Creativity: The Burdens of Talent

In certain respects, children endowed with unusual constitutional capacities necessarily behave differently from their peers, if only because of the sheer pleasure of exercising their talent. Such satisfaction will pull them into frequent spells of certain repetitive activities that do not occur with the ordinary child. In many cases, their constitutional assets appear, simultaneously, to entail relative handicaps in terms of some other functional capacities, so that any particular child may be misidentified as having a deficit, rather than potential talent. In any case, it is likely that a child who has the potential to grow up to be a creative person may be atypical in his or her development. Such a circumstance presents caretakers with a more difficult task than does raising an “ordinary” youngster. Performing well as a parent is, at best, a challenge seldom met with unqualified success; any condition that makes it more difficult will defeat most families. It stands to reason that rearing talented children has turned out to be quite problematic.

Fairly typical of the difficulties of raising a child destined to be a major artist is the history of Lucian Freud—albeit his own accounts have not as yet been subjected to much scrutiny and may, in some respects, turn out to be myths (see Blackwood, 1993; Gowing, 1982; Hughes, 1989; Lampert, 1993). At any rate, the current official version is that this grandson of Sigmund Freud, raised by wealthy parents in Berlin, joined a delinquent gang at the age of seven. The family emigrated to England as soon as Hitler came to power, when Lucian was eleven, and he was sent to an exceedingly progressive boarding school, where he concentrated on horseback riding—so much so, that he is said to have forgotten German faster than he was learning English.

After several transfers, Freud ended up at a private art school that he was allegedly responsible for burning to the ground, having engaged in smoking