The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

by Alice Miller

The automatic, natural contact with his own emotions and needs gives an individual strength and self-esteem.

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.

The child, most often an only child or the first-born, was seen as the mother’s possession.

What the mother had once failed to find in her own mother she was able to find in her child: someone at her disposal who could be used as an echo and could be controlled, who was completely centered on her, would never desert her, and offered her full attention and admiration.

In what is described as depression and experienced as emptiness, futility, fear of impoverishment, and loneliness can usually be recognized as the tragic loss of the self in childhood, manifested as the total alienation from the self in the adult.

Behind manifest grandiosity there constantly lurks depression, and behind a depressive mood there often hides an

unconscious (or conscious but split off) sense of a tragic history.

In fact, grandiosity is the defense against depression, and depression is the defense against the deep pain over the loss of...

Grandiosity

He must excel brilliantly in everything he undertakes, which he is surely capable of doing

He, too, admires himself, for his qualities—his beauty, cleverness, talents—

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.

for nothing genuine that could have given inner strength and support had ever been developed.

He seeks insatiably for admiration, of which he never gets enough because admiration is not the same thing as love.

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.

Depression as the Reverse of Grandiosity

depression was coupled with grandiosity in many ways.

Depression sometimes appeared when grandiosity broke down

2: In the combination of alternating phases of grandiosity and depression, their common ground can be recognized. They are the two sides of a medal that can be described as the “false self,” a medal that was once actually won for achievement.

true satisfaction is no longer possible, since the right time for that now lies irrevocably in the past.

Again, as long as he is able to deny this need with the help of illusion—that is, with the intoxication of success—the old wound cannot heal.

only mourning for what he has missed, missed at the crucial time, can lead to real healing.*

Continuous performance of outstanding achievements may sometimes enable a person to maintain the illusion of the constant atten...

Such a person is usually able to ward off threatening depression with increased displays of brilliance, thereby deceiving both himself and those around him.

The depression is thus kept outside, and the grandiose one can look after his “poor” partner, protect her like a child, feel strong and indispensable,

A false self that has led to the loss of the potential true self

A fragility of self-esteem because of a lack of confidence in one’s own feelings and wishes

Perfectionism

• Denial of rejected feelings • A preponderance of exploitative relationships

An enormous fear of loss of love and

therefore a great readiness to conform • Split-off aggression • Oversensitivity • A readiness to feel shame and guilt • Restlessness.

Depression as Denial of the Self

Depression consists of a denial of one’s own emotional reactions. This denial begins in the service of an absolutely essential adaptation during childhood

When psychiatrists with decades of experience have never dared to face their own reality and have instead spent their time (and their parents’ time) talking about “dysfunctional families,” they will need a concept like a “Higher Power” or God to explain to themselves the “miracle” of healing. They will then behave like people who are faithfully trying to follow a map, without realizing that the first step they took was in the wrong direction.

Because they have lost the way from the very start, their “scientific” fidelity to the map doesn’t give them the expected results and doesn’t take them where they want to go.

We cannot really love if we are forbidden to know our truth, the truth about our parents and caregivers as well as about ourselves. We can only try to behave as if we were loving. But this hypocritical behavior is the opposite of love. It is confusing and deceptive, and it produces much helpless rage in the deceived person. This rage must be repressed in the presence of the pretended “love,” especially if one is dependent, as a child is, on the person who is masquerading in this illusion of love.

Only a child needs (and absolutely needs) unconditional love.

I so desperately wanted to be loved—and that meant, of course, to comply, to be obedient. It was actually a very, very conditional “love” that was being offered there.

As adults we don’t need unconditional love,

This is a childhood need, one that can never be fulfilled later in life,

Whenever she began, through her imaginative play, to have a true sense of herself, her parents would ask her to do something “more sensible”—to achieve something—and her inner world, which was just beginning to unfold, would be closed off to her. She reacted to this interference by withdrawing her feelings and becoming depressed,

as an adult this person allows herself to face such reminders and work with them, she will be able to feel the old rage,

The depression will then disappear, because its defensive function is no longer needed.

The extreme intensity of childhood feeling is to be found nowhere else, except in puberty.

usually more accessible than the earliest traumas, which are often hidden behind the picture of an idyllic childhood or even behind an almost complete amnesia.

Because grandiosity is the counterpart of depression within the narcissistic disturbance, the achievement of freedom from both forms of disturbance is hardly possible without deeply felt mourning about the situation of the former child.

If a person is able, during this long process, to experience the reality that he was never loved as a child for what he was but was instead needed and exploited for his achievements, success, and good qualities—and that he sacrificed his childhood for this form of love—he will be very deeply shaken, but one day he will feel the desire to end these efforts.

The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.

freedom cannot be achieved if its childhood roots are cut off. Our access to the true self is possible only when we no longer have to be afraid of the intense emotional world of early childhood.