With her first bestseller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, published a quarter of a century ago, Miller sent an entire generation into therapy when she wrote about how parents scar their children not only by glaring instances of cruelty and physical punishment but also through humiliation, neglect and inattention.

If the crude characterisation of Dworkin's position was that "all men are rapists", then the equivalent caricature of Miller's psychoanalytic view would be that "all children are abused by their parents". Recognition of this allows the patients to be who they are for the first time and to experience their own emotions - both positive and negative. Few will describe so precisely what it is for an adult not only to recover those childhood traumas but to re-experience them as that child did, in all their nightmarish proportion.

It is the most amazing book i have ever read and has helped me understand so much better why i am who i am and then using that knowledge with your therapist, you can get your life back, you can be 'normal', it's ok to be angry, sad, jealous, happy, even ecstatic - these are all normal emotions which have been stunted in your early years by either abuse or neglect of any sort. She was a victim of the holocaust and never recovered completely from it as her father died in the Warsaw Ghetto. If we are to accommodate influence, distortion, solipsism, and the ever-shifting nexus of authenticity itself, then I suspect a nature can only ever be temporarily true and, if sought on a psychic map, will forever be sailing North, South, East and West, to a bewildering variety of foreign locales - each of which will require the re-establishment of anchorage and the reassessment of our definition of "true.

After 17 long years, my dad's mid-life crisis resulted in the radical move of our family to the SF Bay Area when I was 7. Most people continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, fearing and avoiding dangers that haven’t been real for a long time. The Drama of the Gifted Child is one of those rare gems that isn’t afraid to cut deep into the heart of the psyche.Because it’s impossible to avoid failure entirely, these kids never learned how to deal with the emotions that come with failure.