Author: Alice Miller

Miller trained as a psychoanalyst in Switzerland and then turned on her own profession, arguing in The Drama of the Gifted Child and For Your Own Good that ordinary child-rearing, and the demand that a child suppress feeling to keep a parent comfortable, produces most later damage. The books changed how a generation talked about childhood. After her death her son Martin Miller published an account describing her as cold and unavailable, saying she had failed to protect him, and revealing that she had concealed her Jewish identity and her wartime survival in Poland from him for most of his life. She died in 2010, and the two accounts have been read against each other ever since.