Pictures of a childhood

In PICTURES OF CHILDHOOD, Alice Miller explores the connection between childhood and that creative anxiety which 'somehow permits us to come to grips with the demons of our past and give form to the chaos within and thereby master our anxiety.' Having realised in the early seventies a lifelong desire to paint, Dr Miller found an unfamiliar world emerging from her paintings: not the 'nice' world of her childhood, to which she had always testified, but one of fear, despair and loneliness. Meditating on her spontaneously executed watercolours- sixty-six of which are reproduced here in full colour- and their implications, Dr Miller offers a profound analysis of the roots of creativity in the authentic self's struggle for survival.