If you were unable to attend the first two seminars in the SENG Signature Mental Health Seminar Series, there is no need to despair. These sessions are designed as an ongoing conversation, and there are many opportunities to join us with a monthly focus on specific topics.
I have long found that teaching and creating presentations offer a valuable opportunity to organize and reflect on my therapeutic experience with gifted individuals. In each session I am excited to share with you a case-study based seminar series combining conceptual and didactic material with brief clinical vignettes and an extended case study.
Gifted Endowment: Strength and Vulnerability
The first seminar explored what I consider the hallmarks of giftedness, and how these endowed traits can function both as foundations for remarkable achievement and as sources of significant emotional difficulty.
One clinical vignette illustrated this tension vividly. A highly capable, newly credentialed paralegal demonstrated extraordinary intuition and insight, enabling her to identify a serious flaw in her legal team’s proposed guidance to a major client. Her intervention helped avert a potential malpractice suit and significant financial consequences for the firm.
Yet, despite clear objective evidence of professional recognition—including praise, bonuses, and anticipated promotions—she found herself unable to tolerate being identified, rewarded, and valued for her giftedness. Instead, she developed a growing conviction that her supervisors intended to undermine and discredit her. This cognitive and emotional distortion eventually crystallized into a belief that her professional reputation was about to be destroyed, leading to a diagnosis of Delusional Disorder, one of the more serious psychiatric conditions.
Using a psychodynamic framework, we explored how unresolved emotional conflicts—particularly conflicts surrounding the recognition of giftedness for the first time—contributed to the development of these symptoms. While psychodynamic assessment helped explain how this process unfolded, the deeper question of why remains complex and, in many cases, unanswered.
Why Psychodynamics?
In the second seminar, I reviewed commonly used assessment processes for gifted individuals. Educational, psychoeducational, psychological, and neuropsychological evaluations provide detailed descriptions of cognitive profiles, academic strengths and weaknesses, and developmental patterns. Emotional difficulties are often understood as secondary—either the result of asynchronous development, co-occurring conditions, or reactions to primary cognitive challenges. Recommendations typically include skill remediation, accommodations, advocacy strategies, and frequently CBT-based interventions for emotional regulation.
Psychiatric assessments, by contrast, focus on symptom patterns and diagnostic categorization, often attributing emotional distress to neurobiological vulnerabilities and recommending medication and CBT.
What is frequently missing is a psychodynamic assessment, which examines cognitive, behavioral, and emotional symptoms through the lens of conscious and unconscious mental conflict. For gifted—and especially profoundly gifted—individuals, layers of unresolved conflict are common. A psychodynamic formulation can help locate these conflicts and guide more effective, individualized therapeutic approaches.
Turning Toward Profound Giftedness
In the upcoming January seminar, I will turn our attention specifically to profound giftedness, examining both the extraordinary capacities of these individuals and the serious emotional and social challenges that can arise for some of them.
No discussion of profound giftedness would be complete without reference to Leta Hollingworth, herself a remarkably resilient and visionary psychologist. Hollingworth used early versions of the Binet intelligence test to study children with IQs above 180. Her clinical vignettes provide invaluable insight into the lived experience of profoundly gifted children—their sensitivities, capabilities, and inner worlds.
However, a 75-year follow-up of some of these individuals revealed a striking finding: relatively few achieved the level of adult accomplishment one might expect given their extraordinary early endowment. While no definitive explanation was offered, this observation raises essential clinical and developmental questions. In this seminar, using a psychodynamic lens, we will begin to explore why this may be so.
The Inner World of the Profoundly Gifted
Over decades of clinical work with gifted, exceptionally gifted, and profoundly gifted individuals, I have learned that while profoundly gifted individuals share many qualities with their gifted peers, the interaction of these qualities is different.
Their intense drive for knowledge, intuition, insight, and what often feels like clairvoyance can “turbocharge” cognitive functioning. Discovery, invention, learning, and understanding may occur with little conscious effort—sometimes spontaneously. While this can appear enviable, it often carries a psychological cost.
For many profoundly gifted individuals, moments of exhilaration are brief and followed by anxiety, depression, disorientation, or even depersonalization. A recurring question emerges: How does one take ownership of creations and insights that seem to arise automatically, without effort or explanation?
In therapy, profoundly gifted individuals often sense quickly that I understand giftedness and recognize them as whole people. Yet deepening the therapeutic relationship can be complex. Mutual trust develops gradually as we work together to uncover the central emotional dynamics underlying their symptoms—and to help them integrate the reality of their giftedness into a more coherent and livable sense of self.
The series continues…
Each upcoming seminar builds on these foundations, turning toward specific questions facing gifted, twice-exceptional, and profoundly gifted individuals across the lifespan—from therapeutic challenges and psychiatric perspectives to medication, meaning, and thriving in the real world while honoring one’s giftedness. We invite you to review the details of each upcoming session and join the conversations that resonate most with your interests and needs.
Check out our mental health offerings: https://sengifted.org/product-category/mental-health-events/
Jerald Grobman, MD is a graduate of Tufts University School of Medicine, a board-certified psychiatrist, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatry Association.
For the past 40 years, he has been in private practice specializing in the assessment and psychotherapy of gifted adolescents and adults. His website, publications, presentations, and seminars have become important resources for the national and international gifted community.
At SENG conferences, Dr. Grobman has led workshops on such topics as underachievement, common problems of gifted individuals and how to treat them, the inner experience of gifted individuals, the moral/ethical dilemmas of the gifted, a comparison of counseling and therapy techniques for gifted individuals and an advanced SENG institute course (2008) on underachievement. At SENG conferences he has also conducted several continuing education courses for therapists looking for advanced training in the assessment and therapy of gifted individuals.
Dr. Grobman received the SENG service award in 2013.
