Edwin Friedman, one of the pioneers of 'Family Systems' has a book of fables which he uses to talk about the universal predicament we all face: the hero's journey of becoming our own person.  We may scratch our head and ask, 'isn't that what we're doing?'  But if we look at the myriad of ways we unconscious, tenaciously, hold on to the habits we were taught when we're young, we discover we are all composites of patterns we adopted early in our lives to survive and never managed to unlearn.  We talk a great deal about the value of freedom but, don't often realize how captive we are to our own past.