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

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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. 70
I would never smoke in my father's presence, for example —and that is a sign of my respect for him." This man was neither stupid nor uncongenial, but he had little schooling. We might therefore nurse the illusion that education could counteract this process of destroying the spirit. But how does this illusion stand up to the next example, which concerns an educated man? A talented Czech author is reading from his own works in a town in Western Germany. After the reading there follows a discussion with the audience, during which he is asked questions about his life, which he answers ingenuously. He reports that despite his former support of the Prague Spring he now has plenty of freedom and can frequently travel in the West. He goes on to describe his country's development in recent years. When he is asked about his childhood, his eyes shine with enthusiasm as he talks about his gifted and many-sided father who encouraged his spiritual development and was a true friend. It was only to his father that he could show his first stories. His father was very proud of him, and even when he beat him as punishment for some misdemeanor reported by the mother, he was proud that his son did not cry. Since tears brought extra blows, the child learned to suppress them and was himself proud that he could make his admired father such a great present with his bravery. This man spoke of these regular beatings as though they were the most normal things in the world (as for him, of course, they were), and then he said: "It did me no harm, it prepared me for life, made me hard, taught me to grit my teeth. And that's why I could get on so well in my profession." Contrasting with this Czech author, the film director Ingmar Bergman spoke on a television program with great awareness and far more understanding of the implications 71
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The Drama of the Gifted Child
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A previous version of chapter 1 app
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Vantage Point 1990 Almost ten years
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Although, understandably enough, I
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Preface We live in a culture that e
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of child abuse. Had just one person
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ecognizing the absurdity of what th
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ification. On top of all this, the
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them), if one cannot love oneself a
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The Drama of the Gifted Child
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yet, for many people the truth is s
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ing, general attitudes, these peopl
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• The most appropriate objects fo
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that were free of conflict. Usually
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would be a denial of the empirical
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terest. The parents have found in t
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that he killed a child thirty years
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there is most acting out. The patie
Page 44 and 45: had not been able to give her child
Page 46 and 47: The Psychoanalyst's Situation It is
Page 48 and 49: e found beyond the deep ambivalence
Page 50 and 51: may be his secret delusion, a secre
Page 52 and 53: tention as our patients usually do,
Page 54 and 55: Chapter 2 Depression and Grandiosit
Page 56 and 57: iotic phase) but also after the gra
Page 58 and 59: conditions), and the child could de
Page 60 and 61: If the child's demands become too g
Page 62 and 63: ceptional capacity for suffering. P
Page 64 and 65: neighborhood. They therefore made s
Page 66 and 67: is not allowed to be what he really
Page 68 and 69: 3. Continuous performance of outsta
Page 70 and 71: an absolutely essential adaptation
Page 72 and 73: eader's letter in which the tragic
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Page 78 and 79: (holding) empathic environment. Win
Page 80 and 81: to formulate connections that the p
Page 82 and 83: strate to the patient that "his hop
Page 84 and 85: that resist this adaptation. In old
Page 86 and 87: Points of Contact with Some Theorie
Page 88 and 89: Chapter 3 The Vicious Circle of Con
Page 90 and 91: finished his ice cream, he gave the
Page 92 and 93: een caught at night outside the loc
Page 96 and 97: about his own childhood, which he d
Page 98 and 99: ment of their children. What are we
Page 100 and 101: If we want to avoid the unconscious
Page 102 and 103: ference feelings and his own childi
Page 104 and 105: • The hope that with this birth t
Page 106 and 107: self—to show himself to the world
Page 108 and 109: PERPETUATION OF CONTEMPT IN PERVERS
Page 110 and 111: horrified eyes, and this clearly em
Page 112 and 113: pulses, for he does not allow the c
Page 114 and 115: dramas, nor pangs of conscience whe
Page 116 and 117: "the others," classify, group, and
Page 118 and 119: sexual satisfactions, whereas the c
Page 120 and 121: puberty also had to live out his fa
Page 122 and 123: the 21st of January to the 5th of J
Page 124 and 125: through experience, not merely corr
Page 126 and 127: ecause of their very nature, inacce
Page 128 and 129: course of analysis it can then be s
Page 130 and 131: flicts had absolutely no effect, th
Page 132 and 133: not so clever and quick (for instan
Page 134 and 135: that their teacher once had and was
Page 136 and 137: the history of his childhood and th
Page 139 and 140: Works Cited Abraham, K. 1960 (orig.
Page 141 and 142: Index abandonment, 10-14, 79 Abraha
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