4 definitions
Dutiful love (n.) traps both sides: the daughter must love involuntarily because the mother is sick involuntarily — each doing what they don't want, to get what they do.
Psychoanalysis (n.) is a game of one-upmanship the patient cannot win — and his contest with the analyst turns out to be his contest with life.
Silence (n.) from a therapist is inevitably a comment on the patient, and "I won't tell you what to do" is still a direction.
Symptom (n.) is strategic: it lets a person control others without taking responsibility — like the invalid mother whose sickness, not she, keeps her daughter at home.