A question that has been asked many times is, how does one discover a person’s talent? A few weeks ago the question came to me when I heard the importance of converting selfishness into altruism that works well within a social environment. Then I was interested in knowing which desire to receive or to give is implicit in one’s actions, because it can be giving and receiving in various areas or activities.
I will use an example to explain it. Let’s suppose someone is born into a family of lawyers, that is to say, the family tradition is to dedicate oneself to provide law service, but that person does not find that he or she has talent in that area. On the other hand, they somehow developed an oral drive and ate compulsively. This drive has caused that person to pay a lot of attention whenever there is talk of cooking food, they remember many dishes and like to savour the food. As the sages say, unlike animals, the human being has developed the capacity to desire what the other has in order to get it and provide it, but if there is not a desire to share, it only leads to envy. The desire acts, as if creating a larger vessel to receive more energy that manifests itself in various forms. Then that person in parallel to his or her desire to eat has developed a more detailed and more interesting speech for him or herself regarding food which in turn detracts from the interest in the field of advocacy.
It seems that this person has the potential to channel the interest in food into a skill or talent in the field of cooking, i.e. to be a chef, rather than in the field of law. But that does not mean that he or she can go into cooking because he or she has to go through developing a taste that matches the taste of others and be able to offer his or her talent, i.e. to cook for others. Such a person may encounter several problems in what psychoanalysis calls the field of the Other and others. First, the oral drive has developed in an autistic way, i.e. only for oneself, so, for example, if this person were to start working in a restaurant kitchen, at first he/she would be tempted to eat or cook only his/her favourite dishes and would develop an unconscious resistance to cook what the customers demand. Then they would carry the burden of the question that for this person’s others (the most influential people are the others of his childhood) what is valuable is to be a lawyer, so the rest is not valuable within their family life goals, i.e. his ego (that was built from childhood environment opinion about the child) and superego (what was aligned or allowed by childhood ideals) would have developed in that way, while their id (one person’s childhood tendencies) would be more aligned with food.