Problems of the Gifted Child

Alice Miller, in Prisoners of Childhood: The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self, first identifies the problem of the gifted child [or the child who is "sensitive," "good," "dutiful" and "exemplary" (viii-ix)] and then offers suggestions for the solution of that problem. The problem specifically is the loss of self experienced by the gifted child who has learned to be available to his parents---especially his mother---while his parents were unavailable to him. The solution to the problem is a psychoanalysis which leads to the adult's discovery of "his long-lost authentic sense of being truly alive" (x).

The gifted child essentially takes the parents' problems onto himself, and neglects his own emotional and psychological reality. He abandons his own self for the sake of the narcissistic parents. The mother, for example, desperately needs the child's love to feel as if she herself truly exists, and the gifted child senses the requirements of this role and tries to fill them. The result for the child is a "splitting-off" of the authentic self: "For the majority of sensitive people, the true self remains deeply and thoroughly hidden. . . . Such people are enamored of an idealized, conforming, false self." The "true self" becomes lost in "'solitary confinement' within the prison of the false self" (ix).

Most gifted patients of Miller have as children "helped capably to take care of their younger siblings" (5). In one way or another, they were as children

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all the gifted child or adult knows. The solution to this dilemma is, in Miller's view, a psychoanalysis which helps the adult learn to love himself in terms of first coming to recognize, then express and value his own emotions and sensations. Miller's book is effective in part because she refuses to place judgment on the parents for their failures in terms of availability to the sensitive child and their manipulation of the child. In addition, she does not offer grandiose schemes for reforming the world to prevent such parental failures now or in the future: The more insight one gains into the unintentional and unconscious manipulation of children by their parents, the fewer illusions one has about the possibility of changing the world or of prophylaxis against neurosis (27). One of the obstacles to successful treatment of the gifted child in such a predicament is the prejudice against the idea of narcissism. By no means does Miller suggest that the child adopt the kind of neurotic narcissism of the parents in such a relationship. To the contrary, she suggests that the neurosis of the untreated child is the result of a kind of absorption by the child of the parents' neurosis: "In psychoanalytic terms, one could say that it

Category: Psychology - P