Carl Jung Quotes

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. Carl Jung

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment. Carl Jung

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people. Carl Jung

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. Carl Jung

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. 

Carl Jung

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

Carl Jung

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

Carl Jung

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. Carl Jung

The word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. Carl Jung

We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more. Carl Jung

Through pride, we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience, a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune. Carl Jung

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate. Carl Jung

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool. Carl Jung

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. Carl Jung

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves. Carl Jung

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown. Carl Jung

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results. Carl Jung

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. Carl Jung

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgment of the intellect is only part of the truth. Carl Jung

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics. Carl Jung

We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learned to bear its ills without being overcome by them. Carl Jung

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble. 

Carl Jung

A 'scream' is always just that - a noise and not music. Carl Jung

Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Carl Jung

We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society. Carl Jung

Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose. Carl Jung

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. Carl Jung

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity. Carl Jung

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

Carl Jung

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. Carl Jung

There is no coming to consciousness without pain. Carl Jung

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. Carl Jung

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine, or idealism. Carl Jung

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. Carl Jung

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk. Carl Jung

There is no birth of consciousness without pain. Carl Jung

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves. Carl Jung

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Carl Jung

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum. Carl Jung

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Carl Jung

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts. Carl Jung

The word 'belief' is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it - I don't need to believe it.

Carl Jung

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. Carl Jung

A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning. Carl Jung

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Carl Jung

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off. Carl Jung

Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better. Carl Jung

Everyone knows nowadays that people 'have complexes'. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us. Carl Jung

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious. Carl Jung

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition. Carl Jung

The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.

Carl Jung

Just as we might take Darwin as an example of the normal extraverted thinking type, the normal introverted thinking type could be represented by Kant. The one speaks with facts, the other relies on the subjective factor. Darwin ranges over the wide field of objective reality, Kant restricts himself to a critique of knowledge. Carl Jung

Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness. Carl Jung

We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.Carl Jung

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us. Carl Jun

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgment of the intellect is only part of the truth. Carl Jung

There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. 

Carl Jung

Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling. Carl Jung

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy. Carl Jung

Early glimpse of the dangers of AI: Fake image showing an explosion at the Pentagon goes viral on Twitter

We live in a world of lies and we couldn't believe anything we heard and now we can't believe anything we see either!

"A suspected AI-generated image claiming to show an explosion near the Pentagon went viral on Twitter Monday, sending markets crashing. Dozens of verified accounts - including national news organizations - reshared what shows black smoke billowing up from the ground next to a white building. The image appears so realistic that people became frantic as it circulated the platform around 10 am ET, which caused the S&P 500 to drop 10 points in five minutes as the image went viral."

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12112413/Fake-image-showing-explosion-Pentagon-goes-viral-Twitter-sending-markets-plummeting.html

 AI and the future of humanity | Yuval Noah Harari at the Frontiers Forum

In a World of Lies, the Truth is Treated as Committing a Crime

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2022/03/in-world-of-lies-truth-is-treated-as.html

Eliezer Yudkowsky on if Humanity can Survive AI

I don't have formal education either and I do agree with Eliezer Yudkowsky. Humanity is insane and with the aid of technology is going to destroy itself much faster. 

The biggest threat to humanity --  is people's repressed emotions of the child they once were -- and as long as people's repressed emotions are unresolved, they will be blinded by them and driven by them into the state of compulsion repetition to hurt and exploit others the same way they were hurt and exploited as defenseless little children. If people were not emotionally blind, they would be able to see the lies, illusions, and all the traps society constantly puts in front of them. And yes, an emotionally blind humanity with the aid of technology will destroy itself much faster.  

the conversation about the effects of childhood repression in our society needs to start happening in the stage of the world, sooner rather than later, if we want to save ourselves and humanity from falling off the cliff and committing mass suicide. 

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-conversation-about-effects-of.html

Education alone is just another illusion. Resolving childhood repression is the only long-term solution for people to stop following blindly political leaders. And that is a lot more difficult!

"I wonder how the high colleges managed to produce so many high asses." Paracelsus

As long people's childhood repression goes unresolved -- they will be shackled into the chains of compulsion  repetition -- and it doesn't matter how well anyone articulates very nice ideas... The problem is not lack of knowledge and educated people, there are plenty of educated people with intellectual knowledge, the problem is an emotional blockage with the so-called “professionals” or “educated people” hiding behind their rationalizations and seductive theories to protect themselves from having to face and feel their own emotional pain.  It takes courage to see, face, and feel our painful truths, intelligence alone is not enough; but it rather helps create seductive, rationalizations, theories, illusions, and lies. 

