Alice Miller

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Alice Miller (born  January 12, 1923 in Piotrków Trybunalski , Poland , as Alicija Englard; † April 14, 2010 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence , Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur , France ) was a Polish- Swiss author and Psychologist .

She has presented her views on the child-parent relationship in many generally understandable works and criticized psychoanalysis . Miller described their drive theory as unreal belief, because the drive theory depicts childhood traumas as childish fantasies and denies the reality of child abuse and child abuse. She consequently resigned from the Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis and the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1988 . Since the late 1980s she vehemently contradicted her classification as a psychoanalyst (→  turning away from psychoanalysis ) and most recently referred to herself as a childhood researcher .

Best known was her first book The Drama of the Gifted Child , which appeared in 1979 and several times thereafter with additions and revisions. In her work, she dealt critically with psychoanalysis and other psychotherapeutic and educational paradigms.

Life

Parents and childhood

Alice Miller grew up as Alicija Englard in an Orthodox Jewish family in Piotrków, Poland. She was the eldest daughter of Gutta and Meylech Englard.

Alice Miller characterized her father as an “unsuccessful banker” and her mother as a housewife who “once” “was” “a girl without rights, oppressed by her parents and brothers”, with “words about love, morality and duty ”“ was raised ”. The couple married in July 1921. Miller was born eighteen months after the wedding; after another four years her younger sister was born. Miller wrote of her mother that she “had her established ideas, such as those used in the past, and the like. a. that, by definition , every mother only 'wants the best for her child' [...] ”. The mother presented her daughter's exercise books "to her friends as evidence of her educational talents". About her situation in the family she wrote in 1988: “The discovery that I was an abused child, that from the beginning of my life I had to cater to my mother's needs and feelings and had no chance at all to feel my own, made me feel very surprised."

In 1931 she moved to Berlin with her parents , where she learned the German language. After the National Socialists seized power , the family returned to Piotrków in 1933.

Survive during the German occupation of Poland

After the German occupation of Poland in the autumn of 1939, living conditions for the Jewish minority deteriorated dramatically. Alice Miller was able to take her Abitur at the age of 17 in 1940 . Then she was sent to the Piotrków Trybunalski ghetto with her entire family . Through contacts with the Jewish underground organization, Miller managed to obtain a passport with the code name Alice Rostovska , to leave the ghetto in the summer of 1940 and to live in Warsaw under a false identity. She also managed to free her mother and sister from the ghetto. The father died in the ghetto in 1941.

Education and life in Switzerland

In 1942, at the age of 19, she began studying literary history and philosophy at the Secret University of Warsaw ( Tajny Uniwersytet Warszawski ).

After the end of the Second World War , Alice Miller continued her studies at the University of Łódź in 1945 . After two semesters as a guest student of the Swiss Academic Post-War Aid , she went to the University of Basel , where she continued her studies at the Faculty of Philosophy and History. When she immigrated to Switzerland, she kept her code name , which for a long time led the public to believe that Rostovska was her maiden name. From December 1946 to February 1953 she studied philosophy as the main subject and psychology and sociology as minor subjects . She interrupted her studies several times; for example because of his marriage to Andreas Miller on April 14, 1949, a sociologist who also emigrated from Poland; because of her move from Basel to Rapperswil (SG) on Lake Zurich and the birth of her son Martin.

She then obtained her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Basel through a dissertation with Heinrich Barth on the problem of individualized concept formation with Heinrich Rickert . Their publication as a book by a publishing house in Winterthur was made possible by the University's rain committee with a larger contribution from the dissertation fund.

During her studies, she attended exercises and lectures in Poland Władysław Witwicki , Władysław Tatarkiewicz , Józef Chałasiński , Tadeusz Marian Kotarbiński and his former student and later wife Dina Sztejnbarg (pseudonym: Janina Kaminska ) and in Basel except for Heinrich Barth also with Fritz Buri - Richard, Hermann Gauss (Professor of Philosophy), Karl Jaspers , Hans Kunz , Hendrik van Oyen (Professor of Theology), Edgar Salin , Herman Schmalenbach , Andreas Speiser and John Eugen Staehelin-Iselin (Professor of Psychiatry).

After completing his humanities degree, Miller began training in Freudian psychoanalysis in Zurich . The training of psychoanalysts according to the guidelines of the International Psychoanalytic Association  (IPV) was formally part of the Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis  (SGPsa) and its teaching committee at the time, but it was actually left to an informal circle of friends of psychoanalysts in Zurich, apostrophized as Kränzli .

This group initially included Fritz Morgenthaler , Jacques Berna and the couple Goldy Parin-Matthèy and Paul Parin , then Harold Winter , Harold Lincke and Fred Singeisen and even later Arno von Blarer , Ulrich Moser , Maria Pfister-Ammende , and the couple Renate Grütter and Emil Grütter , Hans Müller-Winterthur and others. Ultimately, the growing interest in psychoanalysis meant that this group grew so much that it had to be given an institutional framework in 1958 for practical reasons: the Psychoanalytical Seminar for Candidates  (PSK) was founded in Zurich . It remained formally independent of the SGPsa and published its first two programs together with the institute for medical psychotherapy, which is not Freudian but life-analytical oriented, and which is related to the Psychiatric University Clinic Zurich (“Burghölzli”) . From 1958 to 1965, besides Berna, von Blarer, Lincke, Morgenthaler, U. Moser, Müller-Winterthur, P. Parin and Winter, Gustav Bally and Ernst Blum also taught at the PSK .

Miller completed two psychoanalyses in connection with her training; her second analyst was Gertrud Boller-Schwing , who in 1940 published the book A Path to the Soul of the Mentally Ill . Despite the analyzes, Miller's childhood amnesia remained “more or less intact” by his own assessment.

