„Traumatic disappointments suffered during these archaic stages of the development of the idealized self-object deprive the child of the gradual internalization of early experiences of being optimally soothed, or of being aided in going to sleep. Such individuals remain thus fixated on aspects of archaic objects and they find them, for example, in the form of drugs. The drug, however, serves not as a substitute for loved or loving objects, or for a relationship with them, but as a replacement for a defect in the psychological structure.” (Kohut, 1971, p.46)

The passage struck me because it draws a line that looks small but matters enormously in clinical work. We’re used to hearing that a drug replaces a relationship — that it soothes what the people around the user failed to soothe. On this reading, substance use becomes an expression of relational suffering.

Kohut is saying something quite different, and it reframes not only how we think about addiction, but how we think about using AI. If a drug replaced a person, then what’s missing would be an object of desire that was lost — and treatment would mean supplying a good-enough object able to make up for that loss. A relationship would fix it. But clinical reality doesn’t cooperate with that story.

Once you’re talking about a substitute for missing structure, the picture changes considerably. However good the present-day relationship is, it still can’t do the job that needs doing — the dependent person’s actual sense of well-being. Because the problem was never the absence or presence of someone. It’s the absence of an internal apparatus that does the work — soothing, continuity, inner equilibrium — without needing outside help (the way it works for most people). Kohut’s point is that the substance doesn’t take the place of a person. It takes the place of the part of the structure whose job was soothing, continuity, equilibrium.

This explains something that would otherwise stay puzzling: why people in good, functioning relationships can remain dependent on a substance, and why the idea that love cures everything simply doesn’t hold up. However real the care around someone is, it can’t reach the level where that structural deficit actually sits.

If that’s true, I found myself asking whether AI could take over this function — a present, available object with capacities that look, or seem, genuinely useful here. I think the answer is a qualified one. On availability, AI has a clear edge over a therapist or any other person. If what’s needed is not reacting with hostility even under attack, it manages that well. If what’s needed is not collapsing internally — the way people sometimes do under criticism — it holds. Though of course, being too perfect can itself be a problem. Does it get tired? Never — barring a dropped internet connection. So yes: AI can be there constantly, never overwhelmed by need, never vindictive. As long as it’s built that way — and that qualification matters.

Where it doesn’t hold up is on the word inside the Kohut passage: gradual. Or optimal. Or calibrated. If a relationship never disappoints you in any real sense — because it has no needs of its own, no schedule of its own, no genuine limits — the structure Kohut is describing simply cannot form. No structure, no function. And without the internal function, you’re left needing someone from outside to hold you up whenever things get hard.

It’s precisely the friction between two human beings that builds structure. And why would you ever build the capacity yourself, if an external function is sitting there, always on call?

The obvious objection: couldn’t that optimal disappointment just be programmed in? I think it could be simulated — but what would still be missing is intentionality of its own, motivation of its own, independent of the other person’s need. A parent says no because they’re tired, because they have their own limits, because in that moment they want something else — not because they were calibrated to serve the child’s best interest.

What’s above is only a psychoanalytic angle on one small slice of inner life. Psychoanalysis draws these pictures of how we work from years and years spent with people who genuinely wanted to be explored. Moving the attention from behavior — from what’s visible — to the invisible, often hard-to-think inner dynamics brings up findings like this one, which help explain why, sometimes, even when things look fine on the surface, change doesn’t happen the way we’d expect.

It’s true that on days like this I sometimes get a two-hour lunch break, which is a luxury. That’s how today is. So I decide to go out, into the city, for a quick escape.

My city is Ploiești. It isn’t big, and you don’t have many options in it, but I think you have the important ones, so I go to the store to get myself something to eat. I was born in Ploiești, but I’ve lived in it since ninth grade. To me it seems this city hasn’t changed at all since then. Everyone from there, I think, knows that particular alley — the one that smells of every bodily need relieved in the open... yes, yes, the one downtown. I wonder what it would be like to walk through there once and have it smell of nothing. I think it would feel confusing. Or to not have three or four pharmacies standing side by side... a second-hand shop somewhere nearby... and always — but always — people keeping their eyes on the ground? You see, then, that I know Ploiești by smell (ah, the refineries) and by the invisible weight on its shoulders.

Something is missing in Ploiești... something essential... or maybe that essential something never existed, and so it’s pointless to look for it... that’s how Ploiești has always been, and still is.

*

The news broke of economic changes. A VAT increase, a freeze on public-sector wages, cuts to bonuses, new excise duties — measures that, at least at first glance, satisfy no one. Everyone wants wages to rise, myself included — why not? — but how that might actually be possible doesn’t seem to matter. And suddenly the landscape turns bleak and the great institutions appear to be under pressure. Enormous sums, more than I can wrap my head around, vanished in years past, and now we have to pay. Did we make them disappear?

The gap between describing consequential realities and asking childish questions — well, what now? — or offering false “solutions” of the kind — you did this! — strikes me as troubling in the highest degree.

Then comes the thought of the no-confidence motion and the government’s fall. Which, of course, happens. It was foreseeable, and foreseen. But what fault is it of ours?

Then the avalanche — which seems, and I believe truly is, endless — of lies from nearly every political camp. Who did what, who’s doing what, who’s going to help us?

*

Feelings like these made me look a little more closely — not only at my own states of mind, but at a somewhat wider terrain... my Romania, so to speak. I made a few subjective forays into history and group psychology, under the umbrella of psychoanalysis. I gathered some material and I’m laying it out here, leaving open spaces here and there which, as some psychoanalytic authors say, you will surely make the effort to fill with your own reflections — a valuable process in itself.

About history... nothing but good things to say; I never liked history — the school subject — and I never made any effort to understand it. I understood why much later. As I recall, my last real interaction with history was in my first year of psychology-and-sociology studies, where it felt to me like a nut thrown against a wall, and all I retained was that my professor had racist leanings, and that if you displayed those on the exams, you were rewarded. In psychology school, we studied our professors just as much as our textbooks.

That bloated subject matter of our glorious past created the same kind of mental duality — we were once so great, and today...? Today the scoundrels have overrun us... what could that even mean?

One day, God knows how, but certainly with the belated feeling of destiny catching up, I read Lucian Boia’s Why Is Romania Different? — I read it in one breath, with a slight stomach-turning embarrassment. I knew we believed ourselves the pinnacle of the world, but I didn’t know we were actually looking through the other end of the digestive tube... we’re looking through our own ass and calling it tunnel vision, which is why we always see the little light at the end of the.......

But that was only the first reaction.

I went looking for how Romania organized itself over time, starting from the strange sensation, always present in current conflicts, that we have no clear strategy for approaching things — or if we do, we can’t follow it consistently. And I found things so interesting that I won’t bring in here anything except what serves my present purpose.

Here is how Boia speaks about this ongoing process:

It is natural for every nation to respect and love its history, but it is an illusion — one that can become dangerous — that history has already marked out the road that lies ahead. Today’s responsibility is ours, not our ancestors’; the future is not built by looking to the past. (Boia, 2025, p.250)

What I took from this was an understanding that every justification I hear about what was or wasn’t done “before us” might just be a defense against the powerlessness or ignorance of solving the present, an often awkward attempt to escape a lack of initiative and energy. Of course, instead of the right action — that is, an adequate solution to a real and correctly identified problem — we don’t just turn our gaze to the past, we also blame “the others.” Is there any point bringing in examples from present-day socio-political life? The real effort today, indeed, is to be able to discern amid the crowd of lies and justifications.

The same holds for the pattern used throughout our history; naturally, countless examples can be found there too. In fact, the strongest impression I came away with after reading *History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness* was this: the facts of the past have most often been used to ground a present-day position. That fact matters not just as an illustration of Romanian mytho-history, but even more as a strategy for approaching problems. And yes, I don’t mean to suggest that only we Romanians do this. Probably every people has done it. It’s possible, though, that with us more of it has stuck around. And that matters, because it says something about how reality has been approached.

We find another way of saying the same thing further on in Boia’s book:

In 1866, the Romanians had nothing better to do than copy the Belgian constitution; in 1948, they copied the Soviet one. This spirit of imitation reveals the fragility and instability of Romanian society, always searching for reference points, and all too easily turning them into myth. (Boia, 2025, p.315)

It’s worth underlining this aspect of imitation. Is it something unnatural? Not in the least — many other countries have done more or less the same. And of course it matters that we didn’t just imitate, but that something in our fiber took it up and consolidated it. I think we can formulate a hypothesis about this. In any case, it seems to me that imitation is part of natural growth, but doesn’t occupy the whole of it. I might be wrong, but when I think about a person’s development, I know that alongside imitation comes something from within, something that grows organically and belongs to every living organism. Doesn’t something similar happen with a group, a country? In a fertile environment, don’t both imitation and creativity take place?

Boia again:

Reference points, models, myths: we are far from a clear choice. A phenomenon that is, in fact, natural: over a century and a half, the Romanian nation has been traumatized by three great ruptures: the separation from the East, then the separation from the West through the installation of communism, and finally, the separation from communism and the hesitant return to the Western fold. All of these forced the presence of multiple and contradictory models, meant to give sense and coherence to an endless transition. Modern Romanian civilization is essentially a civilization of transition: hence the feverish search for what others can offer, hence, no less, the fear of what might be lost through contact with others, hence, therefore, the amalgam of fascination and rejection — in other words, the obsession with foreignness. (Boia, 2025, p.323)

These lines strike me as extremely rich; they underline the fact that we are in a state of growth — that is, we haven’t yet found our rhythm, our direction isn’t clearly set. Looking to see what others can offer comes as a natural tendency to search for the right nourishment for ourselves, nourishment we still don’t know for certain; that gets discovered through the direct experience of and through growth. Of course, speaking this way assumes that at the start we are being fed while we search for food. The second thing underlined in the quoted passage is the fear of what we might lose through contact — beautiful, very beautiful. Of course something is always lost in growth, just as something is always gained. You just need to have the right growing environment, whose conditions we’ll discuss a bit further on. Put differently, the fear is justified by the reality of loss. In the same way we might think — and here I’m drawing on individual depth psychology — that the fear of loss is also our own aggressiveness and destructiveness manifesting in the process of growth. For the individual, the environment — that is, the mother — ensures that a bite of the breast doesn’t produce a disaster. For a country, what might be the container that allows the development of the mechanisms through which it can survive its inherent crises? The quote also underlines fascination and rejection — this back-and-forth between near and far, I-want-you and I-reject-you, I-need-you and I-need-my-own-space. It might seem like I’m forcing the language of individual psychology to fit the socio-group level. Maybe I am, but I still see an advantage in raising the question this way.

Growth, however, isn’t served well by trauma — and here we’re talking about it. In fact, not one trauma but three. And not just three, but somehow layered on top of one another, without time for recovery and mourning. I’ll come back to these points and unpack their importance more fully.

Aware that a pile of facts isn’t a justification — I wouldn’t want to fall into exactly the trap I was describing above — still, all these aspects seem to me relevant to the current context. What I mean is that in any evolution there have been and will be growth spurts, but I think the rule is more a kind of continuity within multiplicity. Boia says that over the last two centuries we’ve kept searching for models that would suit us — democratic, communist, democratic again — but after communism (when things were never quite the same as before it). Searching is good, and it seems to be a process that, essentially, everyone has gone through, a world Romanians are part of. That we haven’t found it, or that if we have found it, as seems the case now, we’re still ambivalent about it — that could be true. And I think that has a meaning that can take shape through adding other perspectives.

This exercise of reading Boia did me a great deal of good by loosening an old, rusted-over conception I didn’t want to return to, out of fear of a huge sense of wasted time — which is what history was, for me. But reading it in one breath, I saw, as if in a film, how, from era to era, the greater and lesser figures produced by this people read the past in their own way. Of course each one read it so that it would suit them somehow, so that it would help them take one more step down the path they’d set for themselves. It sounds very logical, but we still forget what history means. I said at the start that I understood why I never liked history, and here’s how:

In school textbooks, the revolutionary phenomenon of 1848 ends up being completely homogenized and presented to students in such a way that they no longer understand anything at all. The only remaining criterion is chronological, and unity has to show through — the text carries you, with no logical connection, from Iași to Lugoj and from Blaj to Bucharest. (Boia, 2025, p.274)

In other words, no — it isn’t that I disliked history... it’s that I genuinely couldn’t make sense of it. And then he goes on to say:

Beyond the untruth, beyond what is, consciously or not, a political manipulation through history, there is a further, serious flaw hiding here: a lack of responsibility. The teacher “knows” it is good to say things this way; regardless of what he truly believes, he feels safe doing so. An exaggeration in a “patriotic” register feels more convenient to him than settling on the unstable ground of a critical and intelligent history. Unfortunately, students end up doing nothing but memorizing an endless litany, when the real vocation of history should be precisely the exercise of intelligence. History seems to have remained fixed on the goal of forming patriots, not people capable of judging the world and its events independently. In fact, not even patriotic feelings can be cultivated through a stereotyped, however persuasive, discourse. (Boia, 2025, p.278)

I think this is exactly the essential point — the exercise of intelligence cannot be carried out with falsehoods and perspectives that suffer, not just from narrowness at times, but from a serious affliction: an inability to tolerate a different perspective. And more often than not, it’s precisely that difference which enriches each perspective and the larger picture.

And again the question arises, seemingly even more pressing — how do we carry out this exercise of intelligence, since it doesn’t seem to be working for us? And if it isn’t, why is that? Are we missing something, or is this also part of a larger range of phenomena that gives it a meaning and a direction? Our author puts it this way:

Leaving mythology behind requires becoming aware that Romania’s fate, for better or worse, lies in Romanian hands, and that overestimating adversity is a convenient excuse, but one that resolves, at most, momentary political interests. (Boia, 2025, p.325)

Seeing how history has been used as a political tool frees the mind toward questions. Questions are a good path toward an exercise of intelligence. All we need is a study room, a desk, and a way of investigating these problems. Every study we want to undertake has to take into account the concrete and conceptual environment in which it will take place, the state of the moment, but also the deeper intention guiding it. And that’s not just because we need to feel comfortable while we study, but especially because all these factors subtly shape the thread of our thoughts.

Standing against all this — if we reconnect to the present — is the appalling landscape, full of lies, of the current political moment. But that, too, is no accident, since “...the logic of double-speak belongs to the very core of communist ideology” (Boia, 2025, p.154). In fact, communism trained us, we having waited for it on fertile ground. Yes, it’s true that the training ran deep. Just as it’s true that the logic of double-speak isn’t limited to communism. Communism took hold with us also because the general environment of our development showed a certain difficulty of organization — I’d call it not-yet-organization rather than disorganization. To stay in today’s language, perhaps then, as now, our capacity for what we call critical thinking wasn’t very well exercised. Not because we couldn’t have had it back then, but simply because it wasn’t the moment.

The next step I intend to take is toward a specific way of looking at group dynamics. What I’m after isn’t proving some particular point, but drawing other meanings out of a rich present. In fact, reading one of the books by Bion, the psychoanalyst, in which he set out, in his characteristic style, to address lying, I found myself wondering how it is that in the socio-political space I inhabit, lying is so highly valued. And the thread I followed is the one I want to tell you about here.

First, Bion sees lying as a rather troubling symptom, because he sees it as a manifestation of disorganization — he tells us: “I agree that it is often a symptom of a disorganized personality” (Bion, 2019, p.222). This frightened me at first, because seeing how widespread it is in public life, I said to myself, as people do — what a mad world! But since pessimism isn’t characteristic of me, I kept reading and kept wondering. Something else emerged from Bion’s text: that lying appears above all when there’s a certain emotional atmosphere in the group, one marked by rivalry and hostility. In that atmosphere, people tend to lie more. But what is this emotional atmosphere of the group about?

The two essential aspects through whose lens we can begin to observe a group are: the group’s work objective (which he calls the working group) and the emotional atmosphere (for him, the basic assumptions).

Very interesting things can be said about the work group — since it’s a group with a clearly defined objective, it can organize itself to reach that objective. The way it does so is meaningful and can offer important information about consistency, stability, strategy, and so on. A group that wants to reach a work objective is, in a sense, obliged to stay in contact with reality. If it sinks into other internal contents, it will lose direction and slip into other dynamics, characteristic of the basic emotional assumptions. So we see that having a clearly specified pact, with clear rules and, of course, clear consequences when those rules aren’t followed, would be an indicator of contact with reality, and would allow for a critical analysis of the undertaking in question. In other words, we can trace step by step where we are, because we have markers to orient ourselves by.