Alice Miller explains beautifully in her book For Your Own Good: hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the Roots of Violence page 42 and 43: "Just as in the symbiosis of the "diaper stage," there is no separation here of subject and object. If the child learns to view corporal punishment as "a necessary measure" against "wrongdoers," then as an adult he will attempt to protect himself from punishment by being obedient and will not hesitate to cooperate with the penal system. In a totalitarian state, which is a mirror of his upbringing, this citizen can also carry out any form of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience. His "will" is completely identical with that of the government.

Now that we have seen how easy it is for intellectuals in a dictatorship to be corrupted, it would be a vestige of aristocratic snobbery to think that only "the uneducated masses" are susceptible to propaganda. Both Hitler and Stalin had a surprisingly large number of enthusiastic followers among intellectuals. Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self. Indeed, intelligence is capable of innumerable rationalizations when it comes to the matter of adaptation. Educators have always known this and have exploited it for their own purposes, as the following proverb suggests: "The clever person gives in, the stupid one balks." For example, we read in a work on child raising by Grünwald (1899): "I have never yet found willfulness in an intellectually advanced or exceptionally gifted child" (quoted in Rutschky). Such a child can, in later life, exhibit extraordinary acuity in criticizing the ideologies of his opponents--and in puberty even the views by his own parents-- because in these cases his intellectual powers can function without impairment. Only within a group--such as one consisting of adherents of an ideology or a theoretical school--that represents the early family situation will this person on occasion still display a naïve submissiveness and uncritical attitude that completely believe his brilliance in other situations. Here, tragically, his early dependence upon tyrannical parents is preserved, a dependence that--in keeping with the program of "poisonous pedagogy"--goes undetected. This explains why Martin Heidegger, for example, who had no trouble in breaking with traditional philosophy and leaving behind the teachers of his adolescence, was not able to see the contradictions in Hitler's ideology that should have been obvious to someone of his intelligence. He responded to this ideology with an infantile fascination and devotion that brooked no criticism.”

Having special talents is wonderful and it’s okay to cash in your talents for a living, but when people hide behind their talents, fame, and money to hide their own personal truth and keep themselves and others distracted from the truth and facts -- then you are misusing your talents -- and contributing for the lies to spread and silently or covertly you are part of all the violence and atrocities we are witnessing in our world. So if people think they are better than others, because they have special talents, they are being delusional.
https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2014/12/having-special-talents-doesnt-make-you.html 

It's sad to witness all the time people falling for the illusions that formal education, talents, money, and fame are the path to freedom. Formal education, talents, money, and fame alone just reinforce the walls of people's emotional prisons.

People in the tech world create IA to eventually destroy us all so they can unconsciously or consciously blame IA for it
https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2015/09/narcissists-are-secretly-suicidal-and.html?m=1

People in the tech world create IA to eventually destroy us all so they can unconsciously or consciously blame IA for it

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2015/09/narcissists-are-secretly-suicidal-and.html?m=1

‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google and warns over dangers of misinformation

The biggest threat to humanity --  is people's repressed emotions of the child they once were -- and as long as people's repressed emotions are unresolved, they will be blinded by them and driven by them into the state of compulsion repetition to hurt and exploit others the same way they were hurt and exploited as defenseless little children. If people were not emotionally blind, they would be able to see the lies, illusions, and all the traps society constantly puts in front of them. And yes, an emotionally blind humanity with the aid of technology will destroy itself much faster.  

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-conversation-about-effects-of.html

"The neural network pioneer says dangers of chatbots were ‘quite scary’ and warns they could be exploited by ‘bad actors’ [I see bad actors everywhere acting as if personalities pretending to be good people, but are wolves in sheep's clothing, just like at my job of nine and a half years and at my last job of almost 8 years. https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2023/03/hard-evidence-of-my-ex-boss-being.html ]

The man often touted as the godfather of AI has quit Google, citing concerns over the flood of misinformation, the possibility for AI to upend the job market, and the “existential risk” posed by the creation of a true digital intelligence.

Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who with two of his students at the University of Toronto built a neural net in 2012, quit Google this week, as first reported by the New York Times.

Hinton, 75, said he quit to speak freely about the dangers of AI, and in part regrets his contribution to the field. He was brought on by Google a decade ago to help develop the company’s AI technology, and the approach he pioneered led the way for current systems such as ChatGPT.

