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Professor Gori teaches psychoanalysis at universities in southern France, namely in Marseille and Aix-en-Province, an old region of troubadours that most certainly inspired his writing. He is also a collaborator of our journal, which is no reason not to praise his book here.
Not only troubadours, but also his own practice has deeply inspired Professor Gori. Choosing details from each case, he draws a highly sensitive picture of human passions.
Fabrice burns to rejoin Beatrice. He walks with large strides, his eyes flaming and glaring, his face and muscles contracted. He runs, flies, rushes to her. He no longer, or almost never, eats. His existence is no longer an ordinary one, ever since Beatrice revealed him to himself. In fact, had he ever lived before meeting Beatrice, before that moment when his life became a thunderstorm akin to the visions of mystics? Since that moment, he no longer belongs to himself.
Anguish and pain! Each one of us has a daily life to live. Unable to bear the thought that Beatrice might restrict their passion to the limits of an ordinary family project, Fabrice chooses to hate her, and then to loose her, rather than share her transformations and see his beloved become different from what he had wanted her to be, and he himself become a different man than the one he had dreamed of becoming. He was fortunate enough to undertake psychoanalysis and would later state: “We were actors playing the same drama, but not heroes of the same tale.”
One of my own patients, once said: “That man and I wrote a song. He wrote the words and I wrote the melody. But we were never to sing it together.”
What this book shows us is that whereas passions may appear as paroxysms of confusion, disorder and irrationality; in fact, they tend to be highly conformist. They obey precise dispositions of the soul. They follow their paths in perfectly well-structured manners. Only those most entangled by them are unable to read their ruling principles. Condemned to follow blindly