Although the world is full of suffering, it is full, also, of the overcoming of it.
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, and how you can still come out of it.
If you could choose your parents,… we would rather have a mother who felt a sense of guilt—at any rate who felt responsible, and felt that if things went wrong it was probably her fault—we’d rather have that than a mother who immediately turned to an outside thing to explain everything, and said it was due to the thunderstorm last night or some quite outside phenomenon and didn’t take responsibility for anything.
…There is no such thing as a baby…
What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face? I am suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself. In other words the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there. All this is too easily taken for granted. I am asking that this which is naturally done well by mothers who are caring for their babies shall not be taken for granted. I can make my point by going straight over to the case of the baby whose mother reflects her own mood or, worse still, the rigidity of her own defenses. In such a case what does the baby see?
… If a community values its children, it must cherish its mothers.
Good parents give their children roots and wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what’s been taught them.
Thomas Edison was a great American inventor, but not many people know that he had been expelled from school because the teachers believed that he had mental deficiencies. His mother was not ready to take it. His mother changed her son’s life by lying to him. This short story tells you about the incident that changed everything in the little boy’s life. Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/UU8dpec9gSM
Thomas A.Edison was a mentally deficient child whose mother turned him into the genius of the century
We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be. There are households of the noblest intellects: choose the one into which you wish to be adopted, and you will inherit not only their name but their property too. Nor will this property need to be guarded meanly or grudgingly: the more it is shared out, the greater it will become. These will offer you a path to immortality and raise you to a point from which no one is cast down. This is the only way to prolong mortality — even to convert it to immortality.
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation.
And in the naked light I saw / ten thousand people, maybe more. People talking without speaking,/ people hearing without listening,/ people writing songs that voices never shared,/ no one dared/ disturb the sounds of silence.
… My stress will be on the idea of transference as a framework, in which something is always going on, where there is always movement and activity.
He who has eyes to see and ears to hear becomes convinced that mortals can keep no secret. If their lips are silent, they gossip with their fingertips; betrayal forces itself through every pore.
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
Meaning is revealed by the pattern formed and the light thus trapped – not by the structure, the carved work itself.
Short words are best; and the old words, when short, are best of all.
When you take a back seat consciously and deliberately in order to show others how humble you are, you are not being humble at all. True humility is something different; it is the feeling of oneness. Humility means giving joy to others. When we allow others to get joy, we feel our joy is more complete, more perfect, more divine.
On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.
Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs. All the years that have passed before them are added to their own. Unless we are very ungrateful, all those distinguished founders of holy creeds were born for us and prepared for us a way of life. By the toil of others we are led into the presence of things which have been brought from darkness into light. … From them you can take whatever you wish: it will not be their fault if you do not take your fill from them. What happiness, what a fine old age awaits the man who has made himself a client of these! He will have friends whose advice he can ask on the most important or the most trivial matters, whom he can consult daily about himself, who will tell him the truth without insulting him and praise him without flattery, who will offer him a pattern on which to model himself.
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession; it is an inflection.
I therefore claim to show not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.
Let thy food be thy medicine, and thy medicine be thy food.
Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity.
What would live in song immortally must in life first perish.
Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.
Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.
For the scientist the formulation of questions is almost the whole thing. The answers, when found, only lead on to other questions . The nightmare of the scientist is the idea of complete knowledge. He shudders to think of such a thing. Compare this with the certainty that belongs to religion, and you will see how different science is from religion. Religion replaces doubt with certainty. Science holds an infinity of doubt, and implies a faith. Faith in what? Perhaps in nothing; just a capacity to have faith; or if there must be faith in something, then faith in the inexorable laws that govern phenomena.
The intention [of this project] is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science.
I am tormented by two aims: to examine what shape the theory of mental functioning takes if one introduces quantitative consideration, a sort of economics of nerve forces; and, second, to peel off from psychopathology a gain for normal psychology.
Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.
To make someone love the unconscious, that is teaching art.
