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Anna Freud
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“Another girl, still in the latency-period, had succeeded in so completely repressing her envy of her little brother's penis — an affect by which her life was entirely dominated — that even in analysis it was exceptionally difficult to detect any traces of it. All that the analyst could observe was that, whenever she had occasion to envy or be jealous of her brother, she began to play a curious imaginary game, in which she herself enacted the part of a magician, who had the power of transforming and otherwise influencing the whole world by his gestures. This child was converting envy into its opposite, into an over-insistence on her own magical powers, by means of which she avoided the painful insight into what she supposed to be her physical inferiority. ... Once this was realized, it was easy for the analyst to deduce the presence of penis envy whenever the game of magic recurred.”
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“... it is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner; to fight his impulses and to accept them; to ward them off successfully and to be overrun by them; to love his parents and to hate them; to revolt against them and to be dependent on them; to be deeply ashamed to acknowledge his mother before others and, unexpectedly, to desire heart-to-heart talks with her; to thrive on imitation of and identification with others while searching unceasingly for his own identity; to be more idealistic, artistic, generous, and unselfish than he will ever be again, but also the opposite: self-centered, egotistic, calculating. Such fluctuation between extreme opposites would be deemed highly abnormal at any other time of life. At this time they may signify no more than that an adult structure of personality takes a long time to emerge.”
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“Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training. ”
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“I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.”
Anna Freud, Austrian-English psychoanalyst
(1895 - 1982)