If a mother cannot meet her baby’s impulses and needs, “the baby learns to become the mother’s idea of what the baby is.” Having to discount its inner sensations, and trying to adjust to its caregiver’s needs, means the child perceives that “something is wrong” with the way it is. Children who lack physical attunement are vulnerable to shutting down the direct feedback from their bodies, the seat of pleasure, purpose, and direction. […] The need for attachment never lessens. Most human beings simply cannot tolerate being disengaged from others for any length of time. People who cannot connect through work, friendships, or family usually find other ways of bonding, as through illnesses, lawsuits, or family feuds. Anything is preferable to that godforsaken sense of irrelevance and alienation.

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” —Vincent van Gogh

A considerable amount of aggressiveness must bedeveloped in the child against the authority which prevents him from having his first, but none the less hismost important, satisfactions, whatever the kind of instinctual deprivation that is demanded of him may be;but he is obliged to renounce the satisfaction of this revengeful aggressiveness