Analyzes were, according to another former character of the psychoanalyst training in Switzerland, not before it begins , but only after its conclusion officially by including Miller in the SGPsa as the competent professional association to training analyzes explained. The reason for this procedure was the handling of analyst training at the SGPsa, which was unique among the member associations of the IPA at the time, which was declared to avoid a school entrance examination for the training course of a psychoanalyst and from which it also followed that at the time it was not formally in the SGPsa Training analyzes still existed as training analysts .

children

Miller was assumed to have no children of her own and therefore idealize children for lack of maternal experience. In fact, she had two children, Martin and Julika. In the mid-1990s, she also publicly thanked her children for the trust they had in her and expressed the hope that she would have enough time left to "really deserve" the trust her children had placed in her.

Miller herself raised her children without corporal punishment, but admitted that because of the earlier suppression of her own feelings and needs, she could not give her first child Martin the understanding he needed and therefore would sometimes have neglected him.

Martin Miller reported after his mother's death that he was beaten by his father, Andreas Miller , in her presence . His father's violence “went from verbal to physical”, “with [his] mother intervening”. He attributed these circumstances during the period of his growing up from the 1950s to the separation of Miller from her husband in the mid-1960s because his parents were "very burdened by the war experience" and "had to work their way up [in Switzerland]. , as refugees, as migrants ”:“ Perhaps they had other worries than worrying about upbringing ”and“ had to come to terms, position themselves in society, be successful [;] the children fell by the wayside ”.

In 1980 Alice Miller described that "countless conversations with [her] son ​​[...] in which he [she] repeatedly confronted [her] with the unconscious upbringing constraints [of] [her] generation internalized by [her] in childhood", "an important role "Played" in [their] knowledge process "about" what education actually is ":

“I owe part of my own liberation from these constraints to the rich and clear expression of his experiences, which was only possible after I had listened to the refined, tiny nuances of the educational attitude. I discussed many of the thoughts outlined here with my son before I wrote them down. "

- In the beginning there was education

Miller suspected 15 years later that she would not have seen her blockages without Martin's openness, persistence, and alertness, and without his ultimate clarity.

Julika Miller's portrait photo, which Alice Miller's German publisher Suhrkamp uses on its website and on the covers of her books, depicts Miller with her glasses in her left hand.

Miller provided this photo because she did not allow photographers to "take pictures of [her] [...] because [she] did not want to give anyone the copyright on [her] pictures".

Life in France

Alice Miller lived in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France since 1985 .

death

On April 5, 2010, Miller announced that it had to stop working on its website because of "severe muscle loss"; while she was already talking about her impending death.

On April 23, 2010, her publisher announced that she had died on April 14, 2010 at the age of 87 and that she had been entombed in close quarters.

In his biography of his mother, Martin Miller describes that Alice Miller was seriously ill in early 2010. After an advanced diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, she sought active euthanasia and ended her life on April 14th. The body was cremated and the ashes scattered on a small mountain lake near St. Rémy.

The self-chosen day of death, April 14th, was Alice and Andreas Miller's wedding anniversary. The wedding took place on April 14, 1949 in Zurich.

Career

Psychoanalytic Practice

In the early 1960s Miller became a member of the SGPsa and was later a member of its teaching committee under the direction of Fritz Morgenthaler. She also became a member of the IPA.

In the second half of the 1960s she dealt with two articles and a lecture given by Heinz Kohut on narcissism in 1966 in Frankfurt am Main . At the 6th workshop of the Central European Psychoanalytic Association in Brunnen on Lake Lucerne in April 1968, she heard a lecture by Clemens de Boors , who ascribed a special and very important role to Kohut's work on narcissism, and de Boor had rightly promised himself from them to take better account of the changed clinical picture of our patients in the last forty years ”.

At the same time, the board of the SGPsa (→  Psychoanalytical Training ) was confronted with the demand for student self-administration in the spring of 1968: On the agenda was the subject of candidate participation in training . Independent working groups of candidates formed in Zurich and Geneva ; In May the SGPsa board decided to consult candidates from Zurich to program the seminars. The first general meeting of the candidates took place in December: Among other things, the holding of seminars without lecturers of the SGPsa and the participation of the SGPsa teaching committee by candidates were negotiated. Since the PSK lecturers viewed the anti-authoritarian demands of the 1968 initiatives with reluctance, conflicts arose with the candidates; nevertheless, candidate representatives were elected to the SGPsa teaching committee. As a result of this development, the PSK was transformed into a self-administered seminar at the beginning of the 1970s. From April 1970, Miller represented the extraordinary SGPsa members in his first seminar leadership after the restructuring. The transformation of the seminar was reflected externally by a name change: In the summer, the psychoanalytic seminar for candidates was renamed the Psychoanalytic Seminar Zurich (PSZ).

In the meantime, Miller took de Boors' lecture as an opportunity to write an article on the treatment technique for so-called narcissistic neuroses , in which, in addition to theoretical and practical explanations, she presented four case studies of patients she had treated in the 1960s (two that she considered severe obsessive-compulsive , and two that she considered " obsessive-compulsive characters "); she submitted the article to the psychoanalytic journal Psyche in July 1970 , where it was published in 1971. At that time she was practicing near Kreuzplatz in Zurich .

Drawing and painting

It was only at the age of 49, in 1972, that Miller began to paint, although she had "wished it all her life without this wish being able to prevail clearly enough". For her pictures she used "all possible techniques", namely oil , oil pastel , gouache and watercolor .

