Prudence Deer

Hello again, enlightened witness. As I stated in my last post, I feel tremendous gratitude for the information contained in Alice Miller's books. I feel that those books are genuinely helping me to find myself. So you can imagine how troubled I felt when I read an interview with Miller's son, Martin  and I learned what an awful mother she was. I've struggled to separate the author's works from her personal life and continue to do so. I won't get into the weeds with details about how awfully Alice Miller treated her son. You can read it for yourself in Martin's book if you wish. It's title is  The True “Drama of the Gifted Child”: The Phantom Alice Miller — The Real Person. I will say that these facts have made me take a closer look at myself, not just as a victim of parental negligence, but as a perpetrator of cruelty myself. It's not something that's easy for me to admit, but I often feel the urge to punish others and, when those others are clearly ...

Today, I am going to begin to explore parts of myself I thought I already knew. Thanks to the books of Alice Miller, I've learned that I have very likely misplaced my focus when trying to sort out the problems of this life. Instead of self-help, I needed self-discovery. If you've never read anything by Alice Miller, I'll give you the Wikipedia synopsis of her work:  Alice Miller (12 January 1923 – 14 April 2010), was a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher of Jewish origin, who is noted for her books on parental child abuse. She was also a noted public intellectual. Her 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 her books she departed from psychoanalysis, charging it with being similar to the poisonous pedagogies. I've read three of her books, so far, and they clearly represent a singularit...