"Once upon a time there was a Little Prince. He lived on a planet barely bigger than himself, and he was desperately lonely…”
Those who understand life will immediately recognize the truth in these words.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Why was the Little Prince alone? Who were his parents? How could they allow their child to be left in complete solitude on a tiny asteroid lost in the vastness of space? Didn’t they love him? And if they did, how did they show it?
When the Little Prince was very young—still in the earliest stage of development—he lived in perfect unity with his Mother in their own private paradise. The Little Prince was so perfect in his Mother’s eyes, so beautiful, so intelligent, so magnificent, that she became attached not to him as a person, but to the image of her perfect child in her imagination. His Father, it seems, was too absorbed in himself to care for the Mother, so all her unfulfilled emotions were directed entirely toward the Prince, making her too close to him. When, after a few months, the Prince began to "hatch" from his symbiotic shell, to explore other people, and to notice that they were different from his Mother, her empathic reactions to his moods had far-reaching consequences for his psychological development. As a Mother, she took immense pleasure in being rewarded for her efforts in caring for the Prince during his first months of life. She was proud of his "knowing" smile, of the fact that she had become something special to him. Her baby looked at her with love, studied her every movement and reaction, and calmed down only when he felt her touch or heard her voice—and she responded in kind. No one had ever belonged to her so completely since she herself was a baby. It had been so long. Deep within her, a string resonated, awakening memories of her own lost childhood. Perhaps, she thought, no one else in the world would ever make her feel so important, so special. And so absorbed was she in her child, who was still in a state of psychological fusion with her, that for a time she lost the ability to pay attention to anyone else—even her husband.
But alas, soon the Little Prince betrayed their happy union. He was destined to outgrow it and seek his happiness in the World beyond their private paradise. As soon as his Mother noticed that he was reacting to others and paying attention to things that did not interest her, she began to resent him and feared losing him. She tried to limit his opportunities for autonomy and control them, making him feel intense shame. Moreover, she began to manipulate him, rewarding and encouraging behaviors that aligned with her personal expectations. In doing so, she fed his inflated grandiosity, preventing him from developing a more realistic sense of himself and his place in the vast World.
And what of the Father? When the Prince was almost ready to form his own identity, he desperately needed his Father’s help to complete the process of psychological separation from his Mother. The Father embodied the alluring Outer World, existing beyond the tangled fusion between the Prince and his Mother that remained after their symbiotic union. But if the Father was unavailable for some reason, the Prince lacked the vital bridge to the larger World that only he could build. Or, if the Father did become involved in the Prince’s development, he did not build a bridge to the World but rather a separate gazebo for admiration and worship of himself and his fatherhood.
Thus, the Little Prince became a prematurely mature little adult who never truly grew up. He became what his Mother or Father needed him to be, not who he really was. Even in appearance. Bioenergetic therapists note that raised shoulders and significant tension in the shoulder girdle often symbolize the attitude of "brilliant task performance," corresponding to parental manipulations and expectations. Tension in the neck, which restricts the flow of feelings from the body to the head, as well as tension in the muscles at the base of the skull and around the eye sockets, is also common. Along with other factors, this blockage represents a line through which bodily sensations could break through to consciousness. This blockage is usually associated with an unwillingness to see the real family situation. In a more modern sense, the blockage around the eyes prevents one from seeing real human beings in others—people who may distance themselves—and allows one to see in others only objects for one’s own gratification and manipulation.
The Little Prince believed he could not—and, moreover, should not—express toward his Mother or Father the rage, humiliation, and helplessness that a child normally feels in early childhood. No wonder he never learned to cope with his feelings—shame, rage, and aggression—and became, on the one hand, very convenient for his adults, and on the other, deeply, deeply emotionally vulnerable. He craved admiration, so he became smarter, learned to be self-sufficient, and avoided despair in frightening circumstances. But when he failed—
“— One day I saw the sunset forty-three times in a single day!
And a little later he added:
— You know… when you’re very sad, it’s good to watch the sunset…
— So, on the day you saw forty-three sunsets, you were very sad?
But the Little Prince did not answer.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
The Little Prince desperately needed someone to control—to reinforce his self-esteem.
“…If you love a flower that is unique, as there is no other like it on any of the millions of stars, that is enough: you look at the sky and feel happy. And you tell yourself: ‘Somewhere out there is my flower…’ But if a sheep eats it, it’s as if all the stars went out at once!…
And then he thought: ‘I thought I owned the only flower in the world, the only one of its kind anywhere, but it was just an ordinary rose. All I had was a rose and three volcanoes, no taller than my knee—and one of them was extinct and might never erupt again… So what kind of prince am I after that?’ He lay down in the grass and wept.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
His fragile self-esteem depended on others’ recognition, yet he also feared this dependence and closeness, which threatened to expose his weakness. Secretly, the Little Prince craved recognition of his superiority and felt envy toward those who had what he lacked—and this filled him with unbearable shame. Though he appeared charming on the outside, deep within his soul burned a strong hunger born from never knowing mutual love.
