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

horrified eyes, and this clearly emerges in the analytic
transference.
The patient goes through torment when he reveals to
the analyst his hitherto secret sexual and autoerotic behavior.
He may, of course, also relate all this quite unemotionally,
merely giving information, as if he were speaking of
some other person. Such a report, however, will not help
him to break out of his loneliness nor lead him back to the
reality of his childhood. It is only when he is encouraged
in the analysis not to fend off his feelings of shame and fear,
but rather to accept and experience them, that he can discover
what he has felt as a child. His most harmless behavior
will cause him to feel mean, dirty, or completely annihilated.
He himself indeed is surprised when he realizes
how long this repressed feeling of shame has survived, and
how it has found a place alongside his tolerant and advanced
views of sexuality. These experiences first show the
patient that his early adaptation by means of splitting was
not an expression of cowardice, but that it was really his
only chance to escape this sense of impending destruction.
What else can one expect of a mother who was always
proud of being her mother's dear good daughter, who was
dry at the age of six months, clean at a year, at three could
"mother" her younger siblings, and so forth. In her own
baby, such a mother sees the split-off and never-experienced
part of her self, of whose breakthrough into consciousness
she is afraid, and she sees also the uninhibited sibling baby,
whom she mothered at such an early age and only now
envies and perhaps hates in the person of her own child.
So she trains her child with looks, despite her greater wisdom—for
she can do nothing else. As the child grows up,
he cannot cease living his own truth, and expressing it
somewhere, perhaps in complete secrecy. In this way a
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