The Drama of the Gifted Child (The Search for the True Self)

dramas, nor pangs of conscience when desire has passed:
"You pay and are free!" Even (and especially) the humiliation
that such an encounter also involves for the client can
increase stimulation—but that is less willingly mentioned.*
The humiliation, self-disgust, and self-contempt are intrapsychic
reflections of the primary objects' contempt and,
through the compulsion to repeat, they produce the same
tragic conditions for pleasure.
Perversion is a borderline case, but gives us an understanding
that is valid for the treatment of other disorders,
namely, understanding of the great importance to be attached
to unconscious, introjected contempt.
What is unconscious cannot be abolished by proclamation
or prohibition. One can, however, develop sensitivity
toward recognizing it and can experience it consciously,
and thus gain control over it. A mother can have the best
intentions to respect her child and yet be unable to do
so, so long as she does not realize what deep shame she
causes him with an ironic remark, intended only to cover
her own uncertainty. Indeed, she cannot be aware of how
deeply humiliated, despised, and devalued her child feels,
if she herself has never consciously suffered these feelings,
and if she tries to fend them off with irony.
It can be the same for us in our analytic work. Certainly,
we do not use words like bad, dirty, naughty,
egoistic, rotten—but among ourselves we speak of "narcissistic,"
"exhibitionistic," "destructive," and "regressive" patients,
without noticing that we (unconsciously) give these
words a pejorative meaning. It may be that in our abstract
vocabulary, in our objective attitudes, even in the way we
formulate our theories, we have something in common
with a mother's contemptuous looks, which we can trace
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* Italics added.