Clara Schumann: 'A woman's love and life': a psychoanalytic interpretation

This study was undertaken to demonstrate how psychoanalysis can shed new light on a much studied life history. Clara's emotional life knew a sequence of losses and "prohibited" intimate relationships that created grave loyalty, identity, and identificatory conflicts for her. Since her early childhood, when her father forced her to give up her mother, she had been forced into a choice between the love objects most dear to her and the one on whom she depended for her emotional survival. This resulted in her later repetition compulsion to maneuver herself into the same conflict of loyalty and in her hesitation to decide when choosing one object meant losing the other. Clara had never known a normal separation, only loss and abandonment. She strove to combine the incompatible and succeeded in remaining loyal not only to her mother and father, but also to Robert Schumann, and eventually to Johannes Brahms. Clara Schumann's ideals were conflicted not only because she was educated by two men who were fighting each other, but also because her father, as well as Robert, had internally inconsistent and ambiguous ideas about women. Clara not only had to be obedient and creative, but self-sufficient at the same time. She was partially able to satisfy her own and her partner's needs and solve her deficiencies by projective identification, choosing taciturn men, more maternal than she.