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

health, youth, or loved ones, and although they mourn
them they do so without depression. In contrast, there are
those with great gifts, often precisely the most gifted, who
suffer from severe depression. One is free from depression
when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of one's own
feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.
The collapse of self-esteem in a "grandiose" person will
show clearly how precariously that self-esteem had been
hanging in the air—"hanging from a balloon," a female
patient once dreamed. That balloon flew up very high in a
good wind but then suddenly got a hole and soon lay like a
little rag on the ground.. .. For nothing genuine that could
have given strength and support later on had even been
developed.
The "grandiose" person's partners (including sexual partners)
are also narcissistically cathected. Others are there
to admire him, and he himself is constantly occupied, body
and soul, with gaining that admiration. This is how his
torturing dependence shows itself. The childhood trauma
is repeated: he is always the child whom his mother admires,
but at the same time he senses that so long as it is his
qualities that are being admired, he is not loved for the
person he really is at any given time. In the parents' feelings,
dangerously close to pride in their child, shame is concealed—lest
he should fail to fulfill their expectations.
In a field study conducted at Chestnut Lodge, Maryland,
in 1954, the family backgrounds of twelve patients suffering
from manic-depressive psychoses were examined. The results
strongly confirm the conclusions I have reached, by
other means, about the etiology of depression, and, I believe,
of narcissistic disturbances as a whole.
All the patients came from families who were socially
isolated and felt themselves to be too little respected in their
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