Blindness, indifference, inattention to the emotional needs of children are very common behaviors whose long-lasting effects are often ignored by parents.
Through her long therapeutic activity, Alice Miller has developed the conviction that at the root of almost all the violent behaviors of the adult man, there are the traumas and anxieties deriving from the lack of effective responses that parents have inflicted on children. In this book the author investigates the forms in which it takes place and the reasons that determine the systematic inattention of many parents towards their children; she also explains how certain perverse mechanisms are triggered that progressively transform the child's feeling of being rejected into aggressive and violent behaviors. Finally, with the clarity and lucidity that belong to her, Alice Miller indicates the therapeutic path to follow so that the constant repression of her childhood is interrupted.