Because Miller initially did not have her own studio, she painted “large oil paintings on the easel in the corner of a room”. In 1973 she began to paint spontaneously , which she later referred to as the beginning of her “liberation process [es]” “from the labyrinth of self-deception called psychoanalysis”. In order to meet her need “not to stay on a picture for days”, but “to communicate quickly and spontaneously”, she began to “work on painting pads”. The scarcity of its time gave rise to the technique of "making large, quick strokes with a soft, fairly broad brush and with oil paints heavily diluted with turpentine", "just as [her] hand [wants]". With the spatula she then pressed further, undiluted colors into the wet paint, which mixed with the wet paints and partially ran out. She then drew various shapes into this mixture, so that some of her pictures were ready in a few minutes. She let the sheets dry for a few days before putting them in drawers because she needed space for the next few pictures. In this way Miller came up with hundreds of sheets of paper which she considered “a kind of diary from that time”. The painting technique described lost its importance for her after she got her own studio with different spatial and technical possibilities.

The attempt to paint pictures that she had dreamed the night before, which began around the same time, was unsuccessful:

“I can only always paint from the moment. As soon as I set out to do something, I am blocked, even if it is my own dream. At the moment of painting, I can only dream new dreams, but not depict a past one. Neither can I plan to design a canvas one way or the other without completely changing my plan in a short period of time. The same thing happens when I try to copy painters who are important to me. I start, and after a few minutes another picture emerges that has little to do with its beginnings. "

- Pictures of a childhood

Miller drew faces in hotels and restaurants; on her travels to different cities she went to life drawing and enjoyed “the concentration of those present on seeing and the attentive silence”. Depending on her mood, she drew "the nude in pose" or, if she was not in the mood, "to look at a naked body in a pose, [...] the faces of the person drawing". Regarding her painting technique in life drawing, she noted:

“As far as the painting technique was concerned, I had to reinvent or rediscover it for myself over and over again, depending on how I felt or what external situation I was in. The resulting technology was therefore the result of a strong urge for expression and the practical possibilities that were available to me. "

- Pictures of a childhood

In addition to face and life drawing, Miller called copying her "school in drawing". Since she was of the opinion that her “inability to copy” applied “above all” to “painted pictures”, she mainly copied drawings, namely faces by Leonardo da Vinci , Pablo Picasso and “again and again” by Rembrandt .

She herself described her style as improvising:

“I always have to search, find, feel, try things out, and I can never do anything slowly, rely on what I know, practice something and finish it off. I have to surrender myself to an event that seems to have its own legality and which defies control and censorship. As soon as I try to control it, to think about working more slowly, this process is blocked. The result can then seem skilful, but it bores me, probably because it lacks the language of the unconscious, which naturally eludes my knowledge and ability. "

- Pictures of a childhood

All in all, she considered her books to be “completely unthinkable” without the freedom gained through painting.

Dispute about the "Modena Hauser paper"

In the fall of 1975 authored two candidates on PSZ, Ursula Hauser and Emilio Modena , originally internal paper with theses on the introduction of a Study Group (dt.  Study Group ) on ways of psychoanalytic research from a Marxist perspective . In it they formulated u. a .:

“The political situation at the seminar is characterized by the successful conclusion of a phase of struggle between the petty-bourgeois-radical-democratic against bourgeois-authoritarian forces, which has led to a formal democratization of the seminar structures. As a result, the struggle between bourgeois, petty-bourgeois and proletarian tendencies and ideas extends today to the field of teaching content and psychoanalytic conceptualization. "

- Introductory theses

Professor Ulrich Moser , for whom the paper was actually not intended as a late member of the Kränzli (→  Psychoanalytical Training ) and lecturer at the PSZ, received knowledge of this and responded with a letter to the seminar leader of the PSZ as well as to the president and the teaching committee of the SGPsa: “The study groups were introduced to find a freer way of dealing with literature. Lecturers were dispensed with [...] and the requirement that a member of the [SGPsa] should lead such an event was dropped. It was not meant, however, that groups are carried out in an amateurish manner, and even less should the objective be to mix political strategy with scientific research planning ”.

Thereupon protracted conflicts arose over the Modena-Hauser paper , which was partly made known outside the Study Group in this way . In February 1976 Ulrich Moser requested that the accessibility of the study groups , the procedure for their inclusion in the PSZ program and the definition of their content be changed. The seminar leader put these proposals in a modified form on the agenda of the responsible meeting and sent Moser's proposals with the invitation, but neither the Modena-Hauser paper nor Moser's related letter.

“As a result, there was a very emotional confrontation between politically diverging currents within the seminar. […] In this process at the PSZ, some successful training analysts and some analysts with completed analysis lost their analytical relaxation and serenity and resorted to political-tactical means such as filibuster , manipulation, blackmail or rumbling protest à la former Khrushchev in the UN in New York. For the first time in the history of the SGP [sa], perhaps also the IPA, the strike was used as a means of political pressure, with 8 lecturers stopping their lectures until the situation in the seminar had been clarified. "

- Annual report of the seminar leader

Miller served on the SGPsa teaching committee during these operations. At the beginning of March 1976 she submitted a six-page proposal to the then SGPsa President Fritz Meerwein , which was to be introduced at the next annual meeting of the SGPsa, with the object of withdrawing the PSZ's recognition as a training seminar. In the reasoning of the application, she led u. a. from, “ In the Modena-Hauser-Moser affair, the seminar leaders would have refused to comply with Moser's request and tried to trivialize the matter and keep it secret. Young analysts generally have to struggle with the greatest fears and feelings of powerlessness if they want to express their opinion in plenary, and are mocked or hushed up if the opinion “deviates” from “the majority”. "If this is really the case, if nothing can be changed within the seminar, which the unsuccessful attempts of Prof. Moser prove, the moment has not now come to withdraw the approval of the SGP [sa] from this seminar and another, to found a closed one where only potential members of the [SGPsa] could be trained? "

Just two weeks before the vote on Miller's motion, however, it turned out that "Ulrich Moser's attempts to change something in the seminar" were " not in vain, in contrast to the statements of Alice Miller ": They were approved on May 10, 1976 with a large majority accepted. Miller's motion found a simple majority at the annual meeting on May 22nd, but failed because of the two-thirds majority required for the withdrawal since a change in the statutes in 1974.

