Download or read book The Drama of the Gifted Child written by and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-12-15 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “rare and compelling” (New York Magazine) bestseller examines childhood trauma and the enduring effects it has on an individual's management of repressed anger and pain. Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound book has provided millions of readers with an answer--and has helped them to apply it to their own lives. Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents' expectations and win their "love." Alice Miller writes, "When I used the word 'gifted' in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb.... Without this 'gift' offered us by nature, we would not have survived." But merely surviving is not enough. The Drama of the Gifted Child helps us to reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth.
Download or read book Prisoners Of Childhood reissue written by Alice Miller and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 1996-07-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “drama” of the gifted—i.e., sensitive, alert—child consists of his recognition at a very early age of his parents' needs and of his adaptation to those needs. In the process, he learns to repress rather than to acknowledge his own intense feelings because they are unacceptable to his parents. Although it will not always be possible to avoid these “ugly” feelings (anger, indignation, despair, jealousy, fear) in the future, they will split off, and the most vital part of the “true self” (a key phrase in Alice Miller's works) will not be integrated into the personality. This leads to emotional insecurity and loss of self, which are revealed in depression or concealed behind a facade of grandiosity.Alice Miller defines the ideal state of genuine vitality, of free access to the true self and to authentic individual feelings that have their roots in childhood, as “healthy narcissism.” Narcissistic disturbances, on the other hand, represent for her solitary confinement of the true self within the prison of the false self. This is regarded less as an illness than as a tragedy.The examples Alice Miller presents make us aware of the child's unarticulated suffering and of the tragedy of parents who are unavailable to their children—the same parents who, when they were children, were available to fill their parents' needs. In her psychoanalytical work, Dr. Miller found that her patients' ability to experience authentic feelings, especially feelings of sadness, had been for the most part destroyed; it was her task to help her patients try to regain that long-lost capacity for genuine feelings that is the source of natural vitality. Many people who have read her books have discovered within themselves for the first time in their lives the little child they once were. This may explain the unusually strong and deep reactions Alice Miller's books have evoked in so many readers from different countries. The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self is the original title of the book, which was published in Germany.
Download or read book From Rage to Courage Answers to Readers Letters written by Alice Miller and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-10-12 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects therapeutic answers to hundreds of reader letters, in a volume that explores the controversial connection between childhood trauma and physical illness, drug use, crime, and future cycles of abuse.
Download or read book Lost Childhood written by Annelex Hofstra Layson and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author recounts her childhood experiences as a Japanese prisoner during World War II.
Download or read book Prisoners Of Childhood written by Alice Miller and published by New York : Basic Books. This book was released on 1981-05-14 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "drama" of the gifted - i.e., sensitive, alert - child consists of his recognition at a very early age of his parents' needs and of his adaptation to these needs. In the process, he learns to repress rather than to acknowledge his own intense feelings because they are unacceptable to his parents. Although it will not always be possible to avoid these "ugly" feelings (anger, indignation, despair, jealousy, fear) in the future, they will split off, and the most vital part of the "true self" (a key phrase in Alice Miller's works) will not be integrated into the personality. This leads to emotional insecurity and loss of self, which are revealed in depression or concealed behind the facade of grandiosity. Alice Miller defines the ideal state of genuine vitality, of free access to the true self and to authentic individual feelings that have their roots in childhood, as "healthy narcissism". Narcissistic disturbances, on the other hand, represent for her solitary confinement of the true self within the prison of the false self. This is regarded less as an illness than as a tragedy. In her psychanalytical work, Dr. Miller found that her patients' ability to experience authentic feelings, especially feelings of sadness, had been for the most part destroyed; it was her task to help her patients try to regain that long-lost capacity for genuine feelings that is the source of natural vitality.
Download or read book Disrupted Childhoods written by Jane A. Siegel and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on interviews with nearly seventy youngsters and their mothers conducted at different points of their parents' involvement in the process, the data reveals the experiences of prisoners' children, their family life and social world.
Download or read book Banished Knowledge written by Alice Miller and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1991-09-01 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the bestselling classic The Drama of the Gifted Child—a book that believes that children are inherently good and traces all forms of criminal deeds to past mistreatments. In direct opposition to the Freudian drive theory, "Alice Miller writes lucidly and passionately, asks daring questions and sees through conventions that most of us take for granted" (San Francisco Chronicle).
Download or read book Free from Lies Discovering Your True Needs written by Alice Miller and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-06-07 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A clarion call from one of the great psychological mins of our time." Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco --
Download or read book Thou Shalt Not Be Aware written by Alice Miller and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 1998-10-15 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1984, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware explodes Freud's notions of "infantile sexuality" and helps to bring to the world's attention the brutal reality of child abuse, changing forever our thoughts of "traditional" methods of child-rearing. Dr. Miller exposes the harsh truths behind children's "fantasies" by examining case histories, works of literature, dreams, and the lives of such people as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Gustave Flaubert, and Samuel Beckett. Now with a new preface by Lloyd de Mause and a new introduction by the author, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware continues to bring an essential understanding to the confrontation and treatment of the devastating effects of child abuse.
Download or read book The Untouched Key written by Alice Miller and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-05-09 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As in her former books, Alice Miller again focusses on facts. She is as determined as ever to cut through the veil that, for thousands of years now, has been so meticulously woven to shroud the truth. And when she lifts that veil and brushes it aside, the results are astonishing, as is amply demonstrated by her analyses of the works of Nietzsche, Picasso, Kollwitz, Keaton and others. With the key shunned by so many for so long - childhood - she opens rusty looks and offers her readers a wealth of unexpected perspectives.What did Picasso express in "Guernica"? Why did Buster Keaton never smile? Why did Nietzsche heap so much opprobrium on women and religion, and lose his mind for eleven years? Why did Hitler and Stalin become tyrannical mass murderers? Alice Miller investigates these and other questions thoroughly in this book. She draws from her discoveries the conclusion that human beings are not "innately" destructive, that they are made that way by ignorance, abuse, and neglect, particularly if no sympathetic witness comes to their aid. She also shows why some mistreated children do not become criminals but instead bear witness as artists to the truth about their childhoods, even though in purely intuitive and unconscious ways.
