For Your Own Good, the contemporary classic exploring the serious if not gravely dangerous consequences parental cruelty can bring to bear on children everywhere, is one of the central works by Alice Miller, the celebrated Swiss psychoanalyst. With her typically lucid, strong, and poetic language, Miller investigates the personal stories and case histories of various
For Your Own Good, the contemporary classic exploring the serious if not gravely dangerous consequences parental cruelty can bring to bear on children everywhere, is one of the central works by Alice Miller, the celebrated Swiss psychoanalyst. With her typically lucid, strong, and poetic language, Miller investigates the personal stories and case histories of various self-destructive and/or violent individuals to expand on her theories about the long-term effects of abusive child-rearing. Her conclusions – on what sort of parenting can create a drug addict, or a murderer, or a Hitler – offer much insight, and make a good deal of sense, while also straying far from psychoanalytic dogma about human nature, which Miller vehemently rejects. This important study paints a shocking picture of the violent world – indeed, of the ever-more-violent world – that each generation helps to create when traditional upbringing, with its hidden cruelty, is perpetuated. The book also presents listeners with useful solutions in this regard – namely, to re-sensitize the victimized child who has been trapped within the adult, and to unlock the emotional life that has been frozen in repression.
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Buy this and begin healing…. I ran into Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence shortly after it was published in an English translation here in the USA in 1983. She is a psychoanalyst and as all psychoanalysts must do, herself underwent analysis with another practitioner of this arcane discipline. I hope that I do her no injustice by simply stating that this book is one outcome of her therapy. It became apparent to her that the way in which she was raised by her…
Exception book on child abuse Alice Miller is one of my favorite writers. I first read her in a college class, and I still seek her out.If you experienced abuse as a child, this book may be difficult to read simply because it is so truthful. I bought it months ago and have only been able to read a few pages at a time. Every page, however, is filled with my own penciled notations because it seems like she wrote the book just for me! She writes about the history of child abuse, its insidiousness and how it still…
Harsh in disciplining your kids? You may want to rethink that.Due to my relatively new status as parent to a toddler and having known many people both internally within my immediate and distant family and externally amongst close friends and associates who’ve suffered under excessively harsh parenting, I am often drawn to child psychology literature and any other psych lit that will help me understand how to interpret the more negative aspects of their adult behavior. Throughout this enormous and daunting quest to…