The Emperor's New Clothes

 "In the preceding chapter, I chose the depictions in art of the sacrifice of Isaac to suggest that it is possible for grown children to have a creative confrontation with their parents. But I do not see the symbolic content of that scene as being limited to the relationship between father and son. Everything I said about Abraham's attitude is equally valid for mothers. And of course, Isaac also symbolizes the daughter who can be hindered by both father and mother not only in her movements but also in her ability to see, speak, and breathe.

The assertion that men are solely responsible for conditions in today's world does just as little to expose and combat the presence of evil, destructive rage, violence, and perversion as does the demonization of women. Both sexes have always contributed to the genesis of the forces of evil. 

Mothers as well as fathers have considered it their duty to punish their children and have used their children to satisfy their own ambitions and other needs. Every aggressive reaction on the child's part to this abuse was suppressed, and this suppression laid the foundation for destructive behavior in adulthood. 

And yet there always have been individual parents who were capable must of giving love and who provided their children with a counterbalance for the cruelty they suffered. Above all, however, there must have been helping witnesses present in the person of nannies, household staff, aunts, uncles, siblings, or grandparents-who did not feel responsible for raising the child and who were not camouflaging cruelty as love because they had experienced love in their own childhoods. 

If this were not the case, the human race would have died out long ago. On the other hand, if there had been more mothers and fathers capable of love, our world would be different today; it would be more humane. People would also have a clear understanding of what love is because they would have experienced it in childhood, and it would be inconceivable for biographers to call something an expression of maternal love that in its essence was a prison, concentration camp, refrigerator, or brainwashing institute. Yet according to most of today's biographers, Stalin and Hitler had "loving mothers."

When punishment is held up as proof of love, children are filled with confusion, which bears bitter fruit later in life. 

If these children become involved in politics, they continue the work of destruction initiated with them in childhood, and they camouflage it by taking on the role of savior just as their parents did before them. Both Stalin and Hitler claimed that they wanted only to do good. Murder was simply the necessary means to good. This ideology was passed on to them by both parents. If this had not been so, one parent had served as a helping witness and shielded the child from the other parent's brutality and coldness, the children would not have become criminals in later life

Although it is men who make preparations for war, the confusion in their heads is the end product of child-rearing practices and ways of treating children that are attributable to men and women of past generations. The absolute power a mother has over her little child knows no limits, and yet no qualifications are required of her. It is therefore of the utmost urgency to examine more closely the effects of such unchecked power, to recognize parental power for what it is, and, through this awareness, to reduce its danger for the future.

While reflecting on these ideas, I was reminded of the fairy tale "The Emperor's New Clothes." Here a man, the emperor, symbolizes the seemingly mighty but actually helpless parents who are at the same time dangerous because of their total blindness and their great power over their children.

The Emperor's New Clothes

Many, many years ago there was an emperor who s terribly fond of beautiful new clothes that he spent money on his attire. He did not care about his soldiers attending the theatre, or even going for a drive in the pr unless it was to show off his new clothes. He had an outfit for every hour of the day. And just as we say "The king is in his council chamber," his subjects used to say. The emperor is in his clothes closet.

In the large town where the emperor's palace was life was gay and happy, and every day new visitors arrived. One day two swindlers came. They told everybody that they were weavers and that they could weave the most marvelous cloth. Not only were the colors and the patterns of their material extraordinarily beautiful, but the cloth had the strange quality of being invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office or unforgivably stupid.

"This is truly marvelous," thought the emperor. "Now if I had robes cut from that material, I should know which of my councilors was unfit for his office, and 1 would be able to pick out my clever subjects myself. They must weave some material for me!" And he gave the swindlers a lot of money so they could start working at once.

They set up a loom and acted as if they were weaving. but the loom was empty. The fine silk and gold threads they demanded from the emperor they never used but hid them in their own knapsacks. Late into the night, they would sit before their empty loom, pretending to weave.

"I would like to know how far they've come," thought the emperor; but his heart beat strangely when he remembered that those who were stupid or unfit for their office would not be able to see the material. Not that he was really worried that this would happen to him. Still, it might be better to send someone else the first time and see how he fared. Everybody in town had heard about the cloth's magic quality and most of them could hardly wait to find out how stupid or unworthy their neighbors were.

"I shall send my faithful prime minister to see the weavers," thought the emperor. "He will know how to judge the material, for he is both clever and fit for his office if any man is."

The good-natured old man stepped into the room where the weavers were working and saw the empty loom. He closed his eyes and opened them again. "God preserve me!" he thought. "I cannot see a thing!" But he didn't say it out loud.

