A lecture by Alice Miller

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Alice Miller: The Childhood Trauma

I gave this lecture at the Lexington 92nd Street YWHA in New York City
on October 22, 1998, and could not answer all the questions I was
asked due to a lack of time. The audience was very interested in
getting more information and deeply involved so I can only hope to be
able to come again and to discuss these issues in a meeting with an
open end, without time limitations. If you have comments to make to
this text, you can send your letter to my publisher at the address
below. Thank you for your understanding. -Alice Miller

Letters can be sent to:
Alice Miller
c/o Pantheon
201 East 50th Street
New York NY 10022-7703
USA

Or http://www.alice-miller.com/

Alice Miller: The Childhood Trauma

Since adolescence I have wondered why so many people take pleasure in
humiliating others. Clearly the fact that some are sensitive to the
suffering of others proves that the destructive urge to hurt is not a
universal aspect of human nature. So why do some tend to solve their
problems by violence while others don't?

Philosophy failed to answer my question and the Freudian theory of the
death instinct has never convinced me. Nor could I make sense of
genetic explanations of the evil, of the naive idea that a human being
can be "born bad." Nobody could answer the crucial question: How is it
that so many turn-of-the-century German children were born with such
malignant genes that they'd later become Hitler's willing
executioners? It has always been inconceivable to me that a child who
comes into the world among attentive, loving and protective caregivers
could become a monster. Then, by closely examining the childhood
histories of murderers, especially mass murderers and dictators, I
began to comprehend the roots of good and evil: not in the genes, as
commonly believed, but in the earliest days of life. Today,
neurobiological research seems to fully corroborate what I discovered
almost twenty years ago.

At that time I quoted in For Your Own Good at length the pedagogical
advice given to parents in Germany a century ago, and detailed what I
believed to be a connection between the systematic cruelty of these
methods and the systematic cruelty of Hitler's executioners forty
years later. The numerous and widely-read tracts by Dr. Daniel
Gottlieb Schreber, the inventor of the Schrebergärten (the German word
for "small allotments"), are of major interest here. Some of his books
ran to as many as forty editions around the year 1860, and their
central concern was to instruct parents in the systematic upbringing
of infants from the very first day of life. Many people-motivated by
what they thought to be the best of intentions-complied with the
advice given them by Schreber and other authors about how best to
raise their children. Today we would call it a systematic instruction
in child persecution and maltreatment. One of Schreber's convictions
was that when babies cry they should be made to desist by the use of
spanking, assuring his readers that "such a procedure is only
necessary once, or at the most twice, and then one is master of the
child for all time. From then on, one look, one single gesture will
suffice." Above all, these books counseled that the newborn child
should be forced from the very first day to obey and to refrain from
crying.

We all know-or, today, we should all know-that physical punishment
only produces obedient children but cannot prevent them from becoming
violent or sick adults precisely because of this treatment. This
knowledge is now scientifically proven and was finally officially
accepted by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1998. Contrary to
common opinion prevalent as recently as fifteen years ago, the human
brain at birth is far from being fully developed. It is use-dependent,
needing loving stimulation for the child from her first day on. The
abilities a person's brain can develop depend on experiences in the
first three years of life.

Studies on abandoned and severely maltreated Romanian children, as an
example, revealed striking lesions in certain areas of the brain. The
repeated traumatization has led to an increased release of stress
hormones which have attacked the sensitive tissue of the brain and
destroyed the new, already built-up neurons. The areas of their brains
responsible for the "management" of their emotions are twenty to
thirty percent smaller than in other children of the same age.
Obviously, all children (not only Romanian) who suffer such
abandonment and maltreatment will be damaged in this way.

The neurobiological research makes it easier for us to understand the
way Nazis like Eichmann, Himmler, Hoss and others functioned. The
rigorous obedience training they underwent in earliest infancy stunted
the development of such human capacities as compassion and pity for
the sufferings of others. Their total emotional atrophy enabled the
perpetrators of the most heinous crimes imaginable to function
"normally" and to continue without the slightest remorse to impress
their environment with their efficiency in the years after the war.
Dr. Mengele could make the most cruel experiments with Jewish children
in Auschwitz and then live for thirty years like a "normal," well
adjusted man.

