IJSP Number 7, 2025

International Journal of Supervision in Psychotherapy, Number 7, 2025 Page | 59 some special ‘space’ to breathe and continue to nurture its processes. Neither of the two extreme directions does have to be exclusive but rather inclusive and tolerant of the other part. It is all in the art of making compromises, meaning reciprocal promises (as the meaning of the word goes) to understand the importance of the other perspective, although situated at the extreme. In such a ‘com-promise’ it is not just to hand something over but also to gain something in return – like in a symbiosis that works smoothly for both sides. After all, it is, if recognized as such, a win-win situation, one which integrates two apparently different, exclusive and incompatible terms of an anthropological and existential equation of life. Such a magic operation and compromise is facilitated by the sophisticated procedure of differentiation of the self and the permanent dialogue or dialectic of togetherness and individuality, between the pseudo-self and its counterpart, the solid self : “A threat to closeness triggers feelings of rejection; a threat of too much closeness triggers feelings of being intruded upon, overwhelmed, and out of control. Threats of too much distance and too much closeness activate the stress response.” [16] Such a new psychic unit needs a lot of time to develop out of the all-engulfing maelstrom of the fusion aspects of life in a family system. At first, the core of the self is very weak and insignificant, and, consequently, it has a hard time to express itself and its needs or wants. After all, self-expression goes against the initial fusion with the mother and the family system. In a sense, the Ego -split is an act of treason towards the entire corpus of the family and its embrace. That is as logical as the simple fact that fission is the opposite of fusion (and vice versa, of course). Nevertheless, it is one thing to analyse these things intellectually and a completely different one when registered by the very sensitive feelings of the emotional system. Consequently, everyone who went true this process had at least two major things to do and to deal with. One of them was the slow split and detaching from the all-engulfing embrace of the forces of fusion of the first stages of child development. This means to realise and to enforce an emotional process, which has to have a serious string of repercussions. After all, this process is directed against the most near and dear person of our life, namely our mother. At a closer look, one’s own mother is the main representative of the family system, it is she who intermediates its values, beliefs, norms, feelings, and every modus operandi that characterises it. Hence, the violent and ungrateful character of infidelity involved in such a courageous enterprise of detaching or differentiating oneself from the fusional forces of the family. Nevertheless, somewhere down the line there will be somebody, already constituted as a solid self , who will master the courage to say: “This is who I am, what I believe, what I stand for, and what I will do or not do.” [11]. It is striking in this phrase how much the ‘I’, or the Ego for that matter, is put forward. We have to understand that this ‘great leap forward’ is expressed on the stage of the family system governed mainly by emotional fusion and the all-encompassing feelings of loyalty based on merits, imbued by an incontrovertible legitimacy. On the other hand, the solid self has not only to detach itself from the relational emotionality of one’s own family and its centripetal and pulling forces, but it has also to search for some kind of authentic identity construed out of all the influences, constrictions, and everything one has absorbed from early childhood onwards. As the time goes by, and the child grows, other formative influences and the most diverse pressures of social nature are continuously added to the mould we already are in. First it is the school and the whole educational system we have to go through. Then there is the globalism, mercantilism, and mediatisation we live in and which exert a great pressure on each individual, especially