Sublime

And, by extension, no one has ever fallen gravely mentally ill without, somewhere along the line, having suffered from a severe deficit of love.

In writing about the orphan archetype, Jungian analyst Rose-Emily Rothenberg notes a pervasive feeling of unworthiness and a felt need for support. “He [the orphan] feels that he is the ‘injured one’ and needs all the care he can possibly get.”63 She describes a pattern of dependency and clinging to whatever and whoever represents the protection an

The journalistic encounter seems to have the same regressive effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter. The subject becomes a kind of child of the writer, regarding him as a permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother, and expecting that the book will be written by her. Of course, the book is written by the strict, all-noticing, unfor

For my patients, madness is not a political statement. More important, it is something by which hardly any of my patients would choose to be burdened. For those of us who are fortunate enough to be comparatively sane, it is abhorrent to stand in celebration of Woolf’s madness. It did, after all, cost her her life. It is audacious and self-serving o

fellowship. From being a person who wanted to die rather than live with their voices, I can now say with true sincerity that I am proud to be a voice hearer.

The dreams I received during that time showed me that I had been abandoning, neglecting, and even selling out my creativity. I needed to live and work in a way that was respectful of my gifts and abilities. I had been putting them in service to someone else’s enterprise, which had very little vision beyond its own expansion. Meanwhile, my own scrap

For many of the undermothered, life has felt hard. There has been struggle around livelihood, struggle around relationships, struggle simply to feel okay. This struggling is a different octave of the failure-to-thrive syndrome identified in orphanages.

She was trying to bring me back from wherever it was she thought I was going. She saw a quiet kid with potential who was retreating from the world, and she wasn’t about to let him go without a fight.