Wish I'd Known Back Then

“A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content. All that needs to be done is to turn back each single reproach on to the speaker himself. There is something undeniably automatic about this method of defending oneself against a self-reproach by making the same reproach against someone else... A grown-up person who wanted to throw back abuse would look for some really exposed spot in his antagonist and would not lay the chief stress upon the same content being repeated.”

Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria