03/01/2024
Beautiful beings 💚
I am feeling called to educate everyone about the basis of self development…. We are a collective, with many inner worlds and communities, but with individual selves not being fully seen and nurtured, leading to improper developments, we face mental illnesses and disconnection/separatism at best and fights and wars at worst. We MUST go back to the basics… 🌱
When I was studying all the psychoanalytic theories in grad school and at the Wright Institute, the self psychology theory of HEINZ KOHUT stood out to me and changed my life. I want others to get a grasp of what kind of waters the soil of the self needs to grow properly and healthily, to improve our parenting, our teaching, and our self healing, ALL of which change the future 🌿
According to Kohut, the number ONE need a self has to grow into a healthy whole self is MIRRORING. The second need is IDEALIZING. The THIRD NEED is TWINSHIP, and the fourth is ADVERSITY. The people that serve these needs are called self objects.
1. Mirroring need: the self needs to be seen and its realities AND fantasies reflected back with empathy and attunement by their self objects, for it to continue growing and flourishing its seed. It needs to continuously feel “Wow I am real and loved and I matter!”
2. Idealizing need: the self needs to admire someone and something bigger than them. It needs to be awed and wowed by a loving magical authoritative other, the people serving as their self objects. It needs to feel “Wow, you are AMAZING!
3. Twinship need: the self needs to be able to feel one and almost identical to their self object, in some aspects, needs to be able to play copy, and pretend to be like them and feel “Wow, I can be AMAZING LIKE YOU!” “I too am wonderful!”
4. Adversity need: the self needs to experience optimal frustrations by their self objects. For instance, because the self objects are human, they will gradually fail to meet their self needs, and in those instances, the self then gets frustrated and only then deeply internalized all the good that’s been given to them up until that point. And that slow dance continues as the self grows and grows🪴