14 Quotes by Stephen A. Mitchell

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

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.

This fear manifested in Harvey’s self-protective vigilance with the analyst, his continually orchestrating the analytic experience rather than allowing himself to rely on the analyst.

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.