Self-Directed Education
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Alice Miller came to believe that she had discovered the true origin of the vein of ferocity which runs through human relationships everywhere.

She proposed a simple but revolutionary truth: people are not emotionally distorted by their unresolved Oedipus Complex, or by some complex mismanagement of their imperious, inescapable drives. Instead, it is the unrecognized cruelty of their parents, masquerading as ‘firm discipline’ and ‘responsible control’, which injects slow-acting poison into their lives.

If they have learned from their own background and culture to believe that children are in need of repression, they will crush, ‘for their own good’, all their innocent attempts to act independently, leaving them angry, frightened and frustrated. Their children will learn that it is dangerous to resist the god-like power of their parents, and they then grow up into faithful imitators of those who oppressed them.