Maybe I Have A Nobel Prize Complex

During the year 1990, I was in psychotherapy with a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst in Washington, DC, named Stanley R. Palombo: telephone (202) 362 6004.

During one of my sesssions I began to talk about the Nobel Prize. Dr. Palombo chastized me: "You're being grandiose. Talk about something else." Of course, any intelligent, educated layman would probably say the same thing: that I was being grandiose. But I was paying Dr. Palombo $110 per week for treatment. I was expecting more than a layman's opinion.

I subsequently learned that there is a recognized entity known as "the Nobel Prize Complex." Perhaps it would have been useful if Dr. Palombo had known about this specific, recognized entity.

In 1966 Helen Tartakoff introduced a nosological entity, the “Nobel Prize complex,” to apply to people who have in common many of the following characteristics: They are preoccupied with the achievement of diverse ambitious goals, which may include, for example, the wish to become President, to attain great wealth, to be a social leader, or to win an Oscar. Many are intellectually or artistically gifted and possess charismatic qualities that others admire. They are often firstborn and frequently only children. They adopt an all-or-nothing attitude toward their aspirations. They are hypersensitive to disappointments in life, particularly to lack of recognition, and may become depressed and develop psychosomatic symptoms at the time of real or fantasized disappointment. They unconsciously look upon psycho-therapeutic treatment as a magical cure and expect to be rewarded during their treatment with the same applause they received from their mothers.

Dr. Michael A. Sperber has elaborated on the concept in his paper: "Freud, Tausk, and the Nobel Prize Complex." Dr. Sperber is a practicing psychiatrist, affiliated with Mclean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts.