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The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

List Price: $13.95
Your Price: $10.46
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: A Poor Substitute for Religion.
Review: I was given this book by my psychologist to deal with my "so-called" manic depression. I trust science (the pills). I trust religion rooted in tradition. I don't trust Alice Miller. Sorry, but my existence requires more depth than blaming all the problems in the world and in my life on my parents, specifically my mother, and how they failed to live up to Miller's idealistic, goofy, and hockey expectations. She's peddling snake oil folks.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: True insight doesn't require many words or jargon
Review: The shortest and best book I've read on the subject of childhood trauma. This book is controversial because it is terrifying to admit that love can be lied about. If you prefer to mask raw emotion and grief with intellectual diversions or chemicals, this book is not for you.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Outdated and irrelevant
Review: I was very disappointed with this work. If you still subscribe to Freud's outdated theories, then this may be for you. Otherwise, you're better off reading works by newer researchers in the area of psychiatry/psychology. Im particular, I tend to respect those who combine elements of the cognitive, biological, learned behaviour, and psychoanalytic theories in their works.

This book does little more than blame one's mother for the gamut of problems a human being goes through during life. This seems to me to be a highly narrow-minded and ill-informed approach. The human psyche is a complex phenomenon that cannot be explained with a single simplistic theory contained in a 150-page book.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Read Winnicott Instead
Review: This book changed my life - by leading me to the works of D.W. Winnicott, to whom Miller refers here and there. If two stars seem like a stingy payback for a life-changing experience, the reason is that when I read Winnicott I discovered that he had said everything that Miller says, with far greater eloquence and, yes, originality. Go to the source: read Winnicott instead.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: there is hope
Review: I read this book ages ago, and have now sought to read it again. After going through years of psychoanalysis, self work and developing a true feeling of forgiveness towards my mother. (Five years after her death I finally can grieve her dying. When under tremendous stress, sleep deprivation, etc. the old tapes do play. One actively has to redirect your thoughts, but revisit momentarily to feel the hurt, sadness and anger so you can then let it go.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: This book is NOT about gifted children in the usual sense
Review: This book provides a terrific framework for those interested in understanding themselves and possibly undoing some of their learned responses to the world around them. The book aims to get at the real self which has often been repressed as means of coping with frightening feelings. It is sometimes difficult get through the material because it evokes in the reader very strong responses. But it is accessible and compelling. It is also a compassionate book that does NOT lay blame, so much as it seeks to heal by helping one confront the past and his/her relationship with his parents very early in life.

It is NOT a book about gifted children! It is book about children (all of us) as Gifts. And it can help you begin to figure out what some of those gifts might be if you have the courage and the faith to face yourself. It is launching point and not a solution in itself. Nothing compares with the help of a decent therapist. But there is a lot of food for thought here...

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: A treatise on victimhood
Review: The two pillars of this book are: 1) If you're gifted and depressed it's all your mother's fault, and 2) narcissism is a good thing. If ever a book encouraged whining victimhood and wallowing in depression this is it. One wonders if Miller would even have bothered writing this book (first published in 1979) if Prozac had been invented earlier. Reading her methods for "overcoming" one's past makes me thankful that Freud's psychoanalytic techniques have fallen into disfavor of late.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Death of the True Self
Review: It is rare to read about abuse and trauma and their life-long consequences in poetic prose. Alice Miller writes as though she has experienced the slow death of the True Self that comes with all forms of abuse - from beatings and berating to smothering and doting. Indispensable. Sam Vaknin, author of 'Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited'.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Nothing but the truth...
Review: I've worked with kids for 26 years, and I can't read this wonderful book without seeing dozens of faces attached to every sentence. These Rorshach-like reviews speak volumes on the depth of its insights; it has conjured up defenses and denials as well as testimony to its healing powers and teaching of truth. I read it every few years and each time I'm struck by how the books wisdom grows deeper as I become more able to see it and feel it. Quite accessible to lay persons, and a reminder of undiminished truth for even the most knowlegeable on children's issues.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Who am I, really?
Review: When I read this book (which was originally published in German in 1979) for the first time in the early eighties, it completely swept me off my feet. Here was an analysis that explained why I was in search of my 'true self', why I felt my achievements were 'empty', why I felt empathy for others and antipathy for myself. The idea proposed by Alice Miller, in a nutshell, was that there are children who are able to feel and ease the emotional insecurity of their mothers (the 'gift' of the title), thus gain her love but in the process deny their own desires. These children grow up to become helpers in various roles, including therapists - like Alice Miller herself. They develop sensors for the subconscious signals of the needs of others. The problem is, they subconsciously deny themselves the pursuit of their own needs, and consequently cannot become who they 'are'. Which makes them prone to the illnesses which, according to the Freudian theory, go with suppressed desires ¡V depression and grandiosity (the latter being just a way of keeping depression at bay).

Alice Miller¡¦s ideas are based on her experiences as a psychotherapist who practiced for 20 years, and her own self-analysis. Her reasoning draws on some basic Freudian ideas: if the subconscious is brought to consciousness, the illnesses caused by the suppression can eventually be contained; the life of a person is rooted in her childhood and childhood experiences shape who a person 'is'. In the last part of her book she adds a theory derived from her work experience: when children whose needs have been denied in their childhood grow up and have children of their own, they can 'get rid' of their pain by inflicting the pain on their own children. She calls it the vicious circle of disdain, and the handing down of destructive attitudes from one generation to the next like a chain reaction.

How do I see 'The Drama of the Gifted Child' almost 20 years after reading it for the first time? I continue to be convinced that the general argument is true. Alice Miller captures very well the emotional consequences of denying one¡¦s own desires in the service of a person whose love is so overpoweringly important that it demands the sacrifice of one¡¦s 'true' self. Hermann Hesse¡¦s life and works provide her with excellent examples to illustrate this, by the way. On some cornerstones of her argument, however, I have my doubts now. Firstly, the idea of a 'true self', chiseled in stone if you so want, does not sit very well with me any more. Secondly, her thesis completely omits the role of fathers (quite un-Freudian, by the way), and what I saw as a refreshingly new point of view 20 years ago, looks like a major shortcoming to me now. Thirdly, having read up on some developmental psychology, I do not believe any longer that early experience inexorably shapes our lives. Finally, I think humans are so complex that there can not be a simple mechanism such as a handing down of certain attitudes: there are just too many exceptions from the rule.

'The Drama of the Gifted Child' is a powerful book and it is worth reading even after 20 years. It is not a scientific book in the sense that it contains testable findings, it presents a practitioner¡¦s conclusions gained from personal experience. You may call it an informed speculation, or an interim report from 'the search for the true self' as it is subtitled.


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