wallsofsilence.com

On the website of a South African newspaper:

There's an announcement of her death at: http://www.alice-miller.com/readersmail_en.php

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Bernard

I had heard it this morning and it's not unexpected after her last official statement that she was near her end. It's time to continue where she left off and to bring her discoveries to a new level. To learn from the mistakes she made and to spread awareness and empathy.

Dennis

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Everything I write here is my opinion, not absolute truths but I don't want to start every sentence with in my opinion...

Brigitte Oriol, who helped Alice Miller with the readers' mail on the French part of the site, has several blogs based on Miller's work (in French), including a series of video lectures she made on the subject of child maltreatment: http://www.dailymotion.com/alicemiller

I've made quite a few posts on the forum recently to draw attention to the websites of key organizations.... to alert anyone who doesn't yet know, about the bigger picture. The Child Rights Information Network serves more than 2,100 organizations in 150 countries (see http://www.crin.org/about/), and many of them have websites. I know, because I've visited many of the sites to see what they have to say. If Alice Miller readers want to see an improvement in the situation of children, with the backing of new laws, these are the organizations that are making it happen. They have direct access to the UN and government officials in most countries. I am in the process of setting up a new blog focused on these organizations.... to narrow the field down to the best sources of news. It hasn't gone public yet because I'm still adding material from my hard disk collection, but if you come across it one day via Google you'll probably recognize that it's mine.

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Bernard

Thank you very much for your recent information, Bernard. It's really interesting that this awareness on childhood abuse is finally grasping more people. I don't understand French, so I have to pass on the videos of Brigitte Oriol. I'm working on a whole new website for wallofsilence.com, which will contain a large collection of related videos and articles.

Dennis

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Everything I write here is my opinion, not absolute truths but I don't want to start every sentence with in my opinion...

A British newspaper published an obituary of Alice Miller yesterday....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/ ... r-obituary

It was written by Susan Cowan-Jenssen of the London Association of Primal Psychotherapists and is better than most newspaper reports following the publishers' press release in April. The Sunday Times of South Africa misprinted the date of her death as 12th April, but apparently Suhrkamp's press release said it was on the 14th of April.


Miller's last public lecture was in Poland in May 1999 (I said 1998 before because it was for an organization founded in 1998). After that, her campaign against 'smacking' was confined to her books. Cowan-Jenssen says Miller was a passionate supporter of children's rights, although she never mentioned the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child or the proliferation of children's ombudspersons around the world (two in Africa, so far), as noted on a blog that Dennis linked to. From reading recent writings by Alice Miller anyone would think the situation has stayed much the same as it was in the 1980s (denial and inaction). After "Breaking Down the Wall of Silence", it appears she didn't check whether circumstances and attitudes had changed.

It's true, as Susan Cowan-Jenssen notes, that she was an influential (and controversial) figure in the world of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. However, now that Alice Miller is no longer with us, I have been investigating what she didn't write about. It turns out that Peter Newell of the Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children is hugely more influential in the world of children's rights. He was a member of the Editorial Board of the UN Secretary-General's Study on Violence against Children, published in 2006, and has presented briefings to the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

An earlier obituary in the Washington Post had interesting things to say....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 05249.html

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Bernard