Alice Miller (Swiss Standard German: [ˈmɪlər]; born Alicja Englard; 12 January 1923 – 14 April 2010) was a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher noted for her books on parental child abuse, translated into several languages. She was also a noted public intellectual. Her 1979 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 the fields of child development, psychotherapy, and trauma. In her books she departed from psychoanalysis, charging it with being similar to the poisonous pedagogies.
Miller systemically critiqued Freudian concepts like the Oedipus complex as an attempt to reinterpret or obscure the reality of child abuse. Core to Miller's writings was that the suppression of childhood truths (which perpetuates the psychological groundwork for violence, authoritarianism, war, mental illness, and systemic cruelty) is both a crime against humanity and a universal and enduring taboo against the true self, by privileging the authority of parents, tradition, religion, morality, or society over the needs of children. In a New York Times obituary, British psychologist Oliver James was quoted saying that Miller was "almost as influential as R.D. Laing".
Alicja Englard was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland into an affluent Orthodox Jewish family. She was the oldest daughter of Gutta and Meylech Englard. Her younger sister, Irena, was born five years later. From 1931 to 1933 the family lived in Berlin, where nine-year-old Alicja learned the German language. Due to the National Socialists' seizure of power in Germany in 1933, the family was forced to return to Piotrków Trybunalski. Shortly after the start of World War II, in October 1939 the Nazis interned all Jewish Piotrków Trybunalski inhabitants (including Miller and her family) at the Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto, when Miller was sixteen years old. Miller quickly began planning her escape and assumed a non-Jewish name, Alicja Rostowska. Miller eventually succeeded in smuggling herself, her mother, and her sister out of the ghetto, but was forced to leave her father behind as he spoke only Yiddish and had little chance of passing as a non-Jew in Nazi-occupied Poland. In 1941, her father died of illness in the ghetto, months before all remaining inhabitants (including Miller's paternal grandparents) were liquidated to the Majdanek and Treblinka extermination camps.
After escaping the ghetto, Miller hid her mother and sister in a Catholic convent in Warsaw where, against the protests of her mother, Miller arranged for her sister to be baptized to ensure the family would not be outed as Jews. Upon urging from Miller's mother, Miller responded to an ad for an apartment, which unbeknownst to the family was posted by a szmalcownik (an undercover Gestapo informant who blackmailed Jews by threatening to expose them to the Nazis) named Andrzej (Andreas) Miller. Andrzej threatened to out Miller, and, according to Martin Miller's 2013 biography of his mother, The True "Drama of the Gifted Child", Miller narrowly escaped certain death by seducing and later marrying Andrzej, a fact that Miller would keep secret for the remainder of her life.
In 1946, Miller (under her assumed name Alicja Rostowska) and Andrzej moved from Poland to Switzerland, where the couple had won scholarships to study at the University of Basel. In 1949, she married Andreas, who was completing a doctorate in sociology. They had two children, Martin (born 1950) and Julika (born 1956), who was born with Down's Syndrome. They divorced in 1973. Shortly after his mother's death, Martin stated in an interview with Der Spiegel and later in his book The True "Drama of the Gifted Child", that in the presence of his mother, he had been routinely beaten and sexually abused by Andreas, who was anti-semitic and authoritarian. Martin stated that his mother did not intervene in her son's abuse and was herself emotionally neglectful, experiences which Miller later drew upon to inform her subsequent theories on child abuse. Martin also mentioned that his mother was unable to share her wartime experiences with him, despite numerous lengthy conversations, and she was severely traumatized by them.
In 1953 Miller got her doctorate in philosophy, psychology and sociology. Between 1953 and 1960, Miller studied psychoanalysis and practiced it between 1960 and 1980 in Zürich. In 1980, after having worked as a psychoanalyst and an analyst trainer for 20 years, Miller "stopped practicing and teaching psychoanalysis in order to explore childhood systematically." She became critical of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Her first three books originated from research she took upon herself as a response to what she felt were major blind spots in her field. However, by the time her fourth book was published, she no longer believed that psychoanalysis was viable in any respect.
In 1985 Miller wrote about the research from her time as a psychoanalyst: "For twenty years I observed people denying their childhood traumas, idealising their parents and resisting the truth about their childhood by any means." In 1985 she left Switzerland and moved to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in Southern France. In 1986, she was awarded the Janusz Korczak Literary Award for her book Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child.
In April 1987 Miller announced in an interview with the German magazine Psychologie Heute (Psychology Today) her rejection of psychoanalysis. The following year she cancelled her memberships in both the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association, because she felt that psychoanalytic theory and practice made it impossible for former victims of child abuse to recognise the violations inflicted on them and to resolve the consequences of the abuse, as they "remained in the old tradition of blaming the child and protecting the parents".
One of Miller's last books, Bilder meines Lebens ("Pictures of My Life"), was published in 2006. It is an informal autobiography in which the writer explores her emotional process from painful childhood, through the development of her theories and later insights, told via the display and discussion of 66 of her original paintings, painted in the years 1973–2005. Between 2005 and her death in 2010, she answered hundreds of readers' letters on her website, where there are also published articles, flyers and interviews in three languages. Days before her death Alice Miller wrote: "These letters will stay as an important witness also after my death under my copyright". Miller died on 14 April 2010, at the age of 87, at her home in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, by means of assisted suicide, after severe illness and diagnosis of advanced-stage pancreatic cancer. She was survived by her two children, including Martin Miller.
Miller extended the trauma model to include all forms of child abuse and neglect, including those that are commonly accepted (such as spanking and leaving infants to cry to avoid "spoiling" a child), which she called "poisonous pedagogy", a non-literal translation of Katharina Rutschky's Schwarze Pädagogik (black or dark pedagogy/imprinting). Drawing upon the work of psychohistory, Miller analyzed writers Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and others to find links between their childhood traumas and the course and outcome of their lives. Miller also analyzed the role of fiction, storytelling and fairy tales—especially classic European stories—as cultural artifacts that reflect deep psychological truths about childhood suffering that are passed down as unconscious expressions of real, often unspoken childhood experiences—especially those involving mistreatment or abandonment by parents.
The introduction to the first chapter in Miller's first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, first published in 1979, contains a line that summarises her core view. In it, she writes: