These are not Miller’s words. She is quoting an excerpt from The Continuum Concept, a work by her fellow psychotherapist Jean Liedloff. Miller uses this excerpt as a kind of interlude in her text, positioned between one chapter and the next. The excerpt continues…
He awakens in a mindless terror of the silence, the motionlessness. He screams. He is afire from head to foot with want, with desire, with intolerable impatience. He gasps for breath and screams until his head is filled and throbbing with the sound. He screams until his chest aches, until his throat is sore. He can bear the pain no more and his sobs weaken and subside. He listens. He opens and closes his fists. He rolls his head from side to side. Nothing helps. It is unbearable. He begins to cry again, but it is too much for his strained throat; he soon stops: He stiffens his desire-racked body and there is a shadow of relief. He waves his hands and kicks his feet. He stops, able to suffer, unable to think, unable to hope. He listens. Then he falls asleep again.
Why Miller uses the excerpt in this way -- and why I’m going to quote it in full -- is because it is both dramatically moving and central to the entire thesis of Thou Shalt Not Be Aware.
When he awakens he wets his diaper and is distracted from his torment by the event. But the pleasant feeling of wetting and the warm, damp, flowing sensation around his lower body are quickly gone. The warmth is now immobile and turning cold and clammy. He kicks his legs. Stiffens his body. Sobs. Desperate with longing, his lifeless surroundings wet and uncomfortable, he screams through his misery until it is stilled by lonely sleep.
That thesis? Be warned. It says something dark about each and every one of us, and a vast conspiracy of silence and betrayal that has been perpetrated against us.
Suddenly he is lifted; his expectations come forward for what is to be his. The wet diaper is taken away. Relief. Living hands touch his skin. His feet are lifted and a new, bone-dry, lifeless cloth is folded around his loins. In an instant it is as though the hands had never been there, nor the wet diaper. There is no conscious memory, no inkling of hope. He is in unbearable emptiness, timeless, motionless, silent, wanting, wanting. His continuum tries its emergency measures, but they are all meant for bridging short lapses in correct treatment or for summoning relief from someone, it is assumed, who will want to provide it. His continuum has no solution for this extremity. The situation is beyond its vast experience. The infant, after breathing air for only a few hours, has already reached a point of disorientation from his nature beyond the saving powers of the mighty continuum. His tenure in the womb was the last he is ever likely to know of the interrupted state of well-being in which it is his innate expectation that he will spend his lifetime. His nature is predicated upon the assumption that his mother is behaving suitably and that their motivations and consequent actions will naturally serve one another.
It is this:
It has always been taken for granted that children are responsible for what was done to them, and it has been essential that when children grow up, they not be aware of the true nature of their past. In return, they are given the right to treat their own children in the same fashion.
And in that thesis, we see how mistaken Liedloff’s little infant is.
Someone comes and lifts him deliciously through the air. He is in life. He is carried a bit too gingerly for his taste, but there is motion. Then he is in his place. All the agony he has undergone is nonexistent. He rests in the enfolding arms, and though his skin is sending no message of relief from the cloth, no news of live flesh on his flesh, his hands and mouth are reporting normal. The positive pleasure of life, which is continuum normal, is almost complete. The taste and texture of the breast are there, the warm milk is flowing into his eager mouth, there is a heartbeat, which should have been his link, his reassurance of continuity from the womb, there is movement perceptible to his dim vision. The sound of the voice is right, too. There is only the cloth and the smell (his mother uses cologne) that leave something missing. He sucks and when he feels full and rosy, dozes off.
It is a radical thesis, especially in the world of psychotherapy, because it is in direct opposition to Freud, who would claim that Miller’s thesis, that children are responsible for what was done to them, is true (in fact, is the very basis of psychoanalysis) and not the sociological fraud that Miller claims that it is.
Freud called it his drive theory, which includes his concepts of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. It is something he derived from his discussions and examinations of patients suffering from hysteria.
