Interview, June 2005
You have established that the Fourth Commandment (“Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother”) is detrimental to the healthy emotional life of a child. This will come as quite a shock for many people. How did you discover that the only function of this “honorable injunction” is in fact manipulation and subordination of the child?
The commandment is not detrimental to the child but later to the adult. All children love their parents, and they wouldn’t need a commandment to tell them to do so. But when we become adults and realize that our love was exploited and we were abused, we should be able to experience our true feelings, including rage, and not be forced to honor parents who were cruel to us. Most people are afraid of their “negative” feelings toward their parents, so they take them out on their children and in this way perpetuate the cycle of violence. It is here that I see the destructive effect of the Fourth Commandment. Since there is as yet no commandment or law that would inhibit parents from dumping their pent-up anger on their offspring, even the most violent behavior displayed by parents can still be called “upbringing.”
You even go so far as to assert that the Fourth Commandment causes physical ailments. How would you explain this link?
It is the suppression of authentic emotions and feelings that makes us ill. The reason why we suppress our genuine feelings is fear. The child’s unconscious fear of violent parents can stay with us all our lives if we refuse to confront it by remaining in a state of denial.
We take it for granted that parents “love” their children. Unfortunately, this is more often than not a myth. Is love, seasoned with “only” occasional “educational” spanking, possible?
As parents, we should know that violent upbringing, in whatever form and however well intended, will kill love.
Why is spanking always wrong?
Spanking is always an abuse of power. It is humiliating and it creates fear. A state of fear can only teach children to be distrustful and hide their true feelings. In addition, they learn from their parents that violence is the right way of resolving conflicts, and that they themselves are bad or unworthy and thus deserve correction. These children will soon forget why they were spanked. They will submit very quickly, but later in life they will do the same to weaker persons. By spanking we teach violence. Children’s bodies have learned the lesson of violence from their parents over a long period, and we cannot expect them to suddenly forget these lessons when they have religious values preached at them, which their bodies do not understand anyway. Instead, their bodies retain the memory of being spanked.
Many despicable acts are committed in the name of parental love. How would you define real parental love?
I love my children if I can respect them with all their feelings and their needs and try to fulfill those needs as best I can. If I see them not as persons whose rights are just as sacrosanct as my own, but as objects that I have to correct, then that is not love.
You speak of child abuse in our culture as a forbidden issue. Why is this so? What is needed to change this state of affairs?
The issue is forbidden because most of us were spanked in childhood, and we don’t want to be reminded of that. We learned as children that spanking is harmless. We had to learn this lie in order to survive. Now, as adults, we don’t want to know the truth, that in fact spanking is harmful. It is interesting that people react aggressively when you say “Don’t spank your child.” They become even more aggressive if you say “You were spanked yourself and suffered as a child; you were forced to deny your pain in order to survive.” They would rather kill themselves than admit the truth and feel the pain of having been humiliated and deprived of love when they were spanked by someone five times bigger than themselves. These aggressive reactions are understandable. Imagine how you would feel if you went out on the street and somebody five times bigger than you suddenly laid into you and you didn’t even understand why. Children cannot bear this truth; they have no choice but to repress it. But adults can face up to it. As adults, we are not so alone. We can look for witnesses, and we have an awareness we didn’t have when we were children.
You say that hatred is better than the adoration of abusive parents, because it is a sign of our vitality. With regard to their parents many people find themselves trapped in a chain of self-deception; they idealize them. How can we direct hatred, rage, and anger at the proper recipient (and not at ourselves or our partners)?
We can try to become emotionally honest with ourselves and find the courage to confront the reality of our childhood. Unfortunately, there are not many people who really want to know what happened in the first years of their lives. But their number seems to be growing. Some years ago we created forums in different languages on the Internet. This proved helpful for many people. Adults who were abused as children and who want to know more precisely what happened to them, and how they actually feel about it, can share their memories with other survivors in a safe environment and gradually get in touch with their true histories. Thanks to the empathy of feeling witnesses, they achieve greater emotional clarity that helps them to change the way they treat their children. Of course, they also become more honest with their partners and themselves once they achieve a clearer understanding of the causes of those strong emotions they have been repressing.
One of the fundamental psychological truths is that persons emotionally deprived in childhood will hope all their lives to receive the love denied to them. Why is it so hard to accept that we weren’t important to anyone? Many even prefer to commit suicide instead.
Yes, you are quite right. Some prefer to commit suicide or willingly accept a chronic illness. Others prefer to demonstrate what they learned as children (violence, cruelty, perversion) by becoming dictators or serial killers rather than acknowledge their early deprivation. The more deprived and mistreated people were in their childhood, the more they stay attached to their parents, waiting for them to change. They also seem to remain bogged down in their childhood fear. This fear in the mind of a tormented child makes any kind of rebellion unthinkable, even if the parents are already dead.
While we are on the subject, Slovenia is famous for its high percentage of suicides. How would you tackle this problem?
Like depression, suicide is always the consequence of denied suffering in childhood. I have written an article about depression (see chapter 1, “Depression: Compulsive Self-Deception,” in this volume). There I refer to many examples of very successful stars, such as Dalida, the famous Egyptian singer, who achieved everything they desired and were admired and famous. But later in life they succumbed to depression, and many of them committed suicide. In all these cases it was not the present that made them suffer. It was the denied traumas of their childhood that made them feel miserable because they were never consciously acknowledged. The body was left alone with its knowledge.
How do you think morality and ethics come about? Why does someone become moral or immoral?
Never by preaching, only by experience. No one is born wicked. It is ridiculous to think, as people did in the Middle Ages, that Satan can foist a wicked child onto a family, and that the only way of making it into a decent person is by beating the daylights out of it. A tormented child will become a tormentor and will certainly turn into a cruel parent unless in childhood he or she was lucky enough to encounter a “helping witness,” a person with whom the child could feel safe, loved, protected, and respected. Experiences of this kind teach us what love can be. Then such a child will not become a tyrant but will be able to respect other people and have empathy for them. It is very significant that, in the childhood of all dictators I have examined, I didn’t find evidence of one single “helping witness.” The child thus had no choice but to glorify the violence it had endured.
Religious education teaches us to forgive our tormentors. Should we really forgive them? Is it in fact possible to do so?
It is understandable that we should want to forgive and forget and not feel the pain. But this never works in the long run. It turns out sooner or later that this path will not get us anywhere. Take the many instances of sexual abuse committed by representatives of the church. They have forgiven their parents for sexual abuse or other abuses of their power. But what are many of them doing? They are repeating the “sins” of their parents precisely because they have forgiven them. If they were able to consciously condemn the deeds of their parents, they wouldn’t feel urged to emulate them and to molest and confuse children by forcing them to stay silent, quite as if this were the most normal thing in the world and not a crime. This is simply self-delusion. Religions can have an enormous power over our minds and force us into many kinds of self-deception. But they have not the slightest influence on our bodies, which know our true emotions perfectly well and insist that we respect them.
Is compassion for Milošević or Saddam Hussein acceptable?
I have always had compassion for children but never for an adult tyrant. Here, I have sometimes been misunderstood, especially in my description of the childhood of Adolf Hitler. Some readers didn’t understand how I could feel compassion for the young Adolf but never for the adult Hitler, who became a monster exactly because he denied the suffering caused him by the severe humiliations inflicted on him by his father. As a child, Adolf Hitler was of course unable to defend his dignity. But he also remained submissive in adulthood. He feared and honored his father his whole life, suffered from attacks of panic at night, and his immense hatred was directed at all Jews and half-Jews.
The fiercest champions of their parents are those who suffered the worst emotional deprivation at their hands. There is a very cruel mechanism at work here, and it produces a very pessimistic vision of life. Is there hope for those so badly wounded in this way?
I don’t think that my view is pessimistic. On the contrary, I believe that if we can understand how the cycle of violence functions, we can share our knowledge with others and cooperate in putting a stop to it. But if we believe that people are born with genes that make them violent, we cannot change anything. Although this opinion is highly pessimistic, and untenable into the bargain, many so-called intelligent individuals share it, preferring to believe in genetic causes rather than see how their parents treated them and feel the pain. But by feeling the pain they could liberate themselves from the compulsion to repeat the misdeeds behind it and thus become responsible adults. This statement is by no means pessimistic.
Is there any hope for those who don’t find a witness?
An informative book can also function as a kind of witness. The more we speak and write about this problem, the more witnesses will be available in the world, well-informed witnesses who can help children to feel respected and safe and help adults to bear their truth. Denial not only urges us to repeat, it also consumes a great deal of energy. Illnesses, eating disorders, and substance addictions are the consequences.
“Positive thinking” is just as harmful as religious injunctions to forgive, turn the other cheek, and love those who hate us. Should we shun New Age self-help manuals?
Yes, you are right. “Positive thinking” is no remedy at all. It is a form of self-deception, a flight from the truth. It cannot help because the body knows better. In my article “What Is Hatred?” (see chapter 4 in this volume) I go into greater detail on this point.
What are the political consequences of your writing?