He struggled to cope with shame and, surprisingly, began to gravitate toward those who most reminded him of his Parents, confusing what was real with what was not.
In response to his early traumas, the Little Prince buried his true, spontaneous self-expression and replaced it with a highly developed, compensatory false self. Poor Little Prince—he spent his whole life with one thought:
‘Don’t be who you are. Be who I want you to be, and I will love you.’ Perhaps the Prince’s Mother, having lost all illusions about life, idealized her son, demanding that he care for her or live according to her perfect expectations. By transferring her idealization onto him, she created conditions for an even more painful trauma and, unwittingly, led him to inner loneliness. When a boy develops a narcissistic false self in response to his mother’s expectations, the jealous Father humiliates him in return. In such a situation, the child’s true self experiences a double trauma: first, from the mother’s inability to accept his weakness and sensitivity and from her idealization of him, and then from the father’s need for revenge and sense of humiliation.
The desperation with which the Little Prince clung to his false self can only be understood by acknowledging and empathizing with the intense pain he felt from this double rejection of his true self.
In his distress, the Little Prince began to blame "bad" people—those he considered imperfect compared to himself—and thus guilty. But upon realizing the artificiality and "fakeness" of his existence, he eventually decided to deal with the problem in the most radical way possible—and met the snake, whose life’s purpose was to painlessly free all those lost in Adult life from their suffering. Because emotionally, the Little Prince remained the same 15–24-month-old boy, alone in his struggle with the most important issues of that period, with bouts of rage and despair caused by this unequal battle.
If only someone had recognized the depth of this pain and helped him survive the crisis of fearing his own insignificance, the Little Prince would have been saved. He would have stayed alive and been able to find true happiness. Oh, if only someone had seen, understood, and accepted the fact that both sides—the Little Prince and his conversational partners—perceived each other as things: ‘You are not real. I am not real. You are an object to me. I am an object to you. We use each other. We manipulate and play with each other. We are not connected. We do not feel or love. We are machines going through the mechanical process of counting days and nights.’
Of course, such false significance is merely a substitute for the love the Little Prince truly craved—a love that would make someone sacrifice themselves for his encouragement and comfort. He felt a painful, growing sense that there must be something more to life. In moments when his defenses fell away, the Prince realized that others really see, hear, and feel each other; that within others’ experiences lies true joy and love; that these feelings can be genuine. The awareness of this and the envy it sparked were the first buds of a possible transformation.
The union between the Little Prince and the Rose is a classic intolerance of loneliness, where another person is used solely to confirm the significance of the false self. The central role here is played by the need for attention, validation, respect, and response. This form of transference is more mature because it aims at the development of a separate personality. The false self is slightly more developed here, and others are narcissistically zombified to support it. The tragedy, of course, is that these others—the same sheep—are used to strengthen the false self rather than to open up and accept the true self.
In the transference that takes the form of fusion, the Little Prince seeks—and then mistakenly accepts—others as the ideal object with whom he wants to merge completely. But he finds only the Rose and invents the Sheep to justify his own care for her.
In everyday life, the search for complete perfection is often projected onto a potential partner—potential because maintaining idealization in close relationships is almost impossible. When idealization takes the form of fusion, the individual still seeks symbiosis, which was either incomplete or lost too early.
In the case of the Little Prince, the normal parent-child bond was reversed so that the child was used to satisfy the parents’ needs. In this reversal, he gained access to manipulation and control—a period when manipulation and control of the environment become paramount. The Little Prince learned to anticipate the pleasures of his true self, replacing them with power and control, achieved through training his willpower to actualize his false self.
Thus, the Little Prince made the inevitable tragic choice, preferring power over pleasure. As a result, the representation of the self at the level of muscular perception often finds its only positive expression in the sensations of flight and euphoria from success, achievements, or the false joy of controlling, manipulating, and impressing others. Ultimately, the integration of such a self depends entirely on external sources of validation—approval that is temporary and never fully satisfying. There always remains a craving for something that, though pleasant, does not nourish or yield any real results.
The true self manifests in real feelings during the crisis of destruction-abandonment, in all forms of natural human pleasures, and in positive attachment feelings rooted in past constructive bonds. Depression in this case is compensated by creative expression that mitigates the fear, on the one hand, of personal annihilation and, on the other, of being abandoned during individuation. Moreover, it sheds light on the essence of the experience—this is a crisis, a healing crisis that must either be rejected or worked through.
But the Little Prince lacked the strength and faith to work through it. The absence of hope and belief in genuine empathic love, existing Here and Now, drove him to overcome even the most primal, deep-seated fear of meeting the snake—and to depart for the Stars. And how painfully piercing it is that no one walked beside him.
“…I didn’t understand anything then! I should have judged by deeds, not words. She gave me her fragrance, she lit up my life. I shouldn’t have run away. Behind those pitiful tricks and deceptions, I should have sensed her tenderness. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young, I didn’t know how to love…”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
This is a beautiful and very sad story that could have ended very differently. But nothing is set in stone as long as life continues. All it takes is the desire—and love—for another person.”
