Necessary Losses
This page contains thoughts from the book Necessary Losses by Judith Viorst. The book is about the process we go through as we are alive in this world: the issues that confront us as we go from infancy to death, the ideas and feelings that we have to come to terms with, one way or another, and the losses that process involves- the giving up of some ideals and wishes, and things that we thought were needs. It is my favorite book and I revisit it periodically for fresh insights... I encourage you to go out and buy it... here are some excerpts that I hope you get something out of:
It is the image in the mind that binds us to our lost treasures, but it is the loss that shapes the image.- Colette
(Infancy) The High Cost of Separation
"A young boy lies in a hospital bed. He is frightened and in pain. Burns cover 40 percent of his small body. Someone has doused him with alcohol and then, unimaginably, has set him on fire.
He cries for his mother.
His mother has set him on fire.
It doesn't seem to matter what kind of mother a child has lost, or how perilous it may be to dwell in her presence. It doesn't matter whether she hurts or hugs. Separation from mother is worse than being in her arms when the bombs are exploding. Separation from mother is sometimes worse than being with her when she is the bomb." Page 22
"Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and too or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise."- Marilynne Robinson
"Severe separations in early life leave emotional scars on the brain because they assault the essential human connection: The mother-child bond which teaches us that we are lovable. The mother-child bond which teaches us how to love. We cannot be whole human beings- indeed, we may find it hard to be human- without the sustenance of this first attachment." Page 29
"we love as soon as we learn to distinguish a separate 'you' and 'me'. Love is our attempt to assuage the terror and isolation of that separateness." Page 30
[PAY ATTENTION SOCIAL WORKERS!!!] "Another defense against loss may be a compulsive need to take care of other people. Instead of aching, we help those who ache. And through our kind minstrations, we both alleviate our old, old sense of helplessness and identify with those we care for so well." Page 32
"These losses we have been looking at- these premature separations of early childhood- may skew our expectations and our responses, may skew our subsequent dealings with the necessary losses of our life. In Marilynne Robinson's extraordinary novel Housekeeping, her desolate heroine ponders the power of loss, remembering 'when my mother left me waiting for her, and established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain.' ... Loss can dwell within us all our life." Page 33
The Ultimate Connection
"This ideal state, this state of boundarylessness, this I-am-you-are-me-is-she-is-we, this 'harmonious interpenetrating mix-up,' this floating 'I'm in the milk and the milk's in me,' this chillproof insulation from aloneness and intimations of mortality: This is a condition known to lovers, saints, psychotics, druggies and infants. It is called bliss." Page 34
"And although we do not remember it, we also never forget it." Page 35
"Mystical union puts an end to self. And whether this union occurs between man and woman, man and cosmos, man and artistic creation or man and God, it repeats and restores- for brief, exquisite moments- the oceanic feeling of that mother-child connection where "the me, and the we, the thou, are not found, for in the One there can be no distinction.'" Page 37
"We must count among our necessary losses the giving up of this world-embracing oneness.
We will never give up wanting to retrieve it." Page 39
"And speaking to us through the dreams that we dream and the tales that we create, images of reunion persist and persist, and persist and persist- and bracket our life.
The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory- there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve..." Page 42
Standing Alone
"For the need to become a separate self is as urgent as the yearning to merge forever." Page 43
"And during our first three years... we venture upon a journey as momentous as any we will ever take- the journey out of oneness into separateness. All subsequent departures from the familiar to the unknown may stir up echoes of this original journey." Page 44
"Somewhere in us, if we were allowed to engage in the normal pursuits of the practicing stage, there lives an exultant being who once was capable of finding wonders everywhere. We are chastened today, and restrained, but if we are lucky we make contact now and then with that self-intoxication, that sense of wonder." Page 45
"Should I go? Should I stay? At several turning points- with our parents, our friends, our partners in passion, our partners in marriage- we will struggle with questions of intimacy and autonomy." Page 46
"What happens to us if we're pushed from the nest by a mother who cannot endure our infant dependencies? Or if- with a quite different mother- we're treated as good when we stay and bad when we go? Or if our first explorations are viewed with alarm, as threats to our health, to our very survivial? Or if, when we say, 'To hell with you. I'm going exploring anyway,' we fall on our face and our mother will not pick us up? What happens is that we adapt, or crumple, or compromise. What happens is that we give in, or make do, or prevail. Whatever solutions we find will be reshaped and elaborated by later experiences. But in some form or other they will continue to mold us." Page 47
The Private "I"
"This 'I' is a declaration of a consciousness of self- of some of the selves that we are or once were or might be. Our body and mind, our goals and roles, our lusts and limits, our feelings and capabilities: All and more are contained within that solitary but always upper-case letter." Page 51
"The 'I' to which we refer has taken into itself- has internalized- a picture of I, the lovingly mothered child. But it also has taken in- by becoming like, by an identification with- various aspects of the loving mother. Identification is one of the central precesses by which we build self. Identification is why I am bossy, cautious and a lover of books- like my mother. Identification is why I am superorganized and stubborn- like my father... Identification is why the apple probably doesn't fall too far from the tree... We each are artists of the self, creating a collage- a new and original work of art- out of scraps and fragments of identifications." Page 52
"the everyday losses of growing up will often promote important identifications. For identification can serve us simultaneously as a way to hang on and let go. Indeed, the act of identification often seems to imply "I don't need you to do it; I'll do it myself." It allows us to relinquish important aspects of relationships by taking in these aspects of relationships by taking in these aspects as our own." Page 53
"And over the years, as we modify and harmonize these different identifications... there are possible other selves we will have to discard. Giving up these possible other selves is one more of our necessary losses... So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal..." Page 54
"The narcissist is commonly viewed as excessively self-adoring... But in fact it is the absence of a stable internal self-love- a healthy narcissism- that inspires in him such consuming concern about it. Pressing him to use other people for pure self-enhancement. Pressing him to use them as reflections and extensions of himself."
