by Alice Miller

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 unconscious vow of silence DESPITE their understandable fear. Encouraged by my books and articles, they have attempted to unearth the memories of their early childhood years, to admit to their true feelings, and to take seriously their indignation, anger, and rage at the behavior of their parents. They were astonished that instead of being punished for this they achieved much greater freedom by recalling those memories. Suddenly they were able to understand the course of their own lives much better and to revive their lost empathy for the children they once were. In this way they learned something they were never allowed to learn as children: to take their own pain, and other feelings, seriously. One reader wrote to me recently: “When I was small, I once fell off a wall. An adult passing by asked me if I had hurt myself. I shall never forget it because it was the first time in my childhood that anyone had ever asked me that question. For my parents my pain and my sorrows just never existed, so I had to wipe them out too.”

The man used this example to illustrate the entire atmosphere of his childhood, something we have to discover in order to free ourselves of it and the consequences it has had. This goes well beyond the active engagement with individual traumas that present-day trauma therapy sets out to induce. It is the discovery of years of unremitting captivity, a discovery achieved by finally owning up to our feelings. That captivity was a time defined by indifference, lack of understanding, refusal of contact, cruelty, sadism, deceit, lies, and very often perversion.

The contents of these letters are by no means exceptional. Millions of people have shared the same fate, but this fact has been concealed (so far) by their silence, their inability or reluctance to put their sufferings into words. So the writers of the letters I answer here are pioneers. They are exceptional because they have dared to overcome the fear of their parents, because they have had the courage to admit to their own truth. I can no longer ask them for their permission to publish their letters in book form, but those letters can be found on my website. My answers show how I have attempted to accompany these people in their quest for their own selves.

Very severe cruelty in childhood is hardly ever recognized as such. Usually, it is considered part of quite normal upbringing. The extreme – often total – denial of the pain we have suffered not only thwarts recognition of the wrongs done to us. Above all, it negates the anger of the little child that has to be suppressed in the body for fear of punishment. Parents are honored out of fear, the adult child waits a whole lifetime for their insight and love, thus remaining trapped in a form of attachment sustained by the fear of being abandoned. The consequences of attachments that are dependent on the absence of true feelings are mental and physical disorders and the suppression and sacrifice of life satisfaction and happiness.

These answers to the question posed me by my readers show how they have attempted to find the way to their own truth. Initially they recognize the lifelong denial of their reality and sense for the first time the pent-up though justified anger caused by the threats they were exposed to – beatings, humiliation, deceit, rejection, confusion, neglect, and exploitation. But if they manage to sense their anger and grief at what they have missed out on in life, almost all of them rediscover the alert, inquisitive child that never had the slightest chance of being perceived, respected, and listened to by the parents. Only then will the adult give the child this respect because he/she knows the true story and can thus learn to understand and love the child within.

To their great surprise the symptoms that have tormented them all their lives gradually disappear. Those symptoms were the price they had to pay for the denial of reality caused by awe of their parents.

Unquestioning adulation of parents and ancestors, regardless of what they have done, is required not only by some religions but by ALL of them, without exception, although the adult children frequently have to pay for this self-denial with severe illness symptoms. The reason why this is the case is not difficult to identify, though it is rarely taken into account. Children are forced to ignore their need for respect and are not allowed to express it, so they later look to their own children to gratify that need. This is the origin of the Fourth/Fifth Commandment (“honor your father and mother”).

This intrinsic dynamic is observable in all religions. Religions were obviously created not by people respected in childhood but by adults starved of respect from childhood on and brought up to obey their parents unswervingly. They have learned to live with the compulsive self-deception forced on them in their earlier years. Many impressive rituals have been devised to make children ignore their true feelings and accept the cruelties of their parents without demur. They are forced to suppress their anger, their TRUE feelings and honor parents who do not deserve such reverential treatment, otherwise they will be doomed to intolerable feelings of guilt all their lives. Luckily, there are now individuals who are beginning to desist from such self-mutilation and to resist the attempt to instill guilt feelings into them. These people are standing up against a practice that its proponents have always considered ethical. In fact, however, it is profoundly unethical because it produces illness and hinders healing. It flies in the face of the laws of life.

—– Original Message —–

by Alice Miller

LOOKING FOR A THERAPIST
Tuesday November 18, 2008

AM: Certainly, if I knew of some therapists who would be respectful enough to answer your questions; free enough to show indignation about what your parents have done to you; empathic enough when you need to release your rage pent up for decades in your body; wise enough to not preach to you forgetting, forgiveness, meditation, positive thinking; honest enough to not offer you empty words like spirituality, when they feel scared by your history, and that are not increasing your life-long feelings of guilt – I would be happy to give you their names, addresses and phone-numbers.
Unfortunately, I don’t know them, but I still like to hope that they exist. However, when I am looking for them on the Internet I find plenty of esoteric and religious offers, plenty of denial, commercial interests, traditional traps, but not at all what I am looking for. For that reason I gave you with my FAQ list tools for your own research. If a therapist refuses to answer your questions right from the start, you can be sure that by leaving him you can save yourself your time and your money. If you don’t dare to ask your questions out of your fear of your parents, your fear may be highly understandable. However, trying to do it anyway may be useful because your questions are important and by daring to ask them you can only win.

About Transference
Tuesday October 14, 2008

At the beginning of our lives we were, as very small children, totally dependent on our parents. And we believed, we HAD TO believe, that we were loved by them. Even when we were abused we couldn’t realize this. Then, after 4 years, we grew up and couldn’t avoid suffering from being rejected, hated and treated cruelly. But as dependent children we still could not afford to FEEL this suffering, we were too small to deal with these feelings, thus we had to repress our rage, indignation, and our deep disappointment into our bodies. When we become adult, these repressed feelings stemming from the cruel treatment of our parents may come to the surface, but they are still connected with the small child’s fear of being punished for every sign of rebellion.

Should we as adults be treated in the same way as our parents treated us as children, many of us – especially if we have been through therapy – can become aware of the cruelty endured before. But the knowledge of the whole amount of cruelty can still rest repressed because the terror happened when we had not yet a name for it. For this reason we need what we call “the transference”, hating for instance another person instead of our mother or father.

The transference is unavoidable if we were once abused children. It can also be highly confusing. But it can be liberating as well if we are ready to see it as a consequence of our early life. If we have summoned the courage to look our outraged, hateful YOUNG parents in the eyes, and to feel the fear of the small child we once were, then the misleading, confusing and defensive role of the transference disappears. We can then strive to feel the fear of the small baby, scared to death by the two big human beings holding our body and soul in their hands and doing or saying to us whatever they wanted, totally careless about our future, about what consequences their abuse might have on our lives. They acted like robots, directed by their own childhoods, unable of any kind of reflection whatsoever.

If we don’t want to become like them we must strive to SEE them as exactly as possible. We can use in this way the transference as a means for discovering the feelings of the small child that we once were and to deepen our understanding for him or her. At this moment the transference becomes our guide that will enable the small child in us to BELIEVE what their body KNEW it’s whole life but his mind could never believe: that so much evil and hatred can be directed towards a small, innocent child only because the parents have endured the same and have never questioned this.

by Alice Miller

My Afterword 2007 to “Path of Life”
Saturday September 15, 2007

Revising this book for the paperback edition, I have decided to omit one of the case studies after receiving from its protagonist an account of the way her story has developed in the meantime. In the hardback version of Paths of Life (1998) a grown-up daughter, whom I call Sandra, proudly relates that she has succeeded in persuading herself to visit her elderly father and, with relative equanimity, to confront him with the fact that he abused her sexually when she was small. She was proud that she had not allowed herself to be swamped by strong feelings and had calmly told him about what she had found out in the course of therapy. As her father could not deny these facts, Sandra felt confident that she could look forward to a complete recovery from her residual symptoms. But to her amazement these symptoms actually became more acute in the space of only a few years. At the same time, new memories and distressing dreams assailed her, revealing her father’s extreme sadism, which she had been unaware of up to that point. She now realized that her father’s jovial “confession” had deceived her about the whole truth, and this realization provoked a towering rage in her. It was the rage of a small girl at her omnipotent father, who had sacrificed her at such an early stage to his pedophiliac leanings. The intense feelings, dreams, and physical responses aroused by all this revealed a man who had nothing to do with the well-meaning father who had so easily confessed to his abusive behavior when she met him in Toronto. At that meeting he must have known that Sandra’s memories revealed only part of the truth. So he continued to play the part of the nice, rather patronizing daddy whose sincerity she so dearly wanted to believe in. Only now did she realize that he had left no trace of empathy for his little child in her memory.

It was this long pent-up, immeasurable rage that freed the adult Sandra from her idealization of her father and her “love” for him. At long last she was able to relinquish the compassion she had cultivated within herself since her childhood as a token of her own generosity. She could finally perceive the full extent of the cruelty done to her as a child, and her migraine attacks and insomnia disappeared as a result.

My book Paths of Life was already in the bookshops when I heard of the turn these events had taken. In the meantime, the reader mail addressed to my website has shown me that many women are unable to sever the bonds attaching them to their fathers, though they are clear in their minds about the brutality with which they were beaten and humiliated. Some of them even suffer from multiple sclerosis or fibromyalgia, chronic pain disorders indicating the beatings they received from their parents and the child’s suppressed rage. Yet they still adhere unswervingly to the conviction that they love their parents and are loved by them in return. In childhood, acceptance and expression of that rage would have involved severe punishment or total abandonment, and the fear of these consequences lives on in the adult children. But as soon as they realize that they are no longer in danger, they will be able to understand the situation they were in as children and to rebel inwardly against the cruelties perpetrated on them, instead of continuing to forgive them “generously.” Normally, this will bring relief, and the body will no longer need to avail itself of the symptoms that are its only way of expressing itself.

