Note 189 — LECTURE XIII TWO TYPES OF PHOBIA (Obsessions Continued)

For instance, when I came to the therapeutics I found in abstraction that the patient did not want to give up her point of view “because,” as she said, “it forms an excuse so that when I feel lonely, if there is nothing else to be lonely about, I have that memory and point of view to fall back upon as something to justify my crying and feeling lonely and blue.”

When she now feels blue and cries, as happens occasionally, and she asks herself Why? then she drifts back in her mind to childhood and remembers she was lonely and then cries the harder. Then she vaguely thinks of her mother’s death being her fault. She likes therefore to hold on to this as a peg on which to hang any present feeling of blueness and loneliness.