In his lecture, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” published in 1896, Freud reports with great clarity, directness, and persuasiveness (at least for the reader of today) that in all eighteen cases of hysterical illness treated by him (six men and twelve women) he discovered in the course of the analytic work repression of sexual abuse by an adult or by an older sibling who had in turn previously been abused by adults. None of the eighteen patients was aware of this fact when treatment began, and Freud contends that their symptoms would not have appeared if these early memories had remained conscious. He is describing facts whose emergence came as a surprise even to him, and as a curious scientist of integrity he could hardly ignore this evidence; he seeks his audience’s understanding in spite of the moral indignation he feels himself. Sometimes one has the impression that he is trying to convince himself as well as his audience, because the facts in question strike him as monstrous. How was someone at the turn of the century who had learned to regard all adults as respected authority figures and who could not yet have any inkling of the knowledge we have today of ambivalence, the crucial importance of early childhood experiences, and the power of the repetition compulsion in the adult’s unconscious come to terms with such a discovery? Understandably, he was horrified and was inclined to pass moral judgment, something we as analysts of adults who abuse their children can perhaps not avoid until we have been able to experience with them the inner distress that goes with these acts. But Freud obviously had no knowledge at that point of the later ramifications of his finding, and he therefore had no choice but to consider these adults perverse. Since they were parents and therefore had to be respected at any cost, Freud was continually tempted not to believe what he discovered about his patients.
In other words, we are taught to trust authority, and under that banner authority abuses us, again and again. In the case of parents and children, that means for generations without end.
When he awakens he is in hell. No memory, no hope, no thought can bring the comfort of his visit to his mother into this bleak purgatory. Hours pass and days and nights. He screams, tires, sleeps. He wakes and wets his diaper. By now there is no pleasure in the act. No sooner is the pleasure of relief prompted by his innards than it is replaced, as the hot, acid urine touches his by-now chafed body, by a searing crescendo of pain. He screams. His exhausted lungs must scream to override the fiery stinging. He screams until the pain and screaming use him up before he falls asleep.
At his not unusual hospital the busy nurses change all diapers on schedule, whether they are dry, wet, or long wet, and send infants home chafed raw, to be healed by someone who has time for such things.
Miller will argue that from this first and simple inability to place blame on the authority figures that committed the abuse, the entirety of Freud’s drive theory was derived. When offered up to the psychological community, it was devoured in total, no student, like the innocent children of abuse, able to interpret the teachings of their betters outside any other context. It was true because those in authority said that it was. Miller calls this “poisonous pedagogy,” and much of her work is dedicated to illuminating its debilitating effects.
If it is an axiom of psychoanalytic training that everything that happened to the patient in childhood was the result of his drive conflicts, then sooner or later the patient must be taught to regard himself as wicked, destructive, megalomanic, or homosexual without understanding the reasons for his particular behavior. For those narcissistic traumas -- humiliation, rejection, mistreatment -- inflicted on the child and traditionally considered a normal part of child-rearing are not touched upon and thus cannot be experienced by the patient. Yet it is only by addressing these concrete situations that we can help the patient acknowledge his feelings of rage, hatred, indignation, and eventually, grief.
By the time he is taken to his mother’s home (surely it cannot be called his) he is well versed in the character of life. On a preconscious plane that will qualify all his further impressions, as it is qualified by them, he knows life to be unspeakably lonely, unresponsive to his signals, and full of pain.
But he has not given up. His vital forces will try forever to reinstate their balances, as long as there is life.
For some patients, this poisonous pedagogy becomes downright sadistic, something to be rebelled against rather than to buckle under and accept. Miller documents one such patient at some length.
In [this patient’s] report, the tragic traces of “poisonous pedagogy” are particularly striking. They can be seen not only in the approaches of the psychoanalytic training institutes, which often appear to have a veritable horror of originality, but, most tragically, in the years of wasted effort on the part of the patient and both [of her] analysts, all of whom were prevented from gaining access to the narcissistic traumas of early childhood because they were inhibited by the unspoken commandment to spare the parents and blame the child. For this reason, what [the patient] reports about her childhood, her parents, and her brothers remains sketchy and devoid of strong feelings … Now all [this patient’s] outrage is directed against psychoanalysis and her second analyst, who did not understand her. Would this woman have been able to struggle against her feelings for four years and bear such torment if she had not been brought up to ignore her inner voice and keep a stiff upper lip? The adults who figured in her early childhood are spared her rage, however. This is the rule, for the more or less conscious goal of adults in rearing infants is to make sure they will never find out later in life that they were trained not to become aware of how they were manipulated. Without “poisonous pedagogy” there would be no “poisonous psychoanalysis,” for patients would react negatively from the very beginning if they were misunderstood, ignored, not listened to, or belittled in order to be forced into a Procrustean bed of theories.
