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

ceptualization and their rejection of reality prevented
me from recognizing the truth for years. Surprisingly, it
was the child in me, condemned to silence long ago—
abused, exploited, and turned to stone—who finally
found her feelings and along with them her speech, and
then told me, in pain, her story. Thus, it was my story
I was telling in The Drama, and many people saw their
own mirrored in it.
In my fourth book, Pictures of a Childhood, I describe in
greater detail how my encounter with this child came
about once she had reappeared after long banishment
and how it happened that I was able to offer her the
protection she needed in order to feel her pain and speak
about it.
I was amazed to discover that I had been an abused
child, that from the very beginning of my life I had no
choice but to comply totally with the needs and feelings
of my mother and to ignore my own. My discovery also
showed me the power of repression, which had kept me
from learning the truth all my life, and the inadequacy
of psychoanalysis, which even reinforced my repression
by means of its deceptive theories. For I had completed
two analyses as part of my psychoanalytic training, but
both analysts had been unable to question my version of
the happy childhood I supposedly had enjoyed.
It was not until I started to experiment with spontaneous
painting in 1973 that I was first able to gain access to
the undistorted reality of my childhood. In the pictures
I painted I was confronted with the terror that my
mother, a brilliant pedagogue, had inflicted on me in my
upbringing. I had been subjected to this terror for years
because no one close to me, not even my kind and wise
father, was capable of noticing or challenging this form
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