Drama of the Gifted Child, by Alice Miller

[rachelmanija]

Getting a jump on some school reading for next quarter.

I have only just started this, but... is it just me, or is she annoyingly prone to assuming that everyone experiences similar things in the same way and has the same reactions, and so insisting that anyone who says they feel differently from what she expects is denying or repressing the ONE TRUTH?

Drama of the Gifted Child

Comments

[kore]

Not quite that simplified. NOT trying to defend her here, but a little bit of the background: she was a Polish Jew who lived through WWII in Warsaw (her books were first published in German). Thou Shalt Not Be Aware was the first book she wrote after her break with psychoanalysis and I think it's also important to understand she was writing in 1981, when it was still difficult for people to analyze Hitler. For once Wiki is pretty good here:

Miller proposed here that German traumatic childrearing produced Hitler and a serial killer of children named Jürgen Bartsch. Children learn to take their parent's point of view against themselves "for their own good." In the case of Hitler, he learned to take his parents' point of view against himself, against Jews, and against other groups of people. For Miller, the traditional pedagogic process was manipulative, resulting in grown-up adults deferring excessively to authorities, even to tyrannical leaders or dictators, like Hitler.

Yeah, it's kinda BATSHIT, but no more batshit than a lot of psychoanalytic theory, and it annoys me when people say "she said child abuse caused WWII," which is like saying "Albert Einstein said everything's relative" (and they mean morally speaking). No, not really. I don't agree with her, but I think it's important to realize what she actually said.

[vass]

The book was For Their Own Good, and I was overstating her thesis for effect. Basically, she argued that German parenting in the generation before WW2 was extremely authoritarian, with the expectation that the child would obey instantly without stopping to question or think. Miller argued that this carried over into their adult life, and made them more receptive to fascism.