Interview, November 1992
How would you describe your childhood?
I was the firstborn child of a typical middle-class family. My parents were much like anyone else. They were not alcoholics. They were not criminals. They even had the reputation of being good, concerned parents. But because they had not experienced love as children, but something more like neglect cloaked in hypocrisy, they had no idea what their duties to their children were. When their first child was born, they were aware of nothing but their own ungratified needs. With the help of that child they proceeded to try and fulfill those needs that they had been forced to repress in their own childhood: the need for attention, consideration, tolerance, respect, love, protection, care, and so forth. What that meant for me was that, from day one, I had to learn to repress my own needs.
In my early books I actually wrote a great deal about my childhood, albeit without realizing that it was my own experiences I was writing about. Since 1985, I have been doing so consciously, and therefore readers will find considerable autobiographical detail in my books. Various reactions over the past twelve years, from people with very different cultural backgrounds, have shown me that my childhood was in no way exceptional. The letters I have received indicate that similar destinies to mine can be found not only throughout Europe and America, but also in Australia, the Philippines, Japan, India, Vietnam, and many other countries. This was one of the reasons why I decided not to publish any further details about the places where I grew up. I did not wish my revelations about the repressed sufferings of childhood in general to be associated with my life, thus making it easy to dismiss them as “my personal problems.” The tendency to do so is understandably great as uncovering one’s own repressions is a painful process.
Experience has shown me that my decision was right. When people read my books, they come face-to-face with their own childhood. Often, it is the first time in their lives that their own story becomes important to them. And this is crucial. Before we have taken this emotional step, we know next to nothing about our own lives, even if we are aware of the facts. As I know from countless letters, my books have enabled some readers to embark on the discovery of their own histories without being distracted by mine. And I do not want to interfere with that effect.
Was there any particular moment or set of circumstances that prompted you to embark on what has proved to be your life’s work?
Even as a child I asked myself: Where does human bestiality come from? Are people born as monsters? Can it be that newborn babies come into the world with genes that “make” them criminal?
Although our entire system of jurisprudence seems to be based on such a view of human nature, thus giving impetus to today’s clarion call for the reintroduction of the death penalty, the notion of “inherent evil” has always seemed to me like the medieval belief in the devil and his children. Experience teaches us just the opposite. Studies have already incontrovertibly proved that all serious criminals were once mistreated and neglected children, children who early in their lives had to learn to repress their feelings, that is, to feel absolutely no compassion for themselves and, as a result, have no emotional access to their own stories. By becoming cynical, irresponsible, and brutal criminals they were able to hold their denial in place—but only at the expense of other people’s lives. Today, I know—and in my books have tried to prove with ever greater clarity—that the destructiveness, and self-destructiveness, that dominate the world are not our fate. We produce them in our children, and the production of this destructive potential begins in pregnancy and at birth. An unwanted child’s desperate struggle for the right to live begins in the womb, leading later to a loss of the capacity to love and trust others, and an inevitable inclination toward (self-) destructiveness. We can put an end to the production of evil as soon as we stop denying the proven facts and the knowledge we now have about childhood.
At the beginning of your career, were there any significant influences, mentors, models?
When I look back over my life, I can find no single person who might have supported, let alone accompanied, me on my journey toward the truth. My former teachers and colleagues clung obstinately to theories whose defensive character thus became increasingly clear to me. When I confronted them with the facts, they reacted with fear and incomprehension. My discoveries cast doubt on their theories, and they were determined, at all costs, to protect the name of Freud, so they simply chose not to understand what I was talking about.
Do you believe there is such a thing as “human nature”? If so, what do you think the quality of this nature is?
As I have already said, I regard all talk of death wishes, destructive drives, or genetically programmed evil as nothing but a flight from the facts—facts that have already been proven—and hence as self-inflicted ignorance. People who delegate their own responsibility to higher powers are willfully ignoring what the facts tell them. They don’t care about the truth. They want to be left in peace. Goodness they attribute to God, evil to the devil or their children’s innate wickedness. They also think that what they believe to be preordained can be transformed by discipline and violence. How could this possibly be the case? Has anyone ever come across one single human being whose “inborn” destructiveness has been transformed by beatings and other forms of mistreatment into good, positive character traits? Nonetheless, “scientists” still cling to their belief in the myth of “inherent evil,” and millions of parents still go on mistreating their children in the belief that they can beat goodness into them. What they create instead is a submissive child, a child that may not reveal his justified anger today, but will later remorselessly act out his rage on others. The only ones who will not be forced to pass on this legacy of destruction are those who encounter, either in childhood or later, an “enlightened witness,” someone who can help them feel the cruelty they suffered, recognize it for what it is and categorically condemn it.
