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Spontaneity: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry, by Gemma Corradi Fiumara, is a welcome book on an intriguing and perplexing subject. The challenge the subject presents begins with the problem of definition. Spontaneity is an ambiguous and multifaceted idea, difficult to describe in clinical terms. Like the idea of the true self or authenticity, it is something we feel we recognize when we see it but have difficulty describing. In her introduction Fiumura takes up the meaning of spontaneity as that which is free and unconstrained, referring to Freud's “personal free will” and “freely aspiring mental activity” (p. 9) and argues with an “imperialistic” notion of science and a determinism that “tells us basically that all of our mental life is to be causally explainable” (p. 6). She places spontaneity on the side of the inner forces, of an “inner constitutive personhood” (p. 8) and the here and now; she is more interested in the “ulterior” perspective, the response to life events, and the “inner actions” linked to “agency, intentionality and initiative” (p. 7). The chief clinical interest appears to be narcissistic disorders and those “devastated patients forever condemning the inadequacy or viciousness of their primordial objects,” who “are actually persons who do not give up analysis and constantly struggle in its pursuit—wilful subjects indeed” (p. 8).
Fiumara narrows the focus in chapter 2 to a spontaneity linked to the early shaping of the world by the infant's projections and internalizations