Yet again, it could become the cutting article of a professional critic. Whatever the disguise, the impulses come from the same place, the white, hot inferno of the unconscious which is shaped and channelled by the mental mechanisms of defence into all the shades and textures of adult behaviour. We are the living disguise of a primitive and powerful childhood self. When we seek depth therapy, we ask the therapist to penetrate and remove our outer civilized self so that the wounded and infected parts of our being may be laid bare, drained, and thus permitted to heal. Only a few of us attempt to handle the white-hot stuff of the unconscious directly.
Most therapists remain near the surface while the sharks remain asleep in the depths.
What therapy patients seek more directly than others, in ordinary society, is to uncover and express aloud this early pain, the situations that caused it and the results in adult life. When the patient connects with unconscious material and brings it across the great river of defensiveness into conscious awareness, healing begins. Previously frozen processes melt, enter the mainstream of mental phenomena and become integrated, losing the power to warp human thought, feeling and behaviour from a hiding place inside of us that we cannot see. Let us look at childhood damage and see what it is we are trying to heal. There are only two ways that an adult can hurt a child.