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

by Alice Miller

Parents who did not experience this climate as children are themselves deprived; throughout their lives they will continue to look for what their own parents could not give them at the appropriate time—the presence of a person who is completely aware of them and takes them seriously.

The most efficacious objects for substitute gratification are a parent’s own children.

since their caring is essential for his existence, he does all he can to avoid losing them. From the very first day onward, he will muster all his resources to this end, like a small plant that turns toward the sun in order to survive.

However paradoxical this may seem, a child is at the mothers disposal. The mother can feel herself the center of attention, for her child’s eyes follow her everywhere. A child cannot run away from her as her own mother once did. A child can be brought up so that it becomes what she wants it to be.

“What would have happened if I had appeared before you sad, needy, angry, furious? Where would your love

have been then?

I can rage when you hurt me, without losing you.”

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.

I lived in a glass house into which my mother could look at any time. In a glass house, however, you cannot conceal anything without giving yourself away, except by hiding it under the ground. And then you cannot see it yourself, either.

Robert, now thirty-one, could never be sad or cry as a child, without being aware that he was making his beloved mother unhappy and very unsure of herself.

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.

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.

Superficially, her despair about getting old seemed to be due to the absence of sexual contacts but, at a deeper level, early fears of being abandoned were now aroused, and this woman had no new conquests with which to counteract them. All her substitute mirrors were broken. She again stood helpless and confused, as the small girl once did before her mother’s face, in which she found not herself but only her mother’s confusion.

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

A preponderance of exploitative relationships

• A readiness to feel shame and guilt

Restlessness.

Today I would say: Only a child needs (and absolutely needs) unconditional love. We must give it to the children who are entrusted to us. We must be able to love and accept them whatever they do, not only when they smile charmingly but also when they cry and scream.

As adults we don’t need unconditional love, not even from our therapists. This is a childhood need, one that can never be fulfilled later in life, and we are playing with illusions if we have never mourned this lost opportunity.

How have you brought me to feel these silly things? Maybe, by teaching me so early that a child doesn’t deserve respect, that he is not a person, that he can be used as a toy to play with, that he can be ignored, mistreated, threatened without any consequences.

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, because she could not take the risk of a normal reaction—rage, perhaps.

The extreme intensity of childhood feeling is to be found nowhere else, except in puberty. The recollection of the pains of puberty, however—of not being able to understand or to place our own impulses—is 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.

What an unfair situation it is when a child is opposed by two big, strong adults, as by a wall; but we call it “consistency in upbringing” when we refuse to let the child complain about one parent to the other.

Common to them all is the sense of strength it gives the adult, who cannot control his or her own fears, to face the weak and helpless child’s fear and be able to control fear in another person.

The mother often reacted with surprise and horror, aversion and disgust, shock and indignation, or fear and panic to the child’s most natural impulses—his autoerotic behavior, investigation and discovery of his own body, urination and defecation, or his curiosity or rage in response to betrayal and injustice.

The patient goes through torment when he reveals to the therapist his hitherto secret sexual and autoerotic behavior. He may, of course, also relate this material quite unemotionally,

He is surprised indeed when he realizes how long this repressed feeling of shame has survived, and how it has found a place alongside his tolerant and advanced views of sexuality.

Can a mother be so menacing? Yes, if she was always proud of being her mother’s dear, good daughter,

orgasm (for instance, with a fetish) can be achieved only in a climate of self-contempt;

At the beginning of his novel Demian, Hermann Hesse describes the “goodness and purity” of a parental home in which there is no room for a child’s fibs.

The child is alone with his sin and feels that he is depraved, wicked, and outcast, though nobody scolds him, since no one as yet knows the “terrible facts.”

Like most parents [writes Hesse], mine were no help with the new problems of puberty, to which no reference was ever made.

A child’s parents seem to him to be free of sexual desires, for they have means and possibilities of hiding their sexual activities, whereas the child is always under surveillance.†