ABSTRACT
Early relationship patterns play a decisive role with regard to problems of shame-anxiety and susceptibility, since shame is based primarily on the fear of losing value in the eyes of others, even if those others are only figures of fantasy. Self-esteem, like shame-anxiety, has an interpersonal origin, and yet it is precisely shame that sends us into isolation or retreat. People who consult a psychotherapist place themselves in an interactive field similar in certain ways to the "primal relationship", in which the maternal caretaker carried out the function of self-regulating other. Analytical psychotherapy requires the analysand's active collaboration. One mandate for psychotherapy derives from Jung's idea that the personality is artificially stunted when the process of its natural unfolding is arrested in some way. The process of individuation, a central concern in Jungian psychology, is something the Greek poet Pindar brought to expression some 2500 years ago in his famous aphorism, "Become who you are".
