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

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Miller offers through her book a fascinating tale of the effects of childhood, not solely on the child as these events take place, but more so on the adult. Because in that case, the child wouldn’t find themselves in their parents’ face, but rather their projections.

What I have learned from this remarkable book is that we hide these feelings from our parents so they will `love' us, but it's not our true self that they love since it is these hidden feelings that are the manifestations of who we really are. The child who is victimized by the Narcissist is gifted because they deal with such heavy challenges and become over-sensitive to others' needs, always eager to please, while suppressing their own self-knowledge, emotions and needs. I only figured out recently that these experiences did not foster resilience in my mother, rather she may have had PTSD as a result.I read this in my mid-30s and at the time, I found this to be the most helpful book I had ever read. It is absolutely urgent that people become aware of the degree to which this disrespect of children is persistently transmitted from one generation to the next, therefore perpetuating destructive behaviour. Of course, not all parents of gifted children are like Katherine’s mother or the ones Miller describes in her book. 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.

But sure, the real problem was that these horrible women made four-year-olds feel bad about their unconscious desires to hang out in places full of drunk male adults. It is only by getting in touch with these lost needs that we can begin to discover those missing parts of ourselves. That's my sense of it, anyway, and stands as a minor complaint in the grander scheme of a useful book.Miller might have done better to include suggestions for positive parental models or success stories, to better indicate the goals of her methods or the point of this book. Psychologist and world renowned author, who is noted for her books on child abuse, translated in several languages. The mother was invested in having her daughter at “the best private school” in the area and nothing would change her mind. What we do know is that Miller was born in Poland in 1923, and settled in Switzerland in 1946, studying philosophy in Basle, then psychoanalysis in Zurich.

Because that child is made of so many repressed emotions, so he seeks to either take revenge upon the world, or hide away everything even more.

After the War, they set up my dad's solo medical practice in the small New Hampshire mill town they were from. In the Zurich exhibition (1977) to commemorate the centennial of [Hermann] Hesse's birth [in 1877], a picture was displayed that had hung above the little Hermann's bed and that he had grown up with. In the beginning, it gained currency because it chimed with what feminism was saying about patriarchy and sexual exploitation, but then it allied itself with a kind of privatisation of unhappiness.

As other reviewers note, "gifted" in this context does not refer necessarily to academic or artistic gifts (though these are common in the patient group Miller describes), rather a kind of emotional sensitivity. Unfortunately, a sense of grandiosity, while good for creating, can also be a sign of repressed emotions from childhood, which can cause depression. If we want our children to be mentally healthy as adults, we need to be sensitive to their sensitivity to our own dreams for them. This wise and profound book has provided thousands of readers with an answer,and has helped them to apply it to their own lives.You see, in the spring of my thirteenth year I made a conscious decision to relive the memories of my early childhood to such an extent that they - as the record of my real self, likely soon to be submerged as I entered the regimental high school system - would henceforth be indelibly stamped on my mental identity. I've read a lot a really helpful books that my therapist has recommended to me in the past six months or so. After 17 long years, my dad's mid-life crisis resulted in the radical move of our family to the SF Bay Area when I was 7. I always bristle at any theory that attempts to explain everything with a single reason or cause, especially in the complicated matters of psychology or human emotion. To illustrate this point, Oliver James describes how, while working as a clinician in a psychiatric hospital in the early 1980s, he found himself treating a five-year-old girl who exhibited a disturbing degree of sexualised behaviour.