Greetings!

This is a very interesting issue to discuss.

Do you know a book called "The Drama Of The Gifted Child" by (one) Alice Miller? I think for anyone, i.e. (e.g.) for me, or for someone like you, it would help and you’d appreciate getting hold of this book. It's a VERY informative, “uncomplicated” book, actually a little book with only (about) 118 pages; an “unconventional” book, though! I myself got it as a birthday present a couple of years ago, and since then, I have always requested it to peoples one comes in contact with, even over the Internet … to buy this little book! It’s a book that will reflect most -- especially young-- people through and through! At least insofar as any discussions pertain to issues like Nurture (vis-à-vis Nature), *emotional intelligence*, Memories, Feelings, "Social-conditioning" etc ... believe me, you WILL see yourself mirrored on many pages of this little book! Try and get a copy: it *WILL* HELP ANYONE!!

Quoted from "The Drama of The Gifted Child":

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We live in a culture that encourages us not to take our own suffering seriously, but rather to make light of it or even to laugh about it. What is more, this attitude is regarded as a virtue, and many people -- [of whom I used to be one] -- are proud of their lack of sensitivity toward their own fate and particularly toward their fate as a child. In my books, I have tried to demonstrate why the disastrous belief that this attitude is a desirable one has been held so tenaciously, and to point out the tragic conditions it helps to conceal.

Again and again, readers from a number of countries have told me with great relief that after reading "The Drama of the Gifted Child", they felt for the first time in their life something approaching sympathy for the neglected, abused, or even battered child they had once been. They say they now have more self-respect than before and are better able to recognize their needs and feelings.

"It was my life you were describing in your book; how could you have known?" I am often asked.

How could I have known? Today, I do not find it hard to answer this question. Today, I know it was not my teachers or my study of philosophy, nor was it my training to become a psychoanalyst that provided me with this knowledge. On the contrary, all of these together, with their mystifying conceptualisation and their rejection of reality, prevented me from recognizing the truth for years. Surprisingly, it was the child in me, condemned to silence long ago -- abused, exploited, and turned to stone -- who finally found her feelings and, along with them, her speech, and then told me, in pain, her story. Thus, it was my story I was telling in "The Drama ...", and many people saw their own mirrored in it.

In my fourth book, "Pictures of a Childhood", I describe in greater detail how my encounter with this child came about, once she had reappeared after long banishment, and how it happened that I was able to offer her the protection she needed, in order to feel her pain and speak about it.

I was amazed to discover that I had been an abused child, that from the very beginning of my life I had no choice but to comply totally with the needs and feelings of my mother, and to ignore my own. My discovery also showed me the power of repression, which had kept me from learning the truth all my life, and the inadequacy of psychoanalysis, which even reinforced my repression by means of its deceptive theories. For I had completed two analyses as part of my psychoanalytic training, but both analyses had been unable to question my version of the happy childhood I had supposedly enjoyed.

It was not until I started to experiment with spontaneous painting that I first was able to gain access to the undistorted reality of my childhood. In the pictures I painted, I was confronted with the terror that my mother, a brilliant pedagogue, had inflicted on me in my upbringing. I had been subjected to this terror for years because no one close to me, not even my kind and wise father, was capable of noticing or challenging this form of child abuse. Had just one person understood what was happening and come to my defence, it might have changed my entire life. That person could have helped me to recognize my mother's cruelty for what it was, instead of accepting if for decades, to my great detriment, as something normal and necessary.

This part of my story -- this lack of enlightened witnesses -- may have been responsible for the attempts I have made in my books to provide information that would reach potential witnesses who could be of help to the suffering child. By 'witnesses', I mean people who are not afraid to stand up for children assertively and protect them from adults' abuse of power. In our society, with its hostility toward children, such people are still hard to find, but their number is growing daily.

