Loneliness

"To Heinz Kohut's classic question, "How does analysis cure?" Frieda had a clear answer: the relationship with the therapist heals the loneliness that lies at the root of all mental illness. A person can't act like others if he feels completely isolated. [...] The loneliness of mental illness, Frieda emphasized, is nothing like the solitude people seek at the ocean or to do creative work. It is a state of extraordinary anguish in which a person ceases to be able to imagine, much less experience, anyone else being able to enter his experience.

[...] Frieda called loneliness "one of the least satisfactorily conceptualized psychological phenomena" and noted that it wasn't even mentioned in most psychiatric textbooks (a fact she found astonishing). Among the few analysts to write anything on the topic was Melanie Klein, and like Frieda, she had done this work late in life. Klein emphasized the unsatisfied longing for "an understanding without words," rooted in the earliest relationship with the mother. Frieda stressed the "incommunicable, isolated core — the corollary to our need for interpersonal intimacy."

Gail A. Hornstein, To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World [pags 305/306]

Intuição e teoria

"Rules of technique in Psychoanalysis are invented at points of ambiguity, to help therapists feel their way along the edges of the unexplored. A patient who can tolerate the precariousness of such a place can sometimes help to show the way, much as moonlight, striking at the right angle, can guide a lost traveler through dense woods. This is what makes Anna O. and R. N. such powerful models: they were courageous enough to work right at the edge of the darkness.

Patients like this are desperate to have therapists who can bravely accompany them into the depths. Mental illness is exhausting. Having to add the burden of the therapist's fear can make it unendurable. Patients know they can't cure themselves. They need doctors who can bear witness to the terror and reclaim them from its power.

Many really gifted clinicians, like Ferenczi and Frieda, are unable fully to explain why they do certain things; they can only say what they tried. This is why Ferenczi's most important work is his 'Clinical Diary' and Frieda's is a text, 'Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy', a diary of a different kind.

Like people with exceptional skill of any kind, therapists like this do what feels right at the moment, making subtle adjustments as they go along. Attending simultaneously to many levels, they trust their intuitions, letting the patient's unconscious mingle with their own. They allow themselves to be guided "by instinct," whether or not they can explain what this means. Freud was just the opposite — better at describing his method than using it. But his descriptions were so brilliant and seductive that analysts have come to value theory over clinical accomplishment.  Frieda may have helped to heal her patients, sometimes even the sickest ones, but she couldn't explain how she did this, which is why Freud has followers and Frieda doesn't."

Gail A. Hornstein, To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World [pag 158]

Frieda

"Every time Frieda rotated closer to Klara [mother], she would occupy a bit more of the central sphere. When their combined intensity threatened to overwhelm Adolf [father] completely, Frieda would float over in his direction and temporarily balance things. Her alliances with her father, although infrequent, provided an essential counterweight to Klara's power, creating a degree of harmony in the family that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. In later life, Frieda's colleagues would wonder how she managed to be on everyone's side and get what she wanted at the same time. They didn't understand that having mastered the art of wrapping her father around her little finger while embracing her mother with the other hand, Frieda could endear herself to people at cross purposes without even noticing what she was doing. No one in her family had the slightest idea that this would prove ideal training for a psychiatrist "

Gail A. Hornstein, To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World [pag 15]