Books like Abbruch der Schweigemauer by Alice Miller

Alice Miller’s study of how parents exploit gifted children, leading to chronic self‑esteem loss and psychic trauma, explores the links between child psychology, narcissism, and adult abuse survivors.

Alice Miller explores how childhood experiences shape adult psychology, focusing on German childrearing, violence, and discipline, and their long‑term impact on personality development.

Original German edition

A clinical guide that integrates psychoanalytic theory with relational therapy to treat adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, focusing on dissociation, transference, and countertransference dynamics.

The Drama of the Gifted Child explains how repressed emotions from an abusive childhood create lifelong feelings of emptiness and alienation, offering readers a path to reclaim personal truth and essential needs.

A collection of essays guiding therapists and survivors through treatment and rehabilitation for PTSD, dissociative disorders, and adult victims of child abuse, offering practical insights into overcoming trauma.

To abuse or neglect a child, to deprive the child of a separate identity and joy in life, is to commit soul murder. Children desperately need to maintain a mental image of a loving and rescuing parent. Torture and deprivation under conditions of complete dependency elicit a terrifying combination of helplessness and rage- feelings that the child must supress in order to survive. The child therefore denies or justifies what has happened, deadens emotions, identifies with the aggressor, and even takes on the guilt that is appropriate to the tormentor. In this book, Dr. Shengold explores various forms of child abuse and deprivation and the resulting psychological trauma that often surface when the victims reach adulthood. He also describes the abuse suffered by four famous authors when they were children and shows how this ill treatment is reflected in their writing. Discussing both his own cases and some of Freud's, Dr. Shengold clarifies the pathogenesis of soul murder and the psychoanalytic techniques used to deal with it. He supports and elaborates on the frequent observation that those who have been abused as children tend to abuse their own children, experiencing sadomasochistic impulses and a susceptibility to terrible rage as well as a compulsion to repeat the traumatic experiences- both as victim and as aggressor. One optimistic note that Dr. Shengold strikes in this saga of pain is that a terrible childhood sometimes strengthens a person. To survive and adjust, he says, some children develop special gifts and talents; these are demonstrated by his analysis of the early lives and literary works of Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Anton Chekhov, and George Orwell. -- from Book Jacket.