conservative. Int. J. Psychoanal 85: 1,
97–116.
Winnicott, D.W. (1951). Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena. In From Paedi-
atrics to Psychoanalysis 229–42. London: Hogarth Press.
Winnicott, D.W. (1960). The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship. In The Maturational
Processes and the Facilitating Environment 37–55. London: Hogarth Press.
Other documents randomly have
different content
addressing me in a loud voice, demanding to know if I expected to
be kept and paid for incorrectly teaching music to his daughters?
Upon receiving a somewhat indistinct explanation, I tremblingly
endeavored—holding on to a back of a chair for support—to
convince him that the alterations complained of were variations, and
that the fault, if any, was the composer’s, not mine. Some of the
gentlemen seemed to feel for my situation, and endeavored to
defend me; but this exasperated him the more, and, with a very
violent expression, he ordered me to leave the room.
I ran back to my little garret, stupefied and affrighted. I believed
I was the most unfortunate being in the world. I looked out upon
the stars, which were now peeping through the heavens, and
imploringly asked if my troubles were never to cease?
On the following morning I communicated to Mr. Curtis my desire
to leave, and he replied that I might do so whenever I paid him the
money he had advanced me to purchase some articles of clothing.
Our agreement was, he said, that I should be paid provided I gave
satisfaction; but as I had not done so, I was not entitled to any
remuneration. I had no means for repaying him, I had no one to
give me advice or render me assistance, and therefore I felt myself
compelled to remain. The clergyman, Mr. Bonner, who recommended
the situation to me, had left London for another part of England.
Upon accepting it, I agreed to do any writing which Mr. Curtis
might require, but I by no means anticipated the quantity which he
daily laid before me. In the evenings it was necessary to take the
documents he gave me to copy to my chamber, where I would work
without intermission until my task was completed, or until
drowsiness and fatigue compelled me to rest. Often during these
occasions, about the hour of midnight, the letters would swim before
my eyes; the glare of my candle became unbearable, and I would
feel a knocking sensation at the back of my head. At these moments
my imagination was more active, and my sensibility more acute.
When I heard the sound of music, of mirth and merriment in the
rooms below, past scenes would present themselves in painful
distinctness; the merry days of childhood, my happy home, and my
kind companions. My dear mother would return and give me that
look of mingled love and sympathy which a mother only can bestow.
My father and brother would stand by my side, and whisper a word
of encouragement, and promise happier days. My sister would come
back, in her sick dress, and repeat her last words, “Poor, dear
Emma!” And then the thought of Alfred would renew conflicting
hopes and fears. At one moment I would fancy he was dead, and
then convince myself he was alive, and conjecture a favorable cause
for his non-arrival. And so I would go on, hoping and fearing,
thinking and dreaming, until my candle had sunk into the socket, or
my aching head made further labor impossible.
It was necessary that I should get up at an early hour every
morning, because, in addition to the writing which I was unable to
finish on the previous evening, I had to dress the young ladies’ hair
—a more difficult undertaking than it is now. After this Mr. Curtis
required me to button-up his gaiters, because his stoutness
prevented him from doing it himself, and he said I did it better than
any of the servants. If I had completed my writing, he would give
me a nod of approbation, and sometimes promise the payment of
my salary, for the period he had formerly refused it. This would give
me encouragement, and make me labor cheerfully, for it held out the
hope of leaving.
Heavy as my duties were, I should have felt them much lighter if
my diet had been more nutritious, and my opportunities for out-door
exercise more frequent. With the exception of my visits to church on
Sundays, I could rarely obtain more than two half-hours for walking
through the week. My stomach gradually became so weak, on
account of these disadvantages, that I was frequently unable to
taste the food laid before me. My meals were sent to my room. The
butter I had for breakfast and tea was purchased by Mr. Curtis from
one of his tenants, and was called “pot-butter.” It smelt so
disagreeable, that I was forced to ask the girl to remove it from my
table. I also enjoyed the privilege of the tea-leaves which came
direct from the parlor, and after a time, I was indulged with fresh tea
on Sundays. I considered this a great favor, because the servants
had to drink milk and water. My bread was home-made, and I used
to find it dark in color, and difficult of digestion. At dinner I enjoyed
a joint, cold or hashed, which came from the parlor on the preceding
day, and what I left was then sent to the kitchen.
The close of the first year at length arrived. I repeated to Mr.
Curtis my wish to leave, because my failing health was unequal to
my duties. He stared at me with apparent wonder, and then declared
his astonishment at my ingratitude, and his surprise at my
complaint. He endeavored to assure me that I ought to feel highly
indebted to him for the shelter he had afforded me; and that my
labors, for a governess, were unusually light. By way of closing the
conversation, he again hinted, that if I did leave, I could not expect
any salary; and when I ventured to ask the reason, he frowningly
alluded to our relative position, and censured my presumption in
asking him for an explanation.
I was conscious that I was undeserving such treatment, but my
defenseless condition rendered resistance impossible, and I was
obliged to remain another year. When I communicated this intention
to Mr. Curtis, he gave me, to my surprise, half of the amount due
me, and promised the remainder when my agreement terminated.
My duties continued unaltered, my health gradually grew worse,
and in a few months, I was laid upon a bed of sickness. The family
wanted to send me to the hospital, but the doctor assured them I
was unable to bear the removal. He attributed my illness to over-
exertion, and a want of out-door exercise. I had become pale and
emaciated. A look of premature old age had spread itself over my
countenance. My head seemed stupefied, melancholy forebodings
were constantly troubling me, and I was frequently subjected to fits
of crying. I had lost all appetite for food, and all love for life. Like
Natalie, I longed “for the grave and nothing more.”
A great change had come over me since my former illness. The
loneliness of my situation, and the recollection of my losses, had
frequently drawn my attention to matters beyond the grave. I
gradually felt the necessity of studying as well as reading my Bible;
and I began to look forward to the Sabbath more as a day for
religious instruction than as a day of rest. As the subject of religion
became nearer and dearer to me, I experienced a feeling of
confidence and resignation which I had never felt before. I became
less irritable when misfortune assailed me, and looked upon it as
intended for some wise purpose. During my present sickness, I felt
very much the need of a clergyman, but for some unaccountable
reason, Mr. Curtis refused to allow one to be sent for, and threatened
my removal to a hospital if I mentioned my wish to the physician.
The doctor was kind and skillful. By his attention, and the diet he
recommended, I was declared convalescent after the lapse of nine
weeks. But when I had recovered I did not regain my former
strength, and was unable to go through with my former duties. The
family speedily saw this, and Mr. Curtis then informed me that my
services were no longer required. He presented me with an account,
in which I was credited with nine pounds for salary, on which he
requested me to write a receipt. After handing it to him he returned
me another, in which I was charged fourteen pounds for board, etc.,
during my illness. That, he remarked, extinguished the amount due
me, and left a balance of five pounds in his favor, which, out of
kindness, he did not intend to charge.
This disappointment very much surprised me. My physician
refused to make any charge for his attendance, and I never
expected, as my illness was produced in Mr. Curtis’s service, that he
would be less liberal. I was, therefore, once more thrust upon a
strange world, weak, moneyless and friendless.
After I left his house, I wended my way to my former residence,
