Parenting & Family Quote by Alice Miller

Miller’s line refuses the comforting myth of the “monster” who simply appears. By calling sadism “not an infectious disease,” she strips away the alibi of sudden contamination, the idea that cruelty is a freak accident, a bad influence, a glitch. Her intent is diagnostic and political at once: if sadism has “a long prehistory in childhood,” then the real scandal is not the adult act but the social arrangements that make a child’s world feel unlivable.

The subtext is sharper than it first sounds. “Desperate fantasies” doesn’t mean daydreams; it signals an internal survival technology. In a “hopeless situation,” the child can’t leave, can’t protest, can’t win. So imagination builds an exit: control, retaliation, omnipotence. The later sadist isn’t born craving pain; they’re rehearsing a script that once kept them psychologically intact. Miller’s phrasing “always originates” is deliberately absolute, a rhetorical gamble meant to force readers to follow causality backward, away from punishment and toward origins.

Context matters: Miller’s work sits in late-20th-century debates about child abuse, repression, and the family as a hidden institution of power. She’s pushing against therapeutic cultures that sanitize childhood and against legal/moral frameworks that treat violence as isolated “bad choices.” The line functions as an accusation aimed at adults and systems: if cruelty is cultivated, then neglect, humiliation, and terror are not private misfortunes. They’re the seedbed. The provocation is uncomfortable by design: it implies that preventing sadism is less about hunting predators and more about believing children early enough that they never need those fantasies.