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Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux )
Release Date: 1998-10-15
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List Price: $16.00
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Product Description
Originally published in 1984, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware explodes Freud's notions of "infantile sexuality" and helps to bring to the world's attention the brutal reality of child abuse, changing forever our thoughts of "traditional" methods of child-rearing. Dr. Miller exposes the harsh truths behind children's "fantasies" by examining case histories, works of literature, dreams, and the lives of such people as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Gustave Flaubert, and Samuel Beckett. Now with a new preface by Lloyd de Mause and a new introduction by the author, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware continues to bring an essential understanding to the confrontation and treatment of the devastating effects of child abuse.
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Amazon.com Review
Miller parts company with Freud on the origins of children's fantasies in this progressive study of repressed memory. Forget the Oedipus complex. Miller reasons that when children suffer abuse, their feelings of pain and rage have nowhere to go in a society that esteems parental power over them as a natural right. Children have no choice but to internalize the anguish, creating a wellspring of fantasy material. This book offers a fresh take on how the unconscious retains memories of childhood and, without appropriate intervention, generates emotional ills and destructive behavior.
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 A helpful book by an important psychologist ( saxmusan )
If I had not already read The Drama of the Gifted Child, I would have found this book a key to understanding how our preverbal years lock in data that is key to our world view. However, this book moves into areas I don't agree with, and so I would recommend The Drama of the Gifted Child rather than this one. (A wise reader never really believes any writer has ALL the wisdom, and must take the good parts and leave the lesser ones.)
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 Liberating ( scarletryane )
In Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, Alice Miller turns Freud's oedipal complex on its head by exposing the circumstances that led Freud to side against his patients, and thus, against the truth of the life experiences of children. It is a great work by a highly regarded psychiatrist and thinker, well researched, and readily useful in applying to one's own life. For myself, this book (along with The Drama of the Gifted Child) helped to liberate me from the lies of my family and confront the abusers of my childhood without fear, dread or resentment, for, as I gradually accepted the facts of their lives as well as my own, I could accept the havoc they wreaked on mine, and finally take unashamed responsibility for my own life.
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Another masterwork from the Galileo of psychoanalysis ( baritoneearl )
Alice Miller makes her perspective so clear and so unavoidable in this book that it is all but impossible not to feel your stomach go up in knots as you try to think about everyone's life that it explains--from best friends to her analysis of author Franz Kafka--but your own.Without hanging Freud in effigy or throwing the baby of his genius out with the bathwater of his philosophical and ethical judgement errors, Miller established her perspective and cry for new psychological techniques based in compassionate listening to others lives and childhoods (instead of forcing others lives into a preexisting paradigm) magnificently. The effect of her work begins with her establishment of Freud's drive theory--Oedipal complex, et. al.--as merely an artistic, pseudo-scientific extension of the very Judeo-Christian, Victorian Age system of morality that allowed for secret atrocities to be routinely committed on innocent children in the first place. Its existential inadequacy in charting the anatomy of the soul (which is what the word "psyche" means) comes up in virtually every psychoanalysed person and derivative doctrine and explains much if not most of the profound failures of the entire discipline in Western society this past century (and, definitively, people's lack of faith in it). It's as if Freud, like Shakespeare or Bach, created a new language with many of the materials of the popular one being used; only unlike Shakespeare or Bach then chose, because of the martyrdom that sticking to his real discoveries demanded of him, to basically backpeddle and translate all of the same antequated ideas he should have replaced into it. Camille Paglia of SEXUAL PERSONAE was the first person I ever heard say that people who try to judge Freud on scientific terms miss the point that he wasn't trying to make science; he was making art. Alice Miller proves she was right, only the art he created hurt people as much as it helped, as his theories of the innate sexual drives of children are based on--but has little to no basis in--the hidden, unspoken reality of the lives of children: powerless against the love, power and abuse of sexually conflicted adults. Alice Miller redefines common sense with her perspective, by replacing your view of history and present day reality. To read her books is to begin to be free, know your inner grief, release it, and be reconnected with your vitality, creativity and joy. In charting Western society's betrayal of the human child, the grief one feels upon its discovery through her is unavoidable. But the secret life and hidden potential one discovers of the human child, through being once again reacquainted with the truth of their (our) infinite posiibilites for growth and transformation--if only left to do so--is astounding. True, if you have ever found yourself brought nearly to tears over stories of child abuse, seeing how prevalent it is and what its actual impact on the world is via reading this will be hard for you to take. But if you ever wondered what really separates the Bill Gateses and Michael Jordans, etc. from the rest of us, because a little voice keeps telling you its something other than exceptional talents, this book, in taking the mystery out of what creates happiness and inner peace, could change your life.