Concentration on journalism

In April 1978 - Miller had her practice at the Zollikerberg near Zurich at that time - she again submitted the typescript for the article Depression and Grandiosity as related forms of narcissistic disorder to the editorial staff of the magazine Psyche . The article was published there the following year and, with small changes, was incorporated into the original edition of their first book Das Drama des Talented Kinder (1979) as Part II . It was published by the same publisher as the books by Psyche founder and editor Alexander Mitscherlich , at Suhrkamp in Frankfurt am Main .

Around the same time, an article appeared in the English language by it under the title The drama of the gifted child and the psychoanalyst's narcissistic disturbance (dt.  The Drama of the Gifted Child and the narcissistic disturbance of the psychoanalyst ), which transferred to the same book as Part I has been.

After 20 years of activity as a psychoanalyst and as a training analyst, Miller gave up in 1980 "her practice and teaching in order to systematically research childhood".

From her time as a psychoanalyst, she concluded in 1985:

"For twenty years I had watched as people denied the traumas of their childhood, as they idealized their parents and defended themselves against the truth of their childhood by all means."

- Pictures of a childhood

Turn away from psychoanalysis

Miller published her second book In the Beginning Was Education in 1980 , followed by You Shall Not Remember - Variations on the Paradise Theme . To this end, she wrote a new epilogue in 1983 in which she wrote: "Only liberation from pedagogical tendencies leads to insights into the actual situation of the child" and then summarized her positions in 21 paragraphs, none of which is longer than two sentences, starting with the sentence “The child is always innocent”. The text was later published independently under the title Twenty-One Points and additional editions of other Miller's books were added.

Both books dealt with and further developed the concept of black pedagogy . She saw black pedagogy as the basis of what she called black psychoanalysis , which became part of her criticism of psychoanalysis.

In 1984 she formulated another text, about twice as long, with the similar title Twelve Points on the Child-Parent Relationship, in which she wrote "So far, society has protected adults and blamed the victims". He first appeared in For Your Own Good , the English edition of her book In the Beginning Was Education .

In the mid-1980s Miller offered psychotherapeutic workshops at the University of Zurich .

In 1985 Miller published “a small part” of her “postcard-sized watercolors” from the period since 1983 in the book Pictures of a Childhood . It contained a German version of the text Twelve Points for the first time .

For Thou Shalt Not Be Aware , the American edition of You shouldn't remember in the translation by Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum, Miller received the fourth Janusz Korczak Literary Award of the Anti-Defamation League in the category Books for on November 13, 1986 in New York Adults over children ; she was presented with a $ 1,000 prize money and a plaque.

In April 1987, she finally announced in an interview for the magazine Psychologie Heute that she was turning away from psychoanalysis.

The following year she resigned from both the Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis and the International Psychoanalytic Association "because she is of the opinion that psychoanalytic theory and practice make it impossible for former victims of child abuse to recognize this and to resolve the consequences of the injuries" .

Two years later she wrote about this time:

“Up until 1988 I received case studies that the training candidates had submitted to the teaching committee in order to become members of the Psychoanalytic Society. In all these representations it could be shown that and in what way the patients were prevented from seeing what had been done to them in their childhood, although this was made abundantly clear from the material. Such treatments, called analyzes, are pointless and often harmful.
My personal experiences finally helped me to understand that psychoanalysis will never integrate the new knowledge about childhood because it cannot by its nature . It owes its raison d'être to the denial of concrete facts with the help of abstract, disguising constructions. Hence it does not miss the truth by accident, but inevitably. It is a well-functioning system of suppressing the truth about childhood, a truth that is feared by all of society. It is no coincidence that psychoanalysis is highly regarded, especially among intellectuals. Infinite mind games can be linked to Freud's theories. "

- Breaking the wall of silence

Consequently, Miller has since vigorously dismissed the term psychoanalyst :

“I owe this information to my readers because I learn from the letters that, unfortunately, individual people, after reading my first books, decide on psychoanalytic training or treatment, assuming that what I represent here are the opinions of today's analysts.
This assumption is completely inaccurate and misleading. The educational structure of psychoanalysis has remained unchanged over the last ten years, and I personally do not know a single person who has integrated the knowledge of my books and still wanted to call himself a psychoanalyst. I also consider this impossible, because a therapist who has gained an emotional access to his childhood, which I consider necessary, cannot remain blind to the fact that psychoanalysis prevents this access at all costs. If I am often still, wrongly, called a psychoanalyst, it is only because I do not find out every time in time to correct this opinion. "

- Location 1990

Letters from the reader

Since 2007, Alice Miller has been replying to letters from readers on her website relating to the subjects of her books or articles. In 2009 she summarized some of her answers in the book Beyond Taboos , which was only available as a PDF file .

Positions

According to Miller's view, long-term, often unconsciously experienced effects of parental psychological influences on the child and the mechanisms of action that are invisible to the people involved are the cause of so-called childish misconduct and psychosomatic and mental illnesses even in adulthood. If these are not processed, Miller argues, they will be passed on to the environment without reflection - e.g. B. as parents to their own children (whereby the child is sometimes pushed into the parenting role) or as a politician to the people - or compensated, for example, by drug consumption or crime.

Miller is of the opinion that even in spectacular cases of child abuse ( trauma ) or child murder, it can always be proven on the basis of the perpetrators' childhood stories that the cause of the crime is to be found in one's own experiences as a child. However, court-appointed experts in criminal proceedings usually do not establish this connection.

Alice Miller opposes black pedagogy , by which she understands an education that aims to break the child's will through manipulation , exercise of power and blackmail . The term `` knowing witness ' ' coined by her describes a person who knows more about the child's suffering than others, such as B. a lawyer or psychologist. The term helping witness means a person who actively supports the child, such as B. a teacher, neighbor or sibling.

Learning from experience

Miller emphasized the importance of concrete life experience as a source of learning:

“Because every child learns by imitation. His body does not learn what we wanted to teach it with words, but what this body has experienced. Hence, a beaten, injured child learns to hit and hurt, while the protected and respected child learns to respect and protect the weaker. Because it only knows this experience. "

- Your saved life

The evil understood Miller in terms of destructiveness damaged people. As a false assertion, she rejected the fact that there are people who are born evil without any cause: "On the contrary, everything depends on how these people were conceived at birth and later treated."

The role of ideologies or religions with regard to the creation of a spirit of submission

In Miller's view, it didn't matter in the slightest what ideologies or religions are used to make people blind, naive subjects:

“As we know, almost every thought lends itself to using people who were abused in childhood as puppets for the respective personal interests of those in power. Even if the true exploitative character of the revered and beloved leaders emerges after their disempowerment or death, this hardly changes the admiration and unconditional loyalty of their followers. Because he embodies the longed-for good father you never had. "

- Your saved life

Books

The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979, revised 1994)

  • According to Miller, children have a natural narcissistic need (for attention, affection). It is the child's very own wish to be seen, noticed and taken seriously as the center of their own activity.
  • Fulfilling this need is essential for building a healthy sense of self and self-confidence. Ideally, the mother acts as a mirror of her own feelings, which can also be lived out without fear of loss when it comes to negative affects (fears, anger, sadness, etc.) so that the toddler develops a healthy sense of self . Only the opportunity to live out your own needs and feelings promotes real social behavior in later life.
  • The child senses the conscious or unconscious wishes of the parents and adapts to them in order to secure the attention of the parents necessary for survival. It has to deny its own needs, which are masked by the urge to adapt in order to secure the object (the mother). The external requirements (e.g. performance, appearance) are internalized and split off as introjects. This separation lives on unconsciously in people and determines their behavior (including envy). This results in the ambivalent state typical of narcissistic people: a oscillation between depression on the one hand and a feeling of grandiosity on the other, comparable to a manic-depressive state .
  • Gifted children (see title) are more susceptible to these narcissistic disorders than “normal” children because they are more able to analyze themselves, their environment and their own behavior more closely. If the child notices differences between what it feels and what is conveyed to it, it usually reacts by looking for a "mistake" in itself and in this way "learning" that its own perception cannot be correct - a lack of self-esteem (feeling small) is the result.
  • According to Alice Miller, no external demands on the child are necessary . It turns against educational tendencies (similar to Hegel 's criticism of the ethics of the ought to be). A child should be supported and encouraged in its own being. If the child is allowed to live out their individuality and peculiarity, they will develop themselves into a healthy and social being.

In the beginning was education (1980)

In the beginning was Education is Miller's Second Book. According to her, the first years of life are crucial and faults in upbringing can, in the worst case, lead to devastating consequences such as crime. Her thesis is based on three case studies, the childhood of a drug addict ( Christiane F. ), a political leader ( Adolf Hitler ) and a child murderer ( Jürgen Bartsch ).

"[...] everywhere I look I see the commandment to respect the parents, but nowhere a commandment that demands respect for the child."

- In the beginning there was education

plant

Since Alice Miller's individual publications are available in a confusing abundance of revisions, extensions and cuts, some of which were carried out by the editorial staff and proofreading, and partly by the author herself, the sources are described in relatively detail below to ensure that they can be clearly identified.

Publications by other authors that contain forewords or afterwords by Alice Miller are not listed here, but in the → Literature section  .

Books

  • The drama of the gifted child (from 1979; for The drama of the gifted child - a paraphrase and continuation )
  • The drama of the gifted child - a paraphrase and continuation (from 1994)
  • Alice Miller, Hugo Stamm: The Flight into the Trap: Dangers of Primary Therapy . Hugo Stamm in conversation with Alice Miller. In: Das Magazin (Switzerland) . No. 14 . Tamedia, Zurich 1995, p. 54-62 .
  • Eva's awakening . About resolving emotional blindness. 1st edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-41223-X (Hardcover. Review ).

HR - Alice Miller-Rostowska: The problem of the individualizing concept formation with Heinrich Rickert . Dissertation to obtain the title of Doctor of Philosophy at the Philosophical-Historical Faculty of the University of Basel. 1955, LCCN  64-033334 (Dissertation, University of Basel, 1953; book trade edition : The individual as an object of knowledge: A study on the methodology of history by Heinrich Rickerts. PG Keller, Winterthur 1955).

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g CV (page 90, not paginated)

DK-90 - The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self . 1st edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-518-37450-8 (paperback based on the hardback edition from 1979. 1981 with an addition to the foreword (pages 12/13). For a new edition of the paperback edition extended by →  location 1990 ).

