For Your Own Good: Roots of Violence in Child-rearing (Paperback)

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.