Parenting & Family Quote by Alice Miller

Miller’s line is a scalpel aimed at the comforting story we tell about cruelty: that it comes from “bad people” with defective personalities. She reroutes blame away from some timeless evil “character” and toward something more concrete and harder to moralize: a practiced script of power learned early, under conditions where the child had no exit and no voice. The detail that stings is “were not permitted to defend themselves.” It’s not only that harm happened; it’s that the harm was enforced through silencing, through the child’s compulsory agreement to reality as the adult defined it. That is where the violence reproduces itself.

The intent is clinically radical: shift the frame from individual pathology to intergenerational mechanics. Miller is also defending a taboo proposition in family culture: that many parents aren’t merely imperfect, they are reenacting. The subtext isn’t “forgive them,” but “stop mystifying them.” If abuse is partly a memory trapped in the body - unresolved humiliation, fear, rage - then mistreatment becomes a displacement: the parent finally gets to occupy the position of control they were denied, mistaking dominance for safety.

Context matters. Miller wrote against postwar European respectability and the psychoanalytic tendency to protect the parent-child bond at all costs. Her work insists that acknowledging what happened is not indulgent, it’s preventive. The quote doubles as a cultural indictment: societies that demand children’s obedience and emotional amnesia quietly manufacture adults who confuse love with submission, and authority with righteousness.