You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Prisoners of Childhood deals with the crippling influence of traumatic early childhood experience and the tenacity of its hold on adults. It is mainly concerned with the “narcissistically cathected” children of narcissistic mothers who use their children to satisfy their neglected narcissistic needs.
Miller is concerned with a special category of children, the gifted, who, in addition, were either only children or first-born. She also deals with a special category of mother, with those having a narcissistic disturbance, who “were extremely insecure and often suffered from depression.” She stresses the serious consequences to the child of an adaptation that is geared to the mother's narcissistic needs, of “the impossibility of experiencing certain feelings of his own (such as jealousy, envy, anger, loneliness, impotence, anxiety).” Although she briefly analyzes the literary output of renowned artists that confirm her observations of patients she has either treated herself or whose treatment she has supervised, her discussion does not distinguish those patients from the general category of patients who “have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings.”
Her emphasis on the importance of allowing children to have and to express their own feelings and on the traumatic effects of repression is the important message of her book. The effectiveness of its argument was demonstrated for me in a discussion at a social