...Some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary”, he told the BBC, warning they could become more intelligent than humans and could be exploited by “bad actors”. “It’s able to produce lots of text automatically so you can get lots of very effective spambots. It will allow authoritarian leaders to manipulate their electorates, things like that.”

But, he added, he was also concerned about the “existential risk of what happens when these things get more intelligent than us. “I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have,” he said. “So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learned something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.”

He is not alone in the upper echelons of AI research in fearing that the technology could pose serious harm to humanity. Last month, Elon Musk said he had fallen out with the Google co-founder Larry Page because Page was “not taking AI safety seriously enough”. Musk told Fox News that Page wanted “digital superintelligence, basically a digital god, if you will, as soon as possible." Read more in the link below:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/02/geoffrey-hinton-godfather-of-ai-quits-google-warns-dangers-of-machine-learning

The Permission to Know

Parents are of course not only persecutors. But it is important to know that in many cases they play this role as well, and very often without even being aware of it. In general, this is a little-known fact; when it is known, it is the subject of much controversy, even among analysts, and it is for this reason that I place so much emphasis on it here.

Loving parents in particular should want to find out what they are unconsciously doing to their children. If they simply avoid the subject and instead point to their parental love, then they are not really concerned about their children's wellbeing but rather are painstakingly trying to keep a clear conscience. This effort, which they have been making ever since they were little, prevents them from letting their love for their children unfold freely and from learning something from this love. The attitudes of "poisonous pedagogy" are not restricted to outdated child-rearing manuals of the past. There they were expressed consciously and unabashedly, whereas today they are disseminated more quietly and more subtly; nevertheless, they still permeate most major areas of our lives. Their very omnipresence makes it difficult for us to recognize them. They are like a pernicious virus we have learned to live with since we were little.

We are often unaware, therefore, that we can live without this virus and would be better off and happier without it. People of high caliber and with the best intentions, like, for example, A.'s father (cf. page 92), can become infected without even realizing it. If they do not happen to undergo therapy, they have no occasion to discover the virus, no opportunity ever to question later in life emotionally charged convictions they adopted from their parents in early childhood. In spite of their sincere efforts to bring about a democratic family environment, they simply cannot help discriminating against the child and denying his or her rights, for, on the basis of their own early experiences, they can hardly imagine anything else. The early imprinting of these attitudes in the unconscious guarantees their enduring stability.

There is another factor that also has a stabilizing effect here. Most adults are parents themselves. They have raised their children with the help of an unconscious storehouse filled with their own childhood experiences and have had no other recourse but to do everything the same way their parents did before them. But when they are suddenly confronted with the knowledge that the greatest and most lasting harm can be done to a child at a very tender age, they understandably are filled with often unbearable guilt feelings. People who were raised according to the principles of "poisonous pedagogy" suffer particular anguish at the thought that they may not have been perfect parents, because they owe it to their internalized parents to have made no mistakes. Thus, they will tend to shy away from new ideas and will seek a haven all the more behind the old rules of child raising. They will insist emphatically that duty, obedience, and suppression of feelings are the portals to a good and honorable life and that we become adults only by learning to keep a stiff upper lip; they will find it necessary to ward off all knowledge about the world of their early childhood experiences.

The knowledge we need is often quite close at hand, even "right under our very nose." When we have the chance to observe children of today who are growing up with fewer constraints, we can learn a great deal about the true nature of the emotional life, which remained hidden for the older generation. To give an example:

A mother is at a playground with her three-year-old, who is clinging to her skirt and sobbing as though her heart would break. Marianne refuses to play with the other children. When I ask what the matter is, the mother tells me with great sympathy and understanding for her daughter that they have just come from the train station. The little girl's daddy, whom they had gone to meet, had not been there. Only Ingrid's daddy had gotten off the train. I said to Marianne, "Oh, but that must have been a big disappointment for you!" The child looked at me, large tears rolling down her cheeks. But soon she was stealing glances at the other children, and two minutes later she was romping happily with them. Because her deep pain was experienced and not bottled up, it could give way to other, happier feelings.

If the observer is open enough to learn something from this incident, he or she will be saddened by it and will wonder if the many sacrifices that had to be made were perhaps not necessary after all. Rage and pain can apparently pass quickly if one is free to express them. Can it be possible that there was no need to struggle against envy and hatred all this time, that their hostile power holding sway within was a malignant growth whose magnitude was a consequence of repression? Can it be possible that the repressed feelings, the calm and controlled "balance" one has proudly attained with so much difficulty are in reality a lamentable impoverishment and not an "asset" at all, although one had become accustomed to seeing it as such?

If the observer of the scene described has until now been proud of this self-control, some of the pride may turn to rage, rage at the realization that all this time he or she has been cheated out of free access to feelings. And the rage, if it is really acknowledged and experienced, can make room for a feeling of sorrow over the meaninglessness as well as the inevitability of the sacrifices. The change from rage to sorrow makes it possible for the vicious circle of repetition to be broken. It is easy for those who have never become aware of having been victims, since they grew up believing in the principles of being brave and self-controlled, to succumb to the danger of taking revenge on the next generation because they themselves have been unconsciously victimized. But if their anger is followed by grief over having been a victim, then they can also mourn the fact that their parents were victims too, and they will no longer have to persecute their children. This ability to grieve will bring them closer to their children.

The same thing holds true for the relationship with grown children. I once talked with a young man who had just made his second suicide attempt. He said to me: "I have suffered from depression since puberty; my life has no meaning. I thought my studies were to blame because they involved so much meaningless material. But now I have finished all my exams, and the emptiness is worse than ever. But these depressions don't have anything to do with my childhood; my mother tells me that I had a very happy and sheltered childhood."

We saw each other again several years later. In the meantime, his mother had undergone therapy. There was an enormous difference between our two meetings. The young man had become creative not only in his profession but in his whole outlook; unquestionably, he was now living his life. In the course of our conversation, he said: "When my mother loosened up with the help of therapy, it was as though the scales fell from her eyes, and she saw what she and my father had done to me as parents. At first, it weighed on me the way she kept talking to me about it--apparently to unburden herself or to win my forgiveness--about how they had both in effect squelched me as a young child with their well-meaning methods of raising me. In the beginning, I didn't want to hear about it, I avoided her and became angry with her. But gradually I noticed that what she was telling me was unfortunately entirely true. Something inside me had known it all along, but I was not allowed to know it. Now that my mother was showing the strength to face what had happened head-on, not to make excuses, not to deny or distort anything, because she felt that she, too, had once been a victim--now I was able to admit my knowledge of the past. It was a tremendous relief not to have to pretend any longer. And the amazing thing is that now, in spite of all her failings, which we both know about, I feel much closer to my mother and find her much more likable, animated, approachable, and warm than I did before. And I am much more genuine and spontaneous with her. The insincere effort I had to make is over. She no longer has to prove to me that she loves me in order to hide her guilty feelings; I sense that she likes me and loves me. She also doesn't have to prescribe rules of behavior for me anymore but lets me be as I am because she can be that way herself and because she is herself less under the pressure of rules and regulations. A great burden has fallen from me. I enjoy life, and it all happened without my having to go through a lengthy analysis. But now I would no longer say that my suicide attempts were unrelated to my childhood. It's just that I wasn't permitted to see the connection, and that must have intensified my feeling of desperation."

This young man was describing a situation that plays a role in the development of many mental illnesses: the repression of awareness dating back to early childhood that can become manifest only in physical symptoms, in the repetition compulsion, or in psychotic breakdown. John Bowlby has written an article entitled "On Knowing What You Are Not Supposed to Know and Feeling What You Are Not Supposed to Feel," in which he reports on similar experiences.

In conjunction with this story of a potential suicide, it was instructive for me to see that even in severe cases analysis may not be necessary for a young person as long as his parents are able to break the ban of silence and denial and assure their grown child that his symptoms are not pure fabrication or the result of overexertion, of "being crazy," of effeminacy, of reading the wrong books or having the wrong friends, of inner "drive conflicts," etc. If the parents are able to stop desperately fighting their own guilt feelings and as a result need not discharge them onto the child but are willing to accept their fate instead, they will give their children the freedom to live not against but with their past. The grown child's emotional and physical wisdom can then be in harmony with his intellectual knowledge. If mourning of this nature is possible, parents will feel close to their children rather than distant from them--a fact that is not well known because the attempt is seldom made. But when mourning is successful, the false demands of child-rearing are silenced and true understanding of life takes their place. This understanding is accessible to anyone who is ready to rely on what his own experience tells him.  Taken from the book "For Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in child-rearing and the Roots of Violence" by Alice Miller (page 271)

I feel like a child, but I think like a mature conscious adult

 Today, I feel like a child, but I think like a mature conscious adult and every day is an adventure for me. I remember when I was a little kid in the village, probably about 4, being so excited about being alive and I could not wait for the sun to come up in the morning so I could go into the woods and explore all the little things and be in awe with all the deferent life forms. And today I am the same way I am looking forward to getting up every morning.

These words by Alice Miller come to mind: “To live with one’s own truth is to be at home with oneself. That is the opposite of isolation. We only need confirmation when we are alienated from ourselves and in flight from the truth. All the friends and devoted admires in the world cannot make up for the loss.” I too like Alice, since feeling the almost unfathomable isolation of my childhood and youth, I no longer feel isolated.

It is Never Right to Hit a Child

 "It is Never Right to Hit a Child"

Interview by Noreen Taylor


Alice Miller pioneered the idea that violence toward children engenders violent adults. Her latest book reveals that many of this century's worst dictators were beaten as children.

For many years Alice Miller was a lone voice in the dark. Her message, devastatingly simple but with the kind of implications people refused to face, was considered far too controversial: violence towards children engenders a violent society.

Gradually, though, she has won wide acceptance around the world for her central theory that abuse runs in the family. The slapped child of one generation becomes the abuser of the next. Violence towards "a bad child" may create a bad adult and eventually foster the creation of a bad society.

Her latest book, Paths Of Life, takes this argument still further, declaring that tyranny and totalitarianism are born in the nursery. Having studied some of the worst dictators known to the modern world - Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Ceaucescu - she says all four were systematically beaten throughout their childhood, and all denied the pain.

Dr. Miller says: "These men learned very early to glorify cruelty and to be able to justify it to themselves without remorse." Crucially, they were also born into societies in which violence towards children was commonplace.

In Hitler's case, for instance, harsh rearing of children was fashionable in Germany in the 1900s. So there is a causal connection between that practice and the terror unleashed 40 years later by so many willing executioners.

If that seems far-fetched, then we must follow Miller's path of self-discovery and enlightenment.

Born in 1923 in Poland to what she describes as ordinary middle-class parents - father, a banker, and mother, a housewife - she imagined her childhood to have been "normal."

She says: "My parents wanted the best for me, but like so many others at that time they had not the slightest idea of a baby's need for attachment, loving contact, respect, and orientation.

"My mother had been emotionally neglected during her childhood so that her body had no recollection of what it meant to be loved and cared for.

Her only concern was to make me obedient as soon as possible. And she succeeded. I became the good girl my parents needed me to be. Today I know that such an achievement was only possible through systematic corporal punishment.

"My parents' strategy demanded a huge price: the repression of my own feelings and needs. Consequently, when I became a mother, I couldn't understand my first baby the way it needed to be understood. Although I never hit either of my two children, I was sometimes careless and neglectful of that first child."

Miller's first discipline was philosophy and she obtained a doctorate from the University of Basle. She then switched to psychoanalysis, training in Zurich as a Freudian and working for 20 years as an analyst and teacher. But her road away from this conformism, and onto her own path of self-discovery, began in 1973 when she took up painting.

"Until then, I believed my childhood had been a good one, but my body and my hands knew more than my mind. They showed me in my painting that I had survived a horror, and that I had repressed this knowledge because no one was there to understand."

The result of her inner turmoil, and her resolution of it, stimulated her first book, The Drama Of Being A Child, a totally new contribution to the eternal debate on the root causes of violence and its devastating toll on society. It was the opening salvo in her struggle to change the way we think about our treatment of children.

The central question, to which she has devoted the last 20 years of her work, seems deceptively simple: why is it so hard not to smack a child? Why do people who wouldn't dream of striking their friends slap their children?

Her answer, equally straightforward, compels us to re-examine both our history as children and our roles as parents:

"Beating children teaches short-term obedience, but in the long term, only violence and anxiety.

"As beaten children, we have to learn to forget our physical and psychic pain. This blocking out enables us to continue punishing our own children while we insist to ourselves: smacks teach lessons. Sadly, all we are accomplishing is sowing the seeds of cruelty for another generation.

"Almost everyone agrees that we should not maltreat children, yet they also claim that corporal punishment is not a maltreatment, labeling it as 'educational discipline'. This is a dangerous error which can only be solved by a law preventing the punishment of children within the home as well as school. The goal of this law should not be the punishment of parents. It should educate them into understanding that every beating is a maltreatment, both socially and emotionally."

This central message, born out of self-knowledge and from what she had learned from dealing with thousands of patients, gradually gained Miller recognition as one of leading figures in the study of abused children, in spite of years of skepticism from her peers.

Her seven best-selling books have become an inspiration. Novelist Edna O'Brien has described her as the child expert "every parent should read." Another writer, Sara Paretsky, believes Miller's books "changed the way I think about my life".

