I first read Swiss psychotherapist Alice Miller years ago when I was introduced to The Drama of the Gifted Child, a book that since its original publication in the late 1970s has assumed almost legendary status as a critique of the unseen emotional wounds of childhood.
I can still recall my own initial strong reaction to the book, a reaction that many other readers also report. Miller’s dissection of the sources of emotional pain in childhood was like a series of small detonations to my at the time frayed psyche. I was suffering from chronic fatigue and more or less blaming myself for my troubles (a good reason in itself to be depressed). Panic attacks had become my unpredictable but frequent and demoralizing companion. But I had also entered psychotherapy and was for the first time in my life truly examining who I was.
In a sense, I was in those days letting go of some official version of my life as I had so far written it, to look deeper into the emotional crevices and hidden passages of what motivated me. That early official version of myself had lent little legitimacy to any emotion other than happy, forward-thinking optimism, nor had it been big on self-compassion. The humiliation of early sexual abuse outside the family had also clouded my psyche in ways I could not recognize. And over the course of time I had come to see only grayness and not the blue sky beyond.
It is, as Miller remarks, a tragedy when individuals cannot confide in anyone about their own feelings, or talk about how they needed to be nurtured when they were children. But working to recover one’s own repressed and denied childhood also offers a pathway out of the clouds of despondency. Reclaiming our emotional lives can be a conductor, not only to restored physical health, but to a deeper, more vital spiritual level. As I’ve discovered, psychological healing usually leads not to blame but to compassion, sensitivity, and understanding. As the adage goes, the two-headed calf may have a problem, but because of that problem it may also come to see twice as many stars.
Healing from a Proper Upbringing
In her new book, The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self, Miller continues her campaign to bring attention to the consequences of emotional trauma in childhood. Miller remains steadfast in her conviction that what is considered a proper upbringing frequently carries hidden traumas and humiliations to a child’s sense of self. It is these hidden hurts that also remain at the root of much of the anxiety, unhappiness, and violence that haunt contemporary society.
Miller’s recommendations on what constitutes the best therapeutic methods appear more open-ended or nuanced here than was perhaps true of her earlier books. She no longer views some type of deep regression therapy as universally necessary to every therapeutic situation. But the decisive elements for emotional healing remain for her what they have always been: acquiring emotional and cognitive recognition of the truth of one’s story, liberating oneself from the self-enforced silence of the victimized mindset, and breaking free from false idealization of parents.
Psychotherapy, in Miller’s view, should help a person identify those areas in everyday life where traces of their early years still surface, enabling them gradually to become more adept at recognizing those flashpoints between past and present for what they are. In this way, a person gradually learns to dismantle the past’s hold, becoming less inclined to act out blindly.
The author also believes it is vital that core emotional healing be accompanied by the presence of an enlightened witness, by which she means a therapist who is not a guru or authority figure but someone who has not been afraid to face up to the truth of his or her own emotions and history. The therapist as enlightened witness offers support to a person who is coping emotionally with present situations, without, as the process of emotional reckoning unfolds, losing contact with the suffering and knowing child that person once was.
Miller’s books are fundamentally about the healing power of love. Yet she always has her own take on what exactly this means. In his book Love and Survival, for example, Dean Ornish, M.D., remarks that love is always the best medicine, noting that heart patients living in resilient relationships have better survival rates than unattached patients. It seems like a truism. Yet sometimes patients cling to the very attachments that contribute to their disease, Miller reminds us. She gives us an example in the story of Jean, a young mother who suffered from severe recurrent depression over the course of twenty years.
At various times confined to bed, refusing to eat, and not having the strength to get up, Jean was treated with medication and/or talk therapy. Accordingly, she would recover for a time only to fall back sooner or later into the dark ravine of her wounded soul. Yet Jean was very much loved by her husband and daughter. Unfortunately, she was also deeply blocked from her true feelings, and thus, as Miller argues, remained essentially alone.
Only when Jean found a therapist interested in exploring her childhood, the course of which exploded the illusion that her tyrannical parents had loved her, did she genuinely begin to get better. At last she could "feel herself" rather than being alienated from herself, numbed by medication and well-meaning but misinformed family members and doctors, who had believed her to be too frail to face the truth of her unhappy childhood.
Miller is careful to say in this instance that therapy brought not a magical, lasting relief from depression. Rather, it opened a door to a stronger frame of personal reference, one supportive of Jean’s growing understanding of her emotional self and her capacity to maintain equilibrium in her life as she faced various ups and downs.
A Psychological Provocateur
For me, Miller’s work has always been defined by consistency and integrity, a searching openness and an unwillingness to accept things as they are. In The Truth Will Set You Free, she is also at her provocative best. She reminds us, for example, how inventive can be the means of psychological denial, how it may even at times read like words exposing the harsh realities of child abuse.
That’s her take on Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt’s graphic description of the misery and troubles of his Irish childhood. In Miller’s paraphrase, "My childhood was awful, but it had its moments, and the main thing is I survived it all and can write about it. It’s the way of the world," the Angela’s Ashes mentality proclaims its fatalistic acceptance. I agree with Miller. We can and should rebel against this kind of childhood, instead of using a kind of defeatist irony and humor to explain away our pain.
Being an intellectual provocateur naturally invites criticism, and Miller has had her share. She’s been criticized at times for an allegedly narrow, almost dogmatic focus on early trauma as the source of all the world’s dysfunction and violence. Her study of the early years of Adolf Hitler, for example, highlighted the fact that the German dictator was routinely beaten and humiliated by his father. Allegedly, the adult Hitler, despite all the power he had acquired, still used to count out loud in his sleep, as years earlier his father had routinely made him do during his beatings. Miller’s attention to such details of Hitler’s psyche, declare some critics, reduces the entire spectacle of German fascism to the scarred, violent childhood and psyche of one troubled soul.
No doubt fascism was a product of a whole convergence of historical factors, not merely the product of one man’s childhood. But Hitler wasn’t born evil — he was made; and Miller rightly refuses to accept the idea that evil is unexplainable. In fact, Hitler was a product of the "normal" Germanic upbringing of his day, as was fascism and World War II a natural outgrowth of the historical workings or contradictions of the then world economy. All of it can be explained, and none of it has to do with some inherent, violent flaw in our human nature.
Miller acknowledges that she never intended to argue that only psychological factors were at work in the story of Hitler’s rise to power. What she has done, however, is point out how consistently the psychological kernel of all this social madness is ignored. After all, if Hitler was a scarred, troubled soul, it took a nation inhabited by other scarred, troubled souls to give such a lunatic power.
The Things I Think About
As I was writing this review, I read in the New York Times of the recent ceremony in Austria to commemorate the hundreds of hospital-bound, disabled children killed by the Nazis during World War II. Dismissed then as "worthless, useless eaters" not deserving of life, the children had been subjects of medical experimentation before being tossed out as garbage.
Now, decades later, young people march through Austrian streets, each carrying a picture of a murdered child in solemn commemoration of our lost humanity. On the same day, I saw a news photo of ex-Afghan soldiers and prisoners of war, hobbling through the streets of Kabul, a parade of crutches and one-legged masculinity. Only the day before another photo had caught my eye, this one of an Afghan jail and poor young women incarcerated there because they dared to flee their husbands or refused other men’s demands to marry.
My thoughts turn now to the souls I’ve known who as children were hurt and wounded by adults who saw them only as sexual objects, not precious children deserving of dignity and respect. As adults these people retreat into magical thinking, giving away something integral of themselves to this or that guru or delusional belief system, as a way of fending off their inner pain.
I think about the man I know who as a child was molested by a priest, destroying himself now with anger and alcohol and betraying everyone around him, unable to identify the true source of his rage. Or Matthew Shepard, tied to a fence on a windswept Wyoming plain, dying a slow, besieged death, victim to the stupid cruelty of others whose own inner furies knew no outlet other than hatred for one who was "different."
I think of the parents who insist on hitting their children as the only way to keep them in line. Replicating their own early mistreatment becomes a way to control the buried memory of how bad it really was for themselves. I think of all the good people I know, who blithely endorse slaughter thousands of miles away, just because some politician tells them to. And I think of myself, caught off guard in a field long ago, a little boy full of shame and confusion, running away from something he didn’t understand. So many years of running.
What a world we live in. Such cruelty everywhere. It can all seem so hopeless at times, I admit. But I think also of Alice Miller, who speaks to us of the possibilities for creating a world of universal dignity and love, for every child, and of the vitality and sensitivity that is within the grasp of any one of us when we confront the ghosts of our childhood. The Truth Will Set You Free reminds us that we ourselves can sweep away the mystifying emotional spirits that used to frighten us but serve now only to raise barriers in our minds, to reduce our capacity to think integrally or see the world as it really is.
I read Alice Miller and I am always reminded of the kind of unlimited, beautiful world we can create, just by giving all children the love, protection, and tenderness that is their birthright.
It is in these moments and thoughts that I know why I remain, despite every harsh challenge this world presents, a hopeful person.
The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self, by Alice Miller (Basic Books, 2001).
Mark Harris is a Chicago-based writer. Visit his Web site, A Writer’s Voice.