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Reviewing some of the literature of the mechanism of normal romantic love the author points to the projection of the ego-ideal upon an object (which reduces tension between the ego-ideal and the ego) and its motivation in unconscious guilt.
He contrasts with this a neurotic type of romantic love, in which the lover is doomed to defeat at the hands of an idealized femme fatale. This second type has dominated Western tradition since the Troubadour revolution of the eleventh century. Supporting his analysis with clinical examples he traces the psychological origins of the tradition in a masochistic fixation upon the image of the cruel and dangerous pre-oedipal mother.
The Troubadour type of romanticization is the product of a different form of degradation of the erotic life from that which springs from a failure to fuse the tender and sensual images which belong to the oedipal mother. 'Whatever the oedipal mother is, she is not cruel and dangerous.' Therefore the Troubadour romanticization conceals both a masochistic fixation and an inability to experience mature love. By this concealment of the true situation the Troubadour spares his narcissism.
Even in the oedipal position traces are evident of the struggle which the Troubadour type has failed to solve. The gallant consideration of the 'weaker sex', which 'resists', 'yields', and 'succumbs'—metaphors obviously borrowed from the mediaeval battle-ground—must be understood not only in terms of castration, but also as a defensive reversal of the passivity of the boy's earlier situation, with the projection of the cruel mother-image upon the father. In analysis what sometimes appears as an obdurate clinging to an oedipal position may be merely the desperate attempt to repudiate the passive rôle from which the boy has just escaped.