For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence by Miller Alice

Author:Miller, Alice [Miller, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2002-11-13T22:00:00+00:00

When I read about Christiane’s problems with the police and with drug dealers, I suddenly saw before me the Berlin of 1945: the many illegal ways of coming by food, fear of the occupation forces, the black market—the “dealers” of that day. Whether this is a strictly private association for me, I do not know. For many parents of today’s junkies, this was the only world that existed for them as children. It is not inconceivable, seen against the background of the inner emptiness resulting from the repression of feelings, that the drug scene in Germany also has something to do with the black market of the forties. This idea, unlike much of the material in this book, is not based on verifiable scientific evidence but on intuition, on a subjective association that I have not pursued further. I mention it, however, because many psychological studies are being conducted that show the long-term effects of the war and the Nazi regime as they relate to the second generation. Time after time, the amazing fact is uncovered that sons and daughters are unconsciously reenacting their parents’ fate—all the more intensely the less precise their knowledge of it. From the few bits and pieces they have picked up from their parents about early traumatization caused by the war, they come up with fantasies based on their own reality, which they then often act out in groups during puberty. For example, Judith Kestenberg tells about adolescents in the sixties who rejected their peacetime affluence and disappeared into the woods. It was later revealed in therapy that their parents had survived the war as partisans in Eastern Europe but had never spoken openly about it with their children. (Cf. Psyche 28, pp. 249-65, and Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust [New York, 1979].)

I was once consulted by a seventeen-year-old anorexic patient who was very proud of the fact that she now weighed the same as her mother had thirty years before when she was rescued from Auschwitz. During our conversation, she revealed that this detail, her mother’s exact weight, was the only thing she knew about that period of her mother’s past, for the mother refused to talk about it and asked her family not to question her. Children are made anxious by secretiveness, by their parents hushing things up, by whatever touches upon their parents’ feelings of shame, guilt, or fear. An important way of dealing with these threats is by fantasizing and playing games. Using the parents’ props gives the adolescent a feeling of being able to participate in their past.

Could it be that the ruined lives described by Christiane go back to the ruins of 1945? If the answer is yes, how did this repetition come about? We can assume that its roots lie in the psychic reality of parents who grew up during a period of extreme material deprivation and who therefore made it their first priority to have enough to live comfortably. By continually adding to their material well-being,

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