Alice Miller has achieved recognition for her revolutionary work on the causes and effects of child abuse - here she works towards demolishing the wall of silence which surrounds the sufferings of early childhood as they affect everyday life, politics, the media, psychiatry and psychotherapy. An infant's trust and dependency on its parents, its longing to be loved and be able to love in return, are boundless. To exploit this dependency, to confuse a child's longings and abuse its trust by pretending that this is somehow good for it, Alice Miller condemns as a criminal act, committed time and again out of ignorance and the refusal to change. The essential first stage in this healing process is feeling the truth of our experience. Only this, Alice Miller writes, can enable us to recognise childhood events and resolve their consequences so that we can lead a conscious, responsible life. If we know and feel what happened to us then, we will never wish to harm ourselves or others now.

Every parent should read her * EDNA O'BRIEN *
Alice Miller changed the way I think about my own life * SARA PARETSKY *

Alice Miller lives in France. For 20 or so years she taught and practised psychoanalysis. Now, she questions the validity of its theories. In 1988 she resigned from the International Psychoanalytical Association and, in 1995, revised her bestselling THE DRAMA OF BEING A CHILD.