Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries | 
|  | | | Title: | Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries | | Author: | Alice Miller | | Publisher: | Anchor | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 01 September, 1991 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0385267622 / 9780385267625 | | List Price: | $13.95 | | You Save: | $2.79 | | Amazon Price: | $11.16 | |
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Product Description
Sparking great controversy among therapists and child psychologists, Alice Miller challenges the traditional views of child rearing and Freud's theories in this, her most influential work since The Drama of the Gifted Child.
Amazon.com Review
If, as a child, you were abused or neglected by someone you loved and trusted, it's likely you blamed yourself. To survive as an abused child, you struggled to forget the pain. But this tactic became a life-destroying force. It deadened your ability to feel, to be aware, to remember and, later, reemerged as unresolved rage, perhaps misdirected at your own children. You can halt that cycle and reclaim the truth about the abuse with this book. Miller's conviction--that it's only through feeling loved and cherished that cruelty can be recognized--provides a starting point for healing.
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Customer Reviews:
• Excellent 15 March, 2006
Alice Miller, I am a fan. Infor helped me let go of some stuff
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1QPI1ZV7H62P4
• Howgwash 14 May, 2007
While I applaud her commitment to exposing Child Abuse and am intrigued by her style of writing, I am horrified that she is so extremist in her views. Alice is obviously well-read and well-educated but some of her assumptions completely miss the mark. She basically made me feel that I am a child abuser. I have never raised a hand to my child. But that does not seem good enough to her. And do not even get me started on her section on Autism! She opens up a can of worms there and never closes it, instead choosing to put her opinion out there and then never defend or back up her claims.
I do think there is some valuable information in this book but no one should take this too seriously. It reads like a work of fiction. The subject matter is heavy and heart-breaking but because of her all-or-nothing approach I found myself tuning out early in the book. Please read it, but get it from the library.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1QX0RWBGZ862L
• Good Info For Self-discovery 06 November, 2007
I came across this book at a local bookstore last weekend just out of curiosity, and the thing that caught my attention was the title itself: "Banished Knowledge." I began to wonder: what kind of knowledge that this author was addressing. Then, I looked through it and it was about a knowledge lost to oneself due to trauma in childhood. And, this book was also about facing one's abused childhood in order to be freed from repressed emotions. This book is a second book by Alice Miller that I have read, with the first being Drama of the Gifted Child. I was a bit skeptical when reading "Banished Knowledge," but there is some good information that lies within.
I do agree with Miller when she said: "repressed pain blocks emotional life and leads to physical symptoms" (p. 161). There are many of us to blocked out memories from childhood that leads to dissociative states, and we tend to act out or act in a way seems unnatural to ourselves and to others. And, because we repressed our emotions, either from our childhood or present time, we would become sick in some aspects. Our emotions do indeed affect our physical bodies.
"Banished Knowledge" is short, with 180 pages, and has nine chapters with an appendix. It is fairly easy to read, but it can be little tough to understand. But, there are nuggets of truth in this book that may or may not help one to face fears stem from one's childhood. I do recommend this book for those who are searching for self-identity. Judge for yourself on how this book affects you, and if you feel anger, then you found one of the repressed emotions leading back to your childhood.
This book will not hold all of the information that will save you from pain/trauma, but it at least will have some truth for you as part of your self-discovery.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AFZNJHDGE0DUJ
• She Condemns Child Abusers But Not The Abuser Within Herself 16 December, 2006
No writer has had more of an impact on me than Alice Miller, but the more I grow, the more I realize her limits.
This book's strength is that Alice Miller understands and beautifully labels the devastating causes and effects of extreme child abuse. Its weakness is that she doesn't realize that these extreme cases are just the tip of the iceberg. And it's a big iceberg.
Although part of Alice Miller is most certainly enlightened, which explains why so much of her writing rings true, part of her remains clouded by denial. In Banished Knowledge her denial hinges on her false belief that she is fully enlightened. In the 1990 edition she repeatedly and confidently states that she has resolved all her own repressed traumas through the therapy method of J. Konrad Stettbacher.
Although this is patently untrue, it is convenient for her to believe because it protects her from her own buried pain. This allows her to radically underestimate the significance of the abuse she herself suffered in her own childhood - and she herself perpetrated on her own two children in her adulthood. After all, parents in any degree of denial cannot help but act out their repressed traumas onto their children, which by nature is abusive to the spirit of the child. This is the repetition compulsion which she herself so aptly elucidates in her other works. This is how I know Alice Miller abused her own children. I learned it by applying the best of her theory to herself.
Although she hints obliquely at her own abusiveness as a mother, her denial prevents her from looking it squarely in the eye...let alone studying her own shadow with the penetrating ferocity that made her famous. Thus, by extension she is unable to study the shadows of those like her, that is, the overwhelming majority of parents. She lets them off the hook the same way she lets herself off the hook.
This is why she tacitly grants non-enlightened parents her consent to procreate - despite it being an inherent recipe for abuse. And she certainly never says "don't have children!" She unconsciously recognizes that it would be hypocritical of her to condemn others for doing what she herself did - and is still unable to acknowledge having done.
No wonder Alice Miller has so many parents as followers. She is a safe leader - and certainly better than most. Although she does provide some enlightened guidance - which is why I was drawn to her in the first place and drank up her books for so long - at the same time she allows them to rest comfortably assured that she will never challenge their basic pathological motive for procreating.
Interestingly, a few years after writing Banished Knowledge, Alice Miller came to her senses and took the evolutionary step of publicly repudiating her idol Stettbacher as manipulative and destructive. In time she also came to acknowledge her own lack of full enlightenment.
Nevertheless, she still managed to find a way to protect her idealization of herself as a parent, and again, by extension, to give damaged people her tacit consent to procreate. She accomplished this by stating (in the last paragraph of the afterward of the 1997 edition of "Drama of the Gifted Child") that full inner healing is impossible and the desire to accomplish this is "hubris." Thus, if full healing is impossible, then some degree of repression and inner pathology is inevitable in everyone - and so, therefore is child abuse. And therefore she has no right to criticize it.
Wrong! The search to know oneself fully is not hubris! Terrifying, yes. Gutsy, yes. Overwhelming, at times, yes. And maybe even impossible for Alice Miller, given her advanced age, severe childhood history, and persistent rigidity.
But hubris for everyone: no! The real hubris is that Alice Miller so readily universalizes her own limited experience to all of humanity.
Here is the truth: Healing is possible. Full enlightenment is possible. And so is an end to all child abuse. Even mild child abuse.
And I guarantee that if Alice Miller were healthier she would be the first to agree.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A30AO422P01XK0
• Worth Reading...... 16 September, 2007
I have read a few of Alice Miller's books and think to truly appreciate her work, that you shouldn't judge by only reading one. I am a fan from the first book of hers I read, but learned to really respect her work the more I read. This is a good read just like her others.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1DZ3D2VFYHQ6S
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