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

that was alive and spontaneous in him was cut off. In childhood
these people have often had dreams in which they
experienced themselves as partly dead. I should like to give
three examples:
My younger siblings are standing on a bridge and throw a
box into the river. I know that I am lying in it, dead, and
yet I hear my heart beating; at this moment I always wake.
[A recurrent dream.]
This dream combines her unconscious aggression (envy and
jealousy) against the younger siblings, for whom the patient
was always a caring "mother," with "killing" her
own feelings, wishes, and demands, by means of reaction
formation. Another patient dreamed:
I see a green meadow, on which there is a white coffin. I am
afraid that my mother is in it, but I open the lid and, luckily,
it is not my mother but me.
If this patient had been able as a child to express his disappointment
with his mother—to experience his rage and
anger—he could have stayed alive. But that would have led
to the loss of his mother's love, and that, for a child, is the
same as object loss and death. So he "killed" his anger and
with it a part of himself in order to preserve his self-object,
the mother. A young girl used to dream:
I am lying on my bed. I am dead. My parents are talking and
looking at me but they don't realize that I am dead.
3. The difficulties inherent in experiencing and developing
one's own emotions lead to bond permanence, which
prevents individuation, in which both parties have an in-
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