The more horrifying the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
If we could see that everything, even tragedy, is a gift in disguise, we would then find the best way to nourish the soul
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
It is death that endows life with its deepest, most unique meaning.
Unconscious wishes are always active and ready for expression whenever they find an opportunity to unite themselves with an emotion from conscious life, and that they transfer their greater intensity to the lesser intensity of the latter.
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.
People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.
You are living as if destined to live forever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire… How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!
No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it. Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn… Learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.
Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who … organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day… Nothing can be taken from this life, and you can only add to it as if giving to a man who is already full and satisfied food which he does not want but can hold. So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbor, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.
It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return. New preoccupations take the place of the old, hope excites more hope and ambition more ambition. They do not look for an end to their misery, but simply change the reason for it.
Indeed the state of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but the most wretched are those who are toiling not even at their own preoccupations, but must regulate their sleep by another’s, and their walk by another’s pace, and obey orders in those freest of all things, loving and hating. If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own.
I am always surprised to see some people demanding the time of others and meeting a most obliging response. Both sides have in view the reason for which the time is asked and neither regards the time itself — as if nothing there is being asked for and nothing given. They are trifling with life’s most precious commodity, being deceived because it is an intangible thing, not open to inspection and therefore reckoned very cheap — in fact, almost without any value.
Nobody works out the value of time: men use it lavishly as if it cost nothing… We have to be more careful in preserving what will cease at an unknown point.
No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly. It will not lengthen itself for a king’s command or a people’s favor. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside. What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.
Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.
You must match time’s swiftness with your speed in using it, and you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow… Just as travelers are beguiled by conversation or reading or some profound meditation, and find they have arrived at their destination before they knew they were approaching it; so it is with this unceasing and extremely fast-moving journey of life, which waking or sleeping we make at the same pace — the preoccupied become aware of it only when it is over.
One of the many interesting and surprising experiences of the beginner in child analysis is to find in even very young children a capacity for insight which is often far greater than that of adults.
I believe that the ego is incapable of splitting the object – internal and external – without a corresponding splitting taking place within the ego.
My psycho-analytic work has convinced me that when in the baby’s mind the conflicts between love and hate arise, and the fears of losing the loved one become active, a very important step is made in development.
It is an essential part of the interpretive work that it should keep in step with fluctuations between love and hatred, between happiness and satisfaction on the one hand and persecutory anxiety and depression on the other.
It is well worth notice that, although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and refer to it medical treatment. We rely on it being overcome after a certain lapse of time, and we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful. The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful sense of dejection, a cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity…a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree
that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.
[Melancholias] show us the ego divided, fallen apart into two pieces, one which rages against the second. This second piece is the one which has been altered by introjection and which contains the lost object. But the piece that behaves so cruelly is not unknown to us either. It comprises the conscience, a critical agency within the ego, which even in normal times takes up a critical attitude towards the ego, though never so relentlessly and so unjustifiably.
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.
Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.
The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotions.
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.
The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
The word “happiness” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Certain phases of mutual analysis represent the complete renunciation of all compulsion and of all authority on both sides: they give the impression of two equally terrified children who compare their experiences, and because of their common fate understand each other completely and instinctively try to comfort each other.
The advantage of sympathy is an ability to penetrate deeply into the feelings of others, and the compulsive wish to help, to which the patient will respond with gratitude. But sooner or later it comes to pass that the patient is not helped by simple empathy. They either wish to stay with me and have me make them happy for the rest of their lives; or they prefer an end in terror rather than terror without end.
The patient became convinced long ago that a great many of her symptoms had somehow been forced upon her from the outside. Since she has become acquainted with psychoanalytic terminology she refers to these sensations, tendencies, displacements and forcibly imposed actions, alien to her own ego as well as contrary and harmful to its tendencies, as actions of the “superego”. She represents this implantation of something alien to her own ego in a quite material way. The two principal persons who impose painful portions of their own egos onto her personality, in order, as it were, to rid themselves of the tension and unpleasure that they had provoked, are above all her mother…and more recently a lady of her acquaintance, who for a period of time had exercised a kind of psychoanalytical as well as metaphysical influence over her.
When I look I am seen, so I exist.
I can now afford to look and see.
I now look creatively and what I apperceive I also perceive.
In fact I take care not to see what is not there to be seen
(unless I am tired).
Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.
The place where cultural experience is located is in the potential space between the individual and the environment (originally the object). The same can be said of playing. Cultural experience begins with creative living first manifested as play.
…every failed analysis is a failure not of the patient but of the analyst.
It is sometimes assumed that in health the individual is always integrated, as well as living in his own body, and able to feel that the world is real. There is, however, much sanity that has a symptomatic quality, being charged with fear or denial of madness, fear or denial of the innate capacity of every human being to become unintegrated, depersonalized, and to feel that the world is unreal.
What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face? I am suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself. In other words the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there. All this is too easily taken for granted. I am asking that this which is naturally done well by mothers who are caring for their babies shall not be taken for granted. I can make my point by going straight over to the case of the baby whose mother reflects her own mood or, worse still, the rigidity of her own defences. In such a case what does the baby see?
MY SQUIGGLE. HIS MODIFICATION. HIS COMMENT—A SEA-LION WITH A BABY.
It was astonishing to witness the way in which he immediately saw in it a mother and baby sea-lion. Subsequent events proved that it was justifiable to understand from this drawing that the boy had a powerful maternal identification; also that the mother-baby relationship was of especial importance to him. Moreover this picture has beauty, not indeed on account of the squiggle, but on account of his use of it.
… In order to make this last idea clear I must examine the state of affairs at this early state of a human life.
Let us start with the two-body relationship (Rickman, 1951), and from this go earlier to the object relationship that is still of the nature of a two-body relationship, but the object is a part object.
What precedes this? We sometimes loosely assume that before the two-body object relationship there is a one-body relationship, but this is wrong, and obviously wrong if we look closely. The capacity for a one-body relationship follows that of a two-body relationship, through the introjection of the object. (Implied is an external world to which the relationship is of a negative kind.)
What then precedes the first object relationship? For my own part I have had a long struggle with this problem. It started when I found myself saying in this Society (about ten years ago) and I said it rather excitedly and with heat: ‘There is no such thing as a baby.’ I was alarmed to hear myself utter these words and tried to justify myself by pointing out that if you show me a baby you certainly show me also someone caring for the baby, or at least a pram with someone’s eyes and ears glued to it. One sees a ‘nursing couple’.
In a quieter way today I would say that before object relationships the state of affairs is this: that the unit is not the individual, the unit is an environment-individual set-up. The centre of gravity of the being does not start off in the individual. It is in the total set-up. By good-enough child care, technique, holding, and general management the shell becomes gradually taken over and the kernel (which has looked all the time like a human baby to us) can begin to be an individual. The beginning is potentially terrible because of the anxieties I have mentioned and because of the paranoid state that follows closely on the first integration, and also on the first instinctual moments, bringing to the baby, as they do, a quite new meaning to object relationships. The good-enough infant care technique neutralizes the external persecutions, and prevents the feelings of disintegration and loss of contact between psyche and soma.
In other words, without a good-enough technique of infant care the new human being has no chance whatever. With a good-enough technique the centre of gravity of being in the environment-individual set-up can afford to lodge in the centre, in the kernel rather than in the shell. The human being now developing an entity from the centre can become localized in the baby’s body and so can begin to create an external world at the same time as acquiring a limiting membrane and an inside. According to this theory there was no external world at the beginning although we as observers could see an infant in an environment. How deceptive this can be is shown by the fact that often we think we see an infant when we learn through analysis at a later date that what we ought to have seen was an environment developing falsely into a human being, hiding within itself a potential individual….
…the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to effect breaches of the closest system which constitutes the patient’s inner world, and thus to make this world accessible to the influence of outer reality.
