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

e found beyond the deep ambivalence of infantile
dependence.*
The patient satisfies his analyst's narcissistic wish for approval,
echo, understanding, and for being taken seriously
when he presents material that fits his analyst's knowledge,
concepts, and skills, and therefore also his expectations. In
this way the analyst exercises the same sort of unconscious
manipulation as that to which he was exposed as a child.
He has, of course, long since seen through conscious manipulation
and freed himself from it. He has also learned
to say no and to stand up for his own opinions and carry
them through. But a child can never see through unconscious
manipulation. It is like the air he breathes; he knows
no other, and it appears to him to be the only normal
possibility.
One analysand, for example, could never be sad nor cry
as a child, without being aware that he was making his beloved
mother unhappy and very unsure of herself, for
"cheerfulness" was the trait that had saved her life in her
own childhood. Her children's tears threatened her equilibrium.
The extremely sensitive child felt within himself
a whole abyss warded off by his mother, who had been in a
concentration camp as a child, but had never spoken about
it. Not until her son was grown up and could ask her
questions did she tell him that she was one of eighty children
who had to watch their parents going into the gas
chambers, and not one child had cried. Throughout his
childhood this son had tried to be cheerful and could express
his "true self," his feelings, and inklings only in obsessive
perversions, which seemed alien, shameful, and incomprehensible
to him until he came into analysis.
* The theses formulated here are based on my own experience, but
they can also be illustrated by the experiences of other analysts; cf. case
material presented by M. Stern, 1972 and Masud Khan, 1974.
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