EQI.org Home | Alice Miller Main Page | Emotional Abuse The
Essential Role of an Enlightened Witness in Society
by Alice Miller, 1997
Since adolescence I have always
wondered why people take pleasure in humiliating others.
Clearly the fact that some people are sensitive to the
suffering of others proves that the destructive urge is
not a universal aspect of human nature. So why do some
tend to solve their problems by violence while others
don't?
Philosophy failed to answer my question, and the Freudian
theory of the death wish has never convinced me. It was
only by closely examining the childhood histories of
murderers, especially mass murderers, that I began to
comprehend the roots of good and evil: not in the genes,
as commonly believed, but often in the earliest days of
life. Today, it is inconceivable to me that a child who
comes into the world among attentive, loving and
protective parents could become a predatory monster. And
in the childhood of the murderers who later became
dictators, I have always found a nightmarish horror, a
record of continual lies and humiliation, which upon the
attainment of adulthood, impelled them to acts of
merciless revenge on society. These vengeful acts were
always garbed in hypocritical ideologies, purporting that
the dictator's exclusive and overriding wish was the
happiness of his people. In this way, he unconsciously
emulated his own parents who, in earlier days, had also
insisted that their blows were inflicted on the child for
his own good. This belief was extremely widespread a
century ago, particularly in Germany.
I found it logical that a child beaten often would
quickly pick up the language of violence. For him, this
language became the only effective means of communication
available. Yet what I found to be logical was apparently
not so to most people.
When I began to illustrate my thesis by drawing on the
examples of Hitler and Stalin, when I tried to expose the
social consequences of child abuse, I encountered fierce
resistance. Repeatedly I was told, "I, too, was a
battered child, but that didn't make me a criminal."
When I asked for details about their childhood, I was
always told of a person who loved them, but was unable to
protect them. Yet through his or her presence, this
person gave them a notion of trust, and of love.
I call these persons helping witnesses. Dostoyevsky, for
instance, had a brutal father, but a loving mother. She
wasn't strong enough to protect him from his father, but
she gave him a powerful conception of love, without which
his novels would have been unimaginable. Many have also
been lucky enough to find later both enlightened and
courageous witnesses, people who helped them to recognize
the injustices they suffered, to give vent to their
feelings of rage, pain and indignation at what happened
to them. People who found such witnesses never became
criminals.
Anyone addressing the problem of child abuse is likely to
be faced with a very strange finding: it has frequently
been observed that parents who abuse their children tend
to mistreat and neglect them in ways resembling their own
treatment as children, without any conscious memory of
their own experiences. It is well known that fathers who
bully their children through sexual abuse are usually
unaware that they had themselves suffered the same abuse.
It is mostly in therapy, even if ordered by the courts,
that they discover, stupefied, their own history, and
realize thereby that for years they have attempted to act
out their own scenario, just to get rid of it.
How can this be explained? After studying the matter for
years, it seems clear to me that information about abuse
inflicted during childhood is recorded in our body cells
as a sort of memory, linked to repressed anxiety. If,
lacking the aid of an enlightened witness, these memories
fail to break through to consciousness, they often compel
the person to violent acts that reproduce the abuse
suffered in childhood, which was repressed in order to
survive. The aim is to avoid the fear of powerlessness
before a cruel adult. This fear can be eluded momentarily
by creating situations in which one plays the active
role, the role of the powerful, towards a powerless
person.
But this is not an easy path to rid oneself of
unconscious fears. And this is why the offence is
ceaselessly repeated. A steady stream of new victims must
be found, as recently demonstrated by the paedophile
scandals in Belgium. To his dying day, Hitler was
convinced that only the death of every single Jew could
shield him from the fearful and daily memory of his
brutal father. Since his father was half Jewish, the
whole Jewish people had to be exterminated. I know how
easy it is to dismiss this interpretation of the
Holocaust, but I honestly haven't yet found a better one.
Besides, the case of Hitler shows that hatred and fear
cannot be resolved through power, even absolute power, as
long as the hatred is transferred to scapegoats. On the
contrary, if the true cause of the hatred is identified,
is experienced with the feelings that accompany this
recognition, blind hatred of innocent victims can be
dispelled. Sex criminals stop their depredations if they
manage to overcome their amnesia and mourn their tragic
fate, thanks to the empathy of an enlightened witness.
Old wounds can be healed if exposed to the light of day.
But they cannot be repudiated by revenge.
A Japanese crew shot a film of therapeutic work in a
prison in Arizona, where the method was based, inter
alia, on my books. I was sent the video cassette and
found the results very revealing. The inmates worked in
groups, talked a lot about their childhood, and some of
them said, "I've been all over the place, and killed
innocent people to avoid the feelings I have today. But I
know that I can bear these feelings in the group, where I
feel safe. I no longer need to run around and kill, I'm
at home here, and I recognize what happened. The past
recedes, and my anger along with it."
For this process to succeed, the adult who has grown up
without helping witnesses in his childhood needs the
support of enlightened witnesses, people who have
understood and recognized the consequences of child
abuse. In an informed society, adolescents can learn to
verbalize their truth and to discover themselves in their
own story. They will not need to avenge themselves
violently for their wounds, or to poison their systems
with drugs, if they have the luck to talk to others about
their early experiences, and succeed in grasping the
naked truth of their own tragedy. To do this, they need
assistance from persons aware of the dynamics of child
abuse, who can help them address their feelings
seriously, understand them and integrate them, as part of
their own story, instead of avenging themselves on the
innocent.
I have wrongly been attributed the thesis according to
which every victim inevitably becomes a persecutor, a
thesis that I find totally false, indeed absurd. It has
been proved that many adults have had the good fortune to
break the cycle of abuse through knowledge of their past.
Yet I can certainly aver that I have never come across
persecutors who weren't victims in their childhood,
though most of them don't know it because their feelings
are repressed. The less these criminals know about
themselves, the more dangerous they are to society. So I
think it is crucial for the therapist to grasp the
difference between the statement, "every victim
ultimately becomes a persecutor," which is false,
and "every persecutor was a victim in his
childhood," which I consider true. The problem is
that, feeling nothing, he remembers nothing, realizes
nothing, and this is why surveys don't always reveal the
truth. Yet the presence of a warm, enlightened witness -
therapist, social aid worker, lawyer, judge - can help
the criminal unlock his repressed feelings and restore
the unrestricted flow of consciousness. This can initiate
the process of escape from the vicious circle of amnesia
and violence.
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Invalidation | Hugs
Emotional
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