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Idealized romantic love has long been symbolized by the perfect rose. We find it within the literary tradition of Apuleius, Chaucer's Roman de la Rose, and in Dante's Divine Comedy, and in contemporary popular culture, particularly around Valentine's Day. The rose symbolizes love and the range of complex feelings between lovers who are able to appreciate one another both as separate beings and as subjects who love and desire one another in mutually satisfying erotic interplay. As clinicians, we are interested in the development not of an idealized and romanticized literary rose, but in developing our patients' capacity for real erotic desire, the rose vivified by the realities of life. As analysts, we “root about” the whole rosebush, roots, earth, snails, torns, and all to understand the loving and hateful aspects of the origins of desire, and its derailments and death.
My colleague, Judith Welles, and I have been interested not only in the origins of the sensual feelings and psychological implications associated with the flower in full bloom, but also in the powerful shaping and misshaping of those feelings and capacities first in the early sensual body language shared by fathers, mothers, and babies, and then through the language of the mind—in the words, stories, and songs of desire that give bodily experiences meaning. In this contribution, I will consider the unconscious determinants and developmental precedents that shape the course of our metaphorical flower's unfolding, determining whether it may reach its peak, be deterred from full fruition, or wither entirely.
In numerous articles (Wrye and Welles, 1989; Welles and Wrye, 1991;