26/02/2026
Il corpo non mente mai!!🏵️
Alice Miller spent her career saying the thing no one wanted to hear. In book after book, the Swiss psychoanalyst argued that the wounds of childhood do not vanish just because we refuse to look at them. They fester. They metastasize. They emerge years later as migraines, as autoimmune disorders, as depressions that will not lift, as bodies that simply give out.
The Body Never Lies, published near the end of her life, is her most direct and most controversial statement of this thesis. It is also, by almost every measure, her most uneven book, simultaneously essential and deeply flawed.
The argument is straightforward and devastating. Miller contends that the body keeps an exact record of everything we experience, particularly the humiliations, neglect, and cruelties of childhood . The mind may repress, may make excuses, may construct elaborate narratives about loving parents who did their best. But the body remembers. And when the truth is denied long enough, the body rebels. Illness becomes the only language it has left .
At the center of Miller's critique is the Fourth Commandment: "Honor thy father and thy mother." She sees this ancient edict not as wisdom but as a form of moral blackmail that has protected abusive parents for millennia . It keeps children, even grown children, from acknowledging what was done to them. It shames them into forgiveness they do not feel. And it colludes with therapists who, unwittingly or not, encourage patients to excuse their parents rather than confront the full weight of their rage and grief .
To illustrate her thesis, Miller offers brief biographical sketches of literary giants, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, others, alongside figures like Hi**er and Saddam Hussein . In each case, she argues, the subject's life and death were shaped by unacknowledged childhood wounds. Woolf's su***de, Kafka's tuberculosis, Proust's chronic illness, all are read as the body's final, desperate testimony to truths the mind could not bear.
5 Lessons from the Book:
1. The body keeps score when the mind looks away
You can repress childhood pain, rationalize it, excuse it, forget it entirely. The body does none of these things. It holds the record exactly, and when ignored long enough, it will speak in the only language it has left: illness.
2. The Fourth Commandment has protected abusers for centuries
"Honor thy father and thy mother" sounds like wisdom. Miller calls it moral blackmail. It shames children into silence, prevents honest reckoning, and colludes with parents who do not deserve protection.
3. Forgiveness is not required
Miller is adamant: forgiveness has never had a healing effect when it is performed rather than felt. Demanding forgiveness from someone still carrying unacknowledged rage is not therapy. It is re-injury.
4. You cannot get from your parents what they never gave
This is the grief at the heart of the work. The child inside keeps hoping that someday, somehow, the parents will become what they should have been. Miller's message is brutal and freeing: that day will never come. Let the hope die.
5. An "enlightened witness" is the only way out
Healing requires someone who can hear the truth without flinching, without moralizing, without demanding forgiveness. A therapist, a friend, anyone who can simply say: "Yes, that happened. Yes, it was wrong. Your rage is real and it matters." That witness is everything.
For readers who have always suspected that their bodies are trying to tell them something, who have felt crazy for holding rage their therapists tell them to release, who have never quite believed that forgiveness is the only path, this book will feel like a hand on the shoulder.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/46h8TgF
