The Drama of the Gifted Child (The Search for the True Self)

learned to feel—did I gradually discover my hitherto
concealed history.
I have described my path to this history and to my new
insights in books published after 1985: The Untouched Key
(1990), Banished Knowledge (1990), and Breaking Down the
Wall of Silence (1991). My first three books mark the beginning
of this development, for it was only as I was
writing them that I began systematically to explore childhoods,
including my own. It was thanks to my work on
those books, and later also thanks to the success of a
carefully and systematically uncovering therapy, that I
could see what, despite my critical attitude toward the
drive theory, still had remained concealed from me during
the twenty years of my analytical practice.
I owe this information to my readers because I have
learned from their letters to me that, unfortunately,
some individuals, after reading my earlier books, decided
to undergo psychoanalytical training or treatment,
assuming that my views as expressed therein reflected
the views of contemporary analysts.
This assumption is completely erroneous and misleading.
The teaching structure of psychoanalysis has remained
unchanged over the past ten years, and I have not
met a single person who, having assimilated the insights
of my books, would still be willing to describe herself or
himself as a psychoanalyst. Nor in my view would this be
possible, since a therapist who has gained emotional access
to her or his childhood—a process that I regard as
essential—cannot remain blind to the fact that it is precisely
this access that psychoanalysis prevents at all costs.
Whenever I am—frequently and mistakenly—described
as a psychoanalyst, it is only because I do not always hear
about it in time to correct such a notion.
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