Those turn-of-the-century children who were "subjugated by looks" and
systematically subjected to obedience drilling were not only exposed
to corporal correction but also to severe emotional deprivation. The
upbringing manuals of the day described physical demonstrations of
affection such as stroking, cuddling and kissing as indications of a
doting, mollycoddling attitude. Parents were warned of the disastrous
effects of spoiling their children, a form of indulgence entirely
incompatible with the prevalent ideal of rigor and severity. As a
result, infants suffered from the absence of direct loving contact
with the parents, which also caused certain areas of the brain to
remain underdeveloped.

I found it logical that a child beaten often and deprived of loving
physical contact would quickly pick up the language of violence. For
him this language became the only effective means of communication
available. However, when I began to illustrate my thesis by drawing on
the examples of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ceaucescu, when I tried to expose
the social consequences of child maltreatment, I first encountered
strong resistance. Repeatedly I was told, "I, too, was a battered
child, but that didn't make me a criminal." When I asked these people
for details about their childhood, I was always told of a person who
made the difference, a sibling, a teacher, a neighbor, just somebody
who liked or even loved them but, at least in most cases, was unable
to protect them. Yet through his presence this person gave the child a
notion of trust and love.

I call these persons "helping witnesses." Dostoyevsky, for instance,
had a brutal father, but a loving mother. She wasn't strong enough to
protect him from his father, but she gave him a powerful conception of
love, without which his novels would have been unthinkable. Many have
also been lucky enough to find "enlightened" and courageous witnesses,
people who helped them to recognize the injustices they suffered, the
significance the hurtful treatment had for them, and its influences on
their whole life. They may even suffer much in their life, may become
drug addicted, and have relationship problems, but thanks to the few
good experiences in their childhood usually do not become criminals.
The criminal outcome seems to be connected with a childhood that
didn't provide any helping witness, that was a place of constant
threat and fear.

In my book The Untouched Key I mention the severe trauma that the
child Pablo Picasso underwent at the age of three: the earthquake in
Malaga in 1884, the flight from the family's apartment into a cave
that seemed to be more safe, and eventually witnessing the birth of
his sister in the same cave under these very scary circumstances.
However, Picasso survived these traumas without later becoming
psychotic or criminal because he was protected by his very loving
parents. They were able to give him what he most needed in this
chaotic situation: empathy, compassion, protection and the feeling of
being safe in their arms.

Thanks to the presence of his parents, the two enlightened witnesses
of his fear and pain, not only during the earthquake but also
throughout his whole childhood, he was later able to express his
early, frightening experiences in a creative way. In Picasso's famous
painting "Guernica" we can see what might have happened in the mind of
the three-year-old child while he was watching the dying people and
horses and listening to the children screaming for help on the long
walk to the shelter. Small children can go unscared even through bomb-
raids if they feel safe in the arms of their parents.

It is much more difficult for a child to overcome early
traumatizations if they are caused by their own parents. In my book
Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, which has now come out in a new edition, I
analyze the childhood of the writer Franz Kafka. I try to show that
the nightmares he describes in his stories recount exactly what might
have happened to the small, severely neglected infant Kafka. He was
born into a family in which he must have felt like the hero of The
Castle (ordered about but not needed and constantly misled) or like K.
in The Trial (charged with incomprehensible guilt) or like The Hunger
Artist who never found the food he was so strongly longing for. Thanks
to the love and the deep comprehension of his sister Otla in his
puberty, his late "helping witness," Kafka could eventually give
expression to his suffering in writing. Does it mean that he therefore
overcame his traumatic childhood? He could indeed write his work, full
of knowledge and wisdom, but why did he die so early-in his thirties-
of tuberculosis? It happened in a time when he knew many people who
loved and admired him. However, these good experiences could not erase
the unconscious emotions and memories stored in his body.

Kafka was hardly aware of the fact that the main sources of his
imagination were deeply hidden in his early childhood. Most writers
aren't. But the amnesia of an artist or writer, though sometimes a
burden for their body, doesn't have any negative consequences for
society. The readers simply admire the work and are rarely interested
in the writers' infancy . However, the amnesia of politicians or
leaders of sects does afflict countless people, and will continue to
do so, as long as society remains blind to the important connections
between the denial of traumatic experiences in early childhood and the
destructive, criminal actions of individuals.

Anyone addressing the problem of child abuse is likely to be faced
with a very strange finding: it has been observed again and again that
parents who tend to maltreat and neglect their children do it in ways
which resemble the treatment they endured in their own childhood,
without any conscious memory of their early experiences. Fathers who
sexually abuse their children are usually unaware of the fact that
they had themselves suffered the same abuse. It is rather in therapy,
even if ordered by the courts, that they can discover, sometimes
stupefied, their own history. And realize thereby that for years they
have attempted to act out their own scenario, just to get rid of it.

The explanation of this fact is that information about the cruelty
suffered during childhood remains stored in the brain in the form of
unconscious memories. For a child, conscious experience of such
treatment is impossible. If children are not to break down completely
under the pain and the fear, they must repress that knowledge. But the
unconscious memories of the child who has been neglected and
maltreated, even before he has learned to speak, drive the adult to
reproduce those repressed scenes over and over again in the attempt to
liberate himself from the fears that cruelty has left with him. Former
victims create situations in which they can assume the active role. In
this way the emotion of fear can indeed be avoided momentarily-but not
in the long term, because the repressed emotions of the past don't
change as long as they remain unnoticed. They can only be transformed
into hatred directed towards oneself and/or scapegoats, such as one's
own children or alleged enemies. I see this hatred as a possible
consequence of the old rage and despair, never consciously felt, but
stored up in the body, in the limbic brain.

The German reformer Martin Luther, for example, was an intelligent and
educated man, but he hated all Jews and he encouraged parents to beat
their children. He was no perverted sadist like Hitler's executioners.
But 400 years before Hitler he was disseminating this kind of
destructive counsel. According to Eric Ericson's biography, Luther's
mother beat him severely even before he was treated this way by his
father and his teacher. He believed this punishment had "done him
good" and was therefore justified. The conviction stored in his body
that if parents do it then it must be right to torment someone weaker
than yourself left a much more lasting impression on him than the
divine commandments and the Christian exhortations to love your
neighbor and be compassionate toward the weak.

Similar cases are discussed by Philip Greven in his highly informative
book Spare the Child. He quotes various American men and women of the
church recommending cruel beatings for babies and infants in the first
few months of life as a way of ensuring that the lesson thus learnt
remains impressed on them for the rest of their life. Unfortunately
they were only too right. These terrible, destructive texts which have
misled so many parents are the conclusive proof of the long-lasting
effect of beating. They could only have been written by people who
were exposed to merciless beatings as children and later glorified
what they had been through. Their cruel beliefs could only grow up in
the darkness of their own cruel and repressed infancy. Fortunately,
these books were not published in forty editions in the USA.

As the example of Luther shows, nothing that a child learns later
about morality at home, in school or in church will ever have the same
strong and long lasting effect as the treatment inflicted on his or
her body in the first few days, weeks and months. The lesson learned
in the first three years cannot be expunged. If the body of a child
learns from birth that tormenting and punishing an innocent creature
is the right thing to do, and that the child's suffering must not be
acknowledged, that message will always be stronger than intellectual
knowledge acquired at a later stage. Greven's examples eloquently
demonstrate that people subjected to maltreatment in childhood may go
on insisting all their lives that beatings are harmless although there
is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Can a person who still
supports corporal punishment of children be considered as somebody who
has overcome his or her abuse? He may still remain a blind victim who
refuses to face his history and to work on it. Instead he will give
destructive advice until his death and continue to ignore the child's
pain, because his view of reality is severely distorted by early
unconscious experience. On the other hand, a child protected, loved
and cherished from the outset will thrive on that experience for a
lifetime and develop empathy for others.