Page 58
" 'All her substitute mirrors were broken,' an analyst writes of an aging depressed woman patient, 'and she again stood helpless and confused, like the little girl once did before her mother's face in which she did not find herself...' " Page 62
"For healthy growth involves being able to give up our need for approval when the price of that approval is our true self. It means being able to give up defensively splitting and to integrate our good with our bad self. It means being able to give up our grandiosity and make do with a human-proportioned self. It means that although we may, in the course of our life, be beset by emotional difficulties, we possess a reliable self, a sense of identity." Page 64
Lessons in Love
"Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy. We reconcile oneness and separateness through ordinary earthbound human love." Page 66
"We discover, from early experiences of passionate intensity, the pleasures love can offer, and the pain. We repeat and repeat our lessons all our life... I play with a little girl who has traumatically lost her mother and her father. In the midst of our fun she stops, stands up, says 'Bye'. Her style seems to be: 'I'm leaving you first, before you go off and leave me.' And I wonder if she will grow up compelled to always leave what she loves before it can hurt her, a practitioner of relationship interruptous... There is in human nature a compulsion to repeat. Indeed it is called the repetition compulsion. It impels us to do again and again what we have done before, to attempt to restore an earlier state of being. It impels us to transfer the past- our ancient longings, our defenses against those longings- onto the present." Page 76
"For many men the denial of dependency on their mother is repeated in their subsequent relationships, sometimes by an absence of any sexual interest in women, sometimes by a pattern of loving and leaving them. For other men and women, however, dependency is the point of love relationships; and whomever they take to bed will always be (at least in their head) the ever-yearned-for, gratifying mother." Page 77
"It seems reasonable to us to wish to transfer the pleasing past onto the present, to seek to repeat the delights of earlier days, to fall in love with those who resemble the first beloved objects of our affection, to do it again because we loved it the first time. If mom was truly wonderful, why shouldn't her son want to marry a girl like the girl who married dear old dad? Surely all normal love- it needn't be kinky, it needn't be blatantly incestuous- is bound to partake in part of transference love... Repeating the good makes sense but we have trouble understanding the compulsion to repeat what causes pain. And while Freud has tried to explain this compulsion as part of a dubious concept called the death instinct, it can also be understood as our hopeless effort to undo- rewrite- the past. In other words, we do it and do it and do it again in the hope that this time the ending will be different. We keep repeating the past- when we were helpless and acted upon- trying to master and change what has already happened." Page 79
"We have to relinquish that hope. We have to let go... For we cannot climb into a time machine, become that long gone child and get what we want when we oh so desperately wanted it. The days for that getting are over, finished, done. We have needs we can meet in different ways, in better ways, in ways that create new experience. But until we can mourn that past, until we can mourn and let go of that past, we are doomed to repeat it... Shaped in whole or in part for good or for ill by the instructors of our childhood, we try to love... We try and we keep on trying because an unconnected life is not worth living. A life of solitude cannot be borne. In an eloquent passage Eric Fromm writes: 'Man is gifted with reason; he is life being aware of itself... This awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short life span, of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he will die, that he will die before those whom he loves, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and of society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison. He would become insane could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite...' And so our noble achievement- the winning of separateness, of self- will also always be our grievious loss. That loss is necessary- there can be no human love without that loss. But through our love that loss may be transcended." Page 80
When Are You Taking That New Kid Back to the Hospital?
"It doesn't take long, however, to begin to realize that the love we receive is not exclusively ours, that there are other, rival claims upon our true love's love, that we crave what we cannot have- that we crave the impossible." Page 83
"in the beginning we all want exlcusive possession of our treasures, including the first of our treasures- our mother's love. And we don't want anyone else to either be given, or to take, the goodies which belong to us alone... For what will be left to us if we share with our rivals? Is anything less than everything enough? The wish to be loved alone may very well be bred in the bone. Angrily and painfully, and with more or less success, we learn to relinquish that wish- to let it go." Page 84
"most of the love we receive in this world is love we will have to share- and that sharing begins at home, with our sibling rivals... We do not like it... The danger of losing our mother's love or our father's love... terrifies us and threatens vast anxiety. And so if we have an impulse (smash that baby!) which might lead to such a loss, we want to make that impulse go away. Through one or more of our- mostly unconscious- mechanisms of defense, we can hold anxiety at bay by opposing, resisting, transforming, getting rid of- defending against- our dangerous and now unwanted impulse... These defenses are not restricted to our problems with sibling rivalry. They serve us throughout our life, whenever a feared or actual loss begins arousing our anxiety." Page 86
"another important tactic used by many sibling rivals... is to distinguish ourselves from our siblings by allotting them one set of characteristics, and allotting to ourselves another- an opposite- set... De-identification begins around the age of six, most often between first and second same-sex children." Page 88
"The ways we resolve, or fail to resolve, our feelings of sibling rivalry are often carried into adult life. And long after childhood's end, in other cities and relationships, we may repeat early sibling patterns... Thus trouble with money, with health, with school, with social relationships or with the law may start in childhood and last into later life, and these troubles can serve the function of stealing parental attention away from successful siblings." Page 90
""Psychologist Robert White, discussing sibling conflicts that have not been resolved during childhood, says that adult sibling rivals are still competing 'for the favor of parents who might be aged, senile or even dead.' And sometimes these 'legacies of competition in the family circle,' he says, spread into professional and social relationships, so that we respond to co-workers, friends, spouses, even our children, as if they were our brothers or our sisters." Page 92
"As an older sister myself I will conceded that firstborns tend to get the best of things, but they also, I'm certain, get the worst of them too. On the one hand, we experience- for months, maybe years beyond symbiotic union- an exclusive, special relationship with our mother. On the other hand, our loss- of this exclusive special relationship- is greater than that of our subsequent brothers and sisters. The birth of a new baby may evoke a sense of betrayal and bewilderment... In other words, no matter what position we hold in the family order of birth, we can prove beyond a doubt that we're being gypped. And sometimes we are. For although parents are supposed to love their children more or less equally, sometimes- because one is smarter, prettier, easier, just like them, more successful, athletic, affectionate, or a boy- one child will receive preferential treatment.
In Max Frisch's intriguing novel, I'm Not Stiller, for instance, there is a striking exchange between two men, Wilfried and Anatol, who go to a cemetery to visit their dead mothers and then repair to a tavern and compare notes:
'Apparently his mother was extremely strict,' writes Anatol, 'mine not in the least... I can remember listening at the keyhole as my mother told a group of friends all the witty and clever remarks I had made... Nothing like that ever happened to Wilfried; his mother worried that Wilfried would never achieve anything worthwhile...'
Furthermore, notes Anatol, Wilfried's mother was a 'practical woman who accustomed Wilfried at an early age to the idea that he would never be able to marry a proper woman if he didn't earn plenty of money.' Anatol's mother, in contrast, was playful and indulgent and 'attached more importance to my inner qualities, convinced that I could marry anyone I liked...'
It is clear that Wilfried and Anatol had two very different mothers. Except... there was only one mother: The men were brothers." Pages 94 and 95
"And this is a sorrowful fact of life that cannot be denied. We have to divide mother love with our brothers and sisters. Our parents can help us cope with the loss of our dream of absolute love. But they cannot make us believe that we haven't lost it... We can, however, learn- if all goes well- that there is sufficient love to go around... And we also can learn that sisters and brothers offer the possibility of another kind of loving family attachment... and this pest, intruder, competitor, this thief of our mother's love, can become our friend." Pages 96 and 97
"In one study of siblings over age sixty he found that 83 percent described their relationship with a brother or sister as 'close'. And since most of the evidence indicates that rivalry does diminish in old age, perhaps the repair and renewal of sibling relationships is one significant task of our final years.... This sharing, if we are able to get past the rivalry, can lay the foundation of a lifetime connection that can sustain us though parents die and children leave and marriages fail. For while brothers and sisters mean loss- the loss of our mother's exclusive love- that loss can yield immeasurable gain." Pages 98 and 99
Passionate Triangles
"Yes, Virginia, there is an Oedipus complex.
