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

through observing her own relationship to her children.
Toward the end, she felt that when her mother had felt
insecure in relation to her, she had in fact often been cold
and had treated her badly. Her mother's anxious concern
for the child had been a reaction formation to ward off
her aggression and envy. Since the mother had often been
humiliated as a child, she needed to be valued by her daughter.
Gradually, the two pictures of the loving mother and
of the wicked witch were united into that of a single human
being whose weakness, insecurity, and oversensitivity
made it necessary for her to have her child at her disposal.
The mother, who apparently functioned well, was herself
basically still a child in her relationship to her own child.
The daughter, on the other hand, took over the understanding
and caring role until she discovered, with her own
children, the demanding child within herself who seemed
compelled to press others into her service.
Not all children of narcissistically deprived mothers have
to suffer from such a disturbance. The siblings can usually
obtain a certain freedom when one child has already accepted
this role. Children who have a nurse or another
stranger caring for them from the beginning are usually
freer to develop in their own way because they are less often
the object of narcissistic cathexis.
In his novel Le Lys dans la vallée, Honoré de Balzac described
his childhood. His mother preferred his brother,
gave Honoré first into the care of a nurse and then sent
him away to school. He suffered greatly and all his life
courted his mother in the guise of different women. But
perhaps he was fortunate that this mother did not use him
as a glorification of herself. The very hopelessness of his
wooing gave him the possibility of developing his own
emotional wealth and the ability to freely develop his ex-
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