Life + Style: My father beat me too, but I became a dictator.

In the winter of 1632-33, the Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune visited the Montagnais-Naskap Indian tribe. He mingled with the “savages” to observe them, not, of course, for anthropological interest, but to inform his chief about the compensation of the natives. Blanca, Christian superiority emanates from her records, but sometimes a childlike wonder slips out of the bag. These savages, what primitivism, they know neither envy nor jealousy, not even adultery as sin. After all, in this way you cannot be sure that you have the child, the Jesuit convinces one of the Naskapi men, but he simply shakes his head:

You French are strange people. Only your own children are important to you, but we love all the children of our tribe equally.

“These barbarians are incapable of punishing their children,” growls Le Jeune in one of his letters, “they don’t even scold them, they can’t deny a crying child anything.” While the “barbarians” respect the spirit of their ancestors in their descendants and instinctively know that children learn not from the beautiful word, nor from the comma, but from what they see around them, they raise children in Europe by means of inquisitive. Beating, starvation, confinement, deprivation of love, humiliation, manipulation are all permissible and even desirable methods for the sacred purpose: the child must be used to unconditional obedience so that he does not remember to follow his bad inclinations.

“The advantage of the early years is, among other things, that we can use violence,” writes the Swiss philosopher Johann Georg Sulzer in 1745. “Children forget over the years what happened to them in their early childhood. If we have successfully deprived a child of his will, he will no longer remember that he ever had a will … “The goal is” an obedient, flexible and good child “, and this can be achieved through” serious scolding and eating “childhood, we eradicate her evil and stubbornness.

Obedience consists of the child being 1. willing to do what is ordered, 2. willing to renounce what is forbidden, and 3. satisfied with the rules that apply to him.

Let’s stop for a moment and imagine man living a life that meets these three points.

Katharina Rutschky pointed out in 1977 that Sulzer’s teaching is by no means an obvious example, when she published a 600-page anthology on 18-19. of the popular pedagogical works of the twentieth century. The books Black pedagogy gave the title: The concept has since become part of educational history and has become known primarily through the work of Alice Miller.

Idealized parents, suffering denied

Alice Miller (born Alicija Englard) escaped the Warsaw ghetto at the age of 17 in the summer of 1940, hiding under a pseudonym for years and then emigrating to Switzerland after the war. He graduated in philosophy, then graduated as a psychoanalyst and practiced for twenty years. Or, as he puts it, “For twenty years, I have been idle watching my patients deny their childhood traumas and idealize their parents so they don’t have to face the reality of their childhood.”

That this mechanism, the idealization of our parents and the denial of the suffering of our childhood, not only leads to individual tragedies, but also fundamentally determines the functioning of society, including the aforementioned. Black pedagogy was made clear to Miller through an anthology titled. He realized that his generation of parents, his grandparents, but also himself, had been brought up according to the principles collected in the volume, and came to the conclusion that this type of early childhood conditioning – breaking the will of the child and pursuing vitality – legally led to the totalitarianism of Hitler and Auschwitz.

Alice Miller gives a coherent psychological explanation of the workings of dictatorship, mass murder, anti-Semitism, servility, crime, in a word, evil. We could also say that all his work is a display of what Hanna Arendt calls the banality of evil. Eichmann in Jerusalem in his book. Arendt is in awe of Eichmann’s worldliness. The man who sent millions and old men to their deaths, men and women with impassive zeal, was “awfully and frighteningly normal,” a fellow from the house next door. How could he go on committing such an act without showing the slightest sign of remorse?

Hanna Arendt did not give a satisfactory answer to the question. He feels that the problem lies in his convulsive desire to conform to power, in the blind execution of command, in Eichmann’s renunciation of his own judgment and responsibility to function as part of the machinery of power. But what causes Eichmann’s “moral blindness” is ultimately pointed out by Alice Miller: Eichmann – and all the other active and passive participants in the genocide – basically did not abandon independent decision as a result of Hitler’s charismatic glow, the possibility of thinking But because from an early age they were conditioned to obey authority. Without a doubt, blind.

