For Your Own Good Audiobook By Alice Miller cover art

For Your Own Good

Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence

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For Your Own Good

By: Alice Miller
Narrated by: Jo Anna Perrin
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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 Child Psychology Developmental Psychology Parenting & Families Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Relationships Murder Mental Health Health
Brutal Truth • Sound Arguments • Excellent Narration • Insightful Awareness
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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.

Great book- too wordy

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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.

everyone should read or listen.

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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.

Stay with it.

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Highly recommended to at least have an idea how the mistreatment of parents affect our adult behavior

Shocking reveling

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

Should be required reading for everyone

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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.

Monotonous performance

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The author demostrates a very harsh reality on how abuse dictates the future of children. Thank you Alice Miller for such heart breaking awareness

Heart breaking reality

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Devastating truth, decades after original publication. I am grateful to the author for the brutal truth she lays bare on these pages. It’s hard to imagine (because it had such an influence on me the first time I read it), but it was even even more meaningful this time around.
In my opinion, Perrin’s narration did a disservice to the text. Plaintiff and droll, she slaughtered the poem by Plath and lessened the quality of the listening experience.

Devastating truth, decades after original publication

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I can't tell where she is criticizing and where she is advocating for manipulation and abuse. Confusing, triggering, dark. I enjoyed her book on the gifted child more, though it had some of this. This book is full of gut wrenching ideas and religious dogma and it is not clear if she is saying this is good or bad much of the time, but it definitely feels very bad in my body. Hate stirring. Do not recommend for general consumption. She seems completely obsessed with punishment and how to do it better? This book has made me very sad for humanity. It is not helpful or hopeful, and just goes on and on about how to punish children into being good punishers of themselves? This book has turned my perception of pedagogy very dark and left me feeling very grateful for all the neglect I was gifted in my childhood. I was labeled gifted and still feel punished for it most days...as agonizing is it is to feel freewilled in our modern domesticated society, I am very grateful to be me. ...is she actually saying we should use corpses to teach children about human sexuality?!? HOW is this woman considered an expert? I guess if breaking wills and propagating shame and abuse is your thing... She does this with an air of shame and blame towards those who shame and blame which I don't quite understand. I do find the argument that poisonous pedagody might create characters like Hitler to be sound and easy to follow, though not a knew idea for me.

Dark and Depressing Walk Through Pedagogy

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This book came highly recommended but sadly I was highly disappointed. The reader was inappropriately robotic, which I felt made the content much less interesting and hard to follow. Very surprising that she was chosen for such an important and profoundly emotional subject. In addition, I thought that overall the content had no real storyline and was choppy in terms of topics covered, ie, no rhyme or reason for the way it was organized. I was looking forward to listening to this book and wish I could have been more positive.

Disappointing

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