Rating: 
Summary: The most enlightening book I've ever read
Review: Reading this book only one year ago illumined so many things about the world for me, and aided in my coming to very necessary realizations about my own life. I saw a lot of myself in the story of Jurgen Bartsch; not in his actions, but in his history. It is his story, told in his own words that come to put a true, human face back onto his visage. Alice Miller's gentle, sympathetic yet forthright examination of his life and that of Adolf Hitler as well as Christiane make this work so penetrating and incredible; and yet that is what makes so many people run from it.
It is a continuing, mass delusion that has kept the facts of what really caused the Holocaust from coming to fore until this book. So many have the attitude that "history must be taught," despite the fact that listing events with no real explanation (as social or cultural theories cannot really explain most things) is not really productive, and what is most important to understand is one's own, personal psychic history.
The insights that can be gained from this, and all of Alice Miller's other books truly need to be made available to all of the world; her courage in continuing to publish these works is inspiring, and I hope I'm not the only who feels that way. We still have a chance to awaken, to quell the sleep of emotional blindness that allows for apathy and senseless cruelty to run the world. We, as damaged children, need not continue to destroy ourselves or each other because of the trauma and lies fed to us so early in life by our parents and other adults who did not deserve the 'respect' they so unquenchingly demanded of us.
As a reply to another review here:
Alice Miller's work is as uncompromising as the title of this book is. Someone who makes statements such as "the child sets the limits" clearly does not agree with people such as 'james dobson' who advise sexual abuse (spanking) and manipulation towards innocent children under the guise of 'discipline.' I've read almost every one of Alice Miller's books, and she speaks out against 'discipline' in all of them, because 'discipline' is just the latest word to be used for continuing the cycle of abuse, used because it isn't fashionable anymore for pedagogues to be more explicit and claim that children are actually demons.
Rating:
Summary: Help for damaged people
Review: This book offers a good clue to the source of the continuing cycle of self-destruction many are in. I am a returning college student studying Psychology and Art Therapy along with world religions. It is a disgraceful shame that the policies of the HMOs in the USA are stiffling Alice Miller's message. If you are a damaged person, please also read her book "Pictures of a Childhood." You can obtain relief independantly of the "Big Money" by utilizing personal art therapy. In addition, it should be understood that the type of discipline suggested by Dr. James Dobson is not child abuse. He has never advocated beating a child senseless. Furthermore, I have yet to read in one of Alice's books any detailed condemnation of discipline. She is against terrorism both physical and psychological. To slander those giving other points of view on discipline without fulling grasping the grace and love in the Christian Gospel is to miss the Christian point of view of "sin." Dr. Dobson roundly condemns child-beating and verbal abuse, as well as repression and oppression perpetrated by both the Christian and non-Christian people of this world.
Rating:
Summary: Cry it from the Mountain Tops
Review: This book should be recommended to all civic organizations that deal with children and families. It should be distributed in churches, synagogues and mosques. If we want to save our families and our future, we need to know what has formed violence in our world. It starts in families.Miller is balanced in her approach telling that violent families beget violent offspring. Telling is her chronicling of the late 1800s and early 1900s Europe spawning the generations that produced Nazism. Can we learn from our mistakes and save our future generations from violence, crime, brutality and retribution from the abused? This book is a must for parents to help them to understand the difference between discipline and abuse and avoidance of future angry generations.
Rating:
Summary: Cry it from the Mountain Tops
Review: This book should be recommended to all civic organizations that deal with children and families. It should be distributed in churches, synagogues and mosques. If we want to save our families and our future, we need to know what has formed violence in our world. It starts in families. Miller is balanced in her approach telling that violent families beget violent offspring. Telling is her chronicling of the late 1800s and early 1900s Europe spawning the generations that produced Nazism. Can we learn from our mistakes and save our future generations from violence, crime, brutality and retribution from the abused? This book is a must for parents to help them to understand the difference between discipline and abuse and avoidance of future angry generations.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely fascinating!
Review: This is one of those rare books that has the power to change the way you look at the world. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning more about how people's childhoods can and do affect their adult selves. The sections exploring the childhoods of a German serial killer and Adolph Hitler offer convincing evidence that people are not born evil. And if people are not born evil, then this has dramatic implications in the way we all raise our children. A must-read book for all parents and educators alike!
Rating:
Summary: alice miller strikes again!
