We usually think of precocity as a gift and associate it with genius: the musical prodigy who plays Carnegie Hall at age 12, for example, or the math whiz doing advanced calculus in grade school. For many people, however, precocity can be a curse when it leads to unrealistic expectations about how easily things ought to come, when it prevents them from doing the hard work involved in true mastery of any discipline. Most of us know the famous quote from Thomas Edison: "Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90% perspiration." No matter how brilliant you are or how precocious your talent, hard work is always necessary to succeed at any meaningful endeavor.

Many highly intelligent people I've known who shone early on found their public school education utterly unchallenging and rarely interesting; they quickly developed an ability to determine the minimum work necessary in order to earn the 'A' and worked no harder. The first 12 years of their education were relatively effortless; for many of them, college came as a shock when they realized they actually had to work in order to succeed. One friend of mine graduated valedictorian of his high school class, went on to a fine university and received two 'C's during his first year there, before developing a different work ethic.

For some people, it might take even longer. I know a brilliant lawyer who grew up in a family of legal minds, where spirited debate at the dinner table was the norm. On her first day in law school, she awed her classmates when the professor engaged her in Socratic dialog about the legal issues in a particular case, and she rose to the occasion. For her, law school was relatively easy and left her a lot of free time, so much that she also joined a modern dance company. But at the end of her second year, when she interned for one of the most prestigious law firms in the country, they told her in the end-of-summer review that she "didn't know how to think" and declined to give her an offer to come back once she graduated.

What she eventually realized as a result of this narcissistic injury was that her intellectual gifts and ease with the legal world had made her lazy, that precocity had led to a kind of self-sabotage. She expected everything to come easily; when it didn't, when she came up against an issue that actually challenged her, a feeling of impatience would rise up and she'd resort to facile conclusions without the needed subtlety of thought. It took her years of hard work to develop a tolerance for that frustration, to overcome her impatience and to value hard work more than quick and showy brilliance. The greatest help came from her ballet teacher, she told me, who taught her how to care about every last detail, including the position of the pinkie finger on her left hand.

Another friend of mine who skipped several grades never had to work very hard to succeed at anything he tried. School came easily, of course, but he also had a gift for singing and acting that landed him on the Broadway stage at the age of 15. On nearly every level, he's had a highly successful life, though impatience is still a feature of his personality. He easily becomes frustrated when things don't come quickly enough, to him or to other people, though he understands the problem and struggles with it. He told me that working with horses has taught him the most about patience. There is no way to rush a show horse through the training necessary to reach advanced levels. It is slow and methodical work; impatience will undermine you in the step-by-step, often tedious process.

I've had my own struggles with this issue, in particular as it has affected my career as a writer. I had a precocious way with language and began writing fiction in the fourth grade: a three-chapter "novel" (about 25 pages in total) featuring my teacher's imaginary pet dragon Herman. The year after I graduated from college, I wrote a science fantasy novel and sold it the following year when I was 22 years old. I published another novel several years later -- a work of psychological suspense that "novelized" a screenplay written by another client of my agent's. Genre fiction came easily to me ... but then I decided to write something "serious". Writing literary fiction takes much more care, more hard work than figuring out and implementing the conventions of a genre. I was crippled by my own facility, the ease with which I had written and published my first two books. My own impatience in the face of hard work prevented me from producing anything truly worthwhile in the realm of literary fiction. I have not published a book since I was 26.

Twelve years ago when I moved to Chapel Hill, I joined a writer's group with seven other members, all of them published novelists and scholars, the most insightful and sensitive critics I've ever known. Last year, with their help and an awful lot of hard work, several drafts and countless revisions, I completed a novel that I believe passes muster. One year ago, I also began to develop content for this website; week after week, I've written carefully and thoughtfully, working hard to promote my site through Facebook and Twitter and, in particular, learning the ropes of "search engine optimization and marketing" -- how a particular website shows up on page one of a Google search. I've curbed my impatience and taken no short cuts.

Two days ago, a publisher offered to buy the first book coming out of this material here on my website. It feels like a major accomplishment to me, not only because I have finally (30 years later!) sold another book, but because I've mastered my impatience, the wish for quick and easy answers; I've done the long hard work to achieve my goal. I'm 56 years old and there's nothing precocious about it.

The Oedipus Complex in Divorce Situations

Since writing my last post about the Oedipus complex, I've been thinking more about those situations where we might make use of Freud's ideas concerning the family triangle; one that occurred to me is a toxic divorce situation of the kind I described in my post on the shame-based divorce.

To summarize the basic ideas in that post: In situations where unconscious shame and mutual idealization have played a large role in a marriage, if the relationship breaks down and the couple divorces, they usually battle one another to see who will be the "winner" and who the "loser". They often try to enlist the loyalty of their children against one another; the parent who can get a child to turn against the other parent will then feel triumphant over the former spouse. This is a tragic instance of the narcissistic needs of that parent overriding his or her concern for the welfare of the child: desire to take vengeance on their ex drives them to sacrifice the child's fundamental need for a good relationship with both parents.

