According to Steiner, 'psychic retreats' are mental places of safety into which subjects withdraw to avoid anxiety and psychic pain, a way of protecting themselves from emotional contact. In most cases, he argues that the retreats become permanent residences rather than temporary refuges. He also decisively places psychic retreats outside or beyond the realm of normality. Given the popularization of Steiner's concept, it is worth establishing a distinction between normal and private emotional mental refuges, on the one hand, and pathological psychic retreats, on the other. In an attempt to distinguish different ways of understanding these private places of the self, Steiner turns to the work of Louise Bourgeois and Franz Kafka. Bourgeois experienced great difficulties in socializing and relating to people. Kafka wrote several stories in which people turned into animals or animals were transformed into people.