I soon realized that Sandra’s wishes had deceived me into thinking – like many therapists – that a “beneficial” heart-to-heart talk with the parents can help to alleviate the injuries inflicted in childhood. Today, nine years later, I doubt that this should be true. Even if Sandra’s father had “come clean,” even if he had sincerely admitted to his sadistic games (and this rarely if ever happens), he could still not have relieved her of the work she had to do. In my latest book Saving Your Life (2007), I describe this “work” and the inner processes it involves. The reality of childhood will never go away. Even if these parents were suddenly all transformed into angels, the memories of their cruelties, their hatred, their rejection remain as knowledge stored in the bodies of their children. The task devolving on the adult children is to free themselves of those memories, not by forgiving and forgetting, but by accepting the logical response to torture, the experience of rage they have denied themselves for so long. Medication can do nothing to reveal this truth. All it can do is to camouflage it, often for decades, without bringing any genuine relief.

Like Sandra, most of us are adamant in refusing to believe that parents can be so cruel to their little innocent children, despite the appalling facts we read about in the papers every day. This refusal leads to a deceptive idealization of our own childhood and hence to an unconscious repetition of that cruelty. The only thing that can help us to relinquish our blindness and spare our children the same fate is the courage to accept this truth.

by Alice Miller

Resolving the Effects of Child Mistreatment
Thursday November 16, 2006

Since the publication of “The Drama of the Gifted Child” in 1979, I have regularly received letters from readers, who tell me their story and ask many questions in regard to it. I often had the need to react to these meaningful life accounts and felt great regret that I could not fulfill this need, mainly because of limitations on my time. I also had the wish to share with others these important testimonies, reports of the victims of child abuse; but I was not allowed to do this because the texts were addressed to me in confidence.
Only in the middle of 2005 did I have the idea to establish a mailbox on my website on the Internet so that I may publish there, with the permission of the authors, letters of general interest and my answers. These letters tell about often-inconceivable agonies of people, mistreated in childhood who never realized, despite years of therapy, that they had been abused. They suffered numerous illnesses, blamed themselves for the cruelty they had to endure, and only when they read my books could they allegedly feel the suffering of their childhood for the first time. Some of them found here the key to understand their whole life and with it also the way out of their panic fears, depressions and addictions.
These people are now understandably confronted with many questions that they had avoided so far. My answers to these questions try to help them in this new situation to find orientation and people, who can support them as empathic, knowing witnesses to use the acquired knowledge optimally.
Thus, the once abused human beings found here a platform, which enabled them to express themselves freely and, together, to look for ways of liberation from the tragic consequences of the abuses they suffered.

We cannot resolve the effects of mistreatment in therapies that evade the facts and confine themselves only to the analysis of the psychic realities. But we can liberate ourselves from the consequences if we are prepared to face emotionally the truth of our childhood, to give up the denial of our suffering, to develop empathy for the child that we were and to thus understand the reasons for our fears. In this way, we free ourselves from the fears and guilt feelings that were burdened upon us from the earliest age. Through the knowledge of our history and our feelings, we get to know the persons that we are, and we learn to give to them what they vitally need but never received from their parents: love and respect. This is the goal of the uncovering therapy: The wounds can be scared over if they are tended to and taken seriously; but the existence of the scars should not be denied.
What I still assumed when I wrote “The Truth Will Set You Free” and “The Body Never Lies” has been fully confirmed by the readers’ letters: Not only a limited group of people suffers from childhood injuries to the soul – but the majority of the world population. Yet, there are only few who want to be aware of it because the fear of the former helplessness of the beaten child detains them from this knowledge. For I take it for granted that WE ALL, with very few exceptions, were beaten in childhood, in most cases very early on (cf. “For Your Own Good”). A beaten child anticipates punishment for every expression of discontent or discomfort. This anxiety may remain unconscious (because its causes were never discovered and never processed), but it can operate very effectively, accompany people throughout their lives as well as determine their entire behavior.

Next, I quote my answer to the question of a reader from August 27, 2006 regarding what I mean by „uncovering therapy” that proved itself to be effective for myself and others.
“I call a therapy uncovering when it helps the clients to get to know their suppressed, painful childhood history with the help of the awakened feelings and dreams so that they no longer must be afraid of the dangers, which threatened them for real in childhood, but which don’t threaten them anymore today. The clients are then no longer in need to unconsciously fear and repeat that which happened to them in the most tender age, because they now know their childhood reality and can react to it with rage and mourning in the presence of the therapist as their empathic witness. They stop to neglect themselves, stop to blame themselves and to harm themselves through all kinds of addictions because they could develop empathy for the child who suffered severely from the parents’ behavior. If later in the lives of these adults dangers should occur, they will be better equipped to confront them because they can better understand their old fears.
“This way of proceeding differs from all forms of treatment that involve practicing new behavior or improving one’s well-being (through yoga, meditation, positive thinking). In all these cases, the issue of childhood is shunned. I trace the fear of this issue, which is noticeable everywhere and can easily be detected, back to the fear of the once beaten children, the fear of the next hit – should they dare to see through their parents’ cruelty. And this fear is so prevailing as most people had to grow up with beatings (psychological but also above all physical, which are still considered as harmless and necessary) without being allowed to defend themselves.
“It can also be seen in psychoanalysis, which to this day side steps and blinds out the abuses suffered in childhood. Its theories were already constructed on the basis of this fear of the parents. Thus the clients as well as the analysts remain, sometimes for decades, stuck in a labyrinth of conceptions and suffer permanently from guilt feelings because they supposedly made it so hard for their parents to understand the “disturbed” child. Often, they don’t know and also may not find out that they were severely abused children.
“If a therapist enables this knowledge depends on what she knows about her own life and her first years. To help to clarify these questions, I have created the FAQ list, which can provide orientation for the person looking for the right, well informed therapist.”

by Alice Miller

We can identify the causes of our sufferings
Wednesday March 01, 2006

On overcoming the consequences of maltreatment

Almost all of us have corporal punishment inflicted on us in our formative years. But the fear and anger such punishment brings with it remain unconscious for a very long time. Children have no choice but suppress their fear and anger, as otherwise they could not sustain their love for their parents, and that love is crucially necessary for their survival. But these emotions, though suppressed, remain stored away in our bodies, and in adulthood they can cause symptoms of varying severity. We may suffer from bouts of depression, attacks of panic fear, or violent reactions towards our children without identifying the true causes of our despair, our fear, or our rage. If we were aware of those causes, it would prevent us from falling ill, because then we would realize that our fathers and mothers no longer have any power over us and can no longer beat us.

In most cases, however, we know nothing about the causes of our sufferings because the memories of those childhood beatings have long been consigned to total oblivion. Initially, this amnesia is beneficial, acting as a protection for the child’s brain. In the long term, however, it is fateful because it then becomes chronic and has a profoundly confusing impact. Though it protects us from unpleasant memories, it cannot preserve us from severe symptoms like the unexplained fear constantly warning us of dangers that no longer exist. In childhood these fears were entirely realistic. One example that springs to mind is the case of a six-month-old girl whose mother regularly slapped her in order to “teach her obedience.” Of course the girl survived those slaps, and all the other physical punishments inflicted on her in youth. But at the age of 46 she suddenly developed heart problems.

For years on end we trust to medication to alleviate our sufferings. But there is one question no one (neither patients nor their doctors) ever asks: Where is this danger that my body incessantly warns me of? The danger is hidden away in childhood. But all the doors that could afford us the right perspective on the problem appear to be hermetically closed. No one attempts to open them. On the contrary! We do everything we can to avoid facing up to our personal history and the intolerable apprehension that dogged us for so long in childhood. Such a perspective would reestablish contact with the most vulnerable and powerless years of our lives, and that is the last thing we want to think about. We have no desire to go through that feeling of desperate impotence all over again. On no account do we want to be reminded of the atmosphere that surrounded us when we were small and were helplessly exposed to the whims and excesses of power-hungry adults.

But this period is one that has an incomparably powerful impact on the rest of our lives, and it is precisely by confronting it that we can find the key to understanding our attacks of (apparently) groundless panic, our high blood pressure, our stomach ulcers, our sleepless nights, and – tragically – the seemingly inexplicable rage triggered in us by a small baby crying. The logic behind this enigma resolves itself once we set out to achieve awareness about the early stages of our lives. After all, our lives do not begin at the age of 15. Seeking that awareness is the first step toward understanding our sufferings. And when we have taken that step, the symptoms that have plagued us for so long will gradually begin to recede. Our body no longer has any need of them, because now we have assumed conscious responsibility for the suffering children we once were.

Truly attempting to understand the child within means acknowledging and recognizing its sufferings, rather than denying them. Then we can provide supportive company for that mistreated infant, an infant left entirely alone with its fears, deprived of the consolation and support that a helping witness could have provided. By offering guidance to the child we once were, we can create a new atmosphere he can respond to, helping him to see that it is not the whole world that is full of dangers, but above all the world of his family that he was doomed to fear in every moment of his existence. We never knew what bad mood might prompt our mother to expose us to the full force of her aggression. We never knew what we could do to defend ourselves. No one came to our aid; no one saw that we were in danger. And in the end we learned not to perceive that danger ourselves.

Many people manage to protect themselves from the memories of a nightmare childhood by taking medication of some kind, frequently of an anti-depressive nature. But such medication only robs us of our true emotions, and then we are unable to find expression for the logical response to the cruelties we were exposed to as children. And this inability is precisely what triggered the illness in the first place.

Once we decide to embark on a course of therapy, all this should change. Now we have a witness for our sufferings, someone who wants to know what happened to us, who can help us learn how to free ourselves of the fear of being humiliated, beaten, and maltreated as we were before, a witness who can assist us in leaving the chaotic mess of our childhood behind, in identifying our emotions and ultimately living with the truth. Thanks to the sustaining presence of this person we can abandon our denial and regain our emotional honesty.

What kind of people go in search of therapy? And why do they do so? In most cases they are women who feel that they have failed their children and who suffer from depression without recognizing it as such. Men usually come on the insistence of their partners, or because they are afraid of being left or because they are already separated.

Therapies are normally expected to solve all our present problems and restore our well-being, but without forcing us to confront our profounder emotions. We fear those emotions as if they were our worst enemy. The pharmaceutical industry caters for these desires with a whole range of remedies – Viagra against impotence, anti-depressives to fend off the effects of depression, but without understanding the deep-seated causes underlying it.

Many therapists use behavioral therapies to remedy the symptoms displayed by their patients, rather than examining their significance and their causes. Their justification for so doing is that those causes cannot be identified. But this is simply not true. In every single case it is possible to identify the causes for the symptoms. They are invariably hidden away in childhood. But only very few people truly want to confront their own histories.

Those exceptional individuals can do so by accepting their emotions for what they are. This is a course of action that we will only recoil from as long as we do not understand the causes of those emotions. Once therapy has enabled us to experience and understand the rage and fear inspired in us by our parents, we will no longer feel the compulsion to take out our anger on surrogate victims, usually our own children. In this way we can discover the reality of our own early biography step by step, understand the sufferings of the children we once were, and become fully aware of the cruelty we were exposed to in our total isolation. Then we will realize that there were very good reasons for our anger and despair, because we were never understood, accepted, and taken seriously. By experiencing these unexpressed emotions we can learn to know ourselves better.

Many therapists themselves still live in a state of total denial and have never for one moment felt the sufferings of the children they once were. We can see this from their publications. They accuse me of transposing the things I went through in childhood onto all other cases, and they insist that my situation was exceptional. Unfortunately this is not so, as I have experienced almost daily for decades. While reflection on this fact is still rare, there is a thinking minority of therapists who do their best to uncover their own repressed histories. After reading the articles on my website, they frequently ask questions that I shall attempt to answer here.

* 1. Once we have realized how much suffering our parents put us through, is there not a danger that we will hate them and perhaps no longer wish to see them?

In my view this “risk” is negligible, because justified hatred that has been experienced and understood as such will resolve itself and leave us receptive for other emotions (see the article “What is Hatred?”) – Unless, that is, we force ourselves to prolong relationships that we do not want. If we do that, we put ourselves in a position of dependency that involves a repetition of the helplessness of the maltreated child. And this helplessness is the source of hatred. True, many people fear that they will lose the love they feel for their parents once they face up to the cruelty inflicted on them in childhood. But I see this as an advantage, not as a loss. The soul of the child needs the love for her parents in order to survive, she also needs the illusion of being loved in order not to have to face up to the fact that she is growing up in an emotional desert. But as adults we can live with the truth, and our bodies will be grateful to us for doing so. In some cases it is indeed not only possible, but absolutely necessary to lose this “love,” in fact to actively desist from sustaining it. It is only by way of self-delusion that individuals who have finally understood the children they once were can love the people who were cruel to them. Many people believe that their love for their parents is stronger than they are. But once we have reached adulthood this is definitely not true. The idea that we are helplessly entrapped in that love derives from a child’s view of things. Adults are free to invest their love in relationships where they can live and express their true feelings without being made to suffer for it.

* 2. Will understanding for the reasons behind our parents’ cruelty help to relieve our sufferings or our disorders?

I believe that the exact opposite is the case. As children we all tried to understand our parents, and we do this all our lives. Unfortunately, it is precisely this compassion for our parents that frequently prevents us from perceiving our own sufferings.

* 3. Is it not selfish to think of ourselves rather than others? Is it not immoral to care more about ourselves than about others?

No. A child’s compassion will not alleviate the mother’s depression as long as the mother denies the sufferings of her own childhood. There are mothers with very loving and caring adult children who still suffer from severe depression because they do not know that the reasons for their sufferings are to be found in their own childhood. The love they receive from their children can do nothing to change this. On the other hand, a child’s persistent involvement with its parents can ruin his/her whole life. The prerequisite for true compassion for others is empathy with one’s own destiny, something a maltreated child can never develop because such a child cannot allow himself to feel his own pain. All criminals, including the cruelest of dictators, display this lack of empathy. They murder others (or have them murdered) without the slightest compunction. A child forced to suppress his own emotions will have no compassion for himself and consequently no compassion for others. This encourages criminal behavior that is frequently concealed behind moral, religious, or apparently progressive verbiage.

* 4. Would it not be ideal for us to love both our old, enfeebled parents and the children we once were?

If someone attacks us on the street, we are hardly likely to give him a hug and thank him for the blows he has dealt us. But children almost always do precisely that when their parents are cruel to them, because they cannot live without the illusion of being loved by them. They believe that everything the parents do to them is inspired by love. In therapy the adult client has to learn to forsake this infant position and live with reality. As I have said, once you have learned to love the child you once were you cannot love his tormentors at the same time.

Access to the history of our childhood gives us the freedom to be true to our own selves, which means feeling and recognizing our emotions, and acting in accordance with our needs. This enables our body to function well, staying in good health. It also gives us the freedom to stay honest and have genuine relationships with our friends. We stop belittling and neglecting our bodies and our souls, and we also stop maltreating them in the same impatient, angry, and humiliating way as our parents once treated the little child that could not speak or make sense of what was going on. We can then attempt to understand the reasons for our distress, and this is easier once we have achieved awareness of our own history. No medication can tell us anything about the CAUSES of our distress or our illnesses. Medication can only cover over those reasons and alleviate the pain – for a while. But unrecognized causes still remain active. They continue to emit their signals until the outbreak of the next illness. That illness will then be treated with different medication, and that medication will again take no account of the causes for the disorder. But those causes are identifiable. All the sick person needs to do is to take an interest in the situation of the child he/she once was and actually experience the feelings clamoring for expression and comprehension.

by Alice Miller

Out of the Prison of Self-Blame
Saturday October 01, 2005

Although many of the letters we have received are of general interest, we cannot publish them all here, nor can I answer every single one of them. This article summarizes the points I would like to make in response.

I am occasionally asked how I can be so sure of myself in contradicting established opinions. After all, I do not belong to any school of thought, any cult, or other community of the like-minded that supply many people with what they believe to be the “right” answers. So what is my confidence based on?

It is indeed true that I only believe in facts I can test for myself. My access to these facts is based on my own experience and on the thousands of letters I have received since 1979 from the readers of my books.

The striking thing about most of these letters is the way they reflect an almost total denial of reality by the people who have written them. For an outsider, however, the facts they relate are a clear indication of this denial. These letters are almost always written from the perspective of the parents, parents who were totally unable to bear, let alone love, their children. The children’s perspective finds no expression whatsoever, except in the sufferings of the adults they have become, the physical symptoms, the bouts of depression, the thoughts of suicide, the crippling feelings of guilt. The writers of these letters constantly insist that they were never abused as children, that the only physical “correction” they received was occasional slap of no consequence at all, or a kick or two they had richly deserved because they sometimes behaved abominably and got on their parents’ nerves. I am frequently assured that deep down these people were loved by their fathers and mothers, and if they were cruelly treated from time to time it was because things just got too much for their parents, who were unhappy, depressed, uninformed, or possibly even alcoholics, and all because they themselves had been deprived of love when they were young. So it is hardly surprising that these parents were quick to lose their tempers and take their unhappiness and resentment out on their children. Such behavior is readily understandable. The dearest wish of these children was to help their parents, because they loved them and felt sorry for them. But however hard they tried, they never managed to free them from their depression and make them happy.

The tormenting feelings of guilt triggered by this failure are unrelenting and implacable. What have I done wrong? These people ask themselves. Why have I failed to free my parents from their misery? I try the best I can. And it’s the same with my therapists. They tell me to enjoy the good things in life, but I can’t, and that makes me feel guilty too. They tell me to grow up, to stop seeing myself as a victim; my childhood is a thing of the past, I should turn over a new leaf and stop agonizing. They tell me not to put the blame on others; otherwise my hatred will kill me. I should forgive and forget, and live in the present; otherwise I’ll turn into a “borderline patient,” whatever that is. But how can I do that? Of course I don’t want to put the blame on my parents, I love them, and I owe my life to them. They had trouble enough with me. But how can I banish my guilt feelings? They get even more overpowering when I hit my children. It’s awful, but I can’t stop doing it, it’s driving me to despair. I hate myself for this compulsive violence; I disgust myself when I fly into an uncontrollable rage. What can I do to stop it? Why must I hate myself all the time and feel guilty? Why were all those therapists unable to help me? For years I’ve been trying to follow their advice, but I still can’t manage to dispel my feelings of guilt and love myself as I should.

Let me quote my answer to a letter that contained all these elements:

“In your first letter you said you had never been cruelly treated as a child. In this one you tell me that when you were young you were cruel to your dog because you were a naughty child. Who taught you to see things that way? The point is that no single child anywhere on earth will be cruel to his/her dog without having been severely maltreated. But there are a whole lot of people who see themselves as you do and whose guilt feelings drive them to despair. Their sole concern is not to see their parents’ guilt because they fear the punishment they would incur for putting the blame where it belongs. If my books have not helped you to understand this, there is nothing more I can do for you. You can only help yourself by no longer protecting your parents from your own justified feelings. Then you will be free of the compulsive urge to imitate them by hating yourself, blaming yourself, and describing yourself as a monster.”

How can people love themselves if the message that they were not worth loving was drummed into them at an early stage? If they were beaten black and blue to make them into a different person? If they had it impressed on them that they were a nuisance to their parents, and that nothing in the world would ever change their parents’ dislike and anger? They will believe that they are the cause of this hatred, though that is simply not true. They feel guilty, they try to become a better person, but this can never succeed because the parents take out on their own children the rage they had to suppress and hold back in their dealings with their own parents. The child was merely the butt of this rage.

Once we have realized this, we stop waiting for the love of our parents, and we know why it will never materialize. Only then can we allow ourselves to see how we were treated as children and to feel how we suffered as a result. Instead of understanding and commiserating with our parents, instead of blaming ourselves, we start taking sides with the abused child we once were. This is the moment when we start loving that child, but this love can never come about without the prior insight into the tragedy we were involved in as youngsters. This is when we stop playing down our sufferings and embark on a respectful engagement with them and with the child. The doors barring us off from our own selves suddenly swing open. But we can never open those doors just by telling someone: “You should love yourself.” A person receiving such advice will be completely confounded by it as long as he/she is cut off from the knowledge of what their childhood was really like and why the truth is so painful.

My conviction is that therapy is only successful if it can change this perspective and the thought-patterns connected with it. People who genuinely succeed in feeling how they suffered from their parents’ behavior as a child will usually lose their empathy for their parents and gain love for themselves. They will train their affections on the children they once were. But for this change of perspective to succeed, we need a witness who sides fully with the child and does not hesitate to condemn the deeds of its parents. The FAQ list (see “Articles” on this Web page) can help to establish whether the therapist is in a position to do that. I believe that therapists who identify with the parents can be dangerous. But genuine Enlightened Witnesses can help us to abandon denial and face up to our own past, so that we can finally leave it behind without feelings of guilt.

by Alice Miller

“The Body Never Lies”: A Challenge
Friday July 01, 2005

Almost all my books have aroused conflicting responses. But the emotional intensity with which the statements I make in my latest book have been affirmed or rejected is remarkable indeed. The impression I have is that this intensity of feeling is an indirect expression of the extent to which the readers in question are close to, or remote from, their own selves.

After the publication of the original German version of The Body Never Lies in March 2004, many readers wrote to me saying how relieved they were that they no longer had to feign feelings they did not really have, or to deny feelings that kept on reasserting themselves. But in other responses, notably in the press, I have found indications of a fundamental misunderstanding that I myself may have contributed to by using the word “mistreatment” in a much broader sense than is usually the case.
The image this word typically conjures up in our minds is that of a child whose whole body displays the tokens of the physical injuries he or she has been subjected to. But what I call “mistreatment” in my latest book has much more to do with violations of the child’s mental or psychical integrity. Initially those violations remain INVISIBLE. The consequences frequently appear decades later, and even then it is rare for the connections with the injuries suffered in childhood to be recognized and taken seriously. Both the victims themselves and society in general (physicians, lawyers, teachers, and unfortunately many therapists) prefer to close their eyes to the fact that the real causes of later “disorders” or “misguided behavior” are very often to be found in childhood.

My decision to call these invisible injuries “mis-treatment” sometimes arouses resistance and indignant protest. I find this attitude easy to understand because it is one that I shared for a very long time. Earlier, if someone had suggested that I had been cruelly treated as a child, I would have roundly denied the “insinuation”. But today I know quite definitely that in my childhood I was indeed exposed to mental cruelty for many years. My dreams, my painting, and not least the messages of my own body have told me this, but as an adult I refused to accept the fact for a very long time. Like many other people I thought: ” Me? I was never beaten. The few slaps I got were nothing special. And my mother took so much trouble with me.” (In my book the reader will find similar statements by others).

But we must not forget that the consequences of early, invisible injuries are so severe precisely because they derive from the trivialization of childhood suffering and the denial of its importance. Adults can easily imagine that they would be horrified and humiliated if they were suddenly attacked by a raging giant many times bigger than themselves. Yet we assume that small children will not react in the same way, although we have all kinds of evidence to indicate how sensitively and competently children respond to their environment (cf. Martin Dornes: Der kompetente Säugling; Jesper Juul: Your Competent Child). Parents believe that slaps and spanking do not hurt. Such treatment is designed to impress certain values on their children. And the children end up believing that themselves. Some even learn to laugh the whole thing off and to deride the pain they felt at the humiliations inflicted on them. As adults they adhere to this derision, they are proud of their own cynicism, sometimes even making literature out of it, as in the case of James Joyce, Frank McCourt, and many others. If they are assailed by symptoms like anxiety and depression, the unavoidable results of the repression of their genuine feelings, then they will easily find doctors who can give them medication that will help, for a while at least. In this way they can maintain their self-irony, that tried and trusted remedy against the feelings asserting themselves from the past. And in so doing they comply with the demands of a society that attaches supreme importance to considerate treatment for parents.

A woman therapist who read my last book very thoroughly and understood what it has to say told me that she has now taken a more forthright line in indicating to her clients the injuries inflicted on them by their parents. In almost all cases their response has been to resist the very idea. She asked me whether the Fourth Commandment is an adequate explanation of this obstinate attachment to their idealized parents.
My conviction is that, while the Fourth Commandment only really takes effect with older children, the reasons underlying the clients’ almost limitless tolerance of the treatment meted out to them by their parents (so limitless that outsiders sometimes find it hard to credit) goes back to a very much earlier stage in their development. Even very small children learn to deny the pain that their parents are so completely unaware of (“a slap doesn’t hurt”), to be ashamed of it, to blame themselves for it, or to deride it, as I mentioned above. At a later stage these victims cannot allow themselves to acknowledge that they were in fact victims. Thus in therapy the clients are unable to identify the true culprit. Even if they do experience a resurgence of their suppressed emotions, the truth will have a hard time asserting itself against the mechanisms internalized at such an early stage. After all, those mechanisms have done such long and sterling service in playing down the pain and apparently banishing it altogether. Relinquishing them means swimming against the tide, and that is not only frightening but initially arouses feelings of loneliness. It also exposes us to accusations of self-pity. Yet it is here that the path to genuine maturity, to the emotional honesty begins.

Accordingly clients aware at the outset of therapy that they were severely injured by their parents and able to take this fact seriously are very unusual indeed. People whose parents took their children’s feelings seriously from the beginning do not have to make such immense efforts at a later stage to take a serious view of their lives and their sufferings. In the majority of cases, however, the early mechanism remains active: these people obstinately trivialize their own sufferings, even if they are therapists themselves. They remain true to the spirit of Poisonous Pedagogy and to the dictates of the society they live in. But frequently they are very remote from their own selves. I believe that it is the goal of effective therapy to diminish such self-distance.

Many therapists – though I hope not all – are at pains to divert their clients’ attention from their childhood. In this book I show very clearly how and why this happens, though I do not know what percentage of them do this kind of thing. There are, after all, no statistics on the issue. My descriptions will help readers decide whether the therapies they are undergoing are encouraging self-companionship or exacerbating self-alienation. Unfortunately the second of these two alternatives is frequently the case. In one of his books, an author highly regarded in analytic circles goes so far as to say that there is no such thing as the “true self” and that it is misleading to talk about it. With therapeutic care based on such an attitude, what chance would adult clients have of identifying their childhood reality? How could they gain awareness of the powerlessness they experienced as children? How could they relive the despair they felt when those injuries were inflicted on them, over and over again, year after year, without being able to perceive their real situation because there was no one there to help them see it? These children had to try to save themselves, by taking refuge in confusion and sometimes in self-derision. Adults unable to resolve this confusion at a later stage in a form of therapy that does not impede all access to the feelings will remain prisoners of the derision of their own destinies.

But if they do manage to use their present feelings as a key to their simple, justified, and strong emotions as small children and to understand them as comprehensible responses to the (intentional or unintentional) cruelties of their parents or stand-in parents, then they will have nothing more to laugh at. The derision, the cynicism, and the self-irony will disappear – and with them, usually at least, the symptoms that have been the price for this luxury. Then the true self, the authentic feelings and needs of the individual, will become accessible. Looking back on my own life, I am astonished at the single-mindedness, the endurance, and the implacability with which my true self has prevailed against all external and internal resistance. And it continues to prevail, without the help of therapists, because I have become its Enlightened Witness.

Naturally, eschewing cynicism and self-irony is not sufficient in itself to come to terms with the consequences of childhood cruelty. But it is a necessary, indeed an indispensable, precondition for doing so. With an attitude of persistent self-derision we could go through a whole series of therapies without any appreciable progress because we would still be cut off from our genuine feelings and hence from any empathy for the children we once were. What we (or our health insurance) then pay for is a species of therapeutic care that, if anything, helps us to flee from our own reality. And we can hardly expect any change for the better to come about on that basis.

Over 100 years ago Sigmund Freud subjected himself without reserve to the prevailing idea of morality by putting all the blame on the child and sparing the parents. His successors did precisely the same. In my last three books I have pointed out that while psychoanalysis has become less prone to close itself off from the facts on cruelty to children and sexual abuse and is indeed making an effort to integrate these facts into its theoretical considerations, these attempts are still largely thwarted by the Fourth Commandment. As before, the role of parents in the development of symptomatologies in children is still played down and actively misrepresented. I have no way of knowing whether this so-called broadening of horizons has really changed the attitudes of the majority of therapists. But the impression I get from publications is that reflection on traditional morality has yet to take place. The behavior of parents continues to be defended both in practice and in theory, as was brought home to me by Eli Zaretsky’s book Secrets of the Soul (Knopf 2004) with its detailed history of psychoanalysis up to the present (and with no discussion of the Fourth Commandment). This is why my engagement with psychoanalysis is more marginal in The Body Never Lies.

Readers unfamiliar with my earlier books may find it difficult to recognize the huge difference between what I have written and the theories of psychoanalysis. After all, analysts focus their attention on childhood to a very large degree and are increasingly open to the idea that early traumas have an impact on later life. But the injuries inflicted by PARENTS are still frequently evaded. The traumas usually addressed are loss of the parents, severe illnesses, divorces, natural disasters, wars, and so forth. Here patients feel that they are no longer alone with these traumatic events. Analysts find it easy to empathize with their situation as children, and as Enlightened Witnesses they can provide effective aid in coming to terms with those childhood sufferings, not least because they rarely remind these analytic therapists of their own sufferings. But things are very different when it comes to the injuries that most people have been exposed to, when it comes to perceiving the hatred displayed by one’s own parents and later the hostility of adults toward their children.

To my mind, Martin Dornes’ interesting and enlightening book (Der kompetente Säugling, 1993/2004) shows clearly how difficult it is to reconcile the notions guiding most analysts with the latest research on infancy, although the author is greatly concerned to convince the reader of the opposite. There are many causes for this, and I have indicated them in my books. But I believe that the main reasons are to be found in the effects of thought blockades (cf. AM, The Truth Will Set You Free, pp. 115-145). Together with the Fourth Commandment, these barriers divert our attention from childhood reality. Sigmund Freud himself, and above all Melanie Klein, Otto Kernberg, their successors, and the ego-psychology of Heinz Hartmann have all ascribed to the child what was dictated to them by an upbringing in the spirit of Poisonous Pedagogy: children are evil by nature, or “polymorphically perverse.” (In Banished Knowledge I have quoted an extensive passage by the highly respected analyst Glover on his view of children). All this has very little to do with childhood reality, and certainly with the reality of an injured and suffering child. And as long as corporal punishment and other forms of mental cruelty are almost universally considered to be a legitimate feature of “proper” upbringing, there can be no doubt that the majority of children come under this heading.

Other analysts like Ferenczi, Bowlby and Kohut, openly addressed this reality. The result was that they have remained on the margins of psychoanalysis because their research was in crass contradiction to the drive theory. Yet as far as I know, none of them left the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). Why? Because like so many others today, they all hoped that psychoanalysis was an open rather than a dogmatic system and that it would be in a position to integrate the findings of modern research. While I do not wish to say that this will never be the case, I do believe that the indispensable prerequisite for such an opening-up is the freedom to perceive the real mental injuries incurred in infancy (“cruelty”) and to recognize the trivializing attitude of parents to the sufferings of their children. This will only be possible when work on the emotions finds its way into psychoanalytic practice, when there is no longer a fear of the revelatory power of the emotions. Such a development would by no means be necessarily identical with primal therapy. But psychoanalysis must recognize the revelatory power of emotions. Once this happens, the survivors can face up to their early injuries and carve out a path to their origins and true selves with the help of an Enlightened Witness and the messages from their own bodies. As far as I know, this has yet to take place in the framework of psychoanalysis.

In my book The Truth Will Set You Free (2001), I illustrate my criticism of psychoanalysis with reference to a concrete example (pp. 157-165). Here I was able to show that even the very creative analyst Winnicott, could not really help his colleague Harry Guntrip because he was unable to perceive or denied the hatred that Harry’s mother had felt for her son. This example stronglypoints up the limitations of psychoanalysis, that protects the parents, and it was those limits that prompted me to leave the Psychoanalytic Association and go my own way. This got me branded as a heretic, what I undoubtlessly have been. Unpleasant as it is to be rejected and misunderstood, the situation of a heretic also brought me major benefits. It proved very fruitful for my research, as it gave me the freedom I needed to follow up the issues I really cared about. Suddenly all avenues were mine to explore, and no one could tell me what to think, or dictate what I was allowed to see and what problems I must on no account address. I relish this freedom of thought very much.

Thanks to this freedom I could afford to take an unsparing view of parents who ruin their children’s lives. This meant violating a major taboo. Not only in psychoanalysis but also in society as a whole, such a step is still considered a scandal. “Parents” and “the family” must on no account be presented as a source of violence and suffering. The fear of this knowledge manifests itself quite obviously in most television programs on the subject of violence. (In the recent past I have expressed my views on these issues in various articles on my website).

Statistical surveys on cruelty to children and also the many clients who have reported on their childhood experiences in therapy have led to the establishment of new forms of therapy outside the domain of psychoanalysis. These concentrate on the treatment of trauma and are employed in many hospitals. But even in these forms of therapy (despite the best of intentions about providing empathic care for the patients) the individual’s genuine feelings and the true nature of his/her parents can still be disguised, notably with the aid of imaginative and cognitive exercises or spiritual consolation. These so-called therapeutic interventions divert attention from the authentic feelings of clients and the reality of their childhood experiences. But clients require both access to their feelings and to their real experiences if they are to find the way to their own selves and thus dispel their depression. If this is not the case, some symptoms may disappear only to recur in the form of physical ailments as long as childhood reality is ignored. This reality can also be left out of account in body therapy, particularly if the therapist still fears his/her own parents and is thus forced to go on idealizing them.

We now have many reports in which mothers (and, in the ourchildhood forums on the Internet, also fathers) give honest accounts of how they have been prevented from loving their children as a result of the injuries inflicted on them in their own childhood. We can learn from them, and if we do, we will cease to idealize motherly love at all costs. Then we will no longer be forced to analyze infants as screaming monsters. Instead we will begin to understand their inner worlds, to grasp the loneliness and impotence of children growing up with parents that deny them any kind of loving communication because they themselves have never experienced it. Then we will recognize in the screams of the infant a logical and justified response to the usually unconscious but none the less factual and real cruelties of the parents, which have yet to be appreciated as such by society. An equally natural response is the despair of individuals about their damaged lives, a despair that some trauma therapies attempt to alleviate with the aid of “positive thinking”. But it is precisely these strong “negative” emotions that enable us to recognize how we must have felt when we were ignored or treated cruelly by our parents. We absolutely need this recognition to eventually overcome the painful effects of the traumas.

Parental cruelty does not always take a physical form (though about 90% of the population of the world are beaten in childhood). It can manifest itself above all in the absence of kindness and communication, in oblivion to the needs of the child and its psychic torments, in senseless, perverse punishment, in sexual abuse, in the exploitation of the child’s unconditional affection, in emotional blackmail, in the destruction of selfhood, and in countless variations in the exercise of power. The list is endless. And the worst thing is that children have to learn to see this as quite normal behavior because they know nothing else. Children always love their parents unstintingly, whatever they do to them.

In one of his books, ethologist Konrad Lorenz gives a very sensitive description of the love of one of his geese for a boot. This was the first thing the gosling had laid eyes on at birth. An attachment of this kind is instinctive. But if we humans were to follow this natural instinct all our lives (useful as it is at the outset), then we would remain well-behaved little children and never enjoy the benefits of adulthood. Among those benefits are awareness, freedom of thought, access to our own feelings, the ability to compare. The fact that churches and governments have a major interest in impeding this development and leaving individuals in dependency on parent figures is generally well-known. What is less well-known is the price the body has to pay for it. After all, what would happen if we were to see through the enormities committed by our parents? And what would become of those parent figures if the exercise of their power no longer had any effect?

This is why “parents” as an institution still enjoy total immunity. If that changes one day (as this book postulates), then we will be in a position to feel what our parents’ cruelties have done to us. We will have a better understanding of the signals emitted by our bodies and we can live in peace with them, not as the beloved children we never were and can never become, but as open-minded, aware, and perhaps loving adults who no longer have to fear our own biographies because we know all about them.

In the responses to my book I have also come across other misunderstandings, two of which I should like to take up here. They are related to the question of distance over and against cruel parents in cases of severe depression, and to my own personal biography.

First of all I must point out that in the book I repeatedly speak of introjected parents, rarely of real parents, and nowhere of “evil” parents. I give no advice to “Hansel and Gretel,” who of course would have to flee their wicked parents. But children can’t do this anyway. What I advocate is that we take seriously the genuine feelings that have been suppressed since childhood and that go on eking out an existence in the cellar of the soul. It is understandable that some reviewers who are not familiar with this kind of inner work believe that I am inciting my readers against their “wicked parents.” But I hope that readers with slightly more psychological awareness will not overlook the term “introjected.”

Naturally I would be glad if the account of my own childhood were to be read with discernment rather than superficially. Ever since I started engaging with the phenomenon of cruelty to children, my critics have accused me of finding it everywhere because I was exposed to it myself. My first reaction to this was astonishment because I knew very little about my early biography at the time. Today I can imagine that the sufferings I fended off may indeed have prompted me to investigate the topic. But what I discovered when I started exploring this subject was not only my own destiny but that of very many others. In fact they were my guides, it was thanks to their accounts that I started dismantling my own defenses, looking around, drawing conclusions from the obstinate denial of childhood suffering that have helped me to understand myself. For this I am of course very grateful to those people.

by Alice Miller

The Longest Journey
Friday May 20, 2005

The Longest Journey – or What Can We Expect from Psychotherapy?

The longest journey of my life was the journey to my own self. I do not know whether I am an exception in this matter, or whether there are other people who have experienced the same thing. It is certainly not a universal experience: fortunately, there are people who from the moment of their birth were lucky enough to be accepted by their parents for what they were, with all their feelings and needs. Right from the outset these people had unrestricted access to those feelings and needs. They did not have to deny them, nor did they have to embark on long journeys to find something withheld from them when they needed it most.

My experience was different. It has taken me all my life to allow myself to be what I am and to listen to what my inner self is telling me, more and more directly, without waiting for permission from others or currying approval from people symbolizing my parents.

I am frequently asked what I understand by successful therapy. I have in fact answered this question indirectly in many of my books. But after this brief introduction perhaps I can put it more simply: Successful therapy should shorten this long journey. It should liberate us from our ingrained adaptation strategies and help us learn to trust our own feelings – something our parents have made difficult, if not impossible. Because it was prohibited, and hence feared, right from the beginning, many people find it impossible to embark on such a journey. Later, the role played initially by our parents is taken over by teachers, priests, society, and morality, all of them conspiring to cement this fear. And cement, as we know, is very difficult to soften.

The wide range of self-help books on non-violent communication, including the valuable and wise advice given by Thomas Gordon and Marshall Rosenberg, are undoubtedly effective if they are consulted by people who, in their childhood, were able to display their feelings without fear of rebuke and grew up in the company of adults who served them as a model for being at one with themselves. But at a later stage children with serious impairments to their identity do not know what they feel and what they really need. They have to find this out in therapy, repeatedly applying what they have learned to new experiences and thus achieving the security that tells them they are not mistaken. As children of emotionally immature or confused parents they were forced to believe that their feelings and needs were wrong. If they had been right, so they believe, then their parents would not have refused to communicate with them.

My belief is that no therapy can fulfill the wish that many people probably harbor: the wish to be able, at long last, to solve all the problems they have been painfully confronted with so far. This is impossible because life repeatedly confronts us with new problems that can reawaken the painful memories stored up in our bodies. But therapy should open up access to our own feelings: the wounded child must be allowed to speak, and the adult must learn to understand and engage with what that child is trying to say. If the therapist is a genuine Enlightened Witness, as opposed to AN educator, then the client will have learned to admit his/her emotions, to understand their intensity, and to transform them into conscious feelings leaving new traces of memory. Of course, like any other individual, the former client will need friends with whom to share worries, problems, and questions. But here communication will take on a more mature form, free of any kind of exploitation, because both sides have seen through the exploitation experienced in childhood.

