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Product Description
Ruth Rendell
'Dr Miller's books, refreshingly free of jargon, read like picturesque fiction'
Review
'Dr Miller's books, refreshingly free of jargon, read like picturesque fiction' RUTH RENDELL 'All too believable... Her thesis is icily simple.' NEW STATESMAN AND SOCIETY
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Alice Miller shows us the roots of our own pain and struggle by explaining how methods of child rearing (what she terms "poisonous pedagogy")brought about the behaviour of Adolf Hitler and others. A difficult book to read, because of the pain it evokes, but truly enlightening as it shows how all cruelty, wars, destruction of our environment, criminality, and terrorism actually stem from the abused child's need to deal with its childhood and the way it was treated by parents, teachers, ministers and other care givers, all for its "own good".
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
An absolutely extraordinary look at how the mind of a child is formed and influenced and the part played by both verbal and physical coercion. This book has become more influential than any other over the years - I read it first some twenty years ago - and influenced how I raised my children, how I treat other people, and the direction of my work and sense of purpose. Genuinely life-changing, Alice Miller's classic reflects a simple truth that consumer society ignores to all our detriment - children, and the society we raise them in, most decidedly make the future (politics, survival of the species and all) in which we will all live or die together. Is there any more important subject?
31 of 36 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
When you listen to the music of Bach, one is consistently amazed at its beauty and power regardless of the piece's length, instrumentation or meaning. And we are amazed, even if quietly so, because Bach always seems to have reinvented music by rediscovering what the language truly is; spiritually reexplaining the music we have grown up hearing--even if it's other classical or cerebral jazz--as one of many dialects. Hearing a masterpiece of Bach's affects us in the end only slightly differently than anything he ripped off in an hour or two for his church chorus before or after. To our souls, the fact that he introduced us to the hidden language of beauty is equally if not more important than even the greatest example of the poetry that, via the language, he created.
Change that metaphor to the jazz of Coltrane, the plays of Shakespeare, the art of Picasso, the universe view of Einstein or what ever you like; this is the effect one feels when reading the psychological work of Alice Miller. This being my fourth book of hers I'm in the middle of reading, I don't bother with rating them according to which is better or worse; each one clearly and eloquently reveals a different facet of the diamond that is the tortured but beautiful soul of Western civilization, and perhaps all of humanity. Alice Miller puts us in touch with the obviously LOST language of the soul of the human child. And she does it to such a degree that you feel that language begin to speak YOU once again, the way it did when you were three or four years old, with every incredible common sense discovery she shares about the actual nature and genesis of culture and its many beliefs. All of her books do this. This is perhaps the paradox that will never cease to amaze you with all of her work, and especialy this one.
With FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, Alice Miller shows you the nature, origins and source of human evil. What made Hitler and Eichmann Hitler and Eichmann; how it relates to the secret psychological pains of common people in 1930's and 40's Germany, 19th century England, and every other society and time; what, hiding behind religion and moral philosophy, nearly murders the soul of children--and is still sanctioned by Western culture as integral parts of "child-rearing". The clarity with which you will see the mystified world in which we live behind the smoke and mirrors of complex philsophies, contradictory historical perspectives and socio-political theories, is simultaneously invigorating and disheartening. You see the degree to which the simplest, most obvious explanation for evil has been so painfully ignored, and the sad, sad reasons as to why; but Miller's writing style and genius makes you feel hope after doing so. Instead of feeling as if your soul has been murdered, even after seeing forgotten aspects of your own childhood slowly and unexpectedly reappear before your eyes like a polaroid picture developing on certain pages and chapters, you feel as if it has simply been frozen against your will--and now you are armed with the technology to thaw it out and discover who you truly are.
Alice Miller with FOR YOUR OWN GOOD gives us the behavioral anatomy of evil in human history via charting both the history and psychological effects of "poisonous pedagogy": inferior and abusive child-rearing practices that become so unconscious to a people as to become definitive of a culture. Evil is demystified with this book, and as such begins to immeidately lose its power and becomes what theologians of every religion have (unsucessfully) tried to wish it into being for millenia: nothing more than the shadow--the absence--of goodness.
Read this book of hers in particular, and you will never say some version of "the children are our future" quite the same way again.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Raise your children for their sake, not your own.
This book confronts our culture's tendency to rationalize raising children in a manner that is convienent for the parents, but often not in a manner that is in the best interests... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Rel
Violence is Power
Alice breathroughs with pickaxe and shovel to emerge through the madness.
German historical archetypes are illuminated as attachment gone wrong. Read more
German historical archetypes are illuminated as attachment gone wrong. Read more
Published on 2 April 2010 by Dr. Delvis Memphistopheles
highly recommendable
In my opinion almost everybody can benefit from reading this book. I think it is probably one of the most important non-fiction books written in the last 100 years. Read more
Published on 8 Aug 2009 by Hella Hirschfelder
Miller psychoanalyzes her civilization, finding ir guilty of child...
Alice Miller digs into the psycho-history behind the mental-illness cases she deals with, turning her lights on the legacy of parent education from medieval through early-modern... Read more
Published on 19 Jan 2008 by Brian Griffith
An excellent insight into childhood
This book gives an excellent insight into many people's childhood, including myself's. The book is well written but seems to re-cover the same ground on many occasions. Read more
Published on 15 July 2005 by D. Hopkins
An esential book for understanding where evil comes from
This is an account of how childhood experiences lead to disastrous adult behaviour, notably in Hitler's case. Read more
Published on 31 Oct 1999 by R. Johnson
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