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

that their teacher once had and was forced to suppress in
relation to his parents. If the students themselves become
teachers one day, they will have the opportunity of handing
on this unusable knowledge, like a pearl of great price
(because it had cost them so much).
It greatly aids the success of analytic work when the
patient can become aware of the inner objects that work
within him. Here is an example: at a certain point in her
analysis a patient suddenly began to help her very intelligent
ten-year-old daughter with her schoolwork, although
the girl never had any difficulty in doing it alone. The patient's
conscious motive was a bit of general advice from
the teacher at a parent-teacher meeting. The child soon lost
her spontaneity in learning, became unsure of herself, and
actually began to have difficulty with her schoolwork.
Now the patient's continued supervision of her daughter's
homework was fully justified. The patient's own mother, a
teacher, had been very proud of her pedagogic talent.
She could, as she put it, "make something out of any child."
She was one of those unsure mothers who would even teach
their children to walk and talk, if they could. By then
both the patient and I knew this, for the patient had repeatedly
experienced her mother in me in the transference,
and she had fantasized that I was less concerned with
her than with my own success and the confirmation of my
own value in wanting her analysis to turn out well. Thereafter,
she had remembered and experienced in her dreams
scenes with her mother that confirmed these feelings. But
that did not suffice. The patient also needed to discover
her mother in herself, had to see how she had become so
afraid—quite unrealistically—that her daughter would
compromise her, in her ability as a mother, before the
teacher. She hated her own compulsion to meddle in her
daughter's life, and experienced it as something foreign to
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