The swindlers asked him to step a little closer so that he could admire the intricate patterns and marvelous col of the material they were weaving. They both pointed ours to the empty loom, and the poor old prime minister opened his eyes as wide as he could; but it didn't help, he still couldn't see anything.

"Am I stupid?" he thought. "I can't believe it, but if it is so, it is best no one finds out about it. But maybe I am not fit for my office. No, that is worse, I'd better not admit that I can't see what they are weaving."

"Tell us what you think of it," demanded one of the swindlers.

"It is beautiful. It is very lovely," mumbled the old prime minister, adjusting his glasses. "What patterns! What colors! I shall tell the emperor that I am greatly pleased."

"And that pleases us," the weavers said; and now they described the patterns and told which shades of color they had used. The prime minister listened attentively, so that he could repeat their words to the emperor; and that is exactly what he did. The two swindlers demanded more money, and more silk and gold thread. They said they had to use it for their weaving, but their loom remained as empty as ever.

Soon the emperor sent another of his trusted councilors to see how the work was progressing. He looked and looked just as the prime minister had, but since there was nothing to be seen, he didn't see anything. "Isn't it a marvelous piece of material?" asked one of the swindlers; and they both began to describe the beauty of their cloth again.

"I am not stupid," thought the emperor's counselor. "I must be unfit for my office. That is strange; but I'd better not admit it to anyone." And he started to praise the material, which he could not see, for the loveliness of its patterns and colors. "I think it is the most charming piece of material I have ever seen," declared the councilor to the emperor. Everyone in town was talking about the marvelous cloth that the swindlers were weaving.

At last, the emperor himself decided to see it before it was removed from the loom. Attended by the most important people in the empire, among them the prime minister and the councilor who had been there before, the emperor entered the room where the weavers were weaving furiously on their empty loom.

"Isn't it Magnifique?" asked the prime minister.

"Your Majesty, look at the colors and the patterns," said the councilor.

And the two old gentlemen pointed to the empty loom, believing that all the rest of the company could see the cloth.

"What!" thought the emperor. "I can't see a thing! Why, this is a disaster! Am I stupid? Am I unfit to be emperor? Oh, it is too horrible!" Aloud he said, "It is very lovely. It has my approval," while he nodded his head and looked at the empty loom.

All the councilors, ministers, and men of great importance who had come with him stared and stared; but they saw no more than the emperor had seen, and they said the same thing that he had said, "It is lovely." And they advised him to have clothes cut and sewn, so that he could wear them in the procession at the next great celebration.

"It is magnificent! Beautiful! Excellent!" All of their mouths agreed, though none of their eyes had seen anything. The two swindlers were decorated and given the title "Royal Knight of the Loom."

The night before the procession, the two swindlers didn't sleep at all. They had sixteen candles lighting up the room where they worked. Everyone could see how busy they were, getting the emperor's new clothes finished. They pretended to take the cloth from the loom; they cut the air with their big scissors, and sewed with needles without thread. At last, they announced: "The emperor's clothes are ready!"

Together with his courtiers, the emperor came. The swindlers lifted their arms as if they were holding something in their hands, and said, "These are the trousers. This is the robe, and here is the train. They are all as light as if they were made of spider webs! It will be as if Your Majesty had almost nothing on, but that is their special virtue."

"Oh yes," breathed all the courtiers; but they saw nothing, for there was nothing to be seen.

"Will Your Imperial Majesty be so gracious as to take off your clothes?" asked the swindlers. "Over there by the big mirror, we shall help you put your new ones on." The emperor did as he was told; and the swindlers acted as if they were dressing him in the clothes they should have made. Finally, they tied around his waist the long train which two of his most noble courtiers were to carry. The emperor stood in front of the mirror admiring the clothes he couldn't see. "Oh, how they suit you! A perfect fit!" everyone exclaimed. "What colors! What patterns! The new clothes are magnificent!"

"The crimson canopy, under which Your Imperial Majesty is to walk, is waiting outside," said the imperial master of court ceremony. "Well, I am dressed. Aren't my clothes becoming?" The emperor turned around once more in front of the mirror, pretending to study his finery.

The two gentlemen of the imperial bed-chamber fumbled on the floor, trying to find the train which they were supposed to carry. They didn't dare admit that they didn't see anything, so they pretended to pick up the train and held their hands as if they were carrying it.

The emperor walked in the procession under his crimson canopy. And all the people of the town, who had lined the streets or were looking down from the windows, said that the emperor's new clothes were beautiful. "What a magnificent robe! And the train! How well the emperor's clothes suit him!"

None of them were willing to admit that they hadn't seen a thing; for if anyone did, then he was either stupid or unfit for the job he held. Never before had the emperor's clothes been such a success.

