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She was his granddaughter and he was her grandfather, but since her birth they had lived far apart and knew each other only from a distance. Then, when she was four, her parents brought her for a two-week family visit. For the first time they could get to know each other as “my granddaughter” and “my grandfather.” They began what he hoped would become a happy lifelong conversation.
After she returned to her own home, the grandfather telephoned her to keep the connection alive. “Hi, Beautiful,” he began when first she took the phone. He called the following week, and again she remembered and welcomed him, engaging in another satisfying conversation. Again, with enthusiasm he greeted her, “Hello, Beautiful.” But when a third week passed and yet again he called, the little girl refused to take the phone.
It took several days before she revealed to her parents the reason for her refusal. “He calls me Beautiful,” she said. “He doesn't know my name.”
Clinical analysis of manifest grandiosity in an adult often reveals an underlying sense of fraudulence in those persistently overpraised in childhood. Seeing oneself recognized as identifiably unique is crucial to the crystallization of a true sense of self.
Everyone has a name, and that name carries a history. It is a history of those the name was meant to represent and those it excluded from representing, as well as being a history of those who gave the name and how they felt about the newly named person. One's sense of oneself is shaped in part by the influences behind the name. Indeed, as with the little girl who would not