I experience you as a shy person when you are in fact someone who desires me or loathes me. Not getting it is here conceived of as an essential, self-protective project; the consequence of it – of this evolving solution to disruptive feeling – is an estrangement from what Malan calls an ‘emotional core’. Real feeling is replaced by defences against it, and the defences come to seem to be what one is really feeling (all these stories depend on there being feelings that can be identified as real). Not getting it here means not getting emotional contact with yourself and others; feeling ceases to
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