"But he doesn't have anything on!" cried a little child. "Listen to the innocent one," said the proud father. And the people whispered among each other and repeated what the child had said.

"He doesn't have anything on. There's a little child who says that he has nothing on. "He has nothing on!" shouted all the people at last.

The emperor shivered, for he was certain that they were right; but he thought, "I must bear it until the procession is over." And he walked even more proudly, and the two gentlemen of the imperial bed-chamber went on carrying the train that wasn't there.

The belief that older people understand more about life because they supposedly have had more experience was instilled in us at such an early age that we continue to adhere to it even though we know better. Naturally, older craftsmen have more experience in their trades, and older scientists have more facts in their heads, but in both cases, their knowledge has precious little to do with wisdom.

Nevertheless, most people never give up hope that they can learn something about life from their elders, whose advanced years must imply richer experiences. Even people whose parents have long been dead will seek out parental substitutes such as priests, psychotherapists, gurus, philosophers, or writers, convinced that those who are older must know better, especially if they are famous. They wouldn't have gained recognition, the thinking goes, without some inherent justification for their fame--if the doctrines they proclaim, the values they represent, and the morality they preach didn't have significance for many others too.

And they actually do have significance. Even if the gurus and their disciples are not from the same culture, the repression of childhood experiences is common to all of them, for full awareness of early experiences is taboo in every culture, religion, and system of child-rearing. 

This situation was not noticed until after World War II, when the first scientifically substantiated reports about childhood appeared, calling into question many of the ideas that had been accepted as right and good for thousands of years. I am thinking here of René Spitz's discovery of hospitalism, John Bowlby's writings about infant abandonment and its consequences, Lloyd De Mause's new look at the history of childhood, Frederick Leboyer's revolutionary discovery that infants already have feelings at birth, and the corroboration provided by primal therapists that feelings repressed in childhood retain their potency and influence our body and mind, often for the rest of our life.

The fact that so many obstetricians still warn today against the dangers of gentle homebirth is attributable not only to their outdated training and the requirements of the hospital system but also to the stunting of their perceptive faculties. They lack the capacity to recognize that a newborn has feelings because such recognition has been blocked for them, possibly as early as the moment of their own birth or perhaps later when their own traumatic experiences are repressed. They examine the newborn infant, and even though they hear its heart-rending cries, they smile at the new mother and tell her that everything is just fine because now the baby's lungs have started to work. These physicians seem to be unaffected by the existing body of knowledge about the role of feelings in the human organism.

The above example of ignorant obstetricians attending childbirth makes clear why advanced age has nothing to do with the value of a person's experiences. Millions of women have given birth in hospitals in recent years under cruel and inhumane conditions, and no one seemed to notice that here a human creature of the tenderest age is being subjected to torture. All that was needed to change this pattern was for one obstetrician, Frederick Leboyer, to take the difficult path of discovering, with the aid of feelings, the memory of his own birth concealed in his psyche and his body. All that was needed was for him to relive his own repressed pain, and suddenly he was able to perceive for the first time what was self-evident: the cries of an infant in the delivery room are expressing pain that is altogether avoidable. To make this simple observation, he first had to overcome the resistance that each of us builds up as a child. We are entitled to this resistance, for we must protect ourselves as best we can from what is unbearable; but what happens when it makes us blind to the most obvious phenomena in our life?

Now computers are being used to help in the care of the newborn, and it has been determined that the child already begins to learn in the first hours of life. Scientists seem to be fascinated by this idea and are busily investigating various achievements of the newborn. But infants also experience feelings and hurt, even prenatally, that set the course for later life, yet these facts haven't attracted the attention of many scientists. It is true that the different functions of the newborn's body can be measured, its behavior observed, the correlates evaluated by the computer. However, as long as the adults involved have not gained access to their own childhood feelings, the infant's feelings, the cause of so many troubles in later life, go totally unnoticed.

What are we to think, then, of the wisdom of older people who had to learn as children that good behavior could be acquired only at the expense of genuine feelings and who were proud of having managed to accomplish this? Since they were not allowed to feel, they became incapable of perceiving vital facts and learning from them. 

What can these people have to tell us today? They attempt to pass on to the younger generation the same principles their parents once transmitted to them, firmly convinced that they are doing something useful and good. But these are the very principles that destroyed their ability to feel and perceive. Of what use are instructions and moral sermons if one's capacity for feeling and compassion has been lost? The most that will be achieved is to inculcate the absurdest of attitudes, which won't be perceived as such because they are shared by so many.

Thus, politicians can profess to be peace-loving Christians and at the same time advocate the production of weapons five million times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. These politicians can defend without a qualm the necessity for an absurd arms race because they learned long ago not to feel. 