for I had no where else to go to. Upon arriving I was told that my
old room was occupied, and I was sent to one adjoining it. I felt very
lonely that day. The scenes around forcibly brought back the
recollection of my dead sister, and recalled my subsequent
disappointments and my cheerless prospects. I did not know what to
do, or where to go. But there was not wanting, amid this
despondence, a degree of confidence in the superintendence of a
Higher Power, which I formerly did not enjoy.
About nine in the evening Mrs. Grassett entered my room, and
expressed her delight at my return. She said she would have called
before, had she not been engaged in waiting upon a sick stranger,
who occupied my former room, and who she did not think would live
much longer. When I inquired about him, she replied that he was a
foreigner, with an unpronounceable name, and desired that I should
visit him with her, as I might be able to converse with him in his
native tongue. After a moment’s consideration I consented to do so.
I found the room greatly altered. The walls were actually black with
dust, the plaster on the ceiling seemed on the point of falling off, the
window was covered with cobwebs, and the bed-linen seemed very
much in need of washing.
We found the patient asleep, his face buried in his pillow. A
moment or two afterward he awoke, and asked, first in French and
then in broken English, for a little water. I turned to observe his
features, and notwithstanding his hollow cheeks, his distended eye-
balls, and his disheveled hair, I recognized my long expected Alfred.
My surprise was so great that I sprang forward, threw my arms
around his neck, and alternately laughed and wept for joy.
He was suffering from typhus fever, and had been confined to his
bed for eleven days. I gathered from him subsequently, that the last
time he saw my brother was when we parted in Paris—that he did
not hear of his death until some months after it occurred—that he
had been compelled to remain in France some time after we left—
that he had been in London for two or three months before I saw
him, but he was unable to find me—that by some accident he had
lost the money he brought with him to England, and was driven by
necessity to seek for shelter in the place where I found him. I asked
for some further information, not from mere curiosity, but from the
interest I took in every thing which concerned him. He chided me for
doing so, because it implied a want of confidence, and the fear of
exhibiting that was sufficient to stop all further inquiries on my part.
The moment my surprise abated I commenced to wait upon him.
I had three shillings and some odd pence in my pocket, which I
placed into Mrs. Grassett’s hands, to purchase what necessaries she
could with it for our patient. I now forgot all the trials which a few
minutes ago weighed so heavily upon me; and with a lighter heart
than I had felt for a long time before, I endeavored to put the room
in order, and to add to his comfort.
Within a few days my little sum was exhausted. I then obtained
fifteen shillings from a pawnbroker for a gold case in which my
mother’s miniature had been set. This supported us for nearly ten
days, and before the expiration of that time I succeeded, after much
exertion, in obtaining collar work. I labored upon this principally
during the moments Alfred slept, and earned from five to six
shillings per week. With the exercise of economy, and the sale of the
remaining trinkets which belonged to me and my sister, I was able to
succeed pretty well, and to support Alfred somewhat comfortably.
Nearly six weeks elapsed before he recovered. His sickness made
him a little irritable, and sometimes my inexperience made me
displease him. My anxiety to please him sometimes confused me,
and he would censure me for my stupidity.
For nearly four weeks Mrs. Grassett and myself would wait upon
him in turns of twelve hours each. His sickness required unremitting
attention, but I can truly say my labor about him was indeed a labor
of love. The hope of sparing him one pang made the longest day
seem short; and the hope that his life might be spared gave an
unqualified pleasure to my exertions. Oh! how often during dark
nights, when all eyes but mine were closed in sleep, have I watched
his features, to seek for traces of returning health, as if my life
depended upon his. Every expression of pain he exhibited had a
sympathetic influence upon myself; every appearance of revival
upon his looks spread a corresponding change upon mine own. And
when gentle slumber had crept over him, I would kneel by his side,
and in a subdued voice pour forth a supplication to Heaven, that his
life might be spared. I felt as if he was the last and only link which
bound me to earth.
Whenever an opportunity offered, I drew his attention to religion.
Sometimes he would listen to me with attention, and at others he
begged me to be silent on account of his debility.
Occasionally I tried to amuse him by singing some of our old
French ballads, when the evening was too far advanced for my collar
work. At other times I read interesting works, from a neighboring
circulating library.
At length he became better, and we were to be married so soon
as he could leave his room. Then hope once more drew back the
curtains of despair. The future brightened again. During his sickness
he seemed dearer to me than he ever was before. I felt as if he was
now my own, to love and cherish, to live for, and, if need, to die for.
As his strength increased he agitated himself in conjecturing how
he could obtain a livelihood; but I endeavored to convince him of my
ability to earn a very comfortable maintenance for us both.
On the second day after he left his room, and three days
previous to that fixed for our marriage, a letter reached him from
Bonn, enclosing some money, and communicating the death of his
uncle, who had bequeathed to him all his property. The receipt of
this news gave us much joy. I looked upon it as an unequivocal
guaranty that my troubles were ended. It may have been selfish in
me, but I confess I felt a little disappointment when he informed me
that this communication necessitated a further delay of our marriage
until his return from Germany. I fancied that as we had been
separated so long we should not be parted again so quickly, but he
strove to convince me that his immediate absence was necessary,
and I at last cheerfully assented. He left on the day which had been
fixed for our wedding, and it was agreed he should return on the
following month.
Within a few days after his departure I again fell sick, arising,
perhaps, from my late exertions and insufficient rest. It was
accompanied with the same loss of appetite, nervous fits of crying,
lowness of spirits, and occasional attacks of delirium, which I had
formerly suffered from. My sane moments, however, were enlivened
by pleasing anticipations of Alfred’s return; and I even felt grateful
he was ignorant of my sickness, because I believed it would spare
him much pain and anxiety. I did not recover so soon as I expected.
My physician did not seem to understand my complaint so well as
his predecessor.
Four weeks had now elapsed since Alfred departed, and I heard
no news of his return. Three or four days more elapsed without
intelligence, and I became alarmed. At length a letter arrived,
addressed to me in his hand—and my heart throbbed with joy. I felt
so delighted, that I committed, what some will call a piece of
extravagance, that is, I kissed the address, because I was convinced
it was his writing. I then hurriedly broke the seal and began to read
the contents. The first paragraph informed me that he had taken
possession of his uncle’s property, and that it was more valuable
than he had supposed, and was, I fancied, conveyed in cooler
language than I expected. The next paragraph had reference to
matters of little importance, but as I read on, another
communication rose up, which made the blood freeze in my veins,
and seemed to suspend the beating of my heart. It told me that now
our relative conditions were greatly changed—that he feared our
dispositions were incompatible—that our marriage was impossible.
As I read on with a brain throbbing and burning, with a bosom
struggling between doubt and despair, I observed an invitation to
reside with him, and a promise to give me a settlement if I
subsequently desired a separation. I think one more paragraph
concluded the letter, but I could read no further. I alternately
laughed and cried. I declared it was all a vile forgery, and then
something told me all was true. I declared it was a dream, but anon
the dread reality stared me in the face. At last every thing seemed to
disappear. For many a long day reason deserted me.
About two years after, I felt as if I had awakened from a sleep,