And it speaks to us in our dreams and on the psychoanalyst's couch. And it speaks through the everyday wishes of everyday children. "When I grow up I'm going to marry-" the nearest and dearest person in our life. It surely makes good sense that in the world of a three-year-old child that nearest and dearest person will be a parent." Page 100
"With a sex life that starts at birth, what makes the oedipal phase hold such fraught and special significance? Because our desires and yearnings run very deep. Because we are overwhelmed by the conflicts erupting out of this dangerous, passionate triangle. And because, though we have forgotten the wild fantasies which once ingnited our mind, we are who we are because of what we have done with them." Page 101
"And so, at around age five, most girls and boys confront the necessity of giving up their forbidden oedipal wishes.
Which are never, however, completely given up.
And which, to greater and lesser degrees, and in sometimes quite troubled ways, continue to triangulate our lives." Page 102
"Mary Ann, age three when her father died, still seeks her dead father in man after married man. But her interest wanes if the man becomes available. Indeed, at heart, she is driven, not by her longing for her father, but by her rage at her mother and wish for revenge. Thus each of her love affairs is, in effect, a reproach to her lover's wife: 'You're losing your husband because you're not taking good care of him.' And each of her love affairs is, underneath, an angry attack on her mother, who 'lost' her husband to death by not taking care of him.
Freud writes of a similar pattern in men whose precondition for loving is that there always must be 'an injured third party'. And so, when such a man falls in love, it is never with someone unmarried or disengaged. He repeats his childhood experience of loving a woman already possessed by another." Page 104
"Still, our sexual feelings and choices most likely express, in later years, our responses to oedipal conflicts. So too may the quality of our professional life. Lou, who has never stopped fearing the mighty father of his childhood, remains- at forty- submissive to authority figures, while Mike, still defiantly trying to topple his autocratic father, has become a political activist, fighting the 'big guys' who push 'little people' around. When such men examine their feelings they find themselves back in a five-year-old's world, where a little person loves/challenges/fears a big guy. And if helpless defeat or angry defiance remains the hallmark of the son-father relationship, defeat or defiance may color every subsequent relationship to authority." Page 105
"For in spite of the anguish we feel, the fact that we cannot steal our daddy from mommy will lead us to growth and a place in the wider world. There will be consolations for our agonized but necessary loss. But to win an oedipal victory, to beat out our rival and get the parent we love, may do us more harm in the end than a defeat." Page 111
"And by giving up our passionate entanglement with our parents, we travel the oneness-to-separateness road yet again, moving into a world that can only be ours if we forsake our oedipal dreams." Page 113
Anatomy and Destiny
"So does our discovery, at eighteen or so months of age, that girls and boys are different from each other. And whatever else this discovery of the anatomical differences may do, it will certainly instruct us in sex-linked limits.
I am saying that the mere fact of our inhabiting a male or female body importantly defines- and confines- our experience.
I am saying that- close as we are- my husband and sons are psychologically different from me in ways that women- any women- are not.
I am saying with Freud that no one can see us- nor can we see them- divorced from the 'male' or 'female' designation.
I am saying that sex-linked limits on our 'anything's possible' omnipotentiality is yet another necessary loss.
It is argued that sex-linked limits have been culturally produced. It is argued that sex-linked limits are innate. What gender-identity studies seem to strongly suggest, however, is that- from the moment of birth- both boys and girls are so clearly treated as boys or as girls, that even very early displays of 'masculine' or 'feminine' behavior cannot be detached from environmental influences.
Are there, in actual fact, real sex-linked limits? Is there an inborn male or female psychology? And is there any possible way of exploring such tricky questions unbiased by culture, upbringing or sexual politics?" Pages 115 & 116
"A few years ago Colette Dowling's best-selling book TheCinderella Complex struck a responsive chord in women everywhere with its theme of a female fear of independence.
Girls are trained into dependency, says Dowling.
Boys are trained out of it." Page 119
"For female dependence appears to be less a wish to be protected than a wish to be part of a web of human relationships, a wish not only to get- but to give- loving care. To need other people to help and console you, to share the good times and bad, to say 'I understand,' to be on your side- and also to need the reverse, to need to be needed- may lie at the heart of women's very identity. Dependence on such connections might be described as 'mature dependence.' It also means, however, that identity- for women- has more to do with intimacy than with separateness.
In a series of elegant studies, psychologist Carol Gilligan found that while male self-definitions empasized individual achievement over attachment, women repeatedly defined themselves within a context of responsible caring relationships. Indeed, she notes that 'male and female voices typically speak of the importance of different truths, the former of the role of separtateness as it defines and empowers the self, the latter of the ongoing process of attachment that creates and sustains the human community.' It is only because we live in a world where maturity is equated with autonomy, argues Gilligan, that women's concern with relationships appear to be a weakness instead of a strength.
Perhaps it is both." Page 120
""Freud once observed that 'we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helpessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.'... the logic thus seems to be that women's dependence on intimacy makes them, if not the weaker sex, the more vulnerable one.
If women's nature is, in fact, more affiliative, more interdependent, more imbedded in personal relationships, why? Let us go back and ponder this question in light of how boys and girls establish their gender identity.
For, it is widely agreed, they do do it differently.
Consider, for instance, that both sexes- all of us- were originally symbiotically merged with mother, and that our first identification- everybody's first identification- was with her. It is true that boys and girls alike must escape symbiosis and set up mother-child boundaries. It is true that both boys and girls must break away. But an intense and prolonged symbiosis will threaten little boys' masculinity more than it threatens little girls' femininity, because to be one with, the same as, or like the earlier caretaking figure is to be one with, the same as, or like (in most cases) a woman.
In their second or third years of life, then, boys decisively will turn away from their mother. They de-identify with what she is. But their pullling away, their protective shield, may involve a number of anti-female defenses. And so it may be that the price males pay for de-identification is a disdain, a contempt. sometimes even a hatred for women, a disowning of the 'feminine' parts of themselves and an enduring fear of intimacy because it undermines the separation upon which their male identity has been founded.
