Those concerned with raising children have always had great trouble dealing with “obstinacy,” willfulness, defiance, and the exuberant character of children’s emotions. They are repeatedly reminded that they cannot begin to teach obedience too soon. The following passage by J. Sulzer, written in 1748, will serve as an illustration of this:
“As far as willfulness is concerned, this expresses itself as a natural recourse in tenderest childhood as soon as children are able to make their desire for something known by means of gestures. They see something they want but cannot have; they become angry, cry, and flail about. Or they are given something that does not please them; they fling it aside and begin to cry. These are dangerous faults that hinder their entire education and encourage undesirable qualities in children. If willfulness and wickedness are not driven out, it is impossible to give a child a good education. The moment these flaws appear in a child, it is high time to resist this evil so that it does not become ingrained through habit and the children do not become thoroughly depraved.”
It is interesting to me the way willfulness is reflexively asserted to be equal to wickedness and evil. But let’s continue with the passage.
“Therefore, I advise all those whose concern is the education of children to make it their main occupation to drive out willfulness and wickedness and to persist until they have reached their goal. As I have remarked above, it is impossible to reason with young children; thus, willfulness must be driven out in a methodical manner, and there is no other recourse for this purpose than to show children one is serious. If one gives in to their willfulness once, the second time it will be more pronounced and more difficult to drive out. Once children have learned that anger and tears will win them their own way, they will not fail to use the same methods again. They will finally become the masters of their parents and of their nursemaids and will have a bad, willful, and unbearable disposition with which they will trouble and torment their parents ever after as the well-earned reward for the “good” upbringing they were given. But if parents are fortunate enough to drive out willfulness from the very beginning by means of scolding and the rod, they will have obedient, docile, and good children whom they can later provide with a good education. If a good basis for education is to be established, then one must not cease toiling until one sees that all willfulness is gone, for there is absolutely no place for it. Let no one make the mistake of thinking he will be able to obtain any good results before he has eliminated these two major faults. He will toil in vain. This is where the foundation first must be laid.”
I’m going to go on quoting this passage at length because I find it so absolutely fascinating and so absolutely foundational to Miller’s thesis. Read the paragraph above one way and you will say, yeah, that’s how you raise obedient children, but read it another way and you will say, gosh, that’s also how you create abused and mindless robots.
“There, then, are the two most important matters one must attend to in the child’s first year. When he is over a year old, and is beginning to understand and speak somewhat, one must concentrate on other things as well, yet always with the understanding that willfulness must be the main target of all our toils until it is completely abolished. It is always our main purpose to make children into righteous, virtuous persons, and parents should be ever mindful of this when they regard their children so that they will miss no opportunity to labor over them. They must also keep very fresh in their minds the outline or image of a mind disposed to virtue, as described above, so that they know what is to be undertaken. The first and foremost matter to be attended to is implanting in children a love of order; this is the first step we require in the way of virtue. In the first three years, however, this -- like all things one undertakes with children -- can come about only in a quite mechanical way. Everything must follow the rules of orderliness. Food and drink, clothing, sleep, and indeed the child’s entire little household must be orderly and must never be altered in the least to accommodate their willfulness or whims so that they may learn in earliest childhood to submit strictly to the rules of orderliness. The order one insists upon has an indisputable influence on their minds, and if children become accustomed to orderliness at a very early age, they will suppose thereafter that this is completely natural because they no longer realize that it has been artfully instilled in them. If, out of indulgence, one alters the order of the child’s little household as often as his whim shall dictate, then he will come to think that orderliness is not of great importance but must always yield to our whim. Such a false assumption would cause widespread damage to the moral life, as may easily be deduced from what I have said above about order. When children are of an age to be reasoned with, one must take every opportunity to present order to them as something sacred and inviolable. If they want to have something that offends against order, then one should say to them: my dear child, this is impossible; this offends against order, which must never be breached, and so on.”
What’s fascinating here is the way in which order is, admittedly, an artificial construct, indoctrinated into a child so that its willfulness can be suppressed. They must be made to believe that order “is completely natural because they no longer realize that it has been artfully instilled in them.” The same thought is carried to a more diabolical conclusion in the next paragraph.
“The second major matter to which one must dedicate oneself beginning with the second and third year is a strict obedience to parents and superiors and a trusting acceptance of all they do. These qualities are not only absolutely necessary for the success of the child’s education, but they have a very strong influence on education in general. They are so essential because they impart to the mind orderliness per se and a spirit of submission to the laws. A child who is used to obeying his parents will also willingly submit to the laws and rules of reason once he is on his own and his own master, since he is already accustomed not to act in accordance with his own will. Obedience is so important that all education is actually nothing other than learning how to obey. It is a generally recognized principle that persons of high estate who are destined to rule whole nations must learn the art of governance by way of first learning obedience. Qui nescit obedire, nescit imperare: the reason for this is that obedience teaches a person to be zealous in observing the law, which is the first quality of a ruler. Thus, after one has driven out willfulness as a result of one’s first labors with children, the chief goal of one’s further labors must be obedience. It is not very easy, however, to implant obedience in children. It is quite natural for the child’s soul to want to have a will of its own, and things that are not done correctly in the first two years will be difficult to rectify thereafter. One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and compulsion can be used. Over the years, children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will, and for this very reason the severity that is required will not have any serious consequences.”
Order and obedience to that order. Again, that is not only how you are evidently supposed to raise children, it is also absolutely (and not coincidentally?) how you create willing thralls to fascism. The closing message here seems to be go ahead and beat your children. Beat them, in fact, until they forget they were beaten.
Here’s Miller’s own commentary on this horrific set of ideas.
It is astonishing that this pedagogue had so much psychological insight over two hundred years ago. It is in fact true that over the years children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood; “they will never remember afterwards that they had a will” -- to be sure. But, unfortunately, the rest of the sentence, “the severity that is required will not have any serious consequences,” is not true.
The opposite is the case: throughout their professional lives, lawyers, politicians, psychiatrists, physicians, and prison guards must deal with these serious consequences, usually without knowing their cause.
And:
If primary emphasis is placed upon raising children so that they are not aware of what is being done to them or what is being taken from them, of what they are losing in the process, of who they otherwise would have been and who they actually are, and if this is begun early enough, then as adults, regardless of their intelligence, they will later look upon the will of another person as if it were their own.. How can they know that their own will was broken since they were never allowed to express it?
It really is the seeds of authoritarianism -- looking upon the will of another person as if it were their own. As children, the other is a parent. As adults, the other is the leader of their nation.
For Your Own Good
That’s all tragic enough, but in For Your Own Good, Miller takes these ideas one step further, and addresses the inherent cruelty in not just the abuse, but in the indoctrination that the abuse is “for your own good.”
When people who have been beaten or spanked as children attempt to play down the consequences by setting themselves up as examples, even claiming it was good for them, they are inevitably contributing to the continuation of cruelty in the world by this refusal to take their childhood tragedies seriously. Taking over this attitude, their children, pupils, and students will in turn beat their own children, citing their parents, teachers, and professors as authorities. Don’t the consequences of having been a battered child find their most tragic expression in this type of thinking?
Because of course this cycle continues, the adult who was beaten as a child beating their own children for the same reasons they were indoctrinated to believe. But like the falsity of the order that their will was sacrificed for, the true reasons for continuing the abuse are also hidden from them.
For parents’ motives are the same today as they were then: in beating their children, they are struggling to regain the power they once lost to their own parents. For the first time, they see the vulnerability of their own earliest years, which they are unable to recall, reflected in their children. Only now, when someone weaker than they is involved, do they finally fight back, often quite fiercely. There are countless rationalizations, still used today, to justify their behavior. Although parents always mistreat their children for psychological reasons, i.e., because of their own needs, there is a basic assumption in our society that this treatment is good for children.
It is not, in fact, for the child’s own good. In a strange and deeply buried way, parents beat their children for their own good.
Sexual Abuse
Miller summarizes this poisonous pedagogy, whatever its source, with the following maxims.
1. Adults are the masters (not the servants!) of the dependent child.
2. They determine in godlike fashion what is right and what is wrong.
3. The child is held responsible for their anger.
4. The parents must always be shielded.
5. The child’s life-affirming feelings pose a threat to the autocratic adult.
6. The child’s will must be “broken” as soon as possible.
7. All this must happen at a very early age, so the child “won’t notice” and will therefore not be able to expose the adults.
