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Spontaneity: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry

Spontaneity is a rich and difficult concept, tied as it is, as Professor Corradi Fiumara shows, to other equally deep concepts in a conceptual web that comes close to defining what we mean by a human being. The concepts are subjectivity, autonomy, the capacity to live with paradox, integration, agency versus passivity, the capacity for forgiveness, for empathy versus sympathy. She might have placed most of the others at the centre of this web but spontaneity is the most surprising and, except for paradox, the least understood. Spontaneity for her is a condition of the whole soul; it is a moral virtue. It will serve to locate the tradition in which Corradi Fiumara writes to cite the names she mentions most often – among analysts, Fromm, Bion, Symington, Winnicott, Klein, among philosophers, Nietzche and Weil, and Kristeva, who is both. Like Fromm, her central interest is freedom and all the ways in which we attempt to escape from it, for example, identifying with the other in a way that leaves him outside oneself; a feared figure rather than one whose values one has internalized. An illuminating idea here is that the patient who hopes to be transformed by incorporating someone else’s knowledge wants what freedom exactly precludes. Freedom – or agency – comes in acknowledging that we are always interpreting what happens to us. This is one of Sartre’s ideas in support of his claim that we are always free. In Chapter Two, ‘Rethinking Internalization’, a continuation of the discussion of spontaneity, she writes: ‘‘Spontaneity is perhaps developed by being capable of resisting the joint threat of outer persuaders and inner agents’’ (p. 20). This sets the stage for the more general claim that, no matter how many outward or inner influences, spontaneity and the valuing capacity always come from the core of oneself. Of course, one may have learned values from society or from one’s beloved objects. Without love or guidance, the child will become an amoral monster. What she needs is a loving parent who teaches her what it is to cherish an ideal, a community, or a person. This is the ground from which spontaneity may grow. At the end of the first chapter, as if an after-thought, there are a couple of brief paragraphs on reasons and causes, and how this distinction allows us to escape the reductionism implicit in ‘cause.’ By now this is a familiar distinction, though difficult and most often misunderstood. Corradi Fiumara does not discuss it in a way that makes the idea clear; so it is misleading to introduce it so briefly and in a way that adds nothing to the discussion. There are some wonderful insights in Chapter 2. For instance: