Deep Reflection: When Fear Becomes Tenderness, and Listening Begins #WritingCulture
A reflection on Karl Abraham’s "La petite Hilda" and how psychoanalysis first emerged through a father’s moment of emotional recognition.
✒️ What if fear is not a flaw to be solved, but a signal that intimacy has already begun?
May 3rd, 1925: Karl Abraham dies.
His legacy does not rest in institutions, but in what he dared to observe.
In “La petite Hilda”, Abraham studies his own daughter. She daydreams, fears "the bad man," and clings to her father's coat. In one quiet moment, she presses her head into his sleeve.
"She kissed the fabric," he writes, "and I had the impression this was the positive side of her fear of the 'bad man,' who was probably myself."
This is not simple reflection. It is psychoanalysis before the textbook, where theory dissolves into lived experience. Abraham becomes both witness and participant. The unconscious is not isolated. It transfers, circulates, seeks address.
Psychoanalytically, this moment anticipates transference. The father is protector and threat. A double figure, as in Freud's "Little Hans." But now, the analyst is also the phantasm.
Culturally, it challenges our hyper-processed view of caregiving. In a world of metrics and optimisation, the radical act may be to sit with ambiguity. Not to solve, but to stay.
Existentially, the question deepens:
What if fear is not pathology but invitation?
What if children do not need answers, but companions in uncertainty?
Years later, Hilda C. Abraham, now a psychiatrist, publishes “Biographie inachevée”, weaving memory with theory. The work remains unfinished. But so does listening. So does love.
La petite Hilda offers no cure. No closure. Only the courage to notice what often goes unseen.
➤ A Gentle Invitation
As we reflect on this moment, let us ask:
What if the origins of understanding are not intellectual, but relational?
Not in what we explain, but in what we feel without defence?
—#WritingCulture— by Ellis Zeitmann @ThinkZeit
#InkOfTheDay #DeepReflections #WritingCulture #Psychoanalysis #KarlAbraham #Transference #RelationalThinking #EllisZeitmann #ParentingAndPhilosophy #ExistentialPsychology#Freud #HildaCAbraham #LittleHans #BiographieInachevée