The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, Third Edition

Product Information

I read this in my mid-30s and at the time, I found this to be the most helpful book I had ever read. Narcissism is fully explained - though many may think that is just another word for self-centeredness - in its many complexities. The title is misleading and apparently renamed for marketing purposes. The child who is victimized by the Narcissist is gifted because they deal with such heavy challenges and become over-sensitive to others' needs, always eager to please, while suppressing their own self-knowledge, emotions and needs. Alice Miller too saw that her son had problems, and how ironic they both have the same name, my ex’s name is also Martin! Alice Miller, like me, started lifting every stone to look for clues to help her son and in the process resolved her own repression and freed herself, just like me, that I went out looking for clues on how to help my Ex and I ended up liberating myself in the process. Alice Miller (born Alicja Englard [1] [ verification needed]; 12 January 1923 – 14 April 2010), was a Polish- Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher of Jewish origin, who is noted for her books on parental child abuse, translated into several languages. She was also a noted public intellectual. I’m so glad I persevered to the end of the book, especially the last added-on chapter - it reads like a thriller. The author believes that depression really comes from the separation of your real self with yourself...in other words, kids who grow up into a false self to please their parents are depressed over this separation of self. This all happens via illusions towards your childhood and not dealing with the truth and most importantly not mourning the loss.

If you have come across the work of Alice Miller, you will know that she is one of those "big ideas" people whose work is challenging and controversial but impossible to ignore. Alice Miller is to family psychology as Andrea Dworkin was to feminism. If the crude characterisation of Dworkin's position was that "all men are rapists", then the equivalent caricature of Miller's psychoanalytic view would be that "all children are abused by their parents". Have you read the book The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller? Where there is no parental respect for a child's feelings, he will seek refuge from his pain in ideologies. Nationalism, racism, and fascism are in fact nothing other than ideological guises of the flight from painful, unconscious memories of endured contempt."And how very interesting that I had not realized before that Alice was actually a little against therapy and that she promoted real life confrontation of the parents as a cure. That is sure to fail in the vast majority of cases and yes, Martin is right - fighting your parents in real life means staying connected to them. It's far better to just set boundaries, I think.

Martin wrote and published the book only after his mother’s death. Decades of complex relationship with her and trying to figure her out and in fact he did. So to those of us to whom the calamitously deleterious memories of vicarious adult ambition resulted in your spiritual death...Miller claims that the key to these feelings is the realisation that one was loved as a child not for who one was, but (in large part at least) because of one's achievements. This leaves the child always desperate to achieve more, to safeguard their parents' love. One's own personality, desires, needs and emotions are suppressed to create a projected perfection which attracts love and awe. Recognition of this allows the patients to be who they are for the first time and to experience their own emotions - both positive and negative. It is remarkably difficult for some people to even contemplate negative thoughts towards their parents. Childhood memories of abuse are among the most strongly suppressed or displaced. Miller references Ingmar Bergman who described in great detail the violent abuse his brother faced at his father's hands, but had no recollection of any mistreatment to himself. (Of course, it seems rather unlikely that he went through his childhood entirely unscathed). It was a difficult read at times because one had to wade through a lot of conjecture to get at facts. I would have preferred that they were more separated. I took one star off of my rating for that. That's just some straight-up misogyny. And considering that misogyny has been one of the things at the root of my depression, a book so steeped in it isn't likely to give me a lot of relief. Miller died on 14 April 2010, at the age of 87, at her home in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence [3] by suicide after severe illness and diagnosis of advanced-stage pancreatic cancer. [21] Work [ edit ] I betrayed that little girl […]. Only in recent years, with the help of therapy, which enabled me to lift the veil on this repression bit by bit, could I allow myself to experience the pain and desperation, the powerlessness and justified fury of that abused child. Only then did the dimensions of this crime against the child I once was, become clear to me. [35]

The “gifted-ness” that Miller refers to isn’t an intellectual giftedness, it is the ability that many sensitive children have to set their own needs aside, and develop a premature, precocious awareness or a kind hyper-empathy toward the parents mood state and unfulfilled narcissistic hungers. According to Alice Miller, worldwide violence has its roots in the fact that children are beaten all over the world, especially during their first years of life, when their brains become structured. [29] She said that the damage caused by this practice is devastating, but unfortunately hardly noticed by society. [31] She argued that as children are forbidden to defend themselves against the violence inflicted on them, they must suppress the natural reactions like rage and fear, and they discharge these strong emotions later as adults against their own children or whole peoples: "child abuse like beating and humiliating not only produces unhappy and confused children, not only destructive teenagers and abusive parents, but thus also a confused, irrationally functioning society". Miller stated that only through becoming aware of this dynamic can we break the chain of violence. [16] Writings [ edit ] This book was amazing. I work with children as well as adult survivors of life threatening child abuse and Alice MIller’s books have been tremendously helpful to me in actually helping people. I only figured out recently that these experiences did not foster resilience in my mother, rather she may have had PTSD as a result. She was agoraphobic and had a very negative outlook. Her attitude was "why bother?" She was always advising us to give up, to quit. Not the message you need from a parent. My father finally came out, in a letter to me, and admitted she was crippled by fear. He made the mistake of covering for her at all costs at the expense of the children.Miller, Martin (2013). Das wahre "Drama des begabten Kindes". Die Tragödie Alice Millers (in German). Freiburg im Breisgau: Kreuz Publishing House.

The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.” I also found Miller's final letter to his mother, written some years after his mother's death and also after the publication of this edition of the book, of value, revealing both Miller's biographical excavation into his mother's life and its value to her son. This, in turn, tended to underscore - rather than undermine - the value of Alice Miller's theory, reflected in the title of one of her books, that "the truth will set you free". In a previous blog post, I discussed how the emotionally sensitive child attunes to the needs and expectations of a narcissistic parent. The child’s over-attuning to her parent’s needs comes at a steep price. The child loses her own self. The book is a mixture of psychology, World War II history, and personal recounting of the family history. It delves into Alice's theories, groundbreaking at the time, of parental damage to their growing children. While she spoke of how to heal from this, she was incapable of seeing the true extent of the damage that she and her husband did to their son, even after he was fully grown.

Additional Video From The Author:

To illustrate this point, Oliver James describes how, while working as a clinician in a psychiatric hospital in the early 1980s, he found himself treating a five-year-old girl who exhibited a disturbing degree of sexualised behaviour. He expressed his unease to a senior colleague, but his qualms were brushed off: "What do you expect? She's a little girl; you're a man." In other words, the standard Freudian line that the girl was simply acting out a fantasy of sexual union with a father figure. "Of course, what one would have done now is call in the police," says James. Acabo de leer este libro sin haber leído ninguno de los escritos por la protagonista. Me invalida este detalle para emitir mis impresiones? No necesariamente, creo. The wisdom that Alice Miller shares with us in her famous book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, is something that every therapist who works with children revisits more often than we would like.