…both structure divorced from energy and energy divorced from structure are meaningless concepts.
…(impulses) cannot be considered apart from the endopsychic structures which they energize and the object relationships which they enable these structures to establish; and, equally, “instincts” cannot profitably be considered as anything more than forms of energy which constitute the dynamic of such endopsychic structures …
Explicit pleasure-seeking has as its essential aim the relieving of the tension of libidinal need for the mere sake of relieving this tension. Such a process does, of course, occur commonly enough; but, since libidinal need is object need, simple tension-relieving implies some failure of object-relationships
it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil
Quoting Freud in psychoanalysis is beginning to last to be like quoting Newton in physics. Both men are assured of that permanent place in the history of thought that belongs to the genius pioneer. It is not the function of the pioneer to say the last word but to say the first word…
…traced the struggle throughout Freud’s work between the physicalistic type of scientific thought in which he had been trained and the need for a new type of psychodynamic thinking that he was destined to create. The first, or process theory, approach was enshrined in his instinct theory, which still persists even now in much of psychoanalytic terminology and writing: although his original quantitative theory of pleasure and unpleasure as physical processes determining all human action occurs now as no more than an occasional echo of the past. The second, or personal, approach became enshrined in his Oedipus complex theory, with its implications that it is what takes place between parents and children that primarily determines the way personality develops; and in his transference theory of treatment, that the object-relations of childhood have to be lived through again in therapeutic analysis if the patient is to grow from them. Only object-relational thinking can deal with the problem of meaning and motivation that determines the dealings of persons with another, and the way they change and grow in the process. The history of psychoanalysis is the history of the struggle for emancipation, and the slow emergence, of personal theory or object-relational thinking.
People are being culturally conditioned today to accept the combination of sexuality and violence as natural in a way that was never possible before the invention of the modern mass media of communication.
…(B)iology and psychodynamics must be both distinguished and properly related, instead of mixed and confused. Then psychoanalysis can attend to its own proper business, studying the unique individual person growing in the medium of interpersonal relations.
What life is about is the urge to develop our creative potentials for love and work, with and for each other. This is arises in human response to the genuine security and valuation others have provided for us and permits and encourages us to pass on to others these priceless conditions of enjoyable and meaningful living. A psychoanalyst should be someone who can use his training, experience, and humanity to do this for those in dire need; his real reward is to grow with his patients. This is what life is about, in various ways, for all of us.
Psycho-analysis itself is just a stripe on the coat of the tiger. Ultimately it may meet the Tiger – The Thing Itself – O.
Most people experience mental death if they live long enough. You don’t have to live long to have that experience— all you have to do is to be mentally alive.
Meaning is revealed by the pattern formed and the light thus trapped – not by the structure, the carved work itself.
The human animal has not ceased to be persecuted by his mind and the thoughts usually associated with it – whatever their origin might be.
If you have no stomach for anxiety, you are in the wrong profession.
Psycho-analysts must be able to tolerate the differences or the difficulties of the analysand long enough to recognize what they are. If psycho-analysts are able to interpret what the analysand says, they must have a great capacity for tolerating their analysands’ statements without rushing to the conclusion that they know the interpretations. This is what I think Keats meant when he said Shakespeare must have been able to tolerate negative capability.” “…Beta-elements are not amenable to use in dream thoughts but are suited for use in projective identification. They are influential in producing acting out. These are objects that can be evacuated or used for a kind of thinking that depends on manipulation of what are felt to be things in themselves as if to substitute such manipulations for words or ideas. . . Alpha-function transforms sense impressions into alpha-elements which resemble, and may in fact be identical with, the visual images with which we are familiar in dreams, namely, the elements that Freud regards as yielding their latent content when the analyst has interpreted them. Failure of alpha-function means the patient cannot dream and therefore cannot sleep. As alpha-function makes the sense impressions of the emotional experience available for conscious and dream –thought the patient who cannot dream cannot go to sleep and cannot wake up.