On the other hand, the group in which the emotional atmosphere dictates the dynamic looks somewhat different. Bion spoke of three kinds of such emotional assumptions capable of driving a group: dependency, the fight-flight pairing, and the tendency to pair off. In any group, at some point, these tendencies become visible. They act as a kind of background to the work activity, and what matters is their intensity. To find a societal counterpart for them, Bion tells us that the Church is the institution addressed by the group led by the dependency assumption. For the fight-or-flight assumption, of course, the Army. For the pairing tendency, two-by-two, he points to the Aristocracy, and its logic is a messianic one: the group lives in the hope that something will be born from the pair — a savior who doesn’t yet exist. And here is the strange and beautiful part: this hope must never be fulfilled. If the messiah really were born, the group would lose its purpose, since it doesn’t live by fulfillment, but by waiting.

What does this mean? Nothing more than that when dependency is active in the large group, its members will look to the Church for a saving figure, a messiah to restore their balance. When they feel attacked, the group’s members will look toward the Army, as the institution deserving of esteem and appreciation (because it comes with the promise of ensuring balance and calm). And when waiting reigns — the hope that from somewhere, from the future, someone or something will come to solve everything — they will gather around a couple, a promise, a person who hasn’t yet shown their power but from whom everything is expected.

*

I feel that, before continuing, I need to bring up a Bionian idea — one I consider somehow central to this psychoanalytic thinker’s theory, and of the greatest importance both to the subject at hand and in general. I mean the fact that Bion built his whole framework around the distinction between the capacity to bear pain and the avoidance of it. More than that, and this is of the greatest importance, Bion was able to distinguish, among all lies, the one that is recognized as a lie by the person telling it, yet cannot be given up, because if that person were to meet the reality of the truth, their psychic system would explode — meaning that the psychic disturbance produced by the impact of encountering the truth of reality would be devastating.

*

The distinction between the working group and the group led by basic affective assumptions is essential, because it illuminates how the group relates to reality, and thus makes efficiency possible. Bion develops his understanding of the large group’s effectiveness and names it clearly: the group’s function is to discover an exceptional person, whom he calls the mystic. Now, the word can mislead (which isn’t unusual when dealing with Bion). Here are his words:

The “exceptional individual” may be described variously as genius, messiah, mystic, and his followers may be many or few. The negative group declares itself hostile to the promise in a way that may be imperceptible to ordinary individuals but is apparently clear to the gifted individual who seeks a more congenial atmosphere for the exercise of his gifts. For ease of expression I shall use the term “mystic” to describe such exceptional individuals. I would include scientists, and Newton is a remarkable example of such a man; his mystical and religious preoccupations have been dismissed as an aberration when they should be regarded as the matrix from which his mathematical formulations evolved. (Bion, 2019, p.274)

And now the somewhat harder part:

The mystic may declare himself revolutionary, or may claim that his function is to fulfil the laws, conventions, and destiny of his group. It would be surprising if any genuine mystic were not regarded by the group as a mystical nihilist at some point in his career. It would be equally surprising if he were not, in fact, nihilistic towards some group, if only for the reason that the nature of his contribution will certainly be destructive of the laws, conventions, culture and hence coherence of a group within the group, if not of the group as a whole. (Bion, 2019, p.275)

The way I understand the idea of the “mystic” refers to a certain, deeper contact a person has with reality. Such contact produces changes within the person and within the group they belong to. Of course, this opens up a further discussion about the relationship between people and the reality we’re talking about. Bionian analysis carries us onto ground whose abstraction seems strange at first — namely: what is the relationship between a thought and a thinker, between an idea and the mind that is about to think it? The author tells us there are three ways of relating to these ideas of great transformative potential: commensal, symbiotic, and parasitic.

By “commensal” I mean a relationship in which two objects share a third, to the advantage of all three. By “symbiotic” I mean a relationship in which one depends on the other for mutual benefit. By “parasitic” I mean a relationship in which one depends on the other to produce a third element which is destructive of all three. (Bion, 2019, p.302)

The same kind of relations are established between a person, the mystic, and the group they belong to.

In a symbiotic relationship the group is capable of both hostility and goodwill, and the mystic’s contribution is subjected to searching examination. From this examination the group grows in stature, and so does the mystic. An easily observed example of the parasitic relationship is the group’s promotion of the individual into a position in the Establishment, where his energies are diverted from his creative-destructive role and absorbed into administrative functions. His epitaph might be: “He was overwhelmed with honours and sank without trace.” (Bion, 2019, p.287)

You can now transpose this process to the group level. An exceptional individual is one who can be in contact with an idea of such scope that it disrupts the order we’ve grown used to. Even when we know that order could be improved, we still cling to it as part of ourselves. This process of “clinging to” isn’t something bad, something negative... we’re simply beings who need stability in order to actualize the functions we have. This stability is, in a way, the environment we need in order to receive a revolutionary idea, an idea that changes the way we look at things and, ultimately, the way we are. And at the group level, it can change the whole organization.

In Bion’s Attention and Interpretation, you can see these ideas applied to how Christianity was able to contain the shattering ideas of Jesus. In our society, I think the present moment offers plenty of chances to observe such realities. The pressure felt both from within and, somehow, from outside, to belong to a modern, open, Western Europe, is felt by part of the population as dangerous (again, understandable, if we consider our history). But this time, integration no longer comes only in form, but — as Maiorescu would have said — with substance too, meaning with the real, costly change that comes along with it. And it’s precisely this substance that shakes not only those who reject it, but also some (all?) of those who administer it. Hence, I think, the counterbalancing discourses — openly nationalist in some, a more discreet braking in others, a yes-but-slower that adopts the form while postponing the substance. The three types of relation Bion describes are present and visible: the idea is European integration; how groups contain it is very interesting to observe — some are commensal (if it has something good to give us, we take it, but we don’t dissolve as Romanians), others are symbiotic (yes, and we transform ourselves), and others parasitic (yes, and we’re hollowed out from within). There’s also another stance — no, it destroys us — but I’ll speak about that in terms of the attack on linking.

That’s why the mystic cannot avoid the moment when they’re seen as a destroyer or a nihilist. It can’t be otherwise, because the change they propose, arising from their contact with innovative ideas, is an attack on the order that came before. And here Bion introduces another idea that fills out this picture very well:

The institutionalization of words, of religions, of psychoanalysis — all are particular instances of the institutionalization of memory, so that it can “contain” mystical revelation and its creative and destructive force. The function of the group is to produce a genius; the function of the Establishment is to take over and absorb the consequences, so that the group is not destroyed. (Bion, 2019, p.290)

The link between the mystic and society/group is carried out through what Bion calls the Establishment. That group of people — the board of directors, if you like — has the role of somehow arranging the mystic’s ideas and placing them into formulations that are more or less digestible for the larger group.

From a certain point of view, contact with reality, for Bion, can be understood as contact with a new and true idea. The character of truth is essential for Bion and is, in fact, the central vertex of psychoanalysis (at least of his psychoanalysis). This contact, when symbiotic, produces conflict, and conflict is looked at closely and from several perspectives. It produces growth. Stagnation, from this point of view, is really stagnation within a single idea. When a person’s discourse stays roughly the same over the years, you realize that they’ve stood still, that they haven’t let any new idea disturb the balance they’ve found. A new and true idea changes not only your perspective, but the way you live your life.

When the relationship with the new and true idea is parasitic, something bad happens: “The link between one mind and another that leads to the destruction of both is the lie,” Bion tells us (Bion, 2019, p. 91).

Provisionally, we may consider that the difference between a true thought and a lie lies in the fact that a thinker is logically necessary for the lie but not for the true thought. No one needs to think the true thought: it waits for the appearance of the thinker who acquires significance by means of the true thought. The lie and its thinker are inseparable; the thinker is of no importance to the truth, but truth is logically necessary to the thinker. His significance depends on whether he will harbour the thought or not, but the thought itself remains unaltered. (Bion, 2019, p.308)

The reversal Bion carries out through these lines is the kind of idea that shifts the axis, and one the mind can refuse to understand, precisely because it might require an internal reorganization. What’s being examined is the relationship between an individual and an idea: the true idea has no need of the individual; put differently, when you adhere to a true idea, your value increases not through yourself, but through the idea. When the value of the idea is given by the mind, then it’s a lie — the kind that needs a mind. This is how we can understand the way an idea settles into a mind, and how we can track the mind to understand its relationship with the idea.

By way of conclusion:

The group needs to preserve its cohesion and identity; efforts to this end show up in conventions, laws, culture and language. It also needs the exceptional individual. This might be simple if exceptional individuals declared themselves in unimpeachable terms, and if the nature of their impact on the group, its laws and conventions, could be judged as life-giving or the reverse. The possibility of such discrimination is doubtful, and, centuries later, it may still be debated whether an individual of this kind exerted a beneficial or harmful effect. The same is true of ideas; moreover, groups are hostile or friendly, favorable or unfavorable to the development of the new person or idea. (Bion, 2019, p.274)

*

Now, all these ideas line up in a coherent way, it seems to me. The feeling I had throughout these historical readings, and also over the last two months, in which I followed with some attention the movements of Romanian socio-politics, brought back to mind, repeatedly, this thought about the attack on linking I was talking about. I mentioned earlier the matter of lying, and the fact that links built on lies are destructive — I might even venture to say that they arise from individuals’ inability to bear the pressure of true ideas, and so reality is made bearable by being falsified. But at the same time, this can also mean a divorce from reality. The novel *1984* is the manual that mirrors the process I’m describing here. I think it’s obvious to anyone, at this moment, that the political deadlock in Romania gives the impression of this difficulty in reaching a pact, an understanding. The parties have reached a point where they can no longer talk to one another (even though real dialogue could already have taken place). And I set out to bring in ideas that could offer some orientation in this landscape. If falsification and lying are a structural incapacity to sustain a tension of thought and action, then perhaps where we stand politically can be understood as an attack on linking — the link between thoughts, between people, between nations.

This kind of attack isn’t easy to tell, and it might be that, right here, it’s easiest to drop the thread and stop following it. Because the descent into individual psyche is total, and so the question arises: what relevance can this have for a group dynamic? My answer is that I don’t know how to answer that question except by saying that this is my own way of building meaning out of a sea of unknowns, hoping that this meaning can shed light on new facets of the situation described.

The attack on linking is an internal process that arises between a baby’s mind and outer reality, under the pressure of initial psychic forces. It has to do, on one hand, with the amount of hatred a child is born with, and, on the other hand, with the quality of the growing environment. When intense, disturbing affects — which we consider natural and present from birth — stir within the baby’s internal space, the baby is soothed by the presence of a good-enough mother. If this doesn’t happen, for one reason or another, then the baby’s internal space is exposed to an attack it cannot cope with. And the only way it has available is to break off contact, the link. It will turn not only toward destroying the relationship with reality, which it considers too violent to sustain, but also — perhaps especially — toward its own psychic apparatus, the one that reaches out toward such disturbing reality. It doesn’t destroy only the relationship, but its own mind as well.

The disturbance of the impulse of curiosity on which all learning depends, and the denigration of the mechanism through which it seeks expression, make normal development impossible. (Bion, 2019, p.151)

Further on, Bion tells us that, in this way, the very formulation of the question “why?” is blocked — it simply cannot arise. In fact, I’ve had this experience inside a group, where asking “why is this happening?” was labeled as aggressive, and an answer simply couldn’t be formed. What I felt then was that I had, indeed, crossed every boundary of good sense with my question, in a context where discussion seemed to be allowed. Of course, it’s just as true that the question “why?”, like any other, like any word really, can be used with destructive intent.

In any case, the phenomenon of the attack on linking seems relevant to me in the context of current political movements. As does the difference between being able to digest tension and avoiding it. As does the difference between a group that sets itself an orderly task, one that can be followed — that is, exposed to view and understanding — and a group that acts on the basis of rather obscure means, that is, through statements of a generality that, in fact, say nothing (meanwhile something is happening there, but you don’t know what). I won’t even mention the attacks that come as answers to specific questions. Those, categorically, reveal the weakness or the impossibility of the argument.

The very next step that pressed itself on my attention was to think about what might result from this attack on linking, given that it doesn’t result in complete chaos or massive destruction. I thought I knew what a mind looks like when the attack on linking takes place within it. After the attack, a void appears, a lack of meaning, of life — precisely what the link, the relationship, represents. But a group? How could we identify the effects of such mechanisms — similar mechanisms, not identical ones — at the level of society?

Romania has evolved, has grown. True, not in every respect, but who grows like that, all at once? And, at the same time, today’s Romania is by no means empty, or without meaning or life. So either there was no attack on linking, or something else happened there.

I remembered how, a few years ago, I got a call from someone wanting an appointment. Having no available slot at the moment, I told them so. The person’s reaction on the phone caught me off guard — they asked whether something might open up if they paid more.

This phenomenon is, or was, I don’t know, more or less widespread in Romania. It goes by the name of corruption. Most Romanians are so used to it that I rarely miss the feeling of being a misfit. That didn’t stop me from wondering, though: underneath this so widespread and accepted behavior of corruption, what might be there? Is corruption the organization that resulted from the attack on linking, at the social level? It might be, because after an attack, a person needs care from someone else. Who cared for Romania? If every process happens within an environment — that is, inside a membrane — what was the skin of Romania that held its contents inside?

A Steiner would tell us this:

We have come to understand that obstacles to contact and obstacles to progress and development are related and that both stem from the deployment of a certain type of defensive organization through which the patient hopes to avoid intolerable anxiety. I call such defense systems “pathological organizations of the personality” and use this term to designate a family of defensive systems characterized by extremely intransigent defenses whose role is to help the patient avoid anxiety by avoiding contact with other people and with reality. (Steiner, 1994, p.1)

Could corruption be a way of protecting ourselves from the intolerable anxiety of encountering a reality for which we don’t seem to have the tools of mature negotiation? Put differently, can my profession become a receptacle for my own greed and arrogance, which make me feel entitled in front of you, and make me feel that, if you want me to take you seriously, you must be loyal to me by virtue of my supposedly superior character? I put it this way because that’s exactly what corruption describes. And when it’s put that way, it sounds worse, and harder to justify. On the other hand, what’s striking isn’t that we’re so used to corruption, but that we know about it, and at the same time the official discourse doesn’t consistently register this reality. This made me think of another, more basal, kind of societal organization, of which corruption is only a symptom. Susan Long helped me with this perspective:

The transformation of authority into personal power is an insidious organizational process. It always requires accomplices, some of whom are fearful, others greedy, and most of whom join in through denial. (Long, 2008, p.35)

The central element now seems to me to be denial — the denial of an evident reality has a protective function, and it accounts not only for the processes that came before, the ones it “covers up,” but also fits very well with the socio-political landscape we see in Romania today. People seem to know and not know at the same time; this way they can change their statements from one day to the next, or, more easily, over a longer stretch of time. And it isn’t so much about ease as about the fact that these statements are often in complete opposition to one another. And so the path opens toward addressing organizational perversion, that is, perversion as a structural part of a society. What does structural perversion mean? Here it is:

Within the perverse structure, certain roles are compelled to adopt corrupt positions. These become an integral part of how things work. The person may condemn certain practices, but the role compels them to adopt them. Tensions between the person and the role can mean that the person occupying that role acts in a way they wouldn’t act if they were in other roles. Such tensions can drive the dynamics of perversity, particularly the basic dynamics of splitting (of the person’s role) and denial (of human responsibilities within the role), or of turning a blind eye. (Long, 2008, p.8)

This idea fits with how Bion saw the relationship between a group and its leader. If, in the large group, there’s a certain leaning — say, toward the fight-flight assumption — then the leader chosen by the group has to resonate with that position. Otherwise, they don’t become the group’s leader, or, once they do, they’ll be forced by the role they’ve taken on to behave according to the group’s dominant basic assumption. So, as I understand it, if you enter a system that has, over time, been structured perversely — that is, in a way that simultaneously uses several realities — then the system will put pressure on every member of it to function in a certain way. The point isn’t just to release the tension that can easily be placed on each participant’s shoulders, but to underline the complexity of large systems and the difficulty of change.

But what are we talking about when we refer to organizational perversion? Susan Long lays out its essential characteristics:

1. The perverse mindset is not simply a deviation from normative morality. It has to do with individual pleasure at the expense of a more general good, often to the point of not recognizing the existence of others, or their rights. It reflects a state of primary narcissism.