And in these maxims we see the roots not just of authoritarianism, but also sexual abuse.
When we consider the major role intimidation plays in this ideology, which was still at the peak of its popularity at the turn of the century, it is not surprising that Sigmund Freud had to conceal his surprising discovery of adults’ sexual abuse of their children, a discovery he was led to by the testimony of his patients.
Miller is extremely critical of Freud and his “theory of drives,” a theory, she feels, wholly dependent on and continually perpetuated by the very poisonous pedagogy that helped give it rise.
We can understand why this theory omitted the fact that it is the parents who not only project their sexual and aggressive fantasies onto the child but also are able to act out these fantasies because they wield the power. It is probably thanks to this omission that many professionals in the psychiatric field, themselves the products of “poisonous pedagogy,” have been able to accept the Freudian theory of drives, because it did not force them to question their idealized image of their parents. With the aid of Freud’s drive and structural theories, they have been able to continue obeying the commandment they internalized in early childhood: “Thou shalt not be aware of what your parents are doing to you.”
Authoritarianism
It’s sick and perverse. And it is from these simple maxims and their theories to which that they give rise that we see not just the rules for rearing children into obedient adults, but when written on a larger canvas, for preparing adults for cultural and political authoritarianism.
When terrorists take innocent women and children hostage in the service of a grand and idealistic cause, are they really doing anything different from what was once done to them? When they were little children full of vitality, their parents had offered them up as sacrifices to a grand pedagogic purpose, to lofty religious values, with the feeling of performing a great and good deed. Since these young people never were allowed to trust their own feelings, they continue to suppress them for ideological reasons. These intelligent and often very sensitive people, who had once been sacrificed to a “higher” morality, sacrifice themselves as adults to another -- often opposite -- ideology, in whose service they allow their inmost selves to be completely dominated, as had been the case in their childhood.
The reference to terrorists may throw some people, but the larger point is just so obvious. Through this poisonous pedagogy, children are not taught to be good, they are taught to sublimate themselves to another’s order. At first, that order is that of their parents. But then, it can easily be the order of the authoritarian.
Miller sees this dynamic perhaps most painfully present in the Holocaust.
The more insight I gained into the dynamics of perversion through my analytic work, the more I questioned the view advanced repeatedly since the end of the war that a handful of perverted people were responsible for the Holocaust. The mass murderers showed not a trace of the specific symptoms of perversion, such as isolation, loneliness, shame, and despair; they were not isolated but belonged to a supportive group; they were not ashamed but proud; and they were not despairing but either euphoric or apathetic.
The other explanation -- that these were people who worshiped authority and were accustomed to obey -- is not wrong, but neither is it adequate to explain a phenomenon like the Holocaust, if by obeying we mean the carrying out of commands that we consciously regard as being forced upon us.
People with any sensitivity cannot be turned into mass murderers overnight. But the men and women who carried out “the final solution” did not let their feelings stand in their way for the simple reason that they had been raised from infancy not to have any feelings of their own but to experience their parents’ wishes as their own. These were people who, as children, had been proud of being tough and not crying, of carrying out all of their duties “gladly,” of not being afraid -- that is, at bottom, of not having an inner life at all.
Purging the Hate of the Self
And in all of this -- we see not just the child being imprinted upon, but crucially the parent, imprinting upon the child all the things they hate, and then working, for the first time, to purge them from the child and from themselves.
The pedagogical conviction that one must bring a child into line from the outset has its origin in the need to split off the disquieting parts of the inner self and project them onto an available object. The child’s great plasticity, flexibility, defenselessness, and availability make it the ideal object for this projection. The enemy within can at last be hunted down on the outside.
Peace advocates are becoming increasingly aware of the role played by these mechanisms, but until it is clearly recognized that they can be traced back to methods of child raising, little can be done to oppose them. For children who have grown up being assailed for qualities the parents hate in themselves can hardly wait to assign these qualities to someone else so they can once again regard themselves as good, “moral,” noble, and altruistic. Such projections can easily become part of any Weltanschauung.
Weltanschauung, indeed. It becomes not just a pedagogy, but an entire worldview. It explains everything. I hate this thing about me. It’s not me, it’s them. I hate them. Each sentence a kind of non sequitur, and yet somehow ever-binding, generation after generation.
