Paths of Life: Seven Scenarios
Psychoanalyst Miller's important message is poorly served by her choice of medium in this collection of composite dialogues intended to show the consequences of childhood abuse and neglect. In her introduction, Miller (The Drama of the Gifted Child) explains that people are marked for life by their family experiences in early childhood, and that knowledge of how childhood suffering affects us in our adult lives is crucial. Even violent offenders, says Miller, can learn empathy for their victims once they begin to understand how their own adult behavior is rooted in cruelty they experienced as children. To show how this type of understanding can develop, Miller presents seven "scenarios" in which fictionalized characters talk out their problems. Miller intends these as stories but they read more like lectures than narratives. Though they deal with significant issues?childhoods filled with neglect, physical cruelty, sexual abuse?they lack emotion, drama and concrete detail. The characters' voices are indistinguishable?perhaps because each is really the voice of the detached analyst herself. At times, the book's message seems overstated, as when a mother agonizes that a difficult childbirth could have been avoided if only she had received proper encouragement. But the section dealing with the parent of a girl with Down's syndrome is, ultimately, quite moving. The two essays with which Miller ends this slim volume, "Gurus and Cult Leaders" and "What Is Hatred?," offer more intellectual substance and engaging insights than do the scenarios.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.