The Silent Patient

by Alex Michaelides

that’s how therapy works. A patient delegates his unacceptable feelings to his therapist: and she holds everything he is afraid to feel, and she feels it for him. And then, ever so slowly, she feeds his feelings back to him.

Someone who has never learned to contain himself is plagued by anxious feelings for the rest of his life; feelings that Bion aptly titled ‘nameless dread’. And such a person endlessly seeks this unquenchable containment from external sources – he needs a drink or a joint to ‘take the edge off’ this endless anxiety – hence my addiction to marijuana.

‘About love. About how we often mistake love for fireworks – for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm – and constant.

one of the hardest things to admit is that we weren’t loved when we needed it most. It’s a terrible feeling, the pain of not being loved.’

‘A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.’