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

PERPETUATION OF CONTEMPT IN PERVERSION
AND OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS
If we start from the premise that a person's whole development
(and his narcissistic balance that is based upon
it) is dependent on the way his mother experienced his expression
of needs and sensations during his first days and
weeks of life, then we must assume that here the valuation
of feelings and impulses is set. If a mother cannot take
pleasure in her child as he is but must have him behave in
a particular way, then the first value selection takes place
for the child. Now "good" is differentiated from "bad,"
"nice" from "nasty," and "right" from "wrong," and this
differentiation is introjected by the child. Against this
background will follow all his further introjections of the
parents' more differentiated valuations.
Since every mother has her own "roomful of props,"
virtually every infant must learn that there are things about
him for which the mother has "no use." She will expect
her child to control his bodily functions as early as possible.
On the conscious level his parents want him to do
this so that he will not offend against society, but unconsciously
they are protecting their own reaction formation
dating from the time when they were themselves small
children afraid of "offending."
Marie Hesse, the mother of the poet and novelist Hermann
Hesse, undoubtedly a sensitive woman, describes in
her diaries how her own will was broken at the age of four.
When her son was four years old, she suffered greatly under
his defiant behavior, and battled against it with varying
degrees of success. At the age of fifteen, Hermann Hesse was
sent to an institution for the care of epileptics and defectives
in Stetten, "to put an end to his defiance once and for
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