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Wonderful, But Contradictory ( mourning_cloak )
Thou Shalt Not Be Aware is one of the finest theoretical books demonstrating how parents betray their children and how devastating this is for the child. Yet Alice Miller, wonderful writer that she is, cannot fully absorb the significance of her own message. This denial pervades her writing and weakens her book's impact.
She spends over three hundred pages of Thou Shalt Not Be Aware showing how parents damage their children, yet she refuses to hold parents accountable. (Page 58: "[People cannot] grasp that I blame neither children nor parents.") In effect, she, one of the 20th century's greatest trumpeters for the child's rights, herself creates a theory which abandons the full truth of the child. Shying away from the strength of her message, she compromises as best she can, turns vague, and blames society instead. Thus, the subtitle of the book: "Society's Betrayal Of The Child."
It is not society that primarily betrays children. It really is parents. Yet Alice Miller, a parent of two children herself and a woman who never came close to processing her own unresolved grief from her own childhood - stemming from maltreatment by her own parents, not society - cannot accept that. It is too painful.
Thus it comes as no great surprise that years after writing this book, when she herself entered deep therapy to resolve her childhood traumas once and for all, her true past horrors surfaced and she suffered a near-psychotic breakdown. A 1995 interview says it all: "At the end of these three weeks my feelings were in a turmoil, so that I could not find sleep, that for the first time in my life I thought of suicide, and had anxiety verging on the psychotic. I was already fearful of this therapy that robbed my organism of sleep, but I could nowhere escape it."
Yet between the time of undergoing this "therapy" and giving this interview, she touted her therapist, J. Konrad Stettbacher, as a brilliant theorist and discoverer of a "remarkably effective therapy method," thus providing him with thousands of referrals, until, that is, she realized correctly that he had been manipulative and destructive with her and she quickly removed all mention of him from later editions of her books...and publicly repudiated him on the internet.
Yet 95% of Thou Shalt Not Be Aware remains an accurate roadmap and fuel station on the path toward enlightenment. So much of Alice Miller is fully enlightened. However, if you aspire to become more enlightened than she is, this book will be partially toxic to you.
For instance, she masterfully exposes Freud's 1897 abandonment of the truth of his patients' sexual abuse histories, yet out of guilt for betraying him and loyalty to loving him (i.e. the omnipotent parent) anyway, she dedicates this book's first edition to...him.
And she spends countless pages beautifully - though not succinctly, as this book does ramble - deconstructing Freud's ludicrous drive theory to expose its basic flaws. But then, on page 51, she writes this: "When I wrote The Drama of the Gifted Child [her first and most famous book, which is anti-Freudian], I still believed my experiences as an analyst were compatible with Freud's drive theory..." This is shocking, and shows how amazing insight and atrocious denial can co-exist in the same person's conscious mind. This is Alice Miller in a nutshell.
And then there is her intense anti-religiosity, and refusal to believe in God or support any form of therapy that does. Yet in June of 2001, nearly twenty years after writing Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, she wrote a letter to Pope John Paul II in which she took on the tone of an enraptured, star-struck young girl begging yet another omnipotent parent figure to hear her point of view. Had I not known beforehand that it was written by the ferocious and insightful Alice Miller I might not have believed it.
I will quote a few lines of it here (and the full text is on her website): "Open Letter to the Holy Father. I take the liberty to write to You again... ...I can't imagine that any other person in the world would have Your courage, Your credibility, as well as Your personal talent and God's grace to be able to speak up against an old tradition [of child abuse]... If the Church continues to ignore the new scientific information and to stay silent about this issue in spite of the lessons of Jesus, who else can be asked to open the parents' eyes in order to prevent the blind escalation of violence. I am sure that if my letters succeed to reach You personally You will not stay indifferent to the knowledge they are trying to pass on to you. With my most profound respect, Alice Miller."
Yet she even predicts her own future capitulation in Thou Shalt Not Be Aware. On page 209, she notes how often "individual analysts shrink in later life from their own findings and return to earlier ways of thinking they had already left behind." As she herself points out consistently, traumas that are not fully exhumed and resolved always find a way to manifest pathologically.
Although part of Alice Miller speaks from her healed side, she continues to behave like the traumatized child some part of her remains. On one hand she speaks the truth more forcefully and honestly than almost anyone else - and as such has legitimately inspired millions through her written word. Yet at the same time she defends parts of her parents' pathologies at all costs. This is her unconscious psychic defense against having another breakdown. Thus, when reading her, we must be aware of her limits. If you are not, then...thou too shalt also not be aware.
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 Has Done Better
I read her other book, Breaking Down The Wall of Silence, and enjoyed it. However, I really had to skim this book. It reminded me of the readings I had to do in college. It was not fun to read, it got too technical for me!
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