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This book is more of interest for its critique of psychoanalysis than for what it has to tell us about the way fantasies of love and death function in art, although what it has to say about this is by no means uninteresting. Gediman notes the “relatively untouched topic of passionate romantic love” in psychoanalysis. “Sex, yes, sexual aberration, yes, pathology in the relationships of affectionate bonding,” but not “the passions of the Passion and the
Liebestod” (p. 9). Similarly, she notes that “there is so little in the psychoanalytic literature” on the resurrection fantasy, despite the fact that, in clinical practice, it is a “frequently encountered variation” of the immortality fantasy, particularly among “people who have entered their sixth, seventh, and eighth decades” (p. 91). (She does quote Freud, Blacker, and Bak, perhaps “the first to refer to resurrection fantasies explicitly” [p. 114], and Lifton's “lofty, humanist-spiritual,” un-Freudian view that it is possible to “transcend” death—presumably in consciousness—without denying it [p. 115].
Gediman's book is meant as a corrective to this situation, and above all to be the whole traditional psychoanalytic conception of “the state of falling-in-love or being-in-love to be a pathological state of heightened narcissism, derived from the earliest infantile experiences of fusion and merger with the mother” (p. 7). Gediman uses “the idea of ‘twin narcissism’”—a term borrowed from Denis de Rougement but owing a good deal to Kohut—to “question these assumptions” (p. 7), arguing that “the apparent conflict between narcissism and object love found throughout psychoanalysis…was questioned by Freud, then…Kohut” (p. 16). It is the latter who is in fact the theoretical hero of Gediman's book. She accepts his “position that there is a separate narcissistic developmental line which is never outgrown but is, rather, transformed” (p. 16). “Some of the transformations of narcissism with adaptive potential…Kohut enumerates