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

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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. A few weeks ago, a mother called me because she wanted me to help her 12-year-old daughter Katherine learn how to be more “ resilient.” I asked for both parents to accompany Katherine to the first session, so I could get everyone’s perspective on the problem.

a b William Grimes (26 April 2010). "Alice Miller, Psychoanalyst, Dies at 87; Laid Human Problems to Parental Acts". The New York Times (Obituary). i wasnt raised by parents who had to survive a war, although that is most certainly the way theyve portrayed themselves. my father, an endlessly quoted and successful person who to this day monitors my name online and demands i take down anything that accidentally can be seen as connected to him and his reign of terror, began smear campaigns against his children when we were just babies. he was always the victim of his dysfunctional children and i remember being as young as 11 when my relatives judgments of me and my sister became obvious to me. both my sister and i can barely remember childhood as a result of what we endured and we have both suffered greatly with chronic illnesses and CPTSD. In 1953 Miller got her doctorate in philosophy, psychology and sociology. Between 1953 and 1960, Miller studied psychoanalysis and practiced it between 1960 and 1980 in Zürich. Seems really dated and simplistic, which, given all we've learned about depression since the advent of SSRI's, isn't all that surprising for a book almost 40 years old. I found it useful more for how it helps illustrate the evolution of psychotherapy and how it helped me understand certain things about how therapists I saw approached their practice than for any insight it offered into myself. To be fair, I'm going to start with the caveat that I'm not a huge fan of Freud, on whose theories of psychoanalysis Alice Miller seems to rely quite heavily in constructing her own. But while I admit my personal bias against the foundation for her psychological theory, I still believe the construction of her general arguments to be weak as well. She seems to depend far too heavily on isolated instances as evidence of the childhood "abuses" that have crippled her patients in their adulthood, while dismissing more pronounced examples of abuse as too extreme for the case she wishes to make. Furthermore, it seems that her entire exploration of the "gifted child" -- not one who is overly bright, but rather a child who is able to empathize with his parents as they struggle through their issues -- is based on her own mama-drama rather than on more objective studies. It seems that Miller is grasping at examples to justify her own childhood frustrations. While surely cathartic, this doesn't strike me as a sound basis for a psychological treatise.Miller called electroconvulsive therapy "a campaign against the act of remembering". In her book Abbruch der Schweigemauer (The Demolition of Silence), she also criticised psychotherapists' advice to clients to forgive their abusive parents, arguing that this could only hinder recovery through remembering and feeling childhood pain. It was her contention that the majority of therapists fear this truth and that they work under the influence of interpretations culled from both Western and Oriental religions, which preach forgiveness by the once-mistreated child. She believed that forgiveness did not resolve hatred, but covered it in a dangerous way in the grown adult: displacement on scapegoats, as she discussed in her psycho-biographies of Adolf Hitler and Jürgen Bartsch, both of whom she described as having suffered severe parental abuse. When you are unaware of not having your very early childhood needs met, you are likely to try to fulfill these early unmet needs through others, albeit unconsciously. You may try to do so via your spouse, clients or even your children… The book also describes what Martin Miller was able to find out about his mother's upbringing, family history, and experiences as a young Jewish woman during WWII. Knowing this provides so much important context for her works, like Drama of the Gifted Child. And REALLY start over at Square One, for it's there, in our murky beginnings, that we must shine the Bright Light of Reason. Once we are adults, only we can save ourselves and anyone that tells us otherwise is fooling us with false hopes and promises.

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 someone did that shit now, they'd lose their license. It's completely unethical--and with good reason. While there are certainly people who have recovered memories of being molested in early childhood--one of my good friends experienced that, and it's the only thing that explains certain aspects of his life--there are others who invented memories to please aggressive therapists like the unethical, wrong-headed person I worked with. In Amid These Storms Churchill wrote: “The greatest and most powerful influence in my early life was of course my father…. He saw no reason why the old glories of Church and State, of King and country, should not be reconciled with modern democracy; or why the masses of working people should not becomes the chief defenders of those ancient institutions by which their liberty and progress had been achieved.” History’s verdict is very different. Randolph was a shallow political demagogue whose star briefly crossed the parliamentary firmament in the mid-1880s, when he became Chancellor of the Exchequer and then, within six months, owing to his extraordinarily bad judgment, plunged out of sight. Have no doubt that Alice Miller's son Martin Miller was a trigger for all of Alice Miller's books. And if he had not been born we would not have had Alice Miller's enlightened books to help us liberate ourselves from the emotional prison of our own childhoods. And I would probably be dead NOW or still living in an emotional prison. He is just like a double-edged sword. Those who process their trauma and live their lives being honest to themselves will be the leaders of change.

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this is not the psychopop of twelve-step, i-got-in-touch-with-my-anger-today, neurosis-no-more books. "gifted" here has nothing to do with what your school counselor/teacher told was gifted or talented. rather, the original german word refers to the ability to empathize and meet the needs of a parent figure--at the loss of your true self. while this gift might enable one to survive his/her childhood, the gifted person's unmet need to express without fear her true feelings and wishes lingers like a virus that wreaks a quiet havoc on one's sense of self throughout adulthood if untreated. this book offers the start of such treatment, best summed-up in a word: hope.

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood. [24] The parents instilled tremendous guilt into their gifted son for not conforming, a guilt which he never entirely escaped. In Hermann Hesse's story, “A Child’s Heart” about his fundamentalist parents we read: "If I were to reduce all my feelings and their painful conflicts to a single name, I can think of no other word but: dread. It was dread, dread and uncertainty, that I felt in all those hours of shattered childhood felicity: dread of punishment, dread of my own conscience, dread of stirrings in my soul which I considered forbidden and criminal." From what Martin Miller described, I'd say Alice Miller was a narcissist, all most no doubt. She might brilliantly survive the WWII and persecution to Jews in Poland, but her behaviour patterns show her Narcissistic personality traits, including lying, hypocrite, can't take criticism etc.. Her son Martin showed great maturity in the book telling the family history and biography, yet, Alice Miller acted as if a child who she didn't grow out of.

Basic Books, new edition, revised and updated 1997

Notice how she rushes to blame "devout women" for wanting to spoil the pleasure of "their husbands and sons." Did "devout women" in 1877 have much influence over art? Were they allowed to create it? Did they have time to create it when they were also probably busy raising families? Did they write and deliver the sermons about the evils of taverns?

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). 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. Her most recent book, Pictures of My Life, was published in 2006; an informal autobiography in which the writer explores her emotional process from painful childhood, through the development of her theories and later insights, told via the display and discussion of 66 of her original paintings, painted in the years 1973 to 2005. Miller presents a solid theory with some difficult truths, but at time the narrowness of her idea turns into a sort of tunnel vision with sweeping generalizations that are far too much. She gets carried away with herself and disregards other influences, other options. I always bristle at any theory that attempts to explain everything with a single reason or cause, especially in the complicated matters of psychology or human emotion. Regardless, the clarity of her presentation makes this an easy read, and Miller's ideas have a great foundation, doubtless a benefit to many, many people.Those who let themselves feel and process the emotions they once repressed will give them the freedom to live a healthy life and encourage others to do the same. i hoped that i could do this in the peaceful mercy of the world without my parents, in the company of my beautiful sister. i hoped, like i have been told by others who got to experience it, that once our parents were no longer here the divide and conquer-trojan horses that seemed to lay the foundation of much of our communication would wither and disappear. there will not be time in this life for that and this book has helped me immensely to see what i can do and that starting anywhere is fine. it has given me something to live for, in a way, which is not at all what i thought would happen in the middle of this forest fire armageddon of grief. 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.”