and I found myself in a very respectably furnished room, with an
elderly lady, who was apparently watching me. I had a somewhat
confused remembrance of both her and the room, though I could
not divine her name, nor remember how I had become acquainted
with her. She also appeared as much surprised as myself, from the
earnest and dubious look she directed toward me. She arose from
her chair, and introduced herself as Mrs. Burnett, I hardly knew what
to say, or what inquiry to make. After a moment, I ventured to ask if
I was not staying in her house—to what circumstance I was
indebted for that favor, and whether I had not been suffering from
insanity?—for that dreadful truth gradually came to my mind.
Perceiving that I was restored to reason, she answered all my
inquiries, and communicated much more than I anticipated. She
informed me how that my father’s old and faithful steward had by
some means prevented the confiscation of his property from being
executed—how that he had, a few months after my departure,
disposed of it, and escaped to London with the proceeds, for the
purpose of handing it to me. How that he used great exertions, after
his arrival, to find me, and in the midst of them fell sick and died.
Before his decease, he lodged the money in the hands of her
husband, who was a banker, together with every information he
could give which might lead to my discovery. That Mr. Burnett had
renewed his efforts, but after several months he abandoned them as
useless. That shortly after he was appointed to be one of the
inspectors of a metropolitan lunatic asylum, and at one of his visits
there, he found an inmate bearing my name. Upon making inquiries
from the keeper, and at the house where I had boarded, (where he
examined some books and papers which belonged to me,) he
satisfied himself that I was the person whom he and the steward
had sought for; and as he heard a favorable character of me, he
removed me to his house, in the hope of affording better treatment
than I was likely to receive in the asylum.
You may suppose this explanation very much surprised me; but
the unexpected recovery of the proceeds of my father’s property did
not produce much gratification. I was not sorry I now possessed a
competence, though I did not feel glad. I felt very grateful to my
deliverers, and to Him by whom my life had been spared; but it was
accompanied with a recklessness and indifference about my future
prospects. My disposition also seemed to have changed into a
settled sadness, which has never since altogether left me.
My kind friends wished me to remain with them, but, with many
thanks, I declined their invitation. I wanted to leave London, and
upon that determination I came to Cornwall, and occupied the little
cottage where we became acquainted.
Many years have passed since these trials happened; and as the
sweetest perfumes are derived from the bitterest drugs, so these
dark clouds have produced many bright and sunny days. True, they
are associated with painful reminiscences, but they have been
followed with incalculable advantages. Amid their severest strokes I
can now recognize the hand of a just but benevolent Father. If in my
subsequent career I could bear disappointment without discontent,
and misfortune without repining; if I could feel resignation
suppressing impatience, and contentment controlling ambition, I
owe it to the struggles which I have endeavored to describe. It is in
the rugged vale of tribulation that the path to human happiness is
found.
LOGAN’S VOW.
———
BY EDWARD J. PORTER.
———
It was not by the war-fire’s light,

