Friday 8 May 2009

Feeling for the Mother Land Never So Intense


... anything that is felt to give out goodness and beauty, and that calls forth pleasure and satisfaction, in the physical or in the wider sense, can in the unconscious mind take the place of [the infant's perception of the mother's] ever-bountiful breast, and of the whole mother. Thus we speak of our own country as the "motherland" because in the unconscious mind our country may come to stand for our mother, and then it can be loved with feelings which borrow their nature from the relation to her. (Melanie Klein, "Love, Guilt and Reparation" 103)

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