Synopsis
An analysis of the roots of violence examines the impact of traditional child rearing practices on human violence in adulthood
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For Your Own Good
How Child-Rearing Crushes Spontaneous Feelings: Glimpses of a Revered Tradition"Poisonous Pedagogy"Punishment followed on a grand scale. For ten days, an unconscionable length of time, my father blessed the palms of his child's outstretched, four-year-old hands with a sharp switch. Seven strokes a day on each hand: that makes one hundred forty strokes and then some. This put an end to the child's innocence. Whatever it was that happened in Paradise involving Adam, Eve, Lilith, the serpent, and the apple, the well-deserved Biblical thunderbolt of prehistoric times, the roar of the Almighty and His pointed finger signifying expulsion-I know nothing about all that. It was my father who drove me out of Paradise.CHRISTOPH MECKEL
Whoever inquires about our childhood wants to know something about our soul. If the question is not just a rhetorical one and the questioner has the patience to listen, he will come to realize that we love with horror and hate with an inexplicable love whatever caused us our greatest pain and difficulty.ERIKA BURKARTIntroductionANYONE who has ever been a mother or father and is at all honest knows from experience how difficult it can be for parents to accept certain aspects of their children. It is especially painful to have to admit this if we really love our child and want to respect his or her individuality yet are unable to do so. Intellectual knowledge is no guarantee of understanding and tolerance. If it was never possible for us to relive on a conscious level the rejection we experienced in our own childhoodand to work it through, then we in turn will pass this rejection on to our children. A merely intellectual knowledge of the laws of child development does not protect us from irritation or anger if our child's behavior does not correspond to our expectations or needs or if--even worse--it should pose a threat to our defense mechanisms.It is very different for children: they have no previous history standing in their way, and their tolerance for their parents knows no bounds. The love a child has for his or her parents ensures that their conscious or unconscious acts of mental cruelty will go undetected. Descriptions of what can be done to children without fear of reprisal are readily available in recent works dealing with the history of childhood (cf., for example, Philippe Ariès, Lloyd de Mause, Morton Schatzman, and Ray E. Helfer and C. Henry Kempe [see Bibliography]).The former practice of physically maiming, exploiting, and abusing children seems to have been gradually replaced in modern times by a form of mental cruelty that is masked by the honorific term child-rearing. Since training in many cultures begins in infancy during the initial symbiotic relationship between mother and child, this early conditioning makes it virtually impossible for the child to discover what is actually happening to him. The child's dependence on his or her parents' love also makes it impossible in later years to recognize these traumatizations, which often remain hidden behind the early idealization of the parents for the rest of the child's life.
In the mid-nineteenth century a man named Schreber, the father of a paranoid patient described by Freud, wrote a series of books on child-rearing. They were so popular in Germany that some of them went through forty printings and were translated into several languages. In these works it is stressed again and again that children should start being trained as soon as possible, even as early as their fifth month of life, if the soil is to be "kept free of harmful weeds." I have encountered similar views in parents' letters and diaries, which provide the outsider with a clear indication of the underlyingcauses of the serious illnesses that developed in their children, who were later to become my patients. But initially, these patients of mine were unable to derive much benefit from these diaries and had to undergo long and deep analysis before they could begin to see the truth in them. First they had to become detached from their parents and develop their own individuality.The conviction that parents are always right and that every act of cruelty, whether conscious or unconscious, is an expression of their love is so deeply rooted in human beings because it is based on the process of internalization that takes place during the first months of life--in other words, during the period preceding separation from the primary care giver.Two passages from Dr. Schreber's advice to parents, written in 1858, will illustrate the method of raising children prevalent at the time:The little ones' displays of temper as indicated by screaming or crying without cause should be regarded as the first test of your spiritual and pedagogical principles ... . Once you have established that nothing is really wrong, that the child is not ill, distressed, or in pain, then you can rest assured that the screaming is nothing more than an outburst of temper, a whim, the first appearance of willfulness. Now you should no longer simply wait for it to pass as you did in the beginning but should proceed in a somewhat more positive way: by quickly diverting its attention, by stern words, threatening gestures, rapping on the bed ... or if none of this helps, by appropriately mild corporal admonitions repeated persistently at brief intervals until the child quiets down or falls asleep ... .This procedure will be necessary only once or at most twice, and then you will be master of the child forever. From now on, a glance, a word, a single threatening gesture will be sufficient to control the child. Remember that this will be of the greatest benefit to your child since it will spare him many hours of agitation inimicable to his successful growth, freeing him from all those inner torments that can, moreover, very easily lead to a proliferation of pernicious character traits that will become increasingly difficult to conquer. [Quoted in Morton Schatzman, Soul Murder]Dr. Schreber doesn't realize that what he is in fact attempting to curb in children are his own impulses, and there is no doubt in his mind that he is recommending the exercise of power purely for the child's own good:If parents are consistent in this, they will soon be rewarded by the emergence of that desirable situation in which the child will be controlled almost entirely by a parental glance alone.Children raised in this way frequently do not notice, even at an advanced age, when someone is taking advantage of them as long as the person uses a "friendly" tone of voice.I have often been asked why I refer mostly to mothers and so seldom to fathers in Prisoners of Childhood: The Drama of the Gifted Child. I designate the most important care giver in the child's first year of life as the "mother." This does not necessarily have to be the biological mother or even a woman. In Prisoners of Childhood I took pains to point out that looks expressing disapproval and rejection that are directed at the infant can contribute to the development of severe disturbances, including perversions and compulsion neuroses, in the adult. In the Schreber family it was not the mother who "controlled" her two infant sons with "glances," it was the father. (Both sons later suffered from mental illness accompanied by delusions of persecution.) In the last decades, however, there has been an increasing number of fathers who have assumed positive maternal functions and have been able to give their child tenderness and warmth and to empathize with his or her needs. In contrast to the era of the patriarchal family, we now find ourselves in a phase of healthy experimentation with sex roles, and this being the case, I have difficulty speaking about the "social roles" of the father or mother without resorting to outdated normative categories. I can only state that every small child needs an empathic and not a "controlling" human being (whether it be father or mother) as care giver.
An enormous amount can be done to a child in the first two years: he or she can be molded, dominated, taught goodhabits, scolded, and punished--without any repercussions for the person raising the child and without the child taking revenge. The child will overcome the serious consequences of the injustice he has suffered only if he succeeds in defending himself, i.e., if he is allowed to express his pain and anger. If he is prevented from reacting in his own way because the parents cannot tolerate his reactions (crying, sadness, rage) and forbid them by means of looks or other pedagogical methods, then the child will learn to be silent. This silence is a sign of the effectiveness of the pedagogical principles applied, but at the same time it is a danger signal pointing to future pathological development. If there is absolutely no possibility of reacting appropriately to hurt, humiliation, and coercion, then these experiences cannot be integrated into the personality; the feelings they evoke are repressed, and the need to articulate them remains unsatisfied, without any hope of being fulfilled. It is this lack of hope of ever being able to express repressed traumata by means of relevant feelings that most often causes severe psychological problems. We already know that neuroses are a result of repression, not of events themselves. I shall try to demonstrate that neuroses are not the only tragic consequences of repression.Because this process does not begin in adulthood but in the very first days of life as a result of the efforts of often well-meaning parents, in later life the individual cannot get to the roots of this repression without help. It is as though someone has had stamped on his back a mark that he will never be able to see without a mirror. One of the functions of psychotherapy is to provide the mirror.It is true that psychotherapy is still a privilege of a minority, and its achievements are often questioned. But having witnessed in case after case the forces that are set free when the results of a cruel upbringing are counteracted; having seen how these forces would otherwise have to be mobilized on all fronts to destroy vital spontaneity in oneself and in others because this quality has been regarded