Sublime

No person is free who is tied to a defensive position. This is true of the neurotic character who erects psychological walls and armors himself muscularly as a protection against possible hurt, only to find that the hurt he feared is locked into his being by this very process.

Dr. Hilde Bruch, in the preface to her book Learning Psychotherapy, states that basically all patients come to psychiatrists with “one common problem: the sense of helplessness, the fear and inner conviction of being unable to ‘cope’ and to change things.”4 One of the roots of this “sense of impotence” in the majority of patients is some desire to

A man has only to declare himself free to feel at the same moment that he is limited. Should he venture to declare himself limited, he feels himself free.

In Adlerian psychology, trauma is definitively denied. This was a very new and revolutionary point. Certainly, the Freudian view of trauma is fascinating. Freud’s idea is that a person’s psychic wounds (traumas) cause his or her present unhappiness. When you treat a person’s life as a vast narrative, there is an easily understandable causality and

Beck found he could teach people to pay attention and hear them. And then he discovered he could teach them how to work with and change these beliefs. This is how cognitive therapy was born, one of the most effective therapies ever developed.

The creator of psychoanalysis and the man synonymous with the discovery of the unconscious saw instead a ‘natural unhappiness’ as the preferred aim. The modest goal of his revolutionary talking therapy was a removal of neurotic or ‘unnatural’ forms of unhappiness and a restoration of the patient (somewhat surprisingly to modern ears) to an ordinary