Alice Miller is dead…
April 24, 2010 § 4 Comments
Thank you Alice Miller for all you have done and everything you have written! Alice Miller died on April 14. I didn’t get to know that until today.
Addition April 30:
“Alice Miller, Psychoanalyst, Dies at 87; Laid Human Problems to Parental Acts” in New York Times by William Grimes. Also see this article here.
“Alice Miller’s Gift to Humanity” by Olivier Maurel April 2010.
“Spankings. Questions and answers about disciplinary violence” by Olivier Maurel.
”To Alice Miller in personal. IMPORTANT! URGENT!!!”
“Why we blame our parents” by Tara Parker-Pope in New York Times.
Addition May 3: The Swedish pediatrician Lars H. Gustafsson about Alice Miller.
He writes, in my amateur translation to English, that he had the advantage (or benefit) of meeting Miller at a small, informal seminar Save the children arranged around 25 years ago. An overwhelming meeting he writes.
He had just written his book “Leva med barn” (Live with children) and asked Miller how she looked at “the problem” with parents’ guilt feelings.
He told her that he met many parents with high demands on themselves, parents constantly walking around with bad conscience.
He had also noticed when he gave lectures for parents about children’s needs and rights that this easily made such feelings arise.
He didn’t know how to handle this.
Miller interrupted him, fastened her eyes on him and said sharply:
“My dear friend, parents SHALL have bad conscience. They have to take this, it is their damn duty.
When parents have done so many bad things to their kids through the years…
No, don’t come here now and talk about bad conscience as a problem in this circumstance! They are grown up people, aren’t they!”
Addition May 4: Here, here and here you can read very briefly about Miller’s death in the Swedish press. Very little is actually written in the Swedish press. I wonder why, but have my thoughts.
Many people in the Swedish media (and not only in Swedish media) are in denial, have fairly strong defences? Denying what Miller has written about and the importance of those things? Denying how in fact essential the way we treat our kids are?
Here about her death on a Danish blog and on Sigruns blog. And here on The Natural Child Project-site
Addition May 5: See the article ”How I Found Alice Miller, and Lost Her” by Jane Isay.
reflektioner och speglingar - Alice Miller II... 
Comment by someone called Kelli at Tara Parker-Pope’s Well-blog (NYTimes):
“I was deeply saddened to learn of Miller’s death, and then disappointed in the lack of response to honoring her life and work. I thought certainly there would be some fantastic obituary coverage for a woman who so profoundly affected many people with her simple, yet groundbreaking ideas.”
I was disappointed, even shocked, to see Alice Miller’s work so misunderstood and what you might call discredited in all the obituaries I’ve read so far, the Times LIVE obituary, and NYTimes obituary Tara Parker-Pope recommends so warmly in her blog entry included. Never mind that her death hasn’t been mentioned with one word in the entire Danish press. On the other hand, can it really be a surprise?…
Together with others’, like R.D. Laing’s, Alice Miller’s work had a decisive influence on how I perceived my own experience, myself. It had me truly understand, and prevented me from walking right into the establishment’s trap of explaining away life problems as genetic, biological diseases. I can only join you: Thank you Alice Miller!
Thank you for your comment! Yes, Alice Miller’s work has meant a lot to me too. Made it possible for me to leave a bad long-term therapy for instance. But on the other hand I would maybe not have landed in that therapy if I hadn’t read Miller.
I hear you, k. Alice Miller was one of our time’s greatest personalities, but she wasn’t perfect, she neither.
No, she wasn’t!