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

[staranise]

Hey, it could be worse. You could be reading The Courage to Heal.

[rachelmanija]

Awww, I have such a fondness for that one. It needs to be taken with large handfuls of salt, but it was extremely helpful to me way back when.

[staranise]

*snerk* And I'm a tiny bit of an Alice Miller fan. There's so much in the early 80s phenomenological/qualitative stuff that makes the much more rigorous and, well, truthful modern literature seem positively anemic.

[kore]

Yeah, Alice went batshit later, but Gifted Child really did help me realize how much my parents had invested in me being a Prodigy Dolly and that it was okay for me to disagree with their narrative that my childhood was Utterly Perfect, which meant a lot at the time -- I think I was 13 or 14.

OH, apparently she revised it in 1997? http://www.alice-miller.com/books_en.php?page=7 Oh. Oh dear. I wonder how different it is. ....LOL, I checked LibraryThing and I have three copies: two of the 1981 edition and one of the 1996.

[rivkat]

I wrote a paper in college on trauma narratives in popular self-help books including The Courage to Heal v. trauma narratives in Stephen King. I had a good time, which says something about me.

[rachelmanija]

Summary, please!

[rivkat]

Oh, now I'm in trouble. My dad threw out all my old papers, so I'm just riffing on my memories: King follows the narrative of the abused child in those self-help books very closely, particularly with respect to children, usually but not always girls, sexually abused by fathers or in sexualized relationships with their fathers. Healing comes from remembering, speaking out, and discovering that healthy adult sexuality exists. King's often more explicitly feminist (for Second Wave values of feminist) than the self-help books.

[kore]

That sounds cool!

[kore]

OMFG so many people gave me copies of that book. "You have so many of the traits, even if there was nobody in your family who could have done it, it MUST have happened to you!" Bleah.