In order to survive, she declared, sensitive, "gifted" children sense the emotional needs of their neurotic parents and disown their own. Thus, she found hundreds of thousands readers who knew themselves to be mistreated in childhood the title "The Drama of the Gifted Child" has become a catchphrase. Nearly monomaniacally and argumentatively did Alice Miller champion her cause and fell out with colleagues, who did not exactly share her views. Her central thesis: the key to a peaceful society lies in an early socialization with empathy and without violence a thesis based on predecessors like Ellen Key ("The Century of the Child," 1900) or Janusz Korczak ("The Child's Right to Respect," 1918). It was her point to sensitize the public to the right of children to empathy and non-violent education, and the psychological and social damages caused by "Black Pedagogy" and false taboos in families. It was Miller's credo that children should no longer serve as containers for the emotional waste of the adults.Īlice Miller had a mission. Above all with her first books, "The Drama of the Gifted Child," "For Your Own Good" and "Thou Shalt Not be Aware," published, as all the following books, by Suhrkamp, she celebrated international triumphs. Parents, teachers, therapists should learn to see and feel from the perspective of the child. Miller's bestsellers, translated into 30 languages, demanded a radical paradigm change of society in dealing with children. The outline of the dismal life of a child could be a case study in one of the books of Alice Miller (1923–2010), the great Swiss advocate for the rights of children. Although things are regimented and catholic there, it is for him a recovery from the parental madhouse. When he is seventeen, the adolescent pushes through that he can go to a boarding school. In every nanny, whom the son comes to trust, the mother scents a rival and dismisses her. The son is beaten by his father and coerced into compulsive washing rituals, which he perceives as sexual assaults. Back in his parents' house, the eight year old feels like a stranger because his parents talk Polish among themselves, which he does not understand. Even on his first day of school, the mother stays away. There, on the peninsula Au by Lake Zurich, hardly 30 kilometers away from home, his parents do not visit him a single time. The son, the troublesome bed-wetter, is taken to an asylum for children. The horrified mother accuses the father of having concealed genetic risks in the family. When the son is six, a daughter is born, a child with down syndrome. Finally, an aunt takes pity on him and accommodates him for half a year. For two weeks, he lived with a female acquaintance, who was skilled at child care. Shortly after his birth, the parents gave their son away. The newborn had "refused" her breast, the mother later complains, she had felt rejected, her feelings had been hurt by her own child. A child, who just has come into the world, won't breastfeed. But rather the attempt to understand deeply ingrained traumas. The book, which he now has written at the age of 63, is not an accusation. Her own son came to know a very different woman. Outwardly, Alice Miller stood for the empathetic and non-violent education of children, thereby becoming a star of pedagogy. The Mask of the Children's Rights Activist "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.Martin Miller's book about his mother Alice "Full of wisdom and perception."-Anthony Storr, "New Republic" "The Drama of the Gifted Child" is the first step toward helping readers reclaim their lives by discovering their own needs and their own truth."A book that patients prescribe.the therapists are reading it because their patients are recommending it." "-Washington Post Book World" This poignant and thought-provoking book shows how narcissistic parents form and deform the lives of their children. They in turn inflict the same legacy of repression on their own children. Never allowed to express their true feelings, and having lost touch with their true selves, they act out their repressed feelings with episodes of depression and compulsive behavior. As charming performers who skillfully reflect their parents expectations, far too many children grow into adults driven to greater and greater achievements by an underlying sense of worthlessness.
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