What influence does Alice Miller's theory have on current therapeutical work?

​When I began working as a psychotherapist in my own practice in 1979, I was very curious to see whether I would be able to apply my mother's theory in practice. Of course there were other influences that also shaped my work. Specifically, the theories of Ronald D. Laing, Donald Winnicott, Jan Bastiaans and John Bowlby had a lasting and positive impact. But now, after 42 years of practical experience as a psychotherapist, I can openly say that my mother's theories had the greatest impact of all. As with her readers, her books helped me to better  understand many psychological problems. Most importantly, my mother gave me the key to unlock and better understand my parents' behaviour and my own traumatic experiences. Unfortunately, due to our extremely difficult relationship, my mother became more and more anxious about being confronted with her own theory and its consequences. Her hostile attitude motivated me all the more to apply her theory in my practical therapeutic work.

I shall describe the principal elements of my mother's theory in this presentation. Most theories that are developed are intricately linked with the author's own biography and experiences. Even if Alice Miller had to hide and even split off her true identity for reasons of survival during the Holocaust, she managed to some degree to suppress her trauma. At the same time, she invented an Alice Miller in her books whom she had wanted to be since childhood. This dissociation enabled her to live her true self in her books.

Biographical background relevant to Alice Miller's theory

a) Family setting

Alice Miller was born into an orthodox, hasidic jewish family. Her parents' marriage had been arranged and was fraught with conflict. From as early as childhood, Alice Miller resisted the religious rules and began walking her own path from early on. She understood intuitively how damaging child rearing and religious obedience are to the development of a child. Alice Miller was a gifted child who constantly had show others that they were not nearly as gifted as she was. Her relatives regarded her as arrogant. She insisted that she attend a Polish school and assimilate. She constantly fought with her father and her mother abused her physically with massive beatings – but they could not break her. Intuitively, she sensed that her resistance prevented her from developing a false self, with all consequences included. At the age of 16, she had developed into a highly educated, selfassured young woman.

b) The war and the traumatic experience

My mother's family were incarcerated in the ghetto of her hometown of Piotrków Trybunalski at the beginning of the war. She changed her Jewish identity and took on a polish name
– a false self in order to survive. She immediately established contact with the ghetto's underground organisation. There she met Stefan Moravsky, her later boyfriend who was four years older than her. Together, they founded a well-functioning secondary school in the ghetto for the Jewish youths. Alice Miller's original Jewish name had been Alicia Englard. Her new name was Alice Rostovska and she managed to secure false documents and retained her polish identity all her life. She succeeded in escaping from the ghetto and traveled to Warsaw. There she tutored polish children in order to support her family financially. In 1942, she found out by chance that the Nazis had decided to close the Piotrków ghetto and send all 28.000 Jews into the gas chambers of Treblinka. At the very last moment, she managed to secure false documents for both her mother and sister. Her father, an orthodox Jew, didn't speak Polish at all and was very ill. He died in the ghetto before its inhabitants were deported to Treblinka. Alice Miller saved her mother and sister. She hid her sister in a catholic convent in Warsaw and her mother somewhere in the country side. She herself now lived in the aryan part of Warsaw. She constantly had to avoid being caught by a blackmailer, which would have resulted in her own deportation to Treblinka. She lived in a school and worked as a teacher. Unfortunately, Alice Miller was betrayed to his own blackmailer by her fiance Stefan. As a result, Stefan's blackmailer found out her hiding place in the school and proceeded to blackmail her as well. She gave the blackmailer, who was cooperating with the Gestapo, her last piece of jewellery and was clever enough to seduce him. My mother never spoke to me about her war time experiences. Only once, in what must have been a weak moment, did she tell me that the blackmailer had the same name as my father: Andreas Miller. When the Warsaw uprising started, she and her sister Irena were able to escape to the Russian side.

After the war, she moved to Krakau and continued her studies which she had begun during her time in the underground. She fell seriously ill and after her recovery decided to continue her studies at the University of Lodz. It was there that she met her blackmailer yet again – Andreas Miller, who was completely in love with her.
Meanwhile, Jews were once again persecuted after the war by the stalinist dictatorship and this time, Andreas Miller turned into Alice Miller's saviour. He managed to obtain bursaries for both of them to study at the University of Basel. Andreas and Alice left Poland for Switzerland for good. They married in Switzerland and I was born in 1950.

c) Her books liberated her, but Alice Miller paid a high price

Alice Miller never processed her war trauma. Back then, there was no method of trauma therapy. As a result, she was forced to dissociate her war trauma. In 1978, after 25 years of working in psychoanalysis, Alice Miller decided to write books.
Her book "The drama of the gifted child" is still a bestseller across the world today and has been translated into some 40 languages. In her books, she recreated the Alice Miller that she had been as a child and who she had had to deny during the war in order to survive. Now she became the rebel again, as an author and advocate of oppressed children. She became the ideal mother for her readers who all wanted to have such a wonderful mother. I have described the repressed side of my mother in great detail in both my book, as well as in my film.
In the next part of this presentation I will instead describe just how revolutionary her approach was and how research on trauma is confirming her approach more and more.

