It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent or when the mother's emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that children feel lost.

Sex is something you do. Sexuality is something you are.

How one can live without being able to judge oneself, criticize what one has accomplished, and still enjoy what one does, is unimaginable to me.

Who promised you that only for joy were you brought to this earth?

We are imprisoned in the realm of life, like a sailor on his tiny boat, on an infinite ocean.

The horrors of war, pale beside the loss of a mother

Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed.