A PROFESSOR of philosophy in the United States wrote to me several years ago along the following lines:
I have read your three books and for the first time understand why my two analyses were failures. Since then, in my search for an expert who is familiar with your books and has integrated them into his work, I have interviewed a number of therapists, some of them from among our acquaintances. Although they all knew your name and apparently had read The Drama of the Gifted Child, I was surprised to find that they all used the same vocabulary in discussing your ideas, as if they had all met and agreed on how these ideas were to be assessed. Yet these were people who scarcely knew one another. They declared unanimously that you say nothing in your books that other analysts, such as Kohut and Winnicott, for example, have not already said, but that in your simplification you have gone “much too far.”
When I protested and tried to explain that it wasn’t until I read your books that I became aware of my reality, I met with an unyielding and similarly uniform rejection. On my raising specific questions from Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, I discovered that most of those therapists, while owning your books, hadn’t found time to read them. They kept referring to your narcissism theory, which you have never mentioned again since Drama, and they suggested that your chief merit was that you had introduced psychoanalysis to the public. I was invariably annoyed to find myself so intimidated by the self-assurance of each therapist in turn that only when I got home did I think of rebuttals, although I had read all your books several times.
There was one therapist who seemed less rigid and arrogant, and with him I did try, timidly, to formulate my point of view. I began with a purely logical argumentation and demonstrated that one can’t tell the same author that her discovery has long since been known and at the same time claim that her statements are wrong: either it is a discovery or it isn’t. I received no reply, as if this were no longer of any consequence whatever. The young man behind his desk suddenly looked at me with wide eyes and said: “But Alice Miller blames the parents!” “So?” I asked. Again no reply, but at that moment I didn’t dare ask any more questions. I felt I could sense his fear, and I wanted to respect it.
Is it possible that this fear explains why I cannot find a therapist to accompany me? We’ve all had parents, after all. Why is it that therapists and analysts of all people benefit less from your books than everybody else? They react with annoyance to the mere mention of child abuse and are obviously afraid of casting doubt on parents. How can they support me when I feel that the path I must take is the very one they are afraid of?
The conversations usually ended in my being advised to seek therapy from one of your “followers.” But I am not looking for followers, I am looking for a therapist who does not evade the questions you ask, because these are also my questions and because I also find them again in the evasive attitude of the therapists.
I have received a great many similar letters, with many personal details, most of them ending with a request for therapists who might have integrated my work into their own. The foregoing letter shows why I cannot fulfill these requests. But it also shows that the critical faculty of patients is growing and that this growing critical faculty will one day help patients to distinguish the real from the supposed support.
In Thou Shalt Not Be Aware I have in several places mentioned criteria that searching patients can use as guidelines. However, each patient must examine to what extent the person offering his help can bear the truth and to what extent he is suited to accompany and support a formerly abused child in his search for the truth.
When I say that many people find it difficult to understand my books, I often meet with astonishment, and some say: How can anyone not understand your books? You stick to facts that we are all familiar with from everyday life and that we can check out. You have cleared away the theoretical ballast that obscures the sight of the truth. The reaction of many people to your books is: How true! How can anyone not understand them?
This question was also put to me by the well-known anthropologist Ashley Montagu. For him, my books are clear and explicit because, thanks to his research in various cultures, he also discovered, many decades ago, that the child is not wicked at birth but is brought up by his environment to be a wicked person. Most people don’t know this because they aren’t allowed to know. And such people are bound to misunderstand my books. Since earliest childhood they have learned that they must take the blame for everything done to them by their environment, and by the time they are students they have come to take for granted the theories on the innate destructiveness of human beings. They believe in this because these teachings were stored in them at an early age, and the university cements these teachings with the customary socially conforming theories.
So when these people read my books they are given a chance to query what they were taught as children and later at university as students. But this chance is all that I can give them. How they make use of it will depend mainly on whether in their childhood they were sufficiently at liberty to query their parents’ behavior and opinions or whether this was totally forbidden because the parents had to be regarded as infallible, blameless persons. In the latter case, the doors to any later questioning of the parents and of instilled opinions sometimes remain closed forever, and the learning capacity of such people is severely handicapped. As a result, they pass on to their own children their parents’ pernicious ideas of disciplining and childrearing, without the slightest misgivings. If I as a helpless child was abused and am not allowed to see this, I will abuse other helpless creatures without realizing what I am doing. I will also refuse to read books on abuse, or I won’t want to understand them because, if I did, I would have to feel the tragedy of my childhood and the pain of having been misled at such an early age.
There is no other, easier path. Once someone has read and understood my books, he can no longer remain insensitive toward the child, neither his own child nor himself. But this awakening of sensitivity for the martyrdom of childhood has far-reaching consequences: Suddenly it is no longer possible to regard cruelty, perversion, and crime as a form of upbringing for our own good; we are forced to come to a decision and stop finding excuses for crime.
