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

to formulate connections that the patient himself is discovering
with the help of his own feelings. Otherwise he
is in danger of behaving like a friend who brings some good
food to a prisoner in his cell, at the precise moment when
that prisoner has the chance to escape, perhaps spending his
first night without shelter and hungry, but nevertheless in
freedom. Since this step into unknown territory requires a
great deal of courage in the first instance, it can happen
that the prisoner, comforting himself with his food and
shelter, misses his chance and stays in prison.
Recognizing the fragility of a creative process obviously
does not mean that the analyst must adopt a mostly silent
and hurtful attitude but merely that he must exercise care
in this respect. It is possible, for example—provided the
analyst respects the analysand's need to discover things for
himself—that his compulsion to repeat can be of good
service to his creative self-discovery, especially if its indirect
communications are understood. This will come
about through producing a variety of new situations
through which an old, unremembered situation can, for the
first time, be consciously experienced in its full tragedy and
then finally be mourned. It is part of the dialectic of the
mourning process that such experiences both encourage
and are dependent on self-discovery. (Cf. p. 18-20.)
Grandiosity is the counterpart of depression within the
narcissistic disturbance. The patient can therefore be freed
from his depression for a while if the psychotherapist
knows how to let the patient share in his own grandeur—
that is, when he can enable the patient to feel big and
strong as a part of the idealized therapist. The narcissistic
disturbance then appears in a different guise for a while,
even though it still exists. The achievement of freedom
from both forms of narcissistic disturbance in analysis
is hardly possible without deeply felt mourning. This abil-
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