2. The perverse mindset recognizes reality, but at the same time denies it. This leads to a state of fixed ideation and fantasy, meant to protect against the pain of seeing and not seeing at the same time.

3. The perverse mindset draws others in as accomplices to the perversion.

4. The perverse mindset can flourish where instrumental relationships dominate society. This is because instrumentality ignores others’ right to an independent existence. This is, in itself, abusive. The perverse mindset turns a blind eye to this.

5. Perversion breeds perversion. Abusive cycles are hard to break. Corruption breeds corruption because of the complicity of accomplices and their subsequent denial and self-deception. (Long, 2008, p.15)

After this list, I confess that the current Romanian socio-political landscape looks much clearer to me. Looking at history, Boia helps me see our demythologized past, with its difficulties and its successes. And yet the cohesion I thought we had as a people never really existed, and the one that did form, forcibly, through communism, didn’t suit us. Perhaps that’s one of the realities of this people that we “paper over” with our present-day democratic spirit. Why do I say that? Because, as I said, although Romania is growing, it advances with the handbrake pulled. Why would that be? Precisely because, following partially successful efforts at organization, then phenomena I prefer to call pathological — natural, but harmful — and then an institutional chaos so evident on the declarative surface, we end up with a picture the points above help clarify. One of the politicians who organized a reformist group is said to have said — I never heard him myself, but I’ve heard several people quote or paraphrase him — that if he’d started tackling grand corruption from day one, he’d have been eliminated right away. The question isn’t who... but... how does that happen? A system doesn’t just change on its own. Yes, you need a strong reformer, and then an administrative group to arrange the reformer’s power — the one Bion called the mystic — in front of the whole of society. But that happens within a functional system. What happens when the mystic is attacked precisely by the administrative apparatus? Why does that happen? Long gives us the answer. Perhaps Romanian society has a somewhat perverse organization, matching the five points above, precisely because beneath that organization lies a void and a trauma. No — three, as Boia said. The system doesn’t yield, because beneath it lies a historical not-yet-organization. The system doesn’t yield also because it shields us from pains that have built up over time in us Romanians. Bion says the Establishment either creatively absorbs (symbiotic) or devours (parasitic). When the apparatus attacks the mystic, that’s a parasitic Establishment. It no longer mediates the mystic — it turns them into a ghost, or expels them, because the mystic threatens the perverse organization itself.

Two phenomena are so easy to observe today, almost daily: the first is complicity, which lets you sense that if one falls, everyone’s at risk, so no one falls. And the second is one that frightens me a great deal: the appearance of ghost-like figures. Those figures who seem empty in themselves, even though their discourse is one of fullness — I will do this, I will fix that, and it will be so!... when it’s obvious we’re dealing with a figure of smoke that will vanish at the first breath of wind. And keep in mind, we’re not talking about people... but about roles and functions. The system, from this point of view, is made not of people... but of perversely organized structures that force the functioning.

Is this an illusory explanation? Have I forced ideas from different fields to fit together into a discourse that only seems coherent? What I know for sure is that I set out to bring in ideas that seem to me easy to illustrate, in the past and in the present. They came together into a coherent explanation only on these pages.

One solution for the victim of sadistic or sexual abuse is to become complicit, or even to reproduce the abuse later in life through identification with the aggressor. This is one of the ways abuse perpetuates itself. Although the aggressor, the victim, and the accomplice are quite different roles, with different emergent behavioral symptoms, each of them is caught in a parasitic and perverse system, regardless of whether those holding these roles are aware of it or not. The roles they hold force them to play out perverse scenarios in specific ways, and the person fulfilling that role may feel quite conflicted about it. This is important in the analysis of workplace harassment, for example, where the roles of aggressor, victim, and passive bystander remain caught within a perverse system, sometimes as a result of multiple collusions and the existence of several accomplices, and where exposing the system threatens or disrupts the existing power bases of many of those who hold these roles. The actors are not necessarily free of personal conflict in their roles, but if the harassment is part of a wider culture, their unease can be soothed through systematically sustained denial. (Long, 2008, p.27)

The quote begins by saying... one solution... but when do people actually arrive at such a solution? Because I don’t think it can be said that everyone who is abused automatically becomes an abuser. And if we can find some conditions that resonate, then perhaps we really do have a starting point for more complex explorations of Romania’s present state of affairs.

Here I’ll introduce you to another psychoanalytic author, Vamik Volkan:

...participants in large groups caught in conflict seem to wear two layers of “clothing.” The first fits them perfectly and represents their individual identity — the basis of their inner sense of enduring identity. The second layer is a large covering, made from the fabric of the large group’s tent (large-group identity), through which the person shares a persistent sense of identity with the other members of the large group. Both garments provide safety and protection. But since both are worn daily, the individual barely notices either one under normal circumstances. When a storm arrives, however — that is, during periods of collective stress such as economic crisis, drastic political change, social unrest, or war — the “coat” made from the tent’s fabric takes on greater importance, and individuals may collectively seek the protection of their large group’s tent, and may also help defend it. (Volkan, 2001, p.83)

When you read Boia, you understand perfectly what Volkan meant by the tent’s fabric! Over time, personal and group identities have been put under pressure. Once again, that’s what naturally happens when you grow! But for the solution to become a perverse one, the environment you grow in has to have some deficiencies. For a child, it’s easy today to say that they need a good-enough caregiving environment, a devoted mother, and a father who knows how to hold things together and enjoy the mother-child couple. And we also know these roles can’t simply be learned from books, precisely because they represent some of the most natural and deepest of human expressions.

The more stress group members perceive or experience, the more they engage in maintaining and repairing the tent’s fabric. Under extreme and threatening conditions, they feel entitled to do anything, whether sadistic or masochistic, in order to protect their large-group identity, and they will seek out or gather around a leader who will help them in this task, regardless of the means that leader might use. (Volkan, 2001, p.84)

It strikes me as very important, on one hand, that we’re talking about threatening conditions, and on the other, about sadistic or masochistic actions. What kind of threatening conditions are we talking about here? Well, let’s return to Boia and the three traumatic moments he spoke of — “the separation from the East, then the separation from the West through the installation of communism, and finally, the separation from communism and the hesitant return to the Western fold.” I won’t dwell on analyzing the traumatic character of each one, though clearly each one deserves that attention. I’ll content myself with underlining, on one hand, the character of rupture/separation/splitting, and on the other, the evident lack of space for any kind of working-through of that rupture. And when working-through of these moments did appear, it came late and didn’t have much impact at the societal level. It’s easiest for me to speak about the break with communism, since I witnessed it, though I know that for me communism never had, and doesn’t have, the same significance it has for those who actually lived a meaningful part of their lives within that atmosphere. I remember the events of ‘89 only as a diffuse fear, born from not understanding what was happening, but I saw my grandfather in tears, and everyone else deeply moved. The violence of what was happening on TV affected me in one way, and yet it was also distant from me in another. I was a child. Academic history, as I said, didn’t help me understand any of it at all. Even now we don’t really know what happened back then. Books by prison survivors have been written, painful books. I think there was even a *Memorial of Suffering*, a harrowing TV series. Yes. But you see how it sits in my mind... a few scattered points on a page. Not a consistent process capable of impacting the imagination of the people, of all Romanians. Not a single place in Romania, in the most concrete sense, where, if you want to see what happened under communism, you could go and find out — and above all, be horrified by what marked those who lived through it. Finally, a place where those who lived through it could mourn whatever they needed to mourn. Maybe each of them mourned their loss and their rupture in their own home. Maybe... but not as a nation. Not yet!

...when the members of a group suffer a severe, collective trauma, it isn’t only about the fact that many people in that group will show similar symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, use similar defense mechanisms, or manifest symptoms of similar psychological problems. Such traumatic events affect everyone under the ethnic or national umbrella, and often trigger unconscious social or political processes. (Volkan, 2001, p.86)

So, what do you think... is corruption, is structural perversion, a symptom of the lack of working-through of these ruptures? I think it’s possible, or rather, more likely to be so than not.

Although each individual in a traumatized large group has their own unique identity and their own personal reaction to the trauma, all members share the mental representations of the tragedies that befell the group. Their damaged self-images, associated with the mental representations of the shared traumatic event, are “deposited” into the self-representation forming in the children of the following generation, as though those children were capable of mourning the loss or repairing the humiliation. When children fail to cope with what has been deposited in them, they, as adults, will in turn pass the mental representation of the event on to the next generation. (Volkan, 2001, p.87)

Yes, this is the transgenerational transmission of trauma. And once again — what we live through happens within an environment. The way we live has to do with the environment in which we live these events. If the environment supports us, it forms a container — that is, the event takes place within a body that has skin. If the environment doesn’t support us, holes appear in the containing fabric, and the pain takes on new dimensions. Because the pain is present in both situations, but the way it’s approached, the possibility of expressing it as it appears inside — or, on the contrary, the danger of expressing it — is what makes the difference for the next step. To be able to cope with what has been deposited inside you also means having had an environment that allowed for natural growth and development — that is, precisely the strength to bear the pains of history without becoming dysfunctional. Part of today’s society isn’t very functional, and some parts are completely dysfunctional. Is it because the Romanian is lazy? Or stupid? Or because foreigners won’t let us? From where I stand, not at all. The “foreigner” oppressing us is our own unmetabolized pain. And it will stay that way until we change our minds about how we approach it.

Usually, it’s the following generations of a large group of victims who are affected by a chosen trauma. There are, however, situations in which even the aggressor cannot mourn its losses or overcome the shame associated with an event from the past. In Germany, for example, the shadow of the Nazi era and the German people’s complicity in the Holocaust continue to influence how individuals and Germans, as a group, see themselves today. As the Mitscherlichs observed (1975), the inability of earlier generations of Germans to mourn this period involves a shared defense against identification and association with the Third Reich, along with feelings of shame for the atrocities it committed. These unresolved issues have been passed down to later generations. This problem was recently examined at a symposium titled “The End of Silence?” held in Düsseldorf, Germany, in August 1998. (Volkan, 2015, p.88)

But enough about others — let’s see what Volkan tells us about ourselves, since he visited us after ‘89. Here’s what he says about how difficult our mourning process has been:

Mourning was further complicated because the response to the loss of the two Ceaușescus became mixed together with the responses to the loss of the others who died during the Christmas Revolution. All the dead of the Bucharest revolution lie buried outside the walls of Romania’s National Cemetery in that capital — both revolutionaries and Ceaușescu’s supporters. A single marker proclaims both the revolutionaries and the defenders as “Heroes of the Revolution.” This mingling of rebels and wrongdoers in the same place makes mourning them complicated, because, regardless of the mourner’s sympathies, the burial ground is contaminated by the “bad” dead buried alongside the “heroes.” (Volkan, 1997, p.182)

Volkan also dwells on how it all unfolded. The two Ceaușescus were captured, and a spokesperson for the new regime promised a public trial. That isn’t what happened. Three days later it was announced that they had already been tried — the whole thing lasted nine hours — condemned, and executed. Then came the images, heavily edited, of the trial and of the bodies. How Iliescu and those around him managed to seize power remains, Volkan says, something of a mystery — there didn’t seem to have been any coup prepared in advance, nor any broad movement of dissidents. That’s how a rupture begins, in a way: the haste, the trial that was no longer public, the unmarked graves. And, over everything, the sense that something happened without ever being carried through, seen, understood. I’ll add another weighty quote from the same piece:

Romanians never fully realized that, with the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu, his “sons” had not only killed him, they had also “eaten” him. Having led Romanians for more than two decades, Ceaușescu had become a part of them. With his death, a part of every Romanian died too, but their shame at having been associated with him, and their hidden guilt for having “killed” him, had to be denied. And yet, through their identification with him, they also kept the dictator alive. (Volkan, 1997, p.188)

Just writing these things down, I realize their weight, and the enormous difficulty of approaching them on a larger scale. It’s interesting that a thought crosses my mind too — why am I writing this at all? Was it for me to write, or for those who lived it? Wouldn’t it have done them more good than it does me? But I know that my doubt is a sign of a deeper process than the mere laying down of words on a page.

*

I don’t know how I came to put all these ideas together. What I can say for certain is that I followed, day by day and without excessive emotion, the Romanian political landscape of the last two months. It seemed to me that I recognized individual and group strategies and dynamics, and that encouraged me to keep searching; I read and reread some material that opens a path toward beneficial reflection for me. And it is beneficial, because now, having reached the end, I somehow feel part of a larger whole. I don’t know whether it’s right to call it European or something else, but it’s certainly what led me to choose the word skin for the title.

I started from the unbearable smell of urine in downtown Ploiești, and made a foray into historical strategy alongside Lucian Boia. Then I joined the complexity of Bionian psychoanalysis, because it’s so nourishing. The clarity you gain when you can look at the difference between a work group and a group organized around affective structures is enormous. Just as enormous is the difference between a structure that can bear pain and conflict and one that would do anything to avoid it, to find the shorter path. From Bion, without any difficulty, I moved through another psychoanalytic author, Steiner, to Susan Long, whose book on organizational perversion clarified, more than anything, the idea of perversion as structure. Everything seemed much clearer to me through these lenses. I’d already engaged with Volkan’s work in the past. My thoughts led me toward him without any forcing. And that’s how a picture came together.

Today’s Romania, which spent more than fifty days in internal struggle over forming a government, isn’t something unheard of, or wholly and entirely exceptional. I tried to look at the whole process within a wider frame, and not only out of frustration at the many layers of lies politicians circulate day after day. Maybe the frustration only encouraged me to study further, yes. Is the fact that people lie so easily an exceptional fact (in the negative sense)? I don’t think so. It is worrying, yes, because I’ve seen that lying implies a system that isn’t functioning in a healthy way. It’s even, at times, incoherent. These are the holes in Romania’s skin, left for us, and for the generations to come, to “patch up.” The weight that sat on the shoulders of the generations before us was too great — I think that’s clear by now. The good news is that we are, without a doubt, in process. Just as we are also part of Europe, no matter which way we turn our heads. And it’s true that no process guarantees success. For that you also need internal resources and external support. And anyone who has ever worked on their own growth knows that. Steiner also says something I’ve always liked: recovery from psychic retreat comes through accepting that the outside is good. For us, it seems obvious to me that we’re not sure the outside is good, and that’s why we can’t open up any further. We somehow need to educate ourselves and learn to tell the difference between internal and external danger. Our own wounds shape the way we perceive reality. I don’t think this applies only to individuals, but to large groups as well. The wound makes us defend ourselves, because it hurts. And because we never had, and never even knew we needed, that space in which to feel the pain, to express it, we protected ourselves however we could. Sometimes we lied, other times we closed our eyes even though we knew reality was otherwise, and other times we had to keep our eyes open and add a touch of change. For the better.

Of course I won’t avoid the question — alright, alright, so what’s to be done?

First, I think more minds need to ask this question in the most serious way. Until then, these are only opinions. Second, the answer lies in education. I’ve circled this question for years, both at the personal and at the group level. We need to secure the conditions in which learning from experience can happen. Today the idea of developing critical thinking is in wide circulation. It’s good. For me, as a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist, it’s basic to ask myself how critical thinking can arise or, better put, in what context, in what environment. Psychoanalysis has something to say here, and I think the answer runs through this entire piece.

We need an educational environment safe enough that questions can be asked without the danger of retaliation or inner collapse. Is it enough to have an economy that runs cleanly? To no longer have so much corruption? I don’t think so... just as I don’t think these can truly be achieved without investing in education. And I don’t mean only schooling, important as that is, but also the inner readiness to receive new realities.

You can find the Romanian version here: - https://iarpp.ro/pielea-romaniei-e-posibila-cresterea-fara-continator/

Bibliography:

Bion, W.R. (2019) *The Complete Works of W.R. Bion*, Routledge

Boia, L. (2013) *De ce este România altfel?* [Why Is Romania Different?], Humanitas

Boia, L. (2025) *Istorie și mit în conștiința românească* [History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness], Humanitas

Long, S. (2008) *The Perverse Organisation and Its Deadly Sins*, Routledge

Steiner, J. (1994) *Psychic Retreats*, Routledge

Volkan, V. (2001) *Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas*, The Group-Analytic Society

Volkan, V. (1997) *Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism*, Westview Press

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but wretched man is subject to the times.”

