A harbour and the open sea appear, at first, to represent opposite states.
The harbour offers shelter. Boats are moored. The water is quieter. There are walls, jetties and familiar points of reference. Beyond them lies the open sea: less predictable, more exposed, full of movement and possibility.
It is tempting to imagine psychological development in the same way — as a gradual departure from safety towards independence. We may think that maturity means needing the harbour less, becoming increasingly self-sufficient, and eventually learning to manage the open water alone.
Psychoanalytic thinking suggests something more complex.
We become able to leave precisely because there has been somewhere safe enough to leave from.
A child who develops within a sufficiently reliable environment gradually discovers that separation does not necessarily mean catastrophe. An adult who has experienced relationships in which closeness can survive difference may become increasingly able to tolerate distance, disagreement and uncertainty. The capacity to move towards the open sea is therefore not simply an achievement of independence. It rests upon an internal experience of safety.
The harbour does not disappear when we leave it. Ideally, something of it travels with us.
This distinction matters in psychotherapy because many difficulties that appear to concern dependency, control, jealousy, boundaries or separation are also questions about psychological safety. Beneath the struggle to hold another person close there may be a more primitive anxiety: If you move away from me, what happens to me?
And beneath the struggle to remain indispensable may lie another question: If you no longer need me, will you still love me?
The work is not simply to encourage independence. It is to understand what independence has come to mean.
Safety Makes Separation Possible
Donald Winnicott placed enormous importance on the environment in which psychological life develops. His idea of the “good enough” environment describes something more subtle than perfect parenting or constant availability. What matters is that the developing person encounters sufficient reliability, responsiveness and continuity for a sense of self to begin to emerge.
At the beginning of life, dependence is not optional. The infant cannot regulate distress alone and cannot yet understand absence as temporary. Someone else must repeatedly perform functions that will only later become internal psychological capacities.
Gradually, something changes.
When the environment is reliable enough, brief absences can become survivable. Frustration no longer immediately threatens annihilation. The child begins to discover that the other person can disappear from view without disappearing entirely.
This is one of the foundations of emotional development.
Separation becomes possible not because attachment has been defeated, but because attachment has become sufficiently secure.
We see echoes of this throughout adult life. A partner goes away for several days. A child moves abroad. A close friend forms another important friendship. A colleague leaves an organisation. Someone we love becomes absorbed in interests that do not involve us.
The external event may be ordinary, yet internally it can provoke a disproportionate emotional reaction.
For one person, distance may bring manageable sadness alongside trust.
For another, the same distance may feel like abandonment.
For another, it may provoke irritation, suspicion or attempts to regain control.
And for somebody else, the safest response may be to withdraw first, reducing emotional investment before the possibility of being left becomes too painful.
What differs is not necessarily the objective amount of separation. What differs is the psychological meaning attached to it.
The harbour is therefore not merely an external person or place. It is an expectation about relationships: that distance can occur without the relationship being destroyed.
Being Needed and Being Loved
There can be something profoundly reassuring about being needed.
Another person depends upon us. We solve problems, organise practical life, provide financially, give advice, make decisions or hold the family together. Our usefulness becomes visible and measurable.
Love is much less measurable.
To be loved is to depend upon another person’s freedom.
They could choose differently.
They could disagree with us.
They could manage without us.
And yet they remain connected.
This can make being loved psychologically more demanding than being needed.
If someone needs me, I may be able to explain why they remain close. Their dependence provides a kind of guarantee.
If they no longer need me, I confront a more difficult question: Will they choose me when they are free not to?
For this reason, relationships can sometimes become organised around usefulness.
One partner becomes the provider, the organiser, the rescuer or the person who knows what should happen next. The other may occupy the position of being cared for, guided or financially dependent. Both positions may initially feel reassuring.
But over time, an unspoken contract can develop.
One person gives.
The other needs.
The relationship then derives some of its stability from maintaining these roles.
Difficulties can emerge when the dependent person becomes more autonomous.
A new job, financial independence, therapy, friendships, travel or simply greater confidence may alter the equilibrium. What objectively looks like healthy development can be experienced emotionally as a threat.
If you can do this yourself, where does that leave me?
The anxiety may be expressed indirectly. Increased independence may be criticised as selfishness, ingratitude, disloyalty or emotional distance.
