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Many people will agree that our need to be loved is just as basic and important as our need for water, food, and shelter. A human being can go without water for hardly more than a day, and food for a few days before he meets the inevitable ending. When this happens, several biological factors result in the shutdown of our bodies. But how does a person die from not being loved?
In The Drama of a Gifted Child, Alice Miller presents her personal theory on what makes us yearn for that elusive feeling of love. Like most deep-seated emotions, this longing stems from events in our early youth, according to Miller.
To better understand Alice Miller’s viewpoint, we must first define a key word in her philosophy. Narcissism is defined by Alice Miller as emoti
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Thus we see how a once-innocent and defenseless child now wanders the world not as himself, but a lemming, in order to once again recreate that feeling of love. onal disconnection, or the basis for a certain kind of personality construct. Until then, we are all not only physically, but also emotionally, defenseless; anything can hurt us. But where does narcissism itself arise from?
It has been determined that the human mind does not develop the ability to reason logically on its own until around the age of seven years in most people. The Oxford Dictionary of English defines the word as "psychoanalysis, self-centeredness arising from failure to distinguish the self from external objects, either in very young babies or as a feature of mental disorder. What the person finds is a comfort zone, which is in some way familiar to his childhood. This, according to Miller, is where we often experience abuse from those close to us.
Most of the harm which results in the substitution of the illusion of love for love, usually comes from the mother, the person with whom the child has the closest bond. Naturally, whenever the mother is upset with the child, he assumes that his mother will stop loving him, if he continues such behavior. Coincidentally, our minds are extremely absorptive at such a young age.
The abuse we experience is often unintentional, and is a result of our own human weaknesses, or perhaps the abuse we had encountered as children. Whether it’s a mother repeatedly scolding a child, or a schoolmate maliciously hurting the feelings of another, it leaves permanent scars on our souls. " Miller believes that it is this condition which causes our never-ending search for the illusion of love. This person does not live for him or herself, but for the approval of others.
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