And human nature? Ultimately, it is a philosophical question, though answers have never been forthcoming from philosophers, psychologists, or church reformers. Most of them were severely mistreated as children, but they repressed their pain, blindly defending, as mistreated children have done since the beginning of time, the very system that has made them suffer. Martin Luther, for instance, urged all parents to mistreat their children because he idealized the pitiless beatings his mother had given him and wanted to see them as something positive. In an attempt to transfigure the brutality he had been exposed to, Calvin, the reformer and spiritual father of the city of Geneva, wrote: “The only salvation is to know nothing and to want nothing…man should not only be convinced of his absolute worthlessness. He should do everything he can to humiliate himself.” The philosopher Immanuel Kant put it this way: “Man has an inborn tendency toward evil. In order to prevent him from becoming a beast, this evil must be kept in check.” Although these thinkers fly in the face of the demonstrable truth, their opinions are still taught at universities. For any feeling person, it would probably be enough to visit a maternity clinic and see what happens to newborn babies to realize what unnecessary suffering ignorance and pigheadedness can cause. A child will, for instance, be held up by the feet—so it can breathe, we are told—without anyone recognizing this as sadistic mistreatment. Since none of the people involved know what was done to them at the same age, the newborn baby’s feelings will be totally ignored, despite the fact that today, with the help of ultrasonic technology, we can actually see that children already react to tenderness and cruelty in the womb. And they are not just reacting. They are learning. Society makes its first contribution to a person’s potential for love or destruction right here, in the way it welcomes a new human being into the world. Upbringing can either worsen or greatly improve the situation. Everything depends on the capacity for love and understanding shown by the child’s parents and other important people in his or her life.
Children come into the world with a whole bundle of needs. To fulfill those needs and experience respect, protection, care, love, and honesty, they are absolutely dependent on their parents. If those needs are not fulfilled and children are used, mistreated, and neglected instead, it is readily understandable that they will develop into confused, evil, or sick individuals. Evil is real. Hitler was real, so were his deeds. Who can deny that?
You seem to be suggesting that for many parents, raising a child becomes a kind of psychodrama in which their own mistreatment is reenacted in the brutalization of their child. That this happens with brutal child-abusers is well known, but what I would like to hear more about is how this re-enactment phenomenon affects the life of those millions of families whose inner workings do not go completely out of control but whose dynamic could nevertheless be called “abusive.”
In fact, I have described precisely this dynamic in all my books, especially in The Drama. Like you, I thought that something as obvious as brutal mistreatment and its calamitous effects could not be disputed by anyone. With time, however, I came to see that even the most murderous attacks on a child can be made to seem harmless, often by the victims themselves. As children, they could not face the truth, and they continue to deny it as grown-ups, not knowing that they will no longer have to die of their pain. Only the child would have been killed by the truth and was therefore to repress it. Adults can relieve their repression. By experiencing the painful truth, they also have the chance of regaining their health.
What do you think the role of religion is in the raising of children? Also, how does religion affect the behavior of parents? I’m thinking particularly of how religion might affect the ideology of child-rearing?
People frequently draw my attention to quotations from the New Testament that emphasize the worth of children. But for many people, as we know, holding children in high esteem and sacrificing them is no contradiction. Indeed, the good faith and openness of children frequently tempt their emotionally starved parents to abuse and exploit them. Was Jesus himself not a particularly cherished son? But he was sacrificed all the same. In fact, I know of no religion that forbids and condemns the practice of child abuse. Respect, understanding, and love for our parents are universally preached, no matter how they behave. Children, on the other hand—according to Luther, for instance—should only be loved if they are obedient and God-fearing, that is, as long as they deny themselves. Parents have a right to the unconditional love and respect of their children. Dostoyevsky may have written in The Brothers Karamazov that a father should only be loved if he merits it. But he himself suffered from epilepsy because he was not allowed to know that he was also a severely abused child and the victim of indescribable brutality on the part of his father. Only thanks to his mother’s love and help could he escape from becoming a murderer himself. But he could not escape his illness.
