Miller and deMause

Or:

The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious

9.- For Your Own Good by Alice Miller
(read in 2002)

10.- The Emotional Life of Nations by Lloyd deMause
(read in 2006)

In my review of books 5 and 6 I said, “That smart people seem to be drawn to sects has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with the human mind’s strayed ways of trying to cope with the unprocessed trauma of earlier experiences at home.” In other words, the root cause of my former alienation in cults and paranormal pseudosciences was, of course, the previous abuse I had experienced at home. Below I reproduce an index page of my now defunct antipsiquiatria.org webpage (2003-2010), specifically, a version of what used to be the page of the English section of my website, where I explained why I shifted focus from antipsychiatric subjects—the subject-matter of some of my previous entries—to the authors whom I am most indebted with:


My critique of psychiatry is now relegated to a second plane. The reason for such a drastic change is that in the last few years I have read two authors that have changed my worldview: Lloyd deMause, and Alice Miller who died earlier this year [this was written in 2010]. Though Miller and deMause do not focus on psychiatry, their legacy opened my eyes: it made me see that the child abuses in the psychiatric profession are only the tip of the iceberg of a much wider crime.

Since the times of our simian ancestors infanticide was common, and it continued through the prehistory of Homo sapiens in the ancient world. This can be gathered from the remains of the sacrificed victims. For example, in the city in which I live the ritual murder of children was regularly practiced before the Spanish conquest.

I confess that when I read deMause I was unprepared to face the vast body of historical evidence about infanticide, child mutilation, the tight and tortuous swaddling of babies, the ubiquity of incest and other horrors, many perpetrated through millennia. Once in a while I had to suspend my reading of one of his books to give me a break before the horrific nature of the revelations.

Similarly, the books of Alice Miller made me to delve deeply through the very core of my being: something that detonated an emotional atomic bomb. Miller is right when she states that the suffering of a child victim of extreme parental abuse can surpass the level of pain in a concentration camp for adults [for those who can read Spanish, cf. my chapter on Miller in my Hojas Susurrantes].

Due to what John Bowlby calls attachment, parents are the most notorious soul murderers. For those who have been emotionally crushed and years later have made contact with their inner being, this is obvious. However, it’s not obvious at all for most of mankind. Because of our attachment to the perpetrator, what we are dealing with is the foundational taboo of civilization: what Alice Miller called “the forbidden knowledge.”

♣

For the other eight books see here.