Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst
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Read between October 6 - October 19, 2025
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have this need to talk as though no one had ever examined the subject before, and of course this can make my words ridiculous. But I think you can see in this my own need to make sure I am not buried by my theme.
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some kind of a clash between the personal impulse and the compromises that belong to any kind of relationship that has reliable features.
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It is not possible for the psychoanalyst to maintain the illusion that people get married and live happily ever afterwards, at any rate in their sexual life.
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We need to pay attention to what is latent, when sex, as well as being an enriching phenomenon, is also an ever-recurring therapy.
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stand in other people’s shoes, and to matters of sympathy and empathy.
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origins of the individual’s capacity to live creatively.
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happy is he or she who is being creative all the time in personal life as well as through life partners, children, friends, etc.
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The human individual who does not start off with an experience of omnipotence has no chance to be a cog, but must go on pushing round omnipotence and creativeness and control, like trying to sell unwanted shares in a bogus company.
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confidence in the union of baby and mother based on the experience of the mother’s reliability and capacity to know what the baby needs through identification with the baby.
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in health we devise ways and means for recapturing the feeling of meaningfulness that comes from creative living.
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surprised at ourselves, we are being creative, and we find we can trust our own unexpected originality.
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nothing that has to be done that cannot be done creatively, if the person is creative or has that capacity.
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Picasso. To draw like Picasso one has to be Picasso - else it is uncreative.
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an axiom that children who easily feel they exist in their own right are the very ones who are easy to manage.
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If we are formally joined with partners, we may allow all manner and all degrees (as I have said) of projections and introjections, and a wife may enjoy her husband’s enjoyment of his work or a husband enjoy his wife’s experiences with the frying pan. So in that way marriage - formal union - widens our scope for creative living.
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we are fairly healthy personally, we do not have to live in a world created by our marriage partner and our marriage partner does not have to live in ours.
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intellect helps in the toleration of frustration?
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the true self being psychosomatic,
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can function brilliantly without much reference to the human being.
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accumulation of experiences duly assimilated, may achieve wisdom.
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But there is a limit to the sums that an individual can feel identified with, and this limit belongs to the stage of personality development which the individual has reached and can maintain.
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Poets, philosophers and seers have always concerned themselves with the idea of a true self, and the betrayal of the self has been a typical example of the unacceptable.
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if we have these personal problems, we must live with them and see how time brings some kind of personal evolution rather than a solution.
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Perhaps there is a link between the concept of maturity, or personal adult health, and the solution of this problem of personality.
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each person has a polite or socialized self, and also a personal private self that is not available except in intimacy.
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life difficult because of this need that they have to establish and to re-establish the importance of the true self relative to anything false.
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The child has become able to be depressed. This is an achievement of emotional growth.
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ego strength and of self-establishment and of the discovery of a personal identity,
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ego structure has held over a phase of crisis.
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new experience of destructiveness and of destructive ideas that go with loving.
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can help a depressed person by adopting the principle of tolerating the depression until it spontaneously lifts, and by paying tribute to the fact that it is only the spontaneous recovery that feels truly satisfactory to the individual.
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a person may come out of a depression stronger, wiser and more stable than before he or she went into it. A great deal depends, however, on the freedom of the depression from what might be called ‘impurities’.
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all the failures of ego organization which indicate a tendency in the patient towards a more primitive type of illness, towards schizophrenia.
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disintegration that threatens (schizoid).
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ego strength and personal maturity that is manifested in the ‘purity’ of the depression mood.
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the best that can happen is that something that was not completed in an individual’s development originally becomes to some extent completed at a later date, in the course of the treatment.
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real and integrated person who could accept the truth about her primitive impulses.
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destructive feelings towards what might be called a good object.
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So this helping was quite a new feature and it happened silently (so to speak) alongside the utter destructiveness that die child began to find in the primitive aspects of her loving which she reached in
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things went well enough and then they did not go well enough.
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‘therapeutic’ and this has to do with putting oneself in a position in which one can be communicated with from a deep level.
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this is a sacred date and nothing must get in the way. Unless the appointment becomes predictable by being reliable, the individual boy will not be able to make use of it,
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professional setting of general reliability in which the repressed unconscious may become conscious.
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growth tendencies are present all the time in every individual, except where hopelessness (because of repeated environmental failure) has led to an organized withdrawal.
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imagine are common to us all.
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self-elected and selected individuals. The training aims at providing psychotherapy that reaches to unconscious motivation, and that essentially makes use of what is called ‘transference’.
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if a doctor appears at the time arranged, he experiences a tremendous strengthening of the patient’s trust in him (or her), and this is not only important for the avoidance of patient agony, but also it enhances the somatic processes tending towards healing, even of tissues, certainly of functions.)
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care-cure, the subject of my talk, and it could be the motto of our profession.
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urge to find and to appreciate the ordinary good mother.
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fear of WOMAN is a powerful cause of the seemingly illogical behaviour of human beings in groups,
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