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Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (Basic Books, 1981) Translated by Ruth Ward Revised and updated reissue by Basic Books in paperback in 1996 By using the term "gifted", Miller, a Swiss psychoanalyst, is not referring to children with high IQs or exceptional aptitudes. She is interested in children who overcome an abusive childhood by neglectful, needy, or narcissistic parents. Children repress this abuse and it becomes destructive as they reach adulthood and they are unable to develop true selves; depression is often the result. The cause of the abuse is often a depressed mother who required constant admiration and attention from the child at the expense of the child's needs. The child then does not have his needs or emotions tended to and therefore does not develop a true sense of himself. Miller argues that it is as children that we need unconditional love from our parents, and it is a need that cannot be fulfilled later in adulthood from a therapist. Many parents harm their children unknowingly (in fact, when the book was first published in English in 1981, its title was Prisoners of Childhood). As Miller puts it, "Someone who slaps or hits another adult or knowingly insults her is aware of hurting her. ... But how often were our parents, and we ourselves toward our own children, unconscious of how painfully, deeply, and abidingly they and we injured a child's tender, budding self?" According to Miller, a parent (especially the mother) must respect her child and be tolerant and patient with his feelings. A parent who defines too many behaviors as "right" and "wrong" contributes to a child growing up feeling that he has not satisfied his parents' expectations. There is hope for adults who have repressed childhood abuse, though: Psychotherapy is a very fragile healing process that requires a sensitive therapist. The Drama of the Gifted Child has sold more than 800,000 copies. "The book's impact ... can be accounted for in part by its accessible rendition of basic but often murky psychoanalytic concepts like 'repetition compulsion,' 'maternal mirroring,' 'splitting' and the 'false self,' Daphne Merkin observes. "....But by far the largest reason for the book's effect was its timing: much of what Miller was getting at -- which is that battered or deprived children grow up into enraged or disaffected adults who frequently become monsters themselves -- is now, at least in theory, an accepted part of the cultural dialogue." In her new afterword, Miller discusses preliminary neurobiological theories stipulating that some children are unable to develop the section of the brain that enables them to care for others and ourselves. She also has her criticisms of the purely intellectual approach to psychoanalysis and once again emphasizes the importance of feelings and acknowledges that the departure of many psychoanalysts from a strictly Freudian perspective has happened in part because of the gain in knowledge of the impact of childhood traumas on the emotional life of adults. Miller is very concerned about children's well-being but this book can leave those who do not subscribe to psychoanalytic theory wanting. MORE: Review of The Drama of the Gifted Child by a Loyola College professor Daphne Merkin on Miller and The Drama of the Gifted Child |
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