With bright flames upward wreathed
Into the cloudless sky of night,
My battle vow was breathed;
It was not while the warriors flew,
With scalp-locks flung on air,
The mazes of the war-dance through,
My spirit poured its prayer.
Nor while the battle’s stormy strife

Shook the deep forests wide,
And tomahawk and scalping-knife
Flashed in their gleaming pride.
Alone I stood, amidst the dead,
When the spirit of repose,
That long had clasped my heart, had fled
And vengeance waked her throes.
The dead were round me; yes, my own,

The beautiful, the young;
Their calm looks waked the anguished tone
From Logan’s spirit wrung.
Then, only then, the wild flame woke,
And waved its scorching wings,
That, curbless in its frenzy, broke
My spirit’s slumberings.
The silence of the midnight hour,
Unbroken by a sound,
Hung over all, with spell-fraught power
Beneath its stillness bound;
I stood, as stands the forest’s pride,
When all its leaves are strown,
Swept by the whirlwind wild and wide,
In desolation lone.
Changed in an hour, the white man’s friend

Gleamed in his war array;
The league forever at an end,
And lighted hatred’s ray:
Dark records traced by widow’s tears,
And wailings sad and low,
Have borne wild tales to other years
Of Logan’s vengeful vow.
IMAGINATION AND FACT.
———
BY A NEW CONTRIBUTOR.
———
Imagination’s world of air,

And our own world.
Halleck.
The world is of such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is bounded by a sleep.
Shakspeare.
S’ai che lá corre il mondo ove piu versi
Di sue dolcezze il lusinghier Parnaso
E che ’l vero condito in molli versi,
I piu schivi allentando ha persuaso.
Tasso.
People seem to have an idea that facts are every thing in the
business of the world—the only considerations in the philosophy of
human progress. Opposed to what is merely imaginary, facts are
allowed to have much dignity. Your practical reasoners look for facts;
facts “are the jockies for them”—such as they can see, hear, handle,
or demonstrate; while the imaginations are mostly held synonymous
with the worthless, the unsubstantial and the ridiculous. They seem
to say in the spirit of one of Congreve’s characters—we forget which
—“fiddle-faddle, don’t tell me of this and that and every thing in the
world; but give me mathematical demonstration.” Now we do not go
so far as the philosopher Bayle, who, on the other hand, affected to
laugh at mathematical demonstration; but we think, “under leave of
Brutus and the rest,” that facts do not seem, and have not seemed
to be so exclusively essential to “the cosmogony of the world,” to the
history and progress of mind and the general business of things, as
some solid authorities think. Without troubling our heads, in this
gossiping paper, with the subtleties of Berkley and others, who
knock all creation into the compass of a man’s perceptions—
establish the column of the unsubstantial universe on the pentagonal
base of the senses—we have an idea that a vast amount of the
fictitious and imaginary is blended with our regular business of
being, doing and suffering. Human nature has, in all times, contrived
a little gilding, to make the bitter pill of life go down. Tasso truly says
—in his Invocation to the Virgin Mary for a muse—at the opening of
his “Gerusalemme Liberata”—
For well thou knowest, the world more fondly turns
To old Parnassus’ consecrated spot;
And truths which graceful poetry adorns
Win while they please us; and a spell is wrought
For the most subtle and reluctant thought.
Thus, for the sickly child, by friendly wile,
The cup’s deceptive edge, with sweetness fraught,
Lures to the bitter potion—he the while
Drinks life and health from the judicious guile.
Not alone have the edges of the cup of life been touched in this
way, but the contents of it have always been dashed with large
doses of the same emollient. Reality is not such a delightful thing,
after all. The false and the phantasmal have ever been considered
the necessary complements, as it were, of our condition here.
If we take away from the amount of what the world possesses
that which belongs and is due to the imagination merely—what is
not authentic, and could not be sworn to in a court of justice—what
will be left? Let us take it away—and what then? There is a sudden
solitude in the world. The beautiful is vanished, and the hard, blank
remnant of things is full of gaps, and desert places, disastrous flaws
and a strange silence. There is nothing now, but facts in this
macrocosm. But, believe us, ’tis a very rude, cold place to live in—
much worse than ever it was before; and that—in the opinion of the
pale pessimist over the way there—was bad enough in all
conscience. They who first found out this world, and roamed about
on it, had scarcely called it very good when they began to make it
better, by peopling its too extensive solitudes—creating phantasms
and imaginations for it, where there were none before. The
unclothed reality of things was too bare and blank, beautiful as it
was, for the first human beings that walked the earth. They looked
to the elements, and the infinite host of heaven, and following their
unanswerable instincts, they began to make mysteries, airy fabrics
and visions. They imagined a god for the cope and the clouds of the
firmament, and he wielded the thunderbolts from a high mountain;
another, shaped after the most perfectly formed of men, resided in
the sun,
“The lord of life and poesy and light:”
His sister was the goddess of the earth’s satellite—
“Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns,

To whose bright image nightly by the moon,
Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs.”
They heard gods in winds and in fire—and altars to these were

among the earliest raised. They saw a terrible divinity in the
vastness or angry billows of the sea, and imagined a crowd of lesser
beings to haunt its caverns and depths. The forests were sacred to
the universal Pan—his fauns, sylvans and satyrs; every oak had its
hamadryad, every river its naiad or potamid; the oreads took charge
of the flowery meadows, and the napææ wandered forever in the
shady valleys. Impatient of mere reality, men filled the universe with
phantasies and theories—
“The intelligible forms of ancient poets—

The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
Or forest, by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms or watery depths.”
Suppose we demolish all these graceful fallacies, and the poetry,

also, in which they are embalmed. What a throng of splendid deeds,
of heroic and beautiful figures—demigods, warriors, kings—bright
women and brave men, moving in gorgeous panorama over the vast
back-ground of antiquity—is extinguished in the darkness! The
creations of the ancient poets and imaginative writers have filled up
a space in the earlier ages of the world, which without them would
be a blank and lost to the human mind, as much as the pre-Adamite
chaos is. What a disinheritance it would be to take away the Iliad
and Odyssey! to obliterate Hector, the kind-hearted and manly hero;
and Priam with his mighty sorrows a suppliant for his dead son; and
the warring Achilles—
“Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer,”
and the wandering Ulysses, seeing strange shores and cities, and
the varying manners of men! Not alone would much be wanted in
the want of these venerable works, but in the want of all that
literature which they inspired and gave rise to in after time. The
succeeding poets and dramatists of Greece and Rome drew light
from Homer, as Milton’s stars did in their golden urns from the sun.
They took his historic imaginations and characters as their models,
and reproduced them in forms which the world will not willingly let
die, and which it prizes nearly as much as the Institutes and
Pandects of Justinian, or any thing else of that authentic and
substantial kind.
To come to our own familiar literature, the fictions of our insular
or continental writers are as favorably and generally remembered as
the historic facts of the English-speaking peoples. In our genial
moments, when the mind desires to be refreshed or pleased it will
revert, with an almost universal preference, to what is imaginary, or
adorned with the graces of imaginative literature; and half the world
regard with as much attention the men and women of Shakspeare
and Scott as those of Hume and Prescott. And how intimately and
lovingly we give our interest to the words and actions of these
imaginary beings! What a world of thought and life is in the dramas
of Shakspeare! There is the venerable Lear, driven out into the
storm, and talking the finest philosophy to the wild elements, that so
feelingly persuade him what he is; and Hamlet, so sententious in his
antic disposition; the fair Ophelia, and the prosy old courtier,
Polonius; and the immortal bed-presser, and huge hill of flesh—the
greatest liar and the greatest favorite in the world; and Macbeth,
with his terrible hags on the heath, and his more terrible wife; and
Richard, wooing Lady Anne, or fighting desperately his last battle.
Then there are the witty and adventurous Rosalind, and
“The gentle lady wedded to the Moor;”
and Portia, the beautiful, wise young judge; and the impassioned
Juliet, with the southern lightnings in her veins; and Miranda, the
enchantress, of an enchanted island—and all that magnificent array
of womanhood which reflects for ever the unequaled genius of
Shakspeare.
We have also the creations of Scott—coming nearest of any to
those of the great dramatic poet, and enjoying even a more general
popularity. Successive generations prize them as an imperishable
legacy, and the memory has a pleasure in conjuring them up—so
vivid and picturesque in their colors and outlines: The hall of Cedric,
the Saxon—the swineherd, the templar, the gorgeous tournament at
Ashby de la Zouche, Friar Tuck, the storming of Torquilstone, the
Black Knight, fighting as if ten men’s strength were in his single arm;
and the beautiful Jewess—what splendid series of images—bringing
back so vividly the old pomp and circumstance of the feudal times!
We shall never forget the feelings with which we first read Ivanhoe,
and there found all our vague feelings of romance and dreams of
knightly doings put into such spirit-stirring expression. Then how
true is the picturesque bravery of Fergus McIvor—
“All plaided and plumed in his tartan array;”
and the marching of the Scottish clans; the fine old Baron
Bradwardine, the high-spirited Flora, and the tender Rose. We see
the fierce Balfour of Burley, slaying the guardsman at Drumclog, or
raving in his cave; and the swords of the Solemn League and
Covenant waving in desperate tumult on Bothwell Bridge. Edgar and
Lucy walk to the haunted spring, Caleb Balderstone performs
laughable prodigies of cunning to save the credit of Wolf’s Crag, and
the last Lord of Ravenswood disappears awfully into the “Kelpie’s
flow,”
“And his name is lost for ever moe.”

Norna of the Fitful-Head, speaks her wild rune of the reimkennar
to the spirits of the North wind; “bold Magnus, the son of the earl;”
Minna, Brenda, Cleveland, Claude Halcro, feast, love, fight and
rhyme in the Udaller’s charmed isle. Diana Vernon, on horseback,
clears her five-barred gate and gallops by; Rob Roy cries “claymore,”
and Bailie Nichol Jarvie fights his highlandman with a hot coulter,
and goes up perilously to the Clachan of Aberfoil; Jeannie Deans
stands in the presence of Queen Caroline, pleading for the life of her
sister, while the Duke of Argyle puts his hand to his chin whenever
her Majesty or the Duchess of Suffolk are in danger of a random hit
from the lips of the unconscious advocate; Monkbarn’s discovers the
remains of a Roman prætorium, and Edie Ochiltree comes up and
says: “Prætorium here, prætorium there; I mind the bigging o’t!”
The Knight of the Leopard and the disguised Soldan fight their
chivalrous duel in the desert, and then feast together at the spring,
and Richard Plantagenet, leaping from his sick-bed, in spite of the
Hakim, tears down the standard of Austria from the mound at Acre,
and hurls the giant Wallenrode from the top to the bottom of it.
Dominic Sampson exclaims “prodigious!”—Dirk Hatterick strangles
Glossin and shoots Charlotte Cushman—Meg Merrilies we should say,
but it is all one—who recognizes young Bertram and dies hard. Hal o’
the Wynd “fights for his own band” on the Inch of Perth, in the
mêlée of the clans Chattan and Quhule. Tristram l’Hermit, hangs the
trees around Plessis les Tours with Zingaris, like acorns. Louis and
Charles the Bold ride together into Liege by a breach in the walls,
and the head of the savage De Lamarck secures to the Scottish
soldier the hand of Isabel Croye. The Highland Widow mourns over
her condemned son with all the tragic truth of Æschylus or nature;
the Last Minstrel sings a wild epic of goblin gramarye—the Leaguer
of Branksome—knights and ladies—the lists and the festival.
Roderick and the Knight of Snowdon fight by the ford of Coilantogle;
Constance perishes awfully in her convent cell, and Marmion dies
like a courageous knight, at Flodden
“Charge, Chester, charge; on, Stanley, on—

