Chapter 4 in Banished Knowledge by Alice Miller titled “Why I Reject Psychoanalysis Also as a Therapy Method.”
“Following my interview for the April 1987 issue of the German Journal Psychologie heute (Psychology Today), in which I declared my break with psychoanalysis, I was asked several times whether I didn’t owe psychoanalysis the means that enabled me to query it. Today I can answer this question with a clear No. As recently as in my preface to the first German edition of “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware”, I succumbed to the error myself. Yet later developments showed me unmistakably that psychoanalysis is a maze from which it is very difficult to find a way out. Without the illusionary help of psychoanalysis, which further the resistance to knowledge about past events, there is no doubt that I would have found my way to the truth sooner.”
“I owe my first awakening to the spontaneous pictures that I began to paint in 1973. Nevertheless, even years later, 1981, I still closed my eyes to the fact that psychoanalysis was the very thing that kept me away from feelings blocked since my childhood and thus from the truth. I didn’t discover this until, thanks to J. Konrad Stettbacher’s method, I could approach my childhood step by step.”
“What I find most convincing about this method is its openness to creativity, its precision, its effectiveness, its verifiability, and its respect for the uniqueness and special quality of each individual life and history. Since it makes the path to reality possible and is not afraid of reality, it is free of lies, of being enmeshed in any way with them, free of clichés, pedagogy, moralizing norms, spiritual mystifications, and any and all associated ideological trimmings.”
“On the other hand, there is proof that these elements are present in psychoanalysis, and I have supplied such proofs in my earlier books. Today I realize: It was an illusion to believe that the remains of pedagogy could be removed from psychoanalysis, leaving it still suitable for the liberation of those seeking help. It is no coincidence that psychoanalysis has not yet undertaken any revision of it immanent pedagogy; it cannot do this, for as soon as the pedagogic scaffolding is removed the whole structure will collapse like a house of cards. Since in the past psychoanalysis has served only to disguise childhood traumas, how can it be expected to help abused children? This inability is revealed not only in its theory but also in every detail of its technique – which is useless for getting at the truth.”
“Even if some analysts do wish not to manipulate their patients according to theories and pedagogic morality, but wish instead to accompany them in the discovery of their history, they are bound to fail as long as they work with the method of free association. This method, also known as a basic rule, reinforces intellectual resistance to feelings and reality; for as long as feelings can be talked about they cannot really be felt. And as long as feelings are not felt, the self-damaging blockages remain.”
“Both basic rules – the psychoanalytic setting as well as the method of free association – assume that on the one side there is a superior, informed interpreter, the analyst, and on the other the uninformed patient to whom the analyst explains his situation, his unconscious desires, thoughts and impulses. For the analyst to be able to do this, the patient must as it were uncover, betray, and expose his unconscious with the aid of free association. Thus the authoritarian structure of childhood is preserved unthinkingly in both basic rules. Parents, too, told the child from their perspective how he felt, or how he was supposed to feel, and the child believed that they knew better than he did.”
“On the basis of the pedagogic model, indissolubly coupled as it is with Freudian constructs, the student analysands learn to discuss the patient’s emotions and “to be in the know,” but never to feel anything themselves. No wonder they in turn cannot enable anyone else to feel anything. The patient senses that inability and as a rule will not dare to admit any feelings. If he does, perhaps because he has read books that for the first time opened up some access to his pain, he will quickly learn in psychoanalytic practice to bring order into his suffering, to define it with abstract words, and to manipulate it so as to ‘feel better’ again. He will sense that the interpreters of his soul feel threatened by emotions, because in their constructs they have learned only how to fend them off, and he will do anything to avoid exposing his substitute parents to this threat. He will adapt to their method of free association and talk to them about his feelings without realizing that he is letting himself in for years and years of wandering about in a maze, while in the meantime he is missing his chance of living. For his benumbed life cannot awaken until the child’s confrontation with the authors of his suffering begins; until the patient ceases to philosophize and wonder why his parents did this or that to him and instead begins, with the aid of numerous transferences, to uncover what exactly they did do; until in therapy he can finally confront his internalized parents with his suffering; until with each new pain reminding him of the old one he tries to tell himself what he is feeling and then tests the situation. Just as Daniel did. That which the unharmed child can externalize with his reference persons in reality, the once harmed adult has to try out and learn within the protective setting of therapy. How this works in each case has been made clear in Stettbacher’s description of his method.”
“ It is not possible for someone really to clarify his situation and dissolve his fears until he can feel them rather than discuss them. Only then is the veil lifted and he realizes his true need: not a tutor, not an interpreter, not a confuser; he needs space for his own growth and the company of an enlightened witness on the long journey on which he has set out.”
“Someone who has himself never learned to feel will not know that he makes it impossible for the other person, the patient to feel. It is enough, for instance, to explain to the patient the distress of his parents or of other people for all the patient’s latent reproaches to be instantly silenced. He hasn’t any, he isn’t aware of any, all he feels is pity for the authors of his distress. For it is impossible to feel the pain and at the same time understand why it was inflicted. Once simply does not feel it.”
“It took me years to get away from this “understanding” attitude. The habit, originating in psychoanalysis, of working with free associations proved to be a great obstacle in my own therapy. Time after time, free association enabled me to establish ingenious, intellectual links and thus obtain what I imagined was an overview. This helped me to evade the painful confrontation with my parents and in turn blocked all the avenues through which I might have gained some insight into the reality of my childhood. As long as I could put a name to my feelings, I retained the mastery over the child in me, and making it impossible for her to find her language, the language of hitherto unnamed sensations and feelings. The technique of the four steps helped me become aware of this blockage because I found that, significantly I tended to skip the first two steps. Finally, after a long time, I could allow the child in me to express her sensations and feelings and to take her time doing so. But she could feel only when the adult, educated part of me allowed this to happen and without interference of explanations and associations.”