Some people can already do this. They want to stop contributing to the covering up of the truth. They work with abused children; they see what is being done to children every day; they see how state, school, and the children themselves are protecting crimes without recognizing them as such. Who are these few people? Even if they, like the rest of us, had to endure “poisonous pedagogy,” they must in their childhood have encountered at least one person who was not cruel to them, who thus enabled them to become aware of their parents’ cruelty. For this awareness, a supporting and hence corrective witness is required. A child who knows nothing but cruelty and who lacks such a witness will never recognize it as such.
What I have said so far sounds very pessimistic because it accounts for people’s ignorance—the great threat to the future of humanity—by the atrophy of their emotional learning capacity in childhood. Of what use is writing, speaking, imparting knowledge, one might think, when so many people cannot help but remain blind?
I believe that this can change, that something will change in the very next generation if we cease to expose our children to the abuse known as discipline and childrearing. Children who have grown up respected run no risk in telling their parents if they happen to feel they are being cruelly treated by them. Yet for many adults of the present generation this was absolutely unthinkable when they were children. Formerly abused children could never say, “How dreadful my childhood was!” Instead they said, “That’s life, that’s normal. That’s how I’ll bring up my own children too. After all, I’ve turned out all right.” The early destruction of their learning capacity bears late fruit.
Must we wash our hands of these adults? Is it too late to help them with information because as children they were programmed not to be aware of the cruelty inflicted on them and, consequently, of any child abuse? I don’t think so. My hope is linked to my concept of the enlightened witness. If I succeed with my books in reaching a few people who were fortunate enough to have had a helpful witness in their childhood, even if only for a short time, then, after reading my books, they will become enlightened, conscious witnesses and advocates of children. Wherever they live, they will become aware of the suffering of children more quickly and more deeply than others who must deny it. They will try to uncover the child abuse that occurs unconsciously and is taken for granted by others. In doing so, they will change public awareness, and even the most relentless supporters of punishment will be forced to notice that much of what they had so far regarded as right and proper is life-destroying. Let me cite an example described to me by a child psychotherapist from Northern California.
A girl had told the therapist that in school the children were locked up in small, windowless rooms when they disrupted the class. He wrote a report on this and was dismissed from his job as school counselor. After making a thorough study of various cases he found that this system of punishment was practiced in other schools too. A number of articles appeared concerning the case, and for the first time those involved realized that this was a matter of child abuse. I telephoned the psychologist to congratulate him on his courage and to assure him of my solidarity, because I know how one’s self-confidence can be shaken, how isolated a person can feel, when he knows he is in the right yet everyone else is against him. In an environment in which everyone agrees that a child can learn something good by being punished, a person’s first reaction is that he is wrong in maintaining the opposite. For, after all, the words of his own parents are still ringing in his ears, the parents in whom he once had as much faith as if they were gods. Doubts begin to arise: Is it possible that I am wrong if not a single person among so many is prepared to share the child’s perspective? Yet it is possible that all those others are wrong.
Interventions like the one I just described are not a drop in the ocean: Their effectiveness is very great. The press picks up the incident, with the result that many people are confronted with questions that they had hitherto evaded, among others the following: What are the feelings of a child who has been locked up as a punishment? What happens to his soul when, to be reinstated in the community, to please the teacher, he must repress the feelings of impotence and despair generated by that teacher? What has he learned from this punishment other than to dissemble and, later, as an adult, likewise to resort to violence and to avenge himself on children?
People who were not warped while at university are much more open to such questions. In the course of conversation with a cab driver in London, an East Indian, I asked whether he beat his children. He said he had never beaten his daughter, only his son, because the boy must, after all, grow up to be “a man of character” and this could be accomplished only by punishment. I asked him whether he had been beaten too, and he said he had. I asked whether he remembered what he had learned from being punished. He didn’t. Then he suddenly said: “Or do you believe a man beats his own child only because he was beaten himself?”
That’s how simple it is to achieve an insight if one hasn’t spent years, and considerable time and money, studying the reverse at schools and universities with no opportunity to gain new experience with healthy children. But we are moving in the right direction, and what children who were never tormented can tell us is so unambiguous that it should help us see through the lies of the established theories. People who from earliest childhood have been taken seriously, have been respected, loved, and protected, cannot but treat their own children in the same way because their souls and their bodies have absorbed and stored this lesson at an early age. From the very beginning they learned that it is right to protect and respect the weaker, and it becomes something they take for granted. They will need no psychology textbooks to raise their children. But people who determine the lives of children today—parents, teachers, jurists—had different experiences in their childhood, and they still believe those were correct. They can seldom empathize with children or summon up any feeling for their own childhood fate. Only with the emergence of conscious witnesses and children’s advocates will their certainty vanish. Eventually they will have to abandon those mistaken theories and learn from experience if they don’t want to be overtaken by other contemporaries. I believe that we are on the way to achieving this goal because in the future, thanks to new insights, more and more people will have had a humane childhood. Daniel’s history, told in the next chapter, shows the reasons for my hopes.
* An abbreviated version of this chapter in a different translation appeared in the journal Mothering, New Mexico (Summer 1987).