While boys are threatened by intimacy, girls are more afraid of separation, for their feminine identity is founded upon their relationship with another. I think it might even be argued that we women are literally built for greater relatedness, for the female body is, after all, designed to make room for other human beings. Anatomically we can accomodate a penis in our vagina. We can shelter and nourish a fetus in our womb. And psychologically we seem to be far more willing and able than men to identify with, and adapt to, our love partner's needs." Pages 121, 122 & 123
Analyst Leon Altman suggests that female flexibility derives from the sexual turning away from mother. 'This renunciation' he writes, 'prepares her for renunciation in the future in a way the boy is unable to match'.
For a girl to give up her mother as her object of sensual longing is a difficult letting go, a radical loss. Indeed some analysts say that the notorious penis envy- from which, so Freud insisted, all females suffer- might be understood as a wish to avoid this loss.
But early-childhood envy isn't restricted to penis envy; nor is penis, or other envy, restricted to girls. For as we come to know what bodies are and what they can do, we are bound to covet each other's parts and capacities. We want- of course we want!- the nourishing breast, that versatile penis, that magical, marvelous baby-making ability. Unlike the jealousy triangle, envy begins as a two-person drama: 'You've got it; I want it.'" Page 124
"For the lack of a penis can be, for instance, a symbol around which are gathered earlier feelings of being deprived or gypped.
It can also be a symbol of fears that we aren't quite what the doctor ordered:
remember that every son had a mother
whose beloved son he was,
and every woman had a mother
whose beloved son she wasn't."
Page 126
"As heterosexual humans we identify and love in accordance with gender patterns and possibilities. But it is how we perceive our limits that determines if our anatomy is our destiny.
For surely some sex-linked limits do exist. And surely we may perceive them as a loss. But a recognition of limits need not oppose- indeed it may be a requirement for- the creative development of our potentiality.
'The potter who works with clay recognizes the limitations of his material,' writes Margaret Mead; 'he must temper it with a given amount of sand, glaze it thus, keep it at such and such a temperature, fire it at such a heat. But by recognizing the limitations of his material he does not limit the beauty of the shape that his artist's hand, grown wise in a tradition, informed by his own special vision of the world, can impose upon the clay.'
She is saying that freedom begins when we acknowledge what is possible- and what is not.
She is saying that if we come to know the nature of our clay, we can impose our destiny on anatomy." Page 129
Good as Guilt
"For whether or not we humans are the only creatures capable of guilt, we undoubtedly do it better than beetles or wolves... Nevertheless we must recognize that while guilt deprives us of numerous gratifications, we and our world would be monstrous minus guilt. For the freedoms we lose, our constraints and taboos, are necessary losses- part of the price we pay for civilization... Our guilt becomes our own when, at around the age of five, we begin to develop a superego, a conscience, when the 'No, you can'ts' and the 'Shame on you's' which used to be outside us regroup as our internal critical voice. Our guilt becomes our own when instead of feeling, 'Better not do it; they will not like it,' that 'they' is no longer our mother and father but- us." Page 130
"True guilt, it can be argued, it is not the fear of our parents' wrath or the loss of their love. True guilt, it can be argued, is the fear of our conscience's wrath, the loss of its love... We resolve our oedipal conflicts by acquiring a conscience which- like our parents- limits and restrains. Our conscience is our parents installed in our mind... And if we breach those moral restraints or abandon those ideals, our conscience will arrange to make us feel guilty." Page 131
"Now we know what our conscious guilt feels like- we know the tension and the distress- but our unconscious guilt can only be known indirectly. And among the signs that may attest to the presence of unconscious guilt is a powerful need to injure ourself, a persistent need to get or to give ourself punishment." Page 135
"It was Freud who first observed that analysts sometimes work with patients who ferociously resist relief from their symptoms, who seem to hold on for dear life to emotional pain, and who cling to this pain because it gives them the punishment that they don't even know they want for crimes they don't even know that they have committed. He notes ruefully, however, that a neurosis which has defied an analyst's best efforts may suddenly vanish if the patient gets into an unhappy marriage, loses all his money or becomes dangerously ill. 'In such instances,' writes Freud, 'one form of suffering has been replaced by another; and we see that all that mattered was that it should be possible to maintain a certain amount of suffering.'... Another kind of deficient guilt is displayed by people who punish themselves after they have committed some dreadful act, but who then go on to commit these dreadful acts again and again, again and again. For although their conscience acknowledges that what they did was wrong, and exacts quite brutal payments for their sins, their guilt never functions for them as a warning signal. It serves them only to punish, not to prevent... There are, however, the so-called psychopathic personalities who seem to display a genuine lack of guilt, whose antisocial and criminal acts, whose repetitive acts of destructiveness and depravity, occur with no restraint and no remorse... These psychopaths spell out for us, in letters ten feet high, what kind of world this world would be without guilt... But we don't have to be a psychopath to allow some person or group to stand in the place of our individual conscience. And yet this too can lead to deficient guilt. For when we relinquish to others our sense of moral responsibility, we may become free of central moral constraints. This giving over of conscience can turn ordinary people into lynch mobs and operators of crematoria. And it may enable any of us to act in certain ways which on our own we would surely regard as unthinkable." Pages 137 & 138
"It is tempting to think that put to the test, we would be counted among the morally pure. And some of us would be. And some of us would fail. But all of us, in the course of our life, will engage in acts we know to be morally wrong. And when we do, the healthy response is guilt." Page 139
"But our conscience also contains our ego ideal- our values and higher aspirations, the parts that speak to our 'oughts' instead of our 'don'ts'. And another task of our conscience is to say in effect, 'Good for you' and 'You did well,' to encourage us and approve of us and praise and reward and love us for meeting, or striving to meet, this ego ideal... Our ego ideal is composed of our most wishful, hopeful visions of our self. Our ego ideal is composed of our noblest goals. And while it is an impossible dream that can never be fulfilled, our reachings toward it provide a deep sense of well-being. Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain't-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality... If we could believe in 'anything goes,' we could go merrily-guiltlessly- on our way. But without ideals and restraints, what would we be? A wolf forgiven at his meat. A beetle innocent in his copulation. Something beyond the bounds of humanity." Page 140
Childhood's End
"Moving from oneness to separateness, and from separate self to separate guilty self, we find that we are neither safe nor free. It becomes increasingly clear that the person in charge of us is... us, and we may resent the responsibility. Like the seven-year-old who, chatised by his parents for being naughty, replied to their rebukes indignantly, complaining to his mother and father, 'I'm getting sick of this. Everything I do you blame on me.'... And during those years that are bracketed by the dawning of conscience and end of adolescence we must- by slowly expanding the dominion of what we can be responsible for- become our own grownup." Page 142