— Miron Costin

In his book Balkan Neurosis, Professor Vasile Dem. Zamfirescu writes lucidly and with great clarity about Romanians’ self-hatred — identifying not only the terrible period of the “45 years of light” under communism (which in fact lasted closer to 50), but also qualifying the pre-communist era as a traumatic period. He writes:

“...pre-communist Romanian history is no less traumatic — though differently so — than communist history, which means that all the conditions exist for self-hatred to be a longstanding component of Romanian psychology.” (p. 33)

In his argument, Professor Zamfirescu draws an interesting parallel between the terrible Pitești experiment — “a metaphor for the communist totalitarian system, whose essence it expresses with striking clarity” (p. 27) — and the small child, the newborn, who is abandoned by its parents.

Yet in the same book, the introductory section closes with a small “warning.” The Professor writes: “even if, throughout the text, in certain essays or passages, I have exceeded — in tone or approach — my initial intention of an unpretentious, non-scientific inquiry, I ask the reader not to be misled, and to bear in mind that what they have before them is merely a collection of essays.”

And then, saddened, I recalled the words of Shengold, who wrote about soul murder: “it is as though we, the psychoanalysts, know nothing, that our patients know nothing, that we all can know only nothing.” (Shengold, p. 34)

From nowhere, a phrase rang powerfully in my mind: we behave as though we are orphans...

This was the backdrop against which the invitation to write in the pages of this journal arrived. I accepted immediately, intuitively knowing that the theme I had been preoccupied with for some time — “the malevolent spirit haunting the institutions and private lives” (p. 25) of Romanians, as the Professor calls it — would resonate deeply with the task of writing something in the domain of identity–belonging–community.

I know there is much to be written on such a broad theme, and I also know that we Romanians have every reason to write extensively within it. I will set out with a longer quotation from the philosopher Horia-Roman Patapievici, taken from his 2022 book Why We Have No Marketplace of Ideas. I will explain shortly why I found this an appropriate point of departure. Here is what the author tells us:

“...a functional physiology of the exchange of ideas leads to a sound relationship with reality — provided the exchange takes place in public space, and public space represents that open arena between people made “public” precisely by the fact that anyone can recognise it as a refuge for their freedom and a place of shared truth. The circumstance that the difficulties of the public spirit can be viewed as a blockage of intracommunal exchanges and as a defect of internal reality helps us understand that it is precisely because of these deficiencies that we Romanians have the feeling that reality is arranged by others — when it is hostile to us — that we are perpetual victims, and that we always draw the short straw. In other words, Romanians are tempted to believe that reality, because it is not the same for everyone, cannot be objective. Not being objective, it can be manipulated at will — by the powerful, naturally, who are our enemies. Hence the rhetoric of the eternal victim and of the blameless failure. Behind the neurotic sense of dependency, and beyond the obsessive fear of losing the feeling of sovereignty, one should read in these (sincere) sentiments the presence of a non-unified type of reality, one that cannot be guaranteed, in its objectivity, by the existence of a free community.” (p. 114)

In this passage I recognise several ideas I consider foundational to the question of our identity — and I refer specifically to the identity of being Romanian. In Professor Zamfirescu’s book you will find everything necessary to understand why he places self-hatred and resentment at the very “heart” of Romanian identity, and rightly so. I will not rehearse that explanation here; instead, I invite you to read the book, which I find to be an excellent educational and reflective reference.

The ideas I have in mind — those from the quoted passage — concern the exchange of ideas, that is, dialogue; the recognition through which we become complete human beings. I find that this idea comes close to Jessica Benjamin’s notion of a “lawful world” — a world in which we all know the rules, and our behaviour thus becomes predictable, an essential condition for trust. But above all, it is the idea of a non-unified reality that strikes me most.

Indeed, the passage that rang most powerfully in my mind, apropos of this type of reality, reads as follows:

“The novel element is that, unlike the liberation from tradition in whose name the historical Enlightenment proclaimed itself — a liberation aimed at emancipation — the liberation brought by the postmodern era is eine Befreiung in das Nichts: a liberation into nothingness.” (p. 153)

The essential element here, for me, is the nothingness.

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The constitution of identity and individuality, of belonging and attachment, does not take place outside of exchange with the other — an other who, through recognition, has become essential for the fulfilment of our wholeness as beings. In his book, Horia-Roman Patapievici tells us plainly that we are in a state of blockage, that Romanian culture finds itself blocked, in a failure of communication. Of course, he also proposes a solution to this impasse — an interesting solution... though not an effective starting point, but only viable once the foundation has been laid. I say this because (even limiting myself to two authors, I could multiply the examples) we all feel, see, and can argue persuasively that we are in a state of blockage. Not since yesterday, but for a long time — both Zamfirescu and Patapievici cast a glance at the pre-communist era — and even then, things did not look bright for our identity; the attachments and dependencies of that time, as of today, were not particularly honourable.

I would reformulate in a way that the cited authors have also done — but at the point of reformulation, I will part from them and follow the course of my own thinking. We can call it a blockage, but we might also think of it as a continuity that has been interrupted. As I mentioned, Professor Zamfirescu likens the experiences the Romanian people underwent under communism to the early abandonment of a child, left alone by its mother to grow up... however it may.

For a long time I held this idea — discontinuity in mind, in the soul, but also in the social, in institutions, between countries, and so forth — an idea that only the conception of the dissociative mind could encompass sufficiently well, at least for me. And it is about this (I owe Rita Teodoru my interest in and openness to the dissociative universe) that I would like to speak with you. The principal argument that led me to think in this way was that, over time, there have been people who saw the discontinuity — who probably suffered greatly because of it — who tried to influence it in one form or another, but... this painful but... but things do not move — we are still the same people we always were! Still lacking in reactivity, not to mention initiative; still waiting to be admired for no reason (see the narcissism in Zamfirescu’s book); still victims... as Patapievici says. How is this possible? After all this time...!

Only the particularly powerful mechanism of dissociation can explain this and offer us a mode of action in such situations. For dissociation is that defensive mechanism — among other things — that covers its own tracks: even after it has passed, you do not know it was ever there. P. Siegel writes:

“A Janetian psychoanalyst thus argues that a dissociative experience is a marker of a history not merely forgotten but lost. It is a memorial to a time and a place in which the Self was so overwhelmed by the threat of its own annihilation that it had to be extinguished like a light. What remains encapsulated are thus ‘implicit’ memories of trauma (van der Kolk, 1994), however ‘unformulated’ (Stern, 1997), which are shielded from the conscious Ego and housed in the psyche-soma as alternative identifications of the Self and of the other, of victim and abuser, passive and active. In the harrowing experience of a former state of consciousness, the Self may regress to a pre-linguistic developmental state, so that whatever traumatic anxiety achieves, it achieves, in part, through its fundamental incommunicability. Yet what cannot be communicated through language is instead shared through action, because these dissociated alternative proto-identities are enacted before the very eyes of the therapist (Bromberg, 1998; Davies & Frawley, 1992, 1994; Ehrenberg, 1992; Hirsch, 1994; Stern, 1997). They thus represent the preservation of the original traumatic experience.”

What I want to say is that we are not in a state of blockage. We are lost from within ourselves... with volatile roots... using all the energy dissociatively dislocated against ourselves — that is, hating our roots, trying to be born alone, narcissistically, through our own power, failing again and again and perpetuating in direct experience traumas whose names we have never known. And do you know why dissociation is so terrible? Because after you have lived through the trauma, the devastation wrought upon the mind can be so great that you ask yourself — “Did it really happen?” It is possible to be shattered and to know nothing... nothingness and the absence of meaning. The destructive attack targets the capacity to know anything about one’s personal reality, and then, implicitly, a cruel limitation of social reality follows. Bion’s descriptions of psychotic attacks on linking belong here — they affect or destroy the capacity for reflective thinking, for dialogue.

As psychoanalysts, we know how important relationships with parents are, and we have seen how disaster prefigures itself in the lives of people who maintain a destructive attitude toward parents — to be read, more broadly, as: toward authority. There is not a single work of Freud’s in which he does not underline these things, and we, today, more than 120 years after The Interpretation of Dreams, have seen, researched, and witnessed these events time and again. And since we are looking at it this way, let us examine what the first steps in the constitution of the identity of the self are — healthy or otherwise.

For that, I will present the elements that Daniel Stern describes as foundational in the construction of our identity, and I will offer a quotation that is also rather long, but so precise:

“...I will therefore focus on those senses of the self which, if severely affected, will disrupt normal social functioning and will likely lead to madness or significant social deficits. Among such senses of self are: the sense of agency (without which paralysis may appear, the sense of non-ownership of self-determined actions, the experience of loss of control to outside agents); the sense of physical cohesion (without which fragmentation of bodily experience, depersonalisation, out-of-body experiences, and derealisation may appear); the sense of continuity (without which temporal dissociation, fugue states, amnesias, and the absence of ‘going on being’ in Winnicott’s words may appear); the sense of affectivity (without which anhedonia and dissociative states may appear); the sense of a subjective self that can achieve intersubjectivity with another (without which cosmic loneliness or, at the other extreme, psychic transparency may appear); the sense of the capacity to organise (without which psychic chaos may appear); the sense of transmitting meaning (without which exclusion from culture, deficient socialisation, and the invalidation of personal knowledge may appear). In short, these senses of self constitute the foundation of the subjective experience of normal or abnormal social development.” (D. Stern, p. 61)

I do not think it is necessary to prolong the discussion by speaking too much about the conditions under which these senses are disrupted. I need only tell you — and this may surprise you — that Daniel Stern speaks of the disruption of these senses beginning at the age of two months, and that disturbances arise within the mother-infant dyad (that is, in the relationships between parents and the newborn). The most recent studies — based on direct observation of infants — tell us that babies interact in specific ways from the very beginning of life. It is precisely these specific interactions that have the capacity to generate what Stern calls the core Self (in specific terms, the Self does not emerge at the end of developmental processes, but is inclusive of those very developmental processes functioning in parallel).

As I said at the outset... if the environment in which we live, and which existed some time before we were born, can be called traumatic — and, as you have seen, I do not think we have any reason to doubt this — then the natural response of the human organism to trauma is dissociation. Dissociation is the fragmentation of the mind in the face of a danger from which there is no possibility of response, the result being the division of internal territory into what Bromberg calls self-states. In earlier times, when therapists encountered such individuals, they would diagnose them with multiple personality. In its severe forms, we now call this dissociative identity disorder.

Dissociation interrupts development abruptly, and parts of reality/experience disappear. In other words, we are orphans... we have not forgotten history — we have lost it, in the sense that our history is wandering somewhere, waiting for the light of a strong person’s consciousness to bear its burning. Why do I speak in this way? Because it fits the landscape. We have not been and are not a foolish people. It is too easy to say that we are cunning or lazy, that we play the victim and are cowardly. It is far too easy for it to be so... it is far more likely that we are shattered; and those who are not, are beneath the rubble of the rest.

I have seen this landscape in the consulting room, and you have all seen it in the complete absence of communication between state institutions. But why go that far? Not even the psychoanalytic institutions speak to one another, as though they were plague-stricken — a sign of the profound dissociation that reigns in the landscape.

And I can already hear it... “what dissociation, man, there are interests at stake.” Of course! That would be far more comprehensible, and we would fit into the general landscape. Yet the price paid through the lack of intra- and inter-institutional communication is too great, and for this reason I do not believe we are fortunate enough to be driven by interests (which can be negotiated). We cannot, sir, because we are in a suffering that has traversed many decades — transgenerational, in modern terminology (oh, that sounds like victimhood, but wait a moment!). The observable truth is that we lack vitality, creativity; it does not seem as though we know how to play and be generative, to take thoughts one step further — and this may be the hallmark of substantial and early dissociative processes.

Irena Talaban tells us in her book Terror and Cultural Resistance: The Pitești Experiment:

“The capacity for forgiveness allows the resolution of an irreversible situation. What cannot be punished cannot be forgiven — an act of violence that is denied forecloses any possibility of forgiveness. It is not merely that forgiveness brings relief (though relief is one of its effects), but that forgiveness renders a situation reversible; once the act has been forgiven, we are no longer its prisoners — we become capable, that is, of a new beginning.” (p. 186)

This is the source of my darkening — for we might be willing to forgive, but whom? Who will step forward and tell me they are guilty, so that I might punish and then forgive them? I fear that time has passed and that this is no longer possible (not that it ever concretely was). The time for forgiveness has gone, and so we can no longer free ourselves except, as Patapievici says, toward postmodern nothingness. There, dissociation liberates you from suffering — into nothingness... void... anhedonia... the absence of meaning.

We have parents... but we are orphaned by them... released into a free world in which we cannot speak with one another because we do not know how it is done (hence the impossibility of a marketplace of ideas, dear Mr. Patapievici). And we have still not understood that if we do not forgive ourselves for our incapacities and above all our ignorances, we will never free the internal space for learning. But to forgive, guess what, there must be a fault somewhere... the circle is incomplete... one cannot advance... Perhaps it is as Andrei Pleșu says in his essay — The Third Day of Communism? — perhaps people have a biography to justify that denies access to guilt and forgiveness.

The road to healing passes through verbalisation, through dialogue. Perhaps more truly than in any other situation, you cannot heal from dissociation alone, precisely because dissociation takes place in a rather hypnoid state — somnambulant, one might say — and so you cannot know that you have dissociated. Someone else, an external agent, must tell you that you are not seeing the situation whole. An external agent in whom it is unlikely you will trust, for trust is destroyed by dissociation. But once the process is initiated, what exists in the space that Putnam called “escape when there is no escape” (in Bromberg, p. 173) begins to take shape, and the mind can begin to metabolise it. In this way, the experience that was initially lost begins to be recovered, and slowly the person can begin to dream their dream in its entirety.

I bring you one further quotation, from Sándor Ferenczi. In his celebrated Clinical Diary, under the heading All Hatred Is, in Fact, Psychopathic Projection, he writes:

“If someone is hurt or has love withdrawn from them, there is pain. The rational reaction would be grief while maintaining the real loving relationship — that is: I love as before, they no longer love me, what pain I must bear. The reaction of hatred, by contrast, is entirely unreal: if I am treated badly and begin to maintain that I do not love them, that I hate them, and instead of feeling the real pain I inflict physical or moral pain upon them — what I achieve thereby is that now they suffer and not I. I thus manage to displace my suffering entirely or partially onto another. The paranoid mechanism could also be expressed in the displacement tracing ever wider circles, with hatred extended to an entire race, an entire nation, a family... If the injured party had lived through grief in place of hatred, the work of grief would eventually have shown its effect, whereas the displaced affect — perhaps precisely because of this unreality — may persist for a long time or permanently. The most frequent example: traumatic disappointment in childhood, hatred toward a certain type of person throughout life.” (p. 146)

I believe that at this point you have a clearer picture of how our identity — as inhabitants of this environment — is continually affected by dissociation. We must continually dissociate many aspects of daily life in order to maintain our equilibrium — the way traffic flows, the way the shop assistant or our boss at work behaves, problems in the family, and so forth — and in doing so we alter and contort ourselves inwardly, adapting to an ever more limited register of experience, with an ever narrower path of access toward the lasting and durable happiness of life. After all, we have to survive, don’t we?

And this, it seems to me, is the difficulty — the obstacle we have not yet cleared, and it is uncertain when we will manage to. Like many other psychic processes, dissociation too exists outside of time. We must manage it, because only then will we be whole — meaning we will be able to breathe life with both lungs, as it were. But at the same time, we must become conscious of the force of our dissociations, of our incapacity to move forward, of the uncountained disappointments and furies that lie between us and make us rejoice when our neighbour’s goat dies, or that make us simply overlook the good things others do for us. Yes, something you may not have known: not being acknowledged is just as traumatic as being beaten with a chain.

And since this idea — that neglect is just as traumatic as abuse — comes from attachment theory, here are two of the conditions that favour the change of psychosocial models, as described by J. Bowlby:

1. “the opportunity to discuss one’s position with a knowledgeable and sympathetic friend.”

