Nomen Est Omen Warren S. Poland She was his granddaughter and he was her grandfather, but since her birth they had lived far apart and knew each other only from a distance. Then, when she was four, her parents brought her for a two-week family visit. For the first time they could get to know each other as "my granddaughter" and "my grandfather." They began what he hoped would become a happy lifelong conversation. After she returned to her own home, the grandfather telephoned her to keep the connection alive. "Hi, Beautiful," he began when first she took the phone. He called the following week, and again she remembered and welcomed him, engaging in another satisfying conversation. Again, with enthusiasm he greeted her, "Hello, Beautiful." But when a third week passed and yet again he called, the little girl refused to take the phone. It took several days before she revealed to her parents the reason for her refusal. "He calls me Beautiful," she said. "He doesn't know my name." Clinical analysis of manifest grandiosity in an adult often reveals an underlying sense of fraudulence in those persistently over-praised in childhood. Seeing oneself recognized as identifiably unique is crucial to the crystallization of a true sense of self. Everyone has a name, and that name carries a history. It is a history of those the name was meant to represent and those it excluded from representing, as well as being a history of those who gave the name and how they felt about the newly named person. One's sense of oneself is shaped in part by the influences behind the name. Indeed, as with the little girl who would not [End Page 129] take the telephone, the name can be a crucial aspect of one's coming to know oneself as a distinct person. It was only after I had known this English professor for many years, long after we had become good friends and confidants, that one evening after a few drinks he disclosed to me his feeling of alienation from his own name. Whenever someone called out, "Robert!," the name by which I always knew him, he turned in response, but he said this was only because he had trained himself to do so. Born in the middle of the last century, he was the first child of East European immigrants. His parents must have been torn between their love for their new world and their longings for their old, and in particular painfully gripped by missing their own parents and their own extended families left behind and lost behind in Europe. He had no doubt how deeply his parents loved each other, yet he knew that having to name him had awakened terrible conflicts in each, conflicts that spilled over between the two. Each wanted the beloved new son to have a name that memorialized and honored that parent's forebears, and the fight between the two could not be resolved by the time after delivery that mother and child were discharged from the hospital. As a result, the original birth certificate named the baby "Baby Boy Goldberg." The intensity of the feelings was reflected in the compromise finally accepted as a resolution to the parental dilemma. In English, the first name would be given to reflect one parent's family, with the middle name deriving from the other parent's family. Then in Hebrew, which mattered to the religious parents, the order would be reversed. And finally, to see that neither side had advantage over the other, on a daily basis the lad would be called "Buddy," a nickname neutral to all. The system worked well even when the boy started school, indeed for long afterward. Robert knew that teachers would call him by that name, but he took it as one of the many oddities of the school world, like sitting at his classroom desk with hands folded or like doing homework. It never went beyond that, for even his friends still called him "Buddy." [End Page 130] However, somewhere in middle or late adolescence, my then young friend decided he was no longer a mere "Buddy" but was a real...