“This experience helped me to discover that Freud, with his method, created a system of self-deception that functioned reliably to promote repression. Anyone who does not want to know the truth of his life will find psychoanalysis helpful. In any case he will be helped to reinforce the old resistance to the injuries suffered in childhood and never find out the truth about what happened.”
“Philosophers and other intellectuals have fashioned numerous ways of keeping pain at a distance with the aid of thoughts and of disregarding the realities of life with the aid of an ostensibly defining language. In fact, Martin Heidegger made this is goal of his philosophy. He touched on his former painful and denied experiences only with abstract thoughts that excluded any feelings of the child since the child would have recognized the self-deception. For him there was no duality of passion and thought but only passionate thought, which did not advance toward truth as a result of the thinking process but was itself the goal. It is said that, to make this clear, he once told his students, on introducing Aristotle: “Aristotle was born, worked, and died.” In other words: It is the philosopher’s work that counts not his life.”
“Until a few years ago I might have thought that Heidegger’s error could be regarded has harmless and unimportant as long as his philosophy was not used to confuse the masses. But today I am no longer sure, for recently I have received some proofs to the contrary – among other things, letters from several woman philosophers writing to tell me that, through my books, they had for the first time grasped to what extent philosophy had kept them away from the truth. Its complicated thought processes had helped them not to see that they had been abused children. In spite of the suffering that now erupted, they were glad not to have completely missed the chance to live their lives, for they were still young enough to make use of it.”
“It is possible for a child to protect himself all through life from the tragic, unbearable truth by “passionate thinking” about “the nature of truth” and, as long as his symptoms do not sound the alarm, there the matter rests. However, psychoanalysis is a system that offers the very people who have symptoms to escape from their plight. That is why such people must be told that they can expect no solution from psychoanalysis. The most they can expect is a maze of well-intended paths but with no exit into freedom. It is a prison built with theories of a man who a century ago found himself in the same quandary as most patients do today. To escape insight into martyrdom of his childhood, he fled into the garden of thought constructs, and for a while his symptoms disappeared. But they came back despite increasing efforts to keep the artificial structure from collapsing.”
“Galileo went blind after being forced by the Church to repudiate the truth against his better knowledge. Sigmund Freud forbade himself to voice the truth he had discovered about child abuse and its effects on the psyche of the adult. He betrayed his own discovery after his father’s death. When I read that he later suffered from cancer of the jaw and that after many operations he finally died of it, I have to ask myself whether his jaw was not rebelling on behalf of the truth on which he chose to turn his back. Although my question is to be regarded as a hypothesis which, in the absence of the person involved, I cannot put to the test, I have noticed that, among the innumerable analysts who are so fond of handing out interpretations to their dependent patients, not one of them, as far as I know, has yet published an interpretation of Freud’s illness. Are the disciples not permitted even to wonder why a venerated father figure contracted cancer of the jaw? May interpretations be given only to dependent persons – children and patients? Doesn’t this amount to admitting that interpretations are weapons used against the helpless but not against authority held in awe? Patients are fed all kinds of constructs by the old man and believed that this is genuine nourishment. They believe everything because they need someone who will at last listen to them. And they do not see through the abuse because someone who in childhood experienced nothing but abuse is unable later in life to see through it.”
“The man who was no longer allowed to utter the truth instead wrote volume after volume whose style was universally admired and whose contents led humanity into utter confusion. So “passionate thinking” is by no means as harmless as it appears. In my opinion, everything that suppresses the truth is destructive, even if the consequences cannot be fully realized until much later.”
“In my view, Stettbacher succeeded in finding a way to the injured child in the adult, letting that child express himself with the aid of feelings, and in conceptualizing this way of experiencing the past. This is not to say that there can be no other methods that, based on the same insight into early injuries, enable the same goal to be achieved. The efficacy of various methods will become apparent as soon as publications on the subject become available.”
“Yet one thing remains certain: Since the injured child in us can express himself only by means of physical sensations and feelings related to his traumas, it is essential that therapy secure access to these sensations and feelings and enable the person to articulate them. However, this access remains completely blocked whenever we are satisfied with intellectual speculations, as is the case in psychoanalysis. No matter how impressive and fashionable these speculations may be, they never go beyond the state of self-deception.”
“The invoking of great names such as Freud, Jung, Adler, and others as well as the application of their theories – theories that resist emotions and conceal the truth- cannot possibly help a therapist to rid a patient permanently of his neurosis. They will only produce new, emotion-resistant and ignorant “therapists” who cannot but remain ignorant as long as they cling to fictions, do not query what they once learned, are afraid of the truth, and wish to exert power.”
“The goal of therapy is to allow the once silenced child in us to speak and feel. Gradually the banishment of our knowledge is revoked, and in the course of this process, as the erstwhile torments and the still-existent prisons become evident, we also discover our history, ourself, and our buried capacity for love. A therapy of this kind can be carried out only by a therapist, female or male, who no longer keeps the child in himself and that child’s knowledge in a state of banishment or who at least is moving in that direction – because he wants at all costs to find the truth about himself.” Alice Miller.
I M Perfect lady 