Modern romantic suffering is also to be excised, but with radically different models of the self: it is to be excised in the name of a utilitarian and hedonist model of the healthy psyche in which suffering marks either a fl awed psychological development or a fundamental threat to one’s sense of social worth and self-respect. That is, in contemporary culture, a well-developed character is expressed through one’s capacity to overcome one’s experience of suffering or, even better, to avoid it altogether. Romantic suffering has stopped being part of a psychic and social economy of character formation and even threatens it.

More than that: what is properly modern about romantic suffering is the fact that the object of love is intricately intertwined with the self’s value and worth, and that suffering has become the mark of a flawed self. The result is that the defection of the object of love undermines the self. The ontological insecurity of the self and the need for inter-subjective recognition are thus made more acute by the fact that there are no further cultural/spiritual frameworks, as it were, to recycle it and make it play a role in character formation.