This dynamic always damages the child, but it can be doubly toxic when added to an Oedipus complex dynamic. Here's a scenario that may be familiar to many of you. I'll describe it in relation to divorced mothers and their sons because I'm more familiar with that situation, though it would also apply to fathers and daughters. In cases where the husband's infidelity instigated their divorce, the ex-wife may often have legitimate grounds to be angry, but that wouldn't justify the kind of destructive narcissistic behavior you sometimes see.

I'm thinking of the ex-wife who makes her son into the "little man", who turns to him for the sort of companionship she might look for with a spouse, and who confides thoughts and concerns inappropriate for a child to hear. She might discuss her financial situation in ways that subtly make the boy feel responsible and protective; she might complain to him about the difficulties of her new status as a single woman and the burdens of running a household alone. Looking to a son to assume some of the chores her ex-husband might have shouldered is one thing; asking him to step into his father's shoes as confidante and life partner is another.

The ex-wife's attempts to poison the relationship between father and son make the situation much more lethal for the boy. You may recall that in Freud's view, the Oedipus complex is "resolved" when the son identifies with his father, internalizes him as part of his conscience as conceived of in the id ego superego model of the mind. That resolution implies an intact family, where the father's authority opposes the son's desire for exclusive possession of his mother; it depends upon the boy's respect for his father and an awareness that the father doesn't actually want to retaliate for those patricidal impulses the son may have harbored.

So what happens when the mother enlists her son as a surrogate husband and at the same time tries to destroy his relationship with his dad? In a particularly toxic way, it confirms the Oedipal fantasy. By trashing her ex-husband, she subtly invites the boy to "kill off" his father; how then can he "resolve" his Oedipus complex in the usual way, by internalizing a positive authority as part of his superego? Even if you don't find the Oedipus complex a compelling idea, you'll probably agree that we do internalize our parents as part of ourselves. What effect will it have on a boy's sense of self to internalize a damaged father? I think it undermines that sense of self and encourages a hatred of authority, even legitimate authority, that will handicap him in his ability to navigate roles and relationships in the world at large.

It's interesting to me that in my practice, I rarely make interpretations that concern the Oedipus complex. It's more something I see as I look around me in the world-at-large. So much of the comments I make to my clients concerns the mother-infant dyad (issues about neediness, emotional dependency and helplessness) or shame and damage to our earliest sense of self. Maybe issues arising from the Oedipus complex have more to do with later development; most of the clients I've seen have struggled with first-year-of-life type issues or come from shattered families. Now that I've been thinking about the Oedipus complex, though, I'll be on the lookout for more instances; I'll let you know if I observe anything noteworthy.

And in the meantime, if any of you has an interesting anecdote that illustrates the Oedipus complex at work, please let me know.

Sigmund Freud and the Oedipus Complex

Joseph Burgoin

Envy and Jealousy

Sexuality

October 6, 2011April 10, 2013

Freud's concept of the Oedipus Complex is one of those ideas that seems almost to have disappeared from the field of psychotherapy; even much of what is written from the perspective of psychodynamic theory leaves out this central idea. Very few people search the term nowadays on the Internet -- about 15K per month, as opposed to 135K who search for information about bipolar disorder symptoms or treatment and 110K apiece for borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. In part, this reflects the trend away from explaining mental illness in terms of its psychological and emotional roots (especially in the unconscious) toward the medical view with its emphasis on diagnostic categories akin to those for physical illness. I believe it also reflects a kind of widespread social repression, where unpopular ideas disappear from view, in many ways due to a misunderstanding of what the oedipal situation actually involves.

Sigmund Freud mostly clearly articulated his ideas about the Oedipus complex in the charming case study of Little Hans (1909), though he also discussed Oedipus in The Interpretation of Dreams (1905) and other early works. In Little Hans, Freud puts forward the theory that every little boy wishes to have sexual intercourse with his mother and wants murder his father in order to gain exclusive possession of her. It's hard for us to imagine just how provocative such a theory would have been in Freud's day; we live in a world where Freudian ideas have permeated so many aspects of our culture that it's virtually impossible to understand how shocking and offensive his contemporaries would have found it. I don't think people today find it shocking; if anything, they find it silly and misguided, a quaint idea from the early heyday of psychoanalysis, or maybe just plain wrong. That old Sigmund Freud -- what a wacky idea! Wasn't he the guy who talked about penis envy?

People might find the Oedipus complex more relevant if they understood the revisions and additions that have occurred since Freud first introduced the idea. Most importantly, Melanie Klein wrote extensively about the early stages of the Oedipus complex; she believed it unfolded primarily within the context of the feeding relationship: when the baby begins to become aware of the father's existence, he or she feels him to be a rival for the nourishment and comfort offered by the breast. To me, the Oedipus complex is about emotional competition, in whatever arena; while I have seen clients with unconscious sexual feelings for their mother, I've more often found rivalry in the emotional area.

I've also seen a lot of competition for the father's attention, with hostile feelings toward the mother. Jung referred to this as the Electra complex though that term doesn't seem to have caught on. Many of us now think of the Oedipus complex in a larger, more varied way, as a relationship between three parties (one child and two parents) where the child competes with one parent for the love and affection of the other. It doesn't need to be sexual to be considered Oedipal. It's not limited to a boy's feelings for his mother.

