You see, although you can “love” what you need, you are at the same time less free. So (secretly), you hate the things that you grow to need because they rob you of your “freedom”—and make you mean and ugly.

Think of it! Every “love” of this sort is really a corrupting need that carries with it a secret loathing. Even the drinker and the smoker hate their pleasures, because their pleasures corrupt them and trick them out of their freedom in the guise of “freeing” and helping them —but they manage to interpret this slavery as a form of devotion.

It is the very hatred that forms the basis of their addiction to drink or whatever. The vice helps them forget the guilt of hating what they say they love, as well as the truth concerning their compulsion to serve it.

Parents who are guilty of worshipping their parents become parents who tempt their children to worship them. Our reaction to their need is the beginning of our problems.

If as infants we don’t react they will, of course, escalate their mistreatment of us until we do (so children can hardly avoid being infected to some extent). We are degraded products of degraded generations all the way back to antiquity.

We never see the truth about it because we are too busy loving and hating, seeking to retrieve what we have lost from someone or something else. A child in a candy store experiences a hunger for sweets.

"Parents who are guilty of worshipping their parents become parents who tempt their children to worship them"

The child’s promoted hunger serves the proprietor’s interests while the proprietor “serves” the child with a satisfaction that makes the child hungry for more.

This is the way it is with all skewed authorities and their wards. A child may experience rejection if he grows too demanding. In one sense, a child’s need cries out: “I love you, how great you are! I need you, I need you!” The parent, now in the position of being abused by the child’s hungry demands, is pressured into the classic move of rejection.

The doctor, too, will experience impatience with his patient—particularly when the patient doesn’t get well and keeps pawing, clinging, and drawing support from the doctor. If the need for the support or assistance is rejected, the patient or child will develop a terrible hatred (judgment) against the doctor or parent.

He feels an ambivalent desire to both please and murder the doctor or parent because of that rejection (or impatience). Feeling guilty over his malicious thoughts, he starts pawing again for treatment or approval.

Growing up rejected and full of problems, we seek comfort and security in marriage. We marry to be accepted or to find an object of contempt, to torment even as we were tormented. If we are accepted and loved, we settle down to a life of servitude in exchange for a few pretty words.

If we become too demanding—just as we were with our parent—we could end up with the very rejection we feared and married to avoid.

Or—we could drive our partner up the wall with hate and frustration and give them grounds for rejecting us, which is usually what they married us for to begin with.