the gifted child

quotes from the drama of the gifted child by alice miller

from chapter one

“in my work with people in the helping professions, I have often been confronted with a childhood history that seems significant to me.

-there was a mother* who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her equilibrium on her child’s behaving in a particular way. this mother was able to hide her insecurity from her child and from everyone else behind a hard, authoritarian, even totalitarian façade. [by ‘mother’ I here refer to the person closest to the child during the first years of life. this need not be the biological mother, or even a woman. in the course of the past twenty years, many fathers have assumed this mothering function.]

-this child had an amazing ability to perceive and respond intuitively, that is, unconsciously, to the need of the mother, or of both parents, for the child to take on the role that had been assigned to them.

-this role secured ‘love’ for the child – that is, their parents’ exploitation. they could sense they were needed, and this need guaranteed them a measure of existential security.

this ability is then extended and perfected. later, these children not only become mothers (confidantes, comforters, advisers, supporters) of their own mothers but also take over at least part of the responsibility for their siblings and eventually develop a special sensitivity to unconscious signals manifesting the needs of others. no wonder they often choose to become psychotherapists later on. who else, without this previous history, would muster sufficient interest to spend the whole day trying to discover what is happening in other people’s unconscious? but the development and perfecting of this sensitivity – which once assisted the child in surviving and now enables the adult to pursue their strange profession – also contain the roots of their emotional disturbance: as long as the therapist is not aware of their repression, it can compel them to use their patients, who depend on them, to meet their unmet needs with substitutes.”

“one such consequence is the person’s inability to experience consciously certain feelings of their own (such as jealousy, envy, anger, loneliness, helplessness, or anxiety), either in childhood or later in adulthood. this is all the more tragic in that we are concerned here with lively people who are often capable of deep feelings. it is most noticeable when they describe childhood experiences that were free of pain and fear. they could enjoy their encounters with nature, for example, without hurting the mother or making her feel insecure, reducing her power, or endangering her equilibrium. . . these people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience their feelings only when there is someone there who accepts them fully, understands them, and supports them. if that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother’s love or the love of their substitute in order to feel, then they will repress their emotions. the child cannot even experience them secretly, ‘just for themselves’; they will fail to experience them at all. but they will nevertheless stay in the body, in the cells, stored up as information that can be triggered by a later event.”

“when a woman has had to repress all these needs in relation to her own mother, they will arise from the depth of her unconscious and seek gratification through her own child, however well-educated she may be. the child feels this clearly and very soon forgoes the expression of their own distress. later, when these feelings of being deserted begin to emerge in the therapy of the adult, they are accompanied by intense pain and despair. it is clear that these people could not have survived so much pain as children.”

“several mechanisms can be recognized in the defense against early feelings of abandonment. in addition to simple denial, we usually find the exhausting struggle to fulfill the old, repressed, and by now often perverted needs with the help of symbols (cults, sexual perversions, groups of all kinds, alcohol, or drugs). intellectualization is very commonly encountered as well, since it is a defense mechanism of great power. it can have disastrous results, however, when the mind ignores the vital messages of the body.”

“accommodation to parental needs often (but not always) leads to the ‘as-if personality.’ this person develops in such a way that they reveal only what is expected of them and fuses so completely with what they reveal that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to them behind this false self. they cannot develop and differentiate their true self, because they are unable to live it. understandably, this person will complain of a sense of emptiness, futility, or homelessness, for the emptiness is real. . . the integrity of the child was injured when all that was alive and spontaneous in them was cut off. in childhood, these patients have often had dreams in which they experienced themselves as at least partly dead.”

“the difficulties inherent in experiencing and developing one’s own emotions lead to mutual dependency, which preserves individuation. both parties have an interest in bond permanence. the parents have found in their child’s false self the confirmation they were looking for, a substitute for their own missing security; the child, who has been unable to build up their own sense of security, is first consciously and then unconsciously dependent on their parents. the child cannot rely on their own emotions, has not come to experience them through trial and error, has no sense of their own real needs, and is alienated from themselves to the highest degree. under these circumstances they cannot separate from their parents, and even as an adult they are still dependent on affirmation from their partner, from groups, and especially from their own children. . . unless the heir casts off their ‘inheritance’ by becoming fully conscious of their true past, and thus of their true nature, loneliness in the parental home will necessarily be followed by an adulthood lived in emotional isolation.”