"In the phase that Freud labeled 'latency'- which is usually dated from ages seven to ten- we leave the benevolent fortress of family life. Our job as a latency kid is to acquire the social and psychological know-how without which we cannot manage this new separation, these new necessary losses... In latency we will discover, with amazement and relief, that parents are fallible- 'My dad says it was, but my teacher Miss March says that's wrong.' In latency we will find a new set of people to admire, to be like, to love. With our Oedipal tumult behind us and the storms of adolescence yet to come, we will turn our passions and energies toward learning. And through what we learn- through reading and riding and running some small portion of our universe- we will begin to acquire a feeling of mastery." Page 143
"Analyst Erik Erikson, whose classic 'Eight Ages of Man' describes the stages and challenges of the life cycle, sees latency as that stage when we develop what he calls a 'sense of industry'. The wish to do some kind of completed work. The capacity to handle the tasks and tools of our particular society... Work, even kids' work, offers us- as Joseph Conrad once said- a chance to find ourself, our own reality... Along with learning to make things well, we deepen our self-definition by placing ourself in the context of a group, by seeing that we are members of something called 'boys' or 'girls' or 'nine-year-olds' or fifth-graders'. Our sexual identity and our view of what a kid our age can do are clarified and confirmed by this group membership, which enhances our sense of identity, our 'this is who I am,' at a physical and emotional distance from home... We also expand our world by our development of a sharper sense of reality, by a clearer distinguishing of fiction from fact, which allows us both to make practical plans and to play among our fantasies without the fear that they will take over our life." Page 144
"Many latency kids do not feel ready for it... Ten-year-old Nan tells her mother, 'I will never wear lipstick- never. And you don't have to buy me stockings until I'm a hundred.'... next comes the phase of prepuberty, a time of 'transition from barrenness to fertility'; that this is followed by puberty, defined for a girl by her first menstruation (called menarche) and for a boy by his first ejaculation; that adolesence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges." Page 146
"The moving-out process which starts with wriggling off our mother's lap, then onto our feet, then into other rooms, continuing as we go from the sights, sounds, smells of family life to the studies and tasks and games and rules of latency, deposits us- at puberty- on the shore of a turbulent sea where we plainly see that leaving could mean drowning." Page 147
"Zapped by hormones, our body undertakes a massive revision- enlarging our sexual parts and our hair supply, demonstrating (by menstrual flows and seminal emissions) that we are joining the race of the baby-makers, changing out height and our weight and our shape and our skin and our voice and our odors, till we hardly know what to expect when we wake up in the morning." Page 148
"Yes, our body image- our inner picture of our outer state- undergoes dramatic changes at puberty, as beauty is lost, or found, or lost and then found again, as inches- and sometimes mere fractions of inches- of height, hips, width of ears or length of nose make the difference (it seems) between joy and despair, as power comes to reside in the development of a torso or the possession of just-like-Brooke-Shields' blue eyes and dark hair, as the question girls ask about boys- and boys more relentlessly ask about girls- is not 'Are they smart? Are they nice?' but 'What do they look like?'... It has been said that for adolescents 'to be different is to be inferior'. Okay means being the same as everyone else. Thus any kind of physical deviation from the norm or a maturing that occurs too late or too soon can be a source of awkwardness, a source of shame and chagrin, and can form mental pictures that live with us ('I'll always feel bony and scrawny and too thin') long after the actual physical facts have altered." Page 149
"Anna Freud... writes 'that it is normal for an adolescent to behave for considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner; to fight his impulses and to accept them; to ward them off successfully and to be overrun by them; to love his parents and to hate them; to revolt against them and to be dependent on them; to be deeply ashamed to acknowledge his mother before others and, unexpectedly, to desire heart-to-heart talks with her; to thrive on imitation of and identification with others while searching unceasingly for his own identity; to be more idealistic, artistic, gernerous and unselfish than he will ever be again, but also the opposite: self-centered, egotistic, calculating. Such fluctuations between extreme opposites would be deemed highly abnormal at any other time of life. At this time they may signify no more than that an adult structure of personality takes a long time to emerge'... Now there was, in the course of those masterful years of our latency, the delusion that we had who-am-I all figured out. But under the onslaught of puberty, our sense of self, of selfsameness, of identity, liquifies into something confused and elusive. Among the seemingly endless tasks confronting adolescents is achieving a firm but flexible sense of self." Page 151
"Along with, or maybe as part of, our adolescent identity crisis is the further toning down of our conscience's harshness, and an altering of our ego ideal from impossibly grandiose to something more relaistic and... almost... attainable. For our ego ideal- our standards and expectations of ourself- is formed of the narcissistic dreams of our childhood. And those narcissistic dreams- those infantile visions of what human wholeness can be- have to grow up along with the rest of us. To hew to unrealizable goals and impossible dreams of perfection is to guarantee a perpetual sense of inadequacy, is to guarantee failure time after time after time.
For if we must be the Smartest, a B-plus from our history teacher is a failure.
And if we must be Most Gorgeous, being runner-up for prom queen is a failure.
And if we must be Best Athlete, losing even a single tennis match is a failure.
Growing up means narrowing the distance between our dreams and our possibilities. A grownup has a grown-up ego ideal.
'When I was little,' says thirteen-year-old Anita, 'the gap between what I wanted and had was small. I think when I'm older the gap will be small again. But now between what I want and I have it's like this'- she makes a wide, wide space with her hands- 'and everything'- she sighs- 'is sort of bad.'" Page 152
"Mourning for our lost childhood is another- a central task- of adolescence. There are various ways to evade or accomplish that task.
College-bound Roger, for instance, snarls through his last few months at home, battling with his parents every day. He can't face his wish to stay, but if he arranges to leave feeling mad instead of sad he can avoid the pain of separation.
Brenda's promiscuity appears to be a statement of independence: I am a sexual woman, not a child. Except that the point of the sex is not the during but the cuddles before and after. She probably doesn't know that she is trying not to go away from mother.
Going away to college is a time when many shaky selves will falter. Unbuttressed by family and friends, there are boys and girls who will turn to themselves and find... nothing there. The college counseling services are filled with students whose separation anxieties are being masked by desperate escapes from pain. And while most of these students are hardy enough to survive their struggles with separation anxiety, some of them may sink beneath their damaging and sometimes deadly solutions." Page 154
"One way, of course, not to miss them is to stay at home, to not go, though you needn't always admit that you aren't going. For while some young people may openly cling, there are those who, under a show of great independence, nonetheless arrange to never depart.
The brilliant literary psychologist Leon Edel, for instance, reports that when Henry David Thoreau was about to graduate from Harvard, his mother suggested that he might 'buckle on your knapsack and roam around abroad to seek your fortune.' Henry burst into tears, thinking that his mother was sending him away from her. Later, as Thoreau the Transcendentalist, he did indeed go away- to a hut he built in the woods at Walden Pond, where he made much of the solitary, self-reliant life. However, Edel points out, his cabin was merely a mile away from his mother's house in Concord and there he returned for a visit- every day.