It is a vicious cycle. We are raised to ignore the abuse we have suffered, and when it causes a psychosis and we seek help, we are told that we are to blame for that abuse -- by someone who him or herself has been raised to ignore the abuse he or she has suffered, and taught to blame those abused for the abuse.
Home is essentially indistinguishable from the maternity ward except for the chafing. The infant’s waking hours are passed in yearning, wanting, and interminable waiting for rightness to replace the silent void. For a few minutes a day, his longing is suspended and his terrible skin-crawling need to be touched, to be held and moved about, is relieved. His mother is one who, after much thought, has decided to allow him access to her breast. She loves him with a tenderness she has never known before. At first, it is hard for her to put him down after his feeding, especially because he cries so desperately when she does. But she is convinced that she must, for her mother has told her (and she must know) that if she gives in to him now he will be spoiled and cause trouble later. She wants to do everything right; she feels for a moment that the little life she holds in her arms is more important than anything else on earth.
Because it is exactly this cycle -- the broken breaking the innocent because they are broken -- that Miller is primarily railing against.
Just as educators are convinced that their pedagogical measures are necessary for the child’s present and future well-being (and not for fulfilling their own needs), many psychotherapists honestly believe that their manipulative techniques are of life-sustaining importance for the patient and are not aware that they serve as a sometimes grandiose way of defending themselves against their own insecurity.
And it is this process that we especially see in the lengthy Liedloff excerpt -- all of it so much more painfully obvious because of how innocent a newborn baby has to be.
She sighs, and puts him gently in his crib, which is decorated with yellow ducklings and matches his whole room. She has worked hard to furnish it with fluffy curtains, a rug in the shape of a giant panda, white dresser, Bathinette and changing table equipped with powder, oil, soap, shampoo, and hairbrush, all made and packed in colors especially for babies. There are pictures on the wall of baby animals dressed as people. The chest of drawers is full of little undershirts, slumbersuits, bootees, caps, mittens, and diapers. There is a toy woolly lamb stood at a beguiling angle on top, and a vase of flowers -- which have been cut off from their roots, for his mother also “loves” flowers.
Because of course we are all innocent as babies and Freud’s drive theory is in error.
For if a child in the so-called phallic phase really had biologically determined, naturally sexual needs directed toward the parent of the opposite sex, there would not be any traumatic consequences if these desires were satisfied; then it would not be necessary to repress the experience of these needs so deeply that years of analysis are later required to uncover it. After all, how can a child have any knowledge of incestuous guilt? He or she comes to suspect it only because of secretive behavior on the part of adults. Only the adult knows there is an incest taboo, and only from the adult’s attitude does the child sense that something forbidden is being done to him. His own attitude is at bottom completely free of guilt. Why, then, should he experience any “drive conflicts”? The child seeks adults’ love because he cannot live without it; he meets all their demands to the extent that he is able -- for the sake of survival. He loves his parents, needs their presence, concern, and affection, and will learn to fit his attempt to win these indispensable treasures into the framework provided him by his parents from birth (e.g., by having his genitals massaged, tickled, or sucked, or by having orifices such as mouth and anus used for coitus-like purposes) may under certain circumstances come to regard this type of activity as love because he knows no other form of it. But to brand the child’s reactive desires as blameworthy, as implied in the drive theory, is undeniably a remnant of the ideology of “poisonous pedagogy,” which enables adults to delegate their guilt feelings to the child with the aid of various theories.
This, again, shows the value of the Liedloff excerpt. As adults, we view children through our own lens, never understanding theirs, nor how fundamentally different it is from our own, nor how our own oppressive viewpoint is what changes children into adults. Corruption preys on the innocent, not because it desires to befoul the innocent, but because it has no concrete way to see or understand the innocence that comes before it. Corruption corrupts the innocent, and blames the innocent for that corruption.
With that frame in mind, let’s finish with Liedloff before moving onto the next point.