At other times the person who has been dependent may feel guilty for growing. Their autonomy begins to feel like an attack upon the person who once supported them.
The result is a strange paradox: the relationship may have offered safety, but development begins to threaten the very arrangement through which that safety was maintained.
Psychoanalytic work does not require us to dismiss dependency. Human beings remain dependent upon one another throughout life. The question is whether dependence can gradually coexist with freedom.
Can I matter to you without being indispensable?
Can I care for you without requiring your helplessness?
Can you become stronger without my experiencing your strength as rejection?
And can love survive when usefulness is no longer its guarantee?
Provision, Dependency and the Hidden Contract
Provision is not only financial.
We provide reassurance, solutions, emotional regulation, structure, status, practical competence and certainty. Sometimes we provide an identity for another person: the person who knows who they are because they know what role they occupy in relation to us.
Giving can therefore contain many meanings.
It can be loving.
It can be generous.
It can express commitment and responsibility.
But giving can also protect us from vulnerability.
If I am always providing, I may rarely have to discover what it feels like to need.
If I am always solving, I may avoid the uncertainty of not knowing.
If I am indispensable, I may protect myself from wondering whether I am wanted for who I am rather than for what I do.
This is why the apparent strength of the provider can sometimes conceal a fragile dependency of its own.
The dependency is simply located somewhere unexpected.
The person who appears least dependent may be intensely dependent upon occupying the position of the strong one.
When that role is challenged, anxiety can become visible.
The psychoanalytic tradition repeatedly asks us to look beneath manifest arrangements to the emotional functions they perform. Alessandra Lemma’s contemporary psychoanalytic work has been particularly attentive to the ways in which identity, relationships and our experience of psychological boundaries become organised around attempts to secure continuity of self.
We do not merely inhabit relationships. Relationships can help us know who we are.
This makes change difficult.
If I have spent years knowing myself as the person who protects you, what happens when you no longer require protection?
If I have known myself as the one who sacrifices, who am I when sacrifice is no longer necessary?
If I have been the person holding everybody together, what might I feel if others begin to hold themselves?
The anxiety may not be conscious.
It may appear instead as criticism, disappointment, resentment, increased supervision or repeated reminders of everything that has been provided.
None of this means generosity is secretly controlling.
It means that human motivation is rarely simple.
Love, fear, generosity, narcissistic need, tenderness and anxiety can coexist within the same act.
Psychotherapy gives us somewhere to become curious about these mixtures without reducing them to accusations.
Boundaries Are Not Ruptures
One of the most important developmental achievements in relationships is the capacity to experience a boundary without interpreting it as rejection.
A boundary says: There is a point at which I am separate from you.
A rupture says: The relationship between us has broken.
They are not the same thing.
Yet emotionally they can become confused.
A partner asks for an evening alone.
A friend says they cannot talk tonight.
An adult child makes a decision without consulting a parent.
A therapist ends the session at the agreed time.
Somebody says no.
The boundary may be ordinary and appropriate, but internally it may be experienced as abandonment, punishment or withdrawal of love.
The problem is then not simply the boundary itself. It is the meaning given to separateness.
If difference feels dangerous, relationships can become organised around avoiding it.
One person may repeatedly seek reassurance.
Another may accommodate excessively.
Disagreements may be softened, postponed or never spoken.
People may try to remain emotionally fused because the alternative feels like losing one another.
But relationships without meaningful boundaries eventually become difficult to inhabit.
Closeness requires two people.
Without separation there is not intimacy so much as merger.
Winnicott’s writing repeatedly returns to the paradox that psychological growth involves both connection and the discovery of separateness. The other person must gradually become recognisable as someone who exists beyond our wishes and projections.
This can be painful.
The person we love has a mind we do not control.
They have desires we did not create.
They may find pleasure where we are absent.
They may hold opinions about us that differ from the image we would prefer them to hold.
They can disappoint us.
And they remain real precisely because they are not extensions of ourselves.
Adam Phillips has written compellingly across his psychoanalytic work about the importance of allowing life to exceed our attempts to secure it. Desire itself implies uncertainty. We cannot fully know or manage what another person wants, just as we cannot entirely control our own desires.
The mature relationship is therefore not one from which uncertainty has been removed.
It is one in which uncertainty can increasingly be borne.
The harbour needs an entrance.
Otherwise it becomes a prison.
When Feeling Overwhelms Thinking
None of this is easy when emotion becomes intense.