Thoreau once said, 'Methinks I should be content to sit at the back door in Concord, under the poplar tree henceforth, forever.' Edel says that that's what he in effect did- all his life. And although he created a myth of getting away from the world, of sturdy independence, 'Thoreau, shut up in his childhood, could not leave home.'" Page 155
"Fictional Holden Caulfield's plan for prolonging his adolescence is to figure out how to go on without growing up. The end of childhood seems like the end of all innocence. Rejecting becoming anything like the money-making hypocritical phonies of the adult world, he instead invents a fantasy- a glorious savior fantasy...
For may adolescencts growing up means giving up and selling out. It means letting go of innocence and illusions... It also means relinquishing that sense of endless options- that feeling that he could (if he would just decide what he wanted) be a Soviet expert, marine biologist, journalist. What growing up also means... is: 'Settling down with someone. Supporting myself. And owning life insurance.'" Page 156
"Responsible means that we make and keep commitments. Responsible means, of course, that we tie our own shoes. But is also means that we are not allowed to blame our terrible childhood- or passion, temptation, ignorance or innocence- for acts that are ours, for deeds that we indeed do. For if, in fact, we do them, we are responsible.
It has often been argued that Oedipus, who killed his father, the king, and married his mother, cannot be held responsible because- poor ignorant fellow- he did not know. But analyst Bruno Bettleheim suggests that the guilt of Oedipus derives precisely from his failure to know and that the point of the myth is to 'warn of the utterly destructive consequences of acting without knowing what one is doing.'
There comes a time when we aren't allowed not to know.
In the story of Job, as retold by poet Archibald MacLeish in his play J.B., the tormented hero is offered this cold comfort:
There is no guilt, my man. We all are
Victims of our guilt, not guilty.
We kill the king in ignorance; the voice
Reveals: we blind ourself.
J.B. will not accept this exculpation.
I'd rather suffer
Every unspeakable suffering God sends,
Knowing it was I that suffered,
I that earned the need to suffer,
I that acted, I that chose,
Than wash my hands with yours in that
Defiling innocence. Can we be men
And make an irresponsible ignorance
Responsible for everything?
The answer to that question- the grownup's only answer to that question- has to be no.
And so, somewhere slightly before or after the close of our second decade, we reach a momentous milestone- childhood's end. We have left a safe place and can't go home again. We have moved into a world where life isn't fair, where life is rarely what it should be. Maybe we've even purchased some life insurance." Page 157
"This freedom to chose is the burden and the gift that we take with use when we come to childhood's end." Page 158
Dreams and Realities
"Growing up means letting go of the dearest megalomaniacal dreams of our childhood. Growing up means knowing they can't be fulfilled. Growing up means gaining the wisdom and skills to get what we want within the limitations imposed by reality- which consists of diminished powers, restricted freedoms and, with the people we love, imperfect connections.
A reality built, in part, upon the acceptance of our neccessary losses." Page 161
"Fanatasies can provide us with the magical solution, the fairy-tale ending. In fantasies we can do what we want to do. It is pleasing when our G-rated hollywood happily-ever-afters drift through our consciousness- but they're not the only images that do. For our fantasies also traffic in unabashed glory, X-rated sex and bloody murder. And many of us, recoiling from these glimpses of disreputable desires, will sometimes feel guilty, ashamed and afraid of our fantasies." Page 162
"If ambitious fantasies make people blush, and sexual fantasies make people blush and feel guilty, fantasies of violence and death may make people blush and feel guilty- and frightened too.
This fear has to do with what psychoanalysts call 'magical thinking'- the belief that we can control events with our mind, the belief that in primitive tribes is expressed by sticking pins in dolls and in modern times by sending forth 'bad vibes', the belief that many sophisticated people are shocked to discover they hold: That thoughts indeed do harm. That thoughts can kill." Page 162
"This belief in wish fulfillment, in the omnipotence of thoughts, in the secret, injurious powers that thoughts can possess, belongs to a stage we all pass through and that few of us ever totally outgrow. Given sufficient guilt about some terrible wish of ours, and seeing that terrible wish fulfilled in reality, we find all plausible explanations fleeing from our brain... But even when we aren't afraid of what fantasies can do, we may be afraid of what our fantasies mean, appalled by those fleeting glimpses of our rage and eroticism and grandiosity. Do they represent our reality? do they tell the truth of what we are?... all of us, including the very holiest, have impulses we struggle against every day. And while some of that struggle occurs outside our awareness, there are other urges and wishes- sometimes shaped into those little vignettes we call fantasies- that make us painfully conscious of the person we are trying not to become... For the most part, however, they say that if we could feel less guilty, ashamed and afraid of our fantasies, we could find in them enormous release and relief." Pages 164&5
"as healthy adults we eventually come to understand, as we play our friend spouse parent family roles, the limited nature of every human relationship.
But the trouble with healthy adulthood is that few of us are consistently adult. Furthermore, our conscious goals are often sabotaged unconsciously. For the infantile wishes we sometimes glimpse in dreams or fantasies exercise great power outside our awareness. And these infantile wishes may burden our work and our love with quite impossible expectations... Growing up takes time and we may be a long time learning to balance our dreams and our realities...We may be a long time learning that life is, at best, 'a dream controlled'- that reality is built of imperfect connections." Page 169
Convenience Friends and Historical Friends and Crossroads and Cross-Generational Friends and Friends Who come When You Call at Two in the Morning
"Moving into the world, we try to distinguish fiction from fact, our fantasies and dreams from what actually happens. Moving into the world, we try to accept the compromises of childhood's end. Moving into the world beyond the ties of flesh and blood, we try to form untainted ties of friendship. But these voluntary relationships, like all of our relationships, will have their disappointments as well as their joys." Page 170
"For even if we are lucky enough to have one or two or three beloved 'best friends', friendhsips, we learn, are at best an imperfect connection... the tougher test of friendship is being wholeheartedly able to stand by our friends in their joys... our simultaneous love/hate feelings- begin with the first major figures of our life, and later we transfer some of what we feel toward our [family] onto our spouses, our children and, yes, our friends." Page 171
"Although men, like women, talk about the special importance of their same sex friends, male friendships and female friendships are strikingly different. And considering what we have already learned about women's greater propensity for relatedness, we should not be surprised that studies show men friends to be less open and intimate." Page 174
"The muted sexuality that is present in same-sex friendships is likely to be less muted with male-female friends, making it more difficult for women and men to be nonsexual buddies. In recent years, however, as more arenas have opened up to allow the two sexes to work and play as equals, friendships between men and women- friendships without an erotic agenda- have increased...