The emotional understanding of the child I once was gives me a clearer conception of the biography of that child. Accordingly, it will give me a different kind of access to my own self. It will also give me the strength to deal with present-day problems more rationally and effectively than before. We can hardly expect to be spared any kind of encounter with pain or distressing experience. That is something that only happens in fairy tales. But if I am no longer a mystery to myself, then I can act and reflect consciously, I can give my feelings the room they need to develop. This is because I understand them. And once I understand them, they will no longer cause so much fear as they once did. This sets things in motion, it gives us a kind of resource that we can draw upon if and when depression or physical symptoms reassert themselves. We know that these physical or mental states are an announcement of something, that they are perhaps trying to bring a suppressed feeling to the surface. And then we can try to admit to that feeling.

As the journey to ourselves is a life-long journey, its end will not coincide with the end of therapy. But successful therapy should have helped us to discover and perceive our own genuine needs and to learn to satisfy them. This is precisely what individuals wounded in early childhood have never been able to do. So after therapy the point at issue is still that of satisfying needs, needs that now assert themselves much more strongly and clearly than they did before. The satisfaction of those needs can then take place in a way that accords with the individual in question and does no one else any harm.

We may not always be able to obliterate the traces left by our early upbringing. But once they have been consciously perceived for what they are, they can be used constructively, actively, and creatively, instead of being merely suffered in a passive and self-destructive manner. For example, people only able to survive the early years of life by serving their parents can, as conscious adults, desist from sacrificing their needs in the service of others, as they were forced to do in childhood. They can look for ways of applying the skills they acquired at this early stage to understanding and helping others in such a way that their own needs are not neglected in the process. They may perhaps become therapists themselves and thus satisfy their own curiosity. If they do SO, they will not practice that profession in order to prove their own power. Once they have consciously experienced the impotence of their childhood they will no longer need such proofs.

These people can then become Enlightened Witnesses, assisting their clients by taking their part and siding with them. This needs to take place in a space that is free of moral pressure, a space where the clients (often for the first time in their lives) can experience what it is like to be aware of their own selves. The therapist will be readily able to place such a space at the clients’ disposal if he/she has been through the same experience. The time will have come to cast aside the crutches of morality or professional training (forgiveness, “positive thinking,” etc.). These are now superfluous because therapists of this kind will know that both they and their clients have healthy legs they can stand on. Once they are prepared to look their childhood in the face, neither of them will need those crutches any longer.

by Alice Miller

Depression: Compulsive Self-Deception
Tuesday May 10, 2005

The Russian writer Anton Chekhov has been one of my favorite authors since my youth. I remember very clearly the avidity with which I read his story Ward No. 6 at the age of about 16, enthralled by his acuity, his psychological sensitivity, and above all by his courage in squaring up to the truth, calling it by its name, and never sparing anyone he had identified as a rogue. Very much later I read his Letters, which, together with numerous biographies, provided detailed information on his childhood. What struck me was the fact that Chekhov’s admirable courage in facing and telling the truth came up against its limits as soon as his father was involved. Here is one of his biographers, Elsbeth Wolffheim, on the subject of Chekhov’s father:

“The disparagement and humiliation he was subjected to at school were as nothing compared to the repressions he suffered at home. Chekhov’s father was hot-tempered and uncouth, and he treated the members of his family with extreme severity. The children were beaten almost every day, they had to get up at 5 in the morning and help out in the shop before going to school and as soon as they got back, so that they had very little time for their homework. In the winter it was so cold in the basement shop that even the ink froze. The three brothers served the customers until late in the evening, together with young apprentices who were also beaten regularly by their employer and were sometimes so exhausted that they fell asleep on their feet. Chekhov’s father … played a fanatically zealous role in the life of the church and conducted the choir in which his sons were also forced to sing.” (Elsbeth Wolffheim, Anton Tschechow, Rowohlt 2001, p. 13, trans. A.J.).

On one occasion Chekhov noted that in this choir he had felt like a convict in a penal servitude camp (ibid., p. 14). In a letter to his brother he devotes a few lines to a truthful description of his father, though this truth had no place in the rest of his life: “Despotism and lies have so thoroughly marred our childhood that it makes me feel sick and afraid to remember it.” (Wolffheim, p. 15) Such remarks by Chekhov are extremely rare. All his life he was greatly concerned for his father’s welfare, making major financial sacrifices to support him. No one in his immediate environment suspected that the suppression of the truth also demanded major psychic sacrifices of him. His attitude was generally considered to be that of a virtuous and dutiful son. But the denial of the authentic feelings caused by the extreme abuse he was exposed to as a child made huge demands on his strength and may have been responsible for the fact that Chekhov contracted tuberculosis at an early stage and also suffered from depression, referred to at the time as “melancholia.” Finally he died at the age of 44. (I have gone into these connections in more detail in The Body Never Lies).

From Ivan Bunin’s recently published book Tschechow (Friedenauer Presse, Berlin 2004) I learned that my ideas on this matter can in fact be substantiated by reference to Chekhov’s own words. In the following quote he expresses high praise for his parents, although deep down he must have known that this was a massive distortion of the truth:

“For me, father and mother are the only people on this earth for whom I would do everything they asked of me. If I should make it to the top one day, this will be the work of their hands; they are splendid people, their boundless love of children puts them beyond all praise and outweighs all their faults.”

Bunin tells us that on various occasions Chekhov said to friends: “I have never trespassed against the Fourth Commandment.”

This betrayal of one’s own knowledge is no exception. Repressed fear causes many people to entertain similarly erroneous judgments about their parents throughout their lives. In reality, this fear is the fear a very small child has of its parents. They pay for such self-betrayal with depression, suicide, or severe illnesses leading to an early death. In almost all cases of suicide, it is possible to establish that cruel childhood memories have either been denied completely or never identified in the first place. These people reject the knowledge of their infant sufferings and live in a society equally oblivious of this kind of distress. Even today, there is still little or no room for knowledge about the fate of children and its significance for later life. This is why we are usually surprised when a celebrated star commits suicide, thus revealing that he or she suffered from severe depression. The typical reaction from all sides is that the person involved had everything that other people wish for so dearly. So what can have gone wrong?

The discrepancy between denied reality and the “happy” façade struck me once again when I saw a documentary about the singer Dalida, who suffered from severe depression for a long time and finally took her own life at the age of 54. Many people were interviewed on the matter, and they professed to know her very well, to be very fond of her, and to have been very close to her, either personally or professionally. Without exception, they all insisted that Dalida’s depression and her suicide were a complete mystery to them. Again and again they said: “She had everything most people dream of: beauty, intelligence, incredible success. So why these recurrent bouts of depression?”

This complete ignorance on the part of all Dalida’s closest friends and associates brought home to me the loneliness in which this star had spent her life, despite her many admirers. I assume that the story of her childhood would yield up an explanation for her suicide, but no mention was made of this aspect in the course of the documentary. Looking on the internet, I found the information one nearly always finds in such cases: Dalida had had a happy childhood and loving parents. The tragic destinies of famous people make it very clear just how widespread depression actually is. Yet there is hardly ever any inquiry into the causes, the roots of this suffering. This makes depression look like a trick of fate, something inexplicable and inevitable. The question of how Dalida may have responded to the fact that she grew up in a convent school was studiously avoided.

From what I have read about such boarding schools I know that is by no means rare for children attending them to be exposed to sexual, physical, and mental abuse. They are instructed to understand this as a sign of love and care, which means they are enjoined to accept outright lies as something normal. I also know that attempts to publicize the scandalous conditions prevailing in such schools have been thwarted by the church institutions. Most of the former victims do everything they can to forget the torments inflicted on them in childhood, particularly as they know that in our society they will hardly find Enlightened Witnesses prepared to take their sufferings seriously. Only the indignation of society could help them to feel their own horror and rebel against these lies. But if assistance of this kind is so hard to come by, if all the authorities declare their solidarity with these lies, then depression is thrust upon the victims. Like that of many celebrities, Dalida’s unhappy end remains mysterious, and this is what the public appears to find so fascinating.

Many world-famous stars who are envied and idolized are in fact profoundly lonely people. As the example of Dalida indicates, they were misunderstood precisely because they could not understand themselves. And they were not able to understand themselves because their environment responded to them with admiration rather than understanding. Finally they took their own lives. This vortex tells us a lot about the mechanisms of depression. People seek understanding by pinning their hopes to success, they take endless trouble to achieve such success and to arouse the admiration of an ever larger audience. But this admiration cannot provide any real sustenance as long as understanding is absent. Despite the success they have made of their careers, life is meaningless because they remain strangers to themselves. And this self-alienation persists because they want to completely forget what happened to them in their early lives and to deny the sufferings of childhood. As this is the way society functions, these stars were bound to remain misunderstood and suffered the torments of chronic loneliness.

The categorical denial of the pain we suffered at the beginning of our lives is harmful in the extreme. Suppose someone setting out on a long walk sprains an ankle right at the outset. That person may decide to ignore the pain and to soldier on because he/she has been looking forward to the outing, but sooner or later others will notice that they are limping and will ask what has happened. When they hear the whole story they will understand why this person is limping and advise him/her to go for treatment. But in connection with the sufferings of childhood, which play a similar role in our lives to a sprained ankle at the beginning of a long hike, then things are different. Those sufferings cannot be “played down,” they will leave their mark on the whole enterprise. The crucial difference in this case is that normally no one will take any notice. The whole of society is, as it were, in unison with the sufferer, who cannot say what has happened. It may well be that, despite the violation of their integrity, people who have been injured in this way really have no memories. If they have to spend their whole lives with people who play down the traumas of childhood, then they have no choice but to connive in this self-delusion. Their lives will progress in much the same way as the outing of the hiker who has sprained his ankle but pretends that nothing has happened. Should they, however, encounter people who know about the long-term effects of childhood traumas, then they will have the chance to abandon their denial and good prospects of healing the wounds they have been carrying around with them.

