Melinda

“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:”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine - it is stranger than we can imagine.”
― Arthur Stanley Eddington

“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.”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

“The "child" was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense.

Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up - that is our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage