THIS BOOK CHANGED MY LIFE YEARS AGO!
IT'S CHANGING IT AGAIN!

Fazla çıkarım yapamadığım bir kitaptı. Şunuda söylemeliyim ki kişisel gelişim sevmiyorum ben.

Η Alice Miller ήταν μια σπουδαία ψυχαναλύτρια που έφυγε από τη ζωή το 2010 σε ηλικία 87 ετών. Το βιβλίο αυτό μου το σύστησε ένας καθηγητής μου στο πανεπιστήμιο ο οποίος έχει και αυτός φύγει σε νεαρή ηλικία από ζωή.

Έτσι μοιραία το κείμενο του έχει συνδεθεί μέσα μου με ανθρώπους που αγωνίστηκαν για να καταλάβουν οι γύρω τους πως τίποτα δεν είναι τυχαίο, πως δεν υπάρχουν απλά "κακοί άνθρωποι" και πως πέρα από όποια γενετική προδιάθεση, η κάθε μορφή κακοποίησης στην παιδική μας ηλικία ακόμη και εκείνη που εντάσσεται στα πλαίσια της "μαύρης παιδαγωγικής" μπορεί να έχει ολέθρια αποτελέσματα (ατομικά ή κοινωνικοπολιτικά)

Η θεωρία της Miller στηρίζεται στις πλάτες γιγάντων όπως ο Freud όμως βλέπει και παραπέρα εξηγώντας γιατί τελικά οι ασθενείς του δεύτερου δεν ξεπερνούσαν πάντα τις νευρώσεις τους, παρόλο που αναγνώριζαν τα δράματα της παιδικής τους ηλικίας, τότε πού αισθανόταν ανυπεράσπιστοι μπροστά σε ταπεινώσεις, βία ή εξουσιαστικές τακτικές.

Το βιβλίο είναι πάντα επίκαιρο. Να το διαβάσετε "όσο πιο έγκαιρα γίνεται" όπως μου είχε πει και ο καθηγητής μου. Δεν ξέρω αν ένα βιβλίο μπορεί να μας κάνει καλύτερους γονείς ή πιο συνειδητοποιημένους ανθρώπους ψυχικά, ανακαλύπτοντας το πληγωμένο παιδί μέσα μας. Πάντως βρίσκετε σε καλό δρόμο, αναμφισβήτητα.
Να το διαβάσετε.

ΥΓ. Η γραφή του είναι απόλυτα κατανοητή χωρίς επιστημονική jargon.

A very good example of somebody who is suffering from confirmation bias; the author interprets everything in a way to support her theory of repressed memory.

3.5/5 ✨ Αν σκεφτεί κανείς ότι επί πολλά χρόνια είχα αλλάξει τον τονισμό μίας σημαντικής λέξης του τίτλου του βιβλίου και διάβαζα "φύλακες" αντί για "φυλακές", μπορεί να υποψιαστεί πως είχα ασυνείδητα υποθέσει ότι το συγκεκριμένο έργο διακατέχεται από μία αρκετά οπτιμιστική οπτική.

Ωστόσο, ο τόνος βρίσκεται στην λήγουσα για κάποιον λόγο και αυτό αποδεικνύεται πολύ γρήγορα, καθώς η Alice Miller μιλάει εκτεταμένως για το παιδικό τραύμα, τις κακοποιητικές συμπεριφορές γονέων προς τα παιδιά τους, τον ανέκφραστο πόνο και την καταπιεσμένη οργή, την θλίψη που παραβλέπεται και το συναίσθημα που νεκρώνει. Η συγγραφέας ασπάζεται την άποψη πως το τραύμα οδηγεί στην απομάκρυνση από τον αληθινό εαυτό και στην δημιουργία ενός ψευδούς εαυτού - ντυμένου και σουλουπωμένου με βάση τις προσδοκίες και τις φιλοδοξίες της μητέρας - και κατ' επέκταση στην διαμόρφωση ενηλίκων ανασφαλών, μόνων και συναισθηματικά παραγκωνισμένων, που με την σειρά τους βγάζουν τις δικές τους ανασφάλειες στα παιδιά που πρόκειται να φέρουν στην ζωή.

Επιπλέον, η συγγραφέας αναφέρεται σε διάφορους μηχανισμούς άμυνας που χρησιμοποιούνται από τα παιδιά ώστε να επιβιώσουν, στην εμφάνιση της κατάθλιψης ή των ιδεών μεγαλείου - δηλαδή τις δύο όψεις του ίδιου νομίσματος σύμφωνα με την συγγραφέα - αλλά και στο μονοπάτι προς την ίαση και την θεραπεία που προφανώς και φέρει το όνομα της ψυχοθεραπείας.

Αν και συμφωνώ στο ότι η παιδική ηλικία είναι καθοριστική για την μετέπειτα πορεία μας, καθώς και στο ότι το τραύμα όντως (ανα)διαμορφώνει τον χαρακτήρα μας, αρνούμαι να αποδεχτώ μια ντετερμινιστική σειρά γεγονότων που θέλουν τους γονείς ως ακούσιους καταπιεστές και τα παιδιά ως άτυχους καταπιεσμένους. Οι παράγοντες για την εμφάνιση ή μη κάποιας δυσλειτουργικής συμπεριφοράς είναι πολλαπλοί: βιολογικοί, κοινωνικοί, οικογενειακοί, γενετικοί, ατομικοί. Η υπαιτιότητα δεν είναι πάντοτε ή/και αποκλειστικά της μητέρας και η κατάθλιψη δεν έρχεται πάντα λόγω του πρώιμου παιδικού τραύματος.

Το να αποδέχεσαι έναν ντετερμινιστικό κύκλο σημαντικών ή μη γεγονότων μπορεί να είναι είτε απελευθερωτικό και ανακουφιστικό, είτε πεσιμιστικό και θλιβερό, είναι θέμα οπτικής. Όμως ανεξάρτητα από την σκοπιά του καθενός, παραμένει κάτι περιοριστικό, κάτι απόλυτο και δεδομένο που αψηφά την ύπαρξη της ελεύθερης βούλησης και της προσωπικής ευθύνης και ρίχνει τον κάθε άνθρωπο στον βούρκο ενός ματαιωτικού περιορισμού.

Και εάν κάτι σε αυτή την γη δεν πρέπει να περιορίζεται είναι η ανθρώπινη φύση. Αντιθέτως εμένα μου μοιάζει τόσο ευέλικτη και πολυδιάστατη, τόσο αεικίνητη και ρευστή, τόσο ελκυστικά ανεξερεύνητη. Δύσκολο να την βάλεις σε καλούπι, πόσο μάλλον να προδικάσεις για αυτήν, να την κατηγοριοποιήσεις και να την ταξινομήσεις.

Based on the title, I had thought this book would be about gifted children, specifically. It isn't, really. In fact, I can only recall her mentioning giftedness in a passage about Hermann Hesse (which was fascinating). I wasn't—nor do I have—a wunderkind so I was pleasantly surprised by how much this ultimately resonated with me on a personal level.

Alice Miller said, herself, that her ideas are more fully developed in later books, two of which I've read. Here, there are still some remnants of *shudder* Freud. But when a book makes me pause to contemplate as frequently as this one did, I can't give it any less than 5 stars.

Everyone should read Alice Miller.

One of the most important books in my life.

Those who have experienced insecure or disorganized attachment to their parents as a result of absent or authoritarian parenting, may experience the impact for the rest of their lives. Such parenting can interrupt the bonding process, depriving a young child of the opportunity to feel safe and loved, and ultimately of developing a healthy sense of well-being. As they grow into adulthood, they may try to compensate for that lack of a healthy sense of self by seeking praise and accolades from devotees in the outside world— sometimes at all costs. It becomes almost a matter of survival.

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In his book Humankind, the author treats the terms placebo and nocebo as psychological outlooks. Placebo is positive and encouraging and nocebo is the opposite. These insights complement Alice Miller's book.

My mother was nocebo. My parents were married young and lived through The Great Depression as adults. My dad went to college and medical school during this time and was drafted the day after he finished his medical residency at Boston General Hospital. After the War, they set up my dad's solo medical practice in the small New Hampshire mill town they were from. While my father did the doctoring, my mother ran the business side. After 17 long years, my dad's mid-life crisis resulted in the radical move of our family to the SF Bay Area when I was 7.

I only figured out recently that these experiences did not foster resilience in my mother, rather she may have had PTSD as a result. She was agoraphobic and had a very negative outlook. Her attitude was "why bother?" She was always advising us to give up, to quit. Not the message you need from a parent. My father finally came out, in a letter to me, and admitted she was crippled by fear. He made the mistake of covering for her at all costs at the expense of the children.

If you are nocebo, you're going to be sad, negative, and pessimistic, which turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. My mom's perspective, and my dad's unconditional support of her, did profound damage to the children that ended in tragedy. This is no way to live.

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A few insights from the book....

"Where there is no parental respect for a child's feelings, he will seek refuge from his pain in ideologies. Nationalism, racism, and fascism are in fact nothing other than ideological guises of the flight from painful, unconscious memories of endured contempt."

"It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child’s curiosity, for example (there are questions one should not ask), and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning we offer him special coaching for his scholastic difficulties."

"We could make great progress in becoming more honest, respectful, and conscious, thus less destructive, if religious leaders could acknowledge and respect these simple psychological laws. Instead of ignoring them, they should open their eyes to the vast damage produced by hypocrisy, in families and in society as a whole."

"A child has a primary need from the very beginning of her life to be regarded and respected as the person she really is at any given time."

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Winston Churchill had bad parents but didn't fully realize it.

His biographer, William Manchester explains....

“My mother,” Churchill writes, “always seemed to me a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power. She shone for me like the Evening Star.” In reality Lady Randolph, the American-born Jennie Jerome, was a beautiful, shallow, diamond-studded panther of a woman who neglected him shamefully. Later, when Winston grew to manhood, she found him “interesting,” but she didn’t like children.

His perception of his father was even more distorted...

In Amid These Storms Churchill wrote: “The greatest and most powerful influence in my early life was of course my father…. He saw no reason why the old glories of Church and State, of King and country, should not be reconciled with modern democracy; or why the masses of working people should not becomes the chief defenders of those ancient institutions by which their liberty and progress had been achieved.” History’s verdict is very different. Randolph was a shallow political demagogue whose star briefly crossed the parliamentary firmament in the mid-1880s, when he became Chancellor of the Exchequer and then, within six months, owing to his extraordinarily bad judgment, plunged out of sight.

Emotionally abandoned by both, young Winston blamed himself. Needing outlets for his own welling adoration, he created images of them as he wished they were, and the less he saw of them, the easier that transformation became. His suppressed resentment at their neglect had to be directed elsewhere. Thus he became a difficult child and a wretched student. All his life he would be plagued by spells of depression—“Black Dog” as he called them. Love, he had come to believe, was something that had to be earned, and he sought it in achievement, becoming a creature of ambition and raw energy.

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The author Hermann Hesse is another stunning example.

He was highly repressed as a child by his hard-line parents. (Both his parents and grandparents were missionaries). They saw their son as obstreperous and thus to be brought to heel.

His father wrote:

"Hermann, who was considered almost a model of good behavior in the boys’ house is sometimes hardly to be borne. Though it would be very humiliating for us [!], I am earnestly considering whether we should not place him in an institution or another household. We are too nervous and weak for him, and the whole household [is] too undisciplined and irregular. He seems to be gifted for everything: he observes the moon and the clouds, extemporizes for long periods on the harmonium, draws wonderful pictures with pencil or pen, can sing quite well when he wants to, and is never at a loss for a rhyme."

The parents instilled tremendous guilt into their gifted son for not conforming, a guilt which he never entirely escaped. In Hermann Hesse's story, “A Child’s Heart” about his fundamentalist parents we read: "If I were to reduce all my feelings and their painful conflicts to a single name, I can think of no other word but: dread. It was dread, dread and uncertainty, that I felt in all those hours of shattered childhood felicity: dread of punishment, dread of my own conscience, dread of stirrings in my soul which I considered forbidden and criminal."

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I told my story in this review.....

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Mellbevágó, letaglózó olvasmány. Szomorú, ha az ember magára ismerhet, és felemelő, hogy magyarázatokra lelhet.
A szüleinek kiszolgáltatott gyerek drámája, létezésének csekélysége, mint a későbbi ürességérzet, depresszió, a felnőttkori kudarcokra adott válaszok. Alice Miller tétele alapján érdemes a múltban, a gyerekkorban vájkálni felnőttkori viselkedésünk, beütéseink megértéséhez, énünk felfedezéséhez. Miller nem színes szalagokból szőtt kapaszkodót nyújt, nem hárítja a felelősséget a szülőre, hanem megalapozottan mutat rá, mint illetékesre. Hiszen a szülő vállal felelősséget a gyerekért, és nem fordítva. Igaz, azelőtt meg ez a szülő volt kitéve az ő szüleinek, és így tovább.
Az megjelenés óta már továbbfejlődött ez a szemlélet, további kutatások hosszú időre visszamenő transzgenerációs traumákat is kimutattak, génjeink, sejtjeink is raktározzák a gyerekkorban átélt, aztán tudat alatt megbúvó traumákat. Hiszen a gyerek mindenre fogékony, noha a felnőttek ezt hajlamosak gyakran elfelejteni.

At slightly over a hundred pages, this slim volume addresses the effects of narcissistic parenting and is one of the more highly-regarded works on the subject within the treatment community.

Alice Miller, a Swiss psychologist with twenty years in clinical practice, had come to reject traditional forms of analysis and broke from the theories of Jung and Freud - concluding the standard approach to such emotional injuries left too much power in the parent's court. The primary caretakers (most frequently mothers) were not being held to account for the damage they themselves had suffered and had unconsciously passed on. Holding the perpetrator inviolate, she felt, made it virtually impossible for victims to come to terms with the who and why of their experience and the reality of their plight. The "gifted child" she refers to is the child whose natural gifts were forced underground at an early age because they threatened the parent. Recovery, as Miller perceives it, lies in resurrecting that oppressive dynamic and feeling (frequently for the first time) what could not be felt in childhood without the terrifying loss of a mother's love. Such emotions might include deep pockets of rage, fear, frustration, despair, and a clear sense of danger.

I think this is invaluable material for anyone weighing the prospect of entering therapy. Miller does not sugarcoat the process. Few will describe so precisely what it is for an adult not only to recover those childhood traumas but to re-experience them as that child did, in all their nightmarish proportion. Such an emergence of raw, infantile emotion can prove profoundly shocking to the adult mind. Unhinging. Disabling. And once that Pandora's Box is opened? There's really no way to close it again. This book, in all its fierce revelation, makes an excellent case for the importance of finding the right therapist from the outset - even if it means interviewing five or seven or twelve.

Where I take issue with Miller, and I do take issue here, is in her passionate insistence on the existence of a "true" self. If we are to accommodate influence, distortion, solipsism, and the ever-shifting nexus of authenticity itself, then I suspect a nature can only ever be temporarily true and, if sought on a psychic map, will forever be sailing North, South, East and West, to a bewildering variety of foreign locales - each of which will require the re-establishment of anchorage and the reassessment of our definition of "true." That's my sense of it, anyway, and stands as a minor complaint in the grander scheme of a useful book.

This is an excellent book for learning more about yourself, how you became the way you are, and also as a possible source of help regarding the causes and cure of any emotional difficulties you may have. It will also help you better understand the people around you and how they came to be the way they are. It is a good source of psychological knowledge. Alice Miller shows very clearly how the way our parents raised us when we are children formed us psychologically.

Alice Miller wrote her second book, For Your Own Good, as a continuation of this book, and I think the detailed examples and analysis she provides in the second book will be very interesting to anybody who likes Drama of the Gifted Child.

Another thing that I found helpful was to re-read Drama of the Gifted Child some time after reading For Your Own Good, to see how much more I was able to learn from it after having some time to react emotionally to what I had read the first time. I learned so much that I was inspired to keep re-reading her books periodically to continue learning more and more.

Initially Alice Miller's claims about the extent of damage done to us by our parents seemed exaggerated to me, and I felt that one should not say such things about parents. After recovering somewhat from my parent's punishment of me for saying the truth to them about themselves during my childhood, I am now able to realize that it is true that the most commonly practiced child-rearing practices devastate us psychologically, and that I need to re-discover what my parents did to me during my childhood and how I felt about it in order to recover my psychological health.

For those who have the ability to heal from the traumas they suffered by feeling the repressed feelings from those traumas, Alice Miller's books provide enough information to provoke a long-term emotional healing process. This healing improves your psychological health, and, she claims, will eventually lead to the re-discovery of your true self, your untraumatized soul. I hope this is true.

Highly recommended.

Nuostabi knyga. Jos poveikį bei nagrinėjamą temą apie tikrosios savasties paieškas per išsilaisvinimą nuo tariamosios savasties galiu apibūdinti šia trumpa citata: "Tai ne grįžimas namo, nes namų niekada nebuvo. Tai namų atradimas.".