| World-Renowned Psychologist Alice Miller Changed My Life Posted: 27 Apr 2010 06:05 AM PDT A hero of mine has died — psychologist Alice Miller, at age 87. Back in the 1980s, my friends and I bought her books and passed them around. I can easily say her ideas changed our lives. The New York Times describes how Miller turned the psychology world on its ear: Dr. Miller caused a sensation with the English publication in 1981 of her first book, "The Drama of the Gifted Child." Originally titled "Prisoners of Childhood," it set forth, in three essays, a simple but harrowing proposition. All children, she wrote, suffer trauma and permanent psychic scarring at the hands of parents, who enforce codes of conduct through psychological pressure or corporal punishment: slaps, spankings or, in extreme cases, sustained physical abuse and even torture. Humiliations, spankings and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away," she writes in an explanatory essay on childhood mistreatment and abuse on her Web site, alice-miller.com. "Beaten children very early on assimilate the violence they endured, which they may glorify and apply later as parents….”
Her latest book, The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting, is, in my opinion, one of her best. The book explores the idea that repressed emotional responses to childhood humiliations and unfulfilled needs can produce long-term illness. From Amazon: Alice Miller explores how the cruelties inflicted on us as children cripple us as adults. In this new work, Miller investigates the long-range consequences of childhood abuse on the body—be it cancer, stroke, or other debilitating illnesses.
Have YOU read her books? Your thoughts? |
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