Alice Miller (Polish-Swiss psychologist) Add a review

Alice Miller (Swiss Standard German: [ˈmɪlər]; born Alicja Englard; 12 January 1923 – 14 April 2010) was a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher, noted for her books on parental child abuse, translated into several languages. She was also a noted public intellectual.

Her 1979 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 the fields of child development, psychotherapy, and trauma. In her books she departed from psychoanalysis, charging it with being similar to the poisonous pedagogies.

Miller systemically critiqued Freudian concepts like the Oedipus complex as an attempt to reinterpret or obscure the reality of child abuse. Core to Miller's writings was that the suppression of childhood truths (which perpetuates the psychological groundwork for violence, authoritarianism, war, mental illness, and systemic cruelty) is both a crime against humanity and a universal and enduring taboo against the true self, by privileging the authority of parents, tradition, religion, morality, or society over the needs of children.

In a New York Times obituary, British psychologist Oliver James is quoted saying that Alice Miller "is almost as influential as R.D. Laing."