ABSTRACT
In efforts to learn from life's experiences, the paradox of wishing to grow but also wishing not to be disturbed is encountered. There is the wish to flourish, but also the wish to avoid the disturbance that inevitably accompanies that growth. Psychoanalytic training and practice has offered the opportunity to unlearn some of those hard-edged lessons of medical training, but the theories taught as scaffolds for organising the flow of experience also serve necessarily to parse reality. While theories are important as scaffoldings for learning and as ways to structure experience, they also parse the flow of experience, as does language. The evolutionary legacy of affective upwelling energises and terrifies us. Cortical processes, derived from experience and memory, such as those of maternal care, attempt to shape and to gentle that upwelling in ways that foster perceptions and growing senses about ourselves.
