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

• The hope that with this birth the patient may become
truly alive (the child as symbol for the patient's true self).
• Unconscious communication about the patient's own fate
as a child, with the aid of compulsive repetition (the
child as rival sibling, and abandoned hope); the sibling's
birth had increased the patient's loss of self, and with the
birth of his child the patient would give up (for the
time being) his hope of realizing his true self.
To interpret this questionable wish to have a child as
acting-out is not usually successful, since the compulsion to
repeat is too strong. The analyst is then experienced as a
strict mother, against whom the patient would like to
rebel. At present, however, the patient can do so only in
this self-destructive way, since he is not yet free from
introjects. So the analyst is forced to be a spectator while
the patient gives life to a new human being, apparently in
order to destroy his own chance, but also thereby to rediscover
his formerly only half-experienced life and to experience
it consciously now with his newly awakened feelings.
Just as a child uses the Sceno test figures to represent
his family, so the patient unconsciously uses his new-born
child to lay out for himself the tragedy of his own fate.
This is the double function of the compulsion to repeat.
The patient senses that here for the first time he is really
involved, that it is his own self that is being born. The wish
to have a child expresses this desire, but it has to be expressed
through another person. For the patient now will
devote himself not to the baby he once was, but to an
actual baby in the present. However, since this new-born
baby also stands for his own childhood self, the patient can
emotionally discover his own warded off childhood story,
piece by piece, partly through identification and partly in
the guise of his own parents, whom he gradually discovers
within himself.
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