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Summary: A book for everyone to read
Review: Drama of the Gifted Child addresses the abuse that most all of us have endured as children. This is the kind of abuse that is more subtle than the obvious physical or verbal assaults. This is the kind of abuse that has kept us from being who we truly are because we wanted to please our parents so much. This book is a way for us to get in touch with the truth that is within us all.
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Summary: The Title is More Impressive than the Content
Review: This book offers very little insight into the practical realities of defeating mental illness.
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Summary: Specific insights for hard-to-acknowledge problems
Review: Miller's book is concise and straightforward, asserting that parental expectations for children--however benign or well-meaning--inevitably suppress the child's real self, leading to the ongoing "dramatic" performance of an identity throughout the child's life that is not driven by his/her own feelings. The lists of common behaviors that might be signs of this drama are helpful, and provoke moments of self-recognition that can be both painful and illuminating. My one reservation about Miller's argument is that this suppression of children's true selves is often demonstrated using examples of truly abusive parents, including several accounts of incest and violence. This undermines her overall understanding of the drama tendency as an almost universal property of family life.
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Summary: Groundbreaking introduction to childhood experience!
Review: Very gentle introduction to the concept of re-experienced childhood feelings as the key to (self-)healing in suffering adults. Rather than a work-book this is a map of the feel-scape we all experienced as children. The author's expertise is conveyed in inviting eloquence rather than in psycho-jargon.
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Summary: Defines the problem well, but blaming is counterproductive
Review: The title essay of this book well describes a far too common problem among gifted (intellectually, artistically, or emotionally) children. Because of their quick perceptions and sensitivity, they are deeply attuned to others' wishes, needs, and expectations, and tend to structure their lives around those rather than following the guidance of their "true selves." From my own experience, I completely agree with Miller's description of the problem, and of what in the child's psychological makeup leads to its occurrence. But I part company with her when she places the blame for the child's problems solely on "narcissistic parents." While such parents undoubtedly exist, I think that most parents are sincerely trying to do what's right for their children; they do harm out of ignorance or misguided beliefs rather than deliberate cruelty. For instance, a gifted child may be taught to belittle his/her gifts because the parent believes "humility" is important, not because he/she is selfishly trying to crush the child's spirit. Rather than blaming parents, I think it's more productive to acknowledge their desire to raise their children right, and educate them about the ways in which they may be unconsciously causing harm. And it's far more positive for an adult who recognizes this problem in him/herself to take action to honor the "true self," rather than getting hung up on "what my parents did wrong" and sinking into a victim mentality.
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Summary: Powerfully insightful!
Review: A powerfully insightful book on the intra-psychic 'dramas' that can shape the belief systems of the sensitive (i.e. "gifted") child. Written with an appreciation for the innermost sensitive parts of ourselves that we learn to deny. Alice Miller writes of her discoveries of herself. In so doing she is the antithesis of the detached researcher who studies such sensitive matters with intellect only, thus missing the experience itself, since it is by its nature a deeply emotional one. Yet she brings to it the experience of a seasoned, schooled, therapist while exhibiting her own gift of eloquence and efficient phrasing. A short summary of the root causes of many of our individual and societal problems.
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Summary: Finally, validation and hope
Review: I read this book based on the many strongly positive customer reviews, and I'm not sure I can add anything to the (mostly) eloquent advocacy already posted here, but I will try. Alice Miller has voiced EXACTLY, PRECISELY, and COMPLETELY the realizations I have experienced in the past 30 years of personal construction/reconstruction after a devastating childhood. God, what a RELIEF!!!!! She beautifully smashed open what I have found to be the most potent taboo in human society. In doing so, she has given me powerful validation -- I could not have imagined how powerful -- and a strong tool for recognizing therapists who simply cannot handle the parental issues I have so desperately wanted to deal with for 3 decades. (I had one therapist who did not realize she was -- literally -- curling up in fetal position as I began setting forth my "mother issues," and another [who had even gone through analysis] whose therapeutic manner curdled like milk; I could all but see her mind racing over the way she parents her own children, her subconscious fleeing at lightspeed, absolutely unable to really hear me over the noise in her own head.)I have one academic critique: I suggest that many therapists are still holding onto unidentified and unresolved parental issues not only because they are so deeply afraid of their parents, but because they are so horribly afraid of BEING INADEQUATE PARENTS. I think we're up against something very biological here, the incredible drive to be good parents (I can only speak to this based on observation; I fortunately live in a time where I was able to choose not to have children that I would subsequently screw up with my own profound mental illness), hence the depth and entrenchment of the taboo against deep and close examination and criticism of the damage that parents do, accidental and otherwise. This slim, impassioned, almost poetic volume has revolutionized my life already, and it has been only 24 hrs since I completed reading it for the first of what will be many times. I can also understand why some people would want to set it on fire. Read it and decide for yourself. May it give you as much strength and hope in your struggle as it has given me. I am about to buy another 5 copies to distribute to friends.
