Adam Leite, 'Desire and Refusal'

An encounter with Francesco Hayez's painting Susanna at her Bath inspires reflection upon a distinctive form of desire that appears in the context of interpersonal relationships. Such desires, directed towards someone with whom one is in emotionally significant relationship, involve the wish that the other person do as one desires out of positive emotional responsiveness to one's so desiring. (For a simple example, consider a desire that one's spouse make one's favourite dinner for one's birthday.) In this form of desire a wish for positive emotional regard from the other person is ineluctably at stake, and such desires consequently open vulnerability to distinctive kinds of interpersonally generated hurt, of which feelings of rejection are one central example. Hayez's painting suggests a reading of the Biblical story of Susanna and the Elders as an exploration of the distortions such desires can undergo and the psychological and interpersonal difficulties to which they can give rise, and in the viewer's emotional interaction with the painting's central figure it presents a striking experience of a solution to some of these problems. While such desires can be exceedingly problematic in various ways, they also deepen and enrich human relationships, and the paper ends with an exploration of the ways in which such desires can figure positively in mature forms of relating.