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Category: Alice Miller

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Alice Miller Child abuse

Walsh

In the comments section, the day before yesterday I complained that visitors don’t understand the value of studying the issue of child abuse and psychohistory, which studies its psychological consequences. I want to clarify the point.

Twenty years ago, in the Spanish newspaper El País, Alice Miller wrote something that made my mind fly to my mother’s behaviour (my translation): ‘Where does this repressed rage come from, this need to torment, humiliate, mock and mistreat defenceless human beings (prisoners and children alike)?’ Then Miller answers her question, it comes from poisonous pedagogy: ‘Children and adolescents can be beaten, humiliated and sometimes subjected to the clearest sadism without any legal consequences. Such treatment is tantamount to real torture. But it is not called that’.

Now grown up, this once-beaten girl, who buried her rage for years, begins to take it out on her children, repeating the cycle.

The confessions of Tyrone Patten-Walsh (Joseph Walsh was the name he used on this site), now serving a seven-year sentence for thoughtcrime in the UK, are paradigmatic in showing why we should know Miller’s work as well as psychohistory.

In a comment on The Unz Review that Walsh later deleted, because he posted it before his sentencing earlier this year and was still hoping to be declared non-guilty, he confessed:

I’ve already suffered immensely since I was 17 when I was incarcerated in a mental institute for ‘mental illness’. I’m used to suffering and I don’t expect mercy from life. Life shows little to no mercy to certain people. Consequently I have become merciless. In fact I’ve come to love the suffering and evil of this planet. As long as humans are suffering, justice is being done, that’s what I say. From my teenage years I’ve been obsessed with Satan, Hitler, Charles Manson, Evil, crime, serial killers, etc.

Walsh’s guilt-by-association looks more like a Hollywood Hitler than the historical Hitler! Remember that in my critical article ‘On commenters of The West’s Darkest Hour’ another Englishman was also a fan of Charles Manson. German National Socialists of the previous century wouldn’t even understand how some Anglo-Saxon racialists could be fans of Masson, Satanism or, openly, Evil as Walsh confesses. He adds:

If I go to prison I imagine I should feel right at home. It’s part of being a revolutionary, an outlaw. When I was younger the British state termed my thoughts and words ‘insane’, now my words and thoughts are ‘illegal’ haha. I’ve been termed bipolar, schizoaffective, autistic, Asperger, a terrorist, far right etc. by the usual psychological ‘experts’. I’m sure you can imagine my life’s story Dr Morgan. It’s the same story lived by thousands of other ‘dangerous males’ all across the West.

Yes: Walsh was a martyred teenager by the System. But he didn’t know how to process his abysmal pain. Although when I met him in London he said things that I thought were the most lucid I have ever heard about Aryan ethnosuicide, he followed a very different path from mine (I too had been martyred by my parents). Walsh’s comment to his pal Robert Morgan ends with these words:

I’ll finish with an amusing anecdote. Ten years ago Carolyn Yeager interviewed Tom Metzger and Metzger was talking about the Jews’ collective will to power. Carolyn asked Metzger “Where’s our will to power?” and Metzger paused for a split second then said “They’re all in prison”. Yeager was appalled by Terrible Tommy’s statement and said “Oh, come on”. I wouldn’t have expected her to understand but Metzger certainly did, lol. Thanks for your words of support anyway.

I would put it differently.

When Hitler was triumphing in Europe Carl Jung said that there were two collective unconsciouses: the Jewish collective unconscious and the Aryan collective unconscious. Unfortunately, the Aryan is prey to the former.

For those who are prey to the Judeo-Christian collective unconscious, the interview with Tom Holland that I embedded yesterday is a splendid opportunity to understand what’s going on in our little heads. Such an insight is opposite to Hollywood Nazis admiring Masson, Satan or idealising prison. Today’s prisons are hellish compared to Hitler’s incarceration after the Putsch, as we saw recently in that passage from Brendan Simms’ biography. The Landsberg prison was a five-star hotel compared to the prison Walsh and his friend Chris Gibbons, whom I also met, are now suffering.

Incidentally, recently the Greek man who told me he was going to commit suicide, also mentioned in ‘On commenters of The West’s Darkest Hour’, sent me an email confessing that he hadn’t done it! I suggested that he write his most painful memoirs, as I did in my autobiographical books, in pursuit of the only therapy that saved me. I don’t know if he will follow my advice but another commenter on this site, also committed like Walsh to a mental hospital for a while, has begun to write his memoirs.

More on how the most abusive parents undermine the mental health of the child can be found in my book Day of Wrath, the PDF of which is linked in the featured post.

Categories
Alice Miller Homosexuality

Analysing Dahmer

The series of documentaries and videos that have recently come out about Jeffrey Dahmer, a homosexual who became a serial killer—about whom I have written three posts this month and last month—allow me to present the trauma model of mental disorders for visitors to this site.

First of all, the trauma model is not taught in academia. One of the things that surprised me most when I discovered the Swiss writer Alice Miller at the turn of the century, is that in one of her books she said that there was not a single chair in any university in the world that looked at the mental havoc that abusive parents wreak on their offspring. Not a single one!

Picking up on what I said in my September post on Dahmer, that the human mind resembles what computer programmers say, society does an exhaustive analysis of Dahmer’s ‘garbage out’. It goes into infinite detail about all the grisly things he did to his victims. But the ‘garbage in’ is almost absent: an in-depth analysis of Dahmer’s childhood and early adolescence in the context of family dynamics.

Lionel Dahmer and Jeffrey Dahmer

In this video, for example, four professionals analyse Dahmer’s mind and his father. Both were interviewed in prison after Dahmer had been sentenced. Interestingly, these professionals, who study serial killers, agreed that the father’s role aroused strong suspicions. But what the commenters said in the comments section of that video was more interesting than what the professionals said. Here is a sample of what six commenters had to say about the interview:

Commenter 1: I’ve never met a gay person who wasn’t abused or neglected as a child, myself included. Literally not one. They usually try to minimize it, saying things like, “I had a mostly normal childhood.” But if you talk to them long enough, the truth will come out. It may be something they didn’t view as abuse, probably because they were raised by a narcissistic parent who told them over and over how good they had it.

Commenter 2: Notice how careful J Dahmer was to NOT say anything bad about dad. The very few times he said ANYTHING were brief and almost vague. Imagine how much more difficult it is for a child to tell his feelings to abusive parents… Even interviewers were more interested in the gore that J Dahmer had created and ad revenues this gore tale would bring from increased viewership, but nothing about J Dahmer’s feelings from childhood through the current moment.

Commenter 3: You can see in the interview his dad is still controlling him.

Commenter 4: Yup! Very sad!

Commenter 5: I don’t get why so many people are convinced that Lionel abused sexually his son. Who said it? It looks like people want to find the simplest explanation for Dahmer’s homicidal behaviour, and sexual abuse is supposed to explain everything that went wrong in life.

Dahmer’s father was indeed guilty, but I doubt that he was guilty of direct abuse. Probably, he was guilty of neglect of his son. Remember that he was an old-fashioned fella. He was raised to believe that nurturing the newborn is only a mother’s responsibility. He was for breadwinning, she was for raising the kids. Many men of his generation never even changed the diaper or held their baby, it was considered strictly a mother’s task…

There is a whole theory about forming an attachment and the importance for a newborn to bond with their primary caretaker (usually it is the mother, but it can be any other figure). In the case of Dahmer, the bonding didn’t occur. His mother was unable or disinterested in bonding with her son and the father was also not there. Sometimes mothers have difficulty [in] bonding…

Some mothers have mental health issues, postpartum depression or psychosis or some of them never wanted a child in the first place. For most kids, things are going fine; the bond with the mother is somehow created. The mother is their first object and due to this relationship, children are learning how to recognize their own needs, and emotions and how to communicate with the world. They trust their mother and gradually learn how to be a human, how to behave, and how their behaviour affects others around them.

Dahmer seemed to be completely devoid of this first primal socialization and he never caught up with his peers later in life. For him, his mother was the first non-reactive, distant object, with whom he had minimal human interaction. In a metaphorical sense, she was like an inanimated, robotic, aloof “thing”.

Dahmer later in life treated his victims the same as his parents treated him: as if they were things without needs, emotions and self. He drugged victims to unconsciousness, so they were reduced to inanimate bodies and he cut them open as if they were, for example, clocks, cars or computers and he was a mechanic.

There are people severely neglected in early childhood. Fortunately, not all of them turn up to be serial killers, but many of them suffer from reactive attachment disorder that later can lead to conduct disorder in teenage years, and after that, it can lead to antisocial personality disorder if a child is not treated and fails to form a healthy relationship with parents…

What made Dahmer “special” was his extremely rare paraphilia that he developed and his lack of inhibition due to alcohol consumption. He was also a sex addict. He talked a lot about compulsions. Nevertheless, [he was] a severely disturbed individual, stuck in a very early developmental state his whole life.

Commenter 6: The Father knew mom was on 27 different pills during her pregnancy. Father left Dahmer alone with her more and more—he begged his father not to leave him with her. You guys need to look closer. It would be fascinating.

Although Dahmer repressed the causes of his pathology, he didn’t repress it completely—not even in the interview at his father’s side. Shortly before 1:07 and after 1:15 in the video linked above he said that the lack of control he experienced as a child and in his early teens was mixed with his emerging sexuality. In other words, being at the mercy of some unmentioned adults in his childhood and adolescence, presumably rabid impotence, eventually got displaced into surrogates where Dahmer avenged his pent-up rage.

I have said that no university dares to teach the havoc that abusive parents wreak on the minds of their children. So-called mental health professionals are as clueless as celebrity Youtuber David Rubin, who is ‘married’ to a man and the couple have adopted a baby to raise as a son.

Yesterday I saw an interview in which an Australian Youtuber interviewed this homosexual. Rubin said that the Woke Monster was mysteriously spawned in 2015. He doesn’t even realise that he is part of the Woke psychosis with the fight for so-called gay marriage and the aberration of two men raising a baby as their child. I mention the Rubin case because it is analogous to the utter lack of insight, empathy and compassion of so-called mental health professionals when it comes to the basic aetiology of another kind of monster, such as the compulsion that drives the serial killer.

In one of the revelations that came out in the Dahmer interview with his father by his side, I was able to empathise with Jeff. Shortly before 1:17, the father asked his son when he realised that one is solely responsible for one’s actions. The father always wanted to exonerate himself from his son’s monstrous pathology, even in the book he wrote. Jeff replied that it was when his father had sent him books on the (pseudo-science) of creationism, which (supposedly) refutes Darwinism.

I can empathise with Jeff because I know how a parent can literally programme his child’s mind on religious matters. What the adult Jeff believed about the fundamentalist pseudo-science called creationism parallels what I believed at the age Jeff was when he was interviewed with his father.

As I confess in the entry ‘Introjection’, my father had drummed into me the idea that the so-called Shroud of Turin was the cloth that enveloped Jesus’ body before his Resurrection. Unlike Jeff, over the years I was able to work out an antivirus of the mind that disabused me. Although only those who know my autobiography will understand the details, on this page I mention some of the cognitive steps in my struggle against the parental introject about Turin shroud. Although the pseudoscience of creationism isn’t the same as the pseudoscience that Christian apologists proclaim about the shroud, the aetiology of the pathology of believing in both pseudosciences is the same: parental introjects that are almost impossible to get out of one’s head.

There is much I could say about the trauma model, but the subject is huge. And I find it dismaying that what Alice Miller (1923-2010) said continues to this day: the mental havoc wreaked by parents on their children is not studied at any university. One has to read the writings of independent authors.

Categories
Alice Miller Autobiography Judeo-reductionism Kevin MacDonald Psychohistory Racial right

WDH vs. TOO

‘Tanstaafl cannot think in terms of a combined causality, for him there can be only one cause: the Jews’. —Franklin Ryckaert

I woke up thinking I would post an entry from another section of Savitri Devi’s book and, while checking my email spam filter, I come across an article in The Occidental Observer (TOO) about Tanstaafl (Tan).

Although I never met him personally (the American government doesn’t give me a visa to visit the US), when I first woke up to the Jewish question, Tan and I were friends. Then I began to ask questions, such as the cases of ethno-suicidal miscegenation without Jewish subversion that have occurred throughout history, and I distanced myself from him. While I still believe that the JQ (the Jewish Question) is a very real thing—Kevin MacDonald is more or less right, as far as he goes, in his three books on the JQ that I’ve read—, in expanding the JQ into the CQ (the Christian Question) I lost almost all the friends I had known, thanks to the internet, from white nationalism.

But before I get into the title of this article, which I came up with because my previous article is entitled ‘WDH vs. AmRen’, I would like to confess a few things about my biography.

As you can read in my autobiographical books, my adolescent life begins with a family tragedy that destroyed several people. Cognitively, I was not well after the storm and fell into a neochristian cult, whose dogmas led me into a ‘dark night of the soul’.

Specific anecdotes are beside the point except that, after a period of blind belief in the cult, called Eschatology, I began to ask questions. For example, why, if Eschatology develops paranormal powers to heal the body and in theory one can prolong youth, did eschatologists get sick and die like everyone else (see my article on the subject on pages 9-24 of Daybreak)? My teachers of Eschatology never answered me, nor did it ever occur to them that they should answer me.

That was the first time I left a group that had served as a new family after the loss of my biological family. It was also the first time I realised that a group of religionists are so self-encapsulated in an ideological bubble that any rational argument attacking their bubble from the outside will simply be ignored.

Years after I left the cult, something similar would happen to me with another group I belonged to, but this time it was just an internet group about abusive parents: specifically, readers of the Swiss psychologist Alice Miller. By now I was familiar with the work of Lloyd deMause, who, in his book that was translated into several languages, History of Childhood, said that children had been much more abused in the historical past, and more so in non-Western cultures. Since Miller’s fans were (and apparently still are) all liberals, they didn’t enter into an honest discussion with me about the terrible treatment of children in non-Western cultures.

So, for the second time, I lost a group I had acclimatised with, and for exactly the same reason: a lack of honesty on the part of my colleagues to face the facts. My conclusions about deMause’s work can be read in my book Day of Wrath, and my final word to those I left behind as I crossed the bridge from Miller country to White Nationalist country can be read: here.

But my spirit of always going to the frontier of knowledge made me cross, once again, another bridge, although crossing it has left me almost alone. A commenter on this site hit the nail regarding this ultimate loneliness: ‘The leap from 5 to 6 [of Mauricio’s ladder] is astronomical due to the Xtian malware rejection. Feels lonely sometimes’. Indeed: by introducing the CQ we lose the friendship of not only Christian white nationalists, but Christian sympathisers like Kevin MacDonald and many secular people who comment on his site and AmRen.

The West’s Darkest Hour used to be visited by more people, and even receive more donations, before I went nuclear on the CQ. But I won’t change my views unless someone shows me I’m wrong.

A while ago I asked commenters who subscribed to ‘monocausalism’—Jewry as the primary cause of white decline—not to argue here. I have modified that request and I think that, if they have good reasons to refute me, they could point them out to me—as long as they take into consideration what I say in the single comment of the sticky post!

But there is a problem with this desire of mine for dialogue. If I take into consideration my past, for example all those decades I lost in the cult and the reluctance of eschatologists to discuss the issues with me, or the reluctance of Alice Miller fans to discuss my interpretation of deMause, I think I should understand that white nationalists will never try to refute me. Like the eschatologists and Miller fans, they will simply ignore what I say even though it would be possible, say, for one of these fans to write a critical review of my Day of Wrath, or for the nationalists to write critical reviews of the other books on the sidebar.

As those who study paradigm shifts know, the old-school proponents (e.g., those who believe in the quasi-monocausal premise of TOO) have to die off so that the proponents of the new paradigm—that the CQ and JQ are two sides of the same coin—can begin to flourish.

The problem is that we don’t have much time. The anti-white establishment is growing by the day to ‘wait’ for the monocausalists to die out (think, for example, of who Biden wants to nominate to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat). Rather than trying to convince them, it would be great if younger people could climb Mauricio’s ladder and get to where very few of us are. And if we are wrong, let those of the old school start, for example, by answering what Ferdinand Bardamu objects to about Kevin MacDonald (pages 171-181 of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour).

 

Update of February 4

Edmund Connelly, PhD, the author of ‘Tanstaafl and Rational [!] Discussion of Jews’—the first link in the above article—didn’t mention what Greg Johnson thinks about Tan’s monocausalism.

In white nationalism there are three main sites of pundits: TOO, AmRen, and CC (Counter-Currents) administered by Johnson. Had Connelly been a little more objective, he would have taken Johnson’s objections to Tan into account.

Exactly the same can be said about the commenters in the TOO discussion thread. As of this update, there is not a single critique of Tan—or monocausalists like him—of the sort of Greg Johnson’s sharp critique. That gross omission vindicates what I wrote above about ‘the quasi-monocausal premise of TOO’.

Categories
Alice Miller Autobiography Hojas Susurrantes (book) Psychoanalysis

Nobody wanted to listen, 5

The opinion of psychologists

‘Where are the men?’ the little prince at last took up the conversation again. ‘It is a little lonely in the desert…’

‘It is also lonely among men’, the snake said.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


It may be assumed that Tere simply followed the dictates of traditional morality, but that if I told my testimony to a professional psychologist I would find the much sought after oasis. Nothing further from the truth. In the same multi-family apartment complex where I lived with Tere’s family, I met the psychologist Angelica. She read a version of my Letter and other texts that bear certain similarities with what is written in the narrative part of this book. Let’s see what happened when the psychology teacher read my stuff. I will cite my diary and later some of her letters that we exchanged. I had spoken to Angelica on the phone and I surprised her at the moment when she read the climax of my Letter:

July 25, 1998. I interrupted Angelica right in the passage of ‘The Medusa’! She said that it’s very good; that she doesn’t read out of obligation but because she’s enjoying it a lot; that the psychological references are very good and that she congratulates me. She still doesn’t get to the toughest pages. Right there I interrupted her.

August 12 and 13. Nothing new she told me. We only talked about my next trip. Even when I mentioned Medusa, nothing came out except that she said ‘I had read Laing again’.

Compassion doesn’t exist.

Two years later, I sent Angelica the manuscript of my second book. As psychologists are colleagues of psychiatrists, I was particularly interested in having her tell me something about such a ruthless exposé of psychiatry: something that had never before come from the pen of a fellow countryman. In 2000 she sent me an email note: ‘I think you already handle more psychology than I do. What’s more, I feel myself behind in clinic stuff; just finished my sabbatical and started writing a textbook. I really think you have a lot of easiness to express your ideas’.

Thus the same story and the same lack of compassion of two years ago was repeated. Although Angelica intended to flatter me, her missive upset me. Not only a couple of years before she hadn’t told me anything—like Tere—about the tragedy in my family with my parents. Now she wasn’t saying a word to me about the profession that helped ruin my teenage life. I must say that her position is similar to that of some friends who have focused exclusively on the literary aspect of my Letter: something that doesn’t interest me. The sole purpose of writing had been for someone to tell me something about the agony I suffered as a teenager; that it would show some indignation towards the aggressors and a society that allows such things!

Angelica had gone to live in La Paz. Due to her lack of compassion I decided to get away from her as I decided to get away from Tere. To my surprise, four years after her letter, Angelica visited Mexico City; she went around to find out my new phone number, insisted that we meet and talk in a restaurant. As a mature man, I was determined to tell Angelica that many people who, as a lad, I had taken for friends hadn’t really been friends. I alluded to the case of Tere, her former neighbour, and tried to present my arguments along the same lines to what was written in previous pages. Remember that a few years before I had sent her some drafts similar to the ones I publish in this book: texts about what I have felt about the country in which I was born. In July 2004, just a few days after we last saw each other at the restaurant, Angelica sent me an email:

Hi Caesar:

I read your book again. It’s okay. I think some things seemed too racist to me, for example your comments about your country. Your work loses value by your stupid racism: nacos, etc.

In Mexico naco designates the clumsy and uneducated Indian who emigrates to the city. If Angelica hadn’t been indoctrinated in a Marxist-Leninist university, she wouldn’t have been offended. She is a white woman who had a very handsome son, and at that time she was living with another much smaller son whose absent father was European.

You who seek to be treated as a human being don’t treat others as what you ask. It really gave me deep sadness to see you so aggressive and deteriorated.

I don’t think I told you the end of the dream. I was crying and that’s how it was. When I went on the subway, I became depressed and I broke down crying. Believe me, I esteem you more than I imagined. I really wanted to see you and hug you but your mask prevented me. Hopefully you can read this email.

A hug,

Angelica.

I didn’t answer her. The restaurant meeting had been forced, and it will surely be the last time I see her. But I would like to say something about the mask she mentioned. Angelica had had a dream, one of those that portray a situation. She had dreamt of myself as cold and distant, with a black mask; and in the dream she saw a woman who seemed responsible for all that; whom, within the same dream, Angelica related to my mother. In real life I was cold to her at the restaurant, and that was in dramatic contrast to the friendly lad Angelica had met in her apartment almost twenty years earlier. I wore a black mask in the dream and in real life I was dressed in black on my appointment with her (she was all dressed in flashy red).

Regarding her comment that she highly esteem me, I’ve also heard it from people I don’t want to see. Like Tere and Angelica, many hypocrites say they esteem me. But very few say anything meaningful to me when I open my heart to them by placing a homemade impression of the Letter in their hands: the core of my pain and the key that opens the door to my later life. Although Angelica is a professor of psychology, she didn’t show any compassion for what I told in that epistle. And from the other texts she read, it didn’t occur to her that if my father had agreed to emigrate I’d never have written a derogatory line about Mexico, although I’d have written about the United States. In her mind my cry of loneliness before a culture that is no longer mine appeared as ‘stupid racism’ (in my eleventh book in Spanish and Daybreak in English I address the issue of the word ‘racism’). More serious is that the psychology teacher had less compassion than Tere. The latter at least told me she was devastated; that only when she had the strength would she resume reading my Letter, and that at one point her eyes clouded when she read me. The professional psychologist didn’t even have that hint of pity.

It is worth saying that in 1985 Angelica had yelled at me horribly during an argument in which she agreed with my mother. And it was my mother with whom Angelica was talking about me that year! (although, unlike Tere, Angelica did it over the phone). The psychologist interpreted my belated resentment as if I was ‘aggressive and deteriorated’. Ironically, she saw me like this when I was enormously robust compared to the twenty-something lad of yesteryear. People get used to the docility of people damaged by their parents and with low self-esteem, and a change for the better is seen as a bad thing. I have only been ‘deteriorated’, to use Angelica’s word, when due to lack of a knowledgeable witness I couldn’t confront older women (Angelica and Tere are older than me).

Many years ago I witnessed how Angelica scolded her three-year-old blondish son with the threat: ‘I’m going to cut your balls!’ Betito, the European’s son, began to cry. Angelica and Tere say they esteem me. The truth is that there are many people who, like them, lack empathy for the feelings of others. What they estimate is not the real person, only a facet or one-dimensional image that they have of the person. Whoever is lucky enough to have a friendly ear, someone with whom to communicate the dimensions of the soul, knows that trying to transmit the secrets of the heart to a fellow without empathy is like speaking to Golem. Lack of empathy always has the same cause. The last time I saw her, Tere told me a creepy story perpetrated by her grandfather with his children. Once one of his sons was twelve years old, he took him to another city to abandon him. Tere’s grandpa told him that from that day on he had to subsist on his own. He didn’t even take him with a relative or acquaintances. He left him on the Mexican streets and never saw him again in life.

Tere and Angelica were, like the trio in the Cineteca gathering, victims of mistreatment. And not only that. Like those of the Cineteca they have buried the feelings of anger towards their parents. Ironically, the repression was greater in the psychology teacher than in Tere, who at least told me the story of her grandfather, or the filmmakers, who also spoke about their past. The more terrible the abuse of the parent and the greater the repression, the less empathy the daughter will develop towards her son (we can already imagine the toll that constant threats of castration can cause in a little boy of three years).

 
The analysts

There will be those who, after reading the above story, will think that there are not the psychologists, but the psychoanalysts the experts in deep psychology: professionals who take an interest in the lives of their clients, especially in the terrors of their childhood. This is a myth. I won’t repeat the exposé from my previous book on psychoanalysis because no one currently believes in its cornerstone. Freud said that his ideological edifice rested on his discovery of the Oedipus complex: that parents turn out to be a source of sexual desires for the child. It takes being too stupid, or seeing Freud as an infallible guru, to believe such a thing.

For many years Alice Miller practiced her profession as a psychoanalyst in Switzerland. In her first three books, Das Drama des begabten Kindes (The Drama of the Gifted Child), Am Anfang war Erziehung (translated as For Your Own Good) and Du Sollst Nicht Merken (Thou Shalt Not Be Aware) Miller believed that her discoveries were not incompatible with psychoanalysis. But in the late 1980s and early 90s she openly broke with her profession with the publication of Der gemiedene Schlüssel (The Untouched Key), Das verbannte Wissen (Banished Knowledge) and Abbruch der Schweigemauer (Breaking Down the Wall of Silence).

People like Miller, Jeffrey Masson, and others have found that an analyst is someone trained not to listen to his client. Before I became familiar with her thinking, which helped me distance myself even more from psychoanalysts, I used to hang out with a couple of young Lacanian analysts: Solbein and Hector Escobar. The same year that I gave copies of my manuscript to Tere and Angelica I gave another to the Escobars. Hector, who had studied psychology, loved it and devoured it in a day and a half. In a cafe he talked about my literary skills—as I said, something that irritates me to be told—and also spoke as a psychoanalyst: ‘The problem arose with that self that your mother deconstructed’. Hector was very cordial and warm, but his analytic term (‘deconstructed’) was cold and far from what my pages actually screamed (compare it with my metaphor ‘a dagger in the heart’). Solbein also liked my book and it was she who, when I sat with them in the cafe, brought up on the table the subject of the manuscript I had given them. But Solbein uttered an icy comment: she said she didn’t notice many differences with the cases she saw in her office. It was as if someone were simply telling a Gulag survivor that his story was not dissimilar to other zek stories! The way she concluded her comment was horrifyingly dry:

‘Those are common clinical experiences’.

The analyst’s words remind me neither more nor less of the infamous Dr. Amara when he read the epistle to my mother. Faced with Amara’s evasiveness in his office, I asked him: ‘But what do you think of what I say, that the cause of my problem was my mother?’ In my previous book I tell that Amara answered: ‘It’s myopia’ and that he explained that neuroses exist in every family, and that mine was just one more neurotic family. In addition to this incredible similarity, Solbein told me that the analytic thesis she was writing referred to mystical stages in people who had had absent parents. I wrote in my diary that I was surprised that she wasn’t moved by the tragedy of the physical torture my parents inflicted on me: getting out of bed every day after sleeping for only a few hours, something that has nothing to do with ‘an absent father’. Referring to their comments, in my diary I noted that these Lacanians ‘don’t touch the people, nor the Subject they talk about so much, but they invalidate him by speaking objectively about him’. Although Hector was much warmer, he listened to his wife without realising how terrible terms such as ‘clinic’ sound to those who seek consolation: a word that Angelica had also used in one of her letters. For an autobiographer immersed in the humanities, the repulsiveness of language in psychology and psychoanalysis is discovered in the following anecdote.

At the time when I gave my manuscript to the Escobars I used to eat at a restaurant in downtown Coyoacán in Mexico City, an extremely populous place. For the hermit, few things are more execrable than the crowd, the street vendors and the noise. As I didn’t have a kitchen in my home, I suffered greatly from having to fight my way through the human swarming every day when I went to eat. But, oh miracle, when I met the Escobars in that place I knew that the sacrifice of having gone there for weeks had been worth it. Out of dignity I hadn’t spoken to them on the phone to ask what they thought of my text. I hoped the initiative would come from them. But just like the day I ate with Tere in Coyoacán, my heart burned to know what the young analysts would say about my life. The daily and painstakingly crossing that crowd of Neanderthals, I told myself, was worth it to find them! (incidentally, in those days they both looked like Iberian-type whites). And it is that in my imagery prior to the meeting in the cafe I imagined a compassionate and understanding Solbein who explained to me, with her knowledge, my written confessions. But when in real life I came to what I thought would be an oasis of understanding, I found only sand. The intimate manuscript on the great odyssey of my life simply describes ‘common clinical experiences’.

