ABSTRACT
The legacy of Romantic biology and medicine can be felt throughout psychoanalysis: a view of symptoms as symbols of an overall situation in which something is wrong, thus of therapy as the cure of souls, and the consequent centrality for treatment of the physician's empathy. Crisis, tension and revolution are inscribed in the very beginnings and at the very heart both of Romanticism and of psychoanalysis: the ego is no longer master in its own house. Mourning as a human necessity had been registered in art long before Romanticism and psychoanalysis. The mourning involved in accepting this destabilising and decentering, for psychoanalysis as it was for Romanticism, can also be a new opening out to the contingent and its mystery, to a renewed sense of wonder. As Romanticism required of its audience, psychoanalysis requires the analyst to give up a colonising wish to bring the foreign and the other into an omniscient, Enlightenment gaze.
