Part of the Casswiki article series Books
The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self is a classic short book by Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller, originally published in German in 1979 as Das Drama des begabten Kindes, which reveals that one’s childhood trauma are narcissistic wounds that can fester and “color” the way we see the world and ourselves well into adulthood.
In this book, the author argues that the “gifted child” - the child who is more intelligent, more sensitive and more emotionally aware than other children — is so attuned to her parents’ “expectations” that the child does whatever it takes to fulfill these expectations while ignoring their own feelings and needs. Thus, by becoming the parents’ dream version of the “perfect child” while locking away their true feelings, that child loses their “true self”.