Categories
Alice Miller Autobiography Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book)

Nobody wanted to listen, 4

A supposed great friend

You could tell me that I had the folly to confess to casual acquaintances; that if I had opened my heart to my closest friends, say a compassionate woman, I would have been listened to. Sadly, that is not true. In the middle of my life I know that many people who in my twenties I thought were friends offended me even more than the Cineteca acquaintances. It took me a long time to digest this bitter drink, and only thanks to my discovery of Miller. For example, a close friend named Regina told me the following (I quote from my 1998 diary): ‘“You blame everything on people and your parents. No, Caesar, no. You don’t see yourself in the mirror. You are responsible”. That was yesterday on the phone so the memory is fresh. And she even told me that David Helfgott didn’t blame his dad!’

In my discussions I frequently refer to the film Shine about David’s life, as I did in the filmmakers’ gathering, to show an extreme case of soul murder: what psychiatrists stigmatise with the term schizophrenia. Regina didn’t read Gillian Helfgott’s book where the disturbed David told his wife ‘It’s all daddy’s fault’ talking about his mental condition. Not that Regina shared the New Age philosophy that would have dwarfed the philosophers of classical German idealism (the crazy things I heard at the Cineteca for example). However, her words that ‘one is responsible’ are very common cliches in today’s culture.

In the mid-1980s, without a career or profession to face society, I took refuge in the house of Teresa Moreno: the lady who, in the narrative part [of this book], told me that she never denied the mythopoetic imagery of her children. It was Tere who would introduce me to Regina. I had known Tere since 1977 through her husband: one of the chess fans with whom I played chess in the park. Tere accepted me in her house as a Mother Teresa would accept an evicted person. At least that was the image that my friends took to be true. I don’t want to tell the story of my friendship with Tere; I’m just going to talk about how a young man can be deceived by seeing something that never was.

Before I drank from the true water of communication, as I’ll show at the end of this book, I used to see mirages in the desert. In my desperation to find a friendly ear, I imagined that just by having a few conversations with someone I could open my heart to them. Tere, as I said, sold the idea that she was compassionate with the miserable. Lots of people slept at her house and she and I had long, seemingly profound conversations. Over time, I was closer to her than to her husband. I lived with the Jiménez family for eight months in 1985. More than a dozen years later, when my unpublished autobiographical project was on track, I gave my old friend a copy of my Letter and other intimate writings.

In the case of Regina, to whom I had also given a copy of the Letter, the aberration was that that woman didn’t feel compassion for the teenager I was, but for my parents! But Regina belongs to the humble class and has a low IQ. Following the aforementioned quote from my diary about Regina, I wrote: ‘Let’s see if Tere, to whom I will deliver the manuscript soon, has compassion. Let’s see…’ When Tere read my writing she commented about our friend Regina: ‘She’s like your parents: they are the type of people who, whatever their parents do, you have to honour them’. But when we talked about what she thought herself—oh my! What better than to quote my diary again. A couple of days before I lost my thirties, I wrote:

August 10, 1998.

It was yesterday when I said goodbye to them. Tere had compassion not for me but for my father, whom she had seen the day before and, as she told me, she was ‘thinking all the time about my writing’. That the publication of my book was going to be a shock for him and that it could bump off the poor dad. Tere asked me ‘if I could forgive’ my parents and that despite being the aggressors ‘they were also victims as children’. She hasn’t finished reading my manuscript yet but stayed a few pages before the end. If she had compassion for my tragedy, she said it indirectly: ‘I will continue reading it until I feel stronger’, and that two or three times her eyes had clouded when reading it. In the end, she said that every time I went to talk to her, I ‘left her devastated’. Compassion is truly a gift that very few people have. Tere had already shown signs of lack of compassion with Sergio, whom I mentioned in the conversation yesterday.

The latter is a long and dirty story, and I will have no choice but to bring it out into the open to assess the strange morals of someone I considered a great friend.

Sergio, who had had psychotic crises as a result of being martyred at home, had been an intimate friend of Tere. His twin brother took advantage of Sergio’s relationship with Tere to woo the latter while I lived with the Jiménez family: times when the marriage between Tere and my friend Jiménez was unravelling. When I discovered that Tere preferred the twin, putting Sergio aside, her image of a compassionate and welcoming mother let me down. What shocked me was an occasion when, according to Tere herself, someone—she didn’t specify that it was Sergio—had grovelled before her in a tremendous plea not to leave him, but she coldly continued on her way. It shocked me because I guessed that this someone was Sergio, who had been driven mad by his family. Although that happened over a decade before I started my psychiatry research, I still thought it a crime for Sergio’s own monozygotic twin and ‘mother Teresa’ to betray him in such a way. Sergio was in an extreme situation. It was him, not his twin brother, who needed help. Now, having completed my psychiatry research I know that, well treated, he would have had a chance of recovery. But Tere, the twin brother and their father did the opposite (the twins’ schizophrenogenic mother had already died).

But you can’t learn from another’s mistakes. Even with such brutal evidence I didn’t eradicate from my mind Tere’s public image as a compassionate friend. Only by the end of the century, when I wrote the entry from the diary above and Sergio had already died, did I wake up to the fact that Tere was not the person I assumed to be. For example, when I was writing my diary I omitted to tell something of great importance for me. After Tere told me that she cared about my parents if I published the manuscript, we went to eat. Throughout our meal, with great and more than great expectation I waited for Tere to tell me something significant about what she had read! Quite apart from her concern for my parents, I expected her to tell me something concrete about the tragedy that I tell in the Letter. How I remember Tere’s smiles and her kindness to me while we ate: that character that has captivated so many. But the long-awaited comment didn’t come…

That day Tere died in my heart. And from that day on, not only would I not seek her friendship, but I also eluded her invitations, via third parties, to go to her and her new husband, the twin brother. Not telling me anything about what was most important to me exposed Tere as someone who had never been a true friend. Six years later, the year I sat down to write the analytical part of this book, something unexpected happened. Tere caught me in an office talking on the phone and waited to talk to me. Once again, I quote from my diary:

February 20, 2004. As much as I wanted to avoid her, she waited while I spoke and I had to let her in. Despite being so gentle, she has no empathy. Without me touching the subject, she spoke about my Letter to mom Medusa. And without me touching the subject, she again worried about the image of my parents if I published it!

She doesn’t seem to realise that just talking to my parents makes her my enemy. She even said that what they did ‘was not with bad intention’ and that her ideal was that I abandon all literary projects and resentments, and that that would be my salvation. She used completely different words, but that was her message. The poor thing doesn’t know that telling someone who has a career as a whistleblower, like telling Solzhenitsyn not to write about the Red Terror, is insulting; and although I wasn’t offended in her presence, at home I saw the absurdity of her position. Hers is none other than all that millenary ‘wisdom’ that has had human beings trapped in the sixth day of history.

Every time I see more clearly why I lost so many years of my life. I had no knowledgeable witnesses. Tere is so cute that the fallacies of her speech aren’t noticeable when being with her. But they are paradigms of pedagogical attitudes, as Miller would say, the most harmful attitudes in the world. Not long ago, as she confessed to me yesterday, she spoke to my mother. Tere told me that, since I didn’t visit my parents, my mother had told her that I was ‘very strange’, that that was my character. Although she said it with no intention of offending me, here I got her by the ovaries [vulgarism for ‘I got her’, more common in Mexico as referring to male balls]. It is clear that Tere doesn’t see my tragedy. She denies it. Her advice is not aimed at bullies to change their ways. They are aimed at the victim to try impossible oblivion…

Once again, ‘poisonous pedagogy’ in action.

—impossible because of the null employment opportunities after I lost my profession since the times of the abuse. Tere is asking me that, while her son in Switzerland is studying with his Aryan girlfriend, I, who haven’t even had a real partner, must ‘forget’ my destiny. Her anti-empathy, so evident in the fact that she sees my mother and they are friends, speaks for itself. Not only Tere lacks compassion. Look at the dirty way she treated Sergio. What she told me yesterday corroborates what I thought of her. Hopefully I won’t see her again. She is still on my blacklist and I hope she will have a place in one of my books. After reading Miller I see that people like Tere have played the role of villains in my life. Before Miller, people like Tere confused me greatly and were the cause of my stagnation in life, of not making contact with the feelings of the attacked, tortured and destroyed teen I carry inside. But the light has already reached me, and thanks to having unmasked people like Tere.

Seeing these passages published from an intimate diary will seem cruel to some of my readers. It won’t seem cruel, on the other hand, that someone who I considered my great friend has visited, over the years and behind my back, the person who destroyed me. As I said, in a world where everything is turned upside down, it is not the cruelty of parents to their children that causes scandal, but the denunciation of that cruelty and its accomplices.

Tere’s words move me to add one more page against forgiveness and forgetting. Tere had asked me if I could forgive my parents and commented that they too had been victims. This hasn’t been the first time that I have received this little piece of advice. As we saw on previous pages I have heard it from other people, including my cousin Carmina. The folly of this demand to the victim is already answered in what I wrote in my diary: Tere should have asked my parents to examine their conscience, not the victim to forgive those who avoid any examination.

The belief that forgiveness has a healthy effect is axiomatic in all cultures, and it seems so obvious that it is taken for granted. But the truth is that forgiving an unredeemed parent is psychological suicide. Miller presents a devastating argument: at the behest of the therapist, a man abused in his childhood forgave his father—a sadist—and later he committed an inexplicable murder. This is because the hatred towards the aggressor still dwells, unconsciously, in the forgiver. Hatred cannot be exorcised by force of will. Unilaterally, forgiveness is impossible. Authentic forgiveness is feasible only if the aggressor recognises his fault and does something very concrete to make amends to his victim: bilateral forgiveness. I never tire of repeating that this is impossible as long as the aggressor insists that he acted well. Poisonous pedagogy (*), and I’d venture to say pedagogical attitudes in general, are based on this inversion of the most elemental psychological reality. Ultimately, the values of the world’s cultures towards the victim of parental abuse must be transvalued. Miller’s argument against forgiveness in several of her texts is compelling: and those who believe that one-sided forgiveness has a salutary effect would do well to study the lives of serial killers. To illustrate this argument in less extreme cases, I will mention something that appears in Susan Forward’s Toxic Parents. To her clients who come to her office saying that they have already forgiven their abusive parents, Forward demands that they have to ‘unforgive’ them until they make contact with their unconscious rage. Otherwise nuclear hatred is still there, and like the subject who committed an inexplicable murder, the natural reaction is to displace it towards substitute people: their children or the partner.

Ultimately, no one has come as far as I have. I am the first to do so in eleven autobiographical books so that the subject of soul murder becomes as didactic as possible before an ignorant world. My friend Tere was unable to understand this new literary genre at a time when I was just writing my third book.

___________

(*) Literally translated from German, Schwarze Pädagogik would be ‘black pedagogy’.

Categories
Alice Miller Autobiography Child abuse Film Hojas Susurrantes (book) Holocaust

Nobody wanted to listen, 3

Offended by casual acquaintances

Some would say that Gerardo, from whom I would also distance myself, didn’t tell me anything about my manuscripts because, as a relative, he didn’t want to commit himself. But there have been other filmmakers who have nothing to do with my family and who behaved worse when I brought up the subject of what happened to me as a teen.

In 2003 I used to go to some get-togethers of filmmakers, all of them older than me, who met at noon on Sundays at the Cineteca café in Mexico City. One of those Sundays Elsié Méndez, Fernando Gou and his wife [none of them swarthy by the way] offended me in such a way that I didn’t visit again those gatherings that I hadn’t missed since I met them. Elsié was infuriated by my feelings of outrage at the abuse of minors: she felt threatened. But laughing at one’s suffering during puberty, which she usually does in social gatherings, is a way to avoid pain and to mourn behind walls. As Miller has said, that was the nonsense Frank McCourt did in Angela’s Ashes, which even before I discovered Miller irritated me. In his autobiography McCourt never spoke out against his parents or the culture that tormented him. Rather, and like Elsié, he laughs at his past: and precisely for laughing at the tragedy of his childhood he has been applauded in a world steeped in poisonous pedagogy. I confess that what irritated me the most about Angela’s Ashes when it was released were the reviews I read when I lived in Houston: they praised the author’s non-judgmental stance.

Contrary to popular belief, laughing at extreme parental abuse doesn’t cure the internal injury that the abuse caused. The diametrically opposite heals: crying. The raucous anger at the aggressors with which I used to express myself in the gathering is also curative. Miller has said that if Sylvia Plath had written aggressive letters to her abusive mother—remember my Letter—she wouldn’t have had to commit suicide. I lost years of my life by not prosecuting my parents and their society, as I do now. Before I found a knowledgeable witness to guide me into the forbidden territory of healthy hatred, the guilt complex kept me from getting ahead in life. It took entire ages for me to denounce the cruelty of my parents. But in our world it is very common that it’s not cruelty towards children that causes anger, but the denunciation of that cruelty.

For example, seeing my anger at my parents, both Elsié and Mr. Fernando jumped on me to protect their parents from their unconscious anger. Like everything belonging to Alcoholics Anonymous, Mr. Fernando has avoided thoroughly confronting the figure of the father. In Neurotics Anonymous, which I had attended only once twenty years earlier, I witnessed the victim publicly venting out in free associations. I don’t object to this catharsis, but both groups completely omit the elementary: devising social engineering scenarios to eliminate domestic violence towards the child who, already grown up, takes refuge in drinking or neurotic defense mechanisms to mitigate his pain. Part of this pedagogic attitude, understood as ‘educating’ the victim (‘poisonous pedagogy’) instead of social engineering, can be illustrated by the question that Rocío, Fernando’s wife, asked me about my parents:

‘Have you forgiven them already?’

This woman, whose nose was broken by her father, reversed reality with her question. Her negative photographic vision has to do with the false feelings of guilt that prevent us from putting the criminal father on the dock. Whoever is not under the influence of poisonous pedagogy asks the natural question and directs it to the aggressor, not to his victim: Have you already asked your daughter for forgiveness? Society not only ignores that unilateral forgiveness is impossible; not only does it not penalise parental abuse but, seeing the reverse reality, it turns its weapons against the victim who complains about the unredeemed parent. We can already imagine what effect it would have to ask a Russian Gulag survivor if he has already forgiven Stalin’s willing executioners while they still believe they did the right thing.

If the filmmakers of the gathering reflected on the films that they comment on Sundays, they would realise the absurdity of their position. Consider the documentary S-21: La Machine de Mort Khmère Rouge by Rithy Pahn, shown at the Cineteca itself. In this shocking testimony a survivor of the genocide of the 1970s in Cambodia tells the camera that while some dupes speak of forgiveness and forgetfulness, it is not possible to do so while the executioners of two million Cambodian civilians, including young children, not only are not sorry. They don’t even acknowledge that they made a mistake! The same can be said of unrepentant parents who are not aware that they have harmed their child. Unilateral forgiveness is so artificial, feigned and illusory that, at the time when I argued at the Cineteca, Mrs. Rocío didn’t visit her father, who was dying of cancer. But yes: she and her friends demand unilateral forgiveness from me. The ‘Have you forgiven them already?’ tacitly implies that Rocío had unilaterally forgiven her father, something she didn’t do in real life. Commenting on the heated discussion that Sunday, Pancho Sánchez, the author of several film books who presides over these gatherings, told me alone that those who say they have no resentment towards their aggressors were hypocrites.

That impossible forgiveness that a society blind and deaf in psychological matters demands in unison is one of the main features of what Miller calls poisonous pedagogy, and it will be a subject to which I will have to return later. Nowadays, when I openly express my resentments towards my parents—as in the gathering of film fans—I am unable to take it out on others. If I had been given a lesson at school against an absorbing mother’s behaviour, perhaps I would have made contact with my feelings and not wanted to spill them on Elvira [recounted in the previous section]. But school, society, including my educated relatives, see to it that those feelings never surface. But they are there, in the psychic core and eventually they erupt either against the aggressor in the form of an accusatory epistle—a direct and healthy hatred—or against substitute objects: a displaced and insane hatred.

I must clarify that in a meeting with other film fans at the Cineteca my testimony was very well received, and even a lady encouraged me to ‘get it all out’ as the best therapy. It was only at the table that gathered some individuals who had been mistreated in their childhoods when resistance arose. Like my sister Korina, they did this to avoid feeling their own pain. The only way to convey the intensity of the emotions in the discussion that day is to quote my personal diary, even if I have to correct the syntax and rewrite some passages in addition to omitting some insults (not all). Bear in mind that the films that I saw then were pure anti-German propaganda filmed by Jews: something that, as we shall see in The Grail, I didn’t know at the time.

October 26, 2003

Today the damaged ones attacked me. Some of the things I heard were beyond incredible: ‘You have to blame yourself for everything that happens to you; otherwise you have no power over your life’. Elsié believes that she has a power that she doesn’t have. And Fernando the same.

When I came up with my favourite arguments to refute them, suitable arguments for moviegoers—Sophie’s Choice, a movie that everyone saw, and the girl raped by her father—the incredible happened: the victims were blamed. Elsié commented: ‘They are already thinking about how it was possible that they went like lambs to the slaughterhouse’. That is to say: there are no culprits. Regarding Sophie, they denied my thesis that the only thing she could do was what she did: commit suicide. As to the other case, they said that the girl could perfectly rebuild her life as an adult. In other words: no people are destroyed.

Fernando was more aggressive. When I said that only those who get to the core of pain pull the dagger out of their hearts and that the approach of those in Alcoholics Anonymous was epidermal, he replied that I was ‘arrogant’, and that Alcoholics Anonymous was about ‘reducing the ego’ in the sense of not seeing your pain but that of others. This is just the opposite of my autobiography, which, while I see things like the Gulag, the starting point is my own life. The way Fernando spoke of the ego was like saying that you have to forget in order to forgive.

Pancho, the only one who was not a victim of beating at puberty, didn’t attack me. Reason? He lacks an idiotic defence mechanism that I unintentionally triggered with my observations. Now I will have to stop seeing them because I see that, with that mental block, a genuine friendship couldn’t prosper. I’d have to go just to listen and shut up when the victims are blamed, something I’m not willing to do. The funny thing is that I unwittingly provoked them so that Rocío and Elsié would talk about the most horrendous stories of parental abuse in their lives. Even Fernando said that when he told his father that he wanted to study oratory, he replied: ‘You stutterer are not good for that!’

