Alice Miller (1923 to 2010) was a Polish-born psychologist and psychoanalyst who lived and worked in Switzerland, best known for The Drama of the Gifted Child. She held that the suffering many people went through as children is pushed out of awareness because the child could not have survived feeling it, and that the cost is paid later in the body, in illness and addiction, and in harm passed on to the next generation. Her call to face the truth of childhood, and her refusal to make forgiveness a duty, sit close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s teaching on childhood wounds, which adds the shamanic work of soul retrievalSoul retrieval. Finding an exiled soul-part and inviting it home. In the modern psyche the fort-holder who sent it away must consent first, and the retrieval itself is a beginning: the real work is integration. Read the full answer and the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer.
Who was Alice Miller? #
A psychoanalyst who left psychoanalysis to write about childhood. Miller was born in Poland in 1923 (most references give Piotrków Trybunalski as her birthplace, some Lwów), gained her doctorate in 1953, and trained and practised as a psychoanalyst in Switzerland.1 From 1980 she gave up practice to write books about childhood, and in 1988 she cancelled her memberships of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association, having come to see psychoanalysis itself as one of the ways the truth of childhood is kept hidden.2 She died in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in 2010.
What is The Drama of the Gifted Child about? #
The child who learns to live for other people’s feelings. First published in German in 1979, the book appeared in English as Prisoners of Childhood (1981), and later as The Drama of the Gifted Child, subtitled The Search for the True Self, and in Britain also as The Drama of Being a Child. Its subject is the sensitive, attuned child who learns to sense and meet a parent’s needs, and in doing so loses touch with their own feelings and their true self. Her later books, among them For Your Own Good, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware and The Body Never Lies, took the same concern into child-rearing, society and the body.3
What did she mean by the wall of silence? #
The wall a child builds against facts too painful to bear, and the wall families and professions keep up around them. For Miller, the truth of childhood as many people lived it is “inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed.” Behind that wall still stands the neglected child we once were, waiting to be heard. The repressed story does not go away. It speaks in another language, in sleeplessness, depression and physical symptoms, because “our bodies can’t be misled.”4
She was firm about the pace of recovery. Repression cannot be broken open all at once by force, and she warned against methods that try. Recovery comes “slowly, step by step, and with respect for their own system’s defense mechanisms”.5 See What is trauma, and how does Therapeutic Shamanism understand it?
What are poisonous pedagogy and the enlightened witness? #
Two of her best-known terms. Poisonous pedagogy, her rendering of a German phrase from the educationalist Katharina Rutschky, names the humiliation, beating and emotional cruelty presented to children as upbringing, “for your own good”, which became the title of her book on it.6
An enlightened witness is a person who could at least partly free someone from an imprisoning secret, “if by no other means than by simply heeding their suffering.”7 For Miller, having even one such person can make the difference between a child who repeats cruelty and one who can see it for what it was. Something similar is familiar from the therapy room. Many people new to therapy say their childhood was fine, and it can take the shocked look on a therapist’s face for them to begin to realise that what happened to them really was not okay.8
Must we forgive our parents? #
Here people disagree. Miller spoke out strongly against therapies and recovery programmes that make forgiving one’s parents the condition of getting well. In her view “forgiveness does not resolve latent hatred and self-hatred but can cover them up in a very dangerous way”, and she asked people instead to look honestly at what was done to them and condemn it.9
On the other side, the educational psychologist Robert Enright, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has developed and tested forgiveness therapy. His studies report that forgiveness work brought lower anxiety and depression and higher self-esteem, among others for women who had been emotionally abused and for survivors of incest.10
Therapeutic Shamanism’s own position is different again. Making excuses for parents gets in the way of seeing the truth, and “Reasons do not cancel out impact”; sometimes it is also fine to judge. Forgiveness that skips the anger, grief and pain is what the writer Jeff Brown calls forgiveness bypassing, another form of denial. Healthy forgiveness is a process that may emerge organically from working through the feelings, and if it does not emerge, that is fine too. The damaging thing is faking it.11 See What is the forgiveness trap?
How does her work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In the insistence on facing the truth. The first step in healing childhood wounds is to face what happened, which means stopping making excuses for parents, stopping telling the childhood stories invented in order to cope, and seeing things as they are.12 When a parent-child relationship goes badly wrong it can become, in effect, a hostage situation, and the child, like a hostage with Stockholm Syndrome, makes up stories to excuse the behaviour of the person with power over them, and comes to believe them.13 Miller’s wall of silence and this hostage’s story describe the same survival strategy from two directions.
Where the shamanic map goes further is in what can happen to the parts of us that could not be felt. Miller’s child is still there behind the wall, waiting to be heard. Shamanism also knows soul lossSoul-loss. The sending-away of parts of the self in order to survive: through shock or trauma, or (the chief modern cause) exiling our own parts to fit in. With Power-loss, one of the two root causes of shamanic illness. Read the full answer, in which a part of us is sent away, often in order to fit in, and has to be found and brought back, which is the work of soul retrieval.14 And a missing experience of being held can be met in the Lower-World, where a person can have the experience of being nurtured as a baby by a Lower-World Mother.15 See What is soul retrieval? and Who was Donald Winnicott?