The Oedipus complex also involves the feelings of the parent toward the competing child. Let's not forget that, in the original story of Oedipus Rex, Laius tries to have his infant son Oedipus put to death when he hears the prophecy. Many fathers feel deeply jealous of the attention babies get from their mothers; husbands often feel sexually deprived after the birth, and may feel that the wife's involvement with their newborn leaves him out. It's not unusual for mothers to feel deeply competitive with their daughters, and jealous of the relationship they may have with the father. I've heard it many times from female clients; my own sister told me that she didn't have a decent relationship with our mother until my sister found her own man and got married. She was quite consciously aware that Mom was jealous of her relationship with Dad. Remember the story of Snow White and her vain and jealous step-mother? In the original version of the Grimm Brothers fairy tale, it was actually her mother who felt jealous and tried to kill her.

My colleague Marla Estes discusses this issue in a recent post over on our Movies and Mental Health blog, using a film clip from The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood to illustrate it. To me, the Oedipal situation is still a vital idea, highly relevant to my psychotherapy practice, and observable everywhere once you start to look for it.

When Babies Aren’t Idealized

Joseph Burgoin

Points of Departure

September 28, 2011September 28, 2011

After I wrote my last post, I had an experience that for me captured the lifelong effects of having a mother who did not adore you. It took place during and after my piano lesson.

In addition to giving piano lessons, my teacher is also an accomplished singer and vocal coach. One of her students -- a man in his late 20s who began to study with her when he was seven years old -- has gone on to become a world-class opera singer who'll be performing at the Met this fall. At the beginning of my lesson last week, my teacher showed me a video of a rehearsal that had been filmed, where she provided piano accompaniment to her former student as he prepared for a concert he'll give next month in Europe. It was an extraordinary performance. This young man is truly an artist, with an exquisitely trained voice.

"You must be so proud of him," I said.

Her face was beaming as she agreed. "Not only is he an amazing artist but he's such a well-rounded, truly cultured person." It was obvious she felt deeply attached to this young man and also admired him.

That evening, I thought back to her remarks, and how I would never be an "amazing artist." I later caught myself thinking, "I've really let my French slip these past two years; I need to get my language skills together." For me, speaking French has always been tied up with some fairly pretentious ideas of what it means to be "cultured" (see my early post on having a plan for a person). When I realized what I was thinking, I had to laugh at myself ... but I also felt a little sad. For many people, when your own mother doesn't adore you, there's always an unmet need for someone else to feel that way about you. It became clear to me that, even though I'm ten years older than my teacher, I wanted her to feel about me the way she felt about her former student.

Earlier this week, in session with my client Janice, she was discussing her thoughts about what drives her narcissism. She said that when your mother doesn't adore you, then you're all the time trying to do something bigger and better to get her attention, and then later on, the attention of someone else ... anyone else! Janice understands all about the shame that's the residue of failed attachment; she understands how it drives narcissistic behavior of various kinds. The baby whose mother doesn't adore her never gets over it, not really.

So you might think that making video lectures about my ideas concerning psychotherapy would reflect a wish for people to idealize me because my own mother didn't. As far as I can tell, it isn't. While the narcissist wants to be noticed and admired, he doesn't want to be seen for who he truly is; she wants you to believe in the idealized false self she presents to the world, the one that disproves all that shame she feels at her core. In these videos, I feel as if I'm being seen for who I truly am and I don't think I come across as in any way ideal.

And in this third video, I feel as if I'm finally comfortable enough to be myself. The sense of humor is still missing, and I do wish I could think of something to smile about, but this one feels fairly close to who I really am and probably not that different from how I come across as a professional.

Idealizing Your Baby

Joseph Burgoin

Defense Mechanisms

Self-Esteem and Self-Sabotage

Shame/Narcissism

September 20, 2011September 21, 2011

Good friends of ours recently became grandparents; hearing them talk about the baby -- that brand new life, a blank slate where anything and everything seems possible -- took me back 20 years or so, to the day when my first child came forth into this world. I was not one of those parents who instantly fell in love with his newborn the second it popped out; but not long after that day, I felt overwhelmed with that love nobody can prepare you for. William was born toward the end of May, and that Christmas, at a holiday party for my institute, I went around with a pocketful of photographs, foisting them upon anyone who made the mistake of asking, "How's the baby?" I was besotted.

To me, he was the most beautiful baby I'd ever seen. Literally. While I had some objective awareness that perhaps this wasn't true, I nonetheless felt it, as so many parents have done in their turn. I think adoring your baby is a crucial experience for both parent and child, a critical stage that helps the parents cope with the deprivations of child-rearing and plants the seeds from which self-esteem will later develop in the child. I believe it's crucial for the growing baby to feel that he or she is beautiful to the parents; the experience of being adored determines, in large part, what it feels like to be "you" or "me" in this world -- whether we feel self-confident and capable or riddled with self-doubt and shame.

Continue "Idealizing Your Baby"