by Alice Miller
Isaac’s actual superiority, if he were to refuse to be made the sacrificial lamb, would be based on his awareness, on the fact that he finds out what his situation is and clearly recognizes his own need: “I don’t want to die for being obedient, and I don’t want to kill others. I don’t want to let myself be forced to kill by following absurd orders, no matter how cleverly they are packaged or accompanied by threats. I am ready to look carefully, to refuse to have my eyes bound any longer, and to find out who really has an interest in my being docile. There must be a way to prevent ourselves from repeating the war games of our fathers, and we now must search for it—without having any models because no models exist for this situation in which we are threatened with nuclear annihilation. We can and we must rely on our own experience and on our desire to create a world in which we can live without having to kill others. Since we want to be true to this desire and not to incomprehensible orders, we are willing to take a careful look around us. We are willing to look closely at the psychic landscape of those who label us naive pacifists. We are willing to examine the sources of their reasoning and to consider whether or not it can be valid for us today.”
The cry of the child in Andersen’s fairy tale—“But [the emperor] doesn’t have anything on!”—awakens people from a mass hypnosis, restores their powers of perception, frees them from the confusion caused by the authorities, and mercilessly exposes the emptiness to which rulers as well as masses have fallen victim. All of this happens suddenly, sparked by the single exclamation of a child. Although these words are enormously liberating, we don’t know what to do with our freedom. It is a great relief, to be sure, not to pretend to see the emperor’s golden train when, despite our best efforts, we really don’t see it—a relief not to have to think we’re stupid for not seeing one. But since our fate lies in the emperor’s hands, since we have to rely on his wisdom, perceptiveness, and sense of responsibility, our discovery at first fills us with fear. Who will protect us in times of danger? It is now obvious that this emperor can’t do it. He appears to be so taken with self-admiration that it would be easy to talk him into doing something foolish. That much seems clear, but only to someone who is not dependent on this emperor. If our future does depend on him, however, because he is the only one we have, we would prefer not to know what he is really like but would rather believe he will protect us when we are in trouble. For this belief we are ready to sacrifice ourselves, to doubt our own perceptions.
Like children who endure psychic death to preserve the illusion of having an intelligent, foresighted father, soldiers go to war to die for the leader who misuses them. That has been the way of the world, until recently. Many can still remember it, and those who can’t are still able to see in films the pageantry surrounding Hitler and the jubilant masses. But it needn’t be this way. Indeed, it must not, for the methods of misleading people and destroying them have now taken on gigantic proportions. Therefore, we can no longer afford to deny our perceptions and evade the truth, even if it is painful, for only the truth can save us. It is frightening and painful not to have a strong father when we need his strength. Yet if holding fast to illusion should mean Isaac’s death and our destruction today, then the first, imperative step toward turning things around is to relinquish the illusion. Even if this step is fraught with fear, is not even conceivable without fear.
For only a little child can uninhibitedly cry out, “But he doesn’t have anything on!” and then only if that child cannot yet assess the consequences of these words. Moreover, the child in Andersen’s fairy tale is taken seriously by the father and therefore feels secure. But for adults who never had such a father, the liberation of their senses also endangers or even destroys a vital hope: the hope of being protected. We are horrified at the sight of the deceived emperor without his clothes when we consider that he has the power to issue orders that determine our fate. Of course it would be more conducive to our momentary well-being to deny what we see and to go on believing that the affairs of state are in good hands. But this would be no solution for our future or the future of our children. The Isaac of today can’t afford to close his eyes again once he has opened them. Now he knows that his father is not protecting him, and he is determined to protect himself. He is determined not to look away but to examine his situation.
Abraham’s upward gaze and his childlike submissiveness are a symbol for numerous experiences Isaac had had earlier without being able to understand them. Likewise, the naive and vain emperor is transformed into a little child who wants to show his father his wonderful new clothes so that the father will finally notice the son. This child, this emperor, could have said, “Father, now that I appear in all my imperial splendor, surrounded by these throngs, you can’t overlook me. Now at last you will admire and love me.” And the politician who tries to make us believe he has our freedom at heart (even if we should be incinerated by a nuclear bomb), raises his eyes—like Abraham—to his father, who died long ago, and asks like a child: “Haven’t I done splendidly? See how well I am representing your values? See how hard I am trying to keep the world the way you described it to me sixty years ago and to keep sacred the values you held dear? See how careful I am not to let anything change, just the way you always wanted? Now are you pleased with me? Now can you love me?” There are many varieties of politicians like this. Perhaps one had a father who always felt he was being persecuted. His son will say to him: “I won’t rest until I have destroyed all your enemies. Now are you pleased with me?”
