The mixture of longing, expectation, and fear of disappointment that for most people accompanies the remembrance of festivities from childhood can perhaps be explained by their search for the intensity of feeling they lost back then.

A child does not yet have this possibility open to her. She cannot yet see through her mechanism of self-deception, and, on the other hand, she is far more threatened than an adult by the intensity of her feelings if she does not have a supportive, empathic environment. Moreover, she can be in actual external danger. In contrast to the child, the

that I should lose myself again? I have no connection with what is within me. It is all hopeless . . . it will never be any better. Everything is pointless. I am longing for my former sense of being alive.”

In therapeutic work, we encounter grandiosity only when it is coupled with depression.

A grandiose person will look for a therapist only if depressive episodes come to his aid and force him to do so.

A loved child learns from the beginning what love is. A neglected, exploited, and mistreated child like me can’t know it; she never had the chance to learn it. But I do learn it now, from Michael, very slowly, and I know that I will succeed, in spite of your messages. Because now I know how much I need to be able to love and no longer to have

This woman could not really experience either her own tragedy or that of her child, since her own emotionally inaccessible childhood was the real beginning and the actual key to this story.

But my curiosity and my pain were stronger than my fear, and I decided to continue.

We cannot really love if we are forbidden to know our truth, the truth about our parents and caregivers as well as about ourselves. We can only try to behave as if we were loving. But this hypocritical behavior is the opposite of love. It is confusing and deceptive, and it produces much helpless rage in the deceived person. This rage must be