"Report of the Gifted Adolescent Project"

DR. BERTRAM D. LEWIN:

It is with genuine regret that I cannot be with you today and that I must be content to use the cold written word in this situation which awakens so many warm feelings. I know how many of you resemble me in this and how many too will miss the inspirited presence of our dear friend.

Drs. Loomie, Rosen and Stein have spoken very well for us; and it is right and good that they have presented work in progress, not complete—this is a propitious and appropriate keynote.

The work on the gifted is shaping itself up. Even from the few reports we have heard publicly and now from this brief sketch, we can see new problems and begin to think of new answers. To me a very satisfactory remark appears on page 48 of the report: "Initially, one might have supposed that in these gifted people, the distance from the conflict would also be great… What does emerge, however, is that conflicts do exist and even significantly impinge upon the level of performance." This is really a good beginning. It is not surprising precisely in creative work, which involves the as yet not satisfactorily defined concept of imagination, that a function rated very high as an ego function should be heavily involved by the unconscious.

It has glimmered to us that there may be several sorts of sublimations, and Ernst Kris's work may well have singled out one type for us. If as much attention had been paid to form and history of these mental functions as the physicians have paid to symptoms, then conceivably we might already have available a classification, which in a new but current sense of the word would be clinical, that could have been as detailed and probably as puzzling as any psychiatric nosology. It is interesting that our habit of classifying mental illnesses and our resistance to classifying other mental structures except in an almost belletristic fashion has made us leave untouched whatever analogous problems there may be. We have no one knows how many classifications of