Sibling Rivalry

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1. Abuse At The Hands Of Primary Caregivers The psychoanalytic explanation for why abuse at the hands of primary caregivers is so detrimental to the psyche, why it leads to low self-esteem and enduring dysfunctional patterns of behavior, is that children perceive their parents as godlike figures and often continue to do so into adulthood. We’re not saying that bad consequences don’t result […]...
2. The Toll Of Abandonment We’ve written a lot about the severe psychological toll of abandonment. From our psychoanalytic point of view, the developmental outcome of being abandoned by a primary caregiver in childhood is the deep seated feeling of being unlovable in adulthood. This deep seated feeling usually manifests as the conscious or unconscious decision to keep others at […]...
3. Adopting Children Who Were Abused Or Abandoned Some people asked for advice about their recently adopted adolescent son. He suffered abuse at the hands of his biological caregivers and went through various traumatic experiences before being abandoned. In the new family situation, surrounded by new siblings all spawned by his new adopted parents, he was acting out a lot, saying and doing […]...
4. Problem Relationships With Primary Caregivers People dealing with various problems of living in adulthood often had problem relationships with their primary caregivers in childhood and adolescence, problem relationships marred by abuse, abandonment, disinterest, or other traumas. They continue to deal with unresolved feelings of anger, fear, guilt, shame, and other unwanted thoughts and feelings as adults. But many haven’t yet […]...
5. Distance Patterns A common scenario in burgeoning romantic relationships is where one partner feels threatened by increasing emotional closeness and distances himself or just ends it. He usually doesn’t consciously recognize what he’s doing though and will come up with a perfectly plausible explanation, citing some flaw or defect in his partner’s character, deciding she is a […]...
6. Unlovable If you feel unlovable as an adult the likely reason why is that your primary caregivers were unwilling or unable to love you as a child. But we need only look at family situations that tend to produce happy, healthy, well-adjusted people to see why blaming yourself is wrong thinking. Parents who can and do […]...
7. The Desire To Do Something Big The desire to do something big, something that will be recognized in the world as a great achievement, is a psychological trap for many. Of course it’s healthy to want to increase our human powers, to be successful people, and there’s nothing wrong with working hard to attain our goals. Self-actualization is a good thing, […]...
8. Fame And Self-Love We have written about the desire for fame as a symptom of narcissism, and this is certainly true for many people, but there is another reason why many wish to become famous that’s much less nefarious, a reason that’s actually quite tragic and evokes empathy rather than spite. This reason is the unconscious, secret hope […]...
9. Moving Into Psychological Adulthood Becoming an adult entails a lot more than growing older. One thing that separates humans from every other organism on the planet is that our developmental path isn’t just a set biological process but also a psychological process where our choices and attitudes play a large role in determining who and what we become. Many […]...
10. Letting Go It takes more energy to hold on than it does to let go. A great yoga teacher said this while we were all in a stretch that requires a certain amount of surrender. My thoughts darted to the applicability of her words for people who are grieving. This article is written for you if you […]...
11. Afraid To Get Close There are a million and one rationalizations to explain away the choice to remain emotionally distant in close relationships where intimacy is required. Underneath all those rationalizations what’s really going for people is usually exactly the same. They’re afraid to get close. But they’ve repressed this fear and the reasons behind it because these reasons […]...
12. Depression And The Competitive Attitude Separating normal from abnormal is, for most people, a question of which norms and values their particular cultural group embraces and which norms and values their particular cultural group disavows. They take it as a given that one dominant set of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors derived from the norms and […]...
13. Primary Narcissism A baby developing in a healthy family environment has no reason to suspect she is not the center of the universe. All of her needs are taken care of, usually at the moment they arise. When she is hungry she is fed. When she makes a mess it is cleaned up. When she wants attention […]...
14. Community Everyone knows in their bones that without community, without at least the possibility of one other person to make the act of communing possible, life would not be worth living. We have to share what is inside of us, to bridge the gap of aloneness that is our human destiny as sentient organisms who are […]...
15. Heaven On Earth You’ve probably heard this story. A man is approached by an angel who offers to reveal the answer to any question he might have. Jacob responds ‘I’d like to see the difference between heaven and hell.’ The angel agrees, and says they will first visit hell and then go to heaven. They arrive at a […]...
16. Audrey From Haven We will do a brief psychological profile of Audrey in the first season of ‘Haven’. From a psychoanalytic point of view, we have enough from her past, even though we know almost nothing, to explain her thinking and behavior in the present. We know that she never knew her parents and that she was a […]...
17. Love Lies Within Many of us spend our time waiting for love, searching for love, hoping love will find us. Or we act like sponges, trying to suck up as much love from important figures in our lives as we can. This strategy is ultimately doomed to disappointment because it assumes that love is something floating out there […]...
18. Be Gentle With Yourself How can you expect to be gentle with the people you care about if you aren’t gentle with yourself? Whether or not you want to admit it you’re a narcissist. Don’t be turned off by that statement. As much as most of us like to characterize narcissism as a mental disturbance affecting a very thin […]...
19. Increasing Self-Confidence If your self-confidence is pretty low, then paradoxically you probably spend an inordinate amount of time repressing your conscious awareness of the fact, a common solution for vulnerabilities of all kinds. You’ve probably heard the expression ‘confidence is quiet, insecurities are loud’ and it makes perfect sense from a psychoanalytic point of view, where what […]...
20. Repetition Compulsion To understand the psychological mechanism of repetition compulsion we must first understand the elevated place of the primary relationship in the shaping of human psychology. Particularly in our Western world, where the nuclear family with its somewhat closed system acts as the sustained setting for the psychosocial development of the young child, the primary caregiver […]...