She straightens baby’s undershirt and covers him with an embroidered sheet and a blanket bearing his initials. She notes them with satisfaction. Nothing has been spared in perfecting the baby’s room, though she and her young husband cannot yet afford all the furniture they have planned for the rest of the house. She bends to kiss the infant’s silky cheek and moves toward the door as the first agonized shriek shakes his body.
Softly, she closes the door. She has declared war upon him. Her will must prevail over his. Through the door she hears what sounds like someone being tortured. Her continuum recognizes it as such. Nature does not make clear signals that someone is being tortured unless it is the case. It is precisely as serious as it sounds.
She hesitates, her heart pulled toward him, but resists and goes on her way. He has just been changed and fed. She is sure he does not really need anything, therefore, and she lets him weep until he is exhausted.
He awakens and cries again. His mother looks in at the door to ascertain that he is in place; softly, so as not to awaken in him any false hope of attention, she shuts the door again. She hurries to the kitchen, where she is working, and leaves that door open so that she can hear the baby, in case “anything happens to him.”
The infant’s screams fade to quavering wails. As no response is forthcoming, the motive power of the signal loses itself in the confusion of barren emptiness where the relief ought, long since, to have arrived. He looks about. There is a wall beyond the bars of his crib. The light is dim. He cannot turn himself over. He sees only the bars, immobile, and the wall. He hears meaningless sounds in a distant world. There is no sound near him. He looks at the wall until his eyes close. When they open again, the bars and the wall are exactly as before, but the light is dimmer.
How Common Is The Sexual Abuse of Children?
As I read this book, this is the question that kept occurring to me, over and over again. I would read passages like this one...
It is quite natural for children to awaken sexual desire in the adult, because they tend to be beautiful, cuddly, affectionate, and because they admire the adult so much, probably more than anyone else does. If adults have a satisfying sex life with another adult, they have no need to act upon the desires aroused by the child or to ward them off. But if they feel themselves humiliated and not taken seriously by their partner, if their own needs were never allowed to unfold or mature, or if they were themselves seduced and violated as children, then these adults will show a strong tendency to impose their sexual needs on the child.
...and wonder, how common is this? And how much does it explain the dysfunction in our world? It seems clear that these cycles of abuse -- an abused child, grown to adulthood, abusing children, who grow into adults that abuse children…
Physical attraction and affection are always a part of love, and this has nothing to do with abuse. But parents who have had to repress the fact of having been abused and who have never consciously relived it can become very confused in this regard where their children are concerned. They will either suppress their genuine feelings of affection for fear of seducing their child or they will unconsciously do the same to the child that was done to them, without having any idea of how much harm they are causing, since they themselves always had to distance themselves from their suffering. How can these parents be helped? There is probably no possibility of curing their compulsion to repeat without extensive therapy. It is indeed difficult for people who as children were the property of their parents to realize when they are treating their own children like their property. Nevertheless, I see some hope if people become sensitive to the question, if they become conscious of these connections. This assumes that a person can at least admit that his or her parents were not gods or angels but often deprived and emotionally very isolated people for whom their child was the sole permissible object for the discharge of their affect; these parents, moreover, found justification for their behavior in various ideologies, including pedagogy and, not least of all, even psychoanalysis with its theory of “infantile sexuality.”
...but how common are these cycles? For how many of our friends and neighbors is this their sad and tragic fate?
Miller’s book never explicitly tells me. Near the end I stumbled across an uncited reference that “eighty percent of all female drug addicts and seventy percent of all prostitutes were sexually abused as children”, but that’s all the information it offers. Turning to Wikipedia, I find that the estimates for the sexual abuse of children in the United States vary widely. “A literature review of 23 studies found rates of 3% to 37% for males and 8% to 71% for females, which produced an average of 17% for boys and 28% for girls, while a statistical analysis based on 16 cross-sectional studies estimated the rate to be 7.2% for males and 14.5% for females.
Let’s go with the lowest numbers: 7% of males and 14% of females were victims of sexual abuse as children. With approximately 152 million males and 157 million females in the U.S. population (according to the 2010 census), that means that 10.6 million males and 22 million females have been the victims of sexual abuse as children. Put another way, for every 10 people you know, one of them was sexually abused as a child.
I don’t know that there is any other word for that than horrific. And it leads directly back to my previous speculation. When we’re confronted with dysfunction in our society, it seems reasonable to attribute some significant portion of it to the sexual abuse of children.