There are moments when a person may intellectually understand that a partner needs space, that an adult child is entitled to make independent decisions, or that a boundary is reasonable — yet feel overwhelmed by panic, anger or despair.
At such moments, explanation may have very little effect.
This is where Wilfred Bion’s thinking about containment becomes especially useful.
Bion was interested in the transformation of raw emotional experience into something that can be thought about. Some emotional states initially arrive without words or psychological organisation. They are felt as pressure, urgency, bodily disturbance or catastrophe.
The task of containment is not simply to suppress these states.
It is to make them thinkable.
Early in life, another mind helps perform this function. Distress is received, tolerated and gradually given meaning. What originally felt unbearable becomes something that can eventually be represented and thought about.
In adult relationships, this process continues.
When we are overwhelmed, we may temporarily lose the capacity to think about what we are feeling. Instead, we act from within the feeling.
Fear becomes accusation.
Vulnerability becomes anger.
Uncertainty becomes surveillance.
Longing becomes demand.
Helplessness becomes control.
The immediate aim is often to remove the feeling as quickly as possible.
We call again.
We demand an answer.
We insist on reassurance.
We try to make the other person return psychologically to the position in which we felt safe.
The difficulty is that such strategies may temporarily reduce anxiety while damaging the very relationship upon which safety depends.
Psychotherapy can offer another possibility.
Instead of asking immediately, What should I do?, we become interested in the emotional experience that precedes action.
What happens inside me when I do not know?
What do I imagine is occurring when another person becomes unavailable?
What is the feared catastrophe?
What am I trying to make the other person do with feelings that I cannot yet hold myself?
Containment does not mean becoming emotionally self-sufficient.
It means developing greater capacity to experience emotion without immediately requiring the external world to remove it.
The harbour becomes partly internal.
Tolerating Another Person’s Separateness
Perhaps one of the most demanding forms of love is allowing another person to be psychologically separate.
This sounds obvious until somebody we love exercises that separateness in a way we dislike.
They make a choice we would not make.
They become less dependent upon us.
They establish friendships or interests that exclude us.
They change their mind.
They need something different from what we hoped they would need.
To tolerate separateness does not mean becoming indifferent.
It means resisting the temptation to make another person’s autonomy into evidence that we no longer matter.
This is particularly difficult when self-worth has become organised around another person’s dependence.
Their growing autonomy may then feel not merely inconvenient but narcissistically injurious. The question becomes less What is happening for them? and more What does this say about me?
The relationship becomes crowded by attempts to restore an earlier arrangement.
Psychological development asks for something harder: the capacity to remain present while the relationship changes.
Parents repeatedly confront this task as children grow.
Partners confront it as each person’s identity develops.
Therapists encounter it when patients become more able to think independently, disagree or eventually leave treatment.
The success of a relationship cannot be measured only by how effectively it prevents separation.
Sometimes its success is revealed by the quality of separation it makes possible.
Can the other person move away without needing to destroy us?
Can we miss them without collapsing?
Can we disagree without withdrawing love?
Can we allow them experiences from which we are absent?
Can we welcome them back without punishing them for having left?
These questions belong not only to attachment but to freedom.
A relationship sturdy enough to contain difference creates room for two minds rather than requiring one shared psychological position.
The harbour is not where movement ends. It is what makes movement possible. Photo credit: IM AEK
From an External Harbour to an Internal One
At the beginning of life, safety is largely external.
Somebody comes.
Somebody holds.
Somebody responds.
Somebody makes the world manageable.
Gradually, if development goes sufficiently well, these experiences leave internal traces.
We begin to carry something of the dependable other within ourselves.
This does not mean we cease needing relationships. The fantasy of complete emotional independence is neither realistic nor particularly desirable. Human beings regulate, understand and discover themselves in relation to others throughout their lives.
An internal harbour means something different.
It means that the presence of uncertainty does not automatically become the experience of abandonment.
It means that solitude can sometimes be restorative rather than terrifying.
It means that another person’s boundary can be experienced as a limit rather than as a declaration of rejection.
It means we can miss someone while retaining a sense of their emotional existence.
It means disappointment need not immediately destroy the entire relationship.
And it means we can increasingly soothe, question and contain some of the emotional storms that previously required urgent action from somebody else.
