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

Without therapy, it is impossible for the grandiose person to cut the tragic link between admiration and love. He seeks insatiably for admiration, of which he never gets enough because admiration is not the same thing as love.

In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If we choose instead to content ourselves with intellectual “wisdom,” we will remain in the sphere of illusion and self-deception.

A patient with “antennae” for his therapist’s unconscious will react promptly. If he senses that it is important to his therapist to have patients who soon become autonomous and behave with self-confidence, he will quickly feel himself autonomous and react accordingly. He can do that; he can do anything that is expected of him. But because this

When our children can consciously experience their early helplessness and rage, they will no longer need to ward off these feelings, in turn, with the exercise of power over others. In most cases, however, people’s childhood suffering remains affectively inaccessible and thus forms the hidden source of new and sometimes very subtle humiliation for

For the person who, as a child, had to hide her true feelings from herself and others, this first step into the open produces much anxiety, yet she feels a great need to throw over her former restraints. The first experiences do not always lead to freedom but quite often lead instead to a repetition of the person’s childhood situation, in which she

The collapse of self-esteem in a “grandiose” person will show clearly how precariously that self-esteem has been hanging in the air—“hanging from a balloon,” as a patient once dreamed.

An adolescent may accept and conform to the ideals of a group of youths just as he did to those of his parents when he was younger. But since this attempt is not rooted in an awareness of his own true needs and feelings, he is again giving up and denying his true self in order to be accepted and loved, this time by a peer group. His renewed

same relates to counselors who work with addicted patients or other victims of sexual or physical childhood mistreatment. Usually, they sense only a trace of their own fear before quickly concealing it with the help of abstract theories, commonplace moral advice, or very often simply authoritarian behavior.