For Your Own Good, Alice Miller
For Your Own Good, Alice Miller
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For Your Own Good
Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence

Author: Alice Miller

Narrator: Jo Anna Perrin

Unabridged: 11 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/30/2017


Synopsis

For Your Own Good, the contemporary classic exploring the serious if not gravely dangerous consequences parental cruelty can bring to bear on children everywhere, is one of the central works by Alice Miller, the celebrated Swiss psychoanalyst.

With her typically lucid, strong, and poetic language, Miller investigates the personal stories and case histories of various self-destructive and/or violent individuals to expand on her theories about the long-term affects of abusive child-rearing. Her conclusions—on what sort of parenting can create a drug addict, or a murderer, or a Hitler—offer much insight, and make a good deal of sense, while also straying far from psychoanalytic dogma about human nature, which Miller vehemently rejects.

This important study paints a shocking picture of the violent world—indeed, of the ever-more-violent world—that each generation helps to create when traditional upbringing, with its hidden cruelty, is perpetuated. The book also presents listeners with useful solutions in this regard—namely, to resensitize the victimized child who has been trapped within the adult, and to unlock the emotional life that has been frozen in repression.

About Alice Miller

Alice Miller (1923-2010) was a Swiss psychologist and psychoanalyst. She is noted for her books on parental child abuse, which have been translated into several languages.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Larry

My mother used to say,"We are all victims of victims." If you reflect on this continuum, as Alice Miller does, you realize that many of her case study examples are as immediate today as they ever were since violence is a trait passed down through experience and it is so unerringly inserted deep in t......more

Goodreads review by Aimee J

This is an older book written in 1980 that I came across sitting on the floor of a dusty, old used book store. I snagged it for $3 and it was $3 well spent. This book focuses on the origins of violence and hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence. Amazingly, this book was written in......more

Alice Miller is a German psychologist whose works have been translated into English. This book explores the nature of child-rearing over time and what child-rearing produces in the victims of what she refers to as "poisonous pedagogy." It's not a book in which anyone is blamed but rather a book in w......more

Goodreads review by Katrina

I read this for a class on ancestry. My teacher recommended it because I have German ancestry, and this book was one of the most illuminating I've read in a long time. It helped me understand my upbringing in the light of German culture, and the culture my great-grandparents, grandparents, and even......more