Customer Reviews

Pictures of a Childhood: Sixty-Six Watercolors and an Essay

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The major claim of this book is that we can understand the the disturbed adult through understanding the abuse they have undergone as children from parents. I do not know if Miller makes this as a universal claim but she seems to be speaking for herself, and for a large number of people she has treated through the years. Her aim is a commendable one of healing through providing a means of self- expression for these repressed feelings of abuse.
This book contains a twenty- page essay explaining her point- of- view. The overwhelming body of the book is the drawings , her own work meant to illustrate the book's major thesis.
I could not make much of the paintings and I question the universal validity of her claim. But this does not in any way confound her subjective truth or life - experience.

This book is valuable, but only for the key bits of autobiographical information that Alice Miller reveals in the twenty-some-odd page essay. The rest of the essay (and preface) is just a quick rehash of her (brilliant) point of view, and the paintings, which make up the bulk of the book, are mediocre. She herself states that she painted them as part of her internal healing process - that is, for herself, not for an audience. This comes across. They lack the depth, clarity, message, and universality that place her in a league of her own as a psychological writer. I suspect that she (or her publisher) knew that, which is why she included the tantalizing writing. Had she not I wouldn't have bought the book, and I suspect I am not alone.

Alice Miller's first book The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, Third Edition had been recommended to me by a friend who strongly believed it had helped her and could help me as well. Alice Miller believes (if I understand correctly) that childhood abuse is extensive and repressed and cannot be remembered reliably by the brain, but rather is perfectly remembered in the body (this is made more plain in The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting). These perfect memories in the body can be brought to the conscious mind through certain forms of therapy. Miller believes that she was able to recall abuse from her own childhood through the creative use of watercolors. On her website in the essay "Depression: Compulsive Self-Deception," she wrote in relevant part about the revelatory process of painting "it was my hand that did this, as it obviously knew the whole story and was only waiting until I was ready to feel with the little child I once was." How does a hand store memories and "know the whole story"? How does a hand gauge the readiness of the brain to process something and "wait" for that?

Potentially, Pictures of a Childhood could have been her most useful book, serving as a workbook of sorts, since her other books don't (at least in the ones I've read so far) indicate how one is supposed to recover childhood memories, or how one can trust them. Regrettably, it contradicts the title in that it does not shed any light on her childhood abuse, nor on how readers might be able to recall abuse from their own childhoods. She mentions in the short text "Childhood and Creativity" which precedes the sixty-six watercolors that her mother had toilet-trained her at an exceptionally young age, but that's about the only concrete example, and one that was related to her by her mother, not recalled through art. What memories did she uncover using the watercolors, and exactly how did she recover memories using the watercolors? She doesn't say. In her preface she writes that she did not give titles to the watercolors she reproduced "because I did not want to restrict my readers' freedom of perception. As they view these pictures, they should be able to play with their associations and, influenced by their own history and way of seeing things, make discoveries for themselves." Why should drawings that somehow depict the childhood abuse she endured resurrect memories for other people? Are they actually impersonal, more like Rorschach blots or Thematic Apperception Tests? She doesn't mention those, curiously.

The text itself is short on footnotes: ten, only three of which are to works other than her own. There are interesting statements that should have been footnoted but weren't, like "it is not rare for colors to awaken petrified feelings." There's no bibliography. There is an appendix, which appears as an afterword in many of current editions of her books.

She describes to some extent how she does her watercolors, but not entirely. Most of them have blotches of color over which black blotches and lines have been drawn. The black lines tend to suggest human faces and figures, which suggests a more conscious effort than she describes in the text, though many of the drawings appear entirely abstract and nonrepresentational. She also selected specific watercolors for the book, and chose to enlarge, reduce, or crop some of them. She doesn't describe how or why she chose the ones she did or how she chose to present them. Even if she had described the process of engaging with a single one of the drawings and recovering memories from it, the book would have been much more interesting. Without that, it's pretty disappointing.

A number of additional paintings by her can be found on her website. They lack names and descriptions as well. Some of them have faces and figures that are much more clearly defined. If anyone is aware of a place where she has written in more detail about how her watercolors helped her, let me know!