Optimal Frustration

What does dropping out of graduate school have to do with Goldilocks? How do you know when to "jump in the deep end," or wade in slowly? Even more difficult, how do you know when to push your kids or ease up? Optimal Frustration is a way to get out of this "either-or" thinking and create real growth.  Heinz Kohut, a psychoanalyst in the generation after Freud, developed the concept of Optimal Frustration after he fled to Chicago from the Nazis. His work focused on how we develop a sense of worthiness and value, but this was personal to him -- his own disappointing experience with psychoanalysis led him to add these missing elements to the ever evolving concepts we have about the unconscious mind.