Idealization is a concentrated libidinal investment in an object that is thus exalted and overvalued. The term first appeared in connection with Freud's definition of narcissism (1914), but the concept can already be found in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), where Freud speaks of the biographer who sacrifices the truth to idealize the biographical subject, "reviving in him, perhaps, the child's idea of the father" (p. 130). From the time of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud used the notion of "sexual overvaluation" in relation to fetishism and sexual deviations. This overvaluation makes the subject dependent and submissive toward an object containing traces of the earliest oedipal attachments: "One always returns to one's first love" (1905d, p. 154). This attitude reappears in the subject's passionate dependence on an idealized object.

Idealization involves an object of...