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from: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
List Price: $16.00Amazon.com's Price: $10.88 You Save: $5.12 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 616.8582
EAN: 9780374525439
ISBN: 0374525439
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: October 15, 1998
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sales Rank: 62108
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Originally published in 1984, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware explodes Freud's notions of 'infantile sexuality' and helps to bring to the world's attention the brutal reality of child abuse, changing forever our thoughts of 'traditional' methods of child-rearing. Dr. Miller exposes the harsh truths behind children's 'fantasies' by examining case histories, works of literature, dreams, and the lives of such people as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Gustave Flaubert, and Samuel Beckett. Now with a new preface by Lloyd de Mause and a new introduction by the author, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware continues to bring an essential understanding to the confrontation and treatment of the devastating effects of child abuse.
Amazon.com Review:
Miller parts company with Freud on the origins of children's fantasies in this progressive study of repressed memory. Forget the Oedipus complex. Miller reasons that when children suffer abuse, their feelings of pain and rage have nowhere to go in a society that esteems parental power over them as a natural right. Children have no choice but to internalize the anguish, creating a wellspring of fantasy material. This book offers a fresh take on how the unconscious retains memories of childhood and, without appropriate intervention, generates emotional ills and destructive behavior.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A helpful book by an important psychologist
If I had not already read The Drama of the Gifted Child, I would have found this book a key to understanding how our preverbal years lock in data that is key to our world view. However, this book moves into areas I don't agree with, and so I would recommend The Drama of the Gifted Child rather than this one. (A wise reader never really believes any writer has ALL the wisdom, and must take the good parts and leave the lesser ones.)
Rating:  - Liberating
In Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, Alice Miller turns Freud's oedipal complex on its head by exposing the circumstances that led Freud to side against his patients, and thus, against the truth of the life experiences of children. It is a great work by a highly regarded psychiatrist and thinker, well researched, and readily useful in applying to one's own life. For myself, this book (along with The Drama of the Gifted Child) helped to liberate me from the lies of my family and confront the abusers of my ... Read More
Rating: - Another masterwork from the Galileo of psychoanalysis
Alice Miller makes her perspective so clear and so unavoidable in this book that it is all but impossible not to feel your stomach go up in knots as you try to think about everyone's life that it explains--from best friends to her analysis of author Franz Kafka--but your own.
Without hanging Freud in effigy or throwing the baby of his genius out with the bathwater of his philosophical and ethical judgement errors, Miller established her perspective and cry for new psychological techniques ... Read More
Rating: - Wonderful, But Contradictory
Thou Shalt Not Be Aware is one of the finest theoretical books demonstrating how parents betray their children and how devastating this is for the child. Yet Alice Miller, wonderful writer that she is, cannot fully absorb the significance of her own message. This denial pervades her writing and weakens her book's impact.
She spends over three hundred pages of Thou Shalt Not Be Aware showing how parents damage their children, yet she refuses to hold parents accountable. (Page 58: "[People ... Read More
Rating:  - Has Done Better
I read her other book, Breaking Down The Wall of Silence, and enjoyed it. However, I really had to skim this book. It reminded me of the readings I had to do in college. It was not fun to read, it got too technical for me!
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