Where the last words of Marmion!”
All these, and more, come thronging at the call of the wizard.
And with them will also pass before the reader’s or muser’s eye the
extravagant hero of him who “smiled Spain’s chivalry away;” Doctor
Primrose and his delightful family, Parson Adams, Sir Roger de
Coverley, Evangeline, Ichabod Crane, and a thousand others, which
every body’s memory will distinguish for itself—just as every eye
shapes its proper rainbow. They have all the distinctness of reality,
and it is by an effort that we draw the line between them and bona
fide characters.
Many of these last, in fact, are little better than the fictions of
poets, dramatists and romancers. The histories of the venerable
Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, etc. are half imaginative. There are
outlines of truth in them—
“The truth is there; but dashed and brewed with lies.”
The history of Scotland, for ages, from the reign of Fergus, and
of Ireland from the days of Heber, Heremon and Ith, down to the
conquest of the country by Strongbow, are just as fanciful as the
metrical romances of Scott and Moore. Then, for the annals of
Greece; Herodotus, the patriarch of history, sets down almost every
thing he hears from the lying priests of Egypt, or that he can gather
from vague tradition; and people don’t exactly know whether to call
the Cyropædia of Xenophon a romance or an authentic narration.
Plutarch romances at times like the Scuderis. An old English author,
Taylor, says, of his fallacies and blunders in the lives of the orators—
mendaxille Plutarchus qui vitas oratorum dolis et erroribus consutas,
olim conscribillavit. Neibuhr has got into our old history of Rome and
laid about him like an iconoclast. He destroys a crowd of our beliefs,
and makes a solitude in the first ages of Rome—so wonderful and
picturesque in our school-boy days. He makes a solitude and calls it
truth. He demolishes Mars, Rhea Sylvia, Romulus and Remus and
the Wolf—Numitor, Evander, and so forth. Under the flourishing of
his pen they make themselves into thin air in which they vanish.
Then the Tarquins, their insolence and expulsion; Lars Porsenna of
Clusium, the siege of Rome, Cocles on the Bridge and Scævola at
the flaming Altar—all are inventions of Fabius Pictor, Ennius, Nævius,
and others. This portion of the history of Rome, says the German,
should be called the Lay of the Tarquins, and is just as authentic as
the Lay of the Nibelungen! “Livy’s pictored page,” (if we may be
permitted to make a critical emendation of Byron’s phrase in the
spirit of Bishop Warburton’s Notes on Shakspeare,) is allowed to be
just as fallible as it is brilliant. Thus we have a vast amount of what
is called ancient history confounded with the professed creations of
fanciful minds; and there does not seem to be any very marked
difference between Agamemnon or Ajax, and Cecrops or Codrus;
between Æneas or Dido, and Numa or Clelia—they are all equally
distinct or indistinct. Scott’s King Richard, singing a roundelay and
exchanging a buffet with the Clerk of Copmanhurst, is as firm on the
canvas as Alfred baking his cakes, or Canute sitting on a chair to
rebuke his flatterers on the sea-shore.
And even as regards the more modern and authentic annals of
history, we do not think they have paid much more respect to the
actual truth of things than do the fictionists. Sir Robert Walpole used
to say to his friends, “Don’t read history; that must be false.” And Sir
Walter Raleigh, looking from the window of his prison in the Tower,
and witnessing a quarrel in the court-yard or the street, and the
after-testimony of the by-standers respecting it, was tempted, it is
said, to throw his History of the World into the fire, in despair of
ever being able to gather any thing like truth from conflicting
authorities. And, certainly, the differences of historians—their doubts
concerning motives, and their disagreements concerning facts, tend
to give us very unsettled ideas of history in general. Writers have
sent Col. Kirke down to us from James the Second’s reign with a
very black and bloody renown. But he was not half so black as he
was painted by the whigs; and the story of the poor girl whose
husband he hanged before her eyes, in the morning, though she had
dearly purchased his life on Kirke’s own terms, is pronounced by
Ritson to be an impudent and bare-faced lie. The story is much older
than Kirke. Richard the Third is also one of the historical reprobates;
though it is not unlikely that the young princes were not murdered in
the Tower, and that Perkin Warbeck was really the prince after all; as
truly as the surreptitious, warming-pan prince is known to have been
the true son of James the Second, in spite of the Protestant
historians. Then there are Jack Cade and Wat Tyler; these have been
receiving cruel wrong at the hands of the annalists. They dared, in
an age when the rights of the people were imperfectly understood,
and the influence of the feudal system still strong in the nation, to
take up arms and go to war with the king and the nobles for liberty!
Their sufferings and provocations were undeniable, and their spirit
was certainly heroic—kindred to that which glowed in the bosoms of
Melchthal, Furst, and Stauffacher, at the Brunnens of Grutli. The
Swiss peasants were successful, and are held in honorable
remembrance forever. But the Englishmen failed, and are set up as
scarecrows and Indibria, upon the field of history. Poor Tyler and
Cade were animated by the same kind of blood which boiled in the
face of a tyrant at Naseby, Marston Moor, Dunbar, and elsewhere—
which warmed the hearts of the exiles on the cold rock of Plymouth,
and flowed so freely at Lexington and Bunker Hill. We should honor
these English rebels—in spite of history, and in spite of Shakspeare.
It is remarkable to see this myriad-minded man, so full of the finer
humanities of our nature, yet incapable of sympathizing with the
cause and feelings of the mass of the lower classes. But Shakspeare
was a man of his era—to which, with an astonishing and happy
wizardry, he obliged chronology and human nature to conform; he
dreamed as little of the later evangils of democracy as he did of the
Daguerreotype and the electric telegraph. In this way Cade, Richard,
and a thousand others are in the hands of the historians, tricked out
as much in the colors of imagination as in those of fact.
No man can be sure of the lesser details of the annals, though he
may put faith in some of their great facts. We are not indisposed to
allow that there was a man named Julius Cæsar; though whether he
ever said, Quid times? vehis Cæzarem, in the boat, or Et tu Brute!
when the republicans set upon him in the senate-house, is not quite
so credible. Most of these picturesque properties of character or fact,
so to speak, are furnished by the fancies and after-thoughts of the
narrators, or fabricated wilfully for a purpose. We need not go very
far back in history to discover the truth of this. In a late memoir
(Achille de Vaulabelle’s) of the “Two Restorations,” we are told that
an old story of the consternation of the members of the Directory,
on its violent dissolution by Bonaparte, in 1800, was a false one.
There was no hurry-skurry, nor jumping out of windows, any more
than when Oliver Cromwell put an end to the Long Parliament.
Again, that glorification made on the sinking of the Vengeur, in an
engagement with the English fleet, during the first French revolution,
has been latterly put out of countenance. The story in France was,
that, being terribly damaged, this ship sunk with all on board, her
flag flying, and the crew shouting, “Long live the republic!” Carlyle
adopted this version in his history, and makes quite a cartoon of it,
in his own outlandish phraseology. But on the appearance of the
story in an English work, a naval officer who witnessed the affair of
the Vengeur, wrote a letter to the Times, in which he stated that,
instead of going down with true republican devotion, the poor
French sailors, small blame to them! jumped overboard, and tried to
save themselves, and that some hundreds of them were rescued in
the British boats. That message, said to have come from the dying
Dessaix to Bonaparte, on the field of Marengo, (“Tell the First Consul
I die regretting I can no farther serve him and France,”) was
fabricated in the bulletin by the aforesaid consul himself. The story
of the Duke of Wellington lying in the hollow square of the Guards at
Waterloo, and, on the advance of the French, crying, “Up, Guards,
and at them!” is as untenable as our own famous saying—“A little
more grape, Captain Bragg!” or the military speeches of the great
generals of antiquity, as recorded by Tacitus, Sallust, Cæsar, and the
rest of the writers. Then, as regards great facts, different nations
give different accounts. Ask who gained Waterloo? “We did,” say the
Prussians. “We gave vast assistance,” say the Belgians. Ask John
Bull, or rather, don’t; his answer would be rather brief than polite.
We should like to see a history of the campaigns in Greece of Darius,
Xerxes, and Mardonius, written by Persians. All history is more or
less deserving of Sir Robert Walpole’s designation. Hume, in one of
his letters to Robertson, alluding to the publication of Murdin’s State
Papers, which threw unexpected light upon the annals, exclaims,
“We are all in the wrong!” And, indeed, Hume himself is among
those to whom we are mostly indebted for the imaginative character
of history. He had little of the industry of Gibbon, and trusted very
much to his own sagacity for his views. He was also a tory, and
became, in his scorn of whiggery, the apologist of the Stuarts. His
history is charming as a composition, but errs in its colorings of facts
and its conclusions from them.
Imagination, as we have said, seems the complement of the
world of facts and things, in all mental exercises, except the logical
and mathematical. If we contemplate nature it enhances what we
behold. The mountains, rivers, forests, and the elements that gird
them round about, would be only blank conditions of matter, if the
mind did not fling its own divinity around them. Nature was thus
endowed from the beginning—when men heard voices in the winds,
and the supernatural inhabitants of terra firma,
“Met on the hill, the dale, forest or mead,

