When I used to see Michael Jackson on TV, of course I
admired his art work and enjoyed watching him, I could feel everyone around him
was just exploiting him and I would feel his pain and I wish I could reach over
the TV and could talk to him. He tried to save children around the world, but
he was not able to save first the child he once was from his abusive parents
that exploited him when he was a defenseless little boy, the last doctor, Dr. Conrad
Murray in Michael Jackson final act, playing the role of the father figure, he was
just continuing the exploitation where his parents had left off; his parents,
the first people in Michael Jackson first act, were the ones that needed the
most punishment, because they abused and exploited him when he was a
defenseless little boy and his brain was not yet completed form, but of course society
only focus and care about a person’s final act and ignore the most important
act, the first act, because if they did that then they would have to question their
own parents too. And because he never was not able to face and stand up to his internalized
parents he did not save himself and was not able also to assist others in their
liberation. He tried to have a childhood through other children by surround
himself with children, unconsciously he was using and exploiting children to
fulfill his own childhood needs, but because we can never go back in time we
can never fulfill a need of the child we once were through substitute figures,
only by facing our internalized parents and feeling the repressed emotions of
the child we once were and mourning the loss of our childhood can we liberate
ourselves and stop the repetition compulsion of trying to use and exploit
endless substitutes figures to fulfill our childhood needs.
“On the basis of the
foregoing, the conclusion could be drawn that neither Flaubert nor Beckett
would have written these stories I have discussed had they been fully conscious
that in them they were describing their own problems. This line of thinking
brings some to the cruel conclusion that it is a good thing that the major
writers had an unhappy childhood; otherwise we wouldn’t have their great works
now. I would respond that these writers simply would have written something
different that could have been just as powerful as long as it, too, emanated
from the unconscious. The unconscious is endless; it resembles an ocean from
which we, in analysis, can remove perhaps one glassful of water, that portion
which has made the person ill. A great artist will be able to draw all more
freely from the ocean the less he has to protect himself from the suspected
poison in the glass. He will be free to try out different approaches and keep
discovering himself anew, as can be observed in the life of Pablo Picasso, for
one. In contrast to Picasso, we might mention Salvador Dali, who, although
undoubtedly a great painter, has, like Samuel Beckett, been preoccupied all his
life with the poison in the glass. What I am saying here is not intended as a
value judgment but merely as a comment on the personal tragedy of artists. A
glassful is tiny in comparison with the ocean, but if we imagine a person to be
the size of an ant, then even a glassful can seem like a great ocean.
The common belief
that neurosis is an asset for art may possibly be rooted in an exploitative
attitude that is somehow understandable. We could, for instance, argue:
what would the works of Kafka, Proust, or Joyce be without their authors’
neuroses? Aren’t these the very writers who have described our own inner perils
and inner prisons, our compulsions and absurdities? Therefore, we would not
want them to have been mentally sound, to have written like a Goethe, because
then we would have been deprived of a significant experience and unconscious
mirroring. In Kafka’s The Trial, for example, we experience our own
incomprehensible guilt feelings, in The Castle our powerlessness, and in “The
Metamorphosis” our loneliness and isolation; yet the portrayal of these
existential situations does not cause us to despair, for they apply only to
Kafka’s “fictitious” characters. Such writers fulfill an important function for
us that we would not like to forgo---that of mirroring---and nothing is
required of us in return. We, as these
author’s posterity, take on, in a sense, the role of their parents, since we,
too, profit from their artistic gifts without having to deal with their actual
suffering.
This thought first struck me when I read the letters written
to Mozart by his father, quoted in Florian Langegger’s fascinating study, Mozart---Vater
und Sohn. The father wrote: “Above all you must devote yourself with all your
soul to your parents, well-being, otherwise your soul will go to the devil…
I’ll live for another few years, God willing, pay my debts---and then as far as
I’m concerned you can knock your head against a stone wall if you’re quite fit
the image of a loving father that history has handed down to us. But they show
very plainly the narcissistic abuse of the child, which in most cases need not
exclude great affection and strong encouragement (cf. my review of Langegger’s
book in Psyche 23 PP. 587-88). After reading Leopold Mozart’s “loving” letters
selected by Langegger, it should come as no surprise to us that the son
outlived his father by only a short time, dying at the age of thirty-seven, and
that before his health he suffered from fear of being poisoned. Yet how
unimportant the tragic fate of this human being seems to posterity when weighed
his outstanding achievement.”
From the book “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware” by Alice Miller,
page 249
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