Many professionals in the field also agree, such as Brenda Robinson-Fell, an independent child abuse consultant based in Brighton who works for a variety of bodies, including the NSPCC, the police, and social services departments.

"Alice Miller was a pioneer," she says. "Her breakthrough was in asserting that parents carry responsibility for the adults their children become. Fortunately, her beliefs have become mainstream, and like many of my colleagues, I regard her as one of the main influences on my generation of professionals. We owe her a great deal."

But the parent reading for the first time of Miller's work will doubtless have two lingering questions. The first is the most common defense for slapping: surely the occasional smack can't possibly cause any lasting damage?

The second: how do we account for the fact that every smacked child doesn't become a Hitler?

Surely, I asked Miller, an infrequent cuff, or a spontaneous slap delivered in a moment's fury when one child is caught being cruel to another, is reasonable?

Not so, says Miller. "The claim that mild punishment, such as smacks or slaps, have no detrimental effects is still widespread because we got this message from our parents, who got it from theirs.

"It is this conviction which helps the child to minimize or numb their suffering so that each generation is subjected to the seemingly harmless effects of physical correction. 'What hasn't harmed me cannot harm my child', we tell ourselves. Such a conclusion is wrong because people have never challenged their assumptions."

Violent behavior in teenagers, especially young male rapists can, according to Miller, be linked with early emotional neglect, not only with brutal treatment. "I think violent teenagers are demonstrating what happened to them when they were small. I have no doubts about that. It might not have been a harsh discipline, but through emotional neglect, lack of warm friendly contact, substituted by 'spoiling' (buying lots of expensive objects to replace love) a child learns to repress its own history.

"The more cruelty is denied, the less these young people are able to feel, to confront the actual reasons for their distress. Therefore the urge towards destructive behavior grows stronger. "As beaten children, we learn very misleading lessons. Because the slaps come from the most important figures in our lives we believe such behavior is normal and beneficial. I am not the only one to speak out against such treatment of children. Hundreds of articles and books are written by other experts on the dangerous consequences and uselessness of corporal punishment, yet many people continue to act and think as though such information did not exist.

"I often hear mothers saying they smack their babies without violence just to teach them a lesson. Once, a nice young mother who breastfed her little boy complained to me that he seemed a very anxious child. I asked if she thought the child might be waiting for the next slap? "Never, she said. At 15 months old he was far too young to make such connections. I then asked if she had been beaten as a child. Yes, she said, all the time, by both parents. I asked her how she would feel if a friend told her she was being beaten by her husband. Would she advise her to leave? Of course, she said.

"Why then was she able to sympathize with her friend, but not her child? Simple. Her upbringing taught her this is the correct way to treat children."

Opposing Miller are those who claim that a law forbidding parents to hit their children brings us uncomfortably close to totalitarianism. Many people believe that smacking children remains a private right, and would have grave misgivings if government legislation intruded into an area as sacrosanct as the home.

Her answer is emphatic: "You can't claim the right to play with nuclear weapons on your territory because they belong to you. Similarly, society's interests must go before your pleasure and your habits, and the government must defend these interests.

"Parents may claim the right to hit children when they are small as though they are property. Yet as soon as those children become violent delinquents or drug abusers the same parents are eager to turn the problem over to society.

The anonymous taxpayer has to fund the hospitals and prisons these once so eagerly disciplined teenagers will need."

What then of the argument that so many smacked children do not turn into tyrants? "Of course, not all children who have been violently treated grow into monsters. The key factor in such instances is the presence of what I call 'a helping witness', someone who serves as a protector or friend. It could be a relative, a grandparent for example, or a teacher, or even a neighbor.

Thanks to this good experience these children are not forced to repeat the abuse."
Miller's theory doesn't rest only on her observations as a psychoanalyst. She has found confirmation in the latest research by neurobiologists who have proved the influence of experiences during the first three years of life on the developing structure of the brain.

"For some years now, it has been possible to prove, thanks to the use of new therapeutic methods, that repressed, traumatic experiences in childhood are stored up in the body and, although remaining unconscious, exert their influences even in adulthood.

In addition, electronic testing of the fetus has revealed a fact previously unknown to most adults: a child responds to, and develops, both tenderness and cruelty from the very beginning."

She is also convinced that the terrible savagery in Rwanda is also explained by the cruel way in which infants are socialized in that country. "Wherever I look, it is the same. What we do to our children affects all of society."

This article appeared in the September 7, 1999 Times of London, in a slightly shortened version.

https://www.alice-miller.com/en/