Search results for ""Author Alice Miller""

Miller's wide and profound book about childhood trauma has provided thousands of readers with guidance and hope, and is essential reading for those interested in psychology, psychotherapy, and more.

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More than twenty years ago, a little-known Swiss psychoanalyst wrote a book that changed the way many people viewed themselves and their world. In simple but powerful prose, the deeply moving Drama of the Gifted Child showed how parents unconsciously form and deform the emotional lives of their children. Alice Miller's stories about the roots of suffering in childhood resonated with readers, and her book soon became a backlist best seller.In The Truth Will Set You Free Miller returns to the intensely personal tone and themes of her best-loved work. Only by embracing the truth of our past histories can any of us hope to be free of pain in the present, she argues. Miller uses vivid true stories to reveal the perils of early-childhood mistreatment and the dangers of mindless obedience to parental will. Drawing on the latest research on brain development, she shows how spanking and humiliation produce dangerous levels of denial, which leads in turn to emotional blindness and to mental barriers that cut off awareness and the ability to learn new ways of acting. If this cycle repeats itself, the grown child will perpetrate the same abuse on later generations- a message vitally important, especially given the increasing popularity of programs like Tough Love and of "child disciplinarians" like James Dobson. The Truth Will Set You Free will provoke and inform all readers who want to know Alice Miller's latest thinking on this important subject.

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Longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2022What Fire is about how to continue as catastrophe crawls in, when the climate crisis has its grip on us all, the internet has been shut down, and the buildings are burning up. What happens when the philosophers never arrive? What songs are still worth singing? In her third collection, Alice Miller takes a fierce, unflinching look at the world we live in, at what we have made, and whether it is possible to change.

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The first publication of Drama of Being a Child and of this 1997 edition are separated by fifteen years of experience - the author's experience with her own self-therapy and with other recent therapy methods, and finally her knowledge of the life histories of the several thousand readers who have written to her. The research into childhood she has undertaken in this period has led to further fine-tuning of her earlier findings, as is ocumented and illustrated here with an abundance of examples. The author examines the consequences of repression at personal and social levels, the causes of the physical andpsychological harm done to children and how this can be prevented, and finally the new methods at our disposal for dealing with the consequences of infant traumas.

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Alice Miller has achieved recognition for her revolutionary work on the causes and effects of child abuse - here she works towards demolishing the wall of silence which surrounds the sufferings of early childhood as they affect everyday life, politics, the media, psychiatry and psychotherapy. An infant's trust and dependency on its parents, its longing to be loved and be able to love in return, are boundless. To exploit this dependency, to confuse a child's longings and abuse its trust by pretending that this is somehow good for it, Alice Miller condemns as a criminal act, committed time and again out of ignorance and the refusal to change. The essential first stage in this healing process is feeling the truth of our experience. Only this, Alice Miller writes, can enable us to recognise childhood events and resolve their consequences so that we can lead a conscious, responsible life. If we know and feel what happened to us then, we will never wish to harm ourselves or others now.

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Never before has world-renowned psychoanalyst Alice Miller examined so persuasively the long-range consequences of childhood abuse on the body. Using the experiences of her patients along with the biographical stories of literary giants such as Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust, Miller shows how a child's humiliation, impotence, and bottled rage will manifest itself as adult illness—be it cancer, stroke, or other debilitating diseases. Never one to shy away from controversy, Miller urges society as a whole to jettison its belief in the Fourth Commandment and not to extend forgiveness to parents whose tyrannical childrearing methods have resulted in unhappy, and often ruined, adult lives. In this empowering work, writes Rutgers professor Philip Greven, "readers will learn how to confront the overt and covert traumas of their own childhoods with the enlightened guidance of Alice Miller."

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