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Alice Miller, born as Alicija Englard (12 January 1923 – 14 April 2010), was a Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher of Polish-Jewish origin, who is noted for her books on parental child abuse, translated into several languages. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data. Miller, Alice. Prisoners of childhood. Translation of Das Drama des begabten Kindes. Bibliography: p. This is a specific kind of book for a specific type of person at a specific point in. #61 The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, 1, 3, Jun 08, PM.

Professional Psychology:Debating Chamber · Psychology Journals · Psychologists

Alice Miller (born 1923) is a psychologist noted for her work on child abuse and its effects upon society as well as the lives of individuals. She was born in Poland and in 1946 migrated to Switzerland. She gained her doctorate in philosophy, psychology and sociology in 1953 in Basel. In 1986, Alice Miller was awarded the Janusz Korczak Literary Award by the Anti-Defamation League. She has two adult children.

Miller’s worldviewEdit

The introduction of Miller’s first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, first published in 1979, contains a famous line that summarizes her views: “Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood”.

Miller became strongly disenchanted with her chosen field of psychoanalysis after many years spent in practice. Her first three books originated from research she took upon herself as a response to what she felt were major blind spots in her field. However, by the time her fourth book was published she no longer believed that psychoanalysis was viable at all.

Drawing upon the work of psychohistory, Miller has analyzed writers Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and others to find links between their childhood traumas and the outcome of their lives. She maintains that all instances of mental illness, crime and falling prey of religious cults are ultimately caused by childhood trauma and inner pain not processed by a helper which she has come to term an 'enlightened witness'. She extends this trauma model to include all forms of child abuse, including those that are commonly accepted (such as spanking) which she calls poisonous pedagogy (schwarze Pädagogik).

In the 1990s Miller strongly supported a new method from Konrad Stettbacher, who was later charged with incidents of sexual abuse. Since then she has refused to bring forward therapist or method recommendations. In open letters, Miller explained her decision and how she originally fell for Stettbacher but in the end distanced herself from him and his regressive therapies.

In our culture “Sparing the parents is our supreme law” wrote Miller. Even psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists are unconsciously afraid to blame parents for the neuroses and psychoses of their clients. According to Miller mental health professionals are also creatures of the poisonous pedagogy internalized in their own childhood. This explains why the command “Honor your parents” has been one of the main targets in Miller’s school of psychology.

Miller calls electroconvulsive therapy —a treatment occasionally used for severe cases of depression— “a campaign against the act of remembering”. She also criticizes psychotherapists’ advice to clients to forgive their abusive parents. For Miller this can only hinder the way to recovery: to remember and feel the pain of our childhood. “The majority of therapists fear this truth. They work under the influence of destructive interpretations culled from both Western and Oriental religions, which preach forgiveness to the once-mistreated child”. Forgiveness does not resolve hatred but covers it in a very dangerous way in the outgrown adult: displacement on scapegoats, as she discussed in her psycho-biographies of Adolf Hitler and Jürgen Bartsch, both of which she describes as having suffered atrocious parental abuse.

A common denominator in Miller’s writings is to explain why human beings prefer not to know about their own victimization during childhood: to avoid unbearable pain. However, the unconscious command of the individual, not to be aware how he or she was treated in childhood, leads to displacement: the irresistible drive to repeat traumatogenic modes of parenting in the next generation of children.

WritingsEdit

The following is a brief summary of Alice Miller's books.

The Drama of the Gifted Child (Das Drama des begabten Kindes, 1979) Edit

In her first book (also published under the titles Prisoners of Childhood and The Drama of Being a Child) Miller defines and elaborates the personality manifestations of childhood trauma. She seeks the truth about her own childhood experiences and in so doing defines the model that has become widely accepted in psychotherapeutic circles, such as the Tavistock Institute. She addresses the two reactions to the loss of love in childhood, depression and grandiosity; the inner prison, the vicious circle of contempt, repressed memories, the etiology of depression, and how childhood trauma manifests itself in the adult. From this book flow the others.