2. “support and encouragement in tackling the task from a trusted companion (attachment figure).” (p. 180)

It seems so simple. He then elaborates:

“Since cognitive models are symbolic constructs, in order to compare information about a changed situation with an existing model, to revise that model or replace it with a new one, systematic analysis of the discrepancies is necessary, and so on. Therefore, in any such situation, whether considered favourable or unfavourable, it is greatly advantageous for a person to have the opportunity to verify the new facts with a friend, to review possible alternative models, and to sketch out possible new plans. Discussion with a companion is thus advantageous from a purely cognitive and logical standpoint. From the standpoint of feeling, the position is similar. A perceived change of environment, if unwanted and of whatever magnitude, is felt to be at best uncomfortable and slightly frightening, and at worst intensely frightening and painful. To take account of change, it is always necessary to explore the unknown; and this is most easily done when supported by an attachment figure. George Brown’s finding that an intimate relationship protects a person who has undergone a major psychosocial transition from clinical depression is consistent with this position (Brown et al., 1973).” (Bowlby, p. 180)

It may sound old-fashioned and clichéd... yet friendship remains valuable — cognitively, logically, and emotionally. I would say it is a very good starting point.

Here, then, is what our identity is subjected to. Pressing the pencil harder, Patapievici writes: “...Romanian society does not have a reality, because it does not have, in any full sense, reality.” (p. 113) I have always said that if things are not going well, at least let us look in the right direction — that being, in my view, the only possibility by which we might grow from within, through ourselves, from our roots. Because that is the secret... the energy of growth pushes us from behind, and that is also one of the reasons it hurts so much.

I will close with a quotation “stolen” from Bromberg’s Credo — my favourite psychoanalytic author (and he “stole” it from Henry James):

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Bibliography

1. Benjamin, J. (2018) – Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third. Routledge.

2. Bromberg, Ph. (1998) – Standing in the Spaces. Psychology Press. Taylor & Francis Group.

3. Bromberg, Ph. (2012) – Credo. Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of Relational Perspectives.

4. Ferenczi, S. (2005) – Clinical Diary. [Romanian edition: Jurnal clinic. Editura Fundației Generația.]

5. Patapievici, H-R. (2022) – De ce nu avem o piață a ideilor [Why We Have No Marketplace of Ideas]. Humanitas.

6. Pleșu, A.; Liiceanu, G.; Patapievici, H-R. (2022) – O idee care ne sucește mințile. Humanitas.

7. Shengold, L. (1989) – Soul Murder. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

8. Siegel, P. (2003) – Dissociation and the Question of History. Psychoanalytic Psychology.

9. Stern, D. (2019) – The Interpersonal World of the Infant. [Romanian edition: Lumea interpersonală a copilului. Ed. Trei.]

10. Tălaban, I. (2007) – Teroarea comunistă și rezistența culturală [Communist Terror and Cultural Resistance]. Editura Fundației Generația.

11. Zamfirescu, V. (2012) – Nevroza balcanică [Balkan Neurosis]. Ed. Trei.

12. Ed. Robbie, D. and Kate, W. (2020) – Trauma and Loss: Key Texts from the John Bowlby Archive. Routledge.

(The Romanian version of the article, here - https://uniscan.ro/suportpsi/TRIANGLU_Identitate_Apartenenta_Comunitate_nr%203_2023.pdf)

Starting from this experience, I began to reflect further on the issue, and what follows is the result—more questions than clarifications. But, as Winnicott once said: “Is there anyone who has tried to teach their children how to handle matches by hiding them?”

From a number of neuroscientific studies I have read, it appears that media content listened to or watched before sleep finds its way into our dreams and, what interests me particularly, it seems to produce interruptions in REM sleep associated with dreaming (although we know that dreams are not limited to this stage). This would suggest that such media content, including falling asleep with the television on, influences the quality of sleep and says something about dreams, even potentially disturbing them. From these writings I understood there is a hypothesis that media content may generate a kind of psychic short-circuit, disrupting the mental work otherwise necessary for our psychological equilibrium.

The interest of a psychotherapist with a psychoanalytic orientation in dreams hardly needs extensive justification—within psychoanalysis, dreams have been considered the “royal road to the unconscious,” and their study forms the foundation upon which Freud established the analytic technique. The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, remains one of the most instructive works in psychoanalysis, as it accurately describes and illustrates the basic processes of unconscious mental dynamics. Their importance extends far beyond dream interpretation alone.

In what follows, I will not refer to nocturnal dreams and their significance—much has already been written on this. I will consider dreaming as a vital psychic process necessary for psychological survival, not as a nocturnal imaginative scenario. In order to better understand how I use the notion of dreaming, and subsequently how I address the issue of media consumption, a few psychoanalytic ideas are necessary.

Psychic growth is nothing other than the organism’s processing of a range of information that enables it to update its potentialities. Some of this information comes from within, some from the outside; however, for my purposes it is irrelevant where it originates, as I am interested in the “apparatus” that the human organism uses to transform information into something beneficial for itself. When a person fails to grow emotionally or to mature, something interferes with the functioning of this apparatus, preventing it from processing information in a useful way.

We already know that we do not fully understand how this apparatus works. We also know that at the beginning of life it is not yet developed and requires a sufficiently good environment to begin functioning in support of the organism. Thus, immediately after birth, the apparatus that supports the infant’s emotional—and not only emotional—growth is the mother (the caregiving environment). She processes, or metabolizes, as we say, the information necessary for the infant and delivers it in ways that are usable for the child. This is an unconscious process.

Terms such as container–contained, holding, the good-enough mother, and mentalization each describe, from different perspectives, something essential in the conditions required for the development of a sound mind in the child.

When the caregiving environment (the mother), for various reasons, is unable to process information for the child, the child’s mind is likewise unable to process the information it needs, and stagnation occurs. Early anxieties are well known and do not remain limited to infancy; they also appear in severe psychopathological states—fragmentation, annihilation, and loss are terms that describe them.

But what does it mean to “process” or “metabolize” information? It is, of course, an unconscious process consisting in the creation of links between different contents delivered by the external and internal environment. Meaning can only emerge through connection: white only acquires meaning if black is introduced, so that they are both differentiated and linked simultaneously. On their basis, increasingly complex descriptions and articulations become possible. Without the initial differentiation, white has no meaning at all.

The information in question initially arrives in modified sensory forms, which is why an apparatus is needed to decode it and make it useful for the mind. Without this apparatus, information cannot be used, as it remains in a form inaccessible to mental processing. Without connections between sensory contents, emotions, bodily reactions, and external manifestations, the mind does not develop.

For this reason, we say that without contact with reality, growth is impossible—contact presupposes a psychic system capable of receiving information in its raw form and adapting it to its own functioning. When the distance from reality becomes too great, we speak of mental illness. When contact is adequate, information can be unpacked and the system develops, drawing on its natural endowments.

I have insisted on these clarifications regarding mental functioning because I refer to this process as dreaming. It is that mysterious capacity of the mind to process environmental information in the service of its own development. Dreaming—or reverie—is therefore a capacity that must be cared for.

From these considerations and from my own experience arises a question: might the harmful effect of social networks, increasingly evident to the point that protective policies for minors are being introduced, have to do with interference with, or even blockage of, dreaming? Might the way in which information is delivered affect our internal functioning capacity? Personally, I have experienced this only in a superficial way, but I ask myself: if I were to continue affecting my sleep by listening to podcasts every evening, would it not be only my nocturnal rest that would suffer, but also my capacity to process the information necessary for my mental functioning?

Perhaps it would be useful for each person to ask themselves these questions, since statistical studies are not always easily trusted. And perhaps the goal is not necessarily belief, but allowing the mind to engage with such questions—to observe how we feel before and after media exposure, how our sleep is affected, and how we feel the next day, or even days later.

I would like to extend the reflection further—to what the virtual space itself means and to the emergence of AI. Very little has yet been written about this, but perhaps the time is now appropriate.

First, it is relatively easy to observe that media content is often used to counteract anxieties that arise when one is left alone with oneself. In the absence of the mind’s capacity to think, the psychic system would otherwise be exposed to overwhelming states. It has learned to activate various defensive mechanisms to avoid being inundated beyond its capacity. Thus, when anxiety arises, the tendency to pick up the phone or tablet and immerse oneself in media content of any kind becomes evident, and from this association between anxiety and consumption, a dependency can easily develop.

Given that a positive and consistent interaction requires a dialogue with another person who is attentive to what is being discussed, the use of various AI platforms for “conversation” raises, at least in my mind, serious questions. In effect, interaction with AI simulates the existence of a good space for exchange—apparently rich in meaning and symbolic significance. Yet its concreteness betrays it, and what at first appears to be a dynamic and fruitful process risks being only a simulation of psychic growth. The issue is not whether AI provides correct or incorrect information, but rather the conditions under which the human mind can develop so as to process incoming information effectively.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect arises when a person projects their internal world into the virtual space. From there, the joy of living risks becoming distorted and collapsing, because the apparent boundlessness of time, space, and symbol is in fact a non-space. In a non-space, the symbol cannot breathe.

I would add only that this failure in the use of virtual space—which I have perhaps imprecisely included as both media content and AI use—may itself be grounded in an otherwise legitimate intention: the search for help in processing internal information. Unable to use its own mental space effectively, the psyche turns to the infinite media supply, which may appear attractive and even salvific. The wish to escape psychic pain is understandable. Yet psychoanalysis is traversed by a strong idea: thinking develops from lack. In the presence of absence, the mental apparatus attempts to mitigate frustration and thereby develops. AI, however, appears as an unlimited supply, always available, always ready to gratify the frustrations inherent in human life. If this is the case, it risks depriving us of the very fuel needed for the development of thought.

In the preceding lines I have attempted only to draw attention, starting from a personal experience, to a highly relevant contemporary issue. By suggesting that the vast quantity of media content now available may in fact undermine aspects of our healthy psychic functioning, and that the use of AI platforms may create a seemingly nourishing environment, I do not imply that the solution is an all-or-nothing withdrawal. I am not advocating retreat from the digital world, but rather a deeper understanding of one’s own mind and how it functions.

Perhaps the most useful task is to cultivate, patiently, the capacity to remain alone with oneself as an exercise in inhabiting one’s own inner space. Dreaming, in the sense used here, is not a luxury of those with spare time, but a fundamental necessity—no less real than sleep or nourishment—and perhaps just as easily neglected when the world offers, at any hour, something more colorful and louder in its place.

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Bibliografie:

Allen, J.G.; Fonagy, P.; Bateman, A. (2022) Mentalizarea in practica psihoterapiei, Ed.Trei

Marzi, A (2016) Cyberghosts from the dephts Ed.Karnac

Moverley M, Schedl M, Goritz, A. (2018) Media dreamind and media consuption, International Journal of Dream Research

Ogden, Th. (2014) Arta psihanalizei, Ed. Insight

Solms, M. (2022) Izvorul ascuns. De ce si cum se naste constiinta

Stuart, K, Conduit, R. (2009) Auditory inhibition of rapid eye muvement and dream recall from REM sleep

Winnicott, D.W. (2003) Convorbiri psihanalitice cu parintii, Ed.Trei

He connects this space — for play seems to be a particular kind of space — to the freedom to create, that is, the freedom to be exactly as you are. This proves, as we all know, quite difficult for us humans, though we long for it with such ardor.

But it is not Winnicott I want to speak about today, rather another encounter: with the ideas of neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms about play. For Solms, play is not a simple game either, but a basic affect — an instinctive emotion, one of the seven upon which all others are founded.

For Solms it is clear: “we need to play.” The resonance with the other psychoanalyst is strong, and this is because three functions of play are enumerated that I found so interesting:

1. Identifying the limits of those who play

In play, you test how far you can stretch, how far you can go while remaining fair to the other. The moment you reach their limit, the other will become aggressive or withdraw. And this search for and finding of limits has to do with the formation of a stable social group over time. If we look at the groups in our country, we see a desolate landscape from this perspective. The 60–40 rule of reciprocity struck me as extraordinary, and it has to do with relational balance or, on the opposite side, with domination. The pleasure that keeps the game going and developing respects these proportions: whoever leads, leads 60% of the time, and for the rest shares leadership with the other participants — meaning everyone must enjoy their own capacity to lead. The numbers are not à la Winnicott, but they say something very important about those who cannot accept this “sharing” — those who always want to be in charge.

2. Establishing social hierarchy

Here it is easy to observe the dynamics in which power and status are implicated. We “lock horns” in one way or another and, in doing so, establish order.

3. Developing empathy

Third, Solms tells us, play has to do with the development of empathy — the capacity to identify and take into account the feelings of others. To play you must enjoy yourself, and to enjoy yourself your feelings must be respected. It is that simple. When this happens, the social configurations that emerge are sustained by evolution.

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I know that Winnicott did not speak about play in this way. Nor did he need to. But the fact that play is seen as essential for our psychological development — or, as Winnicott would have said, for our very existence as psychic beings — from such different vantage points, I think gives us something to consider. Solms is not speaking about just any play, but about something inscribed in human neuropsychology through evolution. It is not a choice we make or don’t make… it is a fact of our neuropsychic constitution, and I believe it is worth taking seriously.

In his book The Hidden Spring, there is a passage in which he shows how, when this affect is not allowed to reach its potential, the other affects are activated and the sequence is distorted. Its usefulness for clinicians strikes me as so great that I prefer to bring the full quote here:

“Play episodes come to an abrupt end when they lose their ‘as if’ quality. If you lock up your little sister and throw away the key, then not only have you broken the 60:40 rule but you also are no longer playing the game of Cops and Robbers; instead you are imprisoning your sister. In other words, what is governing your mutual behaviour now is FEAR or RAGE rather than PLAY. The same applies to the other games enumerated above. ‘Doctor/Patient’ is a game until it becomes real sex; then it is governed by LUST.”

What strikes me as particularly valuable in this passage is that the words written in capitals are the basic affects — those encrypted in our brains. The transition from one to another is not as difficult as we might imagine. If in play you are, as Winnicott said, free to be yourself, Solms’ neuropsychoanalysis also gives us pause to consider how easily we can lose this freedom. When the stakes become too real and the “as if” disappears, we are no longer ourselves — we are taken over by affects such as rage or desire. Play then transforms into something else, and with it we lose something essential: the capacity to remain in relationship without being invaded or invading. And reclaiming this space is not simple at all.

Perhaps it is true that when you are young, history doesn’t interest you — only the present moment. And that with age, it becomes meaningful to understand the arc of events: where they came from and where they tend to go. Freud would have called this finding their meaning.

And so I reread a short article by Paula Heimann from 1950 — surprisingly clear and illuminating. The feeling I had at the end was like finishing an entire book only to find, in the last two or three pages, everything essential. I thought: if you want a starting point for understanding what a therapist feels, this article of just a few pages is all you need. Perhaps it is even more than a starting point.

Three things struck me as essential in her article: the evident development of the Freudian conception of what the therapist feels and what they do with it; that what the therapist feels is an essential part of the therapist’s work; and that what the therapist feels is the patient’s creation — and more than that, is part of the patient’s personality.

It is interesting to note that the word “rupture” is often used in psychoanalytic literature to describe the developments various authors have made departing from Freud. Heimann’s text, because it differs from what Freud said, could be catalogued this way. But she herself specifies that she read Freud differently — and I find the way she did it genuinely beautiful.

It makes sense, when speaking about a subject as important as what the therapist feels, to begin with Freud. The history is fascinating: at first, Freud saw countertransference — the technical term for what the therapist feels — as an obstacle. It prevented him from seeing clearly into the other’s story. It was a consistent struggle for clarity of mind, a struggle that all of us who came after Freud have also waged. Out of his difficulty with his own feelings emerged what I consider a vital rule for any therapeutic process to be sustained: every therapist must have their own training analysis. Their own therapy. Perhaps this is the first condition to be met — necessary but not sufficient — when speaking of what it means to be a psychoanalyst or a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist.

Freud realized he did not always see clearly in his patients’ material, and later spoke of the therapist’s blind spots — those places where, due to one’s own unconscious conflicts, visibility is zero, and the risk of projecting onto the patient increases dangerously. Hence the necessity of one’s own analysis.

Heimann’s article feels like a pleasant breeze. And it also strikes me as very different from the intense emotional effusions one sometimes hears in contemporary case presentations.

This is the point beyond which there was no return in psychoanalysis: countertransference is an instrument and can be used in therapeutic work. I find it delicious how Heimann speaks about analysis with crushing simplicity: “It has not been sufficiently stressed that it is a relationship between two persons. What distinguishes this relationship from others is not the presence of feelings in one partner, the patient, and their absence in the other, the analyst, but above all the degree of the feelings experienced and the use made of them, these factors being interdependent.”

