Sublime

One of the aims of psychoanalysis was to re-establish continuity with whatever constituted the patient’s ‘personal beginning’.

This meant focusing on her many inner resources and reminding myself that I could not provide her with the love and caring she had missed as a child. If, as a therapist, teacher, or mentor, you try to fill the holes of early deprivation, you come up against the fact that you are the wrong person, at the wrong time, in the wrong place. The therapy w

One of the most basic mind structures through which the ego comes into existence is identification.

I try to be guided by Carl Whitaker’s advice to feed the patient not when he is crying that he is hungry, but only when I feel the milk overflowing from my own nipples.

parent uses him to gratify his or her own needs

“The roots of resilience,” the psychologist Diana Fosha writes, “are to be found in the sense of being understood by and existing in the mind and heart of a loving, attuned, and self-possessed other.” In how you see me, I will learn to see myself.

who, when the mother does a good-enough job meeting his or her basic needs, feels total adoration.

a capacity for states of primary unintegration brought forward into later life is a developmental necessity.