It is interesting that almost all rescuers of Jews during the
Holocaust who were interviewed reported that their parents had
attempted to discipline them with arguments and support rather than
punishment. They were not beaten. People given early affection and
support are quick to emulate the sympathetic and autonomous natures of
their parents. Common to all the rescuers were self-confidence, the
ability to make immediate decisions and the capacity for empathy and
compassion with others. Seventy percent of them said that it only took
them a matter of minutes to decide they wanted to intervene. Eighty
percent said they did not consult anyone else.

This attitude, prized in all cultures as "noble," is not something
instilled in children with fine words. If the behavior actually
displayed by caretakers is such as to contradict their own words, if
children are spanked in the name of lofty ideals, as is still the
custom in some parochial schools, then those elevated sentiments are
doomed to go unheard or even to provoke rage and violence. The
children may end up aping those high-minded phrases and mouthing them
in later life, but they will never put them into practice because they
have no example to emulate.

In my most recent book, Paths of Life, I try to illustrate this
dynamic by describing Hitler's childhood, a childhood that offers us
many still untouched keys. Hitler's specific problems with Jews can in
fact be traced back to the period before his birth. In her youth,
Hitler's paternal grandmother had been employed in a Jewish merchant's
household in Graz. After her return home to the Austrian village of
Braunau, she gave birth to a son-Alois, later to become Hitler's father
-and received child-support payments from the family in Graz for
fourteen years. This story, which is recounted in many biographies of
Hitler, represented a dilemma for the Hitler family. They had of
course an interest in denying that the young woman had been left with
a child either by the Jewish merchant or his son. On the other hand it
was impossible to assert that a Jew would pay child-support for so
long without good reason. Such generosity on the part of a Jew would
have been inconceivable for the inhabitants of an Austrian village.
Thus the Hitler family was faced with the insoluble dilemma of
devising a version that would serve to nullify their "disgrace."

For Alois Hitler the suspicion that he might be of Jewish descent was
insufferable in the context of the anti-Jewish environment in which he
was raised. All the plaudits he earned himself as a customs officer
were insufficient to liberate him from the latent rage at the disgrace
and humiliation visited on him through no fault of his own. The only
thing he could do with impunity was to take out this rage on his son
Adolf. According to the reports of his daughter of a former marriage,
Angela, Alois beat his son mercilessly every day. In an attempt to
exorcise his childhood fears, his son nurtured the manic delusion that
it was up to him to free not only himself of Jewish blood but also all
Germany and later the whole world. Right up to his death in the
bunker, Hitler remained a victim of this delusion because all his life
his fear of his half-Jewish father had remained locked in his
unconscious mind.

I have set out these ideas in greater detail in my book For Your Own
Good. One can find them highly unsettling and in no way sufficient to
explain Hitler's actions. Not all his actions, I agree, but certainly
his delusions. And those delusions were at the very least the
foundation of his actions, as all our unconscious emotions can become.
I can certainly picture the boy Hitler swearing vengeance on "the
Jews," those monstrous fantasy-figures of an already diseased
imagination. Consciously, he probably thought he could have led a
happy life if "the Jew" had not plunged his grandmother into the
disgrace that he and his family had to live with. And it was this that
in his eyes served to excuse the beatings he received from his father,
who, after all, was himself "a victim of the evil and omnipotent Jew."
In the mind of an angry, seriously confused child, it is only a short
step from there to the idea that all Jews should be exterminated.

Not only Jews. In the household of Hitler's family lived for years the
very unpredictable schizophrenic aunt Johanna whose behavior is
reported to have been very scary for the child. As an adult Hitler
ordered to be killed every handicapped and psychotic person to free
the German society from this burden. Germany seemed for him to
symbolize the innocent child who had to be saved. Consequently, Hitler
wanted to protect his nation from the dangers he himself had faced.
Absurd? Not at all. For an unconscious mind this kind of symbolization
might sound very normal and logical.