Review: what a wonderful book! thank you alice miller! of the three case examples she uses, the one about hitler just takes the cake. she has the audacity, the emotional insight, and the analytic scholarly ability to really piece together what young hitler went through as a kid...and what it made him into as an adult - what he was attempting to act out through the horrors he perpetrated. what makes this book so wonderful is that alice miller has chosen western society's most "evil" character, and shown, in a certain way, how un-evil he really was, rather, that he was simply the product of an exceedingly brutally abusive household. through this book, we can gain some compassion for hitler - without forgiving him his crimes - and by metaphor gain some compassion for the abused child within each of us. we are not evil - we were abused. even hitler was born a beautiful, loving, lovable, and perfect child. shows you what parents can do...in the name of it being "for your own good."
Rating:
Summary: alice miller strikes again!
Review: what a wonderful book! thank you alice miller! of the three case examples she uses, the one about hitler just takes the cake. she has the audacity, the emotional insight, and the analytic scholarly ability to really piece together what young hitler went through as a kid...and what it made him into as an adult - what he was attempting to act out through the horrors he perpetrated. what makes this book so wonderful is that alice miller has chosen western society's most "evil" character, and shown, in a certain way, how un-evil he really was, rather, that he was simply the product of an exceedingly brutally abusive household. through this book, we can gain some compassion for hitler - without forgiving him his crimes - and by metaphor gain some compassion for the abused child within each of us. we are not evil - we were abused. even hitler was born a beautiful, loving, lovable, and perfect child. shows you what parents can do...in the name of it being "for your own good."
Rating:
Summary: Read this
Review: When you listen to the music of Bach, one is consistently amazed at its beauty and power regardless of the piece's length, instrumentation or meaning. And we are amazed, even if quietly so, because Bach always seems to have reinvented music by rediscovering what the language truly is; spiritually reexplaining the music we have grown up hearing--even if it's other classical or cerebral jazz--as one of many dialects. Hearing a masterpiece of Bach's affects us in the end only slightly differently than anything he ripped off in an hour or two for his church chorus before or after. To our souls, the fact that he introduced us to the hidden language of beauty is equally if not more important than even the greatest example of the poetry that, via the language, he created. Change that metaphor to the jazz of Coltrane, the plays of Shakespeare, the art of Picasso, the universe view of Einstein or what ever you like; this is the effect one feels when reading the psychological work of Alice Miller. This being my fourth book of hers I'm in the middle of reading, I don't bother with rating them according to which is better or worse; each one clearly and eloquently reveals a different facet of the diamond that is the tortured but beautiful soul of Western civilization, and perhaps all of humanity. Alice Miller puts us in touch with the obviously LOST language of the soul of the human child. And she does it to such a degree that you feel that language begin to speak YOU once again, the way it did when you were three or four years old, with every incredible common sense discovery she shares about the actual nature and genesis of culture and its many beliefs. All of her books do this. This is perhaps the paradox that will never cease to amaze you with all of her work, and especialy this one. With FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, Alice Miller shows you the nature, origins and source of human evil. What made Hitler and Eichmann Hitler and Eichmann; how it relates to the secret psychological pains of common people in 1930's and 40's Germany, 19th century England, and every other society and time; what, hiding behind religion and moral philosophy, nearly murders the soul of children--and is still sanctioned by Western culture as integral parts of "child-rearing". The clarity with which you will see the mystified world in which we live behind the smoke and mirrors of complex philsophies, contradictory historical perspectives and socio-political theories, is simultaneously invigorating and disheartening. You see the degree to which the simplest, most obvious explanation for evil has been so painfully ignored, and the sad, sad reasons as to why; but Miller's writing style and genius makes you feel hope after doing so. Instead of feeling as if your soul has been murdered, even after seeing forgotten aspects of your own childhood slowly and unexpectedly reappear before your eyes like a polaroid picture developing on certain pages and chapters, you feel as if it has simply been frozen against your will--and now you are armed with the technology to thaw it out and discover who you truly are. Alice Miller with FOR YOUR OWN GOOD gives us the behavioral anatomy of evil in human history via charting both the history and psychological effects of "poisonous pedagogy": inferior and abusive child-rearing practices that become so unconscious to a people as to become definitive of a culture. Evil is demystified with this book, and as such begins to immeidately lose its power and becomes what theologians of every religion have (unsucessfully) tried to wish it into being for millenia: nothing more than the shadow--the absence--of goodness. Read this book of hers in particular, and you will never say some version of "the children are our future" quite the same way again.
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