RECENTLY, I SAT down to watch the film Mommie Dearest about the actress Joan Crawford, broadcast on the Franco-German television channel Arte. The film is based on the book by her daughter Christina Crawford, which I first read some twenty years ago. Initially, I had planned to write about the martyrdom that Christina went through in childhood and adolescence and the way in which the people in her immediate environment dispassionately observed her sufferings without lifting a finger to help or protect her. Her mother’s husbands, the domestic servants, and her schoolteachers all had ample opportunity to see how the famous actress tormented, threatened, abused, tortured, humiliated, and exploited her daughter, but not once did they appeal to the mother to desist from this cruel treatment, accuse her openly, or undertake anything at all to save the child. This behavior on the part of society aroused my profound indignation, and I remember referring to the book in various interviews.
Now that I have seen the film for the first time, I also regard it as a graphic illustration of the subjects addressed in my previous book, The Body Never Lies, and my article “Morality and the Body.” At the end of the film we see Christina standing at her mother’s deathbed with tears in her eyes, saying, “I’ve always loved you, you’ve suffered so much, but now you are freed of those sufferings.” This scene pinpoints the tragedy of abused children. Their own sufferings count for nothing. They have so completely internalized the determination of the parents and of society to ignore what they have been through that they can only feel compassion for their parents, never for the children they themselves once were. This is what we all call love.
What was this “love” but endless hope that her mother might change, endless waiting for some reliable show of affection, for reassuring tenderness, for the termination of fear and lies? Waiting for love is not love, even if we always call it that.
Christina is one of the few examples of people who are capable of representing their own truth, showing us her mother as she was and the way she treated her. Yet at the end she says “I’ve always loved you” because she misinterprets her desire for love as love itself. Luckily, she was able to free herself of this desire and lead a life that was meaningful both for herself and for others, precisely because she recognized her own truth. But very many abused children who confuse the desire for love with actual love run the risk of compensating for the absence of love with the help of their own children or their patients or other people dependent on them. This is why I find it so important for us to extricate ourselves from this confusion. Waiting for love is not love. It is an attachment that frequently makes it impossible for us to empathize with our own sufferings, thus leading to the kind of exploitation demonstrated by the actress Joan Crawford. She was cruel to her daughter because she lived in total unawareness. She could scream and weep and beg for compassion, but she could not understand that she was exploiting her own daughter because she was sparing her own parents, because she “loved” them in the same way as other abused children love their parents. This is an extremely destructive form of attachment, and the only way we have of escaping its clutches is by understanding the dynamic inherent in it.