empathic relationship is the key to well-being

Throughout one's life a person will experience themself as a cohesive harmonious firm unit in time and space, connected with the past and pointing meaningfully into a creative-productive future, but only if at each stage in life one experiences certain representatives of the human surrounding as joyfully responding, as available as sources of idealized strength and calmness, as being silently present but in essence alike, and, at any rate, able to grasp one's inner life more or less accurately so that their responses are attuned to one's needs and allow one to grasp their inner life when one needs sustenance.

- Heinz Kohut, Austrian-born American psychoanalyst who developed Self Psychology and transformed the practice of psychotherapy