Melville House Books

A self-portrait by Alice Miller

Alice Miller, the psychologist whose 1981 book The Drama of the Gifted Child sold over one million copies, caused a sensation, and “changed the way people thought” about childhood, has died at the age of 87 at her home in Provence. Her death occurred on April 14 but was only just revealed, in an announcement by her German publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag. As a New York Times obituary by William Grimes notes, Miller “repositioned the family as a locus of dysfunction with her theory that parental power and punishment lay at the root of nearly all human problems.”

Miller was born in Lwow, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), in 1923. According to the Times, “She studied philosophy and literature at the University of Warsaw, which operated underground during the war,” and became a Freudian psychiatrist after studying in Switzerland.

Her fame started with Drama of the Gifted Child, which was originally titled Prisoners of Childhood, in which she declared, as the Times synopsizes, that all children

… suffer trauma and permanent psychic scarring at the hands of parents, who enforce codes of conduct through psychological pressure or corporal punishment: slaps, spankings or, in extreme cases, sustained physical abuse and even torture.

Unable to admit the rage they feel toward their tormenters, Dr. Miller contended, these damaged children limp along through life, weighed down by depression and insecurity, and pass the abuse along to the next generation, in an unending cycle. Some, in a pathetic effort to please their parents and serve their needs, distinguish themselves in the arts or professions. The Stalins and the Hitlers, Dr. Miller later wrote, inflict their childhood traumas on millions.

As the Times also notes, the book’s “central argument was easy to grasp and, for many readers, offered a tempting explanation for their sorrows and failures.” On the other hand, “Dr. Miller is often credited with turning the attention of therapists to child abuse, both physical and sexual, but also with encouraging millions of adults to regard themselves as victims.”

She went on to detail and deepen her theory in a series of books:

Dr. Miller further developed her ideas in two books published immediately after “The Drama of the Gifted Child”: “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence” (1983) and “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child” (1984). She applied her theory of childhood development to explain the passivity of the German people in the face of Nazi tyranny and took aim at Freud, whose theories, she believed, cast parents as innocents and children as depraved.

Often she used prominent artists as her case studies. In “The Untouched Key” (1990), she held up Friedrich Nietzsche, Pablo Picasso, Kathe Kollwitz and Buster Keaton as illustrations of her theories. In “The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting” (2005), she put Dostoyevsky, Proust and Joyce under the microscope.

Miller eventually stopped her psychiatry practice, having come to believe that “The relationship of analyst to patient … replicated the insidious power relationship of parent to child.” In 1990, she published Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries, in which she “revealed her own abuse as a child, which she discovered through paintings she created spontaneously.”

Miller subsequently wrote of her mother, “Not once did she apologize to me or express any kind of regret. She was always ‘in the right.’ It was this attitude that made my childhood feel like a totalitarian regime.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.