« (..) But how can we overcome this ignorance, how can we access the injured child in him, without blocking his word by the moral demands or educational aims of which psychoanalysis has remained a prisoner? »

« We often wonder how a couple can exist, how this woman can live with this man or vice versa. It may be that the wife in question can bear the common life only at the cost of immense suffering, the abdication of her own life. But she feels like she would die of fear if her husband abandoned her. In reality, this breakup might be the chance of a lifetime. But she cannot realize it until she and her husband relive the old sufferings she experienced with her father and unconsciously repressed. At the idea of being abandoned by this man, she does not feel the present situation, but relives the anguish of abandonment of early childhood and the time when she was truly dependent on her father. »

« "However, the older we get, the more difficult it becomes to find with others the parental love that we lacked in our early years. However, expectations will not disappear, quite the contrary: they will simply be transferred, mainly to children and grandchildren. Unless we become aware of these mechanisms and try, through the lifting of repression and the abandonment of denial, to look as accurately as possible at the reality of our childhood. It is on this condition that we can then build in ourselves to be able to satisfy the needs that since our birth, and sometimes even before, wait to be satisfied. It is then that we can give ourselves the attention, respect, understanding, necessary protection and unconditional love that our parents have denied us. To achieve this, we need to experience the love for the child that we had, otherwise we will not know what the word love means. If we are to learn it through therapy, we will need someone who can accept us as we are, accompany us and protect us with respect and sympathy, help us understand why we have become what we are. This fundamental experience is essential to enable us to assume the parenting role towards the abused child buried in us. An educator who wants to shape us will be unable to make us live it, as will a psychoanalyst who believes that, in the face of childhood traumas, we must remain neutral and interpret our stories as fantasies. No, what we need is exactly the opposite, namely a committed companion, able to share our horror and indignation when our emotions will make us discover together our sufferings as little children - all that we have been able to endure, sometimes in total solitude, when our soul and body struggled to survive. We need such an accompanist, whom I call a lucid witness, to reach and assist this child in us, to have us decipher our body language and meet our needs, instead of ignoring them, as was the case for a long time, as our parents once did. I emphasize that point. With the help of a competent accompanist, not neutral but our ally, they are able to find his truth. »