Cover photograph supplied by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh.
A thematic selection of translated notebook fragments.
Transference:
“Is that you, Mum/Dad?”
Countertransference:
“Darling, it’s me!”
The opposite of dependency is not so much freedom as presence and wholeness.
Separation from your parents is necessary, if only so that you do not follow them when they go.
Dependency is revenge on the world for being unable to become a mother.
A challenge with a star: find a bad boy and turn him into a good dad.
Internal conflict: I want to be a baby, and for the whole world to be an attentive mother.
Whatever you depend on is your imagined mother. But dependency is a mother who lulls you to death.
The codependent person services someone else’s pain to avoid encountering their own.
The ability to receive criticism calmly, judge your own state adequately and reflect are all signs of emotional maturity.
As long as accusations against our parents remain, we cannot see them as people rather than failed functions.
For a child raised in a family with dependencies, avoiding dependency — including dependence in relationships — can become a kind of dependency itself.
Interestingly, people often come to therapy talking about their parents at roughly the age their parents were in their memories.
There is a great deal of energy in the childlike position. Wonderful. The problem is that this position is childlike in its thinking and emotional regulation too.
A pronounced character develops in response to circumstances. At some point it begins to create circumstances of its own, and they are not always pleasant.
The less a boy can express aggression towards his mother before and during puberty, the harder it is afterwards to relinquish the idea of marrying her.
If someone is deeply upset about the parents they had, it indicates that they still need a parent: some part of the psyche has not been able to grow up.
The infant’s position is the most powerful: reality, in the shape of the mother, must answer the cry and read the needs. Remaining helpless is an attempt to preserve and restore that infantile absolute monarchy.
The first step in working with dependency is to see it not as your badness, but as an available way of coping with your pain.
Adaptability is impossible without autonomy. While someone in a parental position can meet your needs, and you remain completely dependent on outside circumstances, resilience to stress has nowhere to develop.
Closing your eyes to difficulties resembles the early-childhood idea that if you cannot see something, it cannot see you, and covering your face with your hands is enough to disappear.
Psychology Notebook is a translated personal archive of observations, study and lecture notes, paraphrases, quotations and remembered ideas. A fragment’s presence here does not establish exclusive authorship or scientific consensus. These are notebook fragments, not clinical guidance.
About Psychology Notebook · Fragments from a Therapist’s Notebook