Advocate for Children Alice Miller (1923-2010): In Memoriam

At age 87 the European author and child advocate Alice Miller died in her home in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France on April 14. The cause was amyotrophia, a disease causing muscle wasting and weakening. Dr. Miller brought together knowledge from psychoanalysis, social work, sociology, and history to focus on and advocate for “the damaged child.” Her breakthrough book, Prisoner of Childhood: The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979), sold over one million copies, and consequently began to change the way many people thought about childhood. Her 13 books argue that all children suffer permanent psychological and sometimes physical damage at the hands of disciplining parents, but her books are thought by many critics to be too sweeping in their conclusions.

Alice Rostovski was born on January 12, 1923 in Lwów, Poland (now Ukraine) into what she described as a “quite ordinary middle class” Jewish family, her father an unsuccessful banker and her mother a homemaker. Although she rarely provided personal details of her life, it is possible to put together a sketchy picture. Through the efforts of her parents she was smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto to live under an assumed identity with a Catholic family. Sometimes she was able to slip back into the Ghetto to see and bring food to her parents, but she could do nothing to save them. After the war, she was rescued by a Swiss charity and lived most of her life in Zurich. In Switzerland she completed her doctoral degree in psychology and sociology at the University of Basel in 1953. Subsequently, she trained in psychoanalysis in Zurich and practiced as an analyst. Her marriage to the sociologist Andreas Miller led to the birth of

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two children prior to their divorce.

After practicing Freudian psychoanalysis for most of two decades, Miller’s repressed memories of the horrors of her past broke through as she started painting in 1975, causing her to question her memories of an idyllic childhood. This occurred at a time when there was considerable controversy over Sigmund Freud’s replacing his initial theory of parental and other adult child abuse as the cause of neurosis with his subsequent theory of childhood fantasies of adult abuse. Dr. Miller started writing about the horrors of child abuse, including the severe disciplining of children. In 1979 she terminated her psychoanalytic practice when she came to believe that the analyst-patient relationship reproduced the negative power dynamics of parent and child. This belief also caused her to break with Freudianism. She explained, “In the Freudian view, the parents, not the child, are innocent. This view fits society, it overlooks in Oedipus the abused child, and sees him…only led to killing his father and marrying his mother.” For this reason, Miller encourages therapists to help their patients evolve from “silent children” to “talking children.” She cautions against saying that disturbed parents were well meaning, because this does not support the child’s feeling their own pain and instead sympathizes with the parents. It was at this time, in 1979, that she began publishing. The dramatic rupture from Freudian psychoanalysis is described in Banished Knowledge (1990), a semi-autobiographical book in which Miller revealed not only her ideas, but that she was in fact abused as a child.

Dr. Miller did some psychobiography in her analyses of Hitler, Nietzsche, Stalin, Picasso, Dostoyevsky, and many other well-known figures as case studies of the impact of child abuse. Growing up witnessing Hitler’s rise to power, Miller wrote that she watched as millions of people “enthusiastically allowed a primitive, arrogant monster to lead them to murder their fellow human beings.” Conse-

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quently, she spent her life “trying to understand the riddle of such dangerous blindness.” Miller explored these ideas more fully later in her career, focusing on the passivity of the German people toward the Nazis in For Your Own Good (1983) and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware (1984). She was also especially noted for her argument that Hitler’s painful childhood led to his murderous regime. Her chapter on him does an outstanding job of tying the child Adolf growing up in a highly authoritarian household to his creation of a totalitarian regime in Nazi Germany in which he played the role of his hated authoritarian father, Alois. Unfortunately, Miller did not have the sensibility of the historian and makes some factual errors as to the details of the abuse and the Hitler family. This, however, does not negate her contribution to Hitler scholarship or the relationship of childhood horror to adult political horror on the stage of history. For her contributions she received the honor of being named featured speaker at a conference of the International Psychohistorical Association where this small, frail woman dominated the proceedings.

“Nobody is born evil” was her core belief, but Miller also thought some individuals could come to act in an evil fashion because of ill treatment as a child. Physical ills, psychic pain, and intergenerational violence were among the consequences of child abuse. Miller was also able to broaden and deepen child welfare by enlightening the field with her studies of psychological abuse, which she felt must be recognized and treated. She believed that Freud’s cancer of the jaw was a response to his unwillingness to confront child abuse as a real problem.

Miller’s ideas have influenced therapists and social workers worldwide. Her influence has led to more therapists today being instructed to ask about child abuse. Adults are encouraged to uncover their own early traumas, resulting in the many “victims movements.” The many victims of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of priests, who have found

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their voices and spoken out publicly, have tarnished the Catholic Church. Dr. Miller’s insistence on listening to the voices of silenced children deserves some credit for this.

The new field of research on “resilient children” supports one of Miller’s arguments. She argued that a child can be “saved” if s/he has the chance to connect with at least one person who is kind and encouraging. In several studies of “high risk” children who have overcome their background, one critical protective factor was having an outsider who took a supportive interest in the child.

Alice Miller argued on her website (www.alice-miller.com), that abuse often creates violent adults. “Children assimilate the violence they have endured, which they then glorify and apply later as parents, believing that they deserved the punishment and were beaten out of love.” Research arising from the battered women’s movement confirms her thesis that abused children often become abusing adults.

Some scholars have argued that Dr. Miller’s 13 books are essentially one book, each making the same argument with varied examples. She has been accused of oversimplification and blaming parents for problems that are often caused by biology, class, economics, and historical forces. Despite these and other criticisms, warranted and unwarranted, Alice Miller deserves much credit for moving the crusade against child abuse a huge step forward. She has done much to break down the wall of silence surrounding child abuse in our world and for this alone she deserves to be memorialized.

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