Besides those fears connected to father and aunt there was his early
relationship with his very intimidated mother, who herself lived in
constant fear of her husband's violent outbursts and beatings. She
called him "uncle Alois" and endured patiently his humiliating
treatment without any protest. Adolf's mother had lost her first three
children to illness and Adolf was her first child to survive infancy.
We can easily imagine that the milk he drank from his mother was in a
way "poisoned" by her own fear. He drank her milk together with her
fears but was of course unable to understand or integrate them. These
irrational fears-that an outsider, watching his speeches on videos,
can easily recognize-stayed unrecognized and unconscious to Hitler
until the end of his life. Stored up in his body, they drove him
constantly to new destructive actions in his endless attempt to find
an outcome. To his dying day, Hitler was convinced that only the death
of every single Jew could shield him from the fearful and daily memory
of his brutal father.

In the absence of positive factors, affection and helping witnesses,
the only course open to the mistreated individual seems to be the
denial of personal suffering and the idealization of cruelty with all
its devastating after-effects. Undergoing an exceedingly humiliating
and cruel upbringing at the pre-verbal stage without helping witnesses
may instill into the victim admiration of this cruelty if there is no
one in the immediate vicinity of the child to query those methods and
stand up for humane values.

Therefore it didn't surprise me that in the childhood of people who
later became dictators, I have always found a nightmarish horror, a
record of continued lies and humiliations, which, upon the attainment
of adulthood, impelled them to acts of merciless revenge on society.
These vengeful acts were always garbed in hypocritical ideologies,
purporting that the dictator's exclusive and overriding wish was the
happiness of his people. In this way, he unconsciously emulated his
own parents who, in earlier days, had also insisted that their blows
were inflicted on the child for his own good.

In the lives of all the tyrants I analyzed, I also found without
exception paranoid trains of thought bound up with their biographies
in early childhood and the repression of the experiences they had been
through. Mao had been regularly whipped by his father and later sent
30 million people to their deaths but he hardly ever admitted the full
extent of the rage he must have felt for his own father, a very severe
teacher who had tried through beatings to "make a man" out of his son.
Stalin caused millions to suffer and die because even at the height of
his power his actions were determined by unconscious, infantile fear
of powerlessness. Apparently his father, a poor cobbler from Georgia,
attempted to drown his frustration with liquor and whipped his son
almost every day. His mother displayed psychotic traits, was
completely incapable of defending her son and was usually away from
home either praying in church or running the priest's household.
Stalin idealized his parents right up to the end of his life and was
constantly haunted by the fear of dangers, dangers that had long since
ceased to exist but were still present in his deranged mind. His fear
didn't even stop after he had been loved and admired by millions.

The same might be true of many other tyrants. They often drew on
ideologies to disguise the truth and their own paranoia. And the
masses chimed in enthusiastically because they were unaware of the
real motives, including those in their own biographies. The infantile
revenge fantasies of individuals would be of no account if society did
not regularly show such naive eagerness in helping to make them come
true. Mad tyrants would not have any power if society understood that
it is their damaged brains which are constantly driving them to avoid
dangers that no longer exist.

Naturally, my references to Schreber and his methods are not
sufficient to explain the history of the Holocaust but they do explain
a lot. However, in no way should this explanation lead to an
exoneration of the perpetrators, relieving them of their
responsibility by declaring them "sick." No upbringing, however cruel,
is a license for murder. But blaming the whole thing on a defective
genetic blueprint doesn't make much sense either. As I asked befo
Why should there have been so many people born in Germany thirty or
forty years before the Holocaust with such a fateful genetic
disposition? I do not know of any gene-researcher who would try to
answer this question. It is quite absurd to assume that some people
are born with the genetic program to later become anti-Semites,
racists, lynchers or rapists. The almost total neglect or
trivialization of the infancy factor in the context of violence
sometimes leads to explanations that are not only unconvincing and
abortive but which actively deflect attention away from the genuine
roots of violence.

