Vacation as a gift

You can give something specific: say, a cruise on the Nile to parents who dream of the exotic. Or a thalassotherapy course for a friend who doesn’t have enough time for herself. Or a weekend in a Gothic castle for newlyweds who can’t afford it yet. But a more convenient option is a tourist gift card of any denomination, according to which your loved one will make a route and travel time on their own. Travel is a material gift, but not specific, it is our attempt to guess and fulfill the cherished desires of the addressee. But are we only fulfilling his desires?

Travel “together”. Deciding to present such an unbanal surprise, we do not just show a sign of attention to a loved one. “We unconsciously want to awaken fantasy, curiosity in him, to give that creative and childish state that we ourselves lack so much in adulthood,” explains psychoanalyst Svetlana Fedorova. – We come up with a trip not only for him, but also partly for ourselves: without going anywhere in reality, we actually live this trip with him in our imagination. Sweet dreams about travel are so strong that we have much longer than real impressions, they excite us, pull us out of the routine.

The therapy is expensive. Departure helps to maintain peace of mind. Giving a vacation to a loved one means giving him a chance to escape into a space woven from adventures and emotions: excitement, joy, fears … As any therapy requires the client to work independently, so this “incomplete” gift leaves the recipient to worry about organizing a tour, obtaining a visa , fees on the road.

A question of influence. A vacation as a gift can be associated with the desire to reveal your inner world to another person, to show him something that is very dear to us. And then, evaluating his impressions, be glad that our preferences are similar. But it can also speak to our desire to make an impact. “Every cultured person should visit the Hermitage…”; “Who has not been to India, has not seen anything …”. “You should not impose your ideas about the ideal on another,” reminds Svetlana Fedorova. “So the giver takes on a patronizing, dominant position, depriving the recipient of the pleasure of planning the trip himself.” He tries to control him, like a mother of a child, and forgets that this “child” is free to refuse the trip altogether or choose it at random. And that travel always holds a secret! What the other person will stop their attention on, what emotions they will experience – we can only fantasize about this.