SUCCESSFUL COMPENSATION
In a famous study by Victor and Mildred Goertzel entitled Cradles of Eminence, the home backgrounds of three hundred highly successful people were investigated. These three hundred subjects had made it to the top. They were men and women whose names everyone would recognize as brilliant in their fields, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, Albert Schweitzer, Clara Barton, Gandhi, Einstein, and Freud. This intensive investigation into their early home lives yielded some surprising findings: Three fourths of the children were troubled either by poverty, by a broken home, or by rejecting, over-possessive, or dominating parents. Seventy-four of eighty-five writers of fiction or drama and sixteen of the twenty poets came from homes where, as children, they saw tense psychological drama played out by their parents. Physical handicaps such as blindness, deafness, or crippled limbs characterized over one-fourth of the sample. How did these people go on, then, to such outstanding accomplishments? Most likely by compensation. They compensated for…
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