Status Updates From The Drama of the Gifted Chi...

Knowledge of theory is essential, but knowledge of the theory must not have a defensive function: It must not become the successor of a strict, controlling mother, forcing the therapist to accommodate himself to it.

A mother cannot truly respect her child as Long as she does not realize what deep shame she causes him with an ironic remark, intended only to cover her own uncertainty. Indeed, she cannot be aware of how deeply humiliated, despised, and devalued her child feels, if she herself has never consciously suffered these feelings, and if she tries to fend them off with irony.

Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having Lived up to their parents' expectations.
This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty
to satisfy his parent's needs.

The newly won capacity to accept her feelings opens the way for the patient's long-repressed needs and wishes to be actualized. Some of these needs cannot be satisfied in reality, since they are related to past situations. The urgent wish for a child…may express among other things the wish to have an available mother. Unfortunately, children are too often wished for only as symbols to meet repressed needs.