Also, the existence of exceptions showed again and again that
propaganda and manipulation at school alone were not sufficient to
transform people into mass murderers. Only men and women who had
experienced mental and physical cruelty in the first weeks and months
of life and had been shown no love at all could possibly have let
themselves be made into Hitler's willing executioners. As Goldhagen's
archive material shows, they needed almost no ideological
indoctrination because their bodies knew exactly what they wanted to
do as soon as they were allowed to follow their inclinations. And as
the Jews, young or old, had been declared non-persons, there was
nothing to stop them indulging those inclinations. But no amount of
indoctrination alone, at school or wherever, will unleash hatred in a
person who has no preconditions in that direction. It is well known
that there were also Germans, like Karl Jaspers, Hermann Hesse and
Thomas Mann, who immediately recognized the declaration that Jews were
non-persons as an alarm signal and the rallying cry of untrammeled
barbarism.

Doubtless there are people who grew up with loving and protecting
parents who could later find a kind, sympathetic partner, could
organize their life and become good parents, even if they had to go
through the horror of a concentration camp during their adolescence.
On the other hand, the lives of many were broken, even without
catastrophic experiences in their later life. They just couldn't find
the way to liberate themselves from their old fears, never identified
as such. From many cases of survivors I learned that it was the
quality of their infancy that determined the way they overcame later
threats, including the Holocaust.

Adults who grew up without helping witnesses need the support and
assistance of enlightened witnesses, of people who are well aware of
the dynamics of child abuse, people who can help them to take their
feelings seriously, understand them and integrate them, as part of
their own story. In an informed society, adolescents will have the
luck to talk to others about their early experiences. They will be
able to verbalize their truth and to discover themselves in their own
story, their own tragedy, without avenging themselves violently for
their wounds, or to poison their systems with drugs.

I have wrongly been attributed to the thesis according to which every
victim inevitably becomes a persecutor, a thesis that I find totally
false, indeed absurd. To say that every cow is an animal doesn't
include the statement that every animal is a cow. It has been proved
that many adults have had the good fortune to break the cycle of
abuse. Yet I can certainly aver that I have never come across
persecutors who weren't themselves victims in their childhood, though
most of them don't know it because their feelings are repressed. The
less these criminals know about themselves, the more dangerous they
are to society. So I think it is crucial to grasp the difference
between the statement, "every victim becomes a persecutor," which is
wrong, and the statement, "every persecutor was a victim in his
childhood," which I consider true. The problem is that, feeling
nothing, he remembers nothing, realizes nothing, and this is why
surveys don't always reveal the truth. Yet the presence of a warm,
enlightened witness ... therapist, social worker, lawyer, judge ...
can help the criminal unlock his repressed feelings and restore the
unrestricted flow of consciousness. This can initiate the process of
escape from the vicious circle of amnesia and violence.

Working toward a better future cannot be done without legislation that
clearly forbids corporal punishment toward children and makes society
aware of the fact that children are people too. The whole society and
its legal system can then play the role of a reliable, enlightened and
protecting witness for children at risk, children of adolescent, drug
addicted criminals who may themselves become predators without such
assistance. The only reason why a parent might smack his children is
the parent's own history. All other so-called reasons, such as poverty
and unemployment, are pure mystification. There are unemployed parents
who don't spank their children and there are many wealthy parents who
maltreat their children in the most cruel way and teach them to
minimize the terror by calling it the right education. With a law
prohibiting corporal punishment towards children, people of the next
generation will not have recorded the highly misleading information in
their brain, an almost irreversible damage. They will be able to have
empathy with a child and understand what has been done to children
over millennia. It is a realistic hope to think that then (and only
then) the human mind and behavior will change. With a law that forbids
spanking every citizen becomes an enlightened witness.

© 1998 Alice Miller. All rights reserved.

Alice Miller was the first person to make the connection between
corporal punishment and the potential damage it can do to children.
Her latest book is Paths of Life, Pantheon.

Check out Alice Miller's Web Site at http://www.alice-miller.com.

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