Alice Miller (psychologist)

Alice Miller (born Alicja Englard; 12 January 1923 – 14 April 2010) was a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher of Jewish origin, who is noted for her books on parental child abuse, translated into several languages.

She was also a noted public intellectual.

From 1931 to 1933 the family lived in Berlin, where nine-year-old Alicja learned the German language.

Due to the National Socialists' seizure of power in Germany in 1933 the family turned back to Piotrków Trybunalski.

As a young woman, Miller managed to escape the Jewish Ghetto in Piotrków Trybunalski, where all Jewish inhabitants were interned since October 1939, and survived World War II in Warsaw under the assumed name of Alicja Rostowska.

While she was able to smuggle her mother and sister out, in 1941, her father died in the ghetto.

She retained her assumed name Alice Rostowska when she moved to Switzerland in 1946, where she had won a scholarship to the University of Basel.

In 1949 she married Swiss sociologist Andreas Miller, originally a Polish Catholic, with whom she had moved from Poland to Switzerland as students.

They had two children, Martin (born 1950) and Julika (born 1956).

Shortly after his mother's death Martin Miller stated in an interview with Der Spiegel that he had been beaten by his authoritarian father during his childhood - in the presence of his mother.

Miller stated that his mother did not intervene and was emotionally abusive.

Martin also mentioned that his mother was unable to talk with him, despite numerous lengthy conversations, about her wartime experiences, as she was severely burdened by them.

In 1953 Miller got her doctorate in philosophy, psychology and sociology.

Between 1953 and 1960, Miller studied psychoanalysis and practiced it between 1960 and 1980 in Zürich.

They divorced in 1973.

It is an informal autobiography in which the writer explores her emotional process from painful childhood, through the development of her theories and later insights, told via the display and discussion of 66 of her original paintings, painted in the years 1973–2005.

The introduction to the first chapter in Miller's first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, first published in 1979, contains a line that summarises her core view.

In it, she writes:

"Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood."

In 1980, after having worked as a psychoanalyst and an analyst trainer for 20 years, Miller "stopped practicing and teaching psychoanalysis in order to explore childhood systematically."

She became critical of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Her first three books originated from research she took upon herself as a response to what she felt were major blind spots in her field.

However, by the time her fourth book was published, she no longer believed that psychoanalysis was viable in any respect.

Her 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 her books she departed from psychoanalysis, charging it with being similar to the poisonous pedagogies.

Miller was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland into a Jewish family.

She was the oldest daughter of Gutta and Meylech Englard and had a sister, Irena, who was five years younger.

In 1985 Miller wrote about the research from her time as a psychoanalyst: "For twenty years I observed people denying their childhood traumas, idealising their parents and resisting the truth about their childhood by any means."

In 1985 she left Switzerland and moved to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in Southern France.

In 1986, she was awarded the Janusz Korczak Literary Award for her book Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child.

In April 1987 Miller announced in an interview with the German magazine Psychologie Heute (Psychology Today) her rejection of psychoanalysis.

The following year she cancelled her memberships in both the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association, because she felt that psychoanalytic theory and practice made it impossible for former victims of child abuse to recognise the violations inflicted on them and to resolve the consequences of the abuse, as they "remained in the old tradition of blaming the child and protecting the parents".

In the 1990s, Miller strongly supported a new method developed by Konrad Stettbacher, who himself was later charged with incidents of sexual abuse.

Between 2005 and her death in 2010, she answered hundreds of readers' letters on her website, where there are also published articles, flyers and interviews in three languages.

Days before her death Alice Miller wrote: "These letters will stay as an important witness also after my death under my copyright".

One of Miller's last books, Bilder meines Lebens ("Pictures of My Life"), was published in 2006.

Miller died on 14 April 2010, at the age of 87, at her home in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence by suicide after severe illness and diagnosis of advanced-stage pancreatic cancer.

Miller extended the trauma model to include all forms of child abuse, including those that were commonly accepted (such as spanking), which she called poisonous pedagogy, a non-literal translation of Katharina Rutschky's Schwarze Pädagogik (black or dark pedagogy/imprinting).

Drawing upon the work of psychohistory, Miller analyzed writers Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and others to find links between their childhood traumas and the course and outcome of their lives.