The spontaneous painting I began to do helped me not only to discover my personal story, but also to free myself from the intellectual constraints and concepts of my upbringing and my professional training, which I now recognized to be false, deceptive, and disastrous in its impact. The more I learned to follow my impulses in a playful way with colours and forms, the weaker became my allegiance to conventions of an aesthetic or any other nature. I did not want to paint beautiful pictures; it was not even my goal to paint good pictures. All I wanted was to help the truth to break through. In this way, when I finally confronted my own truth and was strengthened by it, I found the courage to see with ever-growing clarity how the conventional methods of psychoanalysis block the creativity of "patients" as well as "analysts". This is what I have tried to portray in my books for the sake of helping victims of this process to become aware of what has been done to them, and sparing them the arduous path of my search. For doing this, I have been the recipient of much gratitude but I also encountered much hostility.

In the meantime, I had come to understand that I was an abused child because my parents had experienced something similar in their childhood but had learned, as had my analysts and teachers, to regard this abuse as upbringing or treatment or training for their own good. Because they were not allowed to feel or, consequently, understand what had once been done to them, they were unable to recognize the abuse as such and passed it on to me in turn, without even the trace of a bad conscience. I realized that I could and must attempt to point out to today's young parents -- and especially to future parents -- the danger of misusing their power, that I must sensitize them to this danger and make it easier for them to hear the signals of the child inside them as well as of children everywhere.

This is something I can do if I help children -- victims who have been condemned to silence and who have no rights -- to speak: if I describe their suffering from their perspective and not from that of adults. For, after all, it was from a child that I myself received crucial information, answers to questions which had gone unanswered throughout my study of philosophy and psychoanalysis and which did not cease to preoccupy me in the years that followed. It was thanks to the pain of the child in me that I fully grasped what so many adults must ward off all their life, and I also realized why they fail to confront their truth, preferring instead to plan self-destruction on a gigantic, atomic scale, without even recognizing the absurdity of what they are doing.

These are the same people who, like all of us, entered the world as innocent infants, with the primary goals of growing, living in peace, and loving -- never of destroying life. I recognized the compelling logic of this absurdity after I found the missing piece of the puzzle: the secret of childhood, till then closely guarded.

This discovery convinced me that if we are willing to open our eyes to the suffering of the child, to the wonders of the world, we will soon realize that it lies within us, as adults, to turn the newborn into monsters by the way we treat them, or to let them grow up into feeling -- and, therefore, responsible -- human beings.

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Also found in "The Drama":

THE LEGEND OF NARCISSUS:

The legend of Narcissus actually tells us the tragedy of the narcissistic disturbance. Narcissus sees his reflection in a pool of water and falls in love with his own beautiful face, of which his mother was surely proud. The nymph Echo answers the young man's calls because she is in love with his beauty. Echo's answering calls deceive Narcissus. His reflection deceives him as well, since it shows only his perfect, wonderful side and not his other parts. His back view, for instance, and his shadow remain hidden from him; they do not belong to, and are cut off from, his beloved reflection.

This stage of rapture can be compared with grandiosity, just as another (the consuming longing for himself) can be likened to depression. Narcissus wanted to be nothing but the beautiful youth. He denied his true self, wanted to be the one with "the beautiful picture". This leads to a giving up of himself, to death or, in Ovid's version, to being changed into a flower. This 'death' is the logical consequence of the fixation on the false self.

It is not only the "beautiful", "good", and "pleasant" feelings that make us really alive, deepen our existence, and give us crucial insight, but often precisely the unacceptable and un-adapted ones from which we would prefer to escape: impotence, pride, shame, envy, jealousy, confusion, and mourning.

Narcissus was in love with his beautiful picture, but neither the grandiose nor the depressive "Narcissus" can really love himself. His passion for his false self not only makes 'object love' impossible, but also love for the one person who is fully entrusted to his care: he, himself!

©Alice Miller

First published in German as "Das Drama Des Begabten Kindes"; Zollikerberg, Switzerland, 1986.

Read more about the book on this LINK: