The Search For The Real Self Quotes

“Mothers of normal children teach them about the realities of life by introducing them to frustration experiences in carefully measured doses that gradually dispel the notion that the fused “grandiose child-omnipotent mother” entity can go on forever. They deflate their children’s feelings of grandeur and bring them down to earth. The mother of the future narcissistic personality never dispels this notion. Thus, the fused, symbiotic relationship endures, and the child grows to adulthood perceiving himself just as omnipotent and grandiose as he was as a child.”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“The mother’s unavailability to supply the emotional fuel dampened or thwarted the child’s desire to individuate and become his real self,”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“Many people are caught in a knot of self-destructive behavior and are unable to see it or appreciate how they themselves have tied it. Each believes the problems lie somewhere “out there,” surrounding them but beyond them, rooted in external circumstances. They also believe that the solutions to their problems are “out there” too—the right man, the perfect woman, a more appreciative boss, a more interesting job, the right diet.”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“love is the capacity to acknowledge the other’s real self in a warm, affectionate way, with no strings attached, and to enjoy the sexual passion that energizes the relationship in such a way that the welfare of the partner, in every sense of that term, becomes as important as one’s own welfare. In fact, we could say that true love is a union of two people, each for the good of the other, where the other’s best interests become at least equal to one’s own. In light of what we have been saying throughout this book, to love is to like, approve of, and support another’s real self and to encourage the other to activate, express, and nurture that real self. This investment in the other enlarges, enriches, and completes the experience of the self.”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“The abandonment depression is first experienced at an age when the young child cannot reflect on it or articulate what is happening. The child simply feels that the flow of life is cruelly disrupted and that he teeters on the verge of annihilation should the vital support of the mother be lost or withheld.”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“As the child gets older, the discrepancy between his chronological age and the level of his psychological functioning widens. He develops a “borderline personality disorder” which becomes progressively more entrenched over time as the individual encounters and struggles with the challenges of each life phase.”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“For love and work are the building blocks of a gratifying adult life. They give meaning to life, but not if one’s primary goal is to avoid feeling bad and all love and work activities must be channelled toward that goal. What we have seen in each of the individuals above is a person dominated by a false self, a person who loves or works in an impaired way, convinced that self-destructive behavior is necessary to prevent feeling bad, even though such an attitude can only lead to dead ends in the search for the real self, which alone can give meaning to life.”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“Only when firmly grounded in a strong real self can we live and share our lives with others in ways that are healthy, straightforward expressions of our deepest needs and desires, and in so doing find fulfillment and meaning.”
― James F. Masterson, The Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“His companion grandiose self-image felt good, unique, or special when he received perfect wisdom, direction, and knowledge from the omnipotent mother and father, which he equated with love.”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“Each type of pathology produces its own confusion and its own distorted version of loving and giving. The borderline patient defines love as a relationship with a partner who will offer approval and support for regressive behavior, usually in the form of taking responsibility for the borderline. The narcissist defines love as the ability of someone else to admire and adore him, and to provide perfect mirroring. To extend this perspective further, the schizophrenic would seek a lover who could enter his psychotic world and form a symbiotic relationship based on the patient’s psychosis. Psychopaths seek partners who respond to their manipulations and provide them with gratification. The schizoid—a disorder caused by the lack of support in the early years of childhood akin to that experienced by borderline and narcissistic patients—finds love in an internal, autistic fantasy.”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“Building an intimate, loving relationship with another is the way we overcome the essential aloneness and isolation of the self as an adult. Without such a relationship, the real self will always remain to some extent unfulfilled and incomplete, since the vestiges of that first intimate symbiotic relationship with the mother will always remain in our psyches and memories. Only by risking genuine intimacy are we likely to find a partner who will reinforce and promote a healthy kind of relationship similar to that given up so long ago but never entirely forgotten.”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“In personal relationships, the false self promises to defend against the intimacy that could lead to engulfment or the pains of abandonment by substituting fantasy relationships with unavailable partners for real relationships. On the job, the false self assures the person that he can avoid the conflicts and anxiety that would come from honest self-assertion with authority figures and peers, competition, and discipline by not working up to his full capacity or ability.”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“In each of these cases we have met a person whose capacities to meet the challenges of an ever-changing world are impaired to a considerable degree. You may know people like them or individuals who exhibit these traits on a lesser scale. On the surface some of them exhibit a facade of mastery, an ability to deal with a narrow slice of life, but they do so in pathologic ways. They accept the message from a false self that self-destructive behavior is their only way to deal with the conflict between their feelings and the demands of reality. They believe the false self’s message that they shouldn’t cut—or even hope for—a larger slice of the pie.”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“Personal meaning must be created, not accepted, and the process of creating it requires testing and experimentation. A false self will neither test nor experiment; it is a defense against experimenting.”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“protect them from feeling “bad” at the cost of a meaningful and fulfilling life.”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

“The Search for the Real Self is also about those with an impaired real self who are unable to accomplish the task of finding a fit with their environment, and are compelled to resort to self-destructive behavior patterns—evidence of a false self—that protect them from feeling “bad” at the cost of a meaningful and fulfilling life.”
― James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age