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

not so clever and quick (for instance, in his first, highly
specialized profession).
Only now did it become clear to him that he had felt
compelled to isolate himself from others by means of his
contempt and at the same time was isolated and separated
from his true self (at least from its helpless, uncertain part).
The integration of this side of his personality put him in the
way of a daring and very successful change of profession
that gave him much happiness. And now, after five years of
analysis, this patient could become aware of his Oedipal
fate with an intensity and richness of feeling perhaps no one
could have suspected earlier in this scornful, distant, and
intellectualizing man.
ACHIEVING FREEDOM FROM
THE CONTEMPTUOUS INTROJECTS
Sexual perversions and obsessional neuroses are not the
only possibilities of perpetuating the tragedy of early suffering
from contempt. There are countless forms in which
we may observe the fine nuances of this tragedy. The
child in the adult is full of narcissistic rage against his
mother because she was not available to him and because
she rejected some parts of his self, and in the analysis, for
instance, this rage at first finds expression in the same form
as that in which he felt rejected by his mother.
There are many ways in which one may transmit the
discrimination under which one has suffered as a child.
There are people, for example, who never say a loud or
angry word, who seem to be only good and noble, and
who still give others the palpable feeling of being ridiculous
or stupid or too noisy, at any rate too common compared
with themselves. They do not know it and surely do not
intend it, but this is what they radiate. They have intro-
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