Quotable Quotes
“The earliest stages of the infant and the maternal care belong to each other and cannot be disentangled”
Winnicott
The common place for adolescents to seek, and hopefully find, containment
What are peer groups?
Explanatory, descriptive and vitalizing.
What are the three levels of analytic work and levels of meaning?
The quality in the analyst that needs to be rediscovered or discovered for the first time by the patient.
What is reliability?
The opposite of aesthetic.
What is anesthetic?
“The individual is a group animal at war, not simply with the group, but with himself for being a group animal and with those aspects of his personality that constitute his ‘groupishness.’”
Bion
The World as an Udder best describes this aspect of adolescence.
What is adolescent narcissism?
The capacity to tolerate anxiety and pain and bear thinking is similar to this.
What is the depressive position?
The phase prior to word presentation and the use of and word symbols.
What is infancy? Where the infant depends on maternal care and empathy rather than an understanding of what could be expressed verbally.
This occurs when an infant or child experiences a mother as emotionally inaccessible and takes over maternal functioning.
What is pseudo maturity and premature ego development?
“I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me!”
Maurice Sendak, The Night Kitchen
Latency attempts to keep at bay disturbing emotions with these two strategies.
What are procedure and method?
We need to stay in touch with this in order to get the words, tone and tact right.
What is the deepest feelings the patient has invoked in us?
Anxiety that precedes castration anxiety or separation anxiety developmentally.
What is annihilation anxiety?
One of the conditions essential for healthy cognitive/emotional development.
What is a sense of efficacy or agency?
“Hope and trust in the existence of goodness, as can be observed in everyday life helps people through great adversity, and effectively counteracts persecution.”
Klein
These two capacities will ultimately determine if an adolescent can emerge from a state of pathological narcissism
What are separation and individuation?
Like a work of art, psychoanalysis can sometimes manage this.
What is to stop time?
The inherited potential of an infant cannot become an infant unless linked to this.
What is maternal care?
According to Johann Norman the meaning of language is both of these.
What is lexical and non-lexical?
“Innately perhaps, Georgie was well-endowed with the capacity to recognize and protect that which was good, with relatively little interference from envious and destructive aspects of himself.”
Reid
The phrase or concept that describes the vulnerabilities exposed in adolescence that relate to injury or developmental issues had at earlier junctures. Hint: things don’t break apart randomly, but in….
What are planes of cleavage?
Pre-verbal emotions and phantasies revived in the transference.
What are memories in feeling?
The “total environmental provision” for the infant at the earliest stage of care.
What is holding?
Why is working with infants before they have fully developed ego and language development a good idea?
They have a unique flexibility and a window for undoing issues that before they become crystallized as part of the inner world and infant’s personality structure. This allows the primary object relationship to be re-cast