Review: The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the one that launched them all, everything about "inner child," "re-parenting," etc. A classic, written with almost the sole purpose of celebrating the subjectivity of the child's lived experience. Read it ages ago in graduate school for developmental psychology--it left an indelible impact and unwittingly spurred forth my own analytic-based psychotherapy. No single book champions so vigorously and vociferously the child's right to be taken on his/her terms. This book has been criticized for being abstruse, not clear, turgid, and dense, populated with jargon. All of this is true. But this does not take away from it, because the content is that priceless. It's a slim little volume, and if you do nothing other than simply skim it, it'll be well worth your time.

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