Interview, July 2005
Fairy tales and myths can tell us a great deal about our culture and our perception of the world. One of the best-known fairy tales that small children are sooner or later confronted with is “Little Red Riding Hood.” Among thousands of other folk tales this particular one stands out as incredibly popular. What does it tell us about our attitude to children in our culture?
It tells us that it is quite normal practice to sacrifice children and make them the victims of parental attitudes. The mother sends the child to her grandmother all on her own and cares nothing for the dangers lurking in the forest (the wolf).
I am always shocked by the “official” interpretation that the mother of Little Red Riding Hood is well intentioned and caring. She sends her young daughter into a dangerous forest explaining that this is an “honorable” task (poor grandmother is sick after all). I find this mother cruel, wicked, perverted even. Would you agree?
Yes, I agree, because she must have known that there are wolves in the forest. After all, she tells her daughter not to stray from the path. However, she doesn’t prepare the child for the dangers lurking there, she denies them. As a result, the child trusts the wolf, tells him where her grandmother lives, and even when she later sees the wolf in Grandma’s bed, she talks to him as if he were Grandma. She has already adopted her mother’s denial. She shares her blindness and becomes the naïve victim of the wolf, perhaps symbolizing the incestuous father to whom mothers often deliver their daughters. They protect their own fathers by suppressing the memories of being abused in their childhood and for this very reason are blind to the dangers their daughters are in.
Whenever I addressed some of the nastier aspects of my childhood, my attempts were rejected, and I was told that everything has its good and its bad sides, so we should look on the bright side of life and adopt a positive attitude. In such argumentation even abuse has something to be said for it. How would you react to this kind of relativism?
This kind of thinking is almost necessary in childhood; it is a survival strategy. Even if they have incredibly brutal parents, children do not want to die, so they absolutely have to believe that what they are enduring is not the whole truth. And of course there are moments when the brutal father seems to change. He takes you out fishing, and you can then feel loved for a while. If he later uses you as a toy or as an object of his sexual desires, you can escape your fears because you still have the good memory of the fishing outing or other such occasions. In this way we survive our childhood, and most people try to live only with these good memories by suppressing the bad ones. In so doing they are supported by religions and almost all philosophies known to me. But I think that as adults we have the ability to take the facts seriously and to know that we are no longer in mortal danger if we do so. We can make the effort to see that, for whatever reasons, our parents cannot have loved us if they were able to victimize us so many times, without caring for our feelings, our pain, and our future. This awareness helps us to get rid of our self-destructive feelings of guilt. By condemning our parents’ deeds we become free from the compulsion to repeat such acts with our own children.
How would you define abuse?
Abuse means to me using a person for whatever I want them for, without asking for their consent, without respecting their will and their interests. With children, it is very easy to do so because they are loving, they trust their parents and most adults, and they don’t realize that they have been abused, that their love has been exploited. Especially if they were forced to ignore their emotions from the outset, they may have lost all sensitivity for the alarm signals. A small girl will follow a neighbor who promises her chocolate down into his cellar, although she may feel uncomfortable about it. But if she has learned from the beginning of her life that her feelings don’t matter and that she should obey adults even if she doesn’t like the idea, then she will go along with that neighbor. She will behave like Little Red Riding Hood in the fairy tale. And she may later suffer in her relations with men for her whole life, if she doesn’t come to terms actively with that early experience in the cellar. However, if she does, she will no longer be in danger of becoming a victim of rape or any other kind of molestation.
How many people do you think have been abused in childhood?
It is harder to estimate how many people were not abused. I do know people who were not exploited in their childhood, who were loved, cared for, and allowed to live in accordance with their true feelings. I saw them as babies, and I now see that they are able to give their children the same respect they got from their parents. But I don’t know many like that. Spanking children is still regarded as harmless and beneficial all over the world. I think that about 90 percent of the world population has been abused in this way more or less severely. Every day on TV you can see what the most severely abused are doing now that they have become adults who deny their suffering and admire and respect their abusive parents. There’s a simple test for this. You just go around the world asking the most cruel people what their parents were like. The answer you get from the worst tyrants will often be: My parents were wonderful people. They wanted the best for me, but I was an obstinate brat.
Human blindness to abuse can be astonishing. Even when confronted with their own obvious abuse, people still believe in the myth of being loved and keep abusing their children (and other people’s). How would you most effectively “open their eyes” to what they are doing? Is this possible at all?
I can’t open the eyes of others. They will quickly close them again. They don’t want to see—or they are afraid to see—the truth because they expect to be punished by their parents, or by God, who represents them. I can only open my own eyes and say what I am seeing. And sometimes people feel encouraged to open one eye or even both. They are then surprised that no punishment is visited on them, that they feel even relief since they have stopped betraying themselves.
People normally prefer to deny that they have been abused. Would you interpret eating disorders, obsession with diets, nail-biting, “inoffensive social drinking,” thinking about suicide, asthma, taking drugs, or even the self-destructive “need” for unhealthy junk food or cigarettes as unambiguous evidence of emotional or physical abuse?
Yes, absolutely. All these illnesses or addictions are screams emitted by a body trying to make itself heard. Instead of listening and trying to understand these screams, many have chosen headlong flight.
