Alice Miller
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 in Warsaw where she survived World War II. In 1953 she gained her doctorate in philosophy, psychology and sociology at University of Basel in Switzerland. For the next 20 years Miller studied and practiced psychoanalysis.
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 in any respect. Miller extended trauma model to include all forms of child abuse, including those that were commonly accepted (such as spanking), which she called poisonous pedagogy, a non-literal translation of Katharina Rutschky's Schwarze Pädagogik (black or dark pedagogy)
Drawing upon the work of psychohistory, Miller analyzed writers Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and others to find links between their childhood traumas and the course and outcome of their lives.
In 1979, she stopped practicing as a psychoanalyst after having studied and practiced psychoanalysis for 20 years and became critical of both Freud and Carl Jung.
She has continued to write and lecture on psychological issues.
Her most recent book, Pictures of My Life, was published in 2006; an informal autobiography in which the writer explores her emotional process from painful childhood, through the development of her theories and later insights, told via the display and discussion of 66 of her original paintings, painted in the years 1973 to 2005.
She died in April 14th 2010 in Saint-Rémy de Provence, France.
“People who, as children, were intellectually far beyond their parents and therefore admired by them, but who also therefore had to solve their own problems alone. These people, who give us a feeling of their intellectual strength and will power, also seem to demand that we, too, ought to fight off any feeling of weakness with intellectual means. In their presence one feels one cannot be recognized as a person with problems just as they and their problems were unrecognized by their parents, for whom he always had to be strong.”
Alice Miller
“Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy his parents needs. No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest periods, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy.”
Alice Miller
“One can only remember what has been consciously experienced.”
Alice Miller
“The art of not experiencing feelings. A child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother's love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress emotions.”
Alice Miller
“Nobody is born evil.”
Alice Miller
“Where there had been only fearful emptiness or equally frightening grandiose fantasies, an unexpected wealth of vitality is now discovered. This is not a homecoming, since this home has never before existed. It is the creation of home.”
Alice Miller
“He has given ample evidence of qualities hardly any other living statesman has demonstrated to the same degree: the courage to look facts in the face and to seek flexible solutions, respect for others, give-and-take in dialog situations, absence of hypocrisy, a complete absence of grandeur in the conduct of his personal life. He has never been driven by blind self-assertion to make absurd decisions.”
Alice Miller
“Nuoren ihmisen on murrosiässä ensin hylättävä kaikki, mikä hänelle siihen asti on ollut rakasta, jotta hän voi rakentaa uudet arvot. Samoin Friedrich Nietzsche, joka ei koskaan ollut kokenut puberteetin kapinaa ja joka 12 vuotiaana oli kirjoittanut sovinnaisia ja pikkuvanhoja merkintöjä päiväkirjaansa, ryhtyy nyt 25 vuotiaana hyökkäämään hänelle aiemmin arvokasta kulttuuria vastaan, alkaa pilkata sitä, vääristellä sitä absurditeettiin asti. Eikä hän tee sitä aikuistumassa olevan nuoren ihmisen keinoin vaan filologin ja filosofian professorin pitkälle kehittyneen älyn asein.On aivan selvää, että tällä kielellä on voimaa ja että se tekee vaikutuksen.”
Alice Miller
“Thus he spent his whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he had learned at a very young age to hate himself for what his mother had done to him. (...) But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained obstinently shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his childhood, to the feelings of the little child who was forced to grow up with a severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her.”
Alice Miller
“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.”
Alice Miller
“Fasismi ei ollut Hitlerin keskintöä. Monien aikalaistensa tavoin hänkin tutustui totalitaariseen valtamalliin kotonaan. Fasismin kansallissosialistisessa muodossa on epäilemättä selviä jälkiä Hitlerin lapsuudesta. Hänen lapsuutensa ei kuitenkaan ollut poikkeuksellinen. Siksi Gerhart Hauptmann ja Martin Heidegger ja monet muutkin kuuluisat intellektuellit eivät kyenneet näkemään Hitlerin hulluuden läpi. Siihen he olisivat kyenneet vain jos olisivat nähneet itse saamansa kasvatuksen läpi. Adolf Hitler pääsi tekemään Euroopasta ja maailmasta lapsuutensa taistelutantereen, koska miljoonat silloisen Saksan asukkaat olivat lapsuudessaan kokeneet vastaavaa. He pitivät seuraavia periaatteita itsestäänselvyytenä, vaikkeivät tietoisesti: #1 Arvoista ylin ei ole elämä vaan järjestys ja kuuliaisuus. #2 Järjestyksen voi luoda ja säilyttää vain väkivallalla. #3 Luovuus (jota lapsi edustaa) on aikuiselle vaara ja täytyy hävittää. #4 Korkein laki on ehdoton tottelevaisuus isälle. #5 Tottelemattomuus ja arvostelu eivät tule kysymykseen, koska niiden rangaistuksena on kuritus tai kuoleman uhka. #6 Elävästä, vitaalista lapsesta on mahdollisimman varhain koulittava kuuliainen robotti, orja. #7 Ei-toivotut tuneet ja todelliset tarpeet on siitä syystä määrätietoisesti tukahdutettava. #8 Äiti ei koskaan suojele lasta isän rangaistustoimilta vaan pitää hänelle kidutuksen jälkeen saarnan vanhempien kunnioittamisesta ja rakastamisesta.”
Alice Miller
“Me rakennamme ympärillemme korkeita muureja, joilla suojelemme itseämme tuskallisilta tosiasioilta, koska emme ole oppineet elämään niistä tietoisina. >>Miksi meidän muka pitäisi?>> Joku ehkä kysyy. >>Menneet ovat menneitä. Miksi niitä pitäisi pohtia?>> Vastaus on monitahoinen. Meitä lapsuuden historialta suojelevan muurin takana seisoo nimittäin edelleen se hyljeksitty lapsi, joka me olimme ja joka kauan sitten hylättiin ja petettiin. Hän toivoo meiltä suojaa, ymmärtämystä ja vapautusta eristyneisyydestään, yksinäisyydestään ja sanattomuudestaan. Tuo lapsi on jo kauan kaivannut meiltä ymmärrystä, kunnioitusta ja kiintymystä. Hänellä ei kuitenkaan ole pelkästään tarpeita, jotka meidän tulisi tyydyttää. Hän tarjoaa meille myös lahjaa, jota ilman me emme voi elää täydesti, jota emme voi ostaa emmekä hankkia mistään muualta kuin häneltä, tältä itsessämme olevalta lapselta. Se lahja on totuus, joka vapauttaa tuhoisien käsitysten ja vakiintuneiden valheiden vankilasta, ja lopulta myös turvallisuus, jonka uudestaan saavutettu eheys suo. Lapsi odottaa vain, että me suostuisimme lähestymään häntä ja purkamaan muurit hänen avullaan. Sitä eivät monet ihmiset tiedä.”
Alice Miller
“Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.”
Alice Miller
“I have never known a patient to portray his parents more negatively than he actually experienced them in childhood but always more positively--because idealization of his parents was essential for his survival.”
Alice Miller
“Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated. We can only repress them, delude ourselves, and deceive our bodies. The body sticks to the facts.”
Alice Miller
“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.”
Alice Miller
“If it is very painful for you to criticize your friends, you are safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that is the time to hold your tongue”
Alice Miller