Parenting & Family Quote by Alice Miller

Miller’s line lands like a clinical curse: harm doesn’t dissipate, it reproduces. The power here is its grim symmetry. Each clause is a mirror held up to an abusive world, suggesting that violence is not only an event but an apprenticeship. “Beaten... give beatings” isn’t moral condemnation so much as a chain of cause and effect, stripping away the comforting fantasy that cruelty stays contained inside one household or one generation.

The intent is polemical, almost prosecutorial. Miller is arguing against the culture of “discipline” and secrecy that reframes abuse as character-building. Her verb choices push past euphemism: “intimidated,” “humiliated,” “souls are murdered.” That last phrase is deliberately excessive, because she wants to name the psychic annihilation that polite society minimizes. By escalating from physical harm to existential damage, she frames childrearing not as a private style choice but as a public-health issue with downstream casualties.

The subtext is also a warning about denial. If adults refuse to look at what happened to them, they may reenact it with the authority of “normal.” The quote smuggles in a demand: accountability begins with memory, not amnesia. It echoes Miller’s broader project (especially her critique of authoritarian parenting and the “poisonous pedagogy” that rewards obedience at the cost of inner life): the abused child’s adaptation can harden into an adult’s method.

Contextually, this sits in late-20th-century psychology’s turn toward trauma and intergenerational transmission. Miller sharpens that conversation into a stark moral logic: protect children, or watch society keep teaching violence to itself.