Quotes from Stephen A. Mitchell

Anna Freud's book The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense (1936) was a partial response to this problem. It became a psychoanalytic field marshal's handbook, documenting and illustrating various unconscious defensive strategies of the ego, alerting the clinician to telltale signs of their operation in the patient's psyche. Reorienting

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

people often act in a way that provokes precisely the reactions they are expecting. These

Sullivan came to feel that human activity and human mind are not things that reside in the individual, but rather are generated in interactions among individuals; personalities are shaped to fit interpersonal niches and are not understandable unless that complex, interactive honing process is taken into account.

Sullivan distinguished between fear and anxiety. If a loud noise occurs, if hunger is unaddressed, if tensions of any sort increase, the baby becomes afraid. Fear actually operates as an integrating tendency; as it is expressed in crying and agitation, it draws the caregiver into an interaction that will soothe the baby and address the problem. Anxiety, in contrast, has no focus and does not arise from increasing tension in the baby herself. Anxiety is picked up from other people.

Freud found that the most central childhood problems regularly surface not in discussion but in disguised form in the analytic relationship. It

The stranger's presence alerts him to his mother's absence. For Spitz, this behavioral reaction signaled the attainment of psychological capacities that make a singular, personal attachment possible. "There is no love until the loved one can be distinguished from all others" (1965

Symbolic representation makes it possible for instinctual impulses to find disguised, socially acceptable forms of gratification, not as satisfying as direct physical pleasure, but a reasonable compromise with necessary social constraints. Thus

As with good history, good psychoanalytic interpretations must also make sense, pull together as much of the known data as possible, provide a coherent and persuasive account, and also facilitate personal growth. Psychoanalytic

Interpretations, like the sculptor's chisel, would be used to target and then chip away at the imprisoning defenses, exposing the patient's inner psychic reality. This inner psychic reality, essentially driven by pleasure-seeking fantasy, pulled the patient away from facing what Freud had referred to as "the brick wall of reality" that would challenge unacceptable fantasies and free the entangled energy for more realistic projects.

He envisioned the products of successful analysis as individuals constructively free of repression, able to use their manifold component sexual instincts for their own pleasure and satisfaction.

Many patients grew up feeling their perceptions of their parents were forbidden and dangerous. They have learned to discount their own often discerning observations and consequently feel mystified about what happens between themselves and others. The

Ljubav se stalno menja zato što se mi stalno menjamo. Stoga romanti?na ljubav, sama po sebi, donosi nestabilnost. ?ini nas nezadovoljnim onim što imamo time što nas uvek usmerava ka ne?emu što ne posedujemo u potpunosti, ili posedujemo u nedovoljnoj meri, ili pak u ?ije smo posedovanje suviše sigurni.

If she let herself feel warmly for someone, she feared she would disappear into the other, and enter a marginal, formless world, part human, part inanimate. Here hands, symbolic for her of human connectedness, reached out to her to lure her into a nonhuman nightmare.

In Fromm's view, the unconscious is a social creation, maintained because of the deep abhorrence each of us has of our own freedom and the social isolation we fear may result from a fuller expression of our authentic, personal experience.

Davies and Frawley believe that while the child may be a passive victim of the original sexual abuse, the child's subsequent active elaboration of his or her situation through various fantasies, including reparative longings for magical helpers and identifications with the abuser himself, is also a complex aspect of the problem.

In Lacan's view, it is not just dreams but conscious subjective experience in general that is organized into distracting little stories, and it is the folly of ego psychology and object relations theories to have bought into the disguises offered by secondary elaboration, to have taken the illusory stories as real, rather than covers for an underlying sense of loss, absence, castration.

Maintaining security in the present undermined her chances of broadening her security-enhancing network of relationships in the long run.

the task is "to get the subject to shift from a psychic reality to a true reality" (1988b

The mother becomes important because she provides gratification, he believed; human love is built on both direct and disguised (aim-inhibited) gratifications, as the ego finds ways to repress, sublimate, and refine instinctual impulses so they find a place in more complex object relations.

developmental theorists envision a mind rent by vertical splits between different self-states that have not been integrated with one another.

One may take on some qualities of a loved one following her death; the five-year-old identifies with his father's moral code in response to the oedipal frustration of being denied mother as a sexual partner. As long as gratification is available via objects in the real world, identification is irrelevant. When gratification is interrupted, when the object is lost or becomes unavailable because of conflict, the object is internalized to permit fantasy gratification. Identification

It is too disturbing for the patient to feel sexually attracted to his mother; in a last-ditch effort, the resistance disguises the feelings as current impulses toward the analyst. Although