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It was during a short holiday in Leksand, Sweden, that my hosting bibliophile friend gave me a gift: a book I wish to comment here. It is in Latin but has a beautiful translation with parallel text. Scholarly readers will soon realize what it is about. I did not know it: my training in humanities had shunned it amiably.
I found there some dialogues that I am tempted to present as the first example of an analysis of idealization. A proto-analysis, I should add right away, because the ways of intervention on the part of the «analyst» are definitely raw. Furthermore, the analyst's interventions are vitiated by a capital sin: he wants to convince the patient to go in the direction he wishes (though I am not going to cover this point) and he does so with an unforgivable vehemence that does not resolve the conflict. The «patient» is famous. In the text he is called F., because he is Francesco Petrarca.
A reader with an average education has already intuited that the idealized object cannot be but Laura, whom the poet met for the first time in Santa Chiara Church in Avignon. We don't know anything about Laura, although in this book she is portrayed as an exhausted woman because of child deliveries. «It is a very realistic detail that cannot be allegorically interpreted», Ugo Dotti remarks.
Petrarca idealizes her to the utmost, since still today she constitute prototype of the angelic woman. Psychoanalysis would show that idealization is the product of a splitting; Petrarca himself later said that he is interested in gathering his own «soul's scattered fragments».
Sixteen years have passed after that encounter. Francesco gives up reaching Rome and from Genoa goes to Verona. He is there at the beginning of 1348, the year of the plague. According to authoritative sources it is at that time that the «analysis» is likely to begin: I will extract some fragments of it that I have anticipated. The intimacy that «analyst» and «analyzed» show should not surprise much: the «analyzed» is