How to make a derived class access the private member data?

Question

I\'m stuck with a c++ problem. I have a base class that has a self referential object pointer inside the private visibility region of the class. I have a constructor in the base

Answer 1

I disagree with some of the other answers claiming the only way to access the private member is by making it a friend.

You can directly access the private member via its address in memory. If you're comfortable with it that is. You could have a function in the base class that returns the address of the private member and then use some wrapping function in the derived class to retrieve, dereference and set the private member.