  1. ↑ Part II: Pages 55-103
  2. ↑ Part I: Pages 15–54

AE - In the beginning there was education (from 1980):

AE-80  - In the beginning there was education . 1st edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1980 (hardcover).

  1. ↑ [page number missing]

AE-87 - In the beginning there was education . 9th edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-518-37451-6 (paperback based on the 1980 hardback).

  1. ↑ a b page 12. (reference no longer contained in later editions.)
  2. ↑ a b page 13. (reference no longer contained in later editions.)

AE-90 - In the beginning there was education . 1st edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-518-37451-6 (paperback based on the hardback edition from 1980. For a new edition of the paperback edition extended by →  location 1990 ).

  1. ↑ page 323 f (not paginated)
  2. ↑ page 302

NM - You shouldn't notice (from 1981):

NM-81 - You shouldn't notice . Variations on the Paradise Theme. 1st edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1981 (hardcover).

  1. ↑ [page number missing]

NM-91 - You shouldn't notice . Variations on the Paradise Theme. 11th edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-37452-4 (Paperback based on the hardback edition from 1981. Paperback edition with a new epilogue from 1983. Epilogue added again on page 406 after line 19 to page 410, line 11 . For a new edition of the paperback edition extended by →  location 1990 ).

  1. ↑ page 398 ff
  2. ↑ page 408

BK - Pictures of a Childhood (from 1985):

BK-90 - Pictures of a Childhood . 66 watercolors and an essay. 1st edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-518-37658-6 (paperback. With an excerpt from an article submitted for publication by Hans R. Böttcher (pages 40–42). For a new edition of the paperback edition extended by →  location 1990 ).

  1. ↑ a b c page 14
  2. ↑ page 16
  3. ↑ page 13
  4. ↑ a b page 12
  5. ↑ a b c page 11
  6. ↑ a b c d e f g page 18
  7. ↑ page V.
  8. ↑ Pages 18 f
  9. ↑ a b c page 19
  10. ↑ a b c d e f page 23
  11. ↑ page 24
  12. ↑ Pages 23 f
  13. ↑ a b page 175

VW - The Banished Knowledge (from 1988):

VW-92 - The Banned Knowledge . 4th edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-518-38290-X (paperback based on the hardback edition from 1988. For a new edition of the paperback edition, revised and expanded to include →  location 1990 ).

  1. ↑ a b page 62
  2. ↑ page 69
  3. ↑ Pages 119, 120.

GS - The avoided key (from 1988):

GS-91 - The avoided key . Extended and revised reprint. 1st edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-38312-4 (paperback based on the hardback edition from 1988. For a new edition of the paperback edition expanded to →  location 1990 ).


AB - demolition of the wall of silence (from 1990):

AB-93  - Demolition of the wall of silence . The truth of the facts. 1st edition. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1993, ISBN 3-455-10305-7 (paperback based on the hardcover edition from 1990. For the paperback edition expanded by the epilogue “Liberation from self-deception”).

  1. ↑ page 16 (not paginated)
  2. ↑ page 54

UM-94 - The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self . A paraphrase and update. 1st edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-518-40655-8 (hardcover).

  1. ↑ a b c page 233
  2. ↑ page 24

UM-09 - The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self . A paraphrase and update. 1st edition. Ungehört, Frankfurt am Main 2009 (audio book version).


WL - Ways of Life (from 1998):

WL-98 - Ways of Life . Seven stories. 1st edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-40964-6 (hardcover).


GL - Your Saved Life (from 2007):

GL-07 - Your saved life . Paths to Liberation. 1st edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-518-41934-2 (hardcover).

  1. ↑ a b page 55.
  2. ↑ Pages 76, 77.

JT - Beyond the Taboos . Selected responses to letters to the editor. Self-published, without location information 2009 ( online (PDF) [accessed on August 7, 2009] Answers from the period May 2007 to July 2008. With a foreword by the author. 88 pages).

  1. ↑ page 1

Fascicle

Short, stand-alone texts that have been published identically in several books or articles, or both:

XII - Twelve points . 1984 ( online [accessed August 16, 2009]).

  1. ↑ point 8

XXI - Twenty-one points . 1983 ( online [accessed August 16, 2009]).

  1. ↑ point 1

MXM - location 1990 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1990 (chapter which was placed in front of various subsequent editions of the books published by Miller at Suhrkamp from 1990 to approx. 1995. The page numbers with Roman numerals refer to the uniform pagination within the first three paperbacks).

  1. ↑ page III
  2. ↑ page V.

Articles and conversations

By year of publication:

71a - On the treatment technique for so-called narcissistic neuroses . In: Psyche . Vol. 25, 1971, p. 641-668 .

  1. ↑ page 642
  2. ↑ page 646
  3. ↑ a b page 641
  4. ↑ page 656
  5. ↑ page 664

79a - Depression and grandiosity as related forms of narcissistic disorder . In: Psyche . Vol. 33, 1979, pp. 132–156 (reprinted with minor changes as Part II of “The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self” (1979)).

  1. ↑ page 155
  2. ↑ a b page 132

79b - The drama of the gifted child and the psychoanalyst's arcisstic disturbance . In: International Journal of Psycho-Analysis . Vol. 60, 1979, ISSN  0020-7578 , pp. 47–58 (Published in German as Part I of “The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self” (1979)).

  1. ↑ page 47

79c - Depression and grandiosity as related forms of narcisstic disturbance . In: International Review of Psycho-Analysis . Vol. 6, No. 1 , 1979, ISSN  0306-2643 , pp. 61-76 .


- Florian Langegger: Mozart - father and son . In: Psyche . Vol. 35, 1981, pp. 587-588 (book review).