There is no doubt, I hope for anyone, that to be able to consciously experience emotions and feelings — for therapeutic purposes — requires that personal training with one’s own unconscious. Without it, the blind spots in one’s own psyche will be significant (and, being unconscious, you will not know this), and the capacity to make use of one’s own emotions will be poorly developed.

The development Heimann brings here is something else, however. She speaks of the capacity to identify and use these emotions — but not directly, not through self-disclosure as the relationalists would later propose. If there is awareness but not open acknowledgment, then it is a matter of inhabiting the feeling until the therapist understands what is happening in the therapeutic relationship. The therapist must stay with their own emotions until meaning decants — and then the interpretation they formulate will have clarity and, choosing the right moment, impact. This is analytic technique.

It rests on a foundational hypothesis, which the author recalls, whose importance and depth still shakes me — and which I believe has not yet exhausted its full force. On the contrary, it feels like only an opening: the analyst’s unconscious understands the patient’s unconscious. This hypothesis of unconscious-to-unconscious communication changes everything, if taken with full seriousness. Like the existence of God. These are high-impact hypotheses.

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The other hypothesis that follows naturally from the first is even more striking: what the therapist feels is the patient’s creation, and is part of the patient’s personality. I read it this way: the therapist must have sufficient flexibility to allow themselves to be inhabited, for a time, by an inner content that is not their own.

This content is double-faced: on one side it is experienced as one’s own; on the other, it is a creation of the interaction with the patient — of the relationship — and therefore belongs, in some measure, to the patient. The capacity to penetrate and be penetrated is thus essential to the therapeutic process. If psychic permeability does not allow for such inhabiting, the therapist’s experience of the therapeutic process takes other forms — probably abrasive, porous — and can easily lead to a false therapeutic process, modeled on the false self.

In clinical practice, the therapist sometimes feels sadder, or in acute need to speak, or frightened. There are sessions during which emotions are very intense. After the pandemic period, for instance, I found myself having to hold inside fears of death and various anxieties — until they found, or perhaps more precisely, until they found their place in the lived history of the patient. Time is needed for emotions that are at first barely felt to take shape inside the therapist — sometimes it is a painful void, sometimes a yearning gaze.

Freud began by observing that patients sometimes related to him as though he were a significant person from their past. In this surprising movement, he also discovered that his own reactions could be disturbing to the relationship and the process. At first it seemed a great danger — but years later, Heimann reminded us that this is a relationship in which emotions circulate, and that, with careful observation and honest control, they can be used therapeutically and in the deepening of the relationship.

This was a step taken in the 1950s. Since then, surprisingly elegant things have been said — and yet I keep returning here, to these few pages, to this quiet certainty: that the therapist’s feeling is not noise to be filtered out, but signal to be read. That what moves inside the one who listens is already, in some way, the voice of the one who speaks.

When you first read something like this, you feel like closing the book and setting it aside for a while, telling yourself you probably misunderstood the words. What do you mean, the mind does not exist as an entity? Then what is it? Yes, we know the mind is an instrument, and that this instrument is used toward knowledge of the psychic world — but at the same time they don’t seem that different from each other. Can the mind exist without the psyche, or vice versa? Aren’t both dependent on the existence of the brain?

A second reaction might be a little calmer. What did Winnicott actually want to say? He once said something else that the entire psychoanalytic world knows — there is no such thing as a baby. Of course, the full idea refers to something other than what appears at first glance: namely, to the mother-baby unit. Could it be that in this case — the mind does not exist as an entity — he wants to tell us something similar? I admit that if so, I would want to know what it is. Because in the version where there is no such thing as a separate baby, the idea is so revolutionary that I don’t think it has yet been fully unpacked: the baby is not identified or fused with the mother — mother and baby are one! But that is not the idea to discuss here and now; perhaps only its introduction.

Winnicott also tells us that we have three orders of existence — connected, and it would not be quite right to ask which came first and which second.

One of them is the body. It has an intra-uterine and extra-uterine existence and is subject to multiple external influences before, during, and after birth. The body develops over time the sense organs that allow information exchange with the exterior and, therefore, adaptation.

The second order of existence consists of — or is constituted by — what the same author calls the imaginative elaboration of “the parts, feelings and functions of the soma, that is, of physical aliveness.” This is the order of the psychic world.

Resting upon these two orders, there exists a third, specific one: the mind.

“The mind does not exist as an entity in the individual’s scheme of things provided that the individual’s psychosomatic scheme has gone through the earlier stages of development satisfactorily; mind is therefore no more than a special case of the functioning of the psychosomatic partnership.”

This idea brought to my mind another one whose understanding took me some time, though it appears deceptively simple. I am referring to the Buddhist philosophical idea that things have no self of their own — that their arising and passing away depend fundamentally on the fulfillment of specific circumstances. And here, unexpectedly, I discover the same principle at the heart of psychoanalysis, in Winnicott — a psychoanalyst so appreciated and used today.

If the mind is no more than an appearance at the confluence of the body and the psychic world, why not apply exactly the same way of thinking to the psyche and to the body? Suddenly, what seemed a difficult philosophical idea unfolds into its concrete parts: the psyche could not exist simply on its own, but only as a consequence of the body’s existence and the mother’s; and the body could not exist simply on its own, if a sperm had not met an egg. The principle — this exists because that exists — and their connection and dependence, I think, is evident. Let us return for a moment to the mind.

“The mind therefore has as one of its roots a variable functioning of the psychosomatic partnership, concerned with the threat to continuity of existence that follows any failure of environmental adaptation. Accordingly, the development of the mind is very much influenced by factors that are not individual-specific, including chance events.”

Here appears Winnicott’s central idea about good enough development — an idea we can observe in any therapeutic process and to which all psychoanalysts, sooner or later, arrive: the continuity of existence is essential. Hence the need for quiet and hearing one’s own voice. Hence the capacity to be alone in the presence of another — the other who cares for you must ensure, within themselves first and initially also outside themselves, the continuity of your existence.

It seems to me that this idea wounds human narcissism more deeply than even the Freudian idea that the Ego is not master in its own house, due to the existence of the unconscious. Not only are we not masters of our own being — whose unknown and uncontrolled dimensions lead us to constantly invent illusory methods of self-control or isolated development. But at the foundation of our good functioning, of the fulfillment of our lives, stands another person on whom we depend in the most concrete and direct way. In other words, we cannot move outside of this bond, however much energy or endowment we possess. And these two ideas taken together compose an even more interesting landscape.

Regarding the feeling of being alive, we might say this: alive is the body that moves, feels, makes the spontaneous gesture. The care of this living body initially requires a perfect environment whose characteristics I will not discuss here. It is enough to say that this care must ensure the continuity of the body’s existence — which refers not only to concrete, physical existence, but also to the fact that the baby’s body is (in) the mother’s psyche. These allow the emergence of the baby’s psychic functioning, which quickly takes over aspects of the caretaking and allows for corrections from reality, transforming a care with gaps into one that is just good enough to be. It is at this level that the major distortions occur. For when this process is not secured, the mind can interfere greatly with the “linear” development of these processes. But what does it mean to interfere?

I think, broadly speaking, when the mind interferes with processes that naturally do not require such participation, it means problem-solving. The mind solves the problem of an environment that was not well enough adapted to the initial needs of the newborn. I will not even speak of those passages in which Winnicott talks about the mind’s exact memorization of the stages of birth — that discussion would take us too…far.

I believe the value of the entire development above, and the reason for Winnicott’s article, can in fact be shown through an example easily encountered in psychotherapy sessions.

Let us imagine the beginning of a therapy session when the patient has just entered the office and is walking toward their chair. Just before sitting down, they glance out the window and — it being morning — see not just the clear sky but a horizon that for a fraction of a second lights up their face. It was a real spark. The therapist sees it and asks the patient how they feel. Sometimes the patient’s answer takes on an automatic character: I feel fine today — or — well, a new day begins and I have a lot of things to do — or things of that sort. Other times the automatic answer is much more elaborate and begins with: an image came to my mind — and then discourse builds itself upon that image, which has nothing to do with the lived experience of the sun and the horizon on the patient’s face.

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The psychic world has to do with lived experience, while the mind has to do with the image that comes to mind — and we build upon it without bodily or emotional participation. The mind can then also “invent” emotions and experiences around that image, which nonetheless says nothing about the person sitting before us.

Psychic elaboration is different from intellectual work. Psychic elaboration does not come automatically. It sometimes requires unexpected silence, the feeling that the person in front of you is actually looking inward, even the breathing may change its rhythm, uncontrolled emotion appears on the face, and there is even a certain incapacity to articulate what is happening. It often begins with: I’m not sure I can express this clearly, but… Intellectual activity is organizing, often clear, with rapid and correct connections, as if it were always about someone else — in any case, an activity in which the body does not seem to participate (much as AI does).

I think the picture is now much clearer. The mind and its activity, as necessary as it is, must respect its order. When it takes over too much of what does not belong to it, it creates a duplicate life. As a result of this action, a multitude of states may arise: confusion, the feeling of being an impostor, the sense of not participating in one’s own life and one’s own achievements, chance seems to play the central role in how daily life unfolds, self-confidence is easily shaken, and so on. The opposite version — in which the duplicate is a successful person — is equally possible. The problem is not in the manifestation of the duplicate but in the absence of real contact with one’s own person: body, psyche, mind. The duplicate will exist, but its place is very important — vital, one might say.

As a final remark, I would make a philosophical move. If the mind has such activity and does not even exist in itself — since it requires clear conditions for its arising — then it is natural to change our internal positioning toward it. It is a transitory phenomenon, an instrument we use for certain operations, but not one we carry with us everywhere. Similarly, the psyche — this imaginative elaboration of corporeality with everything it includes — has no existence in itself, since it has everything to do with the existence of the body but also with the way the mother holds the child within herself. Thus, the psyche not only cannot be localized somewhere, but it is also good that we do not try to do so, because we do not know how much of it is truly ours. Dare we ask how much of it we actually are?

The body, likewise, is not the first thing we think of when asked who we are — we do not answer: we are these hands, or these legs, or this body. Another quote from Winnicott comes to mind: “a human being is a temporal illustration of human nature”. Of course, what touches us here is the word “temporal” — temporary. The body comes, be-comes and un-comes. Perhaps the idea of the absence of a self-nature in things is not quite so difficult to consider now, when we know that if the mind believes it is the core, we are in error.

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Two Frightened People and the grid of Rationalization

What follows can be interpreted as having a defensive character, although I prefer to emphasize the associative one. The text results from reading a few lines from Bion’s Brazilian Seminars—specifically the first chapter. It is as if I am trying to salvage something of what I could do or know, conscious of the fact that I will not succeed, hence the chosen title. Nevertheless, I will stay quite close to the text, attempting my own arrangement.

It sounds so good when Bion says it—in the consulting room, there are two frightened people, afraid of what they do not know, that is, the unconscious between and within them. In such a situation, a large amount of uncertainty must exist, and every time an analyst “knows” what they are doing in the room, a serious amount of rationalization can be assumed because, fundamentally, what the analyst knows is a grid composed of concepts that are approximations of reality but which they use as if they were correct, fitting, and real. Therefore, the two must be frightened because they live together in an unknown from which all sorts of states and ideas emerge, and therapy would consist of their attempt not to enter a “nervous collapse” arising from an interpretation. And yet, I cannot give up the idea that the analyst lives with an illusion that they still know or have something extra, and this illusion makes a major difference. This relates to the title, for it seems to me now that science—if such a thing as “knowing” could exist—can only be based on a real illusion.

The Impossibility of Repetition and the Illusion of Time

Now we can ask about doing what you know and knowing how to do something. I do not know if they seem the same, but they bring me a new impression. Doing what you know means avoiding what is happening, as repetition is impossible, whereas knowing how to do something means appealing to an experience that, in the first formulation, was impossible. Since this is just a text, I allow myself to try to understand—repetition is impossible for two reasons: 1. because it appeals to a static reality that is impossible to think, and 2. because it assumes the concept of temporality, which of course can have no meaning.

Bion places a special emphasis on movement, on transformation. For him, nothing can be defined except for a specific moment, which can make thinking become absurd because we are always referring to a present moment that is not identical to anything else. Therefore, saying “anxiety” or “sex” means nothing, and theoretically, in a discussion, we should always ask what we are referring to when we use such terms, because every discussion refers to a present state and not to a concept as understood over time. Bion goes even further, consistently applying the same idea to time—fundamentally, we believe there is something we call time, but that is a definition, I am inclined to say social, meaning we have agreed that something called time exists. In reality, there are only present moments, and defining any other moment—past, future—is extremely difficult, if not impossible.

The “Here-and-Now” and the Task of the Analyst

Anyway, what I have said makes it difficult for me to understand the “advice” to think about the future. Fundamentally, this is just a way of projecting ourselves from a present into a mental projection of a future, given that the text shows clearly—all the temporality the patient speaks from reflects only a present, a powerful here-and-now (a very solid idea, I would say).

Transformation as a principle assumes the individualization of every concept, a difficulty we cannot overcome and, strictly speaking, we shouldn’t. The awareness of the fact that a discussion in which general concepts are used is identical only to itself—meaning it is just a discussion in which general concepts are used—is, I believe, enough. And Bion seems to say that it is the task of psychoanalysts to find out why things are the way they are (de ce lucrurile stau așa). What I understand from “why things are the way they are...” is that there is a “way” (așa) in which things “stand” (stau), and I would even venture to say there is a functional “way,” regardless of how it is conceived. Whether this “way” is in continual transformation, whether our mind has or hasn’t the natural capacity to follow this movement, or whether our understanding can follow it, that is a slightly different problem.

Surviving the Collapse and Emotional Realization

Everything I have said so far seems to me to relate to what I called at the beginning a defensive character. It is hard to conceive or think what Bion says, and then I am left with the feeling that it doesn’t matter anyway because I haven’t managed to say anything concrete, and then the question of utility arises.

“If you can try, and neither you nor your patient suffers what we vaguely call a nervous collapse, but survive, then it means both of you will be mentally stronger after this experience.”

After an interpretation. Hurray (Uraaa), meaning we can still be stronger, mentally!!! And this means two things to me: 1. That a memory exists that records and functions, meaning we can use an experience in the present, and 2. That these things involve the emotional realization of concepts.

The Training of the Unconscious

Even if everything that happens in therapy can be reported to the present moment, this does not negate what Casement advised us, namely to “practice” analysis outside of sessions so that, in sessions, we can rely on an incorporated and functional analytical structure of our mind that functions as if by itself.

If we can free our minds while patients speak to react with something deeper from within us—something we might not know much about but which we have striven to practice—perhaps that would mean being in an atemporal and evidently analytical present. We can accumulate something we call experience that will react from within us, much like transferential elements, in the face of the other, and that would also be the purpose of personal analysis and the subsequent auto-analytical effort, the analysis of countertransference, and so on. On the other hand, without this training of the unconscious—or more precisely, the training of the conscious in the face of the unconscious—the realization Bion speaks of would be hard to conceive.

I refer to the realization of concepts as the act of personalizing, of “emotionalizing“ the concepts we use. Then our discourse becomes alive, perhaps difficult or impossible to understand, but it clearly fits into the natural transformation. And then I can think that “knowing” becomes possible, though it has serious limits that I will often forget.

— Fonagy and Bateman

If we settle into a meditative-reflective posture and look at this passage, we quickly realize it describes nothing unfamiliar. If we pay a little attention to our body and our mind, we see that, in some way, every inner manifestation seems to begin like this: first there is something diffuse, and then it takes a form — a form that can be expressed and recognized as such.

Emotions are, at their root, sensations — reactions of the organism, sometimes locatable in the body — that we seek to name in one way or another. Very young children do not localize their sensations with precision. They do not have stomachaches; they have a feeling of discomfort somewhere in the body, in one region or another. Naming that discomfort coagulates it — it becomes sadness, or anger, or joy — and in this way a mental image of it becomes possible. Eventually, you can make it a character in a story.

The naming of an inner sensation — the emotion — is an act of great significance. It is not merely identification, as we might easily imagine. It is also an act of creation. The sensation we are speaking of is diffuse at first, which means its form cannot be captured in any single description. The word binds it to a form that the mind can recognize. And in this way, both the sensation and the mind take shape.

But this is the extraordinary role of the word. It gives form to something initially undifferentiated — it raises the unformed to the rank of the symbolic. A something without name or shape becomes a named emotion that can be described and communicated.