The political consequences of my writing are not yet widely understood. People love to see human cruelty as a mystery and to consider it innate. Also, some ideologies are good at camouflaging the actual reasons for cruelty. Look what happened in Yugoslavia when Serbian soldiers were allowed to take revenge for the denied pain of children beaten in their early years. Milošević gave them the permission to do so, and this was enough. There was no need for any instructions to be cruel; the soldiers had them stored in their bodies. For years they had been exposed to cruelty as children and were never allowed to react. Now they could take revenge on innocent people in the conviction that they were fighting for an ethnic cause. Likewise, millions of Germans who were beaten into submission as children became sadistic and perverted adults as soon as they were allowed by Hitler’s regime to act in this way.
Many years ago, in my book For Your Own Good, I described the upbringing inflicted on all those Germans who later fell in with Hitler’s crazed ideas. At that time people thought it necessary to beat children as soon as possible, immediately after birth, so that they would become “decent” people. Now, thanks to increasing research on the child brain, we know that the structure of the brain is dependent on experience. We all come into this world with a brain that is not yet fully structured. It takes at least the first three years to complete this process. The structure of the brain is conditioned by early experience (whether a child is loved or maltreated). So it is no surprise that in countries where beating small children is permitted and has become normal practice, wars and even genocide and terrorism seem inevitable. For that reason we need laws prohibiting corporal punishment for children. Unfortunately, such laws only exist in a number of smaller countries, while bigger ones, like the United States, are a long way from even contemplating such legislation. There, physical correction for children at school is permitted in as many as twenty-two states.*
From the http://nospank.net Web site you can learn that spanking at home and paddling in schools are still felt to be absolutely normal by most Americans. They were spanked and paddled when they were small, and now they insist on their right to treat their children the same way. There is hope, however, that this important Web site and others like it will bring about a change sooner or later. The links between so-called “educational” violence and atrocities in “political” life have become so obvious to some people that they cannot be passed over in silence forever. One day, everyone will know that human cruelty is not innate, that it is produced and learned in childhood.
The First Commandment should be: “Honor your children so they won’t need to set up protective barriers against old pain and defend themselves against phantom enemies with terrible weapons capable of destroying the world.”
What is wrong with current psychoanalytic practice? Why were you “expelled” from the Psychoanalytic Association?
I was not expelled from the Psychoanalytic Association; I merely challenged their traditional way of thinking and their denial of childhood suffering. I eventually had to admit that psychoanalysis is no exception in this respect. The way in which Freud used the story of Oedipus is very significant. It shows very clearly the blame put on the child and the tendency to protect the parents. Freud seems to have forgotten that Oedipus was first a victim of his parents and was pushed by them into the role of a “sinner.” His parents sent him away as a very small child. It is highly enlightening to read the true story of Oedipus.
As for current psychoanalytic practice, I believe that it safeguards the protection of parents by adhering to a variety of rules such as neutrality (instead of partiality for the child victim) and by focusing on fantasies (instead of confrontation with the reality of cruel upbringing).
You describe the emotional life of quite a few of the most highly regarded writers of the modern age. Who would you cite as someone who has successfully overcome the traumatic conflict with his or her parents?
This is a very interesting question that nobody has asked me before. I have been looking around for a long time, but I cannot find even one well-known writer who doesn’t believe that we must eventually forgive our parents. Even if they see the cruelty of their upbringing, they feel guilty about seeing it. Franz Kafka was one of the bravest writers on this subject, but at that time nobody could endorse his knowledge. So he felt guilty and died as a very young man, like Proust, Rimbaud, Schiller, Chekhov, Nietzsche, and so many others who began to grasp the truth but were scared of it. Why is it so difficult to bear the truth of having been abused in childhood? Why do we prefer to blame ourselves? Because blaming ourselves protects us from the pain. I think that the worst pain we have to go through in order to become emotionally honest is to admit that we were never loved when we needed it most. It is easy to say this, but it is very, very hard to feel it. And to accept it, to root out the expectation that one day my parents will change and love me. But unlike children, adults can rid themselves of this illusion, for the benefit of their health and their offspring. People who absolutely want to know their truth are capable of doing just that. And I believe that these individuals will change the world. They will not be “heroes” they may be quite unassuming people, but there is no doubt that their emotional honesty will at some point be able to break down the wall of ignorance, denial, and violence. The pain of not being loved is only a feeling; a feeling is never destructive when it is directed at the person who caused the pain involved in it. Then even hatred is not destructive, as long as it is conscious and not acted out. But it can be very destructive, indeed highly dangerous for oneself and others, if it is denied and directed at scapegoats.