THE PYGMALION EFFECT
I think that the vision carrier—therapist, mentor, teacher, or parent
with “a green thumb”—under whom others bloom and develop
their gifts evokes what research psychologist Robert Rosenthal
named the Pygmalion effect.^5 This term describes the power of
positive expectations on the behavior of others. It is so called after
Pygmalion, who fell in love with his own sculpture of the perfect
woman, a statue that was brought to life by Aphrodite and became
Galatea. (Similarly, in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, Henry
Higgins turned a Cockney flower girl into an elegant lady—with
whom he then fell in love. Shaw’s play was the basis for Alan Jay
Lerner’s Broadway play My Fair Lady.)
Rosenthal found that students live up to—or down to—their
teachers’ expectations of them. He studied ghetto schoolchildren,
whose academic performances deteriorate the longer they remain
in school. These children tend to have teachers who are convinced
that the children cannot learn. Rosenthal devised a research project
to determine which came first: the expectation or the performance.
He concluded that our expectations have an extraordinary influence
on others, of which we are often oblivious.
As I read Rosenthal’s study, I thought about my patient Jane, who
came from a Spanish-speaking home and at first was thought of as
slow in school. She entered fourth grade academically behind her
classmates, as convinced as her previous teachers that she wasn’t
bright. But her fourth-grade teacher saw her in a different light, drew
her out, and gave Jane challenges that she expected Jane to meet.
The attention transformed the nine-year-old into a top student, who
now spoke up in class and felt good about herself. Years later, Jane
too became an inspirational teacher who saw and brought out the
potential in her students.
Aphrodite’s Pygmalion effect is also related to what I think of as
her alchemy. In medieval Europe, alchemy was both a physical
process in which substances were brought together in an effort to
transform baser material into gold, and an esoteric psychological
endeavor to transform the personality of the alchemist. We experi-
ence the alchemy of Aphrodite
The Alchemical Goddess