Banished Knowledge : Facing Childhood Injuries by Alice Miller

Author:Alice Miller
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781860493485
Publisher: Time Warner Books Uk
Published: 1997-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

SIX

THE HIGH COST OF LYING

WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT to describe the real, the factual, the true situation of a small child? Whenever I try to do this I am confronted with arguments that all serve the same purpose: that of not having to acknowledge the situation, of rendering it invisible, or, at best, of describing it as purely “subjective.” The victim is always subjective, I am told: He knows only the wrong done to him, not why it was done to him, especially when that victim is a child, for how much can a child really understand? How should he be able to assess the overall situation—for instance, understand the plight of his parents and realize how greatly he has provoked their violence? Again and again the child’s share of the blame is looked for and found, with the result that only in extremely brutal cases is the term “child abuse” mentioned, and even then with reservations, while the broad spectrum of psychic mistreatment is disputed or even totally denied. In this way the victims’ voices are silenced almost before they are raised, and the truth, the whole objective truth, of the facts remains in obscurity.

The absurd consequences to which this silencing can lead could be observed in connection with an issue of the German magazine Stern published in 1987. When the son of the infamous mass murderer Hans Frank, the Nazi governor-general in Poland from 1939 to 1945, condemned his father’s crimes outright, without embellishing, forgiving, or qualifying them and without acknowledging any blame for his report, he unleashed a wave of anger and indignation. Readers wrote, among other things: “No matter what Hans Frank may have done, his foulest deed was undoubtedly the procreation of this perverse monster of a son.” “Anyone else is free to, should, in fact, write this article, but not the son. In doing so he acts just as inhumanly as his father once did.” So we are told that it is inhuman and utterly loathsome if a child of a mass murderer is not prepared to idealize his father, to withhold the truth, and to betray himself.

The public forum is not, of course, the most helpful place to conduct a profitable confrontation with one’s parents. If we are to allow the feelings of childhood to be revived, we need an enlightened witness and not the pent-up, undigested hatred of formerly abused children who, as adults, totally identify with the perpetrators. To expose oneself defenselessly to public view while harboring such feelings from childhood can amount to a kind of self-inflicted punishment, something one seeks when, in spite of everything, one still feels guilty at having expressed the criticism and is prepared to accept hate reactions as a well-deserved punishment. Many sons and daughters come to grief over their attempts at confrontation, either by exposing themselves to the cruelty of the public, just as they were once at the mercy of ignorant, unempathic parents, or, to court public favor, by assuring readers that they forgive their abusive parents everything.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.