The most important elements of Alice Miller's theory

Alice Miller studied the relationship between parents and their children. She discovered that parents don't support their children's originality, but rather hinder the organic development of their children's potential by wielding their authority. She deduces that psychological disorders are a result parents' hostile attitudes towards their children. In her first three books, these elements are described in a radical and disturbing manner.

The drama of the gifted child

In this first book, she ingeniously applies the concept of self by Donald W. Winnicott. This is why the sub-heading of the book is "And the search for the real self".
Winnicott's theory of self can be summarised in the following way: Due to external influences, the human being develops a false self in order to protect the real self. Winnicott describes the real self as the innate potential that strives to develop itself. Paradoxically, the false self not only protects the real self, but also obstructs access to the real self. He describes the development of the false self in the following manner: the false self develops due to amenability. The needs of the external world are made into one's own needs. This can go so far that the adult continues to believe that their false self is indeed their real self. Alice Miller puts the development of psychological disorders down to the development of a false self. This theory had a significant impact on parents' behaviour towards their children, and, of course, also on psychotherapy.
She clearly emphasized that parents have the duty to support their children in reaching their full potential instead of obstructing them and causing psychological disorders in them.

For your own good

In this book, Alice Miller describes in great detail the mechanisms that parents utilise to influence their children and how these mechanisms lead to psychological disorders in later life and also hinder children in developing their own potential. She uses Katharina Rutschky's term "black pedagogy". Lloyd de Mause was the actual founder of psychogenetics. In 1977, he published the book "History of childhood: The untold story of child abuse", which is a psychogenetic history of childhood. He describes how the formation of nation states led to filicide no longer being tolerated. This was the direct result of the state expecting clear guidelines on child rearing as it needed children to serve as soldiers in its armies. These mechanisms of child rearing were extremely repressive. This enormous societal change opened the door for the pedagogic sciences to enter the stage. Pedagogues became the great enablers of repressive and misanthropic child rearing.

Alice Miller describes these pedagogical guidelines in her book and clearly shows the negative effects they generate. One of these guidelines especially stood out to her: "To bring up the child according to your own ideals, you must break the free will of the infant." The pedagogues asserted that children must be raised according to the ideals of grown-ups. If successful, the child would be under the complete control of grown-ups, who would not have to fear any deviations on the part of the child. Although both the state and the church were very clear in their expectations on child rearing, parents were nevertheless bewildered and tried to reduce their bewilderment by overachieving on the educational guidelines. Pedagogues of the 18th century and up to Nazi- Germany developed parenting guides that read like torture manuals. Especially worth mentioning here are Moritz Schreber, as well as Johanna Haarer, Adolf Hitler's preferred education adviser. The last edition of her book was published in 1989.

Alice Miller uses the examples of a German serial killer and a drug addict to show the psychological damage caused by the brutal methods of child raising. She takes on a radical position. Often, she is pessimistic, which is understandable given that her mother used these methods on her as well. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to give a presentation to former members of Germany's 68 movement on occasion of their 50th anniversary in Frankfurt. After my talk, I had the chance to talk to some of these hardened people who, as students in 1968, had rebelled against the morals of their times, the former Nazis still in power, and against elitist and patriarchal structures and lifestyle patterns that hadn't changed. I was surprised when they told me how they had been raised with black Nazi pedagogy. I at once realised that this student movement had actually been a rebellion against the child raising methods of their parents that ended in terrorism.

Without having known trauma theory, Alice Miller clearly showed of the child raising methods of the 18th century and beyond traumatised copious numbers of children. Even if slightly exaggerated, one can argue that child raising methods based on black pedagogy were socially accepted methods of torture intended to traumatise lively children and to rob them of their livability. As said, the unrest caused by the 68 movement was actually a rebellion against sadistic and destructive parenting methods. Unfortunately, the rebellion was unsuccessful because the rebels could not free themselves of the child raising they had experienced but rather applied it to their own members.

As with her first book, Alice Miller's second book was another resounding success that shook pedagogy to its foundations and again influenced psychotherapy. I will return to this aspect at the end of my talk.

