For Your Own Good:  Hidden Cruelty In Child-Rearing and the Roots Of Violence by Alice Miller. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1983.

Reviewed by Mitch Hall

 Alice Miller is a former teaching psychoanalyst in Switzerland. From the evidence in this book, she is a woman of profound compassion, courage, empathy and insight. Fortunately, she decided to devote the next several years of her life to writing so that the understandings she gained in analysis could be available to a wide public.

    Her first volume, The Drama of the Gifted Child (Basic Books, 1981), was an original and moving exploration of the origins, manifestations and treatment of narcissistic disorders. Her writing is inspired. It resounds with the inner presence of a soul who has really lived and suffered the truth of which she is speaking. Her books are powerful. One's deepest feelings are evoked. At the same time, one's thinking about some of the most fundamental issues of human existence is challenged.

    In For Your Own Good, Miller exposes the roots of violence. She shows that evil is reactive, not innate. As with other irrational behavior, violence stems from early childhood experiences that are not remembered or understood.

    Our civilization has perfected child-rearing techniques that "condition a child at an early age not to become aware of what is really being done to him." Alice Miller calls this the "poisonous pedagogy."

    Drawing on historical material in Katharina Rutschky's Schwarze Padagogik, she quotes at length from popular child-rearing manuals of the past two centuries. Her selection and concise comments are revealing. Physical abuse, humiliation, coercion, manipulation, deception, the crushing of spontaneous feelings, the breaking of individual will, and the destruction of exuberance and vitality have all been sanctioned, codified, and hallowed methods of child-rearing for generations. They are always justified to children as being "for your own good."

    In the nature of the power game, parents often take revenge on their children for what was done to them by their parents, in the acting out of a blind, harmful "repetition compulsion."

    Alice Miller gives three detailed case studies in which she makes painfully palpable her claim that "our earliest experiences unfailingly affect society as a whole; that psychoses, drug addiction, and criminality are encoded expressions of these experiences."

    Having cracked that code in a way that departs from psychoanalytical drive theory, she tells us what she learned about Adolf Hitler, about an adolescent girl who destroyed herself with drugs and prostitution, and about a murderer of young boys.

    In each case, the pattern of later destruction reproduced like a photographic print the negative of "soul murder" that had been inflicted on these once-upon-a-time little children. "Every act of cruelty, no matter how brutal and shocking, has traceable antecedents in its perpetrator's past."

These life histories are not easy reading. They are in fact often gruesome. Yet the author's understanding and compassion are redeeming qualities. She writes with empathy, calling this her "sole heuristic tool". She succeeded in "the attempt to identify with the perspective of the child himself and not to judge him through adult eyes."

    The ultimately absurd consequences of the "poisonous pedagogy" are seen in the collective horrors of history. Alice Miller helps us understand how political leaders unconsciously exploit the childhoods of their followers, how ideologies sanction repressed hatred and lust for revenge, how manipulated children become manipulated or manipulating adults.

    For Your Own Good urgently deserves the attention of all who are concerned with the cause of life. "For the hope that by means of rational agreements it might be possible in the long run to prevent nuclear annihilation of the human race is at bottom a form of irrational, wishful thinking and contradicts all our experience .... If we do not do everything we can to understand the roots of this hatred, even the most elaborate strategic agreements will not save us. The stockpiling of nuclear weapons is only a symboI of bottled-up feelings of hatred and of the accompanying inability to perceive and articulate genuine human needs."

Taking this book seriously, reading it, and discussing its implications can help us "understand the roots of this hatred" that threatens us all. For Your Own Good is in itself a great contribution to the perception and articulation of "genuine human needs."

    The entire text points to steps in helping us recover our authentic being. The child in each one of us is called forth to become aware of our inner truth.

    According to the well-known adage, "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world." For Your Own Good brings the relevance of this saying unforgettably home.

    We are faced with the fateful question of whether we can renounce the practice of "poisonous pedagogy" and learn with and from our children what it really means to live.


Originally published in The AHP Perspective,  May 1984, San Francisco: Association for Humanistic Psychology, p. 10.