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

pulses, for he does not allow the childish fear and confusion
to come out as they were originally felt and will only
speak to his patient on an adult level.
One might, in fact, think of it as discrimination, as a devaluation
of the childlike, when an analyst emphasizes that,
for him, of course, his patients are always adults and not
children—as if being a child were something to be ashamed
of, and not something valuable that we lose later on. Occasionally
one hears similar remarks about sickness, when
an analyst is eager to consider his patients as healthy as
possible, or warns them against "dangerous regression"—
as if sickness were not sometimes the only possible way of
expressing the true self. The people who come to us have,
after all, been trying all their lives to be as adult and healthy
(normal) as possible. They experience it as a great, inner
liberation when they discover this socially conditioned
straitjacket of child-rejection and "normalcy"-worship
within themselves and can give it up.
A person who suffers under his perversion bears within
himself his mother's rejection, and thus he flaunts his perversion,
in order to get others to reject him, too, all the
time—so reexternalizing the rejecting mother. For this reason
he feels compelled to do things that his circle and society
disapprove of and despise. If society were suddenly
to honor his form of perversion (as may happen in certain
circles), he would have to change his compulsion, but it
would not free him. What he needs is not permission to use
one or another fetish, but the disgusted and horrified eyes.
If he comes to analysis he will look for this in his analyst,
too, and will have to use all possible means to provoke him
to disgust, horror, and aversion. This provocation is of
course a part of the transference, and from the incipient
countertransference reactions one can surmise what happened
at the beginning of this life.
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