Nietzsche felt that his character had been shaped by the loss of his father when he was five. He seemed to seek out and lose replacements throughout his life. Gedo speculates that his fixation to his father developed out of a sequence of events initiated by Nietzsche's slowness to talk. A physician recommended that the boy be frustrated unless he named desirable objects shown to him. Gedo reasons that the boy may have been so gravely disappointed in his previously indulgent mother that he turned decisively to his father; when the father died, the fixation became established. Nietzsche's difficulties are consistent with the prevalent belief that geniuses are necessarily significantly disturbed in their personalities. Nonetheless, Gedo has reservations about the universality of this characterization of greatness and cites Freud as a genius who was not a near-psychotic.