Sublime

tetchy

A central premise of the partner-as-child theory is that it’s not an aberration or unique failing of one’s partner that they retain a childish dimension. It’s a normal, inevitable feature of all adult existence. You are not desperately unlucky to have hitched yourself to someone who is still infantile in many ways. Adulthood simply isn’t a complete

Think back to your childhood: were you made to feel “bad” or in the wrong, or even responsible for your parents’ bad moods? If it happened to you, it is all too easy to try to repair your feeling of being wrong by making someone else feel wrong, and the victims of this are, far too often, our children.

It’s very touching that we live in a world where we have learned to be so kind to children; it would be even nicer if we learned to be a little more generous towards the childlike parts of one another. It sounds strange at first – and even condescending or despairing – to keep in mind that in crucial ways one’s partner always remains a child. On th

at

one final choice:

‘The principle is’, he wrote in Playing and Reality, ‘that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers. We may or may not enable him or her to encompass what is known or become aware of it with acceptance.’

What Winnicott eventually called fantasying, and here calls daydreaming, becomes a solution at the cost of personal integrity.

Melding, as much so-called Attachment Theory does, Darwin and Freud – the need to survive through dependent relationships made compatible with the need to be sensually gratified