Psychotherapy can contribute to this process because the therapeutic relationship itself creates opportunities to experience continuity alongside separateness.
Sessions begin and end.
There are weekends, holidays and interruptions.
The therapist has a separate mind.
Misunderstandings occur.
Interpretations may be useful on one occasion and miss something important on another.
The work is not based upon creating permanent harmony. It involves discovering that differences, frustrations and absences can sometimes be thought about rather than immediately acted upon.
Over time, this can alter the psychological meaning of separation.
The patient may begin to discover that what is temporarily absent has not necessarily been lost.
They may become more capable of remaining curious during emotional disturbance.
And the therapist’s containing function can gradually become part of the patient’s own internal repertoire.
The harbour becomes less exclusively geographical.
It becomes psychological.
Leaving the Harbour Without Destroying It
There is an important difference between leaving a harbour and destroying it.
When separation feels intolerable, we sometimes turn departure into rupture.
Relationships end explosively.
Contact is cut abruptly.
The other person must become entirely bad so that missing them becomes easier to manage.
Alternatively, separation may be prevented altogether. People remain in relationships, roles or arrangements long after they have ceased to grow because departure feels equivalent to betrayal.
Both positions struggle with ambivalence.
If I can hold love and frustration together, I may be able to leave without declaring that nothing good ever existed.
If I can hold gratitude and disappointment together, I may be able to change a relationship without having to erase its meaning.
If I can love somebody who is separate from me, I may survive the fact that closeness changes.
Psychoanalytic thinking has long been interested in our capacity to hold contradictory feelings towards the same person. Development involves becoming increasingly able to recognise that the person who frustrates us is also the person we love.
Something similar is required when relationships change.
The harbour from which we depart need not become worthless simply because we are sailing elsewhere.
Nor does returning necessarily represent regression.
Human development is not a one-way voyage from dependency to independence. We repeatedly move between connection and solitude, between needing others and relying upon ourselves, between harbour and sea.
At different stages of life we may require different forms of shelter.
Bereavement, illness, parenthood, migration, professional uncertainty, ageing and relationship loss can all reactivate needs we had imagined we had outgrown.
Psychological maturity is therefore less about never needing harbour and more about knowing that needing shelter does not make us incapable of sailing.
The Open Sea
The open sea is compelling because it represents possibility.
But possibility always includes uncertainty.
We cannot have one without the other.
To live only within what can be guaranteed may protect us from some forms of pain, but it also narrows the space in which discovery can occur.
Love itself contains this difficulty.
We cannot make another person love us freely while also controlling the conditions of their freedom.
We cannot demand autonomy from those we care for and simultaneously require them to remain dependent enough to reassure us.
We cannot entirely eliminate the possibility of loss without also reducing the possibility of encounter.
The aim is not fearlessness.
A boat leaving harbour does not cease to be affected by weather.
Neither does emotional development remove grief, jealousy, longing or vulnerability.
What changes is our relationship to these experiences.
We may become more able to recognise a storm without believing it will last forever.
We may learn that anxiety is information without always treating it as instruction.
We may become less compelled to convert uncertainty into control.
And perhaps most importantly, we may gradually acquire a sense that there is somewhere inside ourselves to which we can return.
Carrying the Harbour Within
The deepest form of security is not the guarantee that nobody will leave.
No relationship can provide that guarantee.
People change. Relationships alter. Children grow. Circumstances intervene. Loss is part of human life.
Psychological safety develops instead from another experience: that separation, difference and uncertainty can increasingly be survived without the self disintegrating.
We can remain connected without possessing.
We can provide without making another person permanently dependent.
We can be needed without making need the sole proof of love.
We can establish boundaries without turning them into threats.
We can experience overwhelming feelings and, gradually, learn to think about them.
And we can allow those we love to move into open water while maintaining an internal sense of connection.
The harbour then becomes more than the place where we stay.
It becomes the place from which movement is possible.
Perhaps that is one of the quieter aims of psychotherapy: not to make us invulnerable to separation, but to help us develop enough internal continuity that separation no longer has to mean psychological catastrophe.
The sea will still change.
Relationships will still surprise us.
There will be departures we welcome and others we would never have chosen.
But gradually we may become less dependent upon keeping everything outside us still in order to feel safe inside.
We can move between harbour and open sea.
And eventually we may discover that some of the shelter we once needed another person to provide has become part of our own internal world.
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