The Untouched Key by Alice Miller

Author:Alice Miller [Miller, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307816924
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

NIETZSCHE THE WOMAN HATER

In contrast to the general validity of Nietzsche’s censure of the Wagner phenomenon, of middle-class cultural values and Christian moral values, his ideas about “the nature of woman” often seem grotesquely distorted, but only if we are unaware of the actual women who gave rise to them. As a child, Nietzsche was surrounded by women intent on bringing him up correctly, and he had to use all his energies to endure this situation. He paid them back in later years, but only on a symbolic level, by attacking all women—except his mother and sister. The women who actually caused his suffering remained unassailable, at the cost of the loss of objectivity.

Nietzsche’s misogyny becomes understandable, of course, if we consider how much distrust must have accumulated in someone who was whipped so frequently as a child. But this doesn’t authorize him as an adult to write in his blind and irresponsible rage: “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!” There is no doubt that Nietzsche was brought up according to the principles of “poisonous pedagogy” described extensively in my previous books. The documents I cite in For Your Own Good illustrate how children must be tricked, deceived, and manipulated to make them pious and good.

That is why Nietzsche was rarely able to show his discontent at his sister’s manipulative and insincere behavior toward him, why he didn’t allow himself to see her as she really was. If he ever did see the truth, he quickly retracted anything he may have said against her. Although he admitted on one occasion that he could not stand her voice, he immediately added that basically he had never really doubted her goodwill, her intentions, her love for him, or her trustworthiness. How could he, since he had only one sister and wanted to believe absolutely that she loved him and that her love was more than exploitation and a need to win recognition at any price. If he had been able to see the way the women in his childhood really were, then it would not have been necessary for him to generalize by making all women into witches and serpents and to hate them all.

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