Women & Queer Psychoanalysts, No. 10.
Alice Miller (1923–2010), Polish-Swiss psychologist and writer.
In 1940, she rented a room in Warsaw under the Catholic alias Alicja Rostowska. She was Jewish. Her landlord discovered her identity and began blackmailing her. She did not run. After the war, she carried the secret to Switzerland and never used her real name again.
She went on to write The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979), one of the most influential books on childhood trauma ever published. It let countless people see for the first time: the "good child" is not born but trained into being by an invisible violence. Another book, For Your Own Good (1980), used Hitler's childhood to argue how violent pedagogy produces violence.
She eventually abandoned psychoanalytic practice and publicly accused Freud's theories of providing cover for abusers.
She died in 2010. In 2013, her son Martin Miller published a biography exposing her coldness and prolonged absence as a mother.
She wrote: "The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it." She knew the body stores truth. But her own truth was not opened until after she was gone.