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Spin The Right Fantasy
… If the wife trusts her husband and children, without overvaluing them, the atmosphere is fertile, which makes the family want to live up to that trust. To have trust in her family, and expectations for it, is one of the tasks of the maternal attitude and will invite cooperation.
Nothing is more difficult for a child than to feel itself mistrusted, for then it feels itself to be a miserable creature.
On the other hand, there are mothers who imagine that all their children are either a Savior or a Jesus Christ or the blessed Virgin Mary, and this truly destroys the child. The savior fantasy in mothers is very often at the bottom of the destruction of the son, for it affects the boy.
The mother must spin the right kind of phantasy, neither overvaluing nor undervaluing the child, keeping it rightly in her mind and heart, and then it can go its own way.
Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairytales
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. He saw the most touching moment in that play to be when Stella lies to Blanche as she is about to be led away to the hat factory. ‘I’ll go with you,’ Stella says, but of course both realize the lie…That scene was the play, in Kazan’s eyes. And he was right. And he cried like a baby every time he saw it.
