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

moral evaluation, and although it does not concern a perversion,
it does seem to me to have something in common
with the early history of a perversion, namely, the introjection
of parental contempt for the child's instinctual
needs. This example also has the advantage that it has been
published, and published by the person himself, so that the
connections that I shall postulate can be clarified with concrete
examples from his life.
At the beginning of his novel Demian, Hermann Hesse
describes the goodness and purity of a parental home that
gave neither a place nor a hearing to a child's fibs. (It is
not difficult to recognize the author's own parental home
in this novel, and he confirms this indirectly.) Thus the
child is left alone with his sin and feels that he is depraved,
wicked, and outcast, though nobody scolds him (since nobody
knows the "terrible facts") and everyone shows him
kindness and friendliness.
Many people recognize this situation. The idealizing way
of describing such a "pure" household is not strange to us
either, and it reflects both the child's point of view and the
hidden cruelty of educational methods that we know well.
Like most parents [writes Hesse], mine were no help with
the new problems of puberty, to which no reference was
ever made. All they did was take endless trouble in supporting
my hopeless attempts to deny reality and to continue
dwelling in a childhood world that was becoming more and
more unreal. I have no idea whether parents can be of help,
and I do not blame mine. It was my own affair to come to
terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most
well-brought-up children, I managed it badly. (p. 49) *
To a child his parents seem to be free of instinctual
wishes, for they have means and possibilities of hiding their
* Italics added.
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