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“I'd planned to die at thirty, and then I'd push it on ten years, forty, and then fifty, You always push it on. And then you go on and on and on. It's difficult. Too much trouble. I've thought about death a great deal. One day in the snow I felt so tired. I thought, 'Damn it, I'll sit down. I can't go on. I'm tired of living here in the snow and ice.' So I sat down on the ground. But it was so cold I got up. Oh yes, I used to try to imagine death, but I always come up against a wall.”
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“The really important difficulty is the place, room, cave, cabin to write in. – Jean Rhys”
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“A child can never see through unconscious manipulation. It is like the air he breathes; he knows no other, and it appears to him to be the only breathable air. What happens if we don’t recognize the harmful quality of this air, even in adulthood? We will pass this harm on to others, while pretending that we are acting only for their own good. The more insight I gain into the unconscious manipulation of children by their parents, the more urgent it seems to me that we resolve our repression. Not only as parents but also as therapists, we must be willing to face our history. Only after painfully experiencing and accepting our own truth can we be free from the hope that we might still find an understanding, empathic “parent”—perhaps in a patient—who will be at our disposal.”
― The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
― The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
“We sat under the mango tree and I was holding his hand when he began to cry. Drops fell on my hand like the water from the dripstone in the filter in our yard. Then I began to cry too and when I felt my own tears on my hand I thought, 'Now perhaps we're married.
'Yes, certainly, now we're married,' I thought.”
― Till September Petronella
'Yes, certainly, now we're married,' I thought.”
― Till September Petronella
“Intellectualization is very commonly encountered as well, since it is a defense mechanism of great power. It can have disastrous results, however, when the mind ignores the vital messages of the body (see my reflections on Nietzsche’s illness in The Untouched Key [1990] and Breaking Down the Wall of Silence [1991]). All these defense mechanisms are accompanied by repression of the original situation and the emotions belonging to it. Accommodation to parental needs often (but not always) leads to the “as-if personality.” This person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected of him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to him behind this false self. He cannot develop and differentiate his true self, because he is unable to live it. Understandably, this person will complain of a sense of emptiness, futility, or homelessness, for the emptiness is real. A process of emptying, impoverishment, and crippling of his potential actually took place. The integrity of the child was injured when all that was alive and spontaneous in him was cut off. In childhood, these patients have often had dreams in which they experienced themselves as at least partly dead. A young woman, Lisa, reported a recurrent dream:”
― The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
― The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
Rachael’s 2025 Year in Books
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