The Chid Will Lead Us Home: Honouring the Life of Alice Miller.

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What the Water Gave Me- Frida Khlao- 1938
What the Water Gave Me- Frida Khlao- 1938

Born in Poland on 12th January 1923, Psychologist and Psychoanalyst Alice Miller was an influential and controversial figure. Much of her work centred around getting in touch with the truth of our childhood-including the various humiliations and betrayals we may have experienced. Accordingly, by freeing the wounded child within and finally feeling the feelings that we have repressed we are granted access to our true selves.

Miller maintained that what passes for child rearing is often “poisonous pedagogy”. She thought that analysis further betrayed the wounded child and what was needed was “empathic witnessing”, not interpretation. The ideal would be as a child to have had at least one adult who understood and supported the truth of the child’s experience. According to Miller what was more likely is that the child was exploited to serve the needs of the unhealed parents who were themselves traumatised children. In this way, she says society betrays the child… you can see why her views are controversial.

While Freud- whose model Miller trained in-initially accepted the validity of child abuse his theories were later modified to assert that much of the child’s experience was in fact fantasy. In 1988 Miller resigned from the International Psychoanalytic association which represented Freudian thinking, and continued to ruffle feathers by asserting that Bowlby and the like modified their theories in order to be accepted.

I have personally gained so much from reading Alice Miller and consider her a “gnostic therapist” … how can we truly know ourselves, and therefore know God if our child has been silenced and lost?

For me she is a shining advocate of the Child.

In her astrology Miller has an asteroid Child/Sun Quintile which shows a talent and gift- a positive relationship between the child and the ego conscious. Asteroid Child is also in a harmonious aspect (trine) with Venus highlighting a sense of love and value for the Child.

In the opening paragraph of her first book, “The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self” she says,

“Experience has taught us that we only have one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental; illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood. Is it possible, then, to free ourselves altogether of illusions? History demonstrates that they sneak in everywhere, that every life is full of them- perhaps because the truth often seems unbearable to us. And yet the truth is so essential that its loss exacts a heavy toll, in the form of grave illness. In order to become whole, we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If we choose instead to content ourselves with intellectual “wisdom”, we will remain in the sphere of illusion and self- deception.”

With love to anybody who is retrieving their lost child. 

Alice Miller
Alice Miller

 

 

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