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Adults do not know the passionate, the painful tragedies that break the hearts of small children. They go through their life ignorant of the wounds that they make and leave in the hearts of children.
Now you understand how contradiction and recognition can be completely indifferent when one knows oneself to possess a real certainty. That was my case, and it was why I have held out against scorn and disbelief without even getting bitter.
In the spring of 1936 Margarethe Walter sought out Sigmund Freud, poured her heart out, and still draws strength from that one encounter. “He saved my life,” she said, seventy years later, as she visited Freud's home and office on the Berggasse 19 in Vienna to recall the forty-five minutes that “totally changed” her life. In a sensitive interview by the talented cultural correspondent Peter Roos in Die Zeit (2006) he explains that Margarethe was brought to Freud by her father, a patriarchal small factory owner.1
She was desperately lonely: “I was the loneliest girl in Vienna!” she recalled. “Isolated, materially overindulged, locked in, and certainly not loved.