Here is another part of Alice Miller’s book “Banished Knowledge”…again from the chapter, Wicked Child.
“Reactions to new insights reflect not only training but also the tragedy of unequaled chances: A loved child receives the gift of love and with it that of knowledge and innocence. It is a gift that will provide him with orientation for his whole life. An injured child lacks everything because he lacks love. He doesn’t know what love is, constantly confuses crime with good deeds and mendacity with truth, and hence will continue to be subject to new confusions.
(Had to look up the meaning of Mendacity…telling of lies: deliberate untruthfulness)
“This confusion also became apparent to me in a discussion of an actual case among experts: A woman who had not been subject to achievement pressure in her childhood and had been much loved took into her home a nine year old autistic boy, who she later adopted. She was able to give him plenty of warmth and physical contact, react to him positively, confirm feelings, sense needs, pick up his signals, and eventually understand them too. In her arms the boy learned how to show emotions, to experience anger at what had been done to him in the past, and to discover love. He developed into a healthy, intelligent, very lively, and candid youth.
“I recount this history to a group of experts in the field of autism. The doctors among them said that autism was an incurable neurophysiological disease and that the history in the case showed that the boy had not been suffering from autism; in other words there had been a wrong diagnosis. The psychologists, family therapists, and analysts said that this history was probably a crude simplification, for they knew many cases in which years of psychotherapy had brought no change in autistic patients (which incidentally, I am perfectly willing to believe). They went on to say that such a history could be of no help to parents of autistic children; on the contrary, it would give them guilt feelings because not all parents were in a position to devote that much love and time to their child. The parents usually had several children, had to earn a living, and, after all, they were only human. I said it seemed to me irrelevant whether a parent acquired guilt feelings when it was a matter of uncovering such an important truth.”
“The history of the nine-year old boy confirmed something I had long suspected: A child’s autism is a response to his environment, sometimes the last possible response open to a child. Whether autism is curable depends on the extent to which the people in a new environment can become aware of the truth of the child’s past. The reaction of those expertss showed how difficult it is to find such people. Their resistance prevented them from realizing how greatly this boy’s history could help us in our dealings with children.”
“Later, after many years, I heard of similar though still rare cases of autistic children being cured. A technique was developed, the ‘holding’ technique, aimed at the need of the lost, lonely alienated child to be held. Unfortunately this technique was once again coupled with pedogogy, and that is where I see its great danger. If the mother has gained the child’s trust by holding him and proceeds to place pedagogic demands on him, the child will do anything in his power not to lose his mother’s affection again. I has actually been shown that children treated with this technique do brilliantly in school. But since I wrote my first book in 1979, I have known that this is not necessarily a genuine cure. The mother’s complete physical and psychic devotion to the autistic child can no doubt work miracles, provided she refrains from making pedagogic demands; otherwise she will create the drama of the gifted child – the very thing the child is warding off with his autism.”
Alice Miller
What I am finding so intriguing as well as being affirmed, is that the child and its wellness is often times sacrificed for the comfort of a guilt free parent.
I believe that her definition and the other definition of ‘Gifted Child’ must be different. I must read her book called “The Drama of the Gifted Child”.
Her books are wonderful in showing the costs to the parent and child…and in my humble opinion, it is the voiceless child who is overlooked most often…and it is that child who continues the legacy of what it suffered and was unable to heal.
I M Perfect lady 