Alice Miller (born Alicja Englard[1]; 12 January 1923 – 14 April 2010) was a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher of Jewish origin, who is noted for her books on parental child abuse, translated into several languages.

In 1980, after having worked as a psychoanalyst and an analyst trainer for 20 years, Miller "stopped practicing and teaching psychoanalysis in order to explore childhood systematically.

[20] Miller died on 14 April 2010, at the age of 87, at her home in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence[3] by suicide after severe illness and diagnosis of advanced-stage pancreatic cancer.

[5][22] Drawing upon the work of psychohistory, Miller analyzed writers Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and others to find links between their childhood traumas and the course and outcome of their lives.

[23] The introduction to the first chapter in Miller's first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, first published in 1979, contains a line that summarises her core view.

She maintained that all instances of mental illness, addiction, crime and cultism were ultimately caused by suppressed rage and pain as a result of subconscious childhood trauma that was not resolved emotionally, assisted by a helper, which she came to term an "enlightened witness."

In her book Abbruch der Schweigemauer (The Demolition of Silence), she also criticised psychotherapists' advice to clients to forgive their abusive parents, arguing that this could only hinder recovery through remembering and feeling childhood pain.

It was her contention that the majority of therapists fear this truth and that they work under the influence of interpretations culled from both Western and Oriental religions, which preach forgiveness by the once-mistreated child.

She believed that forgiveness did not resolve hatred, but covered it in a dangerous way in the grown adult: displacement on scapegoats, as she discussed in her psycho-biographies of Adolf Hitler and Jürgen Bartsch, both of whom she described as having suffered severe parental abuse.

A common denominator in Miller's writings is her explanation of why human beings prefer not to know about their own victimisation during childhood: to avoid unbearable pain.

According to Alice Miller, worldwide violence has its roots in the fact that children are beaten all over the world, especially during their first years of life, when their brains become structured.

"[33]Miller proposed here that German traumatic childrearing produced heroin addict Christiane F., serial killer of children Jürgen Bartsch, and dictator Adolf Hitler.

For Miller, the traditional pedagogic process of spanking was manipulative, resulting in grown-up adults deferring excessively to authorities, even to tyrannical leaders or dictators, like Hitler.

Miller even argued for abandoning the term "pedagogy" in favour of the word "support," something akin to what psychohistorians call the helping mode of parenting.

[34] In the Poisonous Pedagogy section of the book, Miller does a thorough survey of 19th century child-rearing literature in the book, citing texts which recommend practices such as exposing children to dead bodies in order to teach them about the sexual functions of human anatomy (45–46), resisting the temptation to comfort screaming infants (41–43), and beating children who haven't committed any specific offense as a kind of conditioning that would help them to understand their own evil and fallen nature.

She scrutinised Freud's drive theory, a device that, according to her and Jeffrey Masson, blames the child for the abusive sexual behaviour of adults.

Pictures of Childhood (1986) The Untouched Key (Der gemiedene Schlüssel, 1988) This book was partly a psychobiography of Nietzsche, Picasso, Kollwitz and Buster Keaton; (in Miller's later book, The Body Never Lies, published in 2005, she included similar analyses of Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Schiller, Rimbaud, Mishima, Proust and James Joyce).

She believed that the philosophical system was flawed because Nietzsche was unable to make emotional contact with the abused child inside him.

She also introduced the fundamental concept of "enlightened witness": a person who was willing to support a harmed individual, empathise with her and help her to gain understanding of her own biographical past.

[35]In a New York Times obituary of 26 April 2010 British psychologist Oliver James is quoted saying that Alice Miller "is almost as influential as R.D.