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In The Romantic Mother Barbara Shapiro studies selected poems of four Romantic poets (Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth) from the psychoanalytic perspective of object-relations theory. Her book is based mainly on the work of Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg but also takes into account that of Melanie Klein, W. D. Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip, and W. D. Winni-cott. In contrast to Freud's emphasis on sexuality and the oedipal stage of development, object-relations theory focuses on the preoedipal relation with the mother as the core experience in psychic and emotional maturation. In her application of this theory to the study of Romanticism, Shapiro emphasizes the inevitable ambivalence of the original image of the mother and the consequent intrapsychic splitting which, when intensified by negative biographical events.
produces ego weakness and prevents the formation of a mature, cohesive self and the sense of a cohesive, concrete reality outside of the self … and may
Page 309also result in a regressive drive for refusion with the mother and in a primitive idealization of self and object images, (p. x)
Following the aesthetic theories of Ernst Kris, for whom the understanding of a work of art depends on the “intactness of the ego,” and for whom “Romanticism is closer to potential pathology than classicism,” she interprets the work of Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth as exhibiting in their representations of women varying degrees and varying resolutions of pathological narcissism. Shapiro's theoretical model embodies an explicit value judgment that determines her ordering of the four poets. What characterizes the best Romantic poetry is that “it portrays the struggle of the ego to resolve its internal conflicts and ambivalences, to make contact with reality, and to establish mature object relations” (p. xii). Within this schema, Shelley emerges as the weakest of the Romantic poets because of the unresolved and fragmented images of his work. Witness his last work, the