Alice Miller

Swiss psychologist (1923-2010)

Person · Open Library

Born: 12 January 1923
Died: 14 April 2010
Works: 68

Top works

The drama of the gifted child and the search for the true self
Ekh le-hafsiḳ le-faḥed ule-hatḥil li-ḥeyot
The Body Never Lies
More miracle than bird [large print]
Abattre le mur du silence

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Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Gender: Male
Origin: United States
Active from: 1904-03-01
Active to: 1944-12-15

americanbig bandjazzswingvocal jazz

Discography

Discogs Stream

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Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 65
Total plays: 1,087

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

Basic local alignment search tool
· 1990 · cited 80,825x
Use of Dinitrosalicylic Acid Reagent for Determination of Reducing Sugar
· 1959 · cited 22,496x
Welcome to the Tidyverse
· 2019 · cited 20,450x
Global burden of 369 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019
· 2020 · cited 15,961x
The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information.
· 1956 · cited 14,983x

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Quotes

“The mother can feel herself the center of attention, for her child's eyes follow her everywhere. A child cannot run away from her as her own mother once did.”
“Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history.”
“Everyone probably knows about depressive moods from personal experience since they may be expressed as well as hidden by psychosomatic suffering. It is easy to notice, if we pay attention, that they hit almost with regularity—whenever we suppress an impulse or an unwanted emotion.”
“The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful, or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience, including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, despair, and grief. But this freedom cannot be achieved if its childhood roots are cut off.”
“When our children can consciously experience their early helplessness and rage, they will no longer need to ward off these feelings, in turn, with the exercise of power over others.”
“Parents are indeed capable of routinely torturing their children without anyone interceding.”

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Key facts

Born: Alicja Englard , ( 1923-01-12 ) 12 January 1923, Piotrków Trybunalski , Poland
Died: 14 April 2010 (2010-04-14) (aged 87), Saint-Rémy de Provence , France
Known for: Psychology , psychohistory , psychoanalysis , philosophy
Children: 2, including Martin Miller

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~23 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Alice Miller ( Swiss Standard German: [ˈmɪlər]; born Alicja Englard; 12 January 1923 – 14 April 2010) was a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher noted for her books on parental child abuse, translated into several languages. She was also a noted public intellectual. Her 1979 book The Drama of the Gifted Child caused a sensation and became an international bestseller upon the English publication in 1981. Her views on the consequences of child abuse became highly influential in the fields of child development, psychotherapy, and trauma. In her books she departed from psychoanalysis, charging it with being similar to the poisonous pedagogies.

Miller systemically critiqued Freudian concepts like the Oedipus complex as an attempt to reinterpret or obscure the reality of child abuse. Core to Miller's writings was that the suppression of childhood truths (which perpetuates the psychological groundwork for violence, authoritarianism, war, mental illness, and systemic cruelty) is both a crime against humanity and a universal and enduring taboo against the true self, by privileging the authority of parents, tradition, religion, morality, or society over the needs of children. In a New York Times obituary, British psychologist Oliver James was quoted saying that Miller was "almost as influential as R.D. Laing".

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Alice Miller” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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