012
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night...I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be... apparitions all the more insistent for being so long banished. It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch”
The knocking and hammering on the mind’s door is what Sigmund Freud meant by repression. Melanie Klein expanded on this idea with the unconscious psychic action of splitting—putting all the unwanted parts of ourselves, elsewhere. The antidote to neurosis is self-acceptance, which is to let in and acknowledge with compassion and forgiveness all of who we are, and all of who we have been.