Alice Miller

Biography

In 1939, a few weeks after the war began, sixteen-year-old Alicja Englard found herself in the ghetto of her home town, Piotrków Trybunalski. What helped her get out was someone else’s name: Alicja Rostowska.

She was born on 12 January 1923 into a Jewish family, the eldest daughter of Gutta and Meylech Englard; her sister Irena was born a few years later. From 1931 to 1933 the family lived in Berlin, and the nine-year-old girl learned German there. The Nazi seizure of power forced them to return to Poland.

Alice led her mother and sister out of the ghetto; her father stayed and died there in 1941. She herself lived in Warsaw under an assumed name; according to some accounts, she took her school-leaving examinations there in 1940, and in 1942 began studying literature and philosophy at the underground university. After the war she studied briefly in Łódź. Under the same name she left for Switzerland at the end of 1946 on a scholarship to study at the University of Basel.

In Basel she studied philosophy, psychology and sociology. In 1949 she married the sociologist Andreas (Andrzej) Miller, who had come from Poland with her; their son Martin was born in 1950 and their daughter Julika in 1956. The marriage ended in 1973. In 1953 Miller defended her doctoral dissertation in philosophy, and in the same year began training in psychoanalysis in Zurich. Around 1960 she opened a practice and kept it until 1980; she was a member of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Her first book, “The Drama of the Gifted Child”, appeared in 1979. In Miller’s account, a child who is praised for his talents often adapts to the unconscious needs of his parents and pays for it with a loss of his own authentic self. In 1980 she closed her practice and gave up teaching “in order to explore childhood systematically”. “For Your Own Good” (1980) and “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware” (1981) followed. In the second she examined the childhoods of Adolf Hitler, Jürgen Bartsch and Christiane F. and used the term “poisonous pedagogy”, largely a rendering of the German “black pedagogy” coined by Katharina Rutschky. In the third book her criticism of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung went as far as a break with the discipline itself.

There are more written records of her painting than of much else in this biography. She began painting in oil in 1972, at forty-nine, having long wished to do so. From 1973 she worked fast, with a large soft brush on drawing pads, and later called those sheets a kind of diary. She drew faces in cafés and nudes in big cities, and copied Leonardo, Picasso and Rembrandt. She considered her books unthinkable without this space of freedom. Postcard-size watercolours made up the book “Pictures of Childhood” (1985).

In 1985 she moved to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France. In 1986 she received the Janusz Korczak Literary Award for the American edition of “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware”. In April 1987, in an interview with the magazine Psychologie Heute, she announced that she was renouncing psychoanalysis, and the following year she left the Swiss and international societies: in her view, their theory and practice prevented former victims of abuse from recognising the harm done to them. Then came “The Untouched Key” (1988), “Banished Knowledge” (1988) and “Breaking Down the Wall of Silence” (1990). In the last she introduced the idea of the “enlightened witness”, a person who supports someone who has been harmed.

In the 1990s Miller supported the method of Konrad Stettbacher, but after accusations against the therapist she distanced herself from him and stopped recommending any practitioners. Critics reproached her for asking too much of parents and for explaining people’s lives by childhood alone.

In 2006 “Bilder meines Lebens” (“Pictures of My Life”) appeared: an account of her emotional path from a painful childhood to her theories, told through 66 paintings made between 1973 and 2005. From 2005 she answered hundreds of readers’ letters on her website. Her son Martin, in a book published in 2013, set his mother’s public views against her treatment of him; in 2020 a Swiss documentary, “Who Is Afraid of Alice Miller?”, was released.

Alice Miller died on 14 April 2010 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, at the age of 87.