A British newspaper published an obituary of Alice Miller yesterday....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/ ... r-obituaryIt 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.
Sue Cowan-Jenssen wrote:
"She was a passionate supporter of children's rights, fighting to the end to abolish the smacking of children, which she saw as an abuse of power."
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