I M Perfect lady

 Another section of Alice Miller's book, "Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child."  

I know it is long…but it shows how the child is missed and why in most therapy sessions…while the parents get their full support.  It isn't that we don't know the parents, but we fail to know the child…and its truths.

"I owe to Freud's methods insights into the human psyche far surpassing anything my study of philosophy ever had to offer me. but it was my application of these very methods that brought me face to face with certain truths that refuted some of his theories.  I cannot abandon my truths I have discovered without abandoning myself, and am therefore compelled to remain true to them, even to those aspects of them that lead me in a different direction from my teachers.  I  what follows it will become clear that I still share common ground and psychoanalytic theory insofar as I subscribe to these tenets:

1. Everyone is shaped (this does not mean determined) by his or her childhood.

2. Neuroses are rooted in childhood.

3. The methods of free association and the analytic setting (couch, rule of abstinence) make it possible for the drama of childhood to be renenacted in the transference and for a maturation process that has been blocked by neurosis to begin.

4. Changes in personality occurring during analysis do not stem form "corrective emotional experiences" but from insights the patient arrives at by repetition, remembering, and working through relevant material.

These four points may explain in large part why I do not accept C.G. Jung, Alfred Adler, or representatives of countless other schools as my teachers.  The analytic psychology of Jung and his followers does not seem to me to give due weight to what I consider the decisive significance of early childhood. Even Adler, who certainly recognizes the problem of power vs powerlessness, did not pay sufficient heed to the many critical factors of a child's early life, considering that Adler's followers are content with the schematic theories (such as organic inferiority) and overemphasize the teleological point of view. In Frankel's logotherapy, for example, which is oriented toward "the search of meaning", a person's primary concern is to find the meaning awaiting him and live accordingly.  It is no doubt true that a person will be subject to depression if he feels his life is meaningless, but the question of why he finds his life meaningless will not be answered by logotherapy if it does not take the dimension of childhood into account."

"In spite of the common ground I share with Freudian psychoanalysis, I see decisive differences between it and my position:

1. I do not believe that a neurosis originates because a drive conflict has been repressed, as Freud thought, but rather because early traumatic experiences could not be articulated and therefore had to be repressed.

2. I do not regard the parents of a patient only as objects of his or her agressive and libidinous desires but also as real persons, who – often without knowing or intending it – have caused the patient real, not only imagined, suffering.

3. The fact that a patient finally faces his or her parent's personalities and actions and is at last permitted to formulate an emotional response to them leads to an increased capacity for integration on the patient's part.

4. This formulation, emerging in the transference and counter-transference and with the aid of fantasies, feelings and reenactments, is possible only if the analyst listens to the patient without setting up an pedagogical goals, i.e., if he (a) does not defend the parents against the patient's reproaches because he no longer has to spare his own parents and suppress his own pain; (b) has integrated his awareness of the child's lack of rights in our cultural traditions; (c) does not hide the reactive nature of destructive impulses behind inappropriate theories about the death instinct; (d) retains his role as advocate and does not let himself be turned into a judge, either by the patient or as a result of the criteria acquired in his own training.

5. I cannot consider the problem of "infantile sexuality" in isolation but see it in connection with my knowledge of all the ways children can be used by their parents.  I have difficulty separating what Freud interprets as libidinous desires from the child's narcissistic needs for echoing respect, attention, mirroring, acceptance, and understanding.

6. The child's position between father and mother undoubtedly leads to various feelings, strong emotions, anxieties, conflicts and problems that can be designated as Oedipal but that I interpret differently from Freud (see chapter 12). By no means do I consider the "Oedipal Conflict" and the need to work it through as a source of neurotic development.

7. The healing process begins when the once absent, repressed reactions to traumatization (such as anxiety, rage, anger, despair, dismay, pain, grief) can be articulated in analysis; then the symptoms whose function it had been to express the unconscious trauma in a disguised, alienated language incomprehensible both to the patient and to those around him, disappear. This statement goes against the practice of many psychoanalysts who attempt to help their patients gain insight, often of a merely intellectual nature, into their drive conflicts, but it does not go against Freud's methods during the period prior to his discovery of the supposed omnipresence of Oepidus complex. Therefore, when I distance myself from Freud in these pages I am thinking of his writings after 1896, on the other hand, I see a confirmation of my own experience.  Alice Miller

What Alice is showing me is how the therapists own education as well as their own viewpoint of their childhood, WILL greatly impact the kind of healing they can orchestrate.  

It almost feels like we are surrounded by folks who do not see the child or maybe more importantly; don't see their parents in their true colors.

How can it be that you will have a clear picture of who you are, unless you can clearly see where you came from; the nature of your upbringing.

Even though, I know the intentions of the parents and or therapists are not to hurt or damage the child, they do so due to the fact that they have covered up their own wounds.

I believe we don't set out to ruin another or to impede his healing…but do so by the very nature of our own unhealed childhoods.

We can only refrain from hurting others when we have taken care of our own hurts…

Until then, we will be reenacting our childhood wounds…waiting for someone to notice. And yet who is going to notice? 

No one sees the wounded child…for then they would have to see the person who did the wounding in a way they can't bear to see.  A father turns into a pedophile.

But, if you choose to disregard that, the child's wounds go unseen.

Many will say they have seen the wounds my father inflicted, but they still call him dad.  I feel and see their allegiance to him and their betrayal of me.  Just as she speaks of the different therapist…about whether they will defend the actions of the parent or focus on the feelings of the child/adult child.

In order for us to begin slowing down the numbers of people abused by family and friends, we will need to begin seeing the child.

Believing the child.