You say the body is wise and can’t be fooled. The good news is that if we listen to it, we can be cured of physical symptoms. But if we are too busy denying its needs and its memories, we condemn ourselves to living in an invisible hell. Everything is perfect, but we are cut off from our true emotions and destined to live a hollow, superficial life, and our body becomes our enemy. How can we become friends with our body, which frequently harbors such unpleasant truths?
First, we have to stop avoiding the truth. Once we have lived through one or more experiences of this kind, we will realize that the truth didn’t kill us, that in fact it made us feel better eventually. If you decide not to take your pills when you get a headache and try to find out instead when exactly the headache started, what happened just before, you might be lucky enough to understand why your body needed a headache just now, what happened today that would make you feel miserable if you gave your full attention to the event. Once you do that, a very painful emotion may arise that demands to be felt. However, after this feeling is over, a solution to your plight may appear. But in any case, to your great surprise, you realize that your headache has disappeared without any medication. If you have already experienced such spontaneous disappearance of a symptom, nobody will ever be able to convince you that your headache absolutely needs aspirin to make it go away. The drug prevents you from understanding yourself. But this understanding may be essential for your health.
The distinction between feelings and emotions is fundamental to understanding the mechanism of denial. Why is it so important to know the difference?
If you no longer try to deny your past, you are freer to trust your emotions. They convey your history to you, often unconsciously and often through the messages of your body. Your mind can learn to understand these messages and in this way to transform the emotions into conscious feelings. If you know your feelings, you have the best protection you can have. If you fight them, you will feel constantly imperiled, afraid of things that happened decades ago and are no longer real dangers.
A child must repress the experience of abuse in order to survive. How does such a life-enhancing mechanism transform itself into a life-stifling one?
This mechanism doesn’t transform itself. It remains the same, but later does not adapt to new circumstances. We don’t need it as adults, so we must let it go. Otherwise we can’t take advantage of being adult. We continue to live as dependent children. If you take a trip on a plane, you need to fasten your seat belt for your own safety. But after leaving the plane, back down on the ground, you no longer need it. No one in their right mind would leave it on. But most people do exactly that. They walk around on earth still wearing what was a lifesaver for them in the air. They adhere as adults to the denial that saved their lives in childhood. And what was necessary then becomes life-stifling now.
You use the term “poisonous pedagogy.” I understand it as an authoritarian form of education. Does permissive education have similar effects?
In the English editions of my books the notion of “Schwarze Pädagogik” has been translated as “poisonous pedagogy.” In For Your Own Good, I describe how these methods for producing obedient, submissive children kill their natural capacity for empathy. The permissive education of the post-1968 era was harmful in other ways, but perhaps it was less destructive. It often meant total neglect of the children’s need for protection and communication. And it was also a kind of exploitation of children’s love for the sake of an adult ideology. This very often led to severe sexual abuse, concealed by Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality, and to deep confusion in the child’s sense of identity. But I don’t think that permissive education was as brutal as the authoritarian variety, which eventually led to millions of people willingly following Adolf Hitler as his obedient servants and henchmen.
When I was asked to prepare a short summary of your book, I wrote that you discuss the abuse of gifted children. Then I was told that I should avoid the term “abuse” because it is too offensive, brutal, and revolting. Instead, I was forced to say that you deal with parents’ “lack of understanding” and “disregard” for their children. What’s your comment on this?
It is very common to be accused of being offensive if you “call a spade a spade” instead of resorting to euphemisms. It is customary practice everywhere to hush up the brutality of parents and vilify the people who denounce this kind of “upbringing.” Since this is the way we have learned to behave, we don’t dare to relinquish it, and we are quickly intimidated.
You write: “Traumata stored in the brain but denied by our conscious minds will always be visited on the next generation.” Can you say a little more about this mechanism? Is an infant bound to be deprived of its innocence simply because it was born to parents who deny traumata?
Yes. Unfortunately, miracles are very rare. If parents say “Spanking never did me any harm,” they will do the same to their children without a second thought. But if they can see that their parents’ treatment mutilated their lives, they will do their best to spare their children the same fate. They will go in search of information, and they will not want to remain captives to denial and ignorance.
I notice that a lot of people react allergically when they see a truly childlike child unburdened by guilt and abuse. They just can’t stand it. They go on saying that children must be socialized as quickly as possible, in other words taken away from their parents and put into nursery school so that they can learn to “adjust.” They preach the blessings of socialization as if it were a supremely sacred and noble cause. I find that this exerts enormous social pressure. In this context socialization frequently means nothing other than adjustment to cruelty. Why is a child who is alive, genuine, and pure unbearable or even sinful in their eyes? Why must children like that be mutilated so that they will resemble them?
Because in the parents, or other adults, the child’s creativity and vitality can trigger the repressed pain of having been stifled in their own childhood. They are afraid of feeling the pain, so they do whatever they can to defuse the triggers. By insisting on obedience they kill children’s vitality, they victimize them as they themselves were victimized before. Most parents don’t want to hurt their children; they do it automatically, by repeating what they themselves learned when they were small. We can help them to refrain from this destructive behavior by explaining to them why it is so destructive. Then they can wake up and make a choice.