Ella fitzgerald these are the blues rar

For your own good (Am Anfang war Erziehung, 1980) Edit

Miller proposes here that German traumatogenic methods of childrearing produced Hitler and a serial killer of children named Jürgen Bartsch. In this work Miller introduces the term “poisonous pedagogy”. Children learn to take their parent’s point of view against themselves “for their own good”. For Miller, the traditional pedagogic process is manipulative, resulting in that the grown-up adult is deferential to authorities, even to tyrannical leaders or dictators like Hitler. Miller even argues for abandoning the term “pedagogy” in favor of the word “support”, something akin to what psychohistorians call the helping mode of parenting.

This book is (legally) available online here.

Thou Shalt Not Be Aware (Du sollst nicht merken, 1981) Edit

Unlike Miller’s later books, this one is written in an academic style. It is her first critique of psychoanalysis, charging it with being similar to the poisonous pedagogies that she described in For Your Own Good. Miller is critical of both Freud and Jung. She scrutinizes Freud’s drive theory, a device that blames the child for the abusive sexual behavior of adults. Miller also criticizes Kafka, who was abused by his father but fulfills the politically-correct function of mirroring abuse in metaphorical novels, instead of exposing it.

The Untouched Key (Der gemiedene Schlüssel, 1988)Edit

This book is basically a psychobiography of Nietzsche, Picasso, Kollwitz and Buster Keaton (in Miller’s latest book, The Body Never Lies published in 2005, she includes similar analyses of Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Schiller, Rimbaud, Mishima, Proust and James Joyce).

According to Miller, Nietzsche did not experience a loving family and his philosophical output is a metaphor of an unconscious drive against his family's oppressive theological tradition. She believes the philosophical system is flawed because Nietzsche was unable to make emotional contact with the abused child inside him. Though Nietzsche was severely punished by a father who lost his mind when Nietzsche was a little boy, Miller does not accept the genetic theory of madness. She interprets Nietzsche’s psychotic breakdown as the result of a family tradition in Prussian modes of childrearing.

Banished Knowledge (Das verbannte Wissen, 1988) Edit

In this more personal book Miller confesses she herself was abused as a child. She also introduces the fundamental concept of “enlightened witness”: a person who is willing to support a harmed individual, empathize with her and help her to gain understanding of her own biographical past.

Banished Knowledge is autobiographical in another sense. It is a pointer in Miller’s thoroughgoing apostasy from her own profession, psychoanalysis. She believes society colludes with Freud’s theories in order to not know the truth about our childhood, a truth that human cultures have “banished”. She concludes that the feelings of guilt instilled in our minds since our most tender years reinforce our repression even in the psychoanalytic profession.

Breaking Down the Wall of Silence (Abbruch der Schweigemauer, 1990)Edit

Written in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Miller takes to task the entirety of human culture. What she calls the “wall of silence” is the metaphorical wall behind which society —academia, psychiatrists, clergy, politicians and members of the media— has sought to protect itself: denying the mind-destroying effects of child abuse. She also continues the autobiographical confession initiated in Banished Knowledge about her abusive mother. In Pictures of a Childhood: Sixty-six Watercolors and an Essay Miller says that painting helped her to ponder deeply into her memories. In some of her paintings Miller depicts baby Alice as swaddled, sometimes by an evil mother. [1]

I betrayed that little girl [..]. Only in recent years, with the help of therapy, which enabled me to lift the veil on this repression bit by bit, could I allow myself to experience the pain and desperation, the powerlessness and justified fury of that abused child. Only then did the dimensions of this crime against the child I once was become clear to me.

See alsoEdit

  • Poisonous pedagogy – further explanation of Miller’s theories

BibliographyEdit

Miller’s published books in English:

  • The Drama of the Gifted Child, (1978), revised in 1995 and re-published by Virago as The Drama of Being a Child. ISBN 1-86049-101-4
  • Prisoners of Childhood (1981) ISBN 0-465-06287-3
  • For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (1983) ISBN 0-374-52269-3 (available on line)
  • Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child (1984) ISBN 0-374-52543-9
  • Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood InjuriesISBN 0-385-26762-2
  • The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and DestructivenessISBN 0-385-26764-9
  • Pictures of a Childhood: Sixty-six Watercolors and an EssayISBN 0-374-23241-5
  • Paths of Life: Seven Scenarios (1998) ISBN 0-375-40379-5
  • Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: The Liberating Experience of Facing Painful TruthISBN 0-525-93357-3
  • The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness (2001) ISBN 0-465-04584-7
  • The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting (2005) ISBN 0-393-06065-9

Miller's essays include:

  • Childhood Trauma
  • The Political Consequences of Child Abuse

Book reviewsEdit

External linksEdit

  • Child abuse and mistreatment - Alice Miller official website


Critical:

  • 'An Analysis of the Limits of Alice Miller' – biographical criticism by Daniel Mackler
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The bestselling book on childhood trauma and the enduring effects of repressed anger and pain
Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound book has provided millions of readers with an answer--and has helped them to apply it to their own lives.
Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own fe
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Published July 22nd 2008 by Basic Books (first published 1979)
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Rating details

Aug 19, 2010Cari rated it liked it · review of another edition
Miller presents a solid theory with some difficult truths, but at time the narrowness of her idea turns into a sort of tunnel vision with sweeping generalizations that are far too much. She gets carried away with herself and disregards other influences, other options. I always bristle at any theory that attempts to explain everything with a single reason or cause, especially in the complicated matters of psychology or human emotion. Regardless, the clarity of her presentation makes this an easy..more
for the people who seem to have it all yet hunger for so much.
this is not the psychopop of twelve-step, i-got-in-touch-with-my-anger-today, neurosis-no-more books. 'gifted' here has nothing to do with what your school counselor/teacher told was gifted or talented. rather, the original german word refers to the ability to empathize and meet the needs of a parent figure--at the loss of your true self. while this gift might enable one to survive his/her childhood, the gifted person's unmet need to
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May 28, 2014howl of minerva rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: auf-deutsch, psychology-psychotherapy, brain-mind, freudiana, parenting-child-development, psychiatry
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
-Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse
Not the facile pop-psychology I was expecting, rather a book with some penetrating insights. As other reviewers note, 'gifted' in this context does not refer necessarily to academic or artistic gifts (though these are common in the patient group Miller describes), rather a kind of emotional sensitivity.
Briefly, Miller de
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Feb 10, 2011Hadrian rated it it was amazing
Recommended to Hadrian by: Alison Bechdel, and an essay on David Foster Wallace
The title here is a bit of a misnomer - 'Gifted Child' in this sense does not necessarily mean a child of academic gifts, but one with an attuned empathetic sense, and thus susceptible to emotional abuse. When this sense is combined with a deficiency or disorder on the part of the parent - anxiety, manic-depressive, etc., the child has to go to extreme lengths.
This creates two 'selves' - the 'true self' - that is, the child's own 'genuine' personality and needs, and the 'false self', complying,
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Jul 13, 2012Tina Hertz rated it really liked it · review of another edition
I read this in my mid-30s and at the time, I found this to be the most helpful book I had ever read. Narcissism is fully explained - though many may think that is just another word for self-centeredness - in its many complexities. The title is misleading and apparently renamed for marketing purposes. The child who is victimized by the Narcissist is gifted because they deal with such heavy challenges and become over-sensitive to others' needs, always eager to please, while suppressing their own s..more
This is an excellent book for learning more about yourself, how you became the way you are, and also as a possible source of help regarding the causes and cure of any emotional difficulties you may have. It will also help you better understand the people around you and how they came to be the way they are. It is a good source of psychological knowledge. Alice Miller shows very clearly how the way our parents raised us when we are children formed us psychologically.
Alice Miller wrote her second b
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Apr 17, 2008Susan Ellinger rated it it was amazing
I've read a lot a really helpful books that my therapist has recommended to me in the past six months or so. This book is amazing and straight to the point. I would recommend it for anyone that has issues w their parents that they want some perspective on or anyone concerned about possibly passing on the legacy of their own difficulties to their children, however inadvertently. I will read all of Alice Miller's books after reading this one.
May 20, 2017William rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
One of the most important books in my life.

