PEOPLE- PLEASING PATTERNS ARE LEARNED WHEN NEEDS ARE NOT MET

Experience shows that in the long run there is only one weapon available against mental sickness: emotional discovery and acceptance of the truth in our individual and unique childhood history. Would that mean that we could free ourselves from illusions with the help of psychoanalysis? History shows that they creep in everywhere and that every life is full of them, perhaps because the truth is often intolerable. Through analysis we undertake the long process of discovering our own personal truth, which always causes pain before giving us a new area of freedom—unless we are content with ready conceptualized intellectual knowledge based on other people's painful experience, for example that of Sigmund Freud. But in that case we remain in the sphere of illusions and self-deceptions. Idealization of mother love is a taboo that has withstood all the current tendencies towards demystification. The usual run of biographies illustrates this very clearly. In reading the biographies of famous artists for example, one gains the impression that their lives began at puberty. Before that they have had a 'happy, contented or untrammelled ' childhood, or one that was 'full of deprivation ' or 'very stimulating', but how it really was seems to awaken no interest, as if the whole life did not have its roots hidden in childhood. I should like to illustrate this with a simple example. Henry Moore describes in his memoirs how, as a small boy, he massaged his mother's back wit