Most people are not so fortunate. The celebrities among them are surrounded by hosts of unsuspecting admirers, none of whom recognize the distress afflicting the stars they idolize. This is in fact the last thing they want to know about. Examples are legion. We may recall the fate of the enchanting Marilyn Monroe, who was put in a home by her mother, was raped at the age of nine, and was sexually harassed by her stepfather when she returned to her family. Right to the end she trusted in her charm, and finally she was killed by depression and drugs. Her own account of her childhood is frequently quoted on the internet:

“I was not an orphan. An orphan has no parents. All the other children in the orphanage had lost their parents. I still had a mother. But she didn’t want me. I was ashamed to explain this to the other children…”

Some may wish for similar success in their lives and cannot understand why celebrities cannot simply enjoy their stardom. If a person is especially gifted, they can use that gift to reinforce the refusal of the truth and keep it away from themselves and others.

Exceptions in this context are people who suffered childhood traumas that were not caused by their parents. These people are more likely to encounter empathy in society because everyone can at least imagine what it must be like to grow up in a concentration camp or to spend horrifying days at the mercy of terrorists. The former victims of such traumas can expect understanding and sympathy, say from foster-parents, or from friends and relatives.

One such example is the French author Boris Cyrulnik, a well-known advocate of the theory of resilience. Apparently he was deported to a concentration camp at the age of seven, but after his liberation he was looked after by many caring people and thanks to their knowledge of the horrors he had been through he was able to come to terms with those appalling experiences. In his books he now insists that every child has the strength to overcome a traumatic childhood without falling ill. He calls this strength “innate resilience.”

In my eyes, this theory contains a dangerous fallacy. It is true that as children we have many resources we can draw upon to survive even severe harm. But to heal the consequences of this harm we need Enlightened Witnesses in society. Such witness are usually conspicuous by their absence when the injuries in question were inflicted on the child by its parents. As adults, children abused by their parents are without witnesses and remain isolated, not only from others, but also from themselves, because they have repressed the truth and there is no one to help them perceive the reality of their childhood. Society is always on the parents’ side. Everyone knows that this is so, so they will hardly venture to seek out their own truth. But if successful therapy helps them to experience and express their anger and resentment, they may well be confronted by the hostility of their families and friends. The readiness to attack them for violating this social taboo has to do with the fact that the violation of that taboo is a source of major alarm for others too. These people will sometimes mobilize all the forces at their command to discredit the former victim and thus keep their own repressions intact.

There are very few survivors of childhood abuse who are able to withstand such aggression and have the fortitude to accept the isolation involved in refusing to betray their own truth. But as knowledge of the emotional dynamics involved in these processes increases, things may hopefully change, and the formation of more enlightened groups will mean that total isolation is not the only possible consequence. The reason why I believe resilience theory is dangerous is that it is liable to reduce rather than increase the number of Enlightened Witnesses. If innate resilience were enough to resolve the severe consequences of traumatization, the empathy of Enlightened Witnesses would be unnecessary. Indifference to child abuse is already widespread enough, there is certainly no need to reinforce it.

But enlightened individuals are still rare, even among the experts. Anyone seeking information about Virginia Woolf on the internet will be told by renowned psychiatrists that she was “mentally ill” and that this had nothing to do with the sexual violence inflicted on her for years by her half-brothers when she was young. Although Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical writings give a harrowing account of the horrors of her childhood, the connections between these severe traumas and her later depression are still roundly denied in the year 2004.

During her lifetime there was of course even less chance of their being recognized. Although Virginia read these texts to a circle of artistic friends, she was still doomed to her lonely fate because neither she nor her environment, not even her husband Leonard (as his memories of his wife reveal) possessed the key to the significance of her early experiences. She was surrounded by people who shared and encouraged her artistic ambitions, but she was unable to understand the subjective experience of total isolation that kept on assailing her. Such an experience can ultimately pave the way to suicide because the present sense of isolation constantly recalls the potentially lethal abandonment we experienced as little children.

So-called mental illnesses leading to suicide are almost invariably traced back to genetic causes. Biographers provide us with the minutest details of the later lives of their protagonists, but their childhood rarely finds the interest it so richly deserves.

Recently the French publisher Fayard published a large-scale biography of film-star Jean Seberg in novel form by Alain Absire under the title Jean S. (2004). Jean Seberg starred in 35 movies, some of them major successes (e.g. Godard’s Breathless). As a child she displayed a passion for the theater and suffered greatly from the puritanical attitude of her Lutheran father, whom she later idealized. When still at school, she was selected for her first film from thousands of candidates. Instead of sharing her elation at this success her father merely uttered dark warnings. He displayed the same reaction whenever she was successful, preaching moral sermons at her in the name of paternal love. All her life she was unable to admit how much her father’s attitude had wounded her and suffered horribly from the torments inflicted on her by partners she chose in accordance with a specific, recurring pattern.

Of course we cannot say that her father’s character was the cause of the unhappiness that marred her life. It was Jean’s denial of what she suffered at her father’s hands that sparked off her bouts of severe depression. This denial dominated her life and drove her to put herself in the power of men who neither understood nor respected her. The compulsive repetition of self-destructive partner choices derived from her inability to identify the feelings her father’s attitude had aroused in her. As soon as she found a man who did not treat her destructively she felt impelled to leave him. She longed for nothing more than recognition from her father for all the successes she had achieved. But all she got from him was criticism.

Obviously Jean Seberg had absolutely no insight into the tragedy of her childhood, otherwise she would not have become slavishly addicted to alcohol and cigarettes and would not have had to commit suicide. She shared this fate with many stars who tried to run away from their true feelings by resorting to drugs or died early from an overdose, like Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, or Janis Joplin.

The lives (and deaths) of all these successful stars indicate that depression is not a form of suffering that relates to the present, which after all has bestowed on them the fulfillment of all their dreams. Instead it is the suffering caused by the separation from one’s own self, abandoned early on, never mourned for, and accordingly doomed to despair and death. It is as if the body used depression as a form of protest against this self-betrayal, against the lies and the dissociation of genuine feelings, because authentic feelings are something it cannot live without. It needs the free flow of emotions in constant flux: rage, grief, joy. If these are blocked by denial the body cannot function normally.

People resort to all kinds of “remedies” to compel the body to function normally all the same: drugs, alcohol, nicotine, tablets, immersion in work. It is an attempt to avoid understanding the revolt of the body, to prevent ourselves from experiencing the fact that feelings will not kill us but, on the contrary, can free us from the prison we call depression. Depression may reassert itself once we revert to ignoring our feelings and needs, but in time we can learn to deal with it more effectively. As our feelings tell us what happened to us in childhood, we can learn to understand them, we no longer need to fear them as we did before, the anxiety recedes, and we are better equipped to face the next depressive phase. But we can only admit those feelings if we no longer fear our internalized parents.

The assumption I proceed from is this: for most people the idea that they were not loved by their parents is unbearable. The more evidence there is for this deprivation, the more strongly these people cling to the illusion of having been loved. They also cling to their feelings of guilt, which provide misleading confirmation that if their parents did not treat them lovingly then it was all their own fault, the fault of their mistakes and failings. Depression is the body’s rebellion against this lie. Many people would prefer to die (either literally or symbolically by killing off their feelings), rather than experience the helplessness of the little child exploited by the parents for their own ambitions or used as a projection screen for their pent-up feelings of hatred.

The fact that depression is one of the most widespread disorders of the present day is well known to experts. The media also address the problem regularly, with discussions on the causes and the various kinds of treatment available. In most cases the sole concern appears to be finding the best psychoactive agents for individual patients. Today, psychiatrists assert that at last medicines have been developed that are not addictive and have no side-effects. So the problem would appear to have been solved. But if the solution is so simple why are there so many people complaining about recurrent depression? Naturally some simply refuse to take tablets on principle, but even among those who do there are many who are repeatedly afflicted by bouts of depression and are apparently unable to free themselves of this disorder, even after decades of psychoanalysis, other kinds of psychotherapeutic care, or recurrent hospitalization.

What does depression involve? In the first place hopelessness, loss of energy, extreme fatigue, anxiety, lack of impetus and interest. Access to one’s own feelings is blocked. These symptoms may materialize in unison or in isolation, and they can afflict a person otherwise functioning normally, doing well at work, sometimes even taking an active interest in therapy and attempting to help others. But these people cannot help themselves. Why?

In my book The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979) I describe how some people manage to fend off depression with the aid of grandiose fantasies or extraordinary achievements. This applies very conspicuously to psychoanalysts and other therapists who in their training have learned to understand others but not themselves. In the book I trace this phenomenon back to the childhood histories of those who elect to go in for this line of work and indicate that they were forced at a very early stage to feel the distress of their mothers and fathers, to empathize with it, and to abandon their own feelings and needs in the process. Depression is the price the adult pays for this early self-abandonment. These are people who have always asked themselves what others need from them, thus not only neglecting their own feelings and needs, but never even making contact with them. But the body is aware of them and insists that the individual should be allowed to live out his/her authentic feelings and to claim the right to express them. This is anything but easy for people who in infancy were used exclusively to satisfy the needs of their parents.

In this way many lose contact in the course of their lives with the children they once were. In fact, this contact was never established in the first place, and access becomes increasingly difficult as time goes on. In the later stages the increasing helplessness of old age becomes a searing physical reminder of the situation they found themselves in as children. This is referred to as old-age depression and regarded as something inevitable that we simply have to live with.

But this is not true. There is no reason why people who are aware of their own stories should lapse into depression in old age. And if they do experience depressive phases, it suffices for them to admit their true feelings and the depression will be resolved. At any age depression is nothing other than the escape from all those feelings that might bring the injuries of childhood back to mind. This leaves a vacuum inside us. If we have to avoid mental pain at all costs, then there is basically not much left to sustain our vitality. Though we may distinguish ourselves with unusual intellectual achievements, our inner life will still be that of an emotionally underdeveloped child. This is true whatever age we may be.

As we have seen, the depression reflecting this inner vacuum results from the avoidance of all the emotions bound up with the injuries inflicted on us in early life. The upshot is that a depressive person can hardly experience conscious feelings of any kind. The only exception is the case where external events may overwhelm us with feelings that remain completely incomprehensible because we have no knowledge of the true, un-idealized story of our childhood years. We may experience such a sudden outburst of feeling as an inexplicable catastrophe.