In one of my books I indicate how intelligent, religious-minded educators still advise people, as Luther did four hundred years ago, to use the rod today so that tomorrow the child “will be loved by God.” In his important book Spare the Child, Philip Greven has shown how widespread sadistic and destructive methods of child-rearing still are, particularly those concealed under the mantle of religiosity. This is true not only of Christian child-rearing. One hundred million Islamic women living today have had their genitals mutilated as children. For the sake of dogma, millions of Jewish and Arab children are subjected to circumcision, either as infants or at a later stage. Such cruelty is only made possible by the total denial of a child’s sensibility. But who can seriously say today that a child does not feel? In India millions of girls have been raped as “brides” in the name of the religiously sanctioned doctrine of marriage. Countless initiation rites condoned by religion are nothing other than sadistic mistreatment of children. Such scenes abound in many of the greatest paintings in the history of art, yet no one bats an eyelid. We have been brought up not to feel. As soon as individual human beings begin to feel, however, many things will inevitably change.
Some critics of the so-called “inner-child movement” have suggested that the concentration on childhood is a form of self-pity and even narcissism. How would you respond to this common criticism?
I do not represent any movement, so I do not know to whom exactly you are referring. Nor can I take responsibility for all that is, unfortunately, propounded in my name. I can only say in response to your question: Allowing the child inside us, whose integrity has been seriously damaged, to at last feel and speak, allowing it to discover its rights and needs is nothing other than enabling it both to grow and to grow up. Making feelings available to our consciousness means setting in motion a process of growth, assuming responsibility, and initiating a process of awareness. This process can only take place once we question parents and society as a whole, and once a person who has been blind to cruelty begins to see. I have never come across anyone in whom this process is not accompanied by genuine sympathy for, and interest in, others, nor anyone who does not wish to help others by communicating the knowledge they have gained. Of course, one can only help those who want to help themselves.
To my knowledge, all this is precisely the opposite of narcissism. The narcissist is trapped in his or her self-admiration and will not dare to venture on such a journey of self-discovery. The awakening of our own sensitivity to the things done to us as children enables us, for the first time, to notice what has been, and is being, done to others. This sensitivity to one’s own fate is a condition—an absolutely essential condition—of our ability to love. People who make light of the mistreatment they received, who are proud of their imperviousness to feeling, will inevitably pass on their experience to their children or to others, regardless of what they say, write, or believe. People who can feel what happened to them, on the other hand, do not run the risk of mistreating others.
In the criticism that you mention I hear the voice of the submissive child, the child who was not allowed to see, feel, or grieve over its parents’ unjust behavior and, instead, had to learn early on to regard all this as “self-pity” and despise it. But why should we not suffer from the suffering inflicted on us? What purpose would that serve? Is this not a shocking and extremely dangerous perversion of natural human impulses? We are born into the world as feeling beings. Feelings and compassion for ourselves are essential for us to find our bearings in the world. Isn’t it bad enough to have been robbed of our capacity to feel, our compass for life, by blows and humiliation? When so-called specialists champion this perversion as a solution and preach “the courage for discipline,” they should be unmasked for what they are: the blind leading the blind. Hitler was proud that he could count the thirty-two strokes his father once gave him without feeling a thing. Rudolf Höss and Adolf Eichmann made similar proud assertions. What that led to is common knowledge, though the connections have never been properly understood.
Some people would say that you tend to see the family in isolation, relatively unaffected by economics, culture, and history. How would you respond to this criticism?
That is precisely what preoccupies me more than anything else. In very different cultures, at very different times, under the influence of very different religions, I find the same thing: the abuse of children on a huge scale, accompanied by repression and denial. This phenomenon can be traced neither to a particular class nor to a particular economic system. Rich people can be child-abusers, or they can be loving parents. And the same goes for the poor. Only one thing is certain: people who were respected as children will later respect their own children. It is, after all, the most natural thing in the world. The reason that children are mistreated lies only in the repression and denial of one’s own experience, something that the careers of dictators amply illustrate. I was told that there are cultures in which children are not mistreated and in which, significantly, no wars are fought. But I have no real knowledge of them. If you hear of such a society, I would be indebted to you for more detailed information about it.