And yet the role of the word does not end there. In the very act of giving form — of transforming matter — the word also deforms it, closes it within its own limits. And its limits are not the limits of sensation. We can always return to what we felt and make new and further descriptions, perhaps more fitting ones, of what it is. Just as we can remain with the image of infinite indetermination — of the unfulfillment of language, or as Bion would say, its non-saturation. Perhaps if language could cover the entire spectrum of our feeling, the landscape would be unbearably dull.

The naming — the creation of an emotion from sensation and word — becomes dear to the mind, which behaves toward it as a mother toward her child. Thus the word is endowed with internal power, and the mind grows attached to its own creation… it may even come to believe more in its own creation than in the reality that lies outside it: the sensation itself. (I hope this piece of writing is subject to the very same formula — it is only a story, to be used in one way or another, hopefully usefully.)

The mind and the word are so close that sometimes you cannot tell them apart — both are instruments. Just as it is not easy to distinguish between thoughts and the mind that thinks them. The mind’s identification with the word leads not only to a more solid creation but also to a greater falsification of raw reality. When this happens, the sensation — which through the word becomes emotion and can stabilize as feeling — transforms rapidly into behavior. This is where many of our problems arise. And it is also, to be fair, where our ultra-rapid reactions come from — the ones that sometimes save our lives.

It is very likely that we received from those who raised us an implicit map of what to do in the face of different emotions. If our caregivers did not bear sadness well — if in its presence they did not open the mind through words, but instead shied away and denied feeling sad — we learned this avoidance. This learning often happens without words, without naming, perhaps only through glances and the atmosphere created. The aggression inherent in human nature is one of the areas most difficult to negotiate, and we reject it when we see it in others not only through words but through our entire verbal and non-verbal behavior. In this way we learn that it is not allowed, not good, not right, not moral. All of this blocks the reflexive mind’s access to understanding and transformation.

But this does not happen only in problematic cases — it happens in all cases. When we are sad, we withdraw from the world, sometimes we seek someone who will understand us, and we try to cry. All of this does us good when we are sad. We no longer even need to think about it — we simply do it. These too are learned, automatic behaviors.

The sensation-emotion transforms into behavior most readily when internal differentiations are not clear, but coarse. A diffuse sensation, not gathered into a word, can produce automatic discharge — behavior without the participation of thought. Introducing thought into the equation requires the effort of identifying the sensation, naming it, describing it, placing it into a flow of thoughts and images that somehow bring it together, that bind it. This effort is what creates inner space.

The short answer: sensation translates automatically into behavior in the absence of a metabolizing inner space. The absence of that functional inner space is, in a metaphorical language, the absence of silence in education. If the child must continually respond to external demands, they cannot develop in such a way as to know their own inner manifestations. For this, they must be left in peace. Or perhaps more precisely: they must be held in peace — that is, in safety. There, in their peace, they will be able to scatter and gather again, as their nature requires.

The automatic transformation of emotion into action reflects not only the absence of inner space, but also the fact that this space will not, in turn, be created. And for inner space to be created, another inner space is needed — one that acts from outside: the caregiver who holds the child.

The transformative analytic process is formed first by containing presence-consciousness, and then by speech. (This distinction is descriptive only.) The pressure a therapist may place on a patient is harmful because it can oblige the patient to do something — to once again fill the space as a result of learned behavior, of implicit procedural memory. Likewise, excessive soothing — calming the patient — has the same effect, because it removes the tension that might otherwise lead them to find meaning. The therapist does not resolve. The therapist contains.

This kind of presence offers the mind the possibility of dis-identifying from its own contents — of having a space of movement between sensations, words, emotions, and behaviors. Allowing a sensation to take a form you can speak about, while knowing that this form, though it is part of you, does not define you completely — this creates the possibility of another perspective on reality.

A flexible identity: one that can use the capacity to remain in uncertainty without becoming too frightened.

At this level, presence — the awareness of the world and of one’s own self — is what not only allows full expression but also transforms it. Our fulfillment as organisms takes place in the presence of someone… who helps you greatly, at first, to falsify reality by identifying and naming your inner states, but who at the same time allows you to play with your emotions and their names.

The absence of containing presence throws you into the abyss of disorganization — a place where the words used for sensations become chaotic, wildly imprecise, unable to create connection between body and mind, between your mind and mine, between my mind and my bod

Reflections on our unconscious defenses, everyday conflicts, and the quiet work of becoming ourselves

I woke up early and saw that it was a beautiful morning, the sun coming in through the blinds and touching my hand, the one holding a cup of coffee. And perhaps this is nothing more than a way of inviting you to a cup of coffee.
I slept well and I would like to write something for you, those of you who read Substack. For me, writing is something very interesting because I have the feeling that if I don’t write, I cannot think, even though I realize I could live perfectly well without it… The problem that quickly appears in my mind is that I have never written because I had to write; now I tell myself that I must write because I have to publish something on Substack. Of course, immediately the thought that for me nothing is a must is present, and I would almost wrestle with it, while in a corner of my mind I know that this will not bring me any subject to write about.

In reality, I want to write. I feel that my mind would wrestle with a subject, split it open, but I have none. That is why I feel like settling a small score with the thought that I should write something for myself, or for you, or for anything else.

It is clear that I want to write something, I don’t know what to write about, and what is very interesting is that I almost don’t even know why I would do this. Just as clear is the fact that regardless of whether I will show you what I write or not, in the end I will write something.

It is interesting how our mind works, and further, how we can understand its organization from the way it functions. For me, the effort of the modern human being to reach some form of balance, fulfillment, or realization of one’s own personality is deeply impressive.

Unfortunately, many of the formulas used in a cliché-like manner are incomplete; of course, this does not make them false, but it makes them impracticable, and implicitly this leads to a frustration that can distance the person who longs for development from this process—said to be the most difficult in our short life.

To be a good observer of one’s own behaviors is important, even foundational, yet it is not enough. To be able to direct one’s attention toward the good, positive parts of one’s life—or of life in general—may also be important one day, but it does not lead to structural change, that is, a change that lasts.

In the lines that follow I would like to offer an answer, or the beginning of an answer, to the question of why most freely offered formulas simply do not work. Or work for a while and then we return to the previous state. Or, no matter how good the theory sounds, we never reach practice.

The reason all this happens lies in the way our mind functions. And no, it is not only about how one person or another believed the mind works, but about a concentrated effort of many thousands of specialists who dedicated their lives to studying these enigmas—at once attractive and disturbing.
So, do we have an ultimate model of the mind’s functioning and structure? The answer is no. But this has not stopped anyone from making their own observations.

It seems that our mind is a territory we know only partially. This means nothing other than that a part of the mind remains unknown to us, yet we must assume its existence because of the evident effects it produces. We call that part the unconscious.

We already know that the unconscious has a specific organization that follows a logic different from everyday logic. We cannot know how much it contains, how vast it is, but there are signs that it might contain, for example, everything we have ever lived. This does not necessarily mean that the unconscious is some kind of extended memory.

And only if we fully accept this idea of the existence of the unconscious can we have a first—admittedly general—answer to the dilemmas above.
No matter how organized and determined we are, something from the unconscious part of our mind can erode our efforts, block them completely, or simply make them heavier (just as sometimes in dreams there is that heaviness of not being able to move, perhaps in a situation of danger).
The existence of this instance somehow runs against our desire to observe ourselves—but this is only a way of speaking. This condition makes psychotherapy both necessary and possible—our capacity for self-observation has profound limits, and we need other eyes to tell us about our blind spots, areas that fall outside the light of our own sight.
Of course, this does not invalidate the personal effort of self-observation and introspection… not at all. It only limits it, and for a serious process of self-knowledge it is good to know this.

Where this limit lies, again, is not something we can know precisely—probably it depends on how developed our capacity for self-observation is, in general, on our emotional state and fatigue, on the exercise we have in making this effort. But in the end, no matter how well we might observe ourselves, something in us will remain a mystery.

Now let us take a step further.

Not only does the existence of the unconscious seem able to oppose the conscious effort to fulfill our existence in one way or another, but this unconscious of ours—about which we know less than we would wish—must also adapt to an external reality separate from it.
The fact that we live in a society with its specific rules makes this adaptation necessary. We know for sure that the unconscious does not, by default, respect those social rules, and that there are in it even… anti-social tendencies.

In psychoanalysis we call them drives, and their regulation is mainly governed by a principle we call the pleasure–unpleasure principle. I think it is quite simple to understand what this means - what gives us pleasure attracts us and we want more of it; what does not, we reject and avoid.
These true forces within us must somehow be tamed in order for us to live together, and the stronger the correction we apply to these internal bio-psychological forces, the more refined the instruments we need to metabolize the internal tensions produced by this movement.

Our unconscious mind does not make this adaptation directly, however. From it develops—or more beautifully said, specializes—a part that deals with this adaptation.

It must take into account both what our deepest interior says and the way we can make room for those messages in the world of people.
It is certain that this task is not simple at all and requires much growth. At first I wrote “much education,” but then I realized the term could be misleading.
We need to grow our capacity to adapt inner contents to external realities. The human being stands between these demands.

And precisely at this point of adaptation—a node of great inner tension and not only inner—lies the territory where what we intend can meet far more destinies than those we consciously imagine. For the part of the unconscious that deals with our adaptation (which in psychoanalysis we call the Ego) will resort to anything to maintain a more or less continuous negotiable balance. Some of the most visible strategies for this—visible because they are noisy and defeat everyday logic—we call defense mechanisms.

It seems to me that the expression defense mechanisms could be misleading and make us believe they are something sufficiently negative that should be eliminated, something we should not use.
Freud defined defenses at one point as “all the techniques used by the Ego in its conflicts, which may eventually lead to neuroses.”
In fact, I admit that I would like this article to be the first in a series of articles dedicated to the techniques used by our adaptive part when deep internal demands do not find a non-conflictual place in the order of the world.

Until then, however, I want to emphasize that defense mechanisms make self-inquiry obligatory and significantly limit our conscious projects.
It sounds somewhat unnatural that what you consciously intend might not receive a positive vote from… precisely your own mind.
And yet… there is no human being who has not passed through such inner conflicts.

But precisely this type of opposition, which provokes some of the hardest reactions to bear… it is as if you promised a good friend that you would meet him at a very clearly established hour, you know that the meeting is very important to him, and yet you lose your house keys just before leaving and must delay another half hour to find them. The fact that you have revealed yourself regarding an intention otherwise unknown to you—oh… that can be very challenging to your inner balance.

(What is even more comic is that the mind can quickly reorient itself and come up with ways to counter the event that silently speaks—the lost keys—but this cancels nothing, for what happened has happened.)

From the collision between the unconscious’s claims to full manifestation and the limitations imposed by the existence of other people within a socio-civilized organization—and through the Ego’s negotiating efforts we call defense mechanisms—symptoms appear. These are, in a way, manifestations of adaptation… half adaptations, half attempts at control or suppression. Given their universality, I feel tempted to say that symptoms are part of the natural path of human becoming.
Our ordinary growth takes many forms and meets moments of great inner or relational tension. This is not unexpected. Even in quieter forms of growth, conflicts smolder inside and periodically produce sleepless nights.

There is a part that brings unorganized, unpolished, incompletely humanized contents into the mind, and there thinking begins.
Those contents are emotions, images, and thoughts… and thoughts force the organism to develop the apparatus of thinking in order to adapt… but about these processes, another time.

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Another important detail in all this unfolding is that defense mechanisms, disturbing as they are, are not on the surface. Exactly like in the example of losing the keys: the motive, the intention of the loss, may be completely foreign to the person, even though the meaning can be so evident.
At the confluence between conscious and unconscious, very harsh negotiations may sometimes take place, and defense mechanisms sit at that negotiating table. Most of the time, they sit on the dark side of the table and from there transform contents that would otherwise be far too disturbing for the bearer—or even for others—into acceptable contents or symptoms.

Thus, what we propose to ourselves with the best intentions one day may completely disappear from our mind the next, and somewhere around Thursday we remember again and decide that on Monday we will finally turn over a new leaf, only for the process to repeat identically, without our being able to identify what is happening within us that makes us refuse our own well-being—or what we believe well-being to be.

Perhaps what we call failure, postponement, or lack of will is not only weakness, but the silent way in which something in us is still trying to protect us from a truth for which we are not ready. And if that is so, then the understanding of our life does not begin with change, but with a far more difficult encounter: the recognition of the way we defend ourselves even from our own becoming.

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The question has received many answers, grouped around concepts such as respect, trust, love. And of course, they each have their share of truth. Here, I have set out to bring a new nuance to this theme, a nuance discovered in my psychoanalytic studies.

As I have grown accustomed to doing in my other writings, I bring in a passage from a well-known psychoanalytic author who offered me material for reflection. Winnicott writes:

“Only when alone—in the presence of someone—can the baby discover his or her personal life. The pathological alternative is a false life built upon reactions to external stimuli. When alone, in the sense in which I use the term, and only when alone, the baby can do something equivalent to what we call, in an adult, relaxing. The baby may become unintegrated, slack, in a state lacking orientation, able for a time to exist without being either reactive to intrusions from the external environment or an active person with direction or movement of interest. The scene is set for an experience of the Id. In time, a sensation or impulse will appear. Only in this setting will the sensation or impulse be felt as real and truly be a personal experience.”

The passage is taken from volume four of this author’s Complete Works, published by Editura Trei, and can be found on page 39, in the article The Capacity to Be Alone, published in 1958. The article is a very short one—just a few pages—and at times it seemed unclear to me. Yet its central idea, the development of the capacity to be alone in the presence of someone as the basis for later deep interactions, appears to me insufficiently emphasized in ordinary discussions on this subject.

Winnicott’s entire work speaks to us about the good development of the human infant and the renowned good-enough environment that allows this development to take place. One of the characteristics of this environment emerges clearly from the passage and article mentioned here. I would say that, for the baby, the capacity to be alone in the presence of another person means nothing other than the existence of a caregiver—usually the mother—who remains nearby and leaves the child in peace, without this meaning that she is inattentive. She can meet the child’s needs as soon as they arise, yet there is a span of time when she is needed only in this form: as an environment that permits registration, the hearing of one’s own voice. Only in the quietness of the other’s presence does a baby come to be able to “hear” his or her own impulses and thoughts. If this quietness does not exist, it means the baby must respond to demands or echoes coming from outside. This renders the baby incapable of “knowing” his or her own experience.

Unable to be alone, a baby—and later the adult—cannot be more than an appendage of the external.

Starting from these thoughts, this idea came to me: might it be that what makes us deaf to our own inner voice is the continuous noise coming from outside? Might it be precisely the endless demands and expectations of others that occupy so much of our inner space that, at a certain point, we become wooden within and inaccessible to our internal riches? Without the safe space in which to hear how thoughts arise, how emotions reverberate inside us, how we are in the most direct way within ourselves—is this not what leads to the failure of so many relationships?

Why would this be so? Because if we do not hear our own inner voice, we lose our humanity. And this loss is not bearable.

(Dara Natis)

One day, I read a poem. I was struck by its force, but above all by its flow. I was reminded of it days ago while cleaning the house. I will not use psychoanalytic lenses to extract meanings and traits from the author’s story—those emerge easily enough—but would like instead to speak about the feeling and the question that stayed with me over time.

Though it would be easy to stop at the relationship with the mother, the verse — “And the soul cried out” — struck me so deeply that it changed the way I perceive the periods when a child, or an adult, becomes ill. We usually think of such moments as pauses in our journey, times when we are cared for. Often, when children are sick more often but not seriously, we assume they are seeking the affection that parents, for one reason or another, cannot give directly. But what if, alongside this meaning, illness is the cry of the soul? What if being sick is a way for the body to make a contorted call for direct contact with oneself? In the end, we are used to seeing the sick person suffer a narcissistic contraction, attention focused entirely on the body. But what if it were exactly so — illness as a way of being in contact with one’s own being? I will play a little with this idea in the lines that follow.

I think what made me consider this, an echo of the poem, is the solitude of illness in which one can hear the soul crying, even when no one else can hear it. “Strangely alive” seems to say… beyond mind, even beyond body there is a cry that encompasses both and resuscitates them… or, as the poet says:

Many things pass before us,
Many ring in the ears,
Who keeps all in mind
And would sit to listen?…
You, sit aside,
Finding yourself again,
When idle noises pass,
Time passes, time comes.

