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

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She spent her life and career trying to understand how the German people could have followed Hitler and went along with his murderous plans. Although I'm guessing there are better and more recent books that incorporate the same line of reasoning. The child becomes molded into what the parents want them to be, rather than accepting the child for who he or she is. Since the parent, especially the mother, is the child's soul source of survival, the child strives to please the all-important parent, fearing disapproval, or abandonment. Another interesting chapter deals with the "process of parental derision" and how it results in humiliation and possible psychic trauma of the child.

I have come to understand irrational and debilitating aspects of my own behaviors, that stemmed from childhood traumas, and seen how these can be liberated once they are experienced emotionally. The thing about these people, though, is that their parents were fundamentally flawed and repeated these actions over and over again.Because he cannot develop and differentiate his true self, he feels empty, emotionally isolated, and “homeless.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. In becoming the “perfect” child of her parents’ dreams, the gifted child loses something very precious. But in trying to give their kids better lives than they had, these adults can actually end up doing more harm than good. Alice Miller makes her readers aware of the unexpressed sufferings of the child and the tragedy of the parent(s) own illness. There were, however, times when I felt an equally apt title would have been, "Yes, you really are fucked up, no matter what you think, and it's all mommy's fault!

Such parenting can interrupt the bonding process, depriving a young child of the opportunity to feel safe and loved, and ultimately of developing a healthy sense of well-being. This book, in all its fierce revelation, makes an excellent case for the importance of finding the right therapist from the outset - even if it means interviewing five or seven or twelve. If we choose to content ourselves with intellectual wisdom instead of emotional understanding, we will remain in the sphere of illusion and self-deception. She became a practising analyst herself, but resigned from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1988 (signalling her "break" with mainstream Freudian analysis). According to one report, Miller was brought up in Germany, but how she and her family spent the wartime years is unknown.