“I did not meet any of the leading figures of the Third Reich who had not been raised rigorously and harshly. Shouldn’t we think about that? “Alice Miller asks. After Initially, the upbringing was In his book, he attempted a psychological analysis of Hitler’s childhood, many attacked (as Arendt did anyway) giving a quasi-excuse to mass murderers and criminals by explaining that the compulsion to kill is always an expression of a tragic destiny. childish. Miller responded to the charge that understanding causes is a fundamental concern of society as a whole. Because if we stopped child abuse, prisons and psychiatric institutions would be emptied and people could no longer be driven to the battlefield.

Early dependence on tyrannical parents perfectly embodies identification with power. Because a well-mannered child is manipulated into interpreting the violation of his will as love, he will feel as helpless in the face of political manipulation as before.

An educated citizen is the perfect subject of totalitarian power: his will completely coincides with the will of power, and he feels that torture and persecution are necessary, that is why he does not have an iota of remorse. That is to say, the man who eminently punctuates the three points mentioned above resembles Adolf Eichmann, who looks at the sequences of images of corpses with an unshakable face, but blushes with shame for not getting up in time from his chair in court.

Who has an interest in education?

According to Miller, the perversion of pedagogy lies in believing in oneself that it works in the best interest of the child. In fact, as the Naskaps intuitively knew, the boy did not need nurturing. You learn from it, and with amazing speed and efficiency, what you see around you, what you experience. To become a healthy and creative adult, all you need to do is be surrounded by a responsive and caring environment where your basic needs are recognized and met, and you help develop your skills.

When we slap a child, he learns to slap.

If we preach morality to a child, he learns to preach morality, if we discipline, he learns to discipline, if we scold, he learns to scold, if we humiliate, he learns to humiliate, if we kill his soul, he learns to kill. You can only choose to do this with yourself, with others, or with both.

Education, says Alice Miller, is not the best for the child but for the adult. The adult cannot exercise total and hidden power over the child in any way. Often, he does not seek to meet the needs of a child entrusted to his care, who is vulnerable to him, but instead uses the child to satisfy his own repressed needs (craving for love, desire for power, aggressive impulses) . ). He does all this, of course, not out of evil, but out of “emotional blindness.” If someone from childhood is conditioned not to feel his own feelings and, instead of knowing his own wishes, knows the wishes of his parents for themselves, he will become insensitive to childhood and ultimately to all kinds of vulnerability . To be empathetic, he would first have to empathize with the child frozen in him, but the price of that is accepting the myth of a happy childhood and the taboo of idealizing parents.

The caregiver of the young child sees each manifestation as an expression of love, so it is very difficult to realize later that what we thought was love was often insensitivity, selfishness, neglect, manipulation or abuse. However, our bodies will always remember that they weren’t comforted when we cried, they weren’t given food when we were hungry, they weren’t full when we weren’t hungry, they were beaten when we were scared, or they rejoiced unbridled, ashamed when we were curious or honest. Your mind says that you were loved, but your body remembers the reality. You will become alienated, have panic attacks, seek a mental disruptor, have aggressive impulses, or fall into depression.

The good news is that it is not suffering that suffers, but its repression, bagellization and inconsistency. Experienced but processed and regretted trauma does not lead to deadlocks and forced repetitions in our lives. That is why Alice Miller dedicated the second half of her life to spreading knowledge. He hoped that future generations, thanks to insights from psychology, brain research, and neuroscience, could break the centuries-old vicious cycle of child abuse in which parenting was lied to. If we allow our children to respond appropriately, that is, with anger, when someone intentionally or unconsciously causes them pain, we allow them to be noticed as adults if they want to hurt or manipulate them. The generation that grows up in this way will be made up of autonomous and critical people whose lives are determined not by repressed anger and frustration, but by the joy of living.

Alice Miller suffered from what she was talking about: as a child, as a Jew, but also as a mother. By the time he understood the mechanism that had ruined the lives of generations, he himself had already made the mistakes he had struggled with throughout his professional life. However, this does not detract from their work, and even exemplifies that it is possible to wake up from the darkest family and social hypnosis. The gap between life and work, Alice Miller and her son Martin Miller, was shaken by the group Horizon Legacy with the title.

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