"It is a never-ending source of acute distress for me when I think of the devastating power of denial in producing the barriers in our minds. One of the ways this obstructive power manifests itself is in the persistence of theologians and philosophers in discussing ethical issues without taking any account of the findings produced by brain research and the laws governing infant development.
These factors are crucial to a clearer understanding of how evil originates and how we actively perpetuate it. For psychoanalysts, it is also high time to rethink the concepts of destructive drives and evil, "perverted" children, which they have inherited from *poisonous pedagogy. But in order to do so they would have to take modern research on infancy seriously. The approach adopted by Daniel Stern and the followers of John Bowlby still appears to gain only peripheral attention in psychoanalytic circles, perhaps because by his theory of initial attachment Bowlby exploded a taboo. By linking the causes of antisocial behavior with the absence of a resilient attachment to the mother, he was flying in the face of Freud's drive theory.
But my conviction is that we have to go a step further than Bowlby went. We are dealing here not just with anti-social behavior and so-called narcissistic disorders but with the inescapable realization that denying and repressing our childhood traumas means reducing our capacity to think and conspiring to erect barriers in our minds. Brain research has succeeded in uncovering the biological foundations of the denial phenomenon. But the consequences, the impact on our mentality, have not yet been adequately contemplated. No one appears to be interested in examining how insensitivity to the suffering of children--a phenomenon found the world over--is bound up with a form of mental paralysis that has its roots in childhood.
As children, we learn to suppress and deny natural feelings and to believe sincerely that the cuffs and blows we receive are for our own good and do us no lasting injury. Our brains, furnished with this false information, then instruct us to raise our own children by the same methods, telling them that it is good for them just as it was good for us.
This way of thinking causes billions of people to believe that children can become good and decent citizens only if we do violence to them.
But my conviction is that we have to go a step further than Bowlby went. We are dealing here not just with anti-social behavior and so-called narcissistic disorders but with the inescapable realization that denying and repressing our childhood traumas means reducing our capacity to think and conspiring to erect barriers in our minds. Brain research has succeeded in uncovering the biological foundations of the denial phenomenon. But the consequences, the impact on our mentality, have not yet been adequately contemplated. No one appears to be interested in examining how insensitivity to the suffering of children--a phenomenon found the world over--is bound up with a form of mental paralysis that has its roots in childhood.
As children, we learn to suppress and deny natural feelings and to believe sincerely that the cuffs and blows we receive are for our own good and do us no lasting injury. Our brains, furnished with this false information, then instruct us to raise our own children by the same methods, telling them that it is good for them just as it was good for us.
This way of thinking causes billions of people to believe that children can become good and decent citizens only if we do violence to them.
They are blind to the fear in their children's eyes and refuse to acknowledge that the only thing we can really instill in children by beating them is the determination to use violence later in life, either against themselves or against others. These destructive beliefs, also held by many intellectuals, are impervious to argument because they are stored in the body at a very early stage. Such people will make blunt assertions that, without their realizing it, stand in the starkest contrast to the pure intellectual knowledge they acquired from books." -- Alice Miller
above excerpt from BARRIERS IN THE MIND
Chapter 7 from The Truth Will Set You Free
by Alice Miller www.nospank.net/miller18.htm
*Alice Miller used a term above "poisonous pedagogy," which you may not be familiar with, so I will enclose a link to a section in her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, where she explains in a summary what "poisonous pedagogy" means www.nospank.net/fyog9.htm#summary
from Project NoSpank www.nospank.net/main-x.htm the entire book of For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence by Alice Miller www.nospank.net/fyog.htm
Alice Miller Index www.nospank.net/milindex.htm
Alice Miller Index www.nospank.net/milindex.htm
above excerpt from BARRIERS IN THE MIND
Chapter 7 from The Truth Will Set You Free
by Alice Miller www.nospank.net/miller18.htm
*Alice Miller used a term above "poisonous pedagogy," which you may not be familiar with, so I will enclose a link to a section in her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, where she explains in a summary what "poisonous pedagogy" means www.nospank.net/fyog9.htm#summary
from Project NoSpank www.nospank.net/main-x.htm the entire book of For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence by Alice Miller www.nospank.net/fyog.htm
Alice Miller Index www.nospank.net/milindex.htm
Alice Miller Index www.nospank.net/milindex.htm
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