82a - The daughters are no longer silent . In: Brigitte, special issue "Books" . October 1982, p. [Page number is missing] (Also reproduced slightly abbreviated in You shouldn't remember (reprint of the 1st paperback edition from 1983), pages 390–397).


87a - Alice Miller, Barbara Vögler: How psychotherapies betray the child . Barbara Vögler in conversation with Alice Miller. In: Psychology Today . Beltz, April 1987, ISSN  0340-1677 , p. 20-31 .

  1. ↑ page 30, column 1
  2. ↑ page 30, column 1 f
  3. ↑ a b page 20, column 2
  4. ↑ page 20, column 1

95b - Alice Miller, Gerhard Tuschy: The psycho business and the dignity of the patient . Gerhard Tuschy in conversation with Alice Miller. In: Psychology Today . Beltz, April 1995, ISSN  0340-1677 , p. 60-65 .


99a - Alice Miller, Noreen Taylor: It is Never Right to Hit a Child . Alice Miller interviewed by Noreen Taylor. In: Times of London . September 7, 1999, ISSN  0140-0460 ( Online [accessed August 10, 2009] Published in print in a slightly shortened version. Online with some additions of 2004).

  1. ↑ a b c answer 1
  2. ↑ Answer 6

Other publications

By release date:

  • Alice Miller: Communication To My Readers. Retrieved on April 29, 2010 (English, distancing from J. Konrad Stettbacher).
  • Alice Miller: Note to My Readers. Retrieved April 29, 2010 (distancing from regression-assisted psychotherapy methods).
  • Alice Miller: pity the father. About Saddam Hussein. January 12, 2004, accessed on August 10, 2009 : “ The psychoanalyst Alice Miller [...] on the childhood trauma that made Saddam Hussein a violent tyrant, and the phenomenon of worldwide compassion for the disempowered dictator after his capture. "
  • Alice Miller: Development of the Ourchildhood Forum. February 24, 2008, accessed on August 7, 2009 : “ Alice Miller wrote the following answer to a letter from a reader who“ worries ”the development in the ourchildhood.de forum, but who has since asked that her contribution not be published becomes. "

literature

  • Louise Armstrong: Kiss Daddy Goodnight . Pronunciation of incest. 1st edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-518-37495-8 , pp. 269-272 (Paperback. With an afterword by Alice Miller (269-272)).
  • Gertie Bögels: Psychoanalysis in the language of Alice Miller . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1997, ISBN 3-8260-1321-2 .
  • JC / 06  - Wolfram Mauser (Ed.): Johannes Cremerius: A life as a psychoanalyst in Germany . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2006, ISBN 3-8260-3295-0 .
  1. ↑ a b c page 195
  2. ↑ page 207
  • Max Edwin Furrer: Miller, Alice. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  • Jean C. Jenson: Reclaiming Your Life . A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Regression Therapy to Overcome the Effects of Childhood Abuse. 1st edition. Dutton, New York, NY (USA) 1995, ISBN 0-525-93948-2 (With a foreword by Alice Miller (pages IX-XIV), translated into American English by Simon Worrall. Hardcover).
  • Jean C. Jenson: Reclaiming Your Life . A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Regression Therapy to Overcome the Effects of Childhood Abuse. 1st edition. Meridian, New York, NY (USA) 1996, ISBN 0-452-01169-8 (With a new foreword by Alice Miller (pages X-XII), translated into American English by Andrew Jenkins. Paperback).
  • Jean C. Jenson: Rediscovering the lust for life . 1st edition. Quadriga, Weinheim / Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-88679-272-2 (Edition by Jean C. Jenson shortened by a third: Reclaiming Your Life with gross translation errors. With an afterword by Alice Miller (pages 231-234)).
  • Hanne Kulessa: Diary of an adolescent girl . 3. Edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-518-37963-1 (with a foreword by Alice Miller).
  • TK / 93

- Thomas Kurz: The rise and fall of the Zurich Psychoanalytic Seminar from the Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis . In: Lucifer-Amor . Vol. 6, No. 12 . edition diskord, October 1993, ISSN  0933-3347 (In this article the name “Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis” is abbreviated to “SGP”. This abbreviation actually stands for the Swiss Society for Psychology, which was founded almost a quarter of a century after the SGPsa ) .

  1. ↑ a b c d e page 1
  2. ↑ page 2
  3. ↑ a b c page 4
  4. ↑ a b c page 8
  5. ↑ page 18
  6. ↑ a b c page 19
  7. ↑ a b c page 20
  8. ↑ page 22
  9. ↑ page 16
  10. ↑ page 23
  • Barbara Lukesch: The Drama of the Gifted Lady . Alice Miller is in ruins because of a charlatan. In: Facts . Zurich June 29, 1995 ( lukesch.ch [accessed August 7, 2009]).
  • Daniel Mackler: Alice Miller: Discoveries and Contradictions . Annosidus Independent Press, Stenungsund (Sweden) 2008, ISBN 978-91-975687-3-9 .
  • MM / 10

- Martin Miller, Philipp Oehmke , Elke Schmitter: My father, yes, in this regard . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 . Hamburg May 3, 2010 (Martin Miller in conversation with Philipp Oehmke and Elke Schmitter).

  1. ↑ a b page 140, column 3.
  2. ↑ a b page 141, column 1.
  3. ↑ page 139, column 3.
  4. ↑ page 140, column 1.
  • MM / 13

- Martin Miller: The true "drama of the gifted child". Alice Miller's tragedy . Kreuz, Freiburg im Breisgau 2013, ISBN 978-3-451-61168-1 .