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Ignore the title. This is a book for anyone struggling with their childhood. And not only those who were abused or not, it's basically anyone that had tough things happen in their childhood that weren't dealed with appropriately. I would think everyone would fall into this category. The book was written for therapists, but a lot of patients end up reading it.
The author believes that depression really comes from the separation of your real self with yourself..in other words, kids who grow up in
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Mar 07, 2019Antigone rated it really liked it · review of another edition
At slightly over a hundred pages, this slim volume addresses the effects of narcissistic parenting and is one of the more highly-regarded works on the subject within the treatment community.
Alice Miller, a Swiss psychologist with twenty years in clinical practice, had come to reject traditional forms of analysis and broke from the theories of Jung and Freud - concluding the standard approach to such emotional injuries left too much power in the parent's court. The primary caretakers (most freque
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Jul 23, 2011Willa rated it really liked it
I liked this book better than I expected to. I had read good things about it; apparently the author's insights on childhood were important in developing psychological understanding in the 70's and later. But I was afraid it was going to be a sort of polemic against parents. Rather, it was more a warning for therapists -- she makes the point that therapists often go into the field because of unresolved issues in their own past and if they are not careful, ie, if they don't have therapy to work th..more
Jan 10, 2013Terri rated it really liked it
'The voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their children they are heaven's lieutenants.” - William Shakespeare
Psychology writer and therapist Alice Miller's classic book is a must read for anyone who has a interest in psychology and childhood trauma/abuse. Written in 1978, it is brilliant and life-changing at little over one-hundred pages.
The author, Alice Miller was forced to live in Warsaw as a Jewish girl living under a false name in World War Two. She was a victim of the holocaust a
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Jul 27, 2015Thomas rated it really liked it
A succinct and insightful book about the effects of child abuse. While childhood mistreatment may give kids certain gifts - such as increased empathy and greater achievement - these strengths come at a great cost. Only by confronting and honoring their pasts can these children rise above their unmet needs. Alice Miller writes with conviction and compassion, and I most enjoyed how she emphasizes the hope all of us gifted children should have: we can all lead fulfilling and meaningful lives, with..more
May 21, 2007Jan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
This is the best book I have ever read. Do not be fooled by the title--the original title of the book was 'Prisoners of Childhood,' and I believe the publisher talked the author into changing the title so that proud parents would want to buy the book. As a marketing ploy, it worked. But it's really not about 'gifted children' in the contemporary sense, which is often about ratings and education. It is about the most important issue of our time: raising children.
Feb 22, 2015Helen rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Recommended to Helen by: No-one.
Drama begabten kindes pdf free youtube
I thought this was an amazingly insightful book on the root causes of many disorders, including 'group madness' such as fascism, nationalism.
The author's thesis is that child abuse is carried forward generation after generation, if only unconsciously, and that child rearing that does not respect the child's needs and feelings, will add to this cycle. The child in order to earn the parent's love, will suppress its rage at not being respected, as well as any other feelings or impulses deemed inap
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Jan 20, 2011Rachel rated it did not like it · review of another edition
To be fair, I'm going to start with the caveat that I'm not a huge fan of Freud, on whose theories of psychoanalysis Alice Miller seems to rely quite heavily in constructing her own. But while I admit my personal bias against the foundation for her psychological theory, I still believe the construction of her general arguments to be weak as well. She seems to depend far too heavily on isolated instances as evidence of the childhood 'abuses' that have crippled her patients in their adulthood, whi..more
Jan 04, 2017David J. Bookbinder rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
I first encountered this book in the mid-80s, a year or two into my first serious psychotherapy, and it was as if all the lights suddenly went on in a previously dimly lit room. Although it's been a long time since I read The Drama of the Gifted Child, the shock of recognition - of the dynamics of my family, of my role in it, of the roles filled by my siblings, my mother, and especially by my father - became starkly revealed in a way no amount of discussion or dream analysis had approached. Ther..more
Dec 28, 2009Hester rated it it was ok
This book is both brilliant and full of schlock. I know people with the problems she described, people who were never going to be loved for who they were, so either buried themselves in achievement or cut off important parts of themselves. These childhood traumas have crippled them in adulthood. The thing about these people, though, is that their parents were fundamentally flawed and repeated these actions over and over again. Unlike in Miller's book, these were not one-off events.
I think it is
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'It's a seminal work in my field,' Dr. Paul Weston (HBO's 'In Treatment') said in response to Frances, the daughter-diagnosed-narcissist, when Frances asked her therapist, Paul (the brooding Gabriel Byrne), if he's ever heard of, 'The Drama of the Gifted Child.'
Naturally, I downloaded the book the next day.
Self-help it is not. Well, not exactly; and I mean that in a good way. But it is a quick read, and only $5 on Kindle!
If you're even thinking of having kids, you must read it, or not, because
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Dec 31, 2007Dennis rated it it was amazing
'The only defense we have against mental illness is the discovery of the truth of our childhood.'
Should be required reading for every psychologist. I liked it even more when, in the third section of the book, the author used Hermann Hesse as an example! I learned something about my favorite author--and, more importantly, gained some highly valuable insights that I hope I can put into practice in integrating my own self.
- If a mother respects both herself and her child from his very first day onward, she will never need to teach him respect for others. He will, of course, take both himself and others seriously—he couldn't do otherwise. But a mother who, as a child, was herself not taken seriously by her mother as
the person she really was will crave this respect from her child as a substitute; and she will try to get it by training him to give it to her.
-The parents have found in their child's 'false self the co
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Jan 06, 2014Chrystal rated it really liked it

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Alice Miller states that when she uses the word 'gifted' in the title, she had in mind 'neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. [She] simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb..Without this 'gift' offered us by nature, we would not have survived.'
I would like to give this book only 1 star for the pain it caused me in unlocking repressed memories from
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Just finished this quick little read. This is a specific kind of book for a specific type of person at a specific point in their specific lives. If the time or the person isn't a great fit, you might hate this book and think it is useless, but if the timing is right, then you might love it. It's about learning about yourself and where you came from. To a certain extent we are all trying to better understand who we are and where we came from. Some people do it more obviously then others. Even if..more
Jan 16, 2013Hanan Kato rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
First things first, misleading title. 'Prisonners of Childhood' is more accurate.
This book is an eye opener! I've read some of it a few years back and just now have gotten to reading it fully. The gist of it is that parents' expectations of their children can be projected in such a way on them, that it robs them from their 'true feelings' and 'true self', trying to become the 'perfect' child that will meet their parents approval and gain their love.A lot of times, the children ignore/shut off/re
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Holy crap, this book. It kind of blew my mind apart, to be honest. I found myself relating to it so much that I returned my library copy after buying a copy for myself; primarily so I could go at it with a highlighter and dog-ear a ton of the pages. I read this book after reading about it in Alison Bechdel's 'Are You My Mother' and thinking it sounded like something I needed to check out. In some ways, it was like opening Pandora's Box. But since I am dedicated to self-work and to asking myself..more
Jan 05, 2017Holly rated it it was ok
Seems really dated and simplistic, which, given all we've learned about depression since the advent of SSRI's, isn't all that surprising for a book almost 40 years old. I found it useful more for how it helps illustrate the evolution of psychotherapy and how it helped me understand certain things about how therapists I saw approached their practice than for any insight it offered into myself.
Re: the evolution of psychotherapy, I was struck by the focus on mothers and what they do wrong. You wou
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Mar 30, 2012Tom Burkhalter rated it really liked it
In 1994 a friend of mind recommended this book to me. I was going through a rough patch -- divorce, change of residence/state, change of occupation, all those major stressors -- and this book was more than a help, it made me see myself and my personal struggle in a new light.
I can't and won't try to summarize this book in a few trite sentences. Suffice it to say that Dr. Alice Miller is a pioneering psychologist with great insight into the human problem. Dr. Miller states her objective, in the i
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Jan 02, 2017Pippi Bluestocking rated it liked it
Be warned: dated, rife with gender essentialism, awkward generalizations, bad science.
Yet, the main argument (how we learn to suppress feeling and expressing emotion because of our parents' parenting) is worth a look. Although I'm guessing there are better and more recent books that incorporate the same line of reasoning.
Jul 05, 2011Lori rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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Another self-help book that I read in my early-20s, and it was instrumental in helping me understand many of my problems. It didn't 'heal' me or change me, but it was a major step in self-recognition.
THIS BOOK CHANGED MY LIFE YEARS AGO!
IT'S CHANGING IT AGAIN!
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Psychologist and world renowned author, who is noted for her books on child abuse, translated in several languages. In her books she departed from psychoanalysis charging it with being similar to the poisonous pedagogies, which she described in For Your Own Good.
Miller was born in Poland and as young woman lived
..more
“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.” — 89 likes
“The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.” — 79 likes
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