For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence - Softcover

Miller, Alice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374522693 ISBN 13: 9780374522698

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

Synopsis

For Your Own Good, the contemporary classic exploring the serious if not gravely dangerous consequences parental cruelty can bring to bear on children everywhere, is one of the central works by Alice Miller, the celebrated Swiss psychoanalyst.

With her typically lucid, strong, and poetic language, Miller investigates the personal stories and case histories of various self-destructive and/or violent individuals to expand on her theories about the long-term affects of abusive child-rearing. Her conclusions--on what sort of parenting can create a drug addict, or a murderer, or a Hitler--offer much insight, and make a good deal of sense, while also straying far from psychoanalytic dogma about human nature, which Miller vehemently rejects.

This important study paints a shocking picture of the violent world--indeed, of the ever-more-violent world--that each generation helps to create when traditional upbringing, with its hidden cruelty, is perpetuated. The book also presents readers with useful solutions in this regard--namely, to resensitize the victimized child who has been trapped within the adult, and to unlock the emotional life that has been frozen in repression.

About this title

About the Author

Alice Miller, Ph.D., practiced and taught psychoanalysis for over twenty years before devoting herself to writing in 1979. She is the author of the bestselling Prisoners of Childhood (reissued in paperback as The Drama of the Gifted Child) and For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, as well as numerous other books. Miller lives in Zurich, Switzerland.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374522693
• ISBN 13: 9780374522698
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 320