In one study, many of the men interviewed said that they felt emotionally closer to their women friends than to their men...
But because of sexual pull, the greater legitimacy given to heterosexual longings, male-female friendships are rarer than same-sex friendships. And when men and women achieve them, notes psychoanalyst Leo Rangell, they usually fit into one of the following categories:
Those that are, in effect, a same-sex relationship-
'I think of her as myself or as I would another man.'
Those that are, in effect, a family relationship- 'I think of him as my father, my brother, my son.'
And those that develop from a platonic palship to disguised-
or perhaps quite undisguised- sexual love." Page 177
"But friendship provides the setting for forms of pleasure and personal growth that may not be found on the wilder shores of love.
In adolescent friendships we use our friends, as we use our lovers, to discover, confirm and consolidate what we are. To some extent we will always use them that way...
Friends broaden our horizons. They serve as new models with whom we can identify. They allow us to be ourself- and accept us that way. They enhance our self-esteem because they think we're okay, because we matter to them. And because they matter to us- for various reasons, at various levels of intensity- they enrich the quality of our emotional life.
Even though, with most of our friends, we form imperfect connections. Even though most of our friends are 'friends in spots'." Page 178
"we established the following categories of friendship:
1. Convenience friends. These are the neighbor or office mate or member of our car pool whose lives routinely intersect with ours... But we don't, with convenience friends, ever come too close or tell too much: We maintain our public face and emotional distance... But which doesn't mean that there isn't sufficient value to be found in these friendships of mutual aid, in convenience friends.
2. Special-interest friends. These friendships depend on the sharing of some activity or concern... We meet to participate jointly in knocking a ball across a net, or saving the world...
And as with convenience friends, we can, with special-interest friends, be regularly involved without being intimate.
3. Historical friends. With luck we also have a friend who knew us... way back when... The years have gone by, they have gone separate ways, they have little in common now, but they still are an intimate part of each other's past.
4. Crossroads friends. Like historical friends, our crossroads friends are important for what was- for the friendsip we shared ar a crucial, now past, time of life... With historical friends and crossroads friends, we forge links strong enough to endure with not much more contact than once-a-year letters at Christmas, maintaining a special intimacy- dormant but always ready to be revived- on those rare but tender occassions when we meet.
5. Cross-generational friends. Another tender intimacy- tender but unequal- exists in the friendships that form across generations, the friendships that once woman calls her daughter-mother and her mother-daughter relationships. Across the generations the younger enlivens the older, the older instructs the younger. Each role, as mentor or quester, as adult or child, offers gratifications of its own...
6. Close friends. Emotionally and physically we maintain some ongoing friendships of deep intimacy... And intimacy means trusting that our friends- although they don't, and should not, think we're perfect- will see our virtues as foreground, our vices as blur. 'To be her friend', said a friend of the late political-activist and writer Jenny Moore, 'was to be for a little while
as good as you wish you were.'" Pages 179-181
"Analyst McMahon writes that 'growth demands relatedness' and that intimacy produces continuing growth thoughout our life because being known affirms and strengthens the self. He quotes philosopher Martin Buber, who says that all real living is a meeting between I and Thou and that 'through the Thou'- through close encounters in which we open ourselves to each other- 'a man becomes I'." Page 181
"Close friendships require a sense of self, an interest in other people, empathy and loyalty and commitment. They also require the letting go- the necessary loss- of some of our fantasies of ideal friendship." Page 182
"Two people, two adults, will never match each other perfectly. Even the best of friends are friends in spots... But we may, in fact, have friends whom we will have to indulge and forgive for admiring Clint Eastwood movies and disdaining Yeats. And, sometimes, for failing us." Page 183
"And yet, despite the ambivalence, the restricted sexuality and the fact that friends are friends only in spots, the friendships we create may be as strong, and sometimes stronger, than those we form through flesh and blood and law- comforting and exuberant, 'sacred and miraculous' connections." Page 184
Love and Hate in the Married State
"Our friends are less than perfect. We accept their imperfections and pride ourselves on our sense of reality. But when it comes to love we stubbornly cling to our illusions- to conscious and unconscious visions of how things should be. When it comes to love- to romantic love and sexual love and married love- we have to learn again, with difficulty, how to let go of all kinds of expectations." Page 185
"Freud furthermore reminds us that even the deepest love relationship will not be proof against ambivalence and that even the happiest marriage will harbor some portion of hostile feelings... The good news is that sometimes the bond between a husband and wife is stronger than any damage that can be done to it. The bad news is that no two adults can do each other more damage than husband and wife." Page 186
Les Sylphides
So they were married- to be the more together-
And found they were never again so much together,
Divided by the morning tea,
By the evening paper,
By children and tradesmen's bills.
Waking at times in the night she found assurance
In his rgular breathing but wondered whether
It was really worth it and where
The river had flowed away
And where were the whilte flowers.
Page 187
"There are marriages where the projective identification and complementarity are quite constructive. But whenever essential needs unmesh, there is risk. And ironically, two partners locked in a pathological marriage may stick together neurotically ever after, while wholer and healthier couples who are able to change and grow may rupture the arrangements that hold them together.
Ironically, the thrust of human development may also contribute to tensions in marriage... It has been argued that the fact that men are men and women are women- two different species?- is a fundamental cause of conflict in marriage." Page 195
That pain and fear and hate... will continue to permeate male-female relationships until men and women raise their children together." Page 196
"The bad news is that no two adults can do each other more damage than husband and wife. The good news is that love can survive the hate." Page 198
"For studies consistently show that 'more wives than husbands report marital frustration and dissatisfaction; more report negative feelings...
To these studies add the following findings: That wives 'conform more to husbands' expectations than husbands do to wives'.
Sociologist Jessie Bernard concludes that the cost of marriage is higher for wives than for husbands. She says the same marriage is different for women and men... And in terms of good mental health, of psychological well-being, all the studies show that his marriage is better." Page 199
"Perhaps, says psychoanalyst Leon Altman, we could love better if we could hate more cheerfully... And perhaps we could hate more cheerfully if we could keep in mind the compelling finding that animal studies reveal: That there are no personal bonds without aggression. That animals devoid of aggression band without bonding, unite anonymously." Page 201
"'All human relationships must end,' Kernberg reminds us in discussing the characteristics of mature love, 'and the threat of loss, abandonment and, in the last resort, of death is greatest where love has most depth.' But awareness of this offers something more than a glimpse into grim reality; 'awareness of this,' he writes, 'also deepens love'." Page 200
"In time we will face the knowledge of what we can never, never expect from one another.