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Summary: The Best Out There, But Flawed
Review: Alice Miller, perhaps the best published psychology writer to date, opens The Drama of the Gifted Child with this classic, timeless pearl: "Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood." If only she could apply this fully to herself.
In the afterward of the 1997 edition she rejects this possibility outright: "I spent a long time looking for a total exploration of my childhood history. Now I see that this was hubris." Alice Miller gave up her quest for enlightenment, compromised to a life of partial mental illness, and in so doing lost her place as a worthwhile role model for the seeker of the full truth.
But the essence of her theory holds nonetheless. She defends the wounded child like no other published writer to date, she brilliantly traces the roots of adult pathology back to childhood trauma, and she thinks outside the box of conventional psychology and is not afraid to say so.
Alice Miller lives split within. A clear boundary separates her amazing, conscious healthiness from the disturbing, unconscious, unresolved feelings emanating from her still-buried trauma. The clearest example of this comes from her 1995 interview in the German-language magazine Psychologie Heute. Here (translated from German), she refers to the eruption of her own unresolved trauma when she began primal therapy in the late 1980s or early 1990s: "At the end of these three weeks my feelings were in a turmoil, so that I could not find sleep, that for the first time in my life I thought of suicide, and had anxiety verging on the psychotic. I was already fearful of this therapy that robbed my organism of sleep, but I could nowhere escape it."
This reveals a disturbed person, one who not only allowed herself to become trapped in an abusive therapy, but had the capacity to break into near-psychosis over it. And this is years after she wrote The Drama of the Gifted Child, which focuses on the consequences of not healing from trauma! It is hypocritical that someone who wrote and still writes in such a confident tone about unearthing buried trauma could remain so out of touch with her own.
Bound to denial, Alice Miller is unable to fully indict her own parents, and by extension all parents - herself included, as she is a mother of two - for their traumatizing behavior. This partially poisons her work, as it directly forces her to temper the power of her own message.
Without realizing it applied to her, she herself noted this as inevitable. Drama, pg. 20: "If we have never consciously lived through this despair and the resulting rage, and therefore have never been able to work through it, we will be in danger of transferring this situation, which then would remain unconscious, onto our patients." And I might add in her case: onto her readers as well! (And of course onto her children.)
But Alice Miller, so blocked in her own emotional growth, cannot fathom a genuinely emotionally resolved adult. As such, she compromises her ideals and turns a blind eye toward a certain level of pathological behavior. This allows her to give unhealed parents her tacit consent to procreate. She ignores both their troubling motives and the damage they will inevitably wreak on their children. At times she even buries her head in the sand further and suggests that perfect parents do exist out there, and in so doing allows unhealed parents to absorb her ferociously truthful message in the same way she has: without having to apply it to the depths of their own flaws.
Similarly, although she is an outspoken proponent of therapy, Alice Miller believes that no one with fully healthy motives would ever enter the field of psychotherapy. She pathologizes the therapist's heightened sensitivity as a remnant of his response to his needy parents of childhood. Although this is true for many therapists, including Alice Miller herself, she cannot fathom that a healed therapist would derive his power from the depths of his true self.
The fact that The Drama Of Gifted Child really is the best on the shelves is a sign of how unevolved and unresolved our world remains.
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