Have you read the book The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller?
If not, I highly recommend it. Alice Miller has much wisdom and knowledge to share with you – whether you are a mental health professional or a lay person trying to get a better understanding of yourself and why you do the things you do.
It is following a conversation with Mike Langlois, LICSW, who has been one of my long-distance friends and mentors for a good part of my social work journey, that I was introduced to this book. Thank you, Mike 🙂
Key Points:
When you are unaware of not having your very early childhood needs met, you are likely to try to fulfill these early unmet needs through others, albeit unconsciously. You may try to do so via your spouse, clients or even your children…
This lack of awareness and denial of your early pain, in turn, could lead you to inadvertently harm your child. It is a cycle that tends to gets repeated from one generation to the next unless someone in the family decides to address in therapy his/her repressed pain head-on or is forced to do so via depression or the expression of other symptoms.
As Alice eloquently states: “This does not rule out strong affection; the mother often loves her child passionately, but not in the way he needs to be loved… What is missing above all is the framework within which the child could experience his feelings and emotions. Instead, he develops something the mother needs, and although this certainly saves his life (by securing the mother’s or the father’s “love”) at the time, it may nevertheless prevent him, throughout his life, from being himself (Miller, p. 30).”
Finally, the denial of the self or of one’s own emotional reactions is one of the origins of depression as well as the root of all suffering. “This denial [of self] begins in the service of an absolutely essential adaptation during childhood and indicates a very early injury. There are many children who have not been free, right from the beginning, to experience the very simplest of feelings, such as discontent, anger, rage, pain, even hunger- and of course, enjoyment of their own bodies (Miller, p. 40).”
I found these thoughts conveyed by Alice to be particularly poignant and powerful. It is only during my journey to becoming a social worker, and now that I have become aware and exposed to the some of the stories held by my unconscious.
As an example of how powerful and subtle the unconscious works, about six months after my husband and I had our first child, we wanted to go away for a few days away sans baby. For no reason known to me at the time, I felt a very strong need and desire to make an album book showing pictures and explaining how we were going away, how our baby would be staying with my husband’s parents and how we were coming back.
In other words, it had been very important to me to convey a sense of security to our baby and I had simply thought that this was a perfectly natural thing to do. It was only recently that I discovered that my parents happened to have gone away for a whole week without telling me that they were going away when I was less than two years old because they didn’t want to “upset” me.
Suddenly, the importance of assuring our baby before we left for our 4 day/3 night trip years ago makes so much sense. I wanted to make sure that our child did not experience the pain and worry that I had gone through when my parents went away without giving me any forewarning or explanation…
This is an example of an early traumatic event unconsciously leading me to do something very positive on behalf of one of my children.
Regretfully, in all likelihood, I have also probably done the reverse, that is, unconsciously tried to have my children fulfill some unmet early needs. As I continue on my journey of self-exploration, I will need to be compassionate with myself and recognize that while I may not change the past, my learnings may change the present and future for the better, as we speak.
What do you think of Alice Miller’s book and/or the passages that I’ve highlighted? Do you have any examples or stories that you would like to share?
Reference:
Miller, A. (2007). The Drama of the Gifted Child. New York: Basic Books. (affiliate link)
Very nice piece on a very important, seminal book in psychoanalytic object relational literature, and a book that also resonates for many clients as well.
The “gifted-ness” that Miller refers to isn’t an intellectual giftedness, it is the ability that many sensitive children have to set their own needs aside, and develop a premature, precocious awareness or a kind hyper-empathy toward the parents mood state and unfulfilled narcissistic hungers.
The current edition of the book is a re-edit/re-issue of at least two other editions. This version of the book grew out of her work with prison populations, and their histories of severe abuse – and charts her own, unique “path of recovery” from childhood abuse.
The current edition of book itself bears little resemblance to the version that was most popular in the early 1980’s (titled Drama of the Gifted Child: Prisoners of Childhood) which focused on much subtler occurrences of narcissistic injury and their effects on a child’s healthy narcissism.
Miller was originally a Winnicottian, and the very first incarnation of this book was called simply Prisoners of Childhood – (this has been reissued as well – and may have also been significantly reedited -look for the out of print versions!)
and fascinatingly -this book was not about abuse or prisoners at all – but about the analysands that she provided a training analysis for!