I shall state the theory first in terms of a model, as follows: The infant suffering pangs of hunger and fear that it is dying, wracked by guilt and anxiety, and impelled by greed, messes itself and cries. The mother picks it up, feeds it and comforts it, and eventually the infant sleeps. Reforming the model to represent the feelings of the infant we have the following version: the infant, filled with painful lumps of faeces, guilt, fears of impending death, chunks of greed, meanness and urine, evacuates these bad objects into the breast that is not there. As it does so the good object turns the no-breast (mouth) into a breast, the faeces and urine into milk, the fears of impending death and anxiety into vitality and confidence, the greed and meanness into feelings of love and generosity and the infant sucks its bad property, now translated into goodness, back again.
Detachment, attachment disorder, and problems managing relationships receive frequent attention from both scholars and practitioners. Youth workers often shake their heads over the difficulty of re-educating and encouraging resilience in youth manifesting a history of toxic relationships with the pivotal adults in their lives. It seems likely that early attachment to one or a few close relatives holds great portent for a person’s overall relational abilities. Attachment predicts the ability to relate to many others, to establish trust, to form and retain friendships, and to engage in mutually satisfying emotional and physical relationships. Why is early experience so important?
Attachment is a reciprocal system of behaviors between an infant and a caregiver—generally the mother. The term reciprocal is apt because not only does attachment affect the child’s behavior (for example, moving closer to the mother when stressed), but also affects the responses of the mother, who emits care-giving responses in the presence of signals from the infant.
A young child’s experience of an encouraging, supportive, and co-operative mother, and a little later, father, gives him a sense of worth, a belief in the helpfulness of others, and a favorable model on which to build future relationships… by enabling him to explore his environment with confidence and to deal with it effectively, such experiences also promote his sense of competence.
We cope with our anxieties and desires … in symbolical ways. We all need a capacity for symbol formation, or symbolization: hopefully, we will try to find someone like our mother to marry, rather than try actually to marry our mother. Artists exist on the borderline of severe psychotic anxieties: if they succeed in symbolizing them, then they can produce great art – but if not, they can be in trouble.
She kept shouting, ‘I shat my lover in the loo! I shat my lover in the loo!’ … Later, after I read Klein, I realized that girl’s words actually had a very obvious meaning; you could understand them. She was the one being evacuated, but in her mind she had reversed that situation: she was the one doing the evacuating. This, I understood, was the language of subconscious fantasy.
There’s no quick cure or absolute certainty. And the truth rarely stays the truth; yesterday’s truth is not today’s. But there is a sense of accumulating evidence. You mustn’t concentrate, or try to remember – but in the mass of patient communication, you have to select the right fact, with an open mind. And you have to be sure that fact is not just your idea, your own, overrated idea. It’s not easy.
The view that phantasy is operative from the beginning, at the most primitive stages of development, implies that this phantasy is to begin with physical: the hallucinated breast is not to begin with a visual experience, but a bodily one. Early experiences, such as hunger or satisfaction, are experienced and interpreted by the infant in terms of object relationship phantasies… Satisfaction is experienced as containing a need-fulfilling object; hunger as persecution. Our language reflects this. We speak about being ‘gnawed by hunger’; or ‘the wolf being at the door.’ My favorite is the French: hunger is being described as eating an enraged cow (‘manger de la vache enragee’).Such primitive psychosomatic phantasies evolve with growth and reality testing, but they remain at the core of our personality and can still play a dynamic part in later development. Physical experiences are interpreted as phantasy object relationships, giving them emotional meaning. A baby in pain may feel itself as being hated. But also, conversely, the phantasies are so close to the somatic that they affect physical functioning. It is well known that emotionally upset baby often develops digestive and other physical symptoms.
When this man turned to his colleagues and family for sympathy, he was shocked to hear them say that they agreed with his boss. … Even when he started therapy, he still didn’t understand the problem, because he believed that all of these people were wrong about him. … (For such narcissists,) other people exist only the way a hamburger exists for them – to make them feel good. …They may charm you and manipulate you to make you see how wonderful they are, but as soon as they get your admiration, they’ll drop you.
