ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on deep appreciation, namely the complex thoughts, emotions, and actions that comprise gratitude. But more than being happy, gratification initiates a blissful merging with the breast and a basic outpouring of love towards whoever provides life-sustaining nourishment. The chapter describes the foundation for a deepening devotion and attachment of parent to child and child to parent, the essential antecedents of mutual love, where both sides recognise the basic “beingness” of each other. Gratitude denotes a response: thankfulness, praise, and the wish, even obligation, to return good for good, a favour for the favour of life. When a child or adult cannot cope with such experiences, or when they revert to an earlier state of mind because various inner impulses are at war with each other, gratitude quickly deteriorates into its opposite, ingratitude. Indeed, the seventeenth-century nobleman and author of witty sayings, Francois de La Rochefoucauld, observed that, “Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favours”.