In short, Millers book FIRST began as a study of what kinds of narcissistic injuries in childhood turned people into THERAPISTS – and in it, she suggests that every therapists first client was their primary caretaker. That therapists organize their childhood around the meeting the unmet narcissistic needs of their parents and then spend their lifetimes, trapped, doing the same thing for their clients. Hence: Therapists are the real Prisoners of Childhood.
So, Millers book has its own detours, and its own hidden unconscious root which comes full circle as therapists recommend the book to their clients.
Find the old copies if you can. Its fascinating.
Thanks for opening up this discussion!
Hi Martha,
Thank you so much for sharing the fascinating historical backdrop to Alice Miller’s book as well as pointing out
what Alice meant by the term “gifted child.”
Hmm… Alice Miller’s underlying theme from the first version of her book that therapists had to meet the unmet narcissistic needs of their parents during their childhood in order to survive makes sense to me.
However, I think I disagree with the second part, in which she suggests that therapists are subsequently trapped in doing the same things for their clients…
When we as therapists go through our own treatment and recognize our own injuries, do we not move beyond them?
With much appreciation,
Dorlee
Yes – I think that is an important point :
Although I doubt that any of us can ever assimilate “all” of our latent conflicts-
in the earlier editions Miller would say that the path out of imprisonment – is through mourning.
She wrote extensively in the earlier books on the the importance of grieving the lost opportunities to have childhood needs met at the appropriate time. All other attempts to rework the conflict later – by becoming a therapist for example – will fail to be corrective – in the view of her early texts – there are aspects of our early injuries that can never be processed, it will all be a day late and a dollar short –
and can only be mourned.
Grieving is the only path to freedom for Miller in the earlier editions of the book. When unmet needs are mourned, – which is a cyclical, life long process like all mourning – they lose their power to drive our actions, and although painful, it is freeing because such loss are real, and allows us to interact with our realities more creatively and effectively.
She felt this mourning process was especially important for therapists (and parents) in order to avoid using clients (or children) to fill archaic needs.
I don’t remember the current edition very well – but think that most of these thoughts on mourning were excised and replaced with a perhaps “7 step” process that she created herself to address the very extreme trauma histories of the violent offenders that she was working with later.
She is a controversial character, in part because of these revisions – and her rejection of her earlier theories. I also worked for several years right out of social work school with clients with severe trauma histories who had been incarcerated for violent offenses – and found her “steps” somewhat simplistic but some others have found them useful.
and I find the first edition to have moments of real brilliance, (and that most of what is moving in the current editions were present from the beginning) and these have have been extremely useful with any population. I do thing resigning ourselves to mourning frees us in ways other “processing” cant.
But, thats me, and I’m clearly just an old psychoanalytic theory-wonk 😉
thanks for the lovely discussion!
Martha
Hi Martha,
Thank you for sharing all this wonderful information… I love hearing and learning about the origins of Alice Miller’s thoughts and theories.
Aside from this book providing important insights, it touched me because I just felt so understood. I felt Alice described some of the things I had gone through or experienced as I grew up and had just become aware of recently.
As painful as it is, I agree with you (and Alice) that it is only by facing and mourning our unmet childhood needs, that we are able to become our true selves.
By the way, the version I am reading makes no mention of [7] steps to healing. Perhaps the latest version you are referring to precedes the latest 2007 version? In the 2007 version, aside from providing her philosophy, Alice provides various examples illustrating the need for therapists and parents to do “the work.”
With much warmth and appreciation,
Dorlee
Oh, interesting – there could certainly have been another edition. I think I last looked at a paperback copy in the late 1990’s.
Thanks for the information>
She certainly has allowed her work to evolve along its own path!
Martha
The fact that Alice’s work has evolved over time looks to me like a wonderful testament to her ability to grow and learn from her experience and work with clients…I so appreciate the way you described/explained the evolution; it really puts her work in context.
I also think that I probably have more knowledge and insights to absorb from her current version as time goes by (with subsequent rereads).
Right now, my focus is inevitably drawn to the topic of facing unmet childhood needs because this is where I am right now 🙂
Best,
Dorlee
What a great discussion you both are having! I can’t recall if Miller meant:
A) trapped trying to repeat our own use of “giftedness” with our patients in an attempt to heal our own trauma,
B) trapped in the dynamic where we traumatize our patients (via countertransference) in an attempt to meet our unmet archaic needs, if we aren’t careful,
C) both.
I suspect the answer is C. But in terms of your concern Dorlee, I would suggest that just because something has an element of re-enactment in it doesn’t make it bad. We may be only partially conscious of it, but that’s what supervision is for. 🙂
I also think that we are inevitably destined to fail our patients empathically, as Kohut would say. We do this no matter how hard we try to avoid it, because it is part of the human condition. He adds that we shouldn’t try to deliberately create empathic failures, because there will be plenty that arise naturally.
If I remember right, Miller became increasingly convinced that psychoanalysis was flawed for the reason that it ended up being another form of denial of the self to please the parent (therapist) and that the healing happened through the person expressing themselves through art. She was pushing the limits of object relations much like Freud pushed the limits of drive theory, but never pushed beyond it to, say, Kohut and self psychology. You can read her as a critique of object relations and the concept of therapy as reparenting taken to a logical conclusion.
One of the challenges I find with Alice Miller, whose work inspired me to become a therapist, is the confusion of tongues between her and other clinicians around the word “traumatic.” She is speaking very much from an object relations perspective, and experience-near to the patient’s childhood experiences. But is that the same phenomenon as a soldier’s PTSD or surviving an attempted genocide? I’m not so sure we’re all using trauma the same way, even though we are discussing important phenomena.
I think the post of mine that Dorlee may be alluding to can be found at http://gamertherapist.com/blog/tag/alice-miller/
Ramble ramble..
Hi Mike,
I’m so glad that you were able to join the discussion 🙂
You raised a number of good points and questions… Yes, good supervision will definitely be of help in addressing some of my concerns; there is no such thing as perfection…
How interesting the way you are looking at her overall style…it definitely makes me want to re-read the book again with the different theories in mind.
Regarding the idea of a person healing through art, I love that Alice believed in this modality (I just completed an art therapy class for clinical social work and was a witness to its powerful therapeutic effects) but I do not recall her mentioning this in my version. Perhaps this was an insight that she shared in an earlier version?
With respect to the term “trauma,” it can be used in different ways and I totally agree with you that it can be confusing. I remember questioning my own use of the word “traumatic” vis a vis my childhood memory. I felt that it fit in with Alice’s definition of the word but that it was not on par with a PTSD memory etc.
Lastly, no – I didn’t get the idea of reading this book from the interesting post you referenced. You had recommended this book to me in an email exchange we had a few months ago when we were touching base. It just took me time to process the book after I read it the first time 🙂
With much warmth and appreciation,
Dorlee
This is a very insightful post, Dorlee. It was interesting to see you comb through your own experiences to develop an understanding of how and why you did things.
This situation is all too common in families of alcoholics. Often children take a back seat to the larger “elephant in the room”.
Hi Marianna,
Thanks so much for your kind feedback and for sharing the information you know about alcoholic families.
I feel for the children in such families … I expect to be learning about what they go through in a graduate class about working with substance abusers and their families that I just started this week.
Best,
Dorlee
Dear Dorlee,
Alice Miller’s early 1980’s version of the book was one of the early influences in my path to becoming a trauma therapist.
Mike’s point about different uses of the word trauma is well taken. There is a big difference between adult traumatic stress reactions and early childhood trauma. Judith Lewis Herman, author of the classic book “Trauma and Recovery”, introduced the concept of complex PTSD to encompass all aspects of the diagnostic picture of survivors of chronic childhood abuse and neglect. The categories of symptoms include: alterations in emotional regulation, alterations in consciousness (flashbacks and dissociation), changes in self-perception, changes in perception of the perpetrator, alterations in relationships, alterations in one’s system of meaning.
Mike also commented on the inevitability of empathic failures with our clients. One thing I have come to realize is that rupture and repair of the therapeutic alliance can be more healing than no rupture in the first place, for clients with early childhood trauma. It is a much deeper corrective emotional experience.
Great topic, Dorlee!
Warmly,
Andrea
Dear Andrea,
I’m so glad that you found this topic interesting and could join in 🙂
Thank you for sharing Judith Lewis Herman’s comprehensive definition of complex PTSD which encompasses all possible reactions to early childhood trauma.
That is so interesting that you have found that an empathic failure and repair of the therapeutic alliance can be more healing than there having been no rupture with clients.
In light of the inevitability of occasional empathic failures, this is also most comforting to hear…
With much warmth and appreciation,
Dorlee