Customer Rating: Summary: A classic. Groundbreaking truths still enlightening after all these years. And I can recommend Comment: a fascinating and remarkably candid memoir written by another brilliant and compassionate woman: That's How the Light Gets In: Memoir of a Psychiatrist by Susan Rako, M.D. The title comes from a song by Leonard Cohen: "There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Rako was herself notably a "gifted child," -- actually a child prodigy on the piano who performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra at age 14, and who became a psychiatrist to heal herself and others on the journey founded on courage to stand to one's own truth. Rako's memoir is wonderfully well-written and a great read. The writing just flows. Customer Rating: Summary: for adults who were parentified as children by their own parents Comment: Great read for adults who were parentified as children by their own parents, and helping you to cope with and MOVE PAST the legacy and wounds your parents accidentally left you with. They learned it from their parents, and it's important to break the cycle if you don't want to pass it to your children too. You will, unless you work very hard to heal the wounds. It's inevitable. Customer Rating: Summary: Great book w good examples Comment: Alice Miller explains how a lot of us have been affected from childhood. The book flows well and is a page turner when you see that a lot of the situations relate to you in some way. I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking to improve themselves! Customer Rating: Summary: A Significant Piece of the Puzzle Comment: Reading books about psychology, especially books dealing with childhood trauma, is a bit like looking into a shattered mirror. Some parts will accurately reflect aspects of one's own psyche; other parts will be too distorted to have any relevance. As far as mirrors go, I think Alice Miller's "The Drama of the Gifted Child" provides for excellent viewing.
The core of the book is about narcissism, or more precisely, the way that children are negatively affected by the emotional unavailability and/or abuse of their parents. These emotional wounds can create severe dysfunctions and personality disorders later in life - disorders over which the victim has absolutely no control, unless they begin the long and painful road towards breaking out of their "Inner Prison" (as Miller puts it).
Early editions of this book used a lot more psychological jargon, and the revised edition makes things quite clear and concise for the layman, without losing the essential concepts: the role and critical responsibility of the primary object (usually mother); the suppression/repression of feelings in favour of a need to please; the cycles of grandiosity and depression; contempt and its role in perversion and obsession; compulsion to repeat behaviours; the societal role in propagating psychologically diseased values through generations; the severe shortcomings of tradition psychotherapeutic methods (although this was first published in 1979), and the key to healing - consciously experiencing hidden emotional pain.
The case studies and quotes from patients are relevant and add an extra dimension to the theory. I found that some of the examples struck a stronger emotional chord than Miller's own observations, which is important if one is reading a book to gain insight rather than for simple curiosity.
Although a short book at approximately 126 pages, there is very little "fluff" or filling in it. Miller gets straight to the point and has little patience for "parental apologia", which is an approach I think needs to be taken. It seems from other reviews though that some parents bought the book thinking it would affirm their own notions of their child's "giftedness", and were a little "miffed" to find out that wasn't the case. In my opinion, parents like these are the exact reason professionals like Miller need to focus the lens directly on their behaviour.
That the book is now still in print and in its 3rd revision is a testament to its long-term appeal. Despite having read it twice now, I still find revisits to be enlightening and worthwhile. I am very glad to have it on my bookshelf and consider it money well spent.
Readers with a deep interest in the subject may also find "The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment", "Why Is It Always About You? : The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism", "Unholy Hungers: Encountering the Psychic Vampire in Ourselves & Others" and the previously mentioned "Myth of Sanity" to be excellent sources of additional information.
Overall, an immensely valuable work and I thank Ms. Miller for her long-term efforts in sharing such important knowledge with the wider public. Customer Rating: Summary: always there Comment: I read this book for the first time when it was first published and it had a great impact on me and on understanding how I had grown. It was painful but at the same time healing. I continue reading it and it continues having those characteristics. Thanks
Alice Miller in the UK, "The Drama of Being a Child" Basic Books, 1981 . The common bond unifying the three studies in this volume is a concern with the factors operative in loss of the self and ...
Books The Drama of Being a Child : The Search for the True Self Alice Miller A good book looking at the connections between childhood trauma and the adults we become.
LRB · Anne Enright: My Milk What I am interested in is not the drama of being a child, but this new drama of being a mother (yes, there are cannibals in my dreams. Yes) about which so little has been written.
Dr Vicky Lebeau : English : University of Sussex ... explores this question as one that belongs to those structures of identification and feeling - psychoanalysis and literature among them - which explore the drama of being a child.