All three, damaged. Fernando, remember, was an alcoholic for many years. He was extremely pissed off that I said I had found the dagger in my heart—the internalised parents—and the way to pull it out, and that I doubted Alcoholics Anonymous, analysts, and psychiatrists could pull it out (‘arrogance’). The one who surprised me the most was Elsié, because on another occasion she had understood Fernando’s repression about his pain and today she changed sides. When I mentioned the case of Sor Juana, everyone came out that she, not the archbishop and Miranda, was the winner! I told them about Juana’s self-immolation and they said that the world remembers her. This reasoning is so stupid that it is not worth refuting.

Octavio Paz wrote a great book about how an archbishop and a confessor cornered Juana de Asbaje.

A real pandemonium of the status quo reaction was triggered today by my attackers. In a soliloquy that I just threw on the street, I realised that the hatred towards the victim—reminiscent of Dr. Amara, the psychiatrists, and the serial killer Miller speaks of—is because they cannot bear the pain of having been themselves victims. Not wanting to see their total helplessness, they come out with ‘I’m over it’, ‘You have to forgive’, ‘You have to forget’ and so on. The worst thing is when they repeat the social clichés, the most nefarious of all, like the one that those stagnated in life haven’t wanted to get out of their victimising stance. I tried to refute them with the case of the Eschatology cult [see the first article in Daybreak] in which I was and chess: that only when I wasn’t aware of the role my parents played did I get stuck and was a looser. That made Fernando angry, who told me things that hurt me, and Elsié and Rocío supported him.

But here’s their story…

Elsié was married when she was almost a child and her abusive father told her: ‘Just one piece of advice: always say yes to your husband’. Already married she cried and cried and didn’t know why. She had two horrendous marriages in which she was beaten. She repeated the patterns of a battered woman with her husbands, she couldn’t get rid of them: something had her ass hooked to them. Rocío’s father broke her nose at age twenty because she dared to confront him with a ‘Why?’ when her father told her ‘You won’t speak to that boy again’ (Fernando). When his father got home, all her siblings shit out of fear. He always beat them undeservedly. They continued with their public confessions but the essential is understood: they told horror stories and cannot see another victim who now wants to make a literary career on the subject. It is painful for them and for Fernando who, although he didn’t say many things due to male circumspection, it is clear that his father crushed him.

The funny thing is that both Rocío (‘have you forgiven them yet?’) and Elsié (credulous of psychoanalysis) and Fernando (credulous of Alcoholics Anonymous) have as a defence mechanism the New Age bullshit that one is ‘the arbiter of one’s own destiny’. Everything has to do with not facing the pain: especially the pain that impotence in childhood was total: the opposite of the lies of the New Age. Ah! I had forgotten to say that Elsié came out with a BS similar to that of Arnaldo Vidal about his brother Juan Carlos, who told me that ‘it made him very comfortable to be sick’. Elsié told me that David Helfgott wanted to stay as a child.

Juan Carlos Vidal, an acquaintance of my family and grandson of the famous Victor Serge, became a mentally-ill lad because of the behaviour of his parents. Helfgott also became ‘schizophrenic’ for the same causes. The filmmakers knew the latter case very well from the movie Shine. The grotesque thing about their position is that if I took them to an asylum, they would say that all diagnosed as schizophrenics found it very comfortable to stay as children.

That’s why Elsié and Fernando get hooked into victim-blame philosophies like psychoanalysis and AA: it is their defence mechanism to believe that they had more power than they actually had. Remember, Caesar, how twenty years ago it bewildered me in Neurotics Anonymous when they talked about ‘selfishness’, and that because of that ‘selfishness’ the poor devils who went there were in bad shape. Whoever presided over that place blamed herself and the rest of the group for their emotional state. I never imagined when I left in the morning that this would be the last day that I go to the gatherings at the Cineteca. The way Elsié and Fernando spoke today was to repeat the social slogans that ‘negative thinking’, mine supposedly, hurts; and rosy glasses heal. And by the way, two of Rocío’s sisters didn’t marry and don’t see their father.

There’s something esle. Both Elsié and Rocío had helping witnesses: their own siblings. But they condemn those who didn’t have them: Caesar, Helfgott, Sor Juana. Also, they don’t want to see that there is a stark difference between the pain of a woman like the one in the movie Sophie’s Choice—I used this example many times—and other pains. Fernando got pissed off and said that the pains cannot be compared. Neither he nor Elsié know that there is a limit of resilience in human pain. If that limit is crossed, the mind breaks down.

In the section on Shine of my previous book I spoke about the latter: an argument that I brought up in one of the previous gatherings but that Mr. Fernando ignored.

Their ravings—that Sor Juana emerged triumphantly; blaming Helfgott, and denying that only suicide could detonate Sophia’s mountain of pain—are clear proof that my arguments were devastating. They had to come out really crazy when I put them on the defensive. Another thing. If someone comes to Alcoholics Anonymous in trauma, the worst thing they can tell him is that he has to ‘get down on the ego’. His damage is in the ego, not in an inflated ego as Fernando believes, but in a wounded ego. The climax of yesterday’s psychotic breakdown were Elsié’s words: ‘You have to blame yourself’ for everything that happens to me in order to ‘have control over life.’

The New Age doctrines are so absurd that they would even lead us to blame the passenger victims of a plane crash. It is so unnecessary to spend ink in refuting them that I better continue with my diary:

Another breakdown: when I mentioned the example of Auschwitz Rocío jumped up claiming that the prisoners in concentration camps had control in some way, meaning that those who survived were the good guys. It is this type of psychotic breakdown in the face of my arguments that makes it unjustified to return to sit at their table. But yes: I will nail them in my books…

October 28. I’ve been thinking more about what happened on Sunday and discovered a thing or two. Both Fernando and Elsié are in cults. I was ignorant of it, so I didn’t realise that saying that Alcoholics Anonymous therapy was ‘skin deep’ was going to cause anger and rage from the cultists. Likewise, when I spoke of Sophie’s pain, they came out with the idea that ‘pain can be an incentive for life’. As if any pain and Sophie’s were the same!, who was made to choose, in front of her children, which of them went to the gas chambers: the fateful ‘Sophie’s choice’.

As I said, what bothers this trio the most is the impotence in the face of evil and the criminal will of the Other. In order not to feel their pain (‘blame oneself’, ‘reduce ego’, ‘forgive’, ‘pain can be a spur for life’) they insulted me. Elsié, it hurts me to say it because at the time she hurt me, told me that self-pity was the worst, and that one had to get out of that victimising position. I felt very bad when, following that line, these idiots blamed the prisoners of the concentration camps. And by the way, Fernando’s bilious zeal when speaking of the ‘Higher Power’, an entity that is instilled in them in Alcoholics Anonymous, was very similar to my old father’s zeal when speaking of God. It is clear that it is the zeal of a cultist.

A few words about self-help groups in general and Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in particular are worth it. In short, it is not enough that some people are willing to listen to our problems, even our deepest demons, as is done in such groups. The victim of abuse must have an enlightened witness: someone who doesn’t come up with idiotic defence mechanisms in the face of tragedy. Now, the difference between the hearing of an enlightened witness and a simple audience such as Alcoholics Anonymous is abysmal. I know a subject who was in AA whom I had to distance myself from because, although he overcame his alcoholism, he displaces hidden anger on his friends. Likewise, there are AA people who transfer their alcoholism to bulimic behaviour, or become addicted to gambling because their psychic damage was never addressed. They are called ‘dry alcoholics’. The dry guy I distanced myself from, for example, once he got over his alcoholism took refuge in chess. He never processed his pain. Divorced and with two small daughters living with their mother, this mature man displaces his anger on others. Alcohol is a balm for pain that the mind is unable to process. Alcoholics Anonymous will have saved him from that false balm, but not from his pain.

Mr. Fernando got very angry when I said that AA therapy was skin deep. But that is exactly what these types of therapies are. Only the enlightenment that comes from an ‘accomplice witness’—a better translation than ‘knowledgeable witness’, one of Miller’s terms [she wrote in German]—along with writing about our lives, can result in true psychological healing.

The key to the keys, Caesar, is that you cannot argue with people who blame the victims of the concentration camps. Exercising such violence to reality hides an infinite aversion to the fact that there is Evil in the world and that we have no control over the evil acts of others. But I’m going to leave these people alone. It’s already eighteen pages of my diary. It’s so sad that I can’t make friends in a world like this…

Remember that, in those days, those movie fans and I watched Hollywood films and knew nothing about the malicious anti-German propaganda or the Jewish question. Independently of that, the disagreement at the Cineteca hurt me in such a way that I promised myself that this would be the last time I would behave cordially with those who, in the future, offend me with poisonous pedagogies. During the 2003 discussion I was still reticent to speak out all of it. I didn’t respond to the filmmakers as vehemently as, alone, I did in my diary, but rather respected social conventions. But respecting them leaves the offended with an irresistible desire for revenge, as we will see in the next few pages.

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book)

Nobody wanted to listen

Six months ago a woman told me in the comments section of this site (one of the essays I included in Daybreak):

I read [Alice] Miller 30 years ago in an attempt to understand and resolve a history of abuse and tyrannical Christian teaching. I gave up because confronting my own past would have meant destruction of much on which my life has been built.

I am still unwell, but in advanced age am finally confronting the catastrophic link between the tortured son on the cross as a model for forgiveness and the cruel parent who demands forgiveness, who links pain and love.

Cesar you are a lone voice in a noisy world, but some of us are listening.

Soon I will begin to translate some chapters of the section ‘Nobody Wanted to Listen’, the second part of My Childhood, the third of my eleven books.

In order not to leave the reader in the dark, I would like to remind him or her that only the first of my eleven books has been fully translated into English. Day of Wrath only translates most of the fourth book, and in Daybreak you can read a couple of articles, ‘On Depression’ and ‘From the Great Confinement to Chemical Gulag’ that give an idea of what I say in my second book.

As Elenka told me half a year ago, this is a topic we all shy away from. It confronts us with the core of our pain. But feeling that pain again is the royal road to the healing of those of us who have been harmed by our families.

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Racial right

Very important subject

I am perfectly aware that virtually all people of white nationalism, or even the alt-lite, are unaware of the psychic havoc caused by abusive parents. The exception, as I have said more than once, is Stefan Molyneux as we saw not long ago in his review of Joker.

What bothers me is that Molyneux’s mother is Jewish, and one would expect a non-Jew of the alt-lite or white nationalism to venture into a subject that I consider fundamental: the actual aetiology of mental illness (as opposed to the psychiatric lies that we hear in the universities).

If the Aryan world shakes off all Jewish influence, beginning of course with a rejection of Christianity and its secular offshoots, over time it will ‘translate’, into Aryan language, the most relevant findings of Jews on the trauma model of mental disorders. In the introduction to my work for a racialist audience I recently wrote for this site:

For now, suffice it to say that Alice Miller continued to mention Hitler under the influence of the official narrative in almost all of her texts, so I currently do not recommend any of her books. It is not that I have repudiated Miller’s findings: a Jewess who, although she suffered as a child in the Warsaw Ghetto, after changing her Jewish surname she never wanted to return to the shelter of her mother’s religion. But I must say that Miller’s psycho-biographical analysis of Hitler is based on the great lie of our times. The Swiss psychologist never considered such elemental issues as the fact that the Holocaust of millions of Ukrainians, largely perpetrated by Bolshevik Jews, caused the legitimate fear, and eventual reaction, of the German state.

But that is a separate matter. The issue that concerns us in Whispering Leaves is very different: the Dantesque hell that some parents put their children in: something that Miller got right.

The issue of abusive parents is not only taboo in all societies, as almost no one connects the dots between mental disorders and poor childrearing. Like the racial issue or the WWII theme, as to mental health the values have been completely reversed.

For example, two years ago, in March 2018, a commenter told me: ‘I have since forgiven my father and every other person of note in my life needing forgiveness’. But forgiveness is a Christian doctrine, although many secular psychotherapists also subscribe such unhealthy way of treating their patients. I answered: ‘I cannot speak for you because I ignore the full story. Generally, for an adult child to forgive a parent who never recognised his fault is psychological suicide. Alice Miller said that a child can excuse his parents, if they in their turn are prepared to recognise and admit to their failures. But the demand for forgiveness that we often encounter can pose a danger for healing. These are some quotable quotes from her’:

• It is the resentment of the past, we are told, that is making us ill. In those by now familiar groups in which addicts and their relations go into therapy together, the following belief is invariably expressed. Only when you have forgiven your parents for everything they did to you can you get well. Even if both your parents were alcoholic, even if they mistreated, confused, exploited, beat, and totally overloaded you, you must forgive.

• The majority of therapists work under the influence of destructive interpretations culled from both Western and Oriental religions, which preach forgiveness to the once-mistreated child. Thereby, they create a new vicious circle for people who, from their earliest years, have been caught in the vicious circle of pedagogy. For forgiveness does not resolve latent hatred and self-hatred but rather covers them up in a very dangerous way.

• In my own therapy it was my experience that it was precisely the opposite of forgiveness —namely, rebellion against mistreatment suffered, the recognition and condemnation of my parents’ destructive opinions and actions, and the articulation of my own needs— that ultimately freed me from the past.

• By refusing to forgive, I give up all illusions. Why should I forgive, when no one is asking me to? I mean, my parents refuse to understand and to know what they did to me. So why should I go on trying to understand and forgive my parents and whatever happened in their childhood, with things like psychoanalysis and transactional analysis? What’s the use? Whom does it help? It doesn’t help my parents to see the truth. But it does prevent me from experiencing my feelings, the feelings that would give me access to the truth. But under the bell-jar of forgiveness, feelings cannot and may not blossom freely.

• I cannot conceive of a society in which children are not mistreated, but respected and lovingly cared for, that would develop an ideology of forgiveness for incomprehensible cruelties. This ideology is indivisible with the command “Thou shalt not be aware” [of the cruelty your parents inflicted to you] and with the repetition of that cruelty on the next generation.

I’ve added italics in the above quotations.

Again, I am not asking my audience to read Miller. But my writings translate, and expand considerably, her findings for an Aryan audience. It is a very important subject for the simple reason that mental health matters, and racialists who have had mental issues are generally clueless about what caused them.

Categories
Alice Miller Hojas Susurrantes (book) Psychiatry

Queer generation

Racist folks who have passed away—Robert Mathews, David Lane, Dr. Pierce, Revilo Oliver, Ben Klassen, George Lincoln Rockwell—were tougher than the younger white nationalists of today. They were also far less compromising with the System’s lies than what we see nowadays in the Alt-Right scene. This reminds me an obituary that I wrote on October 16, 2012 and I translate now into English:

Tom Szasz (1920-2012)

I heard that Thomas Szasz died last month, who had a great influence on my thinking while writing the second book of Hojas Susurrantes twelve years ago. After learning about his death I visited YouTube and watched a long lecture by Szasz at his ninetieth birthday.

Although my critical study of psychiatry is now a thing of the past in my life—the race replacement that occurs throughout the West is infinitely more alarming—I had not seen critical material about psychiatry since then. But I used the news about Szasz’s death to watch other anti-psychiatric videos.

I was surprised to discover that Robert Whitaker [not to be confused with the one who coined the mantra], another of the authors mentioned in Hojas Susurrantes, has published a book critical of the profession that became a bestseller. Anatomy of an Epidemic is even influencing the fraudulent profession that we call psychiatry (this is just one of the several didactic videos of Whitaker that I watched following the death of Szasz).

Finally, remembering the trauma model of mental disorders, so central to my Hojas Susurrantes, yesterday, as I continued to refresh myself on the latest news in psychiatry criticism, I saw several interviews with Colin Ross including this one about trauma. (I quote Ross at length in a pivotal chapter in Hojas Susurrantes.)

How interesting was it to learn that it was the elder Szasz the only one in these videos who, at the beginning of the Q&A session, spoke with the right emotional tone—an open and emotional condemnation—that if a child is sent to a psychiatrist, it is because ‘the parents had done something wrong’, not the child!

Ross, on the other hand, the very psychiatrist who coined the term ‘trauma model’ when referring to parents who drive their children mad, spoke sparingly about the parents in the above-linked interview: as if he wanted to soft-pedal his main message, or convey a politically-correct image to a wider audience.

Whitaker, the psychiatry critic with the most momentum because of his bestseller, doesn’t even know that abusive parents are the cause of mental disorders. He even thinks—as orthodox psychiatrists do—that the aetiology of mental distress and disorders ‘could be biological’!

I’ve already said it elsewhere and I’m not afraid to say it again: Psychiatry critics of the first generation of critics, now all dead—Szasz, Lidz, Laing, Miller—were much braver than critics who are still with us—Whitaker, Ross and those scholars who publish in the journal that Breggin founded.

I am writing this post to reassess the critics of the old guard, and especially Szasz, who has left us.

Categories
¿Me Ayudarás? (book) Alice Miller Autobiography Bible Carl Gustav Jung Day of Wrath (book) God Psychology

God

This text appears in Day of Wrath

______ 卐 ______

 
As I said in Hojas Susurrantes, in California I suffered an internal persecutor: a Christian fear of damnation caused by my father’s miserable introjects. On May 24, 1988, a few months after returning from California still carrying in my soul a legion of dementors, I dined with my parents in a restaurant [I wasn’t living with them]. From the street, three days before I had seen the dry branches of my tree and I believed that the tree would die so, in penance, I shaved my beard the next day after having let them grow for a few months; the only time in life I let them grow.
 
