Chapter 7 ‘For Ever Wilt Thou Love, and She be Fair!’: On Quixotism and the Golden Age of Pre-Genital Sexuality1

The line from Keats’s (1919) poem, ‘Ode on a Graecian Urn’, which I use for my title, is about the idealisation of timelessness: two lovers are immortalised on the urn at the moment immediately before they kiss:

Love will remain for evermore at its most passionate, and at its most perfect: just before consummation — just before becoming real. ‘Yet do not grieve’ is important, as timelessness is a defence against loss and the need to mourn.

The subject of this chapter is romantic daydreaming. The compulsive daydreamer uses idealisation, erotisation and sentimentalisation as defences against emptiness and depression, the reality of life and ultimately of death. Coleridge described Dejection as ‘a grief without a pang, void, dark and drear’; I think what the daydreamer is trying to achieve is ‘a pang without a grief’. What I am calling ‘Quixotism’ involves the creation of a fictional world in which it would be preferable to live, where one would be ideal, and would be forever wrapped up with, in sole possession of, an ideal object. The unconscious model for this relationship is of a baby-self forever adoring and

adored by a perfect parent, a pre-oedipal world as imagined by a child who finds the existence of the parental relationship unbearable, and is determined not to bear it. In this particular ‘oedipal illusion’ (to use Britton’s (1998) term), there was a time, a golden age, which existed before the creation of the parental couple. For this belief to be perpetuated, an aspect of internal reality — the unconscious knowledge of the pre-existence of a parental couple which, at some point in time, created this baby — has to be constantly attacked, together with the part of the mind which holds this fundamental fact of life.

‘Quixotism’ is characterised by the need to immerse oneself in a con