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The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, Revised Edition Paperback – January 1, 1997

by Alice Miller (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 3,619 ratings
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This “rare and compelling” (New York Magazine) bestseller examines childhood trauma and the enduring effects it has on an individual's management of repressed anger and pain.
Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound book has provided millions of readers with an answer--and has helped them to apply it to their own lives.
Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents' expectations and win their "love." Alice Miller writes, "When I used the word 'gifted' in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb.... Without this 'gift' offered us by nature, we would not have survived." But merely surviving is not enough. The Drama of the Gifted Child helps us to reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth.


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Previous page
  1. Print length
    136 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    January 1, 1997
  4. Dimensions
    5.3 x 0.5 x 7.95 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    0465016901
  6. ISBN-13
    978-0465016907
  7. See all details
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Popular Highlights in this book
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  1. For one is free from it only when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of ones own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.
    Highlighted by 3,710 Kindle readers
  2. At first it will be mortifying to see that she is not always good, understanding, tolerant, controlled, and, above all, without needs, for these have been the basis of her self-respect.
    Highlighted by 3,367 Kindle readers
  3. The grandiose person is never really free; first, because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.
    Highlighted by 3,206 Kindle readers
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From the Publisher

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Rare and compelling in its compassion and its unassuming eloquence...her examples are so vivid and so ordinary they touch the hurt child in us all."―The New York Magazine

"An unpretentious little book with an amazing impact...Many readers find themselves portrayed with an accuracy and empathy that seem uncanny, as if the author had been a silent, unseen witness to their childhood [and] their innermost and secret selves."―Vogue

"Full of wisdom and perception."―The New Republic

"Narcissism has rarely been written about with the clarity and quiet insights of this modest, thought-provoking work."―Washington Post Book World

About the Author

Alice Miller (1923-2010) achieved worldwide recognition for her work on the causes and effects of childhood traumas. She was also the author of many books, including The Truth Will Set You Free, Banished Knowledge, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, and For Your Own Good.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books; 3rd edition (January 1, 1997)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 136 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0465016901
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0465016907
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.3 x 0.5 x 7.95 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 3,619 ratings

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Alice Miller

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
3,619 global ratings
Wow! Truth telling at its finest
5 Stars
Wow! Truth telling at its finest
I read Pete Walker’s CPTSD Book and he refers to and recommends this book repeatedly. I’ve honestly gotten more healing and insight from this book than his, even though his book is great. Alice goes into the really deep patterns from our childhood and relates them to our current patterns of living from relationships to our therapy to our parenting. The parent-child dynamics are written about so thoroughly and clearly in this book. Highly recommend... if you are ready for it!
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Top reviews from the United States

Diplomat
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, eloquent, truthful, and painful.
Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2017
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I started working with a great psychologist/therapist last year to deal with a few issues that i had diagnosed in myself and also to deal with PTSD. In one of our sessions, much to my surprise, he linked these issues back to my childhood and my parents and especially my mother. Apparently my mother has highly narcissistic tendencies and my father, with his indifference, has played the role of the enabler. As i started to do more research and read more to understand so many complicated issues that are part of the human psyche, i came across this book. Please allow me to very honest and say that to this day i have not finished reading the whole book. This, not because it is a difficult or poorly written book. On the contrary, it is brilliant, eloquent, and provides enough examples to make the topic easily understood by everyone. I have not finished it because sometimes the truth hurts and it hurts deeply when one faces it's ugly part. It is forces you to look inside your own self, to analyze your thoughts and actions, and more than anything to accept the origin of your fears and insecurities. Read it and re-read it over and over again, because by understanding your past you can change the present and the future and even if you may not fully break free of the pain, at least you will not repeat the same mistakes with your children. I can not recommend this book enough, painful as it is to read it and face truths about one's self. You will become a better person in the end.
537 people found this helpful
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J. Malnar
5.0 out of 5 stars insightful thou i haven't quite made out the title?!
Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2007
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i wrote a note on the cover page which reads: "this is a very sad book. and very necessary to read BEFORE one has children. unfortunately too late for me :((".
and this is how i felt (and still feel) after having read it (just finished it at 2 am this morning).
the premise of the book is that what we are not aware of, rules (destroys) our lives.
the trauma of being mistreated, manipulated, ridiculed or just ignored in the first days / years of our lives by adults we depended on for our existence gets stored in our bodies and it conditions us not only to neurosis, but also to taking it out on the first available weaker person -usually our children.
it also claims that thanks to the way we are brought up and "loved" by our (own screwed up and wounded) caretakers conditionally, for what we do and how we behave and not for who we are (for the fact we exist), we tend to deny parts of ourselves that the caretakers wish to expunge. we mould ourselves according to what we think they want, and lose ourselves in the process.
as adults, we keep carrying the feeling of inadeqacy and unworthiness and experience it as depression or grandiosity (in which no achievement really is enough for us to start valuing ourselves so we keep pushing for more, just to keep the depression and worthlessness at bay).
some children, on the other hand, "kill" their own emotions and feelings, in order to keep their caretaker's love.
in all cases children take the "blame and shame" for their "inadequacies" and idealize the parents or caretakers who inflicted the wounds.
at times, reading this book, i would remember the fact that i too remember nothing of my childhood, except that it was "idilic". or was it? repression of memories and feelings can go straight into almost complete amnesia.
i also thought of a few people i know, whose parents are strict and cold, who display very little emotion, but go thru life sucking love out of other people only to discard them when they get it.
i would remember how i sometimes lash out at my son, like his being a child is a crime.. the same way i was loved for my achievements, i sometimes get demanding on him and show discontent when he does not comply.
i thought of my son's difficult birth and 6 days in ER, without me, all alone. and i want to scream :(
this book hit me like a hammer.
i hope i read it on time. everyone should do the same, if not for their own sake, then for sake of their innocent children.
oh, and one more thing: sentences are so damn long and sometimes barely comprehensible. the translation could have been done more in the spirit of english language.
55 people found this helpful
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Raman
4.0 out of 5 stars Enigmatic
Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2021
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_The Drama of the Gifted Child_ hit me like a train with its plainspoken eloquence. I found it a deeply triggering read. If its contents intersect with your own experience of early childhood, I bet you will find this too. More than most books I've read in the "shrinky" literature, reading through this book is a piece of therapy unto itself. And for this reason, I've felt it change my life.