as bad and threatening from an early age, I want to communicate to society something of what I have learned in the therapeuticprocess. Society has a right to know, to the extent that this is at all possible, what actually takes place in the analytic setting; for what comes to light there is not only the private affair of a few ill or disturbed people; it concerns us all.Breeding Grounds of HatredGUIDES TO CHILD-REARING FROM TWO CENTURIESFOR a long time I asked myself how I could go about giving a vivid and not purely intellectual portrayal of what is done to many children in their earliest days and the consequences this has for society. How could I best tell others, I often wondered, what it is people have discovered concerning the beginning of their life after having gone through a lengthy and laborious process of reconstruction? In addition to the difficulty involved in presenting this material, there is the old dilemma: on the one hand, there is my pledge of professional secrecy; on the other, my conviction that principles are at work here that ought not to remain the special knowledge of a few insiders. Furthermore, I am aware of the resistance on the part of the reader who has not been in analysis, of the guilt feelings that arise when cruel treatment is discussed and the way to mourning still remains blocked. What, then, should be done with this sad fund of knowledge?We are so used to perceiving everything we hear in terms of moralizing rules and regulations that sometimes even pure information may be interpreted as a reproach and thus cannot be absorbed at all. We justifiably resist new exhortations if moral demands were frequently imposed upon us at too young an age. Love of one's neighbor, altruism, willingness to sacrifice--how splendid these words sound and yet what cruelty can lie hidden in them simply because they are forced upon a child at a time when the prerequisites for altruism cannotpossibly be present. Coercion often nips the development of these prerequisites in the bud and what then remains is a lifelong condition of strain. This is like soil too hard for anything to grow in, and the only hope at all of forcibly producing the love demanded of one as a child lies in the upbringing given one's own children, from whom one then demands love in the same merciless fashion.For this reason, it is my intention to refrain from all moralizing. I definitely do not want to say someone ought or ought not to do this or that (for example, ought not to hate), for I consider maxims of this sort to be useless. Rather, I see it as my task to expose the roots of hatred, which only a few people seem to recognize, and to search for the explanation of why there are so few of these people.
I was giving serious thought to these questions when I came upon Katharina Rutschky's Schwarze Pädagogik (Black Pedagogy), a collection of excerpts from books on child-rearing, published in Germany in 1977. These texts describe all the techniques, which I refer to in this book as "poisonous pedagogy," that are used to condition a child at an early age not to become aware of what is really being done to him or her; they offer clear corroboration on a concrete level of the conjectural reconstructions I have arrived at in the long course of my analytic work. This gave me the idea of juxtaposing certain passages from this excellent but very lengthy book so that with their help readers can answer for themselves and on their own personal terms the following questions I shall be raising: How were our parents brought up? How were they permitted--even forced--to treat us? How could we, as young children, have become aware of this? How could we have treated our own children differently? Can this vicious circle ever be broken? And finally, is our guilt any less if we shut our eyes to the situation?It may be that I am trying to attain something with these texts that either is not possible at all or is completely superfluous. For as long as you are not allowed to see something, you have no choice but to overlook it, to misunderstand it, toprotect yourself against it in one way or another. But if you have already perceived it for yourself, then you don't need me to tell you about it. Although this observation is correct, I still do not want to give up the attempt, for it strikes me as worthwhile, even though at the moment only a few readers may profit from these excerpts.I believe the quotations I have chosen will reveal methods that have been used to train children not to become aware of what was being done to them--not only "certain children" but more or less all of us (and our parents and forebears). I use the word reveal here although there was nothing secretive about these writings; they were widely distributed and went through numerous editions. We of the present generation can learn something from them that concerns us personally and was still hidden from our parents. Reading them, we may have the feeling of getting to the bottom of a mystery, of discovering something new but at the same time long familiar that until now has simultaneously clouded and determined our lives. This was my own ...
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