For Your Own Good

Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence

By: Alice Miller

Narrated by: Jo Anna Perrin

For Your Own Good, the contemporary classic exploring the serious if not gravely dangerous consequences parental cruelty can bring to bear on children everywhere, is one of the central works by Alice Miller, the celebrated Swiss psychoanalyst. With her typically lucid, strong, and poetic language, Miller investigates the personal stories and case histories of various self-destructive and/or violent individuals to expand on her theories about the long-term effects of abusive child-rearing. Her conclusions - on what sort of parenting can create a drug addict, or a murderer, or a Hitler - offer much insight, and make a good deal of sense, while also straying far from psychoanalytic dogma about human nature, which Miller vehemently rejects. This important study paints a shocking picture of the violent world - indeed, of the ever-more-violent world - that each generation helps to create when traditional upbringing, with its hidden cruelty, is perpetuated. The book also presents listeners with useful solutions in this regard - namely, to re-sensitize the victimized child who has been trapped within the adult, and to unlock the emotional life that has been frozen in repression.

©1980 Suhrkamp Verlag; translation copyright 1983, 1984, 1990, 2002 by Alice Miller; preface copyright 2002 by Alice Miller (P)2017 Tantor

everyone should read or listen.

if you want to be free from torment, be it by another or by the self, this will definitely open your eyes to this. jo anna perrin did an excellent job of reading.

Stay with it.

Wisdom we all need. It is a bit hard to follow only because the author is so often switching between story telling or reciting others writing. Which is then followed by her own commentary.

Should be required reading for everyone

This truly is the most self revealing book I've ever read. It should be required reading for everyone person on the planet.

Great book- too wordy

This book is great, but very difficult to listen to. It is very wordy. I am getting so frustrated listening and trying to follow along. I wish it was narrated by someone who spoke with more expression.

Monotonous performance

The narrator's performance was very monotonous, especially for such a long audio.
The book contains (especially the first section) contains a lot of excerpts from other books, and the narrator read them all in one tone, it was difficult for me to differentiate just from hearing what belonged to this book and what being read as an excerpt.
In other audios, narrators either change their tone, pitch, or speed to indicate a change between characters, quotes or excerpts.