(Eminescu)

The experience of being alone in the presence of someone — the Winnicottian paradox — speaks exactly to this finding or refinding of oneself. He says — “The individual can reach the state of ‘I am’ only thanks to the existence of a protective environment” — the tea and crescent rolls:

Until the flesh fell;
The bones fell too.
Only the soul remained to cry out.

…and I imagined that it cried out, full of suffering, of pain…struggling to free its throat from unnamed constrictions: I am!

The initial state of existence seems unintegrated, lacking ego boundaries and what we call the “I.” From this state, as Winnicott tells us, in a sufficiently good, containing environment, a form can appear, an existence we might call human in its essence. For this to happen, the infant must be allowed to develop; interactions must be “good enough,” not asking more than they can give. The infant can thus exist unguarded, relaxed, until — “In time, a sensation or an impulse will appear. Only in this frame will the sensation or impulse be felt as real and truly a personal experience.” (Winnicott)

In strictly psychoanalytic terms, it would sound like this: in the absence of a containing environment, illness can act as a substitute container, allowing contact with the True Self through withdrawal from an invasive object relationship. In the analytic situation, the containing function is taken on by the frame and the presence of the analyst, making the illness thinkable and, thereby, dispensable. Symptom disengagement is not imposed, but arises as an effect of the possibility of being with oneself without somatic sacrifice. This is the way the soul’s cry can be heard.

This is only a reflection generated by contact with illness and the suffering that accompanies it. Being so widespread, we constantly seek new ways to fix, solve, annul, or heal…this is my own fantasy, showing me that, at least sometimes, illness is the only path through which contact with one’s own being seems possible. When the environment does not support this contact — not the relational one, which we are so used to attending to, but the internal one, between me and me — then it is expected that the organism reacts in some way, trying to be whole, to bring me to a state in which I feel complete, healthy, happy. The poem above shows precisely this…that through illness and unhappiness, constrictive as they are, there still remains a space to look toward one’s own inner fulfillment.

When things are not going well, a return is necessary, a recovery from beyond flesh and bones. We make the way back when it is permitted by the presence of another who can sustain it without intrusion. We know that for a thought too painful to be thought, it takes two minds.

Looking back, especially at the early years of this mysterious journey—psychoanalysis—I smile at how dedicated I was. I set out, and maybe that was the essential thing that drew me to my first readings of Freud: that psychoanalysis is a discipline in search of truth. Which truth? Of course, the inner one, the one that cannot be falsified because it belongs to each person’s flesh—not as an object, but as an existence, a being.

And because psychoanalysis is a search for truth, I remember with a certain amazement how I once set out to identify, with the greatest accuracy I could muster, the internal dynamics of my patient, the structure of their mind. I was so disciplined in my initial interviews, and after three sessions I had an incredibly rich material and told myself I could certainly guide the treatment in the right direction. Imagine my surprise when the fourth session never happened…the patient quit.

Oh, I was so bewildered! I had what I considered extremely important information about how he functioned, but surpriiise!, I hadn’t interacted with him as a human being at all…I had sought truth in a sufficiently indifferent way that the person, understandably, probably felt like a lab experiment and withdrew after giving me three chances. I had failed, and I didn’t quite understand why.

I quickly abandoned that way of interacting, though my interrogations in search of inner truth probably remained somewhat sharp, in line with my way of being. But over the years, I could not help noticing that discovering this truth, as valuable as it is, is also strange…because, in the end, recognizing another person’s truth is only part of the truth.

This marketplace of self-development, emotional growth, endless advice on how to “be better,” however that may be… seems, as useful as it may be, equally misleading. Deep psychoanalytic ideas are often reworked in ways that render them unrecognizable, or that mislead entirely. Freud’s emphasis on a symptom disappearing once its unconscious root is made conscious has been so stripped of context and distorted that it is scarcely recognizable. Somewhere in our minds, Freud still equals sexual exaggeration, and we shy away from the name, just as he said we would.

And yes, it’s true, psychoanalysis seeks truth; yes, it’s true this search uses specific tools to uncover unconscious messages; and yes, unraveling these messages is followed by their integration into the conscious psychic fabric. But this equation is not everything. Bringing unconscious content to light is only part of the work. Equally important is the field, the atmosphere, the environment in which this information unfolds.

Psychoanalytic technique is so easily misunderstood… for example, much of the time, the analyst is silent. Their silence is so significant that I almost don’t know if I should disturb it with these words. What does an analyst do when silent? Or put differently: how does the analyst’s silence contribute to the patient’s healing?

The most straightforward answer would be that a silent analyst listens. And by listening, I don’t just mean the willingness to know the patient; I mean the capacity to hear the unspoken messages in their discourse.

Another answer is that, in their silence, the analyst offers the patient their own internal space. What does that mean? It means positioning oneself, at times, as a resonating chamber through which the patient’s words reverberate… some sounds louder, some softer… the analyst tries to catch them all and translate them into words. This translation, it is said, is itself a highly valuable therapeutic act. I agree with this idea.

Yet again, I find myself in the same situation I mentioned before… the idea has been abstracted and turned into something self-standing… and it isn’t, really it isn’t. It belongs to an often very intimate process, and outside of it, it doesn’t mean as much. It’s important that hidden messages get the wrapper of words, but that still isn’t everything. Even if someone does this for you, and you feel understood, it still isn’t everything, though it is very valuable. At least, that’s how I feel. And my belief is based on the fact that I often don’t have much difficulty understanding others’ problems, even formulating them correctly…but that doesn’t mean healing…not yet.

It took me many years to articulate more clearly how I see my work: silence creates psychic space only when carried by a mind that can love what cannot yet be thought. Silence without this foundation is a silence that does not nourish in the conventional sense, sometimes resembling a void. Nourishing silence is the space in which the analyst’s mind—or perhaps better, their psyche—functions intensely.

The field in which analytic understanding must appear to be healing is one given by deep human compassion for another’s suffering, a certain humility for our own vulnerabilities, including the sometimes enormous internal effort of the therapist not to be swallowed by the patient’s pain—in plain words, the field is analytic love. I would describe this analytic love not only as dedication to the subjective-emotional truth but also as a special human kindness, the willingness to offer the patient one’s own internal space, to embrace internally the suffering of the other amid the fear of being engulfed, fragmented, suffocated by fantasies and tears. And I call it analytic love because it has to come in this combination…truth-understanding-compassion-humility.

After twenty years of therapeutic work, I believe this combination has the greatest healing power. I don’t mean to say that truth alone or any single element isn’t valuable…it is, and we see every day how even a small piece of understanding shown to another can, for the moment, change their state—or sometimes even more than that—their day.

Silence as an instrument can be mortifying, retraumatizing, or merely narcissistic-defensive—or, on the contrary, it can be a matrix for thinking, a psychic womb, the place where the symbolic is born. For silence to have relational impact, the analyst must be able to hold it within their own solitude.

There, in the first part of the article on care, I was saying that humanity has always stood before the most important themes of our lives, seeking useful explanations and understandings. I wrote:

“The Christian speaks of God and the devil, the Kleinian speaks of the life instinct and the death instinct, others speak of the illusions generated by our ignorance—but the idea is that before we can even begin to ask about them, they are already present in our minds, and then we have to do something with them. All of these are attempts humanity has articulated in order to negotiate its irreconcilable inner realities.”

Shortly after that, I re-read a text by Melanie Klein and encountered the following passage:

“The baby who, because of the strength of paranoid and schizoid mechanisms and the force of envy, fails to separate and keep apart love and hate, and consequently the good object and the bad one, is exposed to confusion between what is good and what is bad in other contexts as well.”

This caught my attention because the very theme of discernment was what I had been pursuing in the previous article. With the “appearance” of this passage, I felt compelled to continue the parallel between psychoanalysis and patristic literature, precisely in the spirit of the idea above: all of these are specific attempts to understand inner realities with which humanity has been struggling for at least several thousands years.

Here we are dealing with the factors that affect the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. In Kleinian psychoanalysis, this capacity is essentially tied to how successfully hatred is negotiated—a force that is extremely powerful from the very beginning of life. Klein takes Freud’s concept of the death drive—Thanatos—and places destructive hatred and envy at its core. Because envy is active from birth, it is negotiated through the mechanisms of that early period, which are themselves very primitive. If this negotiation fails, what Klein describes in the cited passage occurs: the capacity to discern between what is good and what is bad becomes severely impaired, and this will be felt across many life contexts, not only in relation to the mother.

In short, for Klein, discernment is linked to the outcome of the struggle between the life drives and the death drives. If hatred and envy, which are deeply rooted in us, prevail, then this capacity suffers, and its full manifestation is what she calls confusion.

For Saint Nicodimus, the impairment of discernment sounds like this:

“The reason why we do not rightly discern all these things we have spoken of, and many others as well, is that we do not reflect on their depth, but immediately show love or hatred toward them based only on their outward appearance; thus love or hatred runs ahead and darkens our mind, which can no longer judge them with discernment as they truly are. If you, brother, wish that this error find no place in your mind, take heed: whether you see something with your eyes or contemplate it with your mind, keep your will, as much as possible, in check and do not allow it to incline toward love or hatred of that thing, but examine it with the mind alone. For before all else, consider wisely that if something is painful and contrary to your natural inclination, you will be driven by hatred to reject it; if it gives you pleasure, you will be urged by love toward it to desire it.”

The landscape Saint Nicodimus describes is different, but not so different as to be unrecognizable. He is speaking about the moment when a person becomes able to observe himself and notice whether the object he is attending to produces a sensation of pleasure or of pain. Either of these, as we know, will contaminate the mind and even the perception of the object itself.

What the two perspectives share is the collision of the two major affective currents—love and hate. In Kleinian psychoanalysis, if love is stronger, if the child securely introjects a good object, then the adult who results will have the capacity to discern between good and evil. In Saint Nicodimus’s writing, if the mind leans toward either pleasure or pain (which are in some sense equated with love and hate), then it becomes very difficult to perceive correctly.

What differs completely is the developmental stage at which these processes occur, as well as their consequences. In Kleinian psychoanalysis we are dealing with the first six months of the infant’s life. In patristic literature we are dealing with an adult whose observing ego is already formed. In Kleinian analysis, the firm and consistent interpretation of hatred and of schizoid–paranoid mechanisms is the solution. In Saint Nicodimus’s view, it is a matter of will (and ultimately of recognizing one’s own helplessness and turning toward the divine). In psychoanalysis, the outcome of these efforts is the establishment of a balance between the drives, allowing creativity and gratitude to emerge. In patristic literature, the outcome is a mind that rises, clear and luminous, toward the knowledge of the truth of its own functioning, in order to attack—or even uproot—the root of evil in the soul.

Thus we arrive once again at the common point that inspired me to write in this way in the first place: in both perspectives, the struggle against our destructive, harmful inner tendencies is the central aim.

The paths are entirely different and lead toward destinations that may even appear incompatible, mutually repelling: one is mental and psychological, the other moral and spiritual. But the realities behind these words are the same.

I believe that one of the necessary steps in this direction, for all of us, is to accept the inheritances we have received from our parents—by which I mean not only our biological parents, but all those who lived before us. This is the direction toward which the reading of the Church Fathers has drawn my attention in a particular way. Without claiming to understand the deeper meanings of such works, my mind nonetheless lingered on certain passages. The words of Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite are one such example:

Just as every Christian has the duty to do everything within his power to regain the peace of the heart whenever he loses it, so too must he know that it is neither right nor wise to allow any event in this world that may befall him to deprive him of this peace or to disturb it.

I do not think one needs to be a fervent believer to be moved by such words, which direct attention precisely to the kind of care I mentioned earlier. On the contrary, I believe that the peace of the heart spoken of here is what the whole world seeks, regardless of the faith one adheres to.

Of course, the relationship established in this passage between inner peace and “any event in this world” is a strong one—solid in its intention not to be pulled in one direction or another by the phenomenal world, but to remain firmly oriented toward the sources of inner strength. I know that many are unsettled by the fact that, in the Christian faith, God is considered the source of our inner power, the root and the resource we need in order to live well. But everyone believes what they can.

What struck me as even more interesting—because it is more useful—in Saint Nicodemus’ writing is the following passage:

In order to keep your heart at peace in every undertaking, it is also necessary to protect it and defend it from certain inner reproaches and accusations coming from your conscience, which at times come from the devil, even though they may seem to come from God, since they condemn you for one fault or another. You will recognize where they come from by their fruits. For if they humble you and make you more attentive to your actions, if they do not destroy the hope and trust you have in God, receive them as coming from God and give thanks. But if they disturb you and fill you with excessive fear, distrust, indifference, and laziness toward the work of good, be assured that they come from the enemy, and do not heed them, but continue on your path and struggle.

Here we are given very clear indicators of the orientation of our actions—precisely the kind of signposts we so often need in order to discern between good and evil. You can weigh your actions by their fruits, says the Father: if apathy, inattention, and indifference appear in your soul—especially indifference toward what is happening within you—then you should know that you are in error. Your actions are causing you significant inner harm, and your position needs to be reconsidered.

If, on the other hand, there arises in your soul something like a new breath—a state of effortless presence, a correct attitude toward yourself (one that places you neither above nor below any other human being), and a kind of quiet joy in work done well—then you are on the right path.

The importance of this passage also lies in the fact that it refers directly to the protection we must offer our inner life precisely against conscience itself—an inner conflict we are so accustomed to encountering in our clinical practice. It is not strictly necessary to plunge into the question of where these thoughts come from, whether good or bad. The Christian speaks of God and the devil; the Kleinian speaks of the life drive and the death drive; others speak of illusions generated by our ignorance. The point is that, before we can question them, these thoughts are already in our minds—and then we must do something with them. All of these are attempts humanity has articulated in order to negotiate its unresolved inner realities.

The good part of our inheritance can help us in the work of keeping the mind clear.

Yes, I know—this is just a story, The Never Ending Story. However, fitting these words sound for anyone who wishes to set out on the path of self-knowledge, whether we are speaking of knowing one’s own mind, a spiritual path, or perhaps what comes to be called the process of individuation.

To be able to set aside—at least for a moment—your own opinion, precisely in order to encounter, sometimes for the first time in your life, the way your organism—psychic and somatic—actually functions. The wording of the quote may stir the ego a little: “your own opinion no longer matters”… Yes, I believe that sometimes one must travel a long road before being able to observe without judging—that is, to suspend one’s thinking for a moment and give a place of honor the capacity to observe and, above all, to ask.

I believe that if we could truly set out without any weapons—that is, without our (de)formed opinions about what life is, what the world is, what we are—we would be met with countless pleasant surprises. It is like the saying that, those who speaks a lot, learn very little. The entire passage establishes the proper frame for learning something from one’s own experience and from the experience of the world.

To give attention to everything that falls before our eyes, as logic might invite us to think, does not mean that nothing has any importance—on the contrary. In everything, to have the same importance requires a discipline of curiosity and patience. The moment you see a blade of grass with a drop of dew about to fall from it, your lover’s lips between your own, or the moment you are fascinated by the way the washing machine spins the laundry—just know that a message has to be deciphered. All you need to do is to just listen.

Perhaps the most “dangerous” passage is the very first one, even the beginning of the first sentence: AURYN will protect and guide you. Thrown into a world of concrete, where symbolization—the symbolic itself—threatens to turn to stone, who still believes that Life, God, Buddha, AURYN can protect and guide them? And yet, for the one who sets out on their own Path, it is essential to know that there exists a positive force that sustains the journey, even when traveler himself gives up. Because that is how it is.

Here is what Marion Milner tells us in The Hands of the Living God:

“Certainly, some patients seemed to be aware, dimly or increasingly, of a force in them to do with growth, growth towards their own shape, also as something that seemed to be sensed as driving them to breakdown false inner organisations which do not really belong to them; something which can also be deeply feared, as a kind of creative fury that will not let them rest content with a merely compliant adaptation; and also feared because of the temporary chaos it must cause when the integrations on a false basis are in process of being broken down in order that a better one may emerge” (from The Collected Papers of Emmanuel Ghent, Heart Melts Forward).

In few words, growth towards one’s own form becomes possible when one sets out without prejudice. And once the one who has decided to embark on the Journey of their life sets out, they must never forget the rules—that there is not only no turning back, but that they will enter their own Never Ending Story.

All that remains is for the therapist to remember this—and to sustain it.

That is to say: me… you… us…