By paved fountain, or by rushy brook,
Or on the beached margent of the sea;”
or, in the train of powerful Poseidon,
“Took in by lot, ’twixt high and nether Jove,

Imperial rule of all the sea-girt isles.”
And the modern lovers of nature, though they no longer recognize

the mythologic people of the ancient beliefs in her picturesque
wildernesses, clothe them with the attributes of the mysterious
abstract power which is over all things. And, in the towering of her
peaks, the murmur of her forests and seas, the roar of her storms,
the singing of her nightly stars, they find revelations and prophecies
of higher and farther existences. In this respect, the modern poetry
of nature has a nobler scope and purer inspiration than the ancient.
Wordsworth and Byron speculate more sublimely than Lucretius.
In another sense, the imagination materially imposes upon facts.
In contemplating cities, works of art, ruins, or scenes of nature, we
almost always appreciate them for the associations that belong to
them—the imaginations they excite. Look at a gray bleak sort of
plateau between mountains and the sea, and you see little to
admire. But let somebody say, “that is Marathon!” while the blood
thrills at the name, a flood of glory flashes over the immortal
ground; the air is thick with phantoms—
To the hearer’s eye appear,

The camp, the host, the fight, the conqueror’s career—
The dying Mede, his shaftless, broken bow;
The fiery Greek, his red pursuing spear;
Mountains above, earth’s, ocean’s plain below;
Death in the front, destruction in the rear!
It is this quality of the imagination which gives old countries their

superior attractions when compared with new soils. At the sight of
battle-fields, religious houses, cathedrals, castles, either in ruins or
otherwise, we are pleased in calling up a crowd of shadows from the
dust, and finding a sort of mysterious companionship with them
during our passing reveries.
Campbell says very well, that distance lends enchantment to the
view, and it is generally true of the human mind that it regards the
past with a feeling of tenderness—a disposition to make the best of
it. There is a certain charm in Time, whom we regard as the
dominator of us all; and the ruins or remnants of any thing speak an
impressive warning of our own evanescent fate. That belief in the
good old times is an instinct too strong for the philosophy of most of
us. We have a thousand proofs that they were rude, bad, ignorant
times. But the poetry of our nature will not be reasoned with, and
we believe with the bard—
Not rough or barren are the winding ways

Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers.
Any thing old or historic is appreciated in proportion to the scope

it gives to the imagination—to point a moral or adorn a tale. We
gaze on the wild hill, vale, stream or forest of a new country, with
none of those feelings which fill us in beholding similar objects in an
old land. The former may be as fair or fairer to see; but, as
“A primrose by the river’s brim,

A yellow primrose was to him.”
of whom Wordsworth speaks, so the latter is a stream, a forest, a

hill—nothing more. The nameless savages had the place from the
beginning, and the solitude. The other is a tradition, a romance, a
memory. In the valley is the legendary well, and the fairy ring; by
the stream is the fortalice of the feudal period, or the abbey
dwindled to a few ivied walls and the oriel, on the site of a bloody
battle where a king fell fighting, a thousand years ago; and, on the
slope of the hill stand the Druid stones, in a circle, set there,
certainly, in the ancient time of the giants, who descended from
Thor and
Lived in the oldé days of King Artour.
As Webster, the old English dramatist, says:
We love these ancient ruins;

We never tread upon them, but we set
Our foot upon some reverend history.
They receive all their witchery from the imagination of him who
surveys them. This faculty is potentially mingled with all that is most
real in nature; nay, it would seem to be as much a reality as any
thing else we call such. The preacher calls the world a vain shadow,
and the Berkleyan philosopher calls it a huge accident of the five
senses; and Shakspeare is inclined to think there is nothing that is
but thinking makes it so. The practical men, therefore,—the directors
of railways, the managers of stock, and the owners of electric
telegraphs cannot be considered to have matters all to themselves.
The poet and the romancist control as much of the “thick rotundity
of the world” as they; and certainly the most enchanting portion.
Schiller gives us in an admired lyric, the idea that the imaginative
being was forgotten by Jove in the distribution of the earth; but
received a general invitation to the Court of Olympus. Our nether
“maker,” or “finder,” does still, of course, avail himself of this
privilege; but not as one without alternative. He has a great share
and dominion in all sublinary things; and his castles in the air may
be found as firmly fixed, after all, and as well tenanted, as any
existing on any other element.
WINTER.
———
BY ALICE CAREY.
———
Now sits the twilight palaced in the snow,

Hugging away beneath a fleece of gold
Her statue beauties, dumb and icy cold,
And fixing her blue steadfast eyes below;
Where in a bed of chilly waves afar,
With dismal shadows o’er her sweet face blown,
Tended to death by eve’s delicious star,
Lies the lost day alone.
Where late with red mists bound about his brows

