SOURCE: Gordon Braden, "Love and Fame: The Petrarchan Career," in Pragmatism's Freud: The Moral Disposition of Psychoanalysis, edited by Joseph K. Smith and William Kerrigan, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, pp. 126-58.

In the essay below, Braden bases his discussion of Petrarch's love poetry on Freud's ideas concerning "unconventional object choices."

"The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own," Freud ventures in a late footnote to his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, "no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasize its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object" (S.E. 7: 149). Those are not equal options; psychoanalysis aligns itself with...