Psychoanalysts, who have seen their own work mischaracterized as insulated within a hermetic subculture of fanciful notions, might balk at a comparison between psychoanalysis and Romanticism. Yet, in Uncertainties, Mysteries, Doubts: Romanticism and the Analytic Attitude, Robert Snell makes a cogent case for the comparison's value. He views Romanticism as “an area of historical underpinning, without which it is hard to see how it [the analytic attitude] could have developed as a therapeutic resource” (p. 2-3). Snell conceives of “the analytic attitude” as the central artery of psychoanalysis that could not have grown without the cultural atmosphere of Romanticism. In the context of D. W. Winnicott's concern with “early preoedipal states of undifferentiation” in which “the analyst becomes absorbed in his patient like a mother with his baby,” allowing the patient unfettered creative play, Snell defines the analytic attitude as