Download or read book For Your Own Good written by Alice Miller and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2002-11-14 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Your Own Good, the contemporary classic exploring the serious if not gravely dangerous consequences parental cruelty can bring to bear on children everywhere, is one of the central works by Alice Miller, the celebrated Swiss psychoanalyst. With her typically lucid, strong, and poetic language, Miller investigates the personal stories and case histories of various self-destructive and/or violent individuals to expand on her theories about the long-term affects of abusive child-rearing. Her conclusions—on what sort of parenting can create a drug addict, or a murderer, or a Hitler—offer much insight, and make a good deal of sense, while also straying far from psychoanalytic dogma about human nature, which Miller vehemently rejects. This important study paints a shocking picture of the violent world—indeed, of the ever-more-violent world—that each generation helps to create when traditional upbringing, with its hidden cruelty, is perpetuated. The book also presents readers with useful solutions in this regard—namely, to resensitize the victimized child who has been trapped within the adult, and to unlock the emotional life that has been frozen in repression.
Download or read book The Little Prisoner How a childhood was stolen and a trust betrayed written by Jane Elliott and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the age of four, Jane Elliott was forced to carry a terrible secret... Dominated, bullied and sexually abused by her stepfather for 17 years, The Little Prisoner is a devastating true story of one girl’s struggle from freedom.
Download or read book Who Gets a Childhood written by William S. Bush and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Texas as a case study for understanding change in the American juvenile justice system over the past century, the author tells the story of three cycles of scandal, reform, and retrenchment, each of which played out in ways that tended to extend the privileges of a protected childhood to white middle- and upper-class youth, while denying those protections to blacks, Latinos, and poor whites. On the forefront of both progressive and "get tough" reform campaigns, Texas has led national policy shifts in the treatment of delinquent youth to a surprising degree. Changes in the legal system have included the development of courts devoted exclusively to young offenders, the expanded legal application of psychological expertise, and the rise of the children's rights movement. At the same time, broader cultural ideas about adolescence have also changed. Yet the author demonstrates that as the notion of the teenager gained currency after World War II, white, middle-class teen criminals were increasingly depicted as suffering from curable emotional disorders even as the rate of incarceration rose sharply for black, Latino, and poor teens. He argues that despite the struggles of reformers, child advocates, parents, and youths themselves to make juvenile justice live up to its ideal of offering young people a second chance, the story of twentieth-century juvenile justice in large part boils down to the exclusion of poor and nonwhite youth from modern categories of childhood and adolescence.
Download or read book The Truth Will Set You Free written by Alice Miller and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2007-03-21 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than twenty years ago, a little-known Swiss psychoanalyst wrote a book that changed the way many people viewed themselves and their world. In simple but powerful prose, the deeply moving Drama of the Gifted Child showed how parents unconsciously form and deform the emotional lives of their children. Alice Miller's stories about the roots of suffering in childhood resonated with readers, and her book soon became a backlist best seller. In The Truth Will Set You Free Miller returns to the intensely personal tone and themes of her best-loved work. Only by embracing the truth of our past histories can any of us hope to be free of pain in the present, she argues. Miller uses vivid true stories to reveal the perils of early-childhood mistreatment and the dangers of mindless obedience to parental will. Drawing on the latest research on brain development, she shows how spanking and humiliation produce dangerous levels of denial, which leads in turn to emotional blindness and to mental barriers that cut off awareness and the ability to learn new ways of acting. If this cycle repeats itself, the grown child will perpetrate the same abuse on later generations -- a message vitally important, especially given the increasing popularity of programs like Tough Love and of "child disciplinarians" like James Dobson. The Truth Will Set You Free will provoke and inform all readers who want to know Alice Miller's latest thinking on this important subject.
Download or read book Children of Incarcerated Parents written by Katherine Gabel and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 1995 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No descriptive material is available for this title.
Download or read book Prison Island written by Colleen Frakes and published by Zest Books ™. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: McNeil Island in Washington state was the home of the last prison island in the US, accessible only by air or sea. It was also home to about fifty families, including Colleen Frakes' when she was growing up. Colleen's parents—like nearly everyone else on the island—both worked in the prison, where her father was the prison's captain and her mother worked in security. The island functioned as a "company town," where housing was assigned based on rank, and even children's actions could have an impact on a family's livelihood: If you broke a rule, your family could be kicked out of their home. In the graphic memoir Prison Island, Colleen tells her story of growing up on the McNeil Island. Beyond the irregularities of living in a company town near a prison, remote island life posed other challenges to Colleen and her sister. Regular teenage activities like ordering a pizza or going to the movies became extremely complicated endeavors on the island, and the small-town dynamics were amplified by their isolation from surrounding cities. Prison Island tells the story of a typical girl growing up in atypical circumstances using stark, engaging graphic novel panels. It's a story that is simultaneously familiar and foreign, and readers will be surprised to see parts of themselves in Colleen's unique experience.
Download or read book Paths of Life written by Alice Miller and published by Virago Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do our experiences of pain and love affect our future? The author shows people who have suffered great loneliness in childhood and now, as adults, are still trapped in isolation. Encounters with others from loving families open them to new worlds in which they can learn to change.
