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

children are aware of this situation and are able to tell us
about it, for this may enable them to throw off the chains
of power, discrimination, and scorn that have been handed
on for generations. When our children can consciously
experience their early helplessness and narcissistic rage
they will no longer need to ward off their helplessness, in
turn, with exercise of power over others. In most cases,
however, one's own childhood suffering remains affectively
inaccessible and thus forms the hidden source of
new and sometimes very subtle humiliation for the next
generation. Various defense mechanisms will help to
justify this: denial of one's own suffering, rationalization
(I owe it to my child to bring him up properly), displacement
(it is not my father but my son who is hurting me),
idealization (my father's beatings were good for me), and
more. And, above all, there is the mechanism of turning passive
suffering into active behavior. The following examples
may illustrate how astonishingly similar the ways are in
which people protect themselves against their childhood
experiences, despite great differences in personality structure
and in education.
A thirty-year-old Greek, the son of a peasant and owner
of a small restaurant in Western Europe, proudly described
how he drinks no alcohol and has his father to thank for
this abstinence. Once, at the age of fifteen, he came home
drunk and was so severely beaten by his father that he
could not move for a week. From that time on he was so
averse to alcohol that he could not taste so much as a drop,
although his work brought him into constant contact with
it. When I heard that he was soon to be married, I asked
whether he, too, would beat his children. "Of course," he
answered, "beatings are necessary in bringing up a child
properly: they are the best way to make him respect you.
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