The Drama of the Gifted Child

The Search for the True Self, Third Edition
by Alice Miller

Dec 23, 1996
Paperback
US $13.95
CAN $17.00
ISBN: 9780465016907
ISBN-10: 0465016901
Published by Basic Books

 

Description

Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound book has provided thousands of readers with an answer—and has helped them to apply it to their own lives. Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents’ expectations and win their ”love.” Alice Miller writes, ”When I used the word ’gifted’ in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb… Without this ’gift’ offered us by nature, we would not have survived.” But merely surviving is not enough. The Drama of the Gifted Child helps us to reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth.

Reviews


”Rare and compelling in its compassion and its unassuming eloquence…her examples are so vivid and so ordinary that they touch the hurt child in us all.”
New York Magazine

”An unpretentious little book with an amazing impact…Many readers find themselves portrayed with an accuracy and empathy that seem uncanny, as if its author had been a silent, unseen witness to their childhoods [and] their innermost and secret selves.”
Vogue

”Narcissism has rarely been written about with the clarity and quiet insight of this modest, thought-provoking work.”
Newsweek

”A book that patients prescribe…the therapists are reading it because their patients are recommending it.”
Washington Post Book World

”Full of wisdom and perception.”
— Anthony Storr, The New Republic

Selling Territory


World Excluding UK & Commonwealth