The Untouched
Key : Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and
Destructiveness
by
Alice Miller
£
A powerful synthesis of
Alice Miller's ideas, in which she
uses the lives of famous people, such as Picasso, Hitler and Buster
Keaton to illustrate the connection between childhood trauma
and adult behaviour. She challenges us to see our childhoods
as they really were in order to regain our lost awareness and our
full life.
From the publishers:
As in her former books, Alice Miller again focusses on facts. She is as
determined as ever to cut through the veil that, for thousands of years now, has
been so meticulously woven to shroud the truth. And when she lifts that veil and
brushes it aside, the results are astonishing, as is amply demonstrated by her
analyses of the works of Nietzsche, Picasso, Kollwitz, Keaton and others. With
the key shunned by so many for so long - childhood - she opens rusty looks and
offers her readers a wealth of unexpected perspectives.What did Picasso express
in "Guernica"? Why did Buster Keaton never smile? Why did Nietzsche heap so much
opprobrium on women and religion, and lose his mind for eleven years? Why did
Hitler and Stalin become tyrannical mass murderers? Alice Miller investigates
these and other questions thoroughly in this book. She draws from her
discoveries the conclusion that human beings are not "innately" destructive,
that they are made that way by ignorance, abuse, and neglect, particularly if no
sympathetic witness comes to their aid. She also shows why some mistreated
children do not become criminals but instead bear witness as artists to the
truth about their childhoods, even though in purely intuitive and unconscious
ways.
It is Dr. Miller's goal to encourage these sympathetic witnesses, to lend
them support, and to inform them about the worldwide and ignored plight of
children, for she thinks that only by confronting the truth that has been
avoided from time immemorial can human beings be saved from blind destruction
and self-destruction. This discovery is eloquently illustrated in the last
section of "The Untouched Key", wherein the story of Abraham and Isaac and the
story of "The Emperor's New Clothes" are retold to reveal their profound
meaning.
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