"Alice Miller changed the way people thought." "Clinically, she is almost as influential as RD Laing" - referring to the psychiatrist author of The Divided Self who completely overturned conceptions of mental illness in the 1960s. "She's extremely important," says psychologist Oliver James, author of They F*** You Up. She was never merely a pop psychologist, even if she has a considerable talent for presenting psychoanalytic ideas in very clear, even stark terms. Merkin went on to describe Miller as "the missing link between Freud and Oprah".īut that alone does not account for the huge impact of Miller's work. For who would not wish to think of themselves as gifted? This helps to explain the cult status the original book quickly achieved - because educated middle-class readers could easily find themselves reflected in it. As the writer Daphne Merkin observed (in a critical review of Miller's 2002 book, The Truth Will Set You Free), The Drama of the Gifted Child was "cannily" titled - "presumably to flatter its readers". It is much more comforting to identify with the child-victim. And you do not have to have been a vicious childbeater - Proust's mother was no worse than clinging and controlling, but it was enough, according to Miller, to condemn him to an untimely death. It is practically impossible to read her, if you are a parent, without a gathering sense of unease, guilt and defensiveness. And strong stuff is what you get with Alice Miller. It was this attitude that made my childhood feel like a totalitarian regime." In the new book, she writes of her mother thus: "Not once did she apologise to me or express any kind of regret. Elsewhere, she has analysed the psyches of Hitler and his henchmen, and despotism constantly recurs as a metaphor in her work. Whatever her personal experience, the spectre of Nazi persecution haunts the pages of her books. According to one report, Miller was brought up in Germany, but how she and her family spent the wartime years is unknown. It is very painful to realise that, but this realisation can also be liberating from a self-deception."įurther biographical details are hard to obtain. Fortunately not so much as my parents had been to me. She has two (adult) children, about whom she has said: "I never hit them but I was sometimes careless and neglecting to my first child out of ignorance. She has described her background as "ordinary middle-class" - "My father was an unsuccessful banker, my mother a housewife," she said in a rare interview in 1999. She became a practising analyst herself, but resigned from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1988 (signalling her "break" with mainstream Freudian analysis). What we do know is that Miller was born in Poland in 1923, and settled in Switzerland in 1946, studying philosophy in Basle, then psychoanalysis in Zurich. Although she has campaigned vigorously against smacking - penning "open letters" to the Pope and Tony Blair, among others - she is publicity-shy and shuns journalists. Now in her 70s, Miller lives in Switzerland. The drama of the gifted child revisited - without the happy ending. The new book studies, in thumbnail-sketch fashion, the lives of several eminent artists - Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Friedrich von Schiller and others - and describes how the illnesses, mental disorders and addictions that ruined their lives can be traced to the cruelties they had suffered in childhood. The latest, published next month, sticks to the eternal theme - The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting.
Since then, Miller has authored numerous follow-ups, whose titles speak for themselves - Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries, The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness - to name a few. The Drama of the Gifted Child was a word-of-mouth sensation, and went on to sell over a million copies. More than anyone else, Miller put people in touch with their "inner child", encouraging them to own "their own truth" - by which she meant the truth of their abuse. Miller's model of family relation ships has become a landmark for everyone from child-abuse professionals to the self-helping public.
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