Patients turning to a psychotherapeutic hospital for help are repeatedly told that they must not think back to their childhood, that they will not find any answers there, that they should forget everything else and concentrate on coming to terms with their present situation. Highly significant is the care taken to ensure that these patients do not get upset and to prohibit visits from their relatives. Precisely because they act like an emotional charge for the patient, such encounters can have a revitalizing effect. The point is that the emotions thus triggered off are not harmful but in fact beneficial. But in the hospitals this view finds little response. Reading the correspondence between the poet Paul Celan and his wife, we sense the tragedy that such categorical directives can cause in the lives of individuals. Celan was categorically denied visits from his wife in hospital, which only served to exacerbate his loneliness and the severity of his illness.

A spectacular way of shrieking out his loneliness to the world and telling the story of his childhood was devised by King Ludwig II of Bavaria. It is a well-known fact that this king ordered the construction of a number of opulent castles he never used. He spent a total of 11 days in one of them and never saw the others from the inside. These fantastic edifices were built with immense care and in accordance with the very latest principles of engineering. Today they are visited by countless tourists, admired by some, dismissed as kitsch by others, regarded by others again as bizarre excrescences spawned by a sick mind. During his lifetime Ludwig was labeled “schizophrenic,” and this verdict has survived to the present day, although its explanatory power is in fact nil. What it suggests in effect is that absurd behavior is the consequence of a genetic defect and hence cannot be expected to make any sense.

Armed with this misguided knowledge, the tourists shuffle through the halls of these luxurious castles built by a “sick” king who misappropriated the taxpayers’ money for his lunatic purposes. So far no one appears to have asked what happened at the outset of this royal life. Why did he build castles he never lived in? What was he trying to say? Was he trying to tell a story his body had registered only too well but his conscious mind had dissociated on the grounds that we must never accuse our own parents?

As first-born son, Ludwig was subjected from the outset to a strict and rigid upbringing that made him into a lonely child starved of affection and human contact. The main problem was that no one understood him. This highly sensitive child was refused a spiritual home by his parents. He was considered stupid and left to the care of the servants. They at least gave him the food he was denied at the castle with the intention of making him learn to discipline his hunger. No child can understand the fact that such parenting methods are quite simply sadistic and reflect the course taken by the parents’ own childhood. And even if the victim of such an upbringing should be able to understand these connections at a later stage, it would not do him much good: his body will insist that he actually feel his way through to his individual biography, to the genuine emotions that have been repressed. Throughout his life Ludwig II was unable to do that, hence his absurd behavior which was dismissed as “schizophrenia.” The king respected his parents, as is right and proper. He could never admit to his feelings of frustration and later directed his anger vicariously at his servants. The unacknowledged impotence of the child deprived of food in luxurious surroundings left him with one feeling only: anxiety.

This anxiety was the cause of his loneliness as an adult. He avoided other people, suffered from nightmares, feared that he might suddenly be attacked. It is more than likely that these fears can be traced back to real experiences in his childhood. Ludwig lived out his sexuality in secret. He was sent photos of handsome youths who believed they had been selected as models for drawing classes. But once these young men entered the king’s chambers they were sexually abused by him. Such abuse and deceit is unusual if the abuser himself was not abused in his youth. Accordingly the conclusion that suggests itself is that Ludwig suffered sexual violence as a child. This need not necessarily have happened in the family. We know from the memoirs of the court physician Horoard what the French king Louis XIII was subjected to by courtiers in his childhood (cf. Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware).

None of this need have culminated in “schizophrenia” if there had been anyone in the vicinity of the adolescent king who could have helped him to recognize his situation, to realize the cruelty of his parents’ attitude and either defend himself against it or at least admit his anger. Nor was there anyone to ask him at a later stage what it was that prompted him to have the castles built. Maybe he sought a creative way of referring to something he could never have allowed into his conscious awareness: the fact that as a child he was forced to live like a nobody despite all the luxury surrounding him. He was not perceived by his parents, his gifts were unappreciated (his father did not consider him interesting enough to be a suitable companion on his walks), and he was given so little to eat that he occasionally had to turn to peasants outside the castle in order to eat his fill.

In the extensive documentation available on the internet about the life of Ludwig II we find the following report on his childhood:

“Both the princes led very simple lives. One of the fallacies of aristocratic upbringing at the time was the conviction that children should not be allowed to eat their fill, and the future king was very glad when his faithful maid Lisi and other servants brought him food from the town or shared their own rather more generous rations with him.
The princes were severely punished if they indulged in practical jokes or neglected their duties. Ludwig’s father, King Max II, saw this strict upbringing as a way of making his sons hard-working and conscientious …
Max II was unable to establish a trusting relationship with his sons. He felt little affection for the crown prince, who was so different from himself, and took little interest in his development. In his memoirs, Franz von Pfistermeister, the long-serving cabinet secretary to Max II and Ludwig II, comments as follows:
‘The king saw his two little sons, the princes Ludwig and Otto, only once or twice a day, at late breakfast around noon and at the court repast in the evening. Only rarely did he visit them in the quarters where they grew up. If he did, it was only to give them a brief handshake and then retire again forthwith. Shortly before the crown prince came of age, it took considerable effort to persuade the king to take his older son with him on his morning walks in the English Garden (9-10 a.m.). The joint walks were soon abandoned. The king said: “What am I supposed to talk to the young man about? He is not interested in anything I suggest.”‘
Ludwig was troubled all his life by memories of his unfortunate upbringing and the cool relationship with his father. At the age of 30 he wrote the following to crown prince Rudolf of Austria:
‘You are much to be congratulated on having received such a thoroughly excellent and understanding upbringing. And you are very fortunate in having the Emperor take such a vital, personal interest in your education. These things were unfortunately very different with my father, he always looked down on me, and the most I received from him were a few cold, patronizing words. He affected this strange attitude and his other upbringing methods for the peculiar reason that his father had done the same thing to him.’
A much-feted beauty in her youth, Ludwig’s mother, Queen Marie, was a kindly lady of limited intelligence who took no interest at all in the life of the mind. Paul Heyse, a member of the Munich literary circle associated with Max II, had this to say about her:
‘Despite all our efforts we failed completely to arouse her interest in literature and poetry. She only felt really comfortable when engaging in superficial chat … .’
Queen Marie was unable to inspire any genuine affection in her children. In his memoirs Franz von Pfistermeister recalls:
‘The queen was almost entirely unable to win the hearts of her little princes. Though she frequently visited them in their quarters, she had little skill in treating them the way children expect to be treated. Accordingly, her sons felt little real attachment to their mother.’

Even when details about a person’s childhood are well-known, it is extremely rare for any connection to be drawn between these details and the adult’s later sufferings. We speak of a tragic destiny, but we have little interest in understanding the nature of this tragedy. No one in Ludwig’s entourage appears ever to have inquired into the deeper meaning of his castles. Though several films have been made about the “mad king,” no inquiry has been made into the origins of his so-called schizophrenia in childhood. Numerous scholars have conscientiously sifted all the details available about his building mania and published books about it. The culmination of a person’s delusions arouse keen interest, but the genesis of such disorders is passed over in profound silence. The reason is that we cannot understand such a process without pointing to the parents’ cruelty and lack of affection. And this strikes fear into the hearts of most people because it threatens to remind them of their own fates.

This fear is the fear felt by neglected or tyrannized children at looking into the true, undisguised faces of their parents. It is the fear that incites us to self-deception and hence depression – not only isolated individuals, but almost all the members of a society that believes that medication has solved the problem once and for all. But how could this be possible? Most of the suicides I have mentioned took medication, but their bodies were not to be deceived. The body refuses to accept a life that hardly deserves the name. Most people keep the story of their childhood carefully buried away in their unconscious. Without suitable assistance they will find it difficult indeed to establish contact with their early lives, should they wish to do so. They are dependent on experts to help them reveal the self-deception and free them from the chains of traditional morality (in one of his letters, Chekhov wrote: “I am afraid of our morality,” Bunin, p. 263). But if those experts merely prescribe medication, they are helping to cement that fear and also blocking off their patients’ access to their own feelings, thus depriving them of the liberating potential implicit in this discovery.

Personally speaking, I owe my own awakening to spontaneous painting more than anything else. But this is not to suggest that painting can be recommended as a sure-fire remedy for depression. One painter I once greatly admired, Nicolas de Stael, painted 354 large pictures in the last six months of his life. He went to Antibes to work on his paintings, devoting himself to them with searing intensity and forsaking his family for the purpose. Then “he plunged to his death from the terrace that had been his studio in those last six months.” (Nicolas de Stael, Edition Centre Pompidou, 2003). At the time he was only 40 years old. The skill that so many painters envied him for did not save him from depression. Perhaps a few questions might have sufficed to set off a train of reflection in him. His father, a general in the years prior to the Russian Revolution, never acknowledged his gifts as a painter. It may well be that in his despair de Stael hoped that one day he might paint the decisive picture that would earn him his father’s respect and love. Conceivably there is a connection between his gargantuan efforts at the end of his life and this personal distress. Only de Stael himself could have found this out, if he had not been forbidden to ask the decisive questions. Then he might have realized that his father’s lack of esteem had nothing to do with his son’s accomplishments but merely with his own inability to appreciate the qualities of a picture.

In my own case the decisive breakthrough came because I insisted on asking myself such questions. I let my pictures tell me my own submerged story. More precisely, it was my hand that did this, as it obviously knew the whole story and was only waiting until I was ready to feel with the little child I once was. Then I kept on seeing that little child, used by her parents but never perceived, respected, or encouraged, a little child forced to hide her creativity so as not to be punished for living it out.

We do not need to analyze paintings from the outside. This would be of little help for the painter. But pictures can stir up feelings in their creators. If they are allowed to experience those feelings and take them seriously, then they can get closer to themselves and overcome the barriers of morality. They can face up to their past and their internalized parents and can engage with these things differently – on the basis of their growing awareness, not of their infant fear.

If I allow myself to feel what pains or gladdens me, what annoys or enrages me, and why this is the case, if I know what I need and what I do not want at all costs, then I will know myself well enough to love my life and find it interesting, regardless of age or social status. Then I will hardly feel the need to terminate my life, unless the process of aging and the increasing frailty of the body should set off such thoughts in me. But even then I will know that I have lived my own, true life.