BOOK REVIEW
BY SADIA WALI
World-renowned psychoanalyst, Alice Miller has devoted a
lifetime to studying the cruelties inflicted on children. In The Body Never Lies,
Miller goes further investigating the long-range consequences of childhood
abuse on the adult body.
Using numerous case
histories gathered from her practice, as well as examining the biographical
stories of other writers such as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Friedrich Nietzsche,
and others, Miller exhibited how a child's emotional traumas, humiliation, and
rage create physical and mental disorders. While discussing the lives of these
literary celebrities, Miller explored the traumas that haunted each author's
childhood. She also connected the writers' painful childhoods with their age of
maturity, causing severe mental disorders and sickness such as depression,
anorexia, cancer, and even insanity.
Miller examined parental spanking to sexual
abuse and emotional blackmail. According to the writer, the societal pressures cause parents to adopt harsh and tyrannical attitude with
children. To combat the devastating
effects of such jarring, Miller recommended the therapy of "Enlightened
Witness" to reaffirm the patient's repressed reactions to a forgotten
childhood experience.
Miller also discussed that religion can help young Individuals to
become healthy and conscious adults. She urged society to realize that
the Fourth Commandment -"Honor thy father and thy mother"- offers
immunity to abusive parents. Indeed, she argued not to extend forgiveness to
parents whose tyrannical child rearing methods have resulted in unhappy, and
often ruined, adult lives.
Finally, identifying
the consequences, she stated that “Parents and guardians who abuse their
children, both physically and mentally, leave them embarrassed and hurt. The
inability of most children to properly express such feelings causes them to
perpetuate the cycle by lashing out at their family, friends, and, above all
their own children, who will inevitably do the same.’’
By reading this book, I found a calm and
encouraging voice of Miller. The book provide us an insight
to authoritarian parenting and its direct and indirect effect on child’s
personality. The clinical therapy offered by the writer boost up healing powers of the adult self and
the body.
To know
about negative temperaments and mood of your child and how to tackle depression,
illness and other conflicts, parents are recommended to read this book and analyse
the factors which are causing physical problems in their children.
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