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

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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] My mother was nocebo. My parents were married young and lived through The Great Depression as adults. My dad went to college and medical school during this time and was drafted the day after he finished his medical residency at Boston General Hospital. After the War, they set up my dad's solo medical practice in the small New Hampshire mill town they were from. While my father did the doctoring, my mother ran the business side. After 17 long years, my dad's mid-life crisis resulted in the radical move of our family to the SF Bay Area when I was 7. Your vitality will be reborn, if you follow this book’s many stories into deep mourning for your lost inner child. An altar of self-immolation, and the REAL Reason I burned out at retirement, just like so many other frantically-driven managers. Her first three books originated from research she took upon herself as a response to what she felt were major blind spots in he Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

She retained her assumed name Alice Rostowska when she moved to Switzerland in 1946, where she had won a scholarship to the University of Basel. [7] 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 ] Barbara Lukesch: Das Drama der begabten Dame: Alice Miller steht wegen eines Scharlatans vor einem Scherbenhaufen"[Barbara Lukesch: The drama of the gifted lady: Alice Miller is in front of a pile of broken glass because of a charlatan]. Barbara Lukesch (in German). 29 June 1995. Archived from the original on 14 May 2008. I have compassion for them both as both of them were innocent children deeply wounded in their childhood. I both see her and his conflicting viewpoints on their relationship. It’s sad but once again it reminded me that ALL of us are only human.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. This is a gracious understatement, with more specific details given by her son, Martin, clearly still traumatized and understandably emotional from his confusing, difficult childhood.

It is following a conversation with Mike Langlois, LICSW, who has been one of my long-distance friends and mentors for a good part of my social work journey, that I was introduced to this book. Thank you, Mike 🙂 Miller was born in Poland and as young woman lived in Warsaw where she survived World War II. In 1953 she gained her doctorate in philosophy, psychology and sociology at University of Basel in Switzerland. For the next 20 years Miller studied and practiced psychoanalysis. A child has a primary need from the very beginning of her life to be regarded and respected as the person she really is at any given time." Miller, Martin (2013). Das wahre "Drama des begabten Kindes". Die Tragödie Alice Millers (in German). Freiburg im Breisgau: Kreuz Publishing House.What do you think of Alice Miller’s book and/or the passages that I’ve highlighted? Do you have any examples or stories that you would like to share? 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. 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. This is an excellent book for learning more about yourself, how you became the way you are, and also as a possible source of help regarding the causes and cure of any emotional difficulties you may have. It will also help you better understand the people around you and how they came to be the way they are. It is a good source of psychological knowledge. Alice Miller shows very clearly how the way our parents raised us when we are children formed us psychologically.

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. I found these thoughts conveyed by Alice to be particularly poignant and powerful. It is only during my journey to becoming a social worker, andnowthat I have become aware and exposed to the some of the stories held by my unconscious. But with this inner archive, I was later able to more or less easily restore my real self - after the arduous and uncompromising night of neuroleptic drugs eventually lightened into a jagged, broken dawn. Será porque aquellos libros que contienen correspondencia siempre me han parecido igual de macabros que desenterrar un cadáver para analizar sus huesos? Que aquellas letras que fueron destinadas a una persona en particular, a sus únicos ojos, sean expuestas como pescado en la feria, me produce un gran pudor.

It strikes me that Alice Miller is the marmite of the world of therapy and psychoanalysis, with both ardent fans and passionate detractors. Reading her first book The Drama Of The Gifted Child for the first time, even after many years of personal development, I felt seen, championed, for the young child I was, for everything I experienced in childhood and for how that lives in me now as the child within. Since that time, I have been chomping through Alice Miller's books with interest.