Psicólogo – Nivaldo Júnior (CRP 09/016675)

People usually speak about “romanticizing suffering,” referring to attributing positive characteristics to bad situations. Throughout human history, Romanticism was a movement related to Philosophy, Literature, and music, proposing such a way to deal with anguish.

One of the traits of Romanticism was the idealization of the object (represented by perfection) that differs from the real object (that represents imperfection). Beyond that, Romantics usually seek pleasure in pain, suffering, and anguish.

Such facts made the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche oppose the Romantic movement. He was proposing another way to deal with the problem of suffering, in which compassion was not a shared passion – we can understand here passion as having the same origin as the word “pathos” or “pathology.”

In general, “to romanticize” has something to do with the “ideal object,” which could be understood as a failure of judgment. The object itself presents a dichotomy: it’s good and bad at the same time, and it evokes feelings like ambivalence.

For Melanie Klein, the “bad object” is the result of unsatisfaction and frustrated desire, and, from its origin, the mother is the primal object constituted only by love and good provision. The “bad object” would evoke fear, envious feelings, hate, insecurity, and paranoia, among other bad behaviors and emotions, as the individual’s response to the absence of good enough things. In other words, in such situations, there’s no internalized object that seems good enough to support the person to face and deal with the bad side of the thing.

Due to this, the bad object appears when there’s an unsatisfied demand or desire that represents a threat to the desire to be alive. For example, while the baby is expecting the mother’s breast (understood as a good object) and the maternal object is absent to satisfy the baby’s desire to be fed, the baby – incapable of taking care and providing for himself – asks, screams, or cries due to the fear of being eliminated and expects to be held and satisfied by another object.