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

her nature, but she could not give up this need to supervise
the child. At last she found help through her dreams, in
which she felt that she herself was in her mother's situation
during the postwar period. Now she was able to imagine
how it had been for her mother, who had been widowed
early and had to make her own way, for herself and her
daughter, and apparently also had to contend with "public
opinion," which had it that because she went out to work
she was neglecting her daughter. Her only child, my patient,
had therefore to be the more perfect. The family
constellation in the daughter's case was quite different,
however, and the need to supervise her child disappeared
when my patient realized this difference. "I am a different
person and my fate is different from that of my mother,"
she once said. As a result, not only the teacher, but also her
husband and neighbors "spontaneously" stopped giving
her "good advice," and veiled orders.
There are moments in every analysis when dammed-up
demands, fears, criticism, or envy break through for the
first time. With amazing regularity these impulses appear in
a guise that the patient has never expected or that he
might even have rejected and feared all his life. (Cf. pp.
18-19.) Before he can develop his own form of criticism
he first adopts his father's hated vocabulary or nagging
manner. And the long repressed anxiety will surface in—
of all things!—his mother's irritating hypochondriacal fears.
It is as if the "badness" in the parents that had caused a person
the most suffering in his childhood and that he had always
wanted to shun, has to be discovered within himself,
so that reconciliation will become possible. Perhaps this
also is part of the never-ending work of mourning that this
personal stamp must be accepted as part of one's own fate
before one can become at least partially free.
When the patient has truly emotionally worked through
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