“But what does all that have to do with my fate?” Isaac asks himself. “I can well understand the dealings old men have with their fathers, but I don’t want my life to be determined by my forefathers. For what I now have to lose is not real protection but only the illusion of it.”
A great many politicians claim they are doing something for us, and we want to believe what they say because we are dependent on them and because the world has become so complicated that we need experts for everything: technical experts, computer experts, and above all safeguards, more and more safeguards so that the world won’t fall victim to the bomb. But what is to be done if our fear of the danger that makes such vigilance necessary unceasingly produces new dangers for the simple reason that people who are blocked by their repressed past do not want to look to the future? “What I can try to do now,” thinks Isaac, “is direct my father’s eyes to me, away from his forebears and to me lying here on the sacrificial altar he has prepared for me. Perhaps that will bring him to his senses, perhaps it won’t. But turning my eyes to that altar and to my father has brought me to my senses. I am not willing to die, not willing to march and sing war songs. I am not willing to forget that all this has always preceded a war. I have awakened from my millennia-long sleep.”
APPENDIX
The Newly Recognized, Shattering Effects of Child Abuse
For some years now there has been proof that the devastating effects of the traumatization of children take their inevitable toll on society. This knowledge concerns every single one of us, and—if disseminated widely enough—should lead to fundamental changes in society, above all to a halt in the blind escalation of violence. The following points are intended to amplify my meaning:
1. All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection.
2. For their development children need the respect and protection of adults who take them seriously, love them, and honestly help them to become oriented in the world.
3. When these vital needs are frustrated and children are instead abused for the sake of adults’ needs by being exploited, beaten, punished, taken advantage of, manipulated, neglected, or deceived without the intervention of any witness, then their integrity will be lastingly impaired.
4. The normal reactions to such injury should be anger and pain; since children in this hurtful kind of environment, however, are forbidden to express their anger and since it would be unbearable to experience their
pain all alone, they are compelled to suppress their feelings, repress all memory of the trauma, and idealize those guilty of the abuse. Later they will have no memory of what was done to them.
5. Disassociated from the original cause, their feelings of anger, helplessness, despair, longing, anxiety, and pain will find expression in destructive acts against others (criminal behavior, mass murder) or against themselves (drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, psychic disorders, suicide).
6. If these people become parents, they will then often direct acts of revenge for their mistreatment in childhood against their own children, whom they use as scapegoats. Child abuse is still sanctioned—indeed, held in high regard—in our society as long as it is defined as childrearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions stemming from how they were treated by their own parents.
7. If mistreated children are not to become criminals or mentally ill, it is essential that at least once in their life they come in contact with a person who knows without any doubt that the environment, not the helpless, battered child, is at fault. In this regard, knowledge or ignorance on the part of society can be instrumental in either saving or destroying a life. Here lies the great opportunity for relatives, social workers, therapists, teachers, doctors, psychiatrists, officials, and nurses to support the child and to believe her or him.
8. Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed the victim. It has been abetted in its blindness by theories, still in keeping with the pedagogical principles of our great-grandparents, according to which children are viewed as crafty creatures, dominated by wicked drives, who invent stories and attack their innocent parents or desire them sexually. In reality, children tend to blame themselves for their parents’ cruelty and to absolve the parents, whom they invariably love, of all responsibility.
9. For some years now, it has been possible to prove, thanks to the use of new therapeutic methods, that repressed traumatic experiences in childhood are stored up in the body and, although remaining unconscious, exert their influence even in adulthood. In addition, electronic testing of the fetus has revealed a fact previously unknown to most adults: a child responds to and learns both tenderness and cruelty from the very beginning.
10. In the light of this new knowledge, even the most absurd behavior reveals its formerly hidden logic once the traumatic experiences of childhood no longer must remain shrouded in darkness.
11. Our sensitization to the cruelty with which children are treated, until now commonly denied, and to the consequences of such treatment will as a matter of course bring to an end the perpetuation of violence from generation to generation.
12. People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be—both in their youth and adulthood—intelligent, responsive, empathic, and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves but not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than to respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience and because it is this knowledge (and not the experience of cruelty) that has been stored up inside them from the beginning. Such people will be incapable of understanding why earlier generations had to build up a gigantic war industry in order to feel at ease and safe in this world. Since it will not have to be their unconscious life-task to ward off intimidation experienced at a very early age, they will be able to deal with attempts at intimidation in their adult life more rationally and more creatively.
Notes
Notes
PART ONE
Chapter 1
1 “It appears that Picasso’s reluctance”: Palau i Fabre, Picasso: The Early Years, p. 32.
2 “One evening in mid-December 1884”: Ibid., p. 29.
3 “My father thought it safer’ ”: Sabartés, Picasso: An Intimate Portrait, p. 6.
4 “not to say anything”: Ibid., p. 11.
