Free from lies

Since the landmark publication of The Drama of the Gifted Child, no one has been more influential than Alice Miller in empowering adults whose lives were maimed emotionally and physically as children. Now Dr. Miller goes even further, presenting groundbreaking theories that enhance communication between therapist and patient and enable the adult to express powerful emotions that have been trapped for years. Practical and perceptive, Miller’s work explains what we can expect from therapy, how we can identify the causes of our own pain, and why subconscious pain, unaddressed for decades, manifests itself later as depression, self-mutilation, primal inadequacy, and chronic loneliness. With its responses to readers’ letters and powerful stories, Free from Lies is the culmination of a life devoted to healing others.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Mental Health. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.