Went the swart Autumn, wading to the knees
Through drifts of dead leaves shaken from the boughs
Of the old forest trees;
The gusts upon their baleful errands run
O’er the bright ruin, fading from our eyes,
And over all, like clouds about the sun,
A shadow lies.
For, fallen asleep upon a dreary wold,

Slant to the light, one late October morn,
From some rough cavern blew a tempest cold,
And tearing off his garland of ripe corn,
Twisted with blue grapes, sweet with luscious wine,
And Ceres’ drowsy flowers, so dully red,
Deep in his cavern leafy and divine,
Buried him with his dead.
Then, with his black beard glistening in the frost,
Under the icy arches of the north,
And o’er the still graves of the seasons lost,
Blustered the winter forth.
Spring, with your crown of roses budding new,
Thought-nursing and most melancholy fall,
Summer, with bloomy meadows wet with dew,
Blighting your beauties all.
O heart, your spring-time dream will idle prove,

Your summer but forerun the autumn’s death,
The flowery arches in the home of love
Fall, crumbling, at a breath;
And sick at last with that great sorrow’s shock,
As some poor prisoner pressing to the bars
His forehead, calls on mercy to unlock
The chambers of the stars:
You, turning off from life’s first mocking glow,
Leaning it may be still on broken faith,
Will down the vale of autumn gladly go
To the chill winter, death.
Hark! from the empty bosom of the grove

I hear a sob, as one forlorn might pine—
The white-limbed beauty of a god is thine,
King of the seasons, and the night that hoods
Thy brow majestic, brightest stars enweave—
Thou surely canst not grieve.
But only far away
Mak’st stormy prophecies—well lift them higher,
Till morning on the forehead of the day
Presses a seal of fire.
Dearer to me the scene
Of nature shrinking from thy rough embrace,
Than summer, with her rustling robe of green,
Cool blowing in my face.
The moon is up—how still the yellow beams

That slantwise lie upon the stirless air,
Sprinkled with frost, like pearl-entangled hair,
O’er beauty’s cheek that streams.
How the red light of Mars their pallor mocks.
And the wild legend from the old time wins,
Of sweet waves kissing all the drowning locks
Of Ilia’s lovely twins.
Come, Poesy, and with thy shadowy hands

Cover me softly, singing all the night—
In thy dear presence find I best delight;
Even the saint that stands
Tending the gate of heaven, involved in beams
Of rarest glory, to my mortal eyes
Pales from the blest insanity of dreams
That round thee lies.
Unto the dusky borders of the grove

Where gray-haired Saturn, silent as a stone,
Sat in his grief alone,
Or where young Venus, searching for her love,
Walked through the clouds, I pray,
Bear me to-night away.

Psychoanalysis and Ethics The Necessity of Perspective 1st Edition Black

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Psychoanalysis and Ethics The Necessity of Perspective 1st Edition Black

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Psychoanalysis and Ethics The Necessity of Perspective 1st Edition Black

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Full download ebooks at ebookmeta.

Psychoanalysis and Ethics The Necessity of

Download more ebook from https://ebookmeta.com

Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1st

Climate Crisis Psychoanalysis and Radical Ethics 1st

The Ethics of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. A Conversation

Psychoanalysis History and Radical Ethics Learning to

Speculating on the Edge of Psychoanalysis: Rings and

Occultism and the Origins of Psychoanalysis 1st Edition

Ethics Matters Ethical Issues in Pragmatic Perspective

The Human Difference Animals Computers and the

‘Few books so generously provide a rich and nuanced conceptual scaffolding to

‘David M. Black has made an extraordinary individual contribution to psycho-

Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective is an attempt to look

David M. Black is a Scottish writer and psychoanalyst, author of Why Things

General Editor: Anne Patterson

to advance and disseminate ideas in psychoanalysis amongst those working in psy-

The Necessity of Perspective

ISBN: 978-1-032-58834-6 (hbk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

2 The working of values in ethics and religion 9

3 Jonathan Lear: Heir to a different legacy 33

4 Who founded Buddhism? Notes on the psychological

5 Dante’s two suns: The psychological sources of the

6 Dante, duality, and the function of allegory 79

7 Freud and idealisation 91

8 The transcendent in everyday life 106

9 Religion as the affirmation of values 119

10 Levinas’ re-basing of religion 132

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis: for permission to reprint Chapter 2,

The individual essays

psychological development in an analysand. Also, linking with the themes of the

Chapter 4: Who Founded Buddhism?. This chapter considers the psychological

so inspired by elementary misreadings of the non-Christian poet, Virgil. This sur-

Chapter 7: Freud and Idealisation. A review essay of a book by Joel White-

Chapter 9: Religion as the Affirmation of Values. This chapter attempts to answer

Chapter 10: Levinas’ Re-basing of Religion. Emmanuel Levinas described his

The working of values

A creative counter-argument came from the phenomenologists: Brentano, Husserl

“Internal objects”: Freud to Winnicott

greatest variety of visual, acoustic, kinaesthetic and other presentations” (Freud

Melanie Klein lays herself open to misunderstanding in her generalizations by a

inescapably carries of unreality or deceptiveness. He had adopted the word “illu-

Loewald is a hedgehog, not a fox. Although he takes up many aspects of the

It would be interesting to detail the ways in which Loewald’s thought went on

Some implications of the phenomenological

Organisation implies hierarchy

Ethical values and allegorical objects

impressive fore-runner in Kant. In addition to his better known discussion of the

There is a paradox in responsibility, in that I am obliged without this obligation

as “theological,” in which an actual historical event, such as the Israelites’ Exo-

…. I am one who, when Love

The parallel is that, in response to attention given to an experience of external en-

Sulloway, F. (1979). Freud, Biologist of the Mind. Basic Books.

About two years after, I felt as if I had awakened from a sleep,

It was not by the war-fire’s light,

Nor while the battle’s stormy strife

The dead were round me; yes, my own,

Changed in an hour, the white man’s friend

6 Dante, duality, and the function of allegory 79

7 Freud and idealisation 91

8 The transcendent in everyday life 106

9 Religion as the affirmation of values 119

10 Levinas’ re-basing of religion 132