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A review by timcosgrove
The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, Third Edition by Alice Miller
4.0
An important book, especially for people living with depression and feelings of inadequacy. Recommended with some caveats.
The title of the book is frankly poor; this has nothing to do with any concept of "gifted & talented" children. I feel the same way about How to Win Friends and Influence People, which is an excellent book with sane, grounded advice, and which has a genuinely creepy and misleading title.
The "gift" Miller refers to is the ways that very young children will blind themselves to their true feelings and emotions in the face of lack of love or proper treatment from a narcissistic parent. These coping mechanisms repress feelings and behaviors which their parents do not approve of; they therefore win their parents' approval and "love", at the cost of their own self-knowledge.
Miller posits that true healing can only happen when the adult recognizes these feelings and memories that they've suppressed or rewritten, and experiences them directly and grieves for them. There is no intention of asking for reparations or trying to gain or regain something that was not there in childhood, because childhood is gone, and the needs were not met at the time. All that is left is to acknowledge the feelings and the loss without self-blame or misdirection, and mourn what was lacking.
I think this could be a useful book to anyone in therapy who is working through issues around childhood trauma and feelings of not living up to the expectations of one or more parents. It certainly struck a chord with me and gave me a lot to think about with my own childhood and how these psychological constructs shape me now.
Caveats (and to be clear I think this is a good and valuable book, but one of which some parts should be viewed with suspicion):
- I don't see this as a self-help book of any kind. It is very much about working within the constructs of a therapeutic relationship. I think it's potentially a really useful tool if discussed with therapist and its concepts used in therapy, but I'm not sure if it would be helpful to an individual out of therapy.
- Alice Miller seems to have a really negative view of what she calls sexual "perversion". It appears that she thinks that any kind of fetish or unusual sexual desire or inclination is the result of the playing out of childhood trauma relating to narcissistic parents, and that coming to terms with this trauma will in turn allow the patient to have a more "normal" sexuality, though she never states what this normal is.
As an example, she posits that a woman who gets her nipple pierced does so because her father was abusive to her, and thus she learned from her father that pain is concomitent with love. It doesn't seem to occur to Miller that some pain could be enjoyed for its own sake, and "unconventional" sexual desires or practices could be healthy and natural. Sometimes a nipple ring is just a nipple ring.
- There is a lot of emphasis on recovering early memories of childhood, and case study anecdotes that tend to end "Once so and so recovered his earlier childhood memories, he quickly recovered and his depression ended". This is of course a short book and clearly written concise anecdotes sound more impactful than the actual messiness and labor of therapy, but the book might lead some people to believe that recovering preverbal memories is just a matter of trying, and not even trying too hard; and that, things will resolve nicely once that happens. A lot of the stories are "just so", almost too neat and clean, and I don't believe they could represent most people's experience of therapy accurately.
- It's unclear if the audience of the book is therapists or patients, or both. At times, Miller seems to be speaking directly to the reader as a practicing therapist who must be wary of recreating the dynamics of their own childhood with their patients. At other times, she seems to be speaking to the subjects themselves, that is, the people who have undergone this trauma in their childhood. It's not a problem per se, but it's sometimes hard to tell who the author is speaking to, especially as there isn't much structure given defining when transitioning from speaking about therapists or about patients.
The title of the book is frankly poor; this has nothing to do with any concept of "gifted & talented" children. I feel the same way about How to Win Friends and Influence People, which is an excellent book with sane, grounded advice, and which has a genuinely creepy and misleading title.
The "gift" Miller refers to is the ways that very young children will blind themselves to their true feelings and emotions in the face of lack of love or proper treatment from a narcissistic parent. These coping mechanisms repress feelings and behaviors which their parents do not approve of; they therefore win their parents' approval and "love", at the cost of their own self-knowledge.
Miller posits that true healing can only happen when the adult recognizes these feelings and memories that they've suppressed or rewritten, and experiences them directly and grieves for them. There is no intention of asking for reparations or trying to gain or regain something that was not there in childhood, because childhood is gone, and the needs were not met at the time. All that is left is to acknowledge the feelings and the loss without self-blame or misdirection, and mourn what was lacking.
I think this could be a useful book to anyone in therapy who is working through issues around childhood trauma and feelings of not living up to the expectations of one or more parents. It certainly struck a chord with me and gave me a lot to think about with my own childhood and how these psychological constructs shape me now.
Caveats (and to be clear I think this is a good and valuable book, but one of which some parts should be viewed with suspicion):
- I don't see this as a self-help book of any kind. It is very much about working within the constructs of a therapeutic relationship. I think it's potentially a really useful tool if discussed with therapist and its concepts used in therapy, but I'm not sure if it would be helpful to an individual out of therapy.
- Alice Miller seems to have a really negative view of what she calls sexual "perversion". It appears that she thinks that any kind of fetish or unusual sexual desire or inclination is the result of the playing out of childhood trauma relating to narcissistic parents, and that coming to terms with this trauma will in turn allow the patient to have a more "normal" sexuality, though she never states what this normal is.
As an example, she posits that a woman who gets her nipple pierced does so because her father was abusive to her, and thus she learned from her father that pain is concomitent with love. It doesn't seem to occur to Miller that some pain could be enjoyed for its own sake, and "unconventional" sexual desires or practices could be healthy and natural. Sometimes a nipple ring is just a nipple ring.
- There is a lot of emphasis on recovering early memories of childhood, and case study anecdotes that tend to end "Once so and so recovered his earlier childhood memories, he quickly recovered and his depression ended". This is of course a short book and clearly written concise anecdotes sound more impactful than the actual messiness and labor of therapy, but the book might lead some people to believe that recovering preverbal memories is just a matter of trying, and not even trying too hard; and that, things will resolve nicely once that happens. A lot of the stories are "just so", almost too neat and clean, and I don't believe they could represent most people's experience of therapy accurately.
- It's unclear if the audience of the book is therapists or patients, or both. At times, Miller seems to be speaking directly to the reader as a practicing therapist who must be wary of recreating the dynamics of their own childhood with their patients. At other times, she seems to be speaking to the subjects themselves, that is, the people who have undergone this trauma in their childhood. It's not a problem per se, but it's sometimes hard to tell who the author is speaking to, especially as there isn't much structure given defining when transitioning from speaking about therapists or about patients.