ABSTRACT
The courageous person acts on strongly held and intensely felt beliefs. Courage allows a person to better manage the threatening passions of life: love, hate, and anger are prime motivators; fear in the face of danger and anxiety in the face of risk must be overcome. Courage, as Susan Levine elucidates, has yet to be integrated into psychoanalysis. She links "courage", as positive, self-preservation, with "masochism", as negative and self-destructive. Guilt and exhibitionistic or narcissistic needs can be unconscious determinants of courageous acts. The determinants of the courage of these women included love of their child, a hatred of their impoverished, powerless circumstances, their self-ideals and the presence of someone in their backgrounds who modelled determination and the hope of self-betterment. Moreover, the father–son therapeutic relationship which they both had the courage to enter and persist with proved satisfying to William Rivers and sustaining to Siegfried Sassoon.
