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

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about his own childhood, which he described as one long story of humiliation. He related, for example, that if he wet his trousers he had to wear a red dress all day so that everybody would know what he had done and he would have to be ashamed of himself. Ingmar Bergman was the younger son of a Protestant pastor. In this television interview he described a scene that often occurred during his childhood. His older brother has just been beaten by the father. Now their mother is dabbing his brother's bleeding back with cotton wool. He himself sits watching. Bergman described this scene without apparent agitation, almost coldly. One can see him as a child, quietly sitting and watching. He surely did not run away, nor close his eyes, nor cry. One has the impression that this scene did take place in reality, but at the same time is a covering memory for what he himself went through. It is unlikely that only his brother was beaten by their father. It sometimes happens that patients in analysis are convinced that only their siblings suffered humiliation. Only after years of analysis can they remember, with feelings of rage and helplessness, of anger and indignation, how humiliated and deserted they felt when they were beaten by their beloved father. Ingmar Bergman, however, had other possibilities, apart from projection and denial, for dealing with his sufferinghe could make films. It is conceivable that we, as the movie audience, have to endure those feelings that he, the son of such a father, could not experience overtly but nevertheless carried within himself. We sit before the screen confronted, the way that small boy once was, with all the cruelty "our brother" has to endure, and hardly feel able or willing to take in all this brutality with authentic feelings; we ward them off. When Bergman speaks regret- 72
fully of his failure to see through Nazism before 1945, although as an adolescent he often visited Germany during the Hitler period, we may see it as a consequence of his childhood. Cruelty was the familiar air that he had breathed from early on—and so, why should cruelty have caught his attention? And why did I describe these three examples of men who had been beaten in their childhood? Are these not borderline cases? Do I want to consider the effects of beatings? By no means. We may believe that these three cases are crass exceptions. However, I chose these examples partly because they had not been entrusted to me as secrets but had already been made public, but, above all, I meant to show how even the most severe ill-treatment can remain hidden, because of the child's strong tendency to idealization. There is no trial, no advocate, no verdict; everything remains hidden in the darkness of the past, and should the facts become known, then they appear in the name of blessings. If this is so with the crassest examples of physical ill-treatment, then how is mental torment ever to be exposed, when it is less visible and more easily disputed anyway? Who is likely to take serious notice of subtle discrimination, as in the example of the small boy and the ice cream? Metapsychology has no model for these processes. It is concerned with cathexis, with intrapsychic dynamics, object- and self-representations, but not with facts that at most are taken into account as the patient's fantasies. Its concern is the meaning attached to experiences and not the reality behind them. Nevertheless, we do analyze parents, too, and we hear about their feelings toward their children and about their narcissistic needs, and we have to ask ourselves what the consequences of all this are for the develop- 73
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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
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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 76 and 77: can be experienced, insight and ass
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 94 and 95: children are aware of this situatio
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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