Thou shalt not be aware

Alice Miller's third book concerns itself with the internalisation of black pedagogy. Without having been aware of it, she intuitively describes the process of transgenerational trauma. Additionally, she intiutively deals with a change in practical psychotherapeutic work. She radically opposes Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. She accuses him of giving up his initial trauma theory in favour of his Oedipus complex. His theory of sex was also attacked by Alice Miller. She accused psychotherapy in general of being completely disinterested in the biographies of their patients. Instead, psychotherapy represented a speculative theory that in no way did justice to the psychological suffering of patients. If you are truly interested in your patients, it becomes possible to identify the suffering and to resolve it. What she pointed out here is the importance of the patient being able to articulate their subjective experience to an empathic listener. In this way, the patient will become aware of the fact that for their whole lives, they were supposed to remain ignorant as to the way they had been treated. The methods of child rearing that they had been subjected to play a key role in this because their experiences can expose the degree to which the treatment at the hands of their parents turned them into psychological cripples. Alice Miller emphasizes clearly how these parenting styles traumatise children while being largely tolerated by society.
There are still so many people today who are not allowed to be aware and who pass this treatment on to their own children without a trace of a guilty conscience.

Alice Miller put special emphasis on the psychotherapist's attitude towards their patients. She demanded that therapists start taking their patients' accounts seriously and believe them. To her, the role of the therapist had to be that of the 'enlightened witness', because children were alone and helpless in the traumatic situation without anybody there to believe them. She assumed that a witness could have intervened in order to support the victim. Many of these elements of Alice Miller's theory were rejected outright because they were
uncomfortable and shook up the therapeutic lethargy. I will now describe how Alice Miller's theory influenced me as a therapist.

Can Alice Miller's theories be applied in practice?

As Alice Miller's son, I also became a therapist and will now share to which degree I have been able to apply her theory. Alice Miller never applied her theory in practice and so I, as her intellectual heir, got the opportunity to test them.
It is of utmost importance to me to reconstruct the patient's biography in as detailed a manner as possible. In this, Alice Miller's thoughts encouraged to drop my inhibitions in this process. However, unfortunately I never considered that at the same time, I would have to critically assess my own biography.
The theory of inter-subjectivity established itself in psychoanalysis, especially in trauma therapy. This theory states that the patient and the therapist influence each other. However, this is a very different process compared to the classical transference and counter-transference. With inter-subjectivity, both parties change during therapy, each in their own way. The therapist no longer puts an effort into withdrawing their own persons, but rather embarks on a developmental psychological process during therapy, which leads to the development of an inter-subjective relationship. This is no longer the realm of transference. Rather, the therapist gets triggered which leads to a confrontation with the repressed parts of his or her own biography. The challenge lies in the therapist processing these repressed parts during therapy or supervision. By means of this process, the therapist is able to open themselves up to the patient's trauma. The theory of inter-subjectivity enables the therapist to grow personally while working – instead of this being experienced by the patient only.
In my opinion, this theory is certainly an innovation of classical psychoanalysis. Yet my mother's theory makes more sense to me. This refers to the concept of the 'enlightened witness' and conveying to the patients that they are accompanied and that their experiences are empathically responded to. Furthermore, as an enlightened witness it is important to believe the patient and to distance oneself in the sense that it becomes possible to point out the causal connections and to explain them. In my experience, patients feel a great sense of relief when the chaos of their experiences is finally put into order. Alice Miller never described this process because she lacked the practical experience.
My mother never imagined that her parenting would also be critically examined and dissected. This lead to conflict between me and my mother. As I have said, she had to repress her war trauma to be able to write these books at all.
Alice Miller was of the opinion that given the negative experiences, one should accuse one's parents. In my experience, it is much more important to process one's own subjective experience of being a victim. You don't have to forgive, but most parents are unwilling to confront themselves with criticism. Understanding one's parents and distancing oneself from them are the most important factors.

I also expanded Alice Miller's theory with a key element. During the early 1980s, John and Helen Watkins developed the Ego-state-theory. As a starting point, this theory assumes a multi-centric self, which can be fragmented by trauma. I expanded Alice Miller's theory in the sense that I also aligned the Ego-state-theory with work in practice. I have noticed, especially when it comes to trauma, that patients tend to internalise their parents in their behaviour towards the child. The grown-up is basically colonised by their internalised parents. The parents who caused the trauma in the first place, still wield the same amount of power which suffocates the grown-up and their legitimate needs. Reconstructing the true biography of the patient makes it possible to fully grasp the traumatic dynamic of the mental inner world. With the help of the 'enlightened witness' and through dialogue as a grown-up, patients begin to learn how to defend themselves against their internalised parents, to leave behind the helplessness and to no longer be at the mercy of their parents. It is very common for parents to pass their own traumas on to their children by means of a form of transgenerational inheritance. In therapy, it is important to break this cycle.

Conclusion

Alice Miller's theory influenced me greatly and I was often able to apply it. However, unfortunately, it is too aggressive, often exaggerated and drifts off into the domain of literature. But Alice Miller prepared the ground for trauma theory and trauma therapy. It is not without reason that Alice Miller's books are still widely read and enjoy great influence. Because she captured the experience of many people and was radically direct in this. Her thoughts influenced psychotherapy as a whole.