It is therefore possible for those caught in this kind of mental system to plan multiple Hiroshima catastrophes and still to pray in church every Sunday for peace; what is more, they consider themselves entitled to bear the responsibility for the fate of the whole world because they are advanced in years, because they have with wars, because the last time, forty-five years ago, they took part in one. 

Yet what now awaits us hasn't the slightest to do with the way the world was forty-five years ago. The wisdom of our fathers, their experience with war, and with the destruction of feelings since childhood, can be of little help to us today.

If anything can save us from catastrophe, it is not Abraham, the old man who raises his eyes to heaven and does not see what he is doing. It is his son, who we can only hope has perhaps not completely lost his ability to feel and who, owing to this ability, can also imagine the implications of preparing for nuclear war. 

If Isaac is capable of being horrified at his father's monstrous intent and of feeling outraged without repressing this feeling or acting it out, then he will be in a position to understand things that were kept from his father all his life. It is the ability to feel that enables us to establish the right connections, to notice what is going on around us, and to relinquish the illusion that age brings wisdom. Only this painful experience will open Isaac's eyes and make him a man of action instead of a victim. 

Someone who is not allowed to feel can't learn from experience. Again and again, he will accept the so-called wisdom of his elders, which has proven to be unmistakably wrong in our generation-as, for example, "Spare the rod and spoil the child." All his life he will avoid crucial experiences because he must protect himself from pain, and this means ultimately from the truth. He must never doubt his father, must not confront him. Even when his hair has turned white, he will still be his father's obedient child.

Where does such obedience lead? It leads Abraham to the point of murdering his son for the sake of proving his devotion to God the Father, Who requires this act of him. And in our day it leads many old men to prepare for nuclear war with a clear conscience. They destroyed the feeling child in themselves long ago and in doing so learned to kill for the principles of their parents, in good conscience, without remorse, and without being able to imagine the suffering of their victims. For a long time, we were able to overlook their lack of imagination and their unawareness, thinking "for they know not what they do." But can we still afford to do this when we ourselves, like Isaac, are lying on the sacrificial altar and have not yet completely lost the capacity to imagine what nuclear war would mean? The Isaacs of today, the feeling young sons and daughters, have no alternative but to arise from the altar and confront the psychic reality of fathers preparing for war.

Isaac's actual superiority, if he were to refuse to be made the sacrificial lamb, would be based on his awareness, on the fact that he finds out what his situation is and clearly recognizes his own need: "I don't want to die for being obedient, and I don't want to kill others. I don't want to let myself be forced to kill by following absurd orders, no matter how cleverly they are packaged or accompanied by threats. I am ready to look carefully, to refuse to have my eyes bound any longer, and to find out who really has an interest in my being docile. There must be a way to prevent ourselves from repeating the war games of our fathers, and we now must search for it--- without having any models because no models exist for this situation in which we are threatened with nuclear annihilation. We can and we must rely on our own experience and on our desire to create a world in which we can live without having to kill others. Since we want to be true to this desire and not to incomprehensible orders, we are willing to take a careful look around us. We are willing to look closely at the psychic landscape of those who label us naive pacifists. We are willing to examine the sources of their reasoning and to consider whether or not it can be valid for us today."

The cry of the child in Andersen's fairy tale "But [the emperor] doesn't have anything on!"-awakens people from a mass hypnosis, restores their powers of perception, frees them from the confusion caused by the authorities, and mercilessly exposes the emptiness to which rulers, as well as masses, have fallen victim. All of this happens suddenly, sparked by the single exclamation of a child. Although these words are enormously liberating, we don't know what to do with our freedom. It is a great relief, to be sure, not to pretend to see the emperor's golden train when, despite our best efforts, we really don't see it a relief not to have to think we're stupid for not seeing one. But since our fate lies in the emperor's hands, since we have to rely on his wisdom, perceptiveness, and sense of responsibility, our discovery at first fills us with fear. Who will protect us in times of danger? It is now obvious that this emperor can't do it. He appears to be so taken with self-admiration that it would be easy to talk him into doing something foolish. That much seems clear, but only to someone who is not dependent on this emperor. If our future does depend on him, however, because he is the only one we have, we would prefer not to know what he is really like but would rather believe he will protect us when we are in trouble. For this belief we are ready to sacrifice ourselves, to doubt our own perceptions.

Like children who endure psychic death to preserve the illusion of having an intelligent, foresighted father, soldiers go to war to die for the leader who misuses them. That has been the way of the world, until recently. Many can still remember it, and those who can't are still able to see in films the pageantry surrounding Hitler and the jubilant masses. But it needn't be this way. Indeed, it must not, for the methods of misleading people and destroying them have now taken on gigantic proportions. Therefore, we can no longer afford to deny our perceptions and evade the truth, even if it is painful, for only the truth can save us. It is frightening and painful not to have a strong father when we need his strength. Yet if holding fast to illusion should mean Isaac's death and our destruction today, then the first, imperative step toward turning things around is to relinquish the illusion. Even if this step is fraught with fear, is not even conceivable without fear.

For only a little child can uninhibitedly cry out, "But he doesn't have anything on!" and then only if that child cannot yet assess the consequences of these words. Moreover, the child in Andersen's fairy tale is taken seriously by the father and therefore feels secure. But for adults who never had such a father, the liberation of their senses also endangers or even destroys a vital hope: the hope of being protected. We are horrified at the sight of the deceived emperor without his clothes when we consider that he has the power to issue orders that determine our fate. Of course, it would be more conducive to our momentary well-being to deny what we see and to go on believing that the affairs of the state are in good hands. But this would be no solution for our future or the future of our children. The Isaac of today can't afford to close his eyes again once he has opened them. Now he knows that his father is not protecting him, and he is determined to protect himself. He is determined not to look away but to examine his situation.

Abraham's upward gaze and his childlike submissiveness are a symbol for numerous experiences Isaac had had earlier without being able to understand them. Likewise, the naive and vain emperor is transformed into a little child who wants to show his father his wonderful new clothes so that the father will finally notice the son. This child, this emperor, could have said, "Father, now that I appear in all my imperial splendor, surrounded by these throngs, you can't overlook me. Now at last you will admire and love me." And the politician who tries to make us believe he has our freedom at heart (even if we should be incinerated by a nuclear bomb), raises his eyes-like Abraham-to his father, who died long ago, and asks like a child: "Haven't I done splendidly? See how well I am representing your values? See how hard I am trying to keep the world the way you described it to me sixty years ago and to keep sacred the values you held dear? See how careful I am not to let anything change, just the way you always wanted? Now, are you pleased with me? Now can you love me?" There are many varieties of politicians like this. Perhaps one had a father who always felt he was being persecuted. His son will say to him: "I won't rest until I have destroyed all your enemies. Now, are you pleased with me?"

"But what does all that have to do with my fate?" Isaac asks himself. "I can well understand the dealings old men have with their fathers, but I don't want my life to be determined by my forefathers. For what I now have to lose is not real protection but only the illusion of it."

A great many politicians claim they are doing something for us, and we want to believe what they say because we are dependent on them and because the world has become so complicated that we need experts for everything: technical experts, computer experts, and above all safeguards, more and more safeguards so that the world won't fall victim to the bomb. But what is to be done if our fear of the danger that makes such vigilance necessary unceasingly produces new dangers for the simple reason that people who are blocked by their repressed past do not want to look to the future? "What I can try to do now," thinks Isaac, "is direct my father's eyes to me, away from his forebears and to me lying here on the sacrificial altar he has prepared for me. Perhaps that will bring him to his senses, perhaps it won't. But turning my eyes to that altar and to my father has brought me to my senses. I am not willing to die, not willing to march and sing war songs. I am not willing to forget that all this has always preceded a war. I have awakened from my millennia-long sleep."

Alice Miller says it like it is -- she sticks to the facts

 "People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be--both in their youth and in adulthood--intelligent, responsive, empathic, and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves, not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience, and because it is this knowledge (and not the experience of cruelty) that has been stored up inside them from the beginning. It will be inconceivable to such people that earlier generations had to build up a gigantic war industry in order to feel comfortable and safe in this world. Since it will not be their unconscious drive in life to ward off intimidation experienced at a very early age, they will be able to deal with attempts at intimidation in their adult life more rationally and more creatively." -- Alice Miller

 Above excerpt from the Afterword to the Second Edition (1984) of the book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence by Alice Miller 

The Lie of Perfection

Nowadays almost no one makes mistakes. They are so perfect. So awesome. So winners. So evolved. So exemplary.

Always with advice on the tip of your tongue. Always with an opinion about everything.

I miss real people. 

I miss those who confess their faults and fears. I miss the people who feel and show. I miss those who are still learning. 

Artificial people disinterest me. There is a unique glow in those who wear only humanity. 

There is an incomparable beauty in those who do not hide in the lie of perfection.

- Bruno Missouri

‐------------------------------//----------------------

Hoje em dia quase ninguém erra. São tão perfeitos. Tão incríveis. Tão vencedores. Tão evoluídos.

Tão exemplares. Sempre com um conselho na ponta da língua. Sempre com uma opinião formada sobre tudo. 

Eu sinto falta de pessoas reais. Sinto falta dos que confessam as falhas e os medos.

Sinto falta das pessoas que sentem e demonstram.

Sinto falta de quem ainda está aprendendo.

Pessoa artificiais me desinteressam. 

Há um brilho único naqueles que vestem apenas a humanidade. 

Há uma beleza incomparável naqueles que não se escondem na mentira da perfeição.

- Bruno Missurino

Why so Few

 Today there are so few people who do not take pills, smoke cigarettes, or drink alcohol. Most of them resort to these things to achieve an artificial state of well-being that can divert their attention from unpleasant thoughts, rather than prompting them to try to understand them.

So how can they appreciate their true meaning or even try to? How can they realize that these feelings are their true friends, attempting to put them on track that would lead to self-knowledge?

Experience is the only thing that can bring this home to them. You have this experience, and now, to your astonishment, you find that the quality of your life has definitely changed for the better.

But you will not be able to explain this to someone in the grip of the products manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry.

They will not be able to listen to you. They will carry on “loving” their parents until they run into a crisis and suffer from depression or attacks of panic fear or both.

But there are allegedly ‘effective” remedies for that as well. Extreme intelligence is no safeguard. These people will use those remedies as a drug to help them deny their own truth.

Why do they do this? Because they are driven by the panic fear felt by the children they once were at the prospect of more beating if they should dare to see the truth or speak out about it.

So all I can say in response to your question about why so few people want to uncover their own histories is that the overwhelming majority of people in the world were beaten in early childhood.

From the book: “Free From Lies: Discovering Your True Needs” by Alice Miller

"The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears.

I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection.

And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt — and there is the story of mankind." John Steinbeck, East of Eden, 1952

I'm Definitely not Good for Business

Watching Bill Maher's vedio "let the population collapse" brought to mind the words below by Matt Haig.

Elon Musk is living in fear – his unresolved repressed fears of the child he once was -- are now being triggered by his fears of running out of slaves and customers. 

"THE WORLD IS increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn't very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-aging moisturizer? You make someone worry about aging. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind.

To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business." Matt Haig

Abused child sympathizing/identifying fully with the parent is much like Stockholm Syndrome

 Monday, August 15, 2005

Dear Alice Miller,

 … I am currently reading 'Banished Knowledge. It is amazing. I am extremely impressed and think AM is very brave to go up against all of the opposition that you get from people. (My mother used to express her anger & resentment at the suggestion that the {criminal} behavior of convicted criminals might have something to do with how they were raised; as if the criminals were going to be "let off" if they weren't completely blamed & damned as being a self-contained case of living evil in action, with no cause. But, funnily enough, she was abusive to her kids, so no big surprises there, I suppose. And she herself was a battered child - go figure.)

Anyhow, it just occurred to me that some children's experiences (I know mine was) are very similar to the experience of being a terrorized captive, and I think it's interesting that the phenomenon of the abused child sympathizing/identifying fully with the parent is much like Stockholm Syndrome. And I wondered if you had noticed or thought about this. (You probably have, but I just wondered).

 Kind regards,

 J.D.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 Here is some text I copied from

http://www.yahoodi.com/peace/stockholm.html

The Stockholm Syndrome is an emotional attachment, a bond of interdependence between captive and captor that develops 'when someone threatens your life, deliberates, and doesn't kill you.' (Symonds, 1980) The relief resulting from the removal of the threat of death generates intense feelings of gratitude and fear which combine to make the captive reluctant to display negative feelings toward the captor or terrorist.

Victims have to concentrate on survival, requiring avoidance of direct, honest reactions to destructive treatment. Become highly attuned to the pleasure and displeasure reactions of victimizers. As a result, victims know much about their captors, but less about themselves. Victims are encouraged to develop psychological characteristics pleasing to captors: dependency, lack of initiative, inability to act, decide, think, etc. Both actively develop strategies for staying alive, including denial, attentiveness to the victimizer's wants, fondness for the victimizer accompanied by fear, fear of interference by authorities, and adoption of the victimizer's perspective. Hostages are overwhelmingly grateful to terrorists for giving them life. They focus on the captor's kindnesses, not his acts of brutality. Battered women assume that the abuser is a good man whose actions stem from problems that she can help him solve.

Both feel fear, as well as love, compassion, and empathy toward a captor who has shown them any kindness. Any acts of kindness by the captors will help ease the emotional distress they have created and will set the stage for emotional dependency of Counterproductive Victim Responses

 Denial of terror and anger, and the perception of their victimizers as omnipotent people help to keep victims psychologically attached to victimizers. High anxiety functions to keep victims from seeing available options. Psychophysical stress responses develop.

 NOTES:

 Excerpts from, Domestic Violence Response Training Curriculum, November 1991, by Jeri Martinez

Answer from AM to JD:

 I am glad that you mentioned the Stockholm Syndrome. It is absolutely the same mechanism that works for a child. The Stockholm Syndrome has been discovered after a bank robbery followed by taking hostages for almost a whole week. Now, imagine that being under constant terror is a permanent condition for many years. The consequences of having been a hostage are more serious and lingering because the fear of a mortal danger was inflicted at a time when the brain of the child has not yet been structured.

 Beaten children are not allowed to defend themselves. In order to survive, they must deny the endured brutality, suppress their rage, and believe that they are bad. In order to make sense of what happens they feel guilty, they feel like deserving the beatings. As grown-ups they don’t even know that they survived a terror, they will tell you: I have been spanked but this didn’t kill me. They learn so early to believe in lies that they continue to live with these lies and produce new generations of unconscious people. They say: The Bible tells us we should not spare the rod and the child must learn the difference between right and wrong. The truth is that the child learns the wrong lesson, that spanking is harmless, while spanking children is the most brutal crime because it kills in the children the capacity to think, to feel, and to have empathy with themselves and others.

http://www.alice-miller.com/en/message-from-j-d/

Child mistreatment: a family tradition

Once we have identified the dynamics of compulsive repetition, we will find it in all families where children are mistreated. Frequently the kind of abuse exercised on children has a long history. The same patterns of humiliation, neglect, exertion of power, and sadism can often be traced back over several generations. To evade the horror this involves, we keep on dreaming up new theories.

Some psychologists suggest that the sufferings of their clients derive not from their own childhood but from the histories and problems of distant ancestors that they attempt to resolve with their illnesses. Such theories have a palliative effect. They save us from having to imagine the sheer hell these clients went through in their youth, and they spare us indignation. But much like the genetic fallacy, this is in fact nothing other than an attempt to escape the painful reality of the matter. It is absurd to interpret genocide or the increase of violence, say in present-day Iraq, [Now Ukraine] as a consequence of destructive genes. Why should so many people with destructive genes have suddenly been born in the era of Hitler or Milosevic? Yet many intellectuals believe implicitly and unhesitatingly in such explanations. They subscribe to the notion of intrinsic evil to spare themselves the pain involved in admitting that, whatever justifications may be trotted out to disguise such violence, the real reason why numerous parents torment their children is unconscious hatred. But this is the truth. And once we decide to look it in the face, there are real benefits to be gained from that decision. It enables us to forsake the medieval belief in the devil ("rogue genes").

The chain of violence is shown up for what it is, and we realize that we can do something to break that chain. Sadistic parents do not fall from the skies. They were treated just as sadistically in their childhood, there is no doubt about that. To assert the opposite is to evade the simple fact that in the formative years of their lives tormented children suffer not only one death, like a murderer's victim, but countless psychic deaths and tortures at the hands of the people they are dependent on and cannot find a substitute for. The German news media recently reported the death of a seven-year-old girl named Jessica, who was starved to death by her mother and only weighed 18 pounds when she died.

The press was horrified, and there was a funeral ceremony for Jessica, with flowers, candles, and fine words, as is appropriate in such a case. All over the world dead and unborn children are loved and mourned for. But the sufferings of living children are persistently trivialized. Neither at the ceremony nor in the press did anyone ask how a mother can leave her child to starve, how she could look on imperviously as the little body wasted away, why there was no feeling of compassion, why she left the child alone in her torment.

It is hard for us to imagine such sadism, although we are only sixty years away from Auschwitz, the place where millions were intentionally starved and left to stare certain death in the face. But neither then, nor later, nor today has there been any inquiry into the question of how people become so sadistic. How were they brought up, how were they deprived of the capacity to rebel against such wrongs, to recognize their parents' cruelty, to defend themselves against it? Instead, they were taught to approve their parents' sadism in all its forms.

And this succeeded so completely because children want to love their parents and prefer not to look the truth in the face. The truth is too awful for these children to bear, so they avert their eyes. But the body remembers everything, and as adults, those children unconsciously and automatically rehearse their parents' sadism on their own children, on their subjects or employees, on everyone dependent on them. They do not know that they are doing to others precisely what their parents did to them when they were in a state of complete and utter dependence. Some may suspect the fact and seek therapeutic aid. But what do they find?

Therapy: neutrality versus partiality

When I trained to be a psychoanalyst a great deal of importance was attached to the analyst's neutrality. This was one of the basic rules considered since Freud to be self-evident and required to be strictly observed at all times. At that point, I had no idea that there was any connection between this stricture and the compulsion to protect the patient's parents from any kind of blame. My colleagues seemed to have no difficulty maintaining their neutrality, they appeared to have no interest in empathizing with the torments suffered by a beaten and humiliated child exposed to incestuous exploitation.