To Be Accursed
Miller’s last chapter, “Literature: Franz Kafka’s Suffering,” is a fascinating examination of several writers, Kafka among them, who, based on their writings, Miller suspects of having been sexually or otherwise abused as children. In this examination, Miller comes to the rational but troubling conclusion that their art was in many ways dependent on the abuse that they suffered.
There was much suffering in the childhood of all great writers because they experienced the wounds, humiliations, fears, and feelings of abandonment that are an inevitable part of that period of life much more strongly and intensely than others. By storing up the pain they suffered, by making it an essential part of themselves and of their later imaginative life and then expressing it in transfigured form, they guarantee the survival of their painful feelings.
My favorite example is the following story Miller tells about a young Gustave Flaubert.
At the age of fifteen, Gustave Flaubert wrote a story that he entitled “Quidquid volueris.” The hero of the tale is sixteen-year-old Djalioh, the offspring of an orangutan and a slave girl, a union that was planned and brought about in Brazil by Monsieur Paul, a young and ambitious scientist “with a cold heart.” Monsieur Paul takes the child and raises him, but he is unable to teach him human speech. Fifteen years later, when Paul returns to his native France to marry Adele, he brings Djalioh with him. The boy loves Adele, who regards him only as a poor, feeble-minded creature or a good-natured ape. Here are the final scenes of the story in the words of fifteen-year-old Flaubert:
It was in one of these city mansions that Djalioh lived with Monsieur Paul and his wife, and for almost two years much had been taking place in his soul, and the tears he had held back had hollowed out a deep cavity therein.
One morning -- it was that day I’m telling you about -- he got up and went into the garden, where a baby about a year old, wrapped in fine silks and linens, embroideries, and colorful ribbons, was asleep in a cradle whose top was gilded by the rays of the sun.
The child’s nurse was not there. Djalioh looked all around, approached the cradle, going right up to it, and quickly pulled back the covers; then he stood there a while -- looking at this poor, drowsy, sleeping creature, its chubby hands, its rounded contours, its white neck, its little fingernails. Finally he seized it with both hands, swung it round in the air over his head and dashed it with all his might to the ground, which reverberated with the impact. The baby cried out, and its brains spurted out ten paces away next to a gilly-flower.
Djalioh opened his pale lips and gave a forced laugh that was cold and terrible like the laughter of the dead. He immediately went to the house, up the staircase, opened the door to the dining room, closed it again, took the key to that room as well as to the hall door, and -- entering the vestibule of the salon -- threw them both out the window into the street. Finally, he entered the salon, softly, on tiptoe, and once there he double-locked the door behind him. What little light the carefully closed shutters allowed to penetrate into the room fell dimly upon him.
Djalioh stood still and heard only the sound of the pages Adele’s white hand was turning…
Finally, he approached the young woman and sat down beside her. She trembled suddenly and turned her troubled blue eyes to him. Her flowing dressing-gown of white chiffon was open at the neck, and her legs were crossed in such a way that in spite of her gown one could see the contours of her thighs. Surrounding her was an intoxicating perfume; her white gloves lying on the armchair with her sash, her handkerchief, her scarf -- all that had such a delicate and distinctive scent that Djalioh’s large nostrils opened wide to take in the aroma…
“What do you want of me?” she asked in fright as soon as she saw him.
And a long silence followed; he didn’t answer and fixed his devouring gaze on her. Then, drawing closer and closer, he seized her around the waist with both hands and pressed on her neck a burning kiss that seemed to stab Adele like the bite of a serpent. He saw her flesh redden and quiver.
“Oh! I’m going to call for help,” she cried in fright. “Help! Help! Oh! The monster!” she added, looking at him.
Djalioh did not respond, he only stammered and struck his head in rage. What! Not to be able to say a word to her! Not to be able to enumerate his torments and his sorrows and not to have anything to offer her but the tears of an animal and the sighs of a monster! And then to be thrust aside like a reptile! To be hated by what one loves and to be aware of the impossibility of saying anything! To be accursed and not be able to blaspheme!
It’s turgid, but powerful prose. It seems to sum up all that Miller and even Liedloff have to say about the impossible position and perspective of the abused child. To be hated by what one loves and to be aware of the impossibility of saying anything! To be accursed and not be able to blaspheme!
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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