Kasandra

“Winnicott, I think, would have enjoyed the observation made by novelist Fay Weldon: “The greatest advantage of not having children must be that you can go on believing you are a nice person. Once you have children, you understand how wars start.” All relationships,”
― Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Schopenhauer's Porcupines: Intimacy And Its Dilemmas: Five Stories Of Psychotherapy

“There is no perfect solution to the problem of writing about therapy patients. But not to do so strikes me as the riskiest choice at a time in our culture when the power to define madness, malingering, and suicide potential is being handed over to insurance company functionaries.”
― Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Schopenhauer's Porcupines: Intimacy And Its Dilemmas: Five Stories Of Psychotherapy

“Elusive reality does not discourage Umpire Two. We don’t have to fully perceive or understand the underlying nature of our world to negotiate it well. Our senses and reasoning powers evolved as they did because they work just fine in the everyday, nonphilosophical business of survival. Mental constructs of reality are imperfect, but indispensable, ways to organize the otherwise bewildering phenomena of the world.”
― Allen Frances, Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt Against Out-Of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life

“After hearing Atwood’s presentation, I began to think about the role such absolutisms unconsciously play in everyday life. When a person says to a friend, “I’ll see you later” or a parent says to a child at bedtime, “I’ll see you in the morning,” these are statements, like delusions, whose validity is not open for discussion. Such absolutisms are the basis for a kind of naive realism and optimism that allow one to function in the world, experienced as stable and predictable. It is in the essence of emotional trauma that it shatters these absolutisms, a catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one’s sense of being-in-the-world. Massive deconstruction of the absolutisms of everyday life exposes the inescapable contingency of existence on a universe that is random and unpredictable and in which no safety or continuity of being can be assured. Trauma thereby exposes “the unbearable embeddedness of being” (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, p. 22). As a result, the traumatized person cannot help but perceive aspects of existence that lie well outside the absolutized horizons of normal everydayness. It is in this sense that the worlds of traumatized persons are fundamentally incommensurable with those of others, the deep chasm in which an anguished sense of estrangement and solitude takes form. (The devastating impact of trauma on a small child, for whom the sustaining absolutisms of everyday life are just in the process of forming, is illustrated in Schwartz and Stolorow, 2001.)”
― Robert D. Stolorow, Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections: 23