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

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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 86
person can have adapted completely to the demands of his surroundings and can have developed a false self, but in his perversion or his obsessional neurosis he still allows a portion of his true self to survive—in torment. And so the true self lives on, under the same conditions as the child once did with his disgusted mother, whom in the meantime he has introjected. In his perversion and obsessions he constantly reenacts the same drama: a horrified mother is necessary before drive-satisfaction is possible: orgasm (for instance, with a fetish) can only be achieved in a climate of self-contempt; criticism can only be expressed in (seemingly) absurd, unaccountable (frightening), obsessional fantasies. Nothing will serve better to acquaint us with the hidden tragedy of certain unconscious mother-child relationships than the analysis of a perversion or an obsessional neurosis. For in such an analysis we witness the destructive power of the compulsion to repeat, and that compulsion's dumb, unconscious communication in the shaping of its drama. It is of eminent importance that, although the patient has the possibility to experience the analyst as hostile to his drives, critical and contemptuous, yet the analyst should in fact never really be so. This may sound obvious but it is not always in practice. Sometimes the analyst does just the opposite, quite unconsciously and with the best intentions. It may be that he can hardly bear being turned into a figure so hostile to instinctual drives, and so must demonstrate his tolerance by persuading the patient, for example, to describe his masterbatory practice fearlessly. In doing so he will prevent the patient from experiencing his mother in the transference. At the same time this analyst repeats, in reality, the mother's rejection of the patient's childish instinctual im- 87
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The Drama of the Gifted Child
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A previous version of chapter 1 app
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Vantage Point 1990 Almost ten years
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Although, understandably enough, I
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Preface We live in a culture that e
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of child abuse. Had just one person
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ecognizing the absurdity of what th
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ification. On top of all this, the
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them), if one cannot love oneself a
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The Drama of the Gifted Child
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yet, for many people the truth is s
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ing, general attitudes, these peopl
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• The most appropriate objects fo
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that were free of conflict. Usually
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would be a denial of the empirical
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terest. The parents have found in t
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that he killed a child thirty years
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there is most acting out. The patie
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had not been able to give her child
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The Psychoanalyst's Situation It is
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e found beyond the deep ambivalence
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may be his secret delusion, a secre
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tention as our patients usually do,
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Chapter 2 Depression and Grandiosit
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iotic phase) but also after the gra
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conditions), and the child could de
Page 60 and 61: If the child's demands become too g
Page 62 and 63: ceptional capacity for suffering. P
Page 64 and 65: neighborhood. They therefore made s
Page 66 and 67: is not allowed to be what he really
Page 68 and 69: 3. Continuous performance of outsta
Page 70 and 71: an absolutely essential adaptation
Page 72 and 73: eader's letter in which the tragic
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Page 76 and 77: can be experienced, insight and ass
Page 78 and 79: (holding) empathic environment. Win
Page 80 and 81: to formulate connections that the p
Page 82 and 83: strate to the patient that "his hop
Page 84 and 85: that resist this adaptation. In old
Page 86 and 87: Points of Contact with Some Theorie
Page 88 and 89: Chapter 3 The Vicious Circle of Con
Page 90 and 91: finished his ice cream, he gave the
Page 92 and 93: een caught at night outside the loc
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Page 96 and 97: about his own childhood, which he d
Page 98 and 99: ment of their children. What are we
Page 100 and 101: If we want to avoid the unconscious
Page 102 and 103: ference feelings and his own childi
Page 104 and 105: • The hope that with this birth t
Page 106 and 107: self—to show himself to the world
Page 108 and 109: PERPETUATION OF CONTEMPT IN PERVERS
Page 112 and 113: pulses, for he does not allow the c
Page 114 and 115: dramas, nor pangs of conscience whe
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Page 118 and 119: sexual satisfactions, whereas the c
Page 120 and 121: puberty also had to live out his fa
Page 122 and 123: the 21st of January to the 5th of J
Page 124 and 125: through experience, not merely corr
Page 126 and 127: ecause of their very nature, inacce
Page 128 and 129: course of analysis it can then be s
Page 130 and 131: flicts had absolutely no effect, th
Page 132 and 133: not so clever and quick (for instan
Page 134 and 135: that their teacher once had and was
Page 136 and 137: the history of his childhood and th
Page 139 and 140: Works Cited Abraham, K. 1960 (orig.
Page 141 and 142: Index abandonment, 10-14, 79 Abraha
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