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is due to a developmental arrest of the self and the ego in the pre-oedipal stage approximately between the ages of two to three. I have called the key psychodynamic theme that results, The Disorders of the Self Triad: Self-activation leads to separation anxiety and abandonment depression which leads to self-destructive defenses. This dynamic is precipitated by real later life situations that require self-assertion and autonomous functioning or by events that involve separation.
These events interrupt the defenses; the patient begins to experience the abandonment depression and then defends by giving up self-assertion and activating self-destructive defenses whose symptoms can vary from obesity to anorexia, from clinging to others to distancing from others, from sexual promiscuity to the avoidance of sex, from alcoholism to drug addiction.
At the beginning of therapy, the patient will resist allying his emotions with the therapist because it means giving up his usual method of avoiding painful feelings of separation anxiety and abandonment depression. At this point he is inclined to rely upon the familiar strategy, which he thinks works, rather than one still unknown and untested. But the more he invests in the therapist, the more he will give up these old defenses and turn to therapy to work through these feelings of abandonment.
First, however, he must “test” the therapist with his habitual self-destructive strategies to answer two vital questions: Is the therapist competent? Can he trust her? Thus the first phase of therapy is the testing phase.
It is necessary for the therapist to patiently and consistently confront the patient with the genuine destructiveness of his behavior and of his distorted perception that a real therapeutic alliance or involvement in therapy is equivalent to the painful state of being engulfed or abandoned, which up until now has been the patient’s experience when activating the real self. At the same time, the therapist must demonstrate, by actual dealings with the patient, the necessity and value of trusting the therapeutic relationship.
A host of therapeutic values and actions contribute to achieving this objective: The therapist’s thoughtful concern for the patient’s welfare, the accuracy of the confrontations, the therapist’s reliability, and the refusal to exploit the patient or to permit the patient to manipulate. Only when the therapeutic alliance is established will the patient be willing to give up his lifelong dependence on the false self’s ploys for emotional security. This is a momentous turning point in the therapy for the person with BPD, as it means the transference acting out is being converted into a therapeutic alliance and transference, and that the patient is passing into the second or “working through” phase of therapy, where it now becomes possible to work through, attenuate, and overcome the depression.
In a sense, borderline-personality problems can teach all of us about the crucial balance between independence and the need to share our lives with others. Connections – in family, friendships, love and work – are healthy, but building a separate sense of self is critical. While life may involve compromise and some working toward others’ goals, it also requires forging one’s own individual and unique identity.
What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
But what Freud showed us… was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.
That the Sadian fantasy situates itself better in the bearers of Christian ethics than elsewhere is what our structural landmarks allow us to grasp easily. But that Sade, himself, refuses to be my neighbor, is what needs to be recalled, not in order to refuse it to him in return, but in order to recognize the meaning of this refusal. We believe that Sade is not close enough to his own wickedness to recognize his neighbor in it. A trait which he shares with many, and notably with Freud. For such is indeed the sole motive of the recoil of beings, sometimes forewarned, before the Christian commandment. For Sade, we see the test of this, crucial in our eyes, in his refusal of the death penalty, which history, if not logic, would suffice to show is one of the corollaries of Charity.
The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.
Desire is the central point or crux of the entire economy we deal with in analysis. If we fail to take it into account, we are necessarily led to adopt as our only guide what is symbolized by the term ‘reality,’ a reality existing in a social context.
An interpretation whose effects one understands is not a psychoanalytic interpretation.
The analyst asks neither that the subject get better nor that he become normal; the analyst requires nothing, imposes nothing. He is there so that the subject may gain access to the truth of his desire, his own desire, and not so that he may respond to the Other’s demand.
All speech is demand. Every demand [is] a request for love.
~ Visual Quotes and Metaphors