Miller offers an extraordinarily stark, radical, and uncompromising narrative of generational trauma. Here's the core argument: the patient in infancy is conditioned into hiding her emotional needs by an insecure mother. She experiences contempt for her frailty. These experiences are repressed into the subconscious. They manifest later in life as mental illness, aberrant habits, and/or trouble with relationships. When the patient becomes a parent, she finally finds in her own child someone who can offer the unconditional love she needed from her mother in infancy. But the cycle perpetuates when the patient's child has inconvenient childlike needs that bring the patient's repressed memories too close to the surface. Experiencing, in therapy and at an emotional and not intellectual level, the pain of her mother's contempt brings out a cathartic mourning that can break the cycle.

There are examples and they change. Sons and (to a lesser extent) fathers make appearances. Beyond that, this is pretty much the whole book.

The brittle consistency Miller brings to this central dogma makes this volume stunningly repetitive given its brevity. It also makes the book less useful than it could be: given the black and white view of imperfect parenting as "original sin," it offers little guidance, for example, on how to be a better while imperfect parent. Either you go to therapy and experience an essential mourning of your childhood, or you're doomed. It offers little guidance that mental illnesses like depression could have parallel sources or parallel treatments. And it offers little guidance for how to navigate the other traumas in life that have nothing directly to do with parenting.

Reaching into Alice Miller's history offers clues. And this is where things get really meta: the initial intrigue is to ask why this book by an author with such an Anglo sounding name was translated from the German. One goes to Wikipedia to learn that Alice Miller was a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust without her whole family making it, the gyrations of her very name bearing witness to a cross-border struggle to survive. She repressed her war trauma, minimized her own therapy, kept her life history intensely private, and hurt her own son Martin grievously. Back to Amazon, Martin, also a therapist, recently wrote _The True Drama of the Gifted Child_ to tell us all about it. And thus the whole project of Alice Miller's career - of an emotional processing of trauma in therapy triumphing over intellectualized defense mechanisms - falls into context as an intellectualized defense mechanism. At the end of the book, Miller connects her theory of generational trauma to the horrors of fascism. Having learned Miller's life history makes this capstone to the book hard to un-see.

This book is so powerful and potentially life-changing that I think it remains essential. Yet learning its context gives me reservations and says something enigmatic about humanity that I just can't quite cast aside.
124 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Itzel
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente
Reviewed in Mexico on August 8, 2023
Verified Purchase
Muy buen libro para entender muchas cosas. El lenguaje es sencillo pero al estar en inglés la traducción sí debe leerse un par de veces el mismo párrafo para entender la idea. Yo lo compré porque ya había leído uno anterior "El cuerpo nunca miente" y me gustó. La autora es directa y pone ejemplos de pacientes. Hay términos que se pueden cuestionar o investigar pero hay que entender o leer más a la autora.
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JOSE BALAGUER ALEDON
5.0 out of 5 stars profundo
Reviewed in Spain on May 4, 2024
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Muy interesante aunque cuesta leerlo, debido a la forma de escribir del autor. En todo caso es un gran libro que no deja al lector indiferente. Recomiendo su lectura pero con paciencia
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Aleksandar Stojanovic
5.0 out of 5 stars Wow
Reviewed in Germany on March 18, 2024
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Hefty food, not easy to digest but very nurturing… recommended to everyone in search of some deeper truth to be unhidden.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Best book dealing with childhood trauma and diseases
Reviewed in India on March 7, 2024
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As a practicing cardiologist, i find this as a best book so far I have read scoring the neglected, yet most important , topic of childhood trauma it's affects on adult and disease patterns
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Teresa
5.0 out of 5 stars Gem of a book
Reviewed in Australia on November 16, 2021
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This book is a must-read for anyone on a journey. It’s size belies the wealth of insights and wisdom it offers One of my treasured guides that reveal new nuances each time one reads it
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