Copy of The Drama of the Gifted Child; Excerpt 3
All excerpts taken from the audio version of The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller, which can be found on YouTube
This excerpt begins at approximately 2:31:24;
In an effecting and angry letter from Steten (Hermann) Hesse wrote to his parents;
If I were a bigot and not a human being, I could perhaps hope for your understanding.
All the same, his release from the home was on the condition of his 'improvement', so, the boy improved.
In a later poem dedicated to his parents, denial and idealisation are restored, he reproaches himself that it had been his character that had made life so difficult for his parents, many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not living up to their parent's expectations.
This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy his parent's narcissistic needs, no argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest period, and from that they derive their intensity and ardousity.
That probably greatest of narcissistic wounds, not to have been loved just as one truly was, cannot heal without the work of mourning
It can either be more or less successfully resisted and covered up, as in grandiousity and depression, or constantly torn open again in the compulsion to repeat.
We encounter this last case in obsessive neurosis and in perversion. The mother's or father's scornful reactions have been introjected - the mother often reacted with surprise and horror, aversion and disgust, shock and indignation, or with fear and panic to the child's most natural impulses.
And so these have been the mother's reactions to such natural impulses, as the child's auto-erotic behaviour, investigating and discovering his own body, urination and defecation, touching and playing with his own body, or to his curiosity or rage in response to failure or mistreatment.
Later, all these experiences remain closely linked to the mother's horrified eyes, and this clearly emerges in the transference.
The patient goes through torment, when he reveals to the therapist his hithero secret sexual and auto-erotic behaviour.
He may of course also relate all this quite unemotionally, merely giving information as if he was speaking of some other person.
Such a report, however, will not help him to break out of his loneliness, nor lead him back to the reality of his childhood. It is only when he is encouraged not to fend off his feelings of shame and fear (and guilt), but rather to accept and experience them, that he can discover what he felt as a child - his most harmless behaviour will cause him to feel mean, dirty, or completely annihilated.
He himself will be surprised to realise how long this repressed feeling of shame has survived, and how it has found a place alongside his tolerant and advanced views of sexuality.
These experiences first show the patient that his early adaption by means of splitting was not an expression of cowardice, but that it was really his only chance to escape this sense of impending destruction.
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