TRANSCRIPT
I first found Alice Miller writing in 1999. Actually, I think my mother had Drama of the Gifted Child around the house when I was a kid, and I saw it around the house. But I didn’t take seriously any of the psychology books my mother read because, in many ways, my mother was my primary traumatizer. And although she was very good in some ways, was awful in other ways. So I figured if she was reading it, probably didn’t have much positive use for me, and I just ignored it. But I didn’t think much about it until later.
I happened to find Alice Miller. It was a few months before I became a therapist. In 1999, I got an Alice Miller book out of the library. I got the 1994 edition of Drama of the Gifted Child, and I started reading it. I realized that it was a profound book. She really concretely laid out the ideas about the horrors of the consequences of child abuse, why people abused their children, and how inevitable it is if you don’t resolve your traumas of childhood. And that’s all in Drama of the Gifted Child.
In fact, if I’m remembering correctly, Drama of the Gifted Child is basically three chapters. It’s three separate essays that she wrote that she kind of redefined into one single book. I would go so far as to say if you really just want to understand Alice Miller and really get the essence of her point of view, the key is to read that first chapter of Drama of the Gifted Child. Compared to basically almost every other psychology writer I’ve read, she’s just head and shoulders above them. Her writing is better than them, her point of view is more insightful, and she’s not afraid to call parents on the carpet and say, “This is the consequences of the horror that you do.” She takes the side of the child, and I love that about her because so few psychology writers do. And definitely, conventional society as a whole just spontaneously and reflexively takes the side of the adult.
I really think to get the whole essence of her point of view, the key is to read those first three books that she wrote: Drama of the Gifted Child, which is also known as Prisoners of Childhood; then the second book is For Your Own Good; and the third is That Shall Not Be Aware.
There’s one chapter in For Your Own Good that is fantastic, and I think it’s vital reading for anybody in the psychology field or anybody who just wants to study the consequences of child abuse. And that’s her explication of Hitler’s childhood, where she goes through basically all of the biographical material that’s been written on Hitler, or all that she could find, and it’s a ton of it. She goes into connecting the horrors that he experienced in his childhood with the horrors that he acted out as an adult.
Why I particularly love this chapter on Hitler is that she’s chosen the world’s most extreme monster. And by explicating his childhood and the effects of his childhood trauma, she makes the point that the most extreme monster in the whole world was not actually born evil. He was born like all of us, or created like all of us, which is perfect. The horrors that he experienced, the traumas that he went through, that’s what made him evil, and that’s what twisted him.
Now, not everyone who’s traumatized expresses it in obviously in the evil ways that Hitler did, by killing other people and subjugating a nation and trying to subjugate the world. But now, small, it doesn’t say this clearly, but it’s inherent in her work that unless we all resolve our childhood traumas, we all, in our own small way, and some people in their larger way, we all become Hitlers.
I’ve gotten a lot of heat for having criticized Alice Miller in my writings, and I’ve actually gotten heat from Alice Miller too. She read my long critique on my website. Someone sent her a link to it, and she wrote something about it on her website saying that I didn’t understand her at all and that I was just trying to confuse people. And I’ve seen that with Alice Miller with some of her other critics, that she doesn’t take well to being criticized. Basically, she just dismisses her critics and doesn’t engage in dialogue or debate with them, and tends, from what I’ve observed, to not actually learn anything from them. And that’s one of her weaknesses.
It’s odd if the flip side, because part of it’s one of her strengths and part of it’s one of her weaknesses that she’s such a forceful thinker and she’s so confident in her point of view and just is so confident as a person that she’s willing to go where few will tread. I admire her for that, and she plows forward and doesn’t let anyone get in her way. In that way, she seems to be incredibly non-insecure.
The problem is the flip side of that is that I see her as quite rigid and, in many cases, not very self-reflective. For instance, even after writing That Shall Not Be Aware about the horrors of manipulative therapy, she herself got into a relationship with very manipulative therapists, and it really disturbed her. It messed her up. It went way too quick for her. It brought her into a lot of her unresolved issues way too quickly, is the sense that I got, and it kind of flipped her out to the point that she’s written in places that it basically almost drove her psychotic. That it drove her with anxiety to the point of psychosis, I think was the quote.
And then afterward, she went from totally idealizing, for instance, one therapist. I don’t think she had him as her actual therapist, but she had his follower as one of her therapists. This was Jay Conrad Stettbaker, who wrote Making Sense of Suffering, where she idealized him. He was the greatest. She wrote the foreword to one of his books, and I read his book, and it was oddest how manipulative of a therapy book it was. I thought I would not want to practice this type of therapy. This is disturbing to me.
Yeah, she said Jay Conrad Stettbaker is the greatest therapist. He’s fantastic and wonderful. And then after that, she went to the exact opposite stream of idealizing him, and she totally devalued him. She wrote a public letter; it’s on the internet somewhere about how I do not support Jay Conrad Stettbaker, and anyone who associates me in a positive way with the work of Jay Conrad Stettbaker is libel for a lawsuit.