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

arduous path of my search. For doing this I have been the
recipient of much gratitude but I have also encountered
much hostility.
In the meantime I had come to understand that I was
abused as a child because my parents had experienced
something similar in their childhood but had learned, as
had my analysts and teachers, to regard this abuse as
upbringing or treatment or training for their own good.
Because they were not allowed to feel or, consequently,
understand what had once been done to them, they were
unable to recognize the abuse as such and passed it on to
me in turn, without even the trace of a bad conscience.
I realized that I could not change in the slightest my
parents' and teachers' past, which had made them blind.
But at the same time I felt that I could and must attempt
to point out to today's young parents—and especially to
future parents—the danger of misusing their power, that
I must sensitize them to this danger and make it easier
for them to hear the signals of the child inside them as
well as of children everywhere.
This is something I can do if I help children—victims
who have been condemned to silence and who have no
rights—to speak; if I describe their suffering from their
perspective and not from that of adults. For after all, it
was from a child that I myself received crucial information,
answers to questions which had gone unanswered
throughout my study of philosophy and psychoanalysis
and which did not cease to preoccupy me in the years
that followed. It was thanks to the pain of the child in
me that I fully grasped what so many adults must ward
off all their life, and I also realized why they fail to
confront their truth, preferring instead to plan selfdestruction
on a gigantic atomic scale, without even
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