Both child abuse and its consequences are so well integrated into our lives that we are scarcely struck by their absurdity. Adolescents’ “heroic willingness” to fight one another in wars and (just as life is beginning!) to die for someone else’s cause may be a result of the fact that during puberty the warded-off hatred from early childhood becomes intensified. Adolescents can divert this hatred from their parents if they are given a clear-cut enemy whom they are permitted to hate freely and with impunity. This may be why so many young painters and writers volunteered for the front in World War I. The hope of freeing themselves from the constraints imposed by their family enabled them to take pleasure in marching to the music of a military band. One of heroin’s roles is to replace this function, with the difference that in the case of drugs the destructive rage is directed against one’s own body and self.
War, addiction -- it explains everything.
Case Studies
In the second half of the book, Miller applies her theory by examining several figures in history, looking deeply at their specific poisonous pedagogic circumstances in childhood, and then tracing them to specific (and destructive) neuroses in adulthood. The first of these historical figures is Adolf Hitler -- and there are a lot of surprising revelations (to me, at least) in this analysis.
Hitler flattered the “German, Germanic” woman because he needed her homage, her vote, and her other services. He had also needed his mother, but he never had a chance to achieve a truly warm, intimate relationship with her. Stierlin writes:
“N. Bromberg (1971) has written about Hitler’s sexual habits: ‘...the only way in which he could get full sexual satisfaction was to watch a young woman as she squatted over his head and urinated or defecated in his face.’ He also reports ‘...an episode of erotogenic masochism involving a young German actress at whose feet Hitler threw himself, asking her to kick him. When she demurred, he pleaded with her to comply with his wish, heaping accusations on himself and groveling at her feet in such an agonizing manner that she finally acceded. When she kicked him, he became excited, and as she continued to kick him at his urging, he became increasingly excited. The difference in age between Hitler and the young women with whom he had any sexual involvement was usually close to the twenty-three-year difference between his parents.’”
It is totally inconceivable that a man who as a child received love and affection from his mother, which most Hitler biographers claim was the case, would have suffered from these sadomasochistic compulsions, which point to a very early childhood disturbance. But our concept of mother love obviously has not yet wholly freed itself from the ideology of “poisonous pedagogy.”
Using Hitler as one of her case studies is problematic (I think), because there are so many conflicting reports and perceptions about him. Biographies were written to glorify him, after all, so where is the truth and where is the hero-worship?
Such problems don’t arise with her next case -- that of German serial killer Jurgen Bartsch.
Jurgen’s gifts helped him primarily to adapt to his situation in order to survive: to suffer everything in silence, not to rebel against being locked up in the cellar, and even to do well in school. But the eruption of feelings in puberty proved too much for his defense mechanisms. (We can observe something similar in the drug scene.) It would be tempting to say “fortunately,” if the consequences of this eruption had not led to a continuation of the tragedy.
“Naturally, I often said to my mother, ‘Just wait till I’m twenty-one!’ That much I dared to say. Then of course my mother would say: ‘Yes, yes, I can just imagine. In the first place you’re too stupid to get by anywhere except with us. And then, if you really did go out into the world, you’d see, after two days you’d be back here again.’ The minute she said it, I knew it was true. I wouldn’t have trusted myself to get by alone out there for more than two days. Why I don’t know. And I knew for sure that when I turned twenty-one I would not go away. That was crystal clear to me, but I had to let off a little steam once in a while. But to think that I might have had any really serious intentions about it is completely absurd. I never would have done it.
“When I started my job I didn’t say, ‘I like it’; I didn’t say ‘It’s horrible’ either. I didn’t actually think that much about it.”
Thus, any hope for a life of his own was nipped in the bud. How else can this be described but as soul murder? So far, criminology has never concerned itself with this kind of murder, has never even been able to acknowledge it, because as a part of child-rearing it is perfectly legal. Only the last link in a long chain of actions is punishable by the court. Often this link reveals in minute detail the crime’s entire sorrowful prehistory without the perpetrator being aware of it.
Soul murder. It’s an apt description of what is happening, in this case and in so many others. But, as Miller here points out, soul murder is not a crime. It is just the way children are raised.
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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
