The Drama Of The Gifted Child: The Search For The True Self Quotes
"The child has a primary need to be regarded and respected as the person he really is at any given time."
"In an atmosphere of respect and tolerance for his feelings, the child will be able to give up symbiosis with the mother and accomplish the steps toward individuation and autonomy."
"Every childhood's conflictual experiences remain hidden and locked in darkness, and the key to our understanding of the life that follows is hidden away with them."
"We live in a culture that encourages us not to take our own suffering seriously, but rather to make light of it or even to laugh about it."
"The experience of one's own truth, and the post-ambivalent knowledge of it, makes it possible to return to one's own world of feelings at an adult level—without paradise, but with the ability to mourn."
"It is a great relief to him that things he was accustomed to choke off can be recognized and taken seriously."
"The psychoanalyst can use the material the patient presents to show him how he treats his feelings with ridicule and irony, tries to persuade himself they do not exist, belittles them."
"I can be angry and no one will die or get a headache because of it. I can rage and smash things without losing my parents."
"The paradise of pre-ambivalent harmony, for which so many patients hope, is unattainable."
"The child feels this clearly and very soon forgoes the expression of his own distress."
"What cannot be recalled is unconsciously reenacted and thus indirectly discovered."
"The more he is able to admit and experience these early feelings, the stronger and more coherent the patient will feel."
"It is often said that psychoanalysts suffer from a narcissistic disturbance."
"The true self has been in 'a state of noncommunication,' as Winnicott said, because it had to be protected."
"An adult can only be fully aware of his feelings if he has internalized an affectionate and empathic self-object."
"Where there had only been fearful emptiness or equally frightening grandiose fantasies, there now is unfolding an unexpected wealth of vitality."
"True autonomy is preceded by the experience of being dependent."
"The shaming nature of perversions and obsessional behavior can often be understood as the introjection of the parents' shocked reaction to their child's natural, instinctual behavior."
"Depression leads him close to his wounds, but only the mourning for what he has missed, missed at the crucial time, can lead to real healing."
"Both are indications of an inner prison, because the grandiose and the depressive individuals are compelled to fulfill the introjected mother's expectations."
"Every child seeks loving contact and is happy to get it."
"It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means."
"If we want to avoid the unconscious seduction and discrimination against the child, we must first gain a conscious awareness of these dangers."
"The patient discovers his true self little by little through experiencing his own feelings and needs."
"A sensitive analyst will... feel irritation. Should he suppress it to avoid rejecting the patient?"
"Only much later could she risk repeating this experience with 'a wall' with me and not only with subsidiary transference figures."
"Every human being's central need to express himself—to show himself to the world as he really is—in word, in gesture, in behavior, in every genuine utterance."
"The strength of this portrayal leads us to surmise that it concerns a real episode from Hesse's own childhood."
"Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations."
"Political action can be fed by the unconscious anger of children who have been so misused, imprisoned, exploited, cramped, and drilled."
"The aim of analysis, however, is not to correct the patient's fate, but to enable him to confront both his own fate and his mourning over it."
"Contempt for younger siblings often hides envy of them, just as contempt for the parents often helps to ward off the pain of being unable to idealize them."
"So long as one despises the other person and overvalues one's own achievements, one does not have to mourn the fact that love is not forthcoming without achievement."
"Contempt as a rule will cease with the beginning of mourning for the irreversible that cannot be changed."
"Many parents, even with the best intentions, cannot always understand their child, since they, too, have been stamped by their experience with their own parents and have grown up in a different generation."
"It is indeed a great deal when parents can respect their children's feelings even when they cannot understand them."
"The integration of this side of his personality put him in the way of a daring and very successful change of profession that gave him much happiness."
"When the patient has truly emotionally worked through the history of his childhood and thus regained his sense of being alive—then the goal of the analysis has been reached."
"Such a person cannot be tricked with fascinating, incomprehensible words, since he has matured through his own experience."