Perhaps some of them had been the victims of such cruelty. But in their training, they were themselves treated with the neutrality demanded by Freud, so they had no opportunity of discovering the pain they had been denying all along. To be able to break with that denial, they would have needed not a neutral therapist but a partial one, someone who sided unequivocally with the tormented child and displayed indignation at the wrongs done to that child before the client is capable of doing so.

The point is that at the outset of therapy most clients do not feel any indignation. Though they recount facts that invite revulsion and indignation, they have no sense of rebellion, not only because they are dissociated from their feelings but because they do not know that parents can be any different. My experience has repeatedly shown me that my genuine indignation at what clients have been through in their childhood is an important vehicle of therapy.

This becomes especially apparent in group therapy. Individual members of the group may tell us calmly, possibly even with a smile, that they were locked in a dark cellar for hours if they dared to contradict their parents. This will arouse a murmur of horror among the other members. But the person telling the story is not yet capable of such feelings, they have no basis for comparisons. For them this treatment is normal. I have also met people who spent years in primal therapy and who had no difficulty in weeping over the sufferings they had been through in their childhood. But they were still far from feeling any indignation at the incestuous exploitation or the perverted ritual beatings they had suffered at the hands of their parents.

They believed that such inflictions are a normal part of any childhood and that the simple re-discovery of their former feelings would heal them. But this is not always the case, and certainly not if the strong attachment to their unconscious parents and the expectations they have of them continue to subsist. I believe that this attachment and these expectations cannot be resolved as long as the therapist remains neutral.

This has struck me in my discussions with therapists working quite correctly with their clients on access to their emotions but still subject to the idealization of their own parents. They could only help their clients when they had been encouraged to admit their own feelings and consequently to express the indignation aroused in them, as therapists, by the perversions inflicted on the clients by their parents. The effect of this is frequently very striking.

It is like clearing away a dam that has been blocking the course of a river. Sometimes the therapist's indignation will quickly release a veritable avalanche of indignation in the client. But this is not always the case. Some clients need weeks, months, even years before this happens. But the open display of indignation on the part of the therapist as a witness ultimately sets off a process of liberation that has previously been impeded by the moral standards upheld by society.

This unleashing of emotion is due to the free and committed attitude of a therapist able to show the former child that it is legitimate to be scandalized at the behavior of one's parents, that EVERY FEELING INDIVIDUAL WOULD BE SCANDALIZED, WITH THE SOLE EXCEPTION OF THE PERSON WHO HAS ACTUALLY BEEN THIS TORMENTED CHILD. My remarks on this point may be understood as an attempt on my part to write a prescription for therapists, advising them to develop feelings of indignation so as to help their clients achieve this breakthrough. But that would be a major misunderstanding. I cannot advise someone to have feelings they do not have, and no one can possibly follow such advice.

However, I assume that there are therapists who are sincerely indignant when they hear of the scandalous behavior of their clients' parents. It is entirely possible that some of them believe that they should not give expression to this indignation because in their training they have been told that this must be avoided at all costs.

From Freud's school of thought, they may even have learned to regard their feelings as "countertransference," i.e. as a mere "personal" reaction to their clients' feelings. This way they have accustomed themselves to avoiding the perception and expression of their own feelings, their simple and eminently understandable response to cruelty.

The general tendency to evade feelings of indignation is understandable because this feeling can easily spark off a perception of childlike impotence and memories of a time when some of us were hopelessly exposed to the sadism of adults and unable to defend ourselves.

The fact that despite all my efforts I myself am still not entirely free of this instinctive evasion was brought home to me recently by a letter from one of my readers. She wrote that her daughter was working for an emergency telephone service for the victims of the ritual mistreatment of children and had found out that in isolated cases children had been forced to kill babies. This reminded me that in my book Banished Knowledge I had written that the tortured child believes it has killed the baby in itself when it is forced to lie or to hold its tongue. But in perverted and sadistic rituals, it now becomes apparent that children may be literally forced to kill babies, in the same way as they are sometimes forced to torment animals.

It is understandable that we should prefer not to hear about these things and to regard people who engage in such practices as monsters. But as we are increasingly confronted with terrorist violence, we cannot afford to demonize perversion and close our eyes to the way in which people who practice such sadistic rituals were turned into sadists in the first place. The production of perversion goes on unhindered. And if we do not learn to understand the connections and prevent parents from the exercise of their perverted upbringing rituals, then humanity is ultimately doomed to be wiped out by its own deeply rooted ignorance. Alice Miller

From the article: Taking It Personally: Indignation as a Vehicle of Therapy

Read more: http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php?lang=en&nid=54&grp=11