For your own good
Miller proposed here that German traumatic childrearing produced heroin addict Christiane F., serial killer of children Jürgen Bartsch and dictator Adolf Hitler. Children learn to accept their parents' often abusive behaviour against themselves as being "for their own good." In the case of Hitler, it led to displacement against the Jews and other minority groups. For Miller, the traditional pedagogic process was manipulative, resulting in grown-up adults deferring excessively to authorities, even to tyrannical leaders or dictators, like Hitler. Miller even argued for abandoning the term "pedagogy" in favor of the word "support," something akin to what psychohistorians call the helping mode of parenting. In the Poisonous Pedagogy section of the book, Miller does a thorough survey of 19th century child-rearing literature in the book, citing texts which recommend practices such as exposing children to dead bodies in order to teach them about the sexual functions of human anatomy (45–46), resisting the temptation to comfort screaming infants (41–43), and beating children who haven't committed any specific offense as a kind of conditioning would help them to understand their own evil and fallen nature. The key element that Miller elucidated in this book was the understanding of why the German nation, the "good Germans," were compliant with Hitler's abusive regime, which Miller asserted was a direct result of how the society in general treated its children.
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- i totally agree with this, and if you haven't read "For Your Own Good" and "The Drama of the Gifted Child" by Alice Miller you would likely enjoy them.
- If this post resonates with you, there are two books I highly recommend, both by the renowned psychologist Alice Miller [1].
The first is For Your Own Good (1981), in which she describes the "poisonous pedagogy" of emotional and physical abuse passed down from generation to generation, and how we minimize and turn a blind eye to it because we want to follow the 4th commandment "Honor thy father and thy mother" (or in this case, a Confucian equivalent) -- at tremendous cost to ourselves, our own children, and society at large. It is one of the most eye-opening books I have ever read.
The second is her more recent The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting (2005), which is more therapeutic and focused on how people's physical pain and sickness can dissipate when they are able to finally stand up for themselves and their own emotional needs, rather than continue to pretend their abusive parents were actually good.
Alice Miller's first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979) is her best-known, but in my opinion, the above two books show her understanding evolving to become even more sophisticated.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_(psychologist)
- I just want to plug in two books by Alice Miller, mainly about childhood, the effects of growing up in a 'not-good' environment - that sort of thing. I found her to be very level-headed.
[1] The Drama of Being a Child by Alice Miller (also know by the IMO bad title 'The Drama of the Gifted Child')
[2] For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence by Alice Miller
Edit: Also a good comic named 'On a Plate':
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilswo...
- In this field, sending out surveys with "objective" questions to a large amount of people to collect data is the only way to get your research deemed "scientific". I think everyone would agree that the role of the scientists and writers of these pop-psych articles should be to interpret the point and help readers come to an insightful and true conclusion like yours, but really everyone in the psychology and journalism fields are forced to run a "I'm just reporting the facts like my boss wants me to" mantra to keep their job.
It's kind of sad that this academic system makes it so only well-paid therapists get to do that, because of course looking at the current state of affairs in the world and coming to and reporting on and building insight on the logical conclusion that only hurt people hurt people isn't "scientific research" because the peers in your field only allow themselves and others to repeat what the numbers in the excel spreadsheet say. The psychology and objective journalism fields are great examples of dysfunctional academic systems.
I like Alice Miller's hot take on her field in her book "For Your Own Good". I'm just going to straight up copy her text:
Those who swear by statistical studies and gain their psychological knowledge from those sources will see my efforts to understand the children Christiane and Adolf [Hitler] as unnecessary and irrelevant. They would have to be given statistical proof that a given number of cases of child abuse later produced almost the same number of murderers. This proof cannot be provided, however, for the following reasons. Alice Miller lists off 1) child abuse takes place in secret 2) testimony of victims on their own suffered child abuse is often very flawed to protect their parents 3) experts in criminology have already noted this trend in their scientific research
Even if statistical data confirm my own conclusions, I do not consider them a reliable source because they are often based on uncritical assumptions and ideas that are either meaningless (such as "a sheltered childhood"), vague, ambiguous ("received a lot of love"), or deceptive ("the father was strict but fair"), or that even contain obvious contradictions ("he was loved and spoiled"). This is why I do not care to rely on conceptual systems whose gaps are so large that the truth escapes through them, but rather prefer to make the attempt ... to take a different route. I am not searching for statistical objectivity but for the subjectivity of the victim in question, to the degree that my empathy permits.
- If this is a topic that fascinates you, I'd suggest you read Alice Miller's, "For Your Own Good."[1] This has always seemed to me to be the most plausible explanation for why Hitler and the German people acted in a way that seems so inexplicable.
It's the only explanation I've seen that starts from the assumption that there wasn't anything fundamentally different about Hitler or the Germans of the time but that their shared psychosis was the result of well-understood psychological phenomena...that the extraordinary result derives from the extraordinary circumstances in which they lived the formative parts of their lives.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_(psychologist)#Fo...
- The whole fixation on Aryan race was less about racial purity than it was about psychological transference. The combination of abusive child rearing practices, the Treaty of Versailles and the economic depression left many, if not most, Germans very angry with no logical outlet for that anger. Hitler was able to channel that anger towards minority groups, particularly Jews. The other, somewhat controversial theory for why he targeted Jews was the possibility that he was actually 1/8 Jewish and he was targeting the part of himself that he considered shameful.
Regardless, the fixation on the Aryan master race was never about the belief that there should only be one race. It was about needing to feel powerful when others had made them feel victimized. It was the cycle of child abuse played out on an international scale. It didn't need to be ideologically consistent so long as it soothed that hurt that both Hitler and much of the German people felt.
For anyone interested in the psychological explanations for the war, Alice Miller's "For Your Own Good" is any excellent exploration of that subject.