5 “Children’s screams screams of women”: Wiegand, Pablo Picasso, p. 105.
6 “Apparently, Picasso had such a difficult birth”: Palau i Fabre, Picasso: The Early Years, p. 27.
7 “when taken to school Pablo always”: Ibid., p. 31.
Chapter 2
1 “I do not remember much”: H. Kollwitz, The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz, p. 17.
2 “[My] stomach aches were a surrogate”: Ibid., p. 17.
3 “On the whole I was quiet”: Ibid., pp. 17–18.
4 “I needed to confide”: Ibid., p. 23.
5 “There is a picture”: Ibid., pp. 18–19.
6 “so that it would all lie behind me”: Ibid., p. 20.
7 “I don’t know just when I began”: Ibid., p. 21.
8 This information held great significance: Miller, For Your Own Good, pp. 183–84.
9 Even if there are no dead siblings: Miller, Prisoners of Childhood, pp. 3–29.
10 “She often speaks”: K. Kollwitz, Ich sah die Welt mit liebevollen Blicken, p. 34.
11 “Her awareness that her own child”: Ibid., p. 36.
Chapter 3
1 “My parents were”: Keaton, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, p. 14.
2 “A child born backstage”: Tichy, Buster Keaton, p. 15.
3 “I appeared … before many different kinds”: Kroszarski, Hollywood Directors, p. 145.
4 “In this knockabout act”: Ibid., p. 151.
5 “One of the first things”: Keaton, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, p. 13.
6 “If something tickled me”: Blesh, Keaton, p. 40.
7 “It is certain that Keaton’s parents”: Ibid., p. 16.
Chapter 4
1 Then I thought of Kafka: Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, p. 242ff.
2 “Smilovitchi, the Lithuanian village”: Forge, Soutine, p. 7.
3 I have often compared: Miller, For Your Own Good, p. i42ff.
4 A student has investigated: G. Bednarz, unpublished manuscript.
5 —
6 The force of their message: Radström, Hitlers Borndom.
7 “Paul’s father maintained”: Chalfen, Paul Celan, pp. 36–38.
8 These were the witnesses: Miller, Das verbannte Wissen, chap. 2, sec. 2.
9 “led the life of a wastrel”: Lawrin, Fyodor M. Dostojevskij, p. 9.
10 “The family of Joseph”: Payne, The Rise and Fall of Stalin, p. 31.
11 “When Ekaterina Geladze married”: Ibid., p. 32.
12 “The family of Stalin”: Ibid., p. 33.
13 “According to Iremashvili”: Ibid., p. 34.
14 “Church was a consolation”: Ibid., p. 35.
15 “He was seven”: Ibid., pp. 35–36.
PART TWO
Chapter 1
1 After having made this discovery: Miller, Pictures of a Childhood, p. 4.
2 and in the writings of Franz Kafka: Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, pp. 242–95.
3 “His father, when he had time”: Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 48.
4 “upon leaving school”: Ibid.
5 “Those who come across a book”: Ibid., p. 10.
6 “One is an actor”: Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 629.
7 The documents I cite: Miller, For Your Own Good, p. 17ff.
8 The fact that this behavior: Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, pp. 87–88.
9 “I pursued the living”: Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, p. 226–228.
10 “With the storm”: Ibid., p. 334.
11 “My heels twitched”: Ibid., pp. 336–38.
12 “Is this today not the mob’s?”: Ibid., pp. 401–2.
13 “Do not let yourselves”: Ibid., pp. 402–3.
14 “A free life is still free”: Ibid., p. 163.
15 “If you would go high”: Ibid., p. 402.
16 “For the terrible and almost”: Nietzsche, Werke, vol. 4,
p. 752.
17 “I don’t believe I’m going to last”: Deussen, Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 190.
18 “In Christianity the instincts”: Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 588–89.
19 “hatred of the natural”: Ibid., p. 582.
20 “the expression of a profound vexation”: Ibid., p. 582.
21 “If, for example, it makes men happy”: Ibid., p. 591.
22 “So that it could say No”: Ibid., p. 593.
23 “Psychologically considered”: Ibid., p. 598.
24 “To repeat, I am against”: Ibid., pp. 604–5.
25 “The concepts ‘beyond’ ”: Ibid., pp. 611–12.
26 “In Paul the priest wanted power”: Ibid., p. 618.
27 “The great lie of personal immortality”: Ibid., pp. 618–19.
28 “The priest knows only”: Ibid., pp. 629–30.
29 “When the herd animal”: Nietzsche, Basic Writings, p. 786.
30 “False coasts and assurances”: Ibid., pp. 785–86.
31 “The condition of the existence”: Ibid., p. 785.
32 “Except for these ten-day works”: Ibid., pp. 759–60.
33 “Light am I”: Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 217–18.