Banished Knowledge, page 1
BOOKS BY ALICE MILLER
THE DRAMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD
(originally published as Prisoners of Childhood)
FOR YOUR OWN GOOD
Hidden Cruelty in Childrearing and the Roots
of Violence
THOU SHALT NOT BE AWARE
Society’s Betrayal of the Child
PICTURES OF A CHILDHOOD
Sixty-six Watercolors and an Essay
THE UNTOUCHED KEY
Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity
and Destructiveness
BANISHED KNOWLEDGE
Facing Childhood Injuries
PATHS OF LIFE
Seven Scenarios
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 1991
Copyright © 1988 by Suhrkamp Verlag
Translation copyright © 1990 by Leila Vennewitz and Alice Miller
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in 1990. This edition published by arrangement with Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.
Originally published as Das verbannte Wissen (3rd Edition) by Suhrkamp Verlag am Main, copyright © 1988. Any variations from the original text are a result of the author’s wishes.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to quote
from previously published material:
Equinox: Excerpt from Bodywatching by Desmond Morris. Copyright © 1985 by
Desmond Morris.
Simon & Schuster, Inc.: Excerpt from The Human Animal by Phil Donahue.
Copyright © 1985 by Multimedia Entertainment Inc., and Woodward/White Inc.
Yale University Press: Excerpts from Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill. Copyright © 1955 by Carlotta Monterey O’Neill.
Excerpt from Growing Young by Ashley Montagu. Copyright © 1981 by Ashley Montagu. Used by permission of the author.
ANCHOR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, Alice.
[Verbannte Wissen. English]
Banished knowledge/Alice Miller
Translated from the German by Leila Vennewitz.
p. cm.
Translation of: Das verbannte Wissen.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
1. Child psychology. 2. Parent and child.
3. Repression (Psychology) 4. Good and evil.
I. Title.
BF721.M539813 1990 90-3081
150.19′8—dc20
eISBN: 978-0-307-81691-7
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.1
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
The following passage occurs in the Preface to the 2nd edition of Ashley Montagu’s Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin (New York: Harper & Row, 1986):
One regret that every writer must have is that there does not exist in English a word which specifically refers to both sexes. In this edition I first attempted to remedy that situation by employing “it” as a substitute for the customary masculine pronouns. The result was an unacceptable impersonality which, combined with the awkward repetitiveness of “he or she” and “his or hers,” rendered the change repellent. I, therefore, have adhered to customary usage. It is, of course, to be understood that in all instances both sexes are implied. This book is about human beings, not objects, and no baby is an “it” to its mother, nor should it be to anyone else.
I wish to express my great appreciation to the author, Dr. Alice Miller, for the close cooperation I have enjoyed with her. I also wish to thank my husband, William, who has accompanied me throughout the work of this translation with his never-failing, expert assistance.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Copyright
Translator’s Note
PREFACE
ONE
A Saint Nicholas Celebration
TWO
Murdering for the Innocence of the Parents
THREE
The Wicked Child
A Favorite Fairy Tale of Scientists
FOUR
Theories as a Protective Shield
FIVE
Pretending to Want to Know
SIX
The High Cost of Lying
SEVEN
Without Truth There Can Be No Help
EIGHT
The Enlightened Witness
NINE
The Child Sets Limits
APPENDIX
The Way Out of the Trap
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PREFACE
UNLIKE ANIMALS, which generally become self-reliant shortly after birth, the human infant remains dependent on others for a very long time. He comes into the world as a bundle of needs, relying totally on the warmth of human arms, watchful eyes, and tender caresses. Incubators and electric heat are merely a very inadequate substitute for human contact, and the touch of cold instruments can be torture. A baby requires the certainty that he will be protected in every situation, that his arrival is desired, that his cries are heard, that the movements of his eyes are responded to and his fears calmed. The baby needs assurance that his hunger and thirst will be satisfied, his body lovingly cared for, and his distress never ignored.
Is that asking too much? Under some circumstances it is much too much, a great burden, while under others it is a joy and an enrichment. It all depends on what the parents themselves experienced in the past and what they have to give. Nevertheless, every child depends on others for the satisfaction of his needs because he cannot look after himself. Although he can scream for help, he relies entirely on those around him to hear his cries, take them seriously, and satisfy the underlying needs rather than, in an excess of hatred, punishing the screams or even preventing them by means of tranquilizers.
The only possible recourse a baby has when his screams are ignored is to repress his distress, which is tantamount to mutilating his soul, for the result is an interference with his ability to feel, to be aware, and to remember.
When this innate ability to feel cannot blossom, a person cannot know later in life what it means, for example, to be defenseless and so is incapable of providing his or her own child with the protection and love in which this child will likewise stand in urgent need. Parents who have never known love, who on coming into the world met with coldness, insensitivity, indifference, and blindness and whose entire childhood and youth were spent in this atmosphere, are unable to bestow love—indeed, how can they, since they have no idea of what love is and can be? Nevertheless, their children will survive. And, like their parents, they too will not remember the torments to which they were once exposed, because those torments, together with the needs related to them, have all been repressed: that is, completely banished from consciousness.
A human being born into a cold, indifferent world will regard his situation as the only possible one. Everything that person later comes to believe, advocate, and deem right is founded on his first formative experiences. Today we have conclusive evidence that this cost of survival not only is much too high for the individual but also turns out to be the greatest threat to all humanity. In the fifties, experiments showed that monkeys separated from their mothers and raised with fabric dummy mothers had no motherly instincts when they later gave birth. And we have statistics showing clear connections between early neglect and abuse and subsequent adult violence. Why is it that hardly any conclusions are being drawn from these statistics? The repression of past torments and its cost render people deaf to the screams of children and blind to the obvious connections. Thus the factors so clearly revealed by the statistics are ignored to block the eruption of once repressed pain, to prevent the recognition of the truth.
In the heart of snowbound Paris, in the cold January of 1987, a vagrant came upon a plastic bag containing a crying newborn infant. The parents, not wanting to keep him, had left him to his fate. The Arab clochard who, unlike other passers-by, was not in a hurry to reach a warm home (because he had none) saved the infant’s life. If he had not listened to the baby’s crying and if the baby had not been able to signal his plight, the child would have frozen to death. That baby survived freezing temperatures, and other babies have survived just as drastic physical circumstances: A baby found crying in the ruins of the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, for instance, had lived several days without food.
This great adaptability of the newborn infant to our cruel world, this toughness, has since time immemorial misled people to believe that one can inflict anything on a child with impunity: completely neglect him, hold lighted cigarettes against his skin, shake him, throw him against the wall, yell at him. Until recently no one corrected these notions because in their defenselessness injured children could not speak about the torments they were exposed to; their signals went unnoticed. And later, as adults, they had themselves forgotten such experiences, or at least the memory was not vivid enough to cause them to speak of them. But somehow they must have known, their brains had obviously stored the knowledge, for in a sort of compulsive repetition they passed on their traumatic experiences to their children, again oblivious to the consequences.
To demonstrate the hidden sources of violence, I described Adolf Hitler’s childhood in my book For Your Own Good. My aim was to show how the life of a mass murderer reflects the countless murders to which the child was subjected. I described the phenomenon for the same reasons others might describe a virus: to prevent the further spread of the disease or the phenomenon as the result of ignorance. This description was necessary because many people still have no idea that they are placing dynamite in our world when they abuse their children physically or even “only” psychically. They describe their actions as proper and necessary. Others are of the opinion that such behavior, although not quite proper, is unavoidable since children are sometimes difficult and their parents overtaxed: They “can’t help themselves” and lash out. To my mind, both views are mistaken, inhumane, and dangerous.
It is quite simply not true that human beings must continue compulsively to injure their children, to damage them for life and thus destroy our future. When I wrote The Drama of the Gifted Child, while under the influence of psychoanalytic thinking, I still believed that such a cycle of abuse was inevitable. Now I know that that is not true. Infectious diseases need not spread if the virus is known. Injuries can heal and need not be passed on, provided they are not ignored. It is perfectly possible to awaken from sleep and, in that waking state, to be open to the messages from our children that can help us never again to destroy life but rather to protect it and allow it to blossom.
Not to take one’s own suffering seriously, to make light of it or even to laugh at it, is considered good manners in our culture. This attitude is even called a virtue, and many people (at one time including myself) are proud of their lack of sensitivity toward their own fate and above all toward their own childhood. I have tried to show in my books why the fatal belief that such an attitude is desirable can so stubbornly persist, as well as the tragic conditions it helps to conceal. People from various countries constantly tell me, with great relief, that after reading The Drama of the Gifted Child they felt for the first time in their lives something like empathy for the abused or even battered child they had once been. They say that they have more respect for themselves than formerly and that they have become more precisely aware of their needs and feelings. “You have described my life in that book—how did you know about it?” is something I often hear.
How did I know about it? Today I no longer find it difficult to answer this question. Today I know: It wasn’t the books, or my teachers, or my philosophical studies, or my training as a psychoanalyst that provided me with this knowledge. On the contrary. Their mystifying conceptualizations, their turning aside from reality, prevented me far too long from recognizing the truth. Surprisingly, it was only the abused, exploited, fossilized child in me, condemned so long ago to speechlessness, that finally found her feelings and thus her speech and painfully told me her story. It was this story that I began to describe in The Drama of the Gifted Child, and many, many people recognized their own story in it as if I were holding up a mirror to them.
In my fourth book, Pictures of a Childhood, I described in more detail how my encounter with this child came about after she surfaced from her banishment and how I could offer her the protection she needed to feel her pain and be able to talk about it.
The discovery that I had been an abused child, that from the very beginning of my life I had had to adapt to the needs and feelings of my mother, with no chance whatever to feel any of my own, came as a great surprise to me. The discovery of my total helplessness at that time also showed me not only the power of repression that all my life had kept me away from the truth but as well the impotence of psychoanalysis, whose misleading theories further reinforced this repression. For although I had undergone two complete analyses as part of my training, the analysts had been unable to shake my version of the happy childhood I was supposed to have had. It was only my spontaneous painting, which I took up in 1973, that gave me the first unadulterated access to my early reality. In my paintings I came face to face with the terrorism exerted by my mother, at the mercy of which I had lived for so many years. For no one in my environment, not even my kind father, could ever notice or question the child abuse committed under the cloak of childrearing. If but a single person had understood at that time what was going on and had come to my defense, my entire life would have taken a different course. That person could have helped me to recognize the cruelty and not tolerate it for decades as something normal and necessary, at the expense of my own life.
This absence of enlightened witnesses in my life may have contributed to my desire, through my books, to inform potential helpers about the suffering child. By “potential helpers” I mean all those who do not shrink from unequivocally taking the side of the child and protecting him from power abuse on the part of adults. In our child-inimical society such people are still rare, but their number is growing.
My spontaneous painting helped me not only to discover my personal history but also to liberate myself from the mental compulsions and concepts of my upbringing and training, which I recognized as being wrong, misleading, and fatal. The more I learned to follow my impulses in the free play of color and form, the weaker became my ties to aesthetic and other conventions. I was not out to paint beautiful pictures; even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.
By the time of my therapy I had grasped the fact that I had been abused as a child because my parents had undergone similar experiences in their childhoods and had learned to regard that abuse as having been for their own good. Because they—like the analysts in my training—were not allowed to feel and thus understand what had happened to them in the past, they were unable to recognize the abuse and passed it on to me without a trace of guilty feelings.
I realized there was absolutely nothing I could do to change the history of my parents and teachers that had so blinded them. But I felt that, in spite of all this, I can and must try to demonstrate to young parents, and above all to future parents, the dangers of the misuse of their power, to sensitize them and sharpen their ears to their child’s signals.
I can do this if I help the child—hitherto a victim condemned to silence, deprived of rights—to speak out, if I describe his suffering from his perspective and not from that of the adult. For it is from this very child that I received vital messages, answers to questions that had remained unanswered throughout my entire study of philosophy and psychoanalysis yet had refused to cease preoccupying me all my life. Only when the actual reasons for my childhood fears and pains became clear to me in their full extent did I understand what grown men and women must keep at a distance throughout their lives and why, instead of facing up to the truth, they prefer, for instance, to organize a gigantic, atomic self-destruction without the slightest inkling of its absurdity. For me, the absurdity acquired its compelling logic once I was able, thanks to the therapy, to locate the missing piece, the hitherto strictly guarded secret of childhood. For when we no longer need to confront the child’s suffering blindly, we suddenly realize that it is up to us adults, depending on how we treat our newborn infants, either to turn them into future monsters or to allow them to grow up into feeling, and hence responsible, human beings.
In this book my aim is to share with others the knowledge I have gained over the last few years. The extent of my success remains to be seen. However, since I am convinced that this knowledge of the child’s situation can lead people to a radical and urgently necessary rethinking, I wish to leave nothing untried.
ONE
A SAINT NICHOLAS
CELEBRATION
THERE ARE MANY EXAMPLES of how the repression of our suffering destroys our empathy for the suffering of others. Let me pick out an ostensibly harmless illustration and examine it in detail.
One day early in December, while walking through the forest, I encountered a celebration. A number of families had come with their children, lighted candles at the edge of the forest, and invited Saint Nicholas. Traditionally, this celebration is preceded by the young mothers informing Saint Nicholas of the attitudes and behavior of their children and the saint registering the sins in a big book so that he can speak to the children as if he were all-knowing. The mothers hope thereby to gain support for their childrearing methods, and that is what they get. All year long they can allude to his words: “Saint Nicholas sees everything, you’ve heard it yourself—make sure that next time he’s satisfied with you!”
