Alice Miller – författare

Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound book has provided thousands of readers with an answer,and has helped them to apply it to their own lives.Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents' expectations and win their "love." Alice Miller writes, "When I used the word 'gifted' in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb, Without this 'gift' offered us by nature, we would not have survived." But merely surviving is not enough. The Drama of the Gifted Child helps us to reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth.

More than twenty years ago, a little-known Swiss psychoanalyst wrote a book that changed the way many people viewed themselves and their world. In simple but powerful prose, the deeply moving Drama of the Gifted Child showed how parents unconsciously form and deform the emotional lives of their children. Alice Miller's stories about the roots of suffering in childhood resonated with readers, and her book soon became a backlist best seller.In The Truth Will Set You Free Miller returns to the intensely personal tone and themes of her best-loved work. Only by embracing the truth of our past histories can any of us hope to be free of pain in the present, she argues. Miller uses vivid true stories to reveal the perils of early-childhood mistreatment and the dangers of mindless obedience to parental will. Drawing on the latest research on brain development, she shows how spanking and humiliation produce dangerous levels of denial, which leads in turn to emotional blindness and to mental barriers that cut off awareness and the ability to learn new ways of acting.If this cycle repeats itself, the grown child will perpetrate the same abuse on later generations- a message vitally important, especially given the increasing popularity of programs like Tough Love and of "child disciplinarians" like James Dobson. The Truth Will Set You Free will provoke and inform all readers who want to know Alice Miller's latest thinking on this important subject.

In direct opposition to the Freudian drive  theory, the author of the best-selling The Drama  Of The Gifted Child believes that  children, at birth, are inherently good, and she  traces all forms of criminal deeds to past  mistreatments.

As in her former books, Alice Miller again focusses on facts. She is as determined as ever to cut through the veil that, for thousands of years now, has been so meticulously woven to shroud the truth. And when she lifts that veil and brushes it aside, the results are astonishing, as is amply demonstrated by her analyses of the works of Nietzsche, Picasso, Kollwitz, Keaton and others. With the key shunned by so many for so long - childhood - she opens rusty looks and offers her readers a wealth of unexpected perspectives.What did Picasso express in "Guernica"? Why did Buster Keaton never smile? Why did Nietzsche heap so much opprobrium on women and religion, and lose his mind for eleven years? Why did Hitler and Stalin become tyrannical mass murderers? Alice Miller investigates these and other questions thoroughly in this book. She draws from her discoveries the conclusion that human beings are not "innately" destructive, that they are made that way by ignorance, abuse, and neglect, particularly if no sympathetic witness comes to their aid. She also shows why some mistreated children do not become criminals but instead bear witness as artists to the truth about their childhoods, even though in purely intuitive and unconscious ways.

In this book, we will explore together with American journalist Joseph T. Hallinan this human error world. We will know how to think, how to forget and how to see things, and why we make the irresistible mistakes. Hallinan deepens during this exploratory journey in psychology, economics, football, and many different fields.

Never before has world-renowned psychoanalyst Alice Miller examined so persuasively the long-range consequences of childhood abuse on the body. Using the experiences of her patients along with the biographical stories of literary giants such as Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust, Miller shows how a child's humiliation, impotence, and bottled rage will manifest itself as adult illness—be it cancer, stroke, or other debilitating diseases. Never one to shy away from controversy, Miller urges society as a whole to jettison its belief in the Fourth Commandment and not to extend forgiveness to parents whose tyrannical childrearing methods have resulted in unhappy, and often ruined, adult lives. In this empowering work, writes Rutgers professor Philip Greven, "readers will learn how to confront the overt and covert traumas of their own childhoods with the enlightened guidance of Alice Miller."

The renowned childhood researcher, psychotherapist, and best-selling author Alice Miller has received, throughout her long and distinguished career, countless personal letters from readers all over the world. In From Rage to Courage, Dr. Miller has assembled the most recent, producing an insightful work that illuminates the issues and consequences of childhood abuse. Whether exploring the connection between repressed anger and physical illnesses like cancer, the reasons why many survivors of abuse turn to drugs or crime, or the cycle that condemns generations of families to cruelty in childhood, Dr. Miller’s answers are sensitive, honest, and supported by decades of experience. Unafraid of controversy, she discusses much-debated theories such as the impact of religious belief on the cultural traditions of child abuse and the therapeutic community’s denial of the truth and dependency on antidepressants. A practical guide to Dr. Miller’s unique therapeutic concept, this work once again affirms the healing and liberating power of retrieved emotions.

Since the landmark publication of The Drama of the Gifted Child, no one has been more influential than Alice Miller in empowering adults whose lives were maimed emotionally and physically as children. Now Dr. Miller goes even further, presenting groundbreaking theories that enhance communication between therapist and patient and enable the adult to express powerful emotions that have been trapped for years. Practical and perceptive, Miller’s work explains what we can expect from therapy, how we can identify the causes of our own pain, and why subconscious pain, unaddressed for decades, manifests itself later as depression, self-mutilation, primal inadequacy, and chronic loneliness. With its responses to readers’ letters and powerful stories, Free from Lies is the culmination of a life devoted to healing others.

Miller incorporates psychohistorical analyses of Hitler, Stalin, and Ceausescu to reveal the links between the horrors of their childhoods and the horrors they inflicted on the world. She pleads for an awareness of society's role in child abuse and for recognition of the victim.

Never before has world-renowned psychoanalyst Alice Miller examined so persuasively the long-range consequences of childhood abuse on the body. Using the experiences of her patients along with the biographical stories of literary giants such as Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust, Miller shows how a child's humiliation, impotence, and bottled rage will manifest itself as adult illness—be it cancer, stroke, or other debilitating diseases. Never one to shy away from controversy, Miller urges society as a whole to jettison its belief in the Fourth Commandment and not to extend forgiveness to parents whose tyrannical childrearing methods have resulted in unhappy, and often ruined, adult lives. In this empowering work, writes Rutgers professor Philip Greven, "readers will learn how to confront the overt and covert traumas of their own childhoods with the enlightened guidance of Alice Miller."

Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Summer 2018. Is nowhere a place we can get closer to? In her compelling second collection, Alice Miller tackles the circularity of thought, the company of the dead, and the lure of alternative futures. These poems rip into pockets of histories, trying to change facts and voices, searching for the word’s version of music’s home key. They dare you to visit, through a series of cities, the futures we never let happen.

Longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2022What Fire is about how to continue as catastrophe crawls in, when the climate crisis has its grip on us all, the internet has been shut down, and the buildings are burning up. What happens when the philosophers never arrive? What songs are still worth singing? In her third collection, Alice Miller takes a fierce, unflinching look at the world we live in, at what we have made, and whether it is possible to change.

Personal and political collide in Alice Miller’s fourth poetry collection, as she compares present-day Berlin, where she is a new mother, with the city her German-Jewish grandmother was forced to leave. Darting through bedrooms and empires, whispers and wars, bureaucracy and origin stories, these unpredictable poems invoke Mary Shelley, Homer, and the atom bomb to ask if we can ever find a new beginning. How many buildings and oceans, how many minutes and years, how many voices speak through us? And if the past is never past, can we ever repair the present?