Saint Augustine
Before telling what happened in the restaurant I must mention that throughout my childhood I lived under the shadow of the figure of St. Augustine; as I recall, the favorite saint of my father when we lived in San Lorenzo (as we know, Augustine’s ideas had been one of my greatest dementors in California). At dinner with my parents, barely convalescing from the idea that tormented me, I jumped when (my mother?) mentioned the aforementioned saint. I exclaimed that Augustine had rationalized the eternal fire for unbaptized infants… More than convalescing, the psychic wounds of my family’s religion were still open, though not as maddeningly as the suffering in California. My parents felt the vehemence of my words, but not my agony behind them. What my father answered deserves to leave a record and it is worth saying that I wrote it down not in my diary, but in a single sheet. (When planning this volume I had to order my correspondence, documents and loose sheets in dozens of labeled envelopes.) According to my notes, my father answered me:
—Those [Augustine’s views] are people’s mistakes; human failures. I go to what Jesus says.
When I answered that the Gospel of Matthew put Jesus talking about the gnashing of teeth of the damned, he said:
—I do not see [emphasis in his voice] the anathemas of Jesus. I prefer to see the lilies and the birds; come and they will be given food, dressing be added.
On my single sheet, the following day I addressed myself: “Where is the Augustinian father of San Lorenzo? I am reacting—my Epistle [first book of Hojas Susurrantes] and anti-Christianity—against a father and a mother who no longer exist!”
I wrote that, as I said, in 1988. Today, twenty-seven years later, the dementors still persecute me somehow, although in a very much attenuated way compared to my youth. What I want to get is that, if the perpetrator does not recognize his fault, the mental virus transferred to the adult child goes out of control. If my father had been like, say, my very Catholic friend Paulina (who almost daily goes to church), another would be my story. It is not enough to point out the beautiful verses of Matthew to counterbalance the threats of Jesus about Gehenna in that same gospel. It is necessary to recognize that one committed an outrage when “educating” the son in the Christian doctrine of damnation. In one of her letters that she sent me to England by the end of the century, Paulina wrote to me: “Also, since you are not a believer, and you feel that religion was the first reason for your father to crucify you [my emphasis], you must hate religion. And I understand you. And for you it does not make sense to go to church, to say things you do not believe. And that also caused you harm (hell, torture, sadism).”
My father is not like my humble friend. In a dream I had my unconscious caricaturing him, putting in his mouth these words: “I am very Catholic because I only think of my salvation.” To understand the parental egotism that affected me so much, the religious mechanism with which he defended himself from his early sufferings must be analyzed.
 
God for Miller fans
When I returned from California in my twenty-ninth year, I was not only an extremely damaged young man but also extremely naive. I left in the television room [of my parents’ house] a number of books in English that I had brought in such a way that their covers wore the face of Jesus so that my father could see them. At that time I still believed that it was possible to negotiate my father’s faith with solid arguments.
Let us take into account that with the words of Jesus it “sufficed him,” and what he would tell me during the confrontation of the crucifix [recounted in a previous chapter]: that the fact that the miracles were interwoven with the teachings of Jesus implied that the story was true. I arrived in Mexico in February 1988. By the end of 1989 I began to familiarize myself with the skeptical criticism of the allegations of the paranormal by writers whose magazine I subscribed to, The Skeptical Inquirer. It was thanks to these skeptics that I saw clearly that reasoning like those of my father was fallacious. For example, that the (supposed) goodness of the teachings of Jesus demonstrates the historicity of his miracles cannot be sustained. “Logical systems get in trouble,” I paraphrase now from one of the articles in The Skeptical Inquirer, “when they are forced to show their own logic to demonstrate its claims self-referentially.”
When on another occasion I confronted my father with what I had read in those books whose covers he saw, I argued that the killing of the innocents could not be historical, as the historian Josephus, who belonged to the Hebrew priestly caste, does not mention it. (This historian of the 1st century did not silence any of Herod’s authentically historical cruelties.) My father got angry, but he did not answer my argument. While it is more reasonable to assume that the verses of Matthew and Luke about the killing of the innocents are literary fiction, by pure reason I would never get to communicate with him. However, the writers of the CSICOP (acronym of Committee for the Skeptical Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), as this group was then called, had a great limitation. Those who helped me overcome my belief in the miraculous narrative did not reach the core of the problem: the defense mechanism. If my grandfather and the elementary school [in the early 1930s] had not tormented the child César [my father], the adult César would not have clung to the idea of a dad God with the impregnable faith that he did. For Alice Miller, a child whose childhood was lived in an atmosphere of respect is perfectly capable of developing his self without needing the idea of a personal God; preferring, instead, human models. The child destined to be my father could not develop his psyche with worldly models. He had to project the parental luminous side onto the deity of the same religion that his parents taught him.
About five years before I wrote the Epistle [ca. 1983], my father had confessed something important that I picked up right there in the old epistle. He was in his youth completely devastated by something terrible that had happened to him, that he did not specify. He opened the gospels and, according to his words, saw the passage “Come blessed of my father…!” If, for theists like my father, a kind Father has replaced the failed human father, we should not be surprised if they experience great fear upon discovering that this substitute Father also has a dark side. My father does not know English and he did not read what I brought from the United States, but from my Spanish books he borrowed without me knowing Respuesta a Job (Answer to Job) published in 1952 by Carl Jung, of which he told me “I read everything.”
At his late seventy-six years, the Swiss psychologist had dared to uncover the dark side of the God of Hebrews and Christians. The same year that I wrote the Epistle I wrote down in Answer to Job that my father had exclaimed: “A terrible book!” with great emphasis on his voice when pronouncing “terrible.” Jung’s essay had disturbed him so much that he had to read a pious text about Job to console himself. What Jung said about the Judeo-Christian deity is valuable to those who have entered the underworld whose door Miller opened. In May of 1991, three years after the anecdote recounted above, I noted down on the back cover of Answer to Job: “This is the only book I know of that does not criticize religion or Christians or the church: it criticizes God itself.” I could not say it better today, almost a quarter of a century later. Later that year I noted down that Jung had tried to psychoanalyze God. Much later, in my rereading of 2005, I wrote down:

It is amazing how Miller-like this book can be if we only know the ABC of the mind that Jung did not know. Just replace “Yahweh” with “father” and “God” with “mother” and see what you find.
Read for example pages 25f (“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without wisdom?”). They remind me of the conversation I had with my sister in 2000, the day of the cut tree, about dad: “And who are you to…?” he said to my sister. And page 28 (“Yahweh shows Job his omnipotence with so many thunder and lightning”) seems to portray how he treated me in my last confrontation, in 2004 [recounted in my book’s previous chapter]. On page 31 Jung says what for a long time I have said: pride is the other side of infantilism.

Pride is the other side of infantilism. How many times have I told myself this when diagnosing my father! Almost at the beginning of his essay, Jung observes something that could be applied to my initiative to confront my father for what he did, citing the Bible: “Job ‘wanted to reason with God’ (Job, 13:3). Job says ‘I will defend my ways before him’ (13, 15).” Nice phrase, which could summarize what I have written in hundreds of pages: defend my ways before my parents and their witch doctors. Precisely as it was extremely naive of me to hope that whoever destroyed me could, at the same time, listen to my complaint, that same ingenuity had been committed by Job on another level. (Actually, on the same level if we consider that the theistic narrative is nothing but the internal struggle with the parental introjects.) In the context of the supposed goodness of Yahweh, observes Jung: “From a man who does us evil we can not wait that helps us at the same time,” and already openly psychoanalyzing God he adds something that we could impute to either of my parents: “The dependence of the object is absolute when the subject does not possess self-reflection, and, consequently, does not have any vision of oneself.” Like any toxic parent—I would say—, about our parental deities Jung writes: “But Yahweh is too unconscious to be ‘moral’. Morality presupposes conscience.”
What better indication that the idea of God is nothing but the projection of our unresolved, attachment system with our parents! (keep in mind Colin Ross’ class). From this angle, the idea of providence is a parental shadow insofar as it is so full of the dark side that we see ourselves in the need to project it outwards: something that Jung himself was afraid to say. Nevertheless, the Swiss dared to write: “It was natural that humanity, superior to God in certain aspects, should remain unconscious”—unaware of the ultimate nature of the deity. The dissident disciple of Freud wrote the following in the text that scared dad: “Yahweh does not show signs of doubt, repentance or compassion, but only of cruelty and disregard. Yahweh cannot come here with the excuse of unconsciousness, for he flagrantly violates at least three of the commandments that he himself had promulgated at Sinai.”
This brings back to me the fact that my moral was founded on the moralistic tablets of my father. Recall the [1960s] anecdote of Hojas Susurrantes about the “instantaneous introject” when a swarthy boy threw a stone at a helpless crab on the beach. Unfortunately, and parallel to how my father did not regret what he was doing to us, on the next page Jung writes: “Yahweh does not think… of giving Job at least some moral compensation.” And two pages ahead what he says seems to be a reflection of the mentioned speech to Germancito [my nephew], when my father blamed me for my sister’s behavior: “Yahweh puts things backwards, so to speak, and blames Job for what he himself does: man must not be allowed to have any opinion about God.”
Shadow projected to the deity: “Parents should never be judged,” my mother has told me several times. And it is that “Yahweh pays so little attention to the person of Job… that it is not difficult to see that he is totally occupied with himself,” which brings back the penetrating observation of Pedro Martín Moreno and Scott Peck about evil. Later Jung speaks of the “fear of Yahweh to become conscious,” which also brings back the fear of parents like mine to see their behavior.

Yahweh can project, without frowning, his face shadows on man, and remain unconscious at the expense of him…
Job knew Yahweh only of “hearsay.” But now he has experienced the reality of Yahweh even more than David himself. This is an important lesson, which should not be forgotten. Job was once a simpleton; he had come to dream of a “good” God… he believed that God was truthful and faithful…

But to his horror, Job has seen that Yahweh is not a man, but that, in a certain way, he is less than a man, and that he is the same thing that Yahweh says of the Leviathan: “He is king over all the proud” (Job, 41:34).

The mistreated son by his father must not expect moral satisfaction from an intrinsically unconscious being. “I am an amoral natural power, a purely phenomenal force, that does not see its own back.” Job, the son at the complete mercy of the Father whose voice of thunder crushes him when he dared to confront him, becomes, secretly, judge of the divinity.
The author of Answer to Job closes the book’s chapter with these words: “The drama has been consummated for all eternity: the double nature of Yahweh has been revealed, and someone or something has seen and recorded it.”