These lost expectations are necessary losses." Page 201
Saving the Children
"A new dream will arise when we begin to have our babies- the dream of keeping them safe from every harm. But even the loftiest schemes for our children's happiness and well-being may be less than ideal from our children's point of view. And although we yearn to save them from the perils and pains of life, there are limits to what we can and ought to do. We will have to let go of so much of what we hoped we could do for our children. And, of course, we will have to let go of our children too." Page 205
"Because separation ends sweet symbiosis. Because separation reduces our power and control. Because separation makes us feel less needed, less important. And because separation exposes our children to danger... For many mothers do believe that their actual bodily presence stands between their children and all harm. It is, I confess, a belief that I used to share. I once (I know this sounds ludicrous) was positive that as long as I was right there, my sons couldn't choke to death on a piece of meat... One father says that what he used to do when his son first learned to crawl was to get down on the floor and crawl behind him, 'so that,' he explains, 'if an overhead light fixture suddenly fell from the ceiling, I could catch it before it landed on his head.'... Several mothers confessed to me that in any new situation, when leaving their child at camp or a friend's house or school, they spend an absurd amount of time attempting to describe to the surrogate parent every nuance and need of their child's personality." Pages 206&7
We sometimes may not be aware that it is hard for us to separate from our children, and that we are holding on to them too tightly. And this absense of awareness can sometimes make our separation problem their problem...Painful separation in our own early-childhood history can color our separation from our children. Through them we relive the past and may try to repair it... Our problem with separation is not just a matter of physical distance; it involves our children's emotional separateness too. We may rush in too eagerly with assistance and advice... we may have trouble allowing them to be what they wish to be and, within reason, to do what they wish to do. We may even give them too much understanding. For believe it or not, there is a creature called the 'too-good mother', the mother who insistently gives too much, the mother who stunts development by not allowing her child to feel any frustration. Furthermore such mothers may hasten to empathize so totally and immediately that their children can't tell if their feelings are really their own... Parents often have trouble seeing their children as separate people who are moving, psychologically, away... Part of letting our children go is also letting them be, and that means letting go of our expectations for them. For consciously and unconsciously, even before they are born, we dream many dreams about what kind of children we want." Pages 208&9
"As improvements on ourself we expect our children not to posess any of our less appealing qualities... As our second chance in life we expect our children gratefully to make use of the opportunities we offer them... Growing up under our roof, our children, directly and obliquely, will be exposed to our values, our styles, our views. But letting them go eventually means respecting their right to choose the shape of their life.
Letting our children go, and letting our dreams for our children go, must be counted among our necessary losses." Page 210
"Winnicott, who has written approvingly about what he calls 'primary maternal preoccupation'- a mother's consuming investment in her new child- also describes the importance of her readiness 'to let go...as the infant needs to become separate.' He concedes that it is 'a difficult thing for a mother to separate from her infant at the same speed at which the infant needs to become separate from her,' but, as he so frequently notes in his writings, it is the good-enough mother's carefully calibrated failure of adaptation, her failure to give him everything he needs, that permits her child slowly...slowly to learn to tolerate frustration, to acquire a sense of reality and to learn to get some of what he needs for himself." Page 211
"But the need for a mother- and father- to emotionally let go isn't a one-time event that occurs in infancy. In the course of defining themselves and expanding the realm of their autonomy, our children will tug at the ties again and again. And we will renegotiate our relationship with our children not only as boys and girls but as women and men, passing through many stages of separation." Page 212
"The fear that this woman is speaking of is distressingly familiar. It is fear that almost all mothers share: that our flaws as a person and parent will do permanent harm to our children and that even our best intentions will not protect them." Page 213
"Despite our resolutions, we will sometimes catch ourselves mistreating our children the way we were mistreated. And in various other guises, using our daughters and sons as the characters in our drama, we may re-enact hurtful parts of our own early history... And we fear that our imperfect love will harm our children... What is true, however, is that we can glut ourselves with how-to-raise-children information and that we can strive to become more mature and aware but that none of this will spare us from the- yes- inevitablilty that some of the time we are going to fail our children." Pages 214&15
"We will have to give up the hope that, if we try hard, we somehow will always do right by our children. The connection is imperfect. We will sometimes do wrong.
Facing our fallibility as mothers and as fathers is another of our necessary losses.
But human beings have always been raised by fallible human beings. All we have to be is good enough...
There is what some psychiatrists call the True Dilemma Theory of Parenthood: that no matter how much of our life we devote to our children, the result is not entirely within our control. For what happens to them will also depend on the world beyond the family. It will also depend on the world inside their head. It will also depend on the nature they have been born with. And from the very beginning, it will depend on how badly or how well each individual baby and mother connect with each other." Page 216
"Although we can't claim full credit or blame for the child we bring into the world, we are- after birth- the prime fashioners of his envirionment. And even if we and our baby are temperamentally out of sync we can, with help, with growth, with an understanding of what's going on, better adapt to his needs and improve the fit... But 'what happens' in childhood includes both external events- what actually happens to children out there- and internal events- what happens to them in there... And no matter how much we love them our love may not be enough to protect them from feelings of inadequacy or abandonment... because every child is born with certain qualities, with cetain styles and tendencies, certain 'givens', his nature is going to interact with the nurture he receives in unique and sometimes unpredictable ways. This interaction occurs not merely in the outside world but in that inner world between his ears. Thus it's not just a person's experience, but the way in which he experiences his experience, which confers its psychological meaning upon him." Pages 218&19
"On the one hand, then, there are times when, although a child's outer world, his 'real' world, is quite benign, his inner world may flood him with anxiety... For research reveals that not everyone who suffers a damaging childhood grows up to be a damaged human being. And some boys and girls display, in the face of assault and deprivation, such abilities to adjust and survive and triumphantly prevail that they have been actually labeled 'the invulnerables'... It is clear that the constant interplay of inner and outer reality together shapes the human personality... It is true that emotional injury can occur at any age. It is true that all through life a person may alter and repair his past experience... what happens in childhood matters enormously... the early years are our children's most crucial and vulnerable years because their psyche- their 'soul'- is first taking form. But we must also understand that, though we might rather feel guilty than helpless, there are limits to the power parents possess. We also must understand that in both their outside world and the world inside their head, there are dangers in the lives of these children we desperately- so desperately- long to protect over which we have no control...
Our fantasy is that if we are good and loving parents, we can hold the tigers and thorns at bay. Our fantasy is that we can save our children.
Reality will find us late at night, when our children are out and the telephone rings. Reality will remind us- in that heart-stopping moment before we pick up the phone- that anything, that any horror, is possible. Yet although the world is perilous and the lives of children are dangerous to their parents, they still must leave, we still must let them go. Hoping that we have equipped them for their journey. Hoping that they will wear their boots in the snow. Hoping that when they fall down, they can get up again. Hoping." Pages 220, 221, & 222