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Text 2
The intended Profile
February, 2010
The interview published below meant to help a journalist who wanted to write a profile of mine. But eventually she completely lost her interest for this idea after she had read my answers to her questions. I am publishing here the short exchange because I think that it can be clarifying for my readers.
1. Why do therapists insist on always defending the parent? Why are therapists, as you say, so reluctant to accept the possibility of the malignant parent?
1. Almost ALL of us, with very few exceptions, were beaten in our childhood and were not allowed to defend ourselves. Our parents were not always “malignant”; they hit us because they have been treated the same way in their childhood. They simply believed and made us believe that this was the right way of upbringing. This message stays still stored up in our brains and as the beaten children we once were we are still afraid of punishments should we want to rebel against this absurdity. Therapists are not an exception, like all of us, like all adults who were formerly beaten they live in fear of their parents. For that reason they are unable to realize that ALL their patients have been actually mistreated in childhood. Parents don’t need to be malignant to inflicting pain. They just automatically repeat what has been done to them, what they learned in the first years of their lives when their brain had been structured.
2. Why are therapists so dependent on Freudian theory?
2. Because this theory helps them to conceal the painful truth. Freud realized and published 1896 that neurosis is the result of child-mistreatment (To him it was above all the sexual abuse). As a result, he was confronted with hatred and rejection of all of his colleagues and could not bear this loneliness. So he invented a theory of the infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex that protects the parents and blames the child. With this construction he offered his colleagues a lie that was and is still being accepted with much enthusiasm because it helps to protect the parents and to avoid the feared rebellion of the child against them. (In my book “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware” I describe this story extensively). UNFORTUNATELY, IT IS EXACTLY THIS LIE, THE DENIAL OF THE TRUTH THAT MAKES POPLE ILL AND DEPRESSIVE. When they dare to admit the truth, namely that they were treated cruelly in their childhood they can heal from their depression, often very quickly. On my mailbox many stories report about this positive outcome.
3. What kind of therapist, do you feel, is adequately trained to deal with the adult who has been damaged as an early child?
3. In my opinion, only therapists who know well of the painful stories of their own childhoods can respectfully and effectively deal with the suffering of their patients. They will not preach them forgetting and forgiveness out of their own fear; they will know that ALL of their patients suffer from the effects of the denial of having been beaten, humiliated or even tortured.
4. Why are so many professionals resistant to your theories?
4. Most professionals (but certainly not all of them) resist to my writing because they are afraid of feeling their repressed rage that was forbidden in their childhood. Unfortunately, only few of them learned in their training that feeling the legitimate rage in adulthood is not at all dangerous, that it is rather healing instead.
5. What has led to your theories?
5. In contrast to Freud, Jung and others I don’t present any theories or speculations. My research has always been strictly empirical. First I listened to the stories of my patients over more than 20 years without being confused by Freudian theories. Then, after the publication of the Drama of the Gifted Child I have been receiving thousands of letters that told me about people’s illnesses and their recoveries. Thanks to their courage to confront the histories of their childhoods, which were stored up in their bodies many could heal. My two last books (Free from Lies and From Rage to Courage) give testimony of this development.
6. How have your answers to readers’ letters been so important to readers around the world?
6. My answers to readers over the world became so important because they encouraged people to take seriously what they already knew since ever but did not dare to believe. As there are no cultural differences in the way small children are humiliated, people understand my responses EVERYWHERE, in China as well as in Japan, in Brazil, Spain or Russia. The pain is the same, the fear of the parent is the same, and the denial of the truth is the same. And the ones who dare to leave the prison of denial make the same experience; they become rid of their depressions and other symptoms, step by step, as soon as they dare to live with their truth. Every child, even the most mistreated, needs the illusion of being loved. But adults can give up this illusion if they don’t want to pay with a depression for it.
Text 3
Preface to From Rage to Courage
Friday November 13, 2009
Answers to readers’ letters
Alice Miller
I have decided to publish these answers in book form because there are still people who have no access to the internet. But even those who can read these responses online may find it more convenient to own the book for quick reference when they are looking for a particular passage. A degree of computer literacy is however necessary for those who wish to read the original letters.
When I was young, I was an avid reader of Sigmund Freud. But I lost my interest in psychoanalysis when I started working with patients. I found that the concepts and theories I had been confronted with during my psychoanalytical training were an invitation to blame individuals themselves for their distress. Those theories were in fact designed to “repair” them or “put them straight.” In this approach I detected elements of the disastrous and highly abusive ideal of education and upbringing known in German as schwarze Pädagogik (“poisonous pedagogy”).
What interested me was how this distress had come about, the childhood factors that might explain the sufferings of these adults, and the ways in which they might be able to free themselves from the severe consequences of cruel parenting. None of the theories I came across seemed genuinely willing to engage with childhood reality, and this put them fully in line with the attitude of society in general.
It was my patients themselves who provided indirect answers to my questions. Their reports on what they had been through in childhood revealed facts that had hardly ever been addressed during my training: the severe cruelty inflicted on children by their own parents.
At the same time, I became aware of my patients’ deeply entrenched resistance to remembering these painful events: they were extremely reluctant to feel the tragic situation they had been in as children and to take it seriously. Some of them described acts of monstrous cruelty with a complete lack of emotion, as if they were something that was only to be expected. They believed their parents had loved them and that as children they had richly deserved severe punishment because they were so insufferable. The regularity with which true feelings were denied or split off made me realize that almost all of us tend to deny, or at least play down, the pain caused by the injuries we suffered in childhood. We do this because we still fear punishment at the hands of our parents, who could not bear to accept us as we truly were. These childhood fears live on in the adult. If they remain unconscious, that is if they are not identified as such, then they will retain their virulence to the end of our lives. Unfortunately, these fears also live on in those who advance theories that camouflage childhood reality and that concentrate instead on the nature of “psychical structures.” This approach began with Freud and was later taken over by C.G. Jung and others. Like present-day “spiritualist” interpretations, these theories all served one purpose: to allay the fears of the maltreated children these therapists still were.
As almost everyone on this planet received beatings when they were small and do their best to repress the fear of punishment at the hands of their parents, it is difficult to make this unconscious dynamic apparent. After all, no one wants to be told about sufferings they have been fighting to suppress for decades, sometimes sacrificing their health in the process. After listening to the tragic stories of my patients for 20 years without letting myself be confused by the theories of Freud and others, I wrote The Drama of the Gifted Child, in which I pointed the finger at facts that almost everyone knows but strongly denies. Subsequently, I published For Your Own Good, referring to three biographies to indicate the social consequences that cruel parenting can have. One of the things the book revealed was the way in which the complete and utter eradication of empathy from the earliest years and constant persecution by the father turned the former child Adolf Hitler into a mass murderer with the blood of millions of people on his hands. In my later books I have repeatedly demonstrated how the political careers of mass murderers like Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, and others were rooted in the denial of the humiliations inflicted on them in childhood.
I received a great deal of praise for my investigations, and yet no one followed in my footsteps. Why? Presumably because almost all of us are victims of more or less severe cruelty, but this is something we either cannot or will not acknowledge until we have finally faced up to the fact.
Naturally I cannot prove this hypothesis because I cannot investigate the lives of all the people in the world. But the letters addressed to my website in the last few years reveal the reality of childhood abuse in a way that can hardly be denied. The authors of those letters have decided to break their uncons