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 The attitudes of "poisonous pedagogy" are not restricted to outdated child-rearing manuals of the past.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)