  1. ↑ a b page 26
  2. ↑ page 21
  3. ↑ page 31
  4. ↑ page 40
  5. ↑ page 59
  6. ↑ Pages 21–23
  • Florence Rush: The Best Kept Secret . Child Sexual Abuse. 4th edition. Orlanda, Berlin 1988 (American English: The best kept secret . With a conversation with the author of Alice Miller).
  • Anne Stettbacher: Unheard . Daily abuse of children. Zytglogge, Bern / Bonn 1987, ISBN 3-7296-0258-6 (With a foreword (pages 4–8) and →  Twelve points (pages 9–12) by Alice Miller).
  • J. Konrad Stettbacher: If suffering should have meaning . The healing encounter with one's own story. 2nd Edition. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-455-10304-9 (With a foreword to the 1st edition by Alice Miller (pages 9-13), written in September 1989, and an afterword by Alice Miller for the 2nd edition (151 –154), written in July 1990.).

Web links

Wikiquote: Alice Miller  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Annette Prosinger: It wasn't nice to be Alice Miller's son. September 22, 2013. Retrieved September 29, 2013 .
  2. ↑ Portrait of Alice Miller. August 11, 2009, accessed on August 11, 2009 : “Alice Miller, PhD in Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology, as well as childhood researcher and author of 13 books accessible in 30 languages, gave up her practice and teaching as a psychoanalyst in 1980 to write. "
  3. ↑ Gertrud Schwing: A way to the soul of the mentally ill . Rascher, Zurich 1940, LCCN  41-035892 .
  4. ↑ a b Jacques Berna, Fritz Morgenthaler: Psychoanalytic training . In: Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis (Ed.): SGPsa-Bulletin . No. 5 , 1967, p. 2 f . (Quoted from → TK / 93 ; the page number refers to this article).
  5. ↑ Alice Miller. Suhrkamp Verlag, accessed on August 10, 2009 .
  6. ↑ Internet obituary. April 19, 2010, accessed May 3, 2010 .
  7. ↑ a b Childhood researcher Alice Miller is dead. In: T-Online. April 23, 2010, accessed on December 8, 2013 : “[Miller], who last lived in Provence, died on April 14 at the age of 87, as announced by Suhrkamp Verlag. [...] According to Suhrkamp, ​​the funeral took place in the closest circle. "
  8. ↑ Alice Miller's website. April 5, 2010, accessed April 21, 2010 .
  9. ↑ Clemens de Boor: The influence of the development of psychoanalytic theory on treatment technique since Freud . In: Psyche . Vol. 22, 1968, pp. 738-746 .
  10. ^ SGPsa board: minutes of the board meeting . In: Document collection of the PSZ library . May 1968, p. 4 (Quoted from → TK / 93 ; the page number refers to this article).
  11. ↑ Ursula Hauser, Emilio Modena: Possibilities of psychoanalytic research from a Marxist point of view . In: Document collection of the PSZ library . October 1, 1975, p. 18 (Quoted from → TK / 93 ; the page number refers to this article).
  12. ^ Ulrich Moser: Letter . In: Document collection of the PSZ library . October 24, 1975, p. 18th f . (Quoted from → TK / 93 ; the page number refers to this article).
  13. ^ Maria Pfister-Ammende: Annual report seminar leader . In: Document collection of the PSZ library . 1976, p. 20 (Quoted from → TK / 93 ; the page number refers to this article).
  14. ↑ Alice Miller: Proposal to the SGPsa annual meeting . In: Document collection of the PSZ library . March 6, 1976, p. 20th f . (Quoted from → TK / 93 ; the page number refers to this article).
  15. ↑ a b Alice Miller: About the author . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1990 (Uniform blurb for the paperbacks The Drama of the Gifted Child , In the beginning was upbringing , You shouldn't remember , Images of a childhood , The avoided key and The banished knowledge (replicas of the 1st paperback editions)) .
  16. ^ Raffael Scheck, Curriculum Vitae. Retrieved on August 13, 2009 : “University of Zurich (Switzerland) […] Psycho-therapeutic workshops with Doris and Werner Lässer and with Dr. Alice Miller (1983–1987) "
  17. ^ Fourth Janusz Korczak Literary Awards Ceremony . In: Anti-Defamation League-International Center for Holocaust Studies (Ed.): Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies . 3 (autumn), 1986, p. 28 (later published: ADL Braun Center for Holocaust Studies ). An inquiry to the press office of the ADL on August 13th, 2009 resulted in the year of the award ceremony 1986 . The year 1988 given for a long time in the →  blurb of Alice Miller's German books published by Suhrkamp Verlag is therefore incorrect.
  18. ↑ Alice Miller: Contact Information. Retrieved August 7, 2009 .
  19. ↑ Alice Miller: Reader's Post with Answers. Retrieved August 7, 2009 .
  20. ↑ [1]
  21. ↑ [2]
  22. ^ Reference to the relevant theses of Miller: Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer: Childhood between victims and perpetrators. About autobiographies from the years 1927/28 and Martin Walser's novel “Ein springender Brunnen” . literaturkritik.de, No. 6, 1999
  23. ^ Günter Albrecht: Problems of the prognosis of violence by the mentally ill. (PDF; 263 kB) In: Journal for conflict and violence research, issue 5, 1/2003. 2003, accessed February 9, 2014 .
  24. ↑ Alice Miller: You shouldn't notice. Variations on the Paradise Theme . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1983, p. 271.
personal data
SURNAME Miller, Alice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Englard, Alicija (maiden name); Rostovska, Alice (code name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-Swiss author and psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 12, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Piotrków Trybunalski , Poland ,
DATE OF DEATH April 14, 2010
Place of death Saint-Rémy-de-Provence , Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur , France