[.ca] For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and ... (ISBN 078816452X)

From Amazon.com:
Miller explores the backgrounds of extreme cases of self-destructive and violent individuals to further her theories on longterm consequences of abusive childrearing. Her conclusions about what creates a drug addict, a murderer, even a Hitler, stray far from psychoanalytic dogma about human nature. Miller paints a jolting picture of the violent world each generation helps shape when traditional upbringing, with its hidden cruelty, is perpetuated. She also offers a way out by striving to resensitize the child in the adult, to unlock an emotional life frozen in repression.

Read This Book at Your Peril:
It's a sobering thing to have the answers to the deepest questions most of us ever ask about the human condition. I wouldn't trade the insights gained from reading this book for my former uneducated "bliss," but knowing the truth exacts a price. Once you understand the 'emotional physics' of how violent adults begin as violated children, violated, moreover, by the very people who are supposed to love and protect them -- you will see the results of that treatment acted out on various levels all around you, in everyone you know - for none of us have escaped being damaged on some level by abusive child-rearing practices. The 'tough to live with' aspect of such insight is realizing how far too many people become either a Persecutor or a Victim, acting out the imbalance of power they were raised with - not by confronting those who first damaged them (usually their primary caregivers) but by seeking substitute targets to attack on levels from subtle (being a control freak at work and making the lives of your subordinates miserable) to grotesque (marching Jewish children into gas chambers and still being able to sleep at night.) While the entire book is horrifying in it's illumination of sanctioned, morally enshrined cruelty to children in society, it was Ms Miller's chapter on Adolf Hitler that struck the most powerful epiphany. How often in my life had I heard Hitler described as an "unnatural monster," as "sent by the Devil," as someone not human? Miller's analysis of not only Hitler but of his father's and mother's lives, how their damaged characters intersected to create the totalitarian regime that was Adolf's childhood home, sent absolute chills of knowing through me as I read: in a less virulent form, his childhood had been my own. (Dominating father who controlled everyone in the house with his moods and rages/Passive mother who was dependant on him for survival and too frightened of her husband to protect her child.) While many people have suffered this and worse, it is the intervention on some level of an "enlightened witness," Miller maintains, that gives an abused child a perspective other than the one he lives with in the abuse situation and so salvages, on some level, the value of his genuine self. Hitler's insatiable hatred clearly showed that no one was there for him in childhood; his targeting of the Jews was a way to release the pent-up hatred from a lifetime of beatings and humiliation, inflicted on him by a father he wasn't allowed to hate. ("Honor Thy Father & Thy Mother") As we all do on some level, he found a substitute target for his rage. Hitler was also a remarkably sensitive, artistically gifted child, but an upbringing filled with abuse turned his talent toward exploiting the dammed up anger in the German adults of his generation who had also been raised with loveless brutality. What a relief, after so many beatings, so much pain and coldness and inhumanity, to have someone they could hate with impunity! The six million Jews exterminated during World War II were not each personally escorted into gas chambers by Adolf Hitler: he had plenty of help. It was through the common thread of being constantly abused, plus being indoctrinated to mindlessly obey authority, however absurd or cruel the order, that gave so many Germans the go-ahead to project all of the aspects of their' childhood selves their' authoritarian parents considered unacceptable onto the Jews and then try to destroy them. (This in the subconscious belief that the parts of themselves they'd disowned would never return to earn them new parental punishments; by killing the 'bad' part of themselves, they would become upright, perfect and pure, with no flaws, no human faults - good enough at last for their perfectionist parents and never again to be beaten.) If I could ask only one question in all the universe with certainty of a genuine reply, it would be: why do we love and hate? Thanks to Ms. Miller's book, I can't ever again pretend not to know the answer. The question now is whether this knowledge will reach enough people in enough positions of power to prevent an even greater holocaust. Ms. Miller has proven that the seeds of genocide sit squarely in the palm of the hand upraised in violence against a child. Does that sound extreme? Owing to the depth of his humiliation and suffering, the absolute commandment forbidding expression of that suffering and the unstoppable need to vent the resulting rage, I'm convinced that, had Hitler got his hands on a nuclear arsenal, none of us would be here to debate the question.

Millar psychoanalyzes her civilization, finding it guilty of child abuse:
Alice Miller digs into the psycho-history behind the mental-illness cases she deals with, turning her lights on the legacy of parent education from medieval through early-modern times. And to a large degree Miller lays the blame for traditions of mental illness on Christian theology. If children were presumed to be born evil, then the struggle to raise them could be something like exorcizing demons. How should a God-fearing parent proceed? The examples Miller cites from parenting literature are many and disturbing. In a 1740s "Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children", J. Sulzer, argues that the first necessary step is for children to learn that the world of adults has an established order, which can not be altered by wailing protests or selfish demands. Second, they must learn to obey the authors of that order: "The second major matter to which one must dedicate oneself beginning with the second and third year is a strict obedience to parents and superiors and a trusting acceptance of all they do. These qualities are not only absolutely necessary for the success of a child's education, but they have a very strong influence on education in general. They are essential because they impart to the mind orderliness per se and a spirit of submission to the laws. A child who is not used to obeying his parents will also not willingly submit to the laws and rules of reason once he is on his own ..., since he is already accustomed to act in accordance with his own will. Obedience is so important that all education is actually nothing other than learning how to obey." (p.12) Perhaps Miller aims indiscriminately at religion in general. She is focused on cases of abuse, like a policeman who sees crime all day. Her call for compassion is not the whole answer for parents, but it is crucial for a saner world.

Cry it from the Mountain Tops:
This book should be recommended to all civic organizations that deal with children and families. It should be distributed in churches, synagogues and mosques. If we want to save our families and our future, we need to know what has formed violence in our world. It starts in families. Miller is balanced in her approach telling that violent families beget violent offspring. Telling is her chronicling of the late 1800s and early 1900s Europe spawning the generations that produced Nazism. Can we learn from our mistakes and save our future generations from violence, crime, brutality and retribution from the abused? This book is a must for parents to help them to understand the difference between discipline and abuse and avoidance of future angry generations.

I needed this book years ago.....:
....but I'm glad I found it now! Alice Millers words and examples brought me inner peace that only comes with solving the painful mystery of abuse without cause that has plagued my psyche for many, many years. Thank you reviewers for it is your words that brought me to read this valuable gem. This masterpeice should be required reading for humans well BEFORE they undertake the great responsibility or child rearing. I am now reading "Drama Of the Gifted Child" and most likely will continue on to all her books. My highest respect and praises for the gift Alice Miller's work has given to the world.

German Warfare:
I always said that my home was a battleground because of the unaccountable violence. In Ms. Miller's book I read about the cruel methods of childhood upbringing from the German Republic, that are standard. In her depiction of Hitler's childhood, I cried because I found my father in the pages of a book. It was so strange to feel someone had a crystal ball into my home. The same methods employed by Hitler's father, my grandfather inflicted corporeal punishment upon my father. I learned of my father's pain, embarrassment & shame. I learned, he could not help himself. Cruel as it was for me, because I had to let go of my own hate, I emphasized w/his pain & I finally cried for his own lost childhood.