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Category: Alice Miller

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Alice Miller Autobiography Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book) Literature Lloyd deMause

Wirsén on Miller’s fans

That the author is secretly smuggling out and reworking, often lying about and numbing, their abusive emotional childhood is something Alice Miller tends to imply when dealing with works of art: a mode of thinking we as her readers easily slip into, isn’t it? That Kafka’s work is basically explainable as an artistic dramatization of a child’s insecurity about his parents’ true agenda, that the vampiric women of Baudelaire’s poems are in fact his emotionally unavailable and seductive mother… —this is still the only opening to Baudelaire’s work I can stand, the only way in which I can read his work with interest.
In this way, artistic work after Alice Miller demands a new openness and consciousness in the producer. We can’t only chew and chew the unworked-through emotions from our childhood and find creative ways of repackaging them, then call it Art. It’s a new game now. All bets are off… Which brings us to the subject of this post: C.T.’s criticism of Dennis Rodie’s novel The Curse of the Third Rate Artist. Discussing this opens the larger subject of the differences in worldview and even temperament between the two writers.
First I must clarify that I think César is a very promising and interesting writer who in his work is attempting to take on very large themes, which are important to me also. As mentioned briefly above, I believe artists working after Alice Miller have a new responsibility to be conscious. To this, I will add the meta-perspective on history developed by Lloyd deMause, which says that the whole of human history, in particular its destructive aspects, is based on childhood abuse.
“The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken…” begins his most important work. Miller says as much, but not as systematically and not as clearly as to the development that has, despite everything, taken place. Put in this perspective, the emotional abuses and the stressful life situation that Martin Maag, the narrator of Dennis’ novel, was put through was just as destructive as it was, but less destructive and less producing of the kind of howling-at-the-moon stressful psychosis and magical thinking that the childrearing of the European Middle Ages produced.
The criticism of your novel which César wrote in the context of polemics around the subject of Satanic Ritual Abuse elsewhere in this forum must be read in this context. Dennis Rodie’s novel does not have the same meta-perspective as C.T.’s has, something which Mr. Tort from his perspective must see as weaknesses. Since I, myself, am interested in the approach to writing and the expansion of consciousness of which his writing is the physical trace, created for communication that C.T. is developing, I share in part his criticism. Let me, to make writing this post quicker and easier, quote the relevant part from a review-letter I wrote recently to Dennis Rodie after having read his novel The Curse of the Third Rate Artist.

[Wirsén’s review of Dennis’ unpublished novel, a novel that by the way I printed and leather-bounded for my personal library, can be read in Dennis’ own forum. Daniel Mackler✡ on the other hand never shared his huge autobiography with anyone.]

Allow me to get personal for a while. For what I intend, and for the kind of writing I myself aim to produce, a perspective the world needs, I think César is a pioneer developing a new sport. His successes are mine, and even his failures will be valuable lessons. The way he dares to be expressively angry is inspiring to me, though for my own part I am unsure of the outcome. Perhaps by temperament (which can’t be helped), perhaps by lack of courage (which, if true, must be conquered) I cannot be that clear about my anger. On the other hand not anger, but sensitivity, seems to be the guiding star of Dennis Rodie’s novel. For me, the jury is still out and César’s, as well as Dennis’ future developments as a human being and an artist will give me the information I need as to whether this is the road I want to pursue.
César’s five-book work Hojas Susurrantes expands from angry letter to mother, through anti-psychiatric tractate to brutally honest (so I’m told, have not taken it on yet) autobiography, over to family history, to the chronicle of the bloody past of his nation into an assessment of the human race and where we are now, which is an expansion in a new direction of deMausian thought: the quick eradication of those who abuse and hurt children, thus stopping humanity from evolving into the best we can be. How César brings this off in his last book will be very exciting indeed to take part off. That much I know. Whether or not and to what degree I will agree is another of those questions where the jury is still out. On the negative part, he might be steering dangerously close to a new motivation for genocide, a new ideological twist on the old Nazi game.
Daniel Mackler, in his writing, seems to imply that there is a lack of what he calls “enlightenment” in C.T.’s exposing of his emotional life and his family’s. That this is unhealthy exhibitionism, and an unfortunate development of a tortured soul, rather than the pearl the clam produces because a grain of sand is torturing, cutting and carving at, its vulnerable pink flesh. To stop the hurt.
I lean toward César’s side in this conflict. I, myself, have ambitions as a major writer and find that, after assimilating the thinking of Alice Miller, works of art that are not intensely personal and honest to be unrewarding. Is Mackler suggesting that we keep our stories to ourselves and sit around healed in a lonely buddhistic state, when instead we could let our stories go out and make changes in the consciousnesses of the real world? As I said, I lean toward Tort’s interpretation, but as always the jury is still out. And I believe even Mackler can’t avoid looking at Tort’s work, like he has before with the psychological case studies or autobiographies—the motivation for writing which he finds emotionally doubtful—; can’t avoid looking at them as at a beautiful car crash, provided as entertainment for the Buddha from others’ flesh and blood. The Buddha floats around in the suffering of the world with a distanced face.
Everything I have written above must be read in the perspective that I found reading the writings of Daniel Mackler, C.T. and Dennis Rodie as a revelation and breathing with the life of a new integrated consciousness, pulsating with a true emotionality, which I have before found in the work of Alice Miller and Lloyd deMause and to which, once I’d tasted it, nothing else compares. This is the reason I care strongly enough about them to read and reflect on them, as well as writing this text.
Andreas

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Alice Miller Aztecs Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Human sacrifice Mayas Pedagogy Psychology

Day of Wrath, 10


“The best education of the world”
In each Maya city there were two wells: one for drinking water and the other as an oracle to throw the girls almost twenty meters below. When brought out at noon, if they had not died in the cold water they were asked: “What did the gods say to you?” The Maya girls got back at their babies by tying their feet and hands up. And they did something else. Artificial cranial deformation had been practiced since prehistory, with Greek physicians mentioning the practice in some towns. The Mayas placed boards at the sides of the newborn’s cranium to mold it, when it is still plastic, to form the egg-shaped heads that the archeologists have found. Furthermore, the parents also placed objects between their baby’s eyes to make them cross-eyed. Just as the elongated heads, this was a sign of beauty. (When Hernández de Córdova ventured in the Yucatán coast in 1517 he took with himself two cross-eyed Indians he thought could be useful as interpreters.) Once grown, the children had to sacrifice their own blood: the boys had to bleed their penises and the girls their tongues. Some Mayas even sacrificed their children by delivering them alive to the jaguars.
Without specifically referring to Mesoamerican childrearing, deMause has talked about what he calls “projective care.” During the fearful nemotemi, the five nefarious days for the Mexicans, parents did not allow their children sleep “so that they would not turn into rats.” Let us remember the psychodrama of the self-harmer girl in Ross’ paradigm and take one step forward. Let us imagine that, once married, she projected on her own child the self-hatred. Such “care” of not letting the children to sleep was, actually, a case of dissociation with the adult projecting onto the child the part of her self that she was taught to self-hate. Another example: In the world of the Mexica the first uttered words addressing the newborn told him that he was a captive. Just like the shrieks that made the chroniclers shudder, the midwife shouted since it was believed that childbirth was a combat and, by being born, the child a seized warrior. The newborn was swaddled and kindly told: “My son, so loved, you shall know and comprehend that your home is not here. Your office is giving the sun the blood of the enemies to drink.” The creature has barely come to the world and it already has enemies. The newborn is not born with rights but with duties: he is not told that he will be cared for, but that he is destined to feed the great heavenly body. (DeMause has written about this inversion of the parental-filial roles in his studies about western babies in more recent centuries.) In the Mexica admonition the shadow of infanticide by negligence is also cast. “We do not know if you will live much,” the newborn was told in another exhortation.
Tlazolteotl, goddess of infancy, grabbing a child by the hair.
In the illustration can be noted the similarity of Tlazolteotl with the image of the warrior and his captive in the previous chapter. Just like that image, the goddess grabs the hair as a symbol of dominion. One of the few true things that Elsié Méndez told me, a woman so much criticized in my previous book, were certain words she pronounced that I remember verbatim: “La mamá lo pepena” [The mom grabs him] referring to those mothers of our times that choose one of their children to control him to the point of psychic strangulation.
In May of 1998 I listened in Mexican television Miguel León Portilla, the best-known indigenista scholar in Mexico, saying that the Mexica education was “the best education of the world.” Almost a decade later I purchased a copy of the Huehuetlatolli that León-Portilla commented, which includes one page in Nahuatl. The Huehuetlatolli were the moralizing homilies in the first years of the children: ubiquitous advices in Nahua pedagogy. They were not taught in the temples but from the parents to their children, even among the most humble workers, within the privacy of the home. In the words of León-Portilla: “Fathers and mothers, male teachers and female teachers, to educate their children and pupils they transmitted these messages of wisdom.” The exordiums were done in an elegant and educated language, the model of expression that would be used at school. A passage from the Huehuetlatolli of a father to his son that Andrés de Olmos transcribed to Spanish says:

We are still here—we, your parents—who have put you here to suffer, because with this the world is preserved.

This absolute gem depicts in a couple of lines the Mexica education. Paying no attention to these kind of words, on the next page León-Portilla comments: “Words speak now very high of its [the Mexica’s] moral and intellectual level.” Later, in the splendid edition of the Huehuetlatolli that I possess, commented by the indigenista, the sermon says: “Do not make of your heart your father, your mother.”
This advice is the perfect antithesis to Pindar’s “Become what you are!” which summarizes the infinitely more advanced Greek culture of two thousand years before. While León-Portilla describes the Nahua exordiums as highly wise and moral, they actually represent a typical case of poisonous pedagogy [a term explained in my previous book]. If there is something clear after reading the Huehuetlatolli is that that education produced no individuals whatsoever: other people lived the lives of the children, adolescents and youths who are exhorted interminably. What is worse: while León-Portilla praised the education of the ancient Mexicans on national television, at the same time the program displayed codex images depicting pubescent children tied up on their wrists and ankles, with thorns sank into their bodies and tears on their faces. The indigenista had omitted to say that “the punishments rain over the child” as Jacques Soustelle wrote in Daily Life of the Aztecs. The Mexica parents scratched their children with maguey thorns. They also burned red chili peppers and placed their child over the acrid smoke.

Codex Mendoza, page 60: Punishes to children ages 11 to 14.
Note the tears of the child and the sign of admonition
near the father’s mouth.
Another punishment mentioned in the codex was the beating of the child with sticks. Motolinía, Juan de Torquemada, Durán and Sahagún corroborated that the education was fairly severe. It is germane to note that in the mode of childrearing that deMause calls “intrusive,” the striking with objects is considered more prejudicial for the self-image of the child than the spanking of the psychoclass he calls “socializing.” It is also important to note that the parents were the ones who physically abused the children. It is true that the language of the Huehuetlatolli is very sweet: “Oh my little daughter of mine, little dove! These words I have spoken so that you may make efforts to…” But in the first book of this series I demonstrated the short circuit that produces in a child’s mentality this sort of “Jekyll-Hyde” alternation in the parental dynamics with their child.
The Mexicas copied from the Mayas the custom of selling their children. The sold out children had to work hard or they would be punished. A poor family could sell their child as a slave to get out from a financial problem. This still happened in the times when the Spaniards arrived. The noble that stole his father could be punished with death, and it is worth saying that the great draughts of 1450-1454 were dealt with the massive sacrifice of children to the water deities.
Which was the attitude that the child had to had toward such parents? In Nahuatl the suffix -tzin was aggregated to the persons that would be honored. Totatzin is our respected father. In previous pages I noted that the frenetic dances discharged the affects contained in the Mexica psyche. Taking into account that in such education the child was not allowed to live his or her feelings—as it is clearly inferred from the texts cited by León-Portilla (not only the Huehuetlatolli but educational texts in general)—, the silhouette of what had to be discharged starts to be outlined.
In Izcalli, the last month of the Mexica calendar, the children were punctured on the ears and the blood was thrown to the fire. As I said, at ten the boy’s hair was cut leaving a lock that would not be cut until, already grown, he would take a prisoner. In one way or the other every Mexica male had to participate in the seizure of victims for the serial killing. Those who could not make prisoners had to renounce the military theocracy and resign themselves with being macehuallis: workers or plebeians attached to their fields who, under the penalty of death, were forbidden to usurp the honorific symbols of feathers, boarded dresses and jewels. The macehuallis formed the bulk of the society. On the other hand, he who captured four prisoners arrived with a single jump at the upper layer of society. To excel in the seizure of men for the serial killing was so relevant that “he who was born noble could die slave.”
Both on national television and in his writings, León-Portilla is filled with pride that the ancient Mexicans were the only peoples in the world that counted with obligatory schooling in the 16th century. The indigenista belongs to the generation of my father, when children’s rights were unheard as a subject, let alone parental abuse. The form in which the Nahuas treated their children, that presently would be considered abusive, was continued at school. The school education to harden the soul of the elite, the Calmécac (“house of tears”) consisted of penances and self-harming with maguey thorns. Another case of the father’s projective care was the advice to his son about the ultra-Spartan education he would be exposed in the boarding school:

Look, son: you have to be humble and looked down on and downhearted […], you shall take out blood from your body with the maguey thorn, and take night baths even though it is too cold […]. Don’t take it as a burden, grin and bear it the fasting and the penance.

“Don’t take it as a burden” means do not feel your feelings. According to Motolinía, this most beloved practice of homiletic admonitions was even longer for the girls. In the boarding school the boy had to abandon the bed to take a bath in the cold water of the lake or a fountain. As young as seven-year-olds were encouraged to break from the affective attachment at home: “And don’t think, son, inside of you ‘my mother and my father live’. Don’t remember any of these things.”
Because the child was consecrated for war since birth, the education at schools was basically military. The strictly hierarchical system promised the striving young to escalate to the level of tequiuaque and even higher if possible. If the boy of upper classes did not want to become a warrior he had another option: priesthood. About his twentieth year he had to make a choice: a military life or a celibate and austere life, starting with playing the drum or helping the priest with the sacrifices. Severity was extreme: one of Netzahualcoyotl’s laws punished by death the drunk or lusty priest. No society, not even the Islamic, has been so severe with adultery and alcoholism: crimes where the capital punishment was applied both for the male and the female. The macehuallis who got drunk were killed in front of the adolescents. (The equivalent today would be that American schoolchildren were required to witness the executions of the pot addicts in the electric chair, as a warning.) The Calmécac were both schools and monasteries ruled by priests in black clothes. In the Florentine Codex an image can be seen of adolescents wearing dresses made of fresh human skins. We can imagine the emotional after-effects that such practice, fostered by the adult world, caused in the boys.
In the Nahua world it was frowned upon that the youth expressed his grudges and it was considered acceptable that he restrained and controlled himself. No insolent individual, Soustelle tells us, “no one who talked what came to his mouth was placed in the real throne,” and the elite were the first ones to submit to the phlegmatic code. And it was not merely a matter of concealing the grudges when, say, a boy or a girl learnt that their own parents had offered a little sister as sacrificial payment. The parents advised them in the ubiquitous sermons: “Look that your humility not be feigned, because then it will be told of you titoloxochton, which means hypocrite.” In the Nahua world the child was manipulated through the combination of sweet and kind expressions with the most heinous adultism. The parents continued to sermon all of them, even “the experienced, the fully grown youth.”
 
An unquenchable sun
Tell me who are your gods and I will tell you who you are. The myth of the earth-goddess Tlaltecuhtli, who cried because she wanted to eat human hearts, cannot be more symbolic. Just as the father-sun would not move without sacrifices, the mother-earth would not give fruits if she was not irrigated with blood. Closely related to Tlaltecuhtli, Coatlicue, was also the goddess of the great destruction that devours everything living.
Sacrifices were performed in front of her; vicious rumors circulated around about “juicy babies” for the insatiable devourer. In the houses the common people always had an altar with figurines of a deity, generally the Coatlicue. (In our western mind one would expect to find the male god of the ancient Mexicans, Huitzilopochtli.) The terrible goddess demanded:

And the payment of your chests and your hearts would be that you will be conquering, you will be attacking and devastating all macehuallis, the villagers that are over there, in all places through which you pass. And to your war prisoners, which you will make captives, you will open their chest on a sacrificial stone, with the flint of an obsidian knife. And you will do offerings of their hearts and will eat their flesh without salt; only very little of it in the pot where the corn is cooked.

Of the Mexica I only have a few culinary roots, such as eating tortillas. Culturally speaking, the educated middle and high classes in Latin America are basically European, of the type of Spain or Portugal. If we compare the above passage with our authentic roots, say, the Christianized exordiums of Numbers or Leviticus against cannibalism and other practices, the difference cannot be greater. Likewise, the Mexica mythology cannot contrast more with the superior psychoclass of Greece: where Zeus opens the belly of his father, Cronus, who had swallowed his siblings establishing thus a new order in the cosmos.
The papas punctured their limbs as an act of penance for the gods. These gods were a split-off, dissociated or internalized images of the parents. Even the emperor frequently abandoned the bed at midnight to offer his blood with praying. The Anonymous Conqueror was amazed by the fact that, among all of the Earth’s creatures, the Americans were the most devoted to their religion; so much so that the common Indian offered himself by taking out blood from his body to offer it to the statues. The 16th century chronicler tells us that on the roads there were many shrines where the travelers poured their blood. If we remember the scene of the Mexican film El Apando, based on the homonym book by José Revueltas where a convicted offender in the Lecumberri penitentiary bled himself while the other prisoners told him that he was crazy, we can imagine the leap in psychogenesis. What was considered normal in the highest and most refined strata of the Mesoamerican world is abnormal even in the snake pits of modern Mexico. The most terrible form of Mexica self-harming that I have seen in the codexes appears on page 10 of the Codex Borgia: a youth pulling out his eye as symbol of penitence. This was like taking the disturbing Colin Ross paradigm about the little girl to its ultimate expression.
At the bottom of the Mesoamerican worldview it always appears the notion that the creature owes his life, and everything that exists, to his creators: paradigm of the blackest of pedagogies that we can imagine. [Schwarze Pädagogik, literally black pedagogy, is a term popularized by Alice Miller. English publishing houses translate it as “poisonous pedagogy.”] The Mesoamerican mythology speaks of the transgression of some gods to create life without their parents’ permission, thus making themselves equals with them. In the Maya texts it is said that these children “made themselves haughty” and that what they did was “against the will of the father and the mother.” The transgressors were expelled from heaven and to come back they had to sacrifice themselves. Two of them threw themselves alive into the bonfire and were welcomed by their pleased parents. The resonances of this myth appear in the practice of throwing the captives to the bonfire. We should remember Baudez’s analysis: Mesoamerican sacrifice replaces self-sacrifice. It is merely a substitute sacrifice “as it is shown in the first place by the primeval myths that precede self-sacrifice.” This original sin condemned human beings to the sacrificial institution since “they could not recognize their creators.” (When I reached this passage in Arqueología Mexicana I could not fail but remember my father’s phrase that injured me so badly, as recounted in my previous book, when he referred to the damned “because they didn’t recognize their Creator.”) The sacrificial institution thus understood was a score settling, a vendetta. Moreover, in some versions of the Mesoamerican cosmogony the sun gives weapons to the siblings faithful to their parents to kill the 400 unfaithful children. The faithful execute the bidding and thus feed their demanding parents: once more, the cultural antithesis of the successful rebellion by Zeus, who had rescued their siblings from the tyrannical parent.
The connection of childrearing with the sacrificial institution is so obvious that when the warrior made a captive he had it as his son—which explains why he could not participate in the post-sacrificial feast—and the captive had him as his lord father. Some historians even talk about dialogues. When making a prisoner, the capturer said: “Behold my beloved son,” and the prisoner responded: “Behold my honored father.” In one of the water holydays of the Tota forest, which means “Our Father,” a girl was taken beside the highest tree to be sacrificed. Each time that the priest lifted a heart toward the sky as a sun offering the catastrophe that threatens the universe was, once more, postponed because “without the red and warm elixir of the sacrificed victims the universe was doomed to freeze.” As modern schizophrenics reason, the universe of the common Mesoamerican, just as the bicameral minds of other cultures, was constantly threatened and exposed to a catastrophe. The primordial function of the human race was to feed their parents, intonan intota Tlaltecuhtli Tonatiuh, “to our mother and our father, the earth and the sun.” The elegance of these four Nahua words evokes the compact Latin.
In the Mexica world destiny was predetermined by the tonalpohualli, “the count of the days” of the calendar where an individual’s birth by astrological sign was his fate. If León-Portilla had in mind the pre-Columbian cultures, he erred in his article “Identidad y crisis” published in July of 2008 in Reforma, by concluding that in antiquity the sun was seen as the “provider of life.” Duverger makes the keen observation that the solar deity, which appears at the center of the calendar, was so distant that it was not even worshipped directly. Instead of providing life the insatiable deity demanded energy, under the penalty of freezing the world (“We are still here—we, your parents—who have put you here to suffer, because with this the world is preserved”). The noonday heavenly body is not a provider of energy: it demands it. The thirsty tongue that appears at the very center of the Stone of the Sun (also called Aztec Calendar) looks like a dagger: it represents the knife used during the sacrifices. The solar calendar with Tonatiuh at the center of the cosmos was an absolute destiny: he could not even be implored. It is important to mention the psychohistorical studies about the diverse deities of the most archaic form of infanticidal cultures: according to deMause, they were all too remote to be approached.
When I think of the musician that sacrificed himself voluntarily to Tezcatlipoca in the holyday of the month Tóxcatl, which according to Sahagún was a holiday as sacred to the Mexicas as Easter to Christians, I see the culture of the ancient Mexicans under all of its sun. (Pedro de Alvarado would perpetrate the massacre in the main temple when he feared he would be sacrificed after that holiday.) Baudez’s self-sacrificial observation deserves to be mentioned again. Like the martyr of Golgotha who had to drink from the calyx that deep down he wanted to take away from himself, only if the young Indian submitted voluntarily to the horrifying death he earned the inscrutable love of the father. This is identical to the most dissociated families in the Islamist world, as can be gathered from deMause’s article “If I blow myself up and become a martyr, I’ll finally be loved.” But unlike Alvarado and the conquerors’ metaphorical Easter (and even contemporary Islamists), the Mexicas literally killed their beloved one before decapitating him and showing off his head in the tzompantli.
Just as the mentality of the Ancient World’s most primitive cultures, in the Mesoamerican world, where the solar cycle reigned since the Mayas and perhaps before, “the sacrifice was performed to feed the parent with food (hearts) and drinking (blood).” I had said that the priests’ helpers gave the captive’s “father” a pumpkin full of warm blood of his “son.” With this blood he dampened the lips of the statues, the introjected and demanding “shadows” of their own parents, to feed them. The priests smeared their idols with fresh blood and, as Bernal Díaz told us, the principal shrines were soaked with stench scabs, including the pinnacle of the Great Teocalli.
In our times, the ones who belong to this psychoclass are those who show off their acts by smearing the walls with their victims’ blood: people who have suffered a much more regressive mode of childrearing than the average westerner. Richard Rhodes explains in Why they Kill that Lonnie Athens, the Darwin of postmodern criminology, discovered that those who commit violent crimes were horribly subjected to violence as children. One hundred percent of the criminals that Athens interviewed in the Iowa and California prisons had been brutalized in their tender years. Abby Stein has confirmed these findings (Journal of Psychohistory, 36,4, 320-27). It is worth saying that, due to the foundational taboo of the human mind, when in January of 2008 I edited the Wikipedia article “Criminology” it surprised me to find, in the section where I added mention to Athens, only the pseudoscientific biological theories about the etiology of the criminal mind.
An extreme case at the other side of the Atlantic was that of a serial killer of children, Jürgen Bartsch, analyzed by Alice Miller in For Your Own Good. Bartsch had been martyred at home in a far more horrific way than I was. Miller believes that Bartsch gloated over by seeing the panic-stricken looks in the children’s eyes; the children that he mutilated in order to see the martyred child that inhabited in Bartsch himself.
 
___________
The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will reproduce here the section on the encounter of the Spaniards with the American natives. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath can request it: here.

Categories
Alice Miller Christendom Friedrich Nietzsche Music Pedagogy

“Her little child”

Excerpted from Werner Ross’s Der ängstliche Adler
– Friedrich Nietzsches Leben (1980):

carl_ludwig_nietzsche

Carl Ludwig Nietzsche,
Nietzsche’s father

The boy does not remember the Röcken home dominated by women, but only the image of the father, idealized on par as it gradually fades out. The pious rural cleric remains completely safe from the uprising against Christianity, which would be the true mission of Nietzsche from his eighteen years. Since then, his father is for him an “ethereal angel.” One of the qualities that he has inherited from him is the kindness, the renunciation of revenge for nobility. So in the late self-portraiture of Ecce homo we read that, in case of offense, Nietzsche prohibits himself “any retaliation, any measure of defense.”

[Chechar’s note: Those who have read the passages of Alice Miller in The Untouched Key as to why Nietzsche went mad—just imagine a self-proclaimed Antichrist who, simultaneously, never defended himself before the father clergyman!—would treasure passages such as these.]

Another inherited quality is the love of music. In a postcard to Peter Gast [Heinrich Köselitz] of the time of Zarathustra an observation is included: “It is raining in torrents, music gets me away. I like that music and the way I like it is something I cannot explain based on my experiences: rather based on my father. And why should not…?”

The phrase is cut, but can be completed with another of Ecce homo in which he says: Why should not I continue to live in him and he in me after his untimely death?

And he was no less mystical in his later years, when he conceived the doctrine of eternal recurrence, so he could skip the generational order to become a descendant of Napoleon, Caesar or Alexander. But the same process also allowed otherwise: the mysterious identification with the father, either in the agonizing fear of premature death and madness, either in the gut, not even confessed to his friend Gast, that having survived the fateful thirty-third year of his life he would merge with his father to form a single figure with him.

The family was assured that Fritz (short for Friedrich) would be clergyman as the father. His mother, who was not limited to accompany him to the bed but every night carried him into it, panting said, “If you continue like this I’ll have to carry you up to bed until you study theology.” Fritz, meanwhile, was a precocious and obedient child; knew by heart passages of the Bible and religious songs so that their local school classmates called him the little shepherd. He was no friend of other children, and in school they laughed at him but then, at home, spoke wonders of the little sage.

Young Nietzsche, whose strange factions made one think of an owl, had an excellent performance. An anecdote belonging to the repertoire of Elisabeth [Nietzsche’s sister] tells us that, at one point, it started raining and as everyone ran from school to their homes, he continued to walk at a leisurely pace with the board over his hat and scarf on the blackboard. When Nietzsche got home was completely soaked. That why he had not run like the others? Well, because the school regulations say that, after school, children should go to their houses quietly and politely. The story seems credible; it was not normal behavior, but a show of obedience directed against his classmates’ behavior.

The little shepherd never tires of reciting pious maxims, edifying virtuous desires and prayers. Words like purpose, wise decision of God, beneficent hand of God, heavenly father come out of his lips with astonishing naturalness.

The strongest impressions were those that religious music gave Nietzsche. In the misty autumn evenings, the boy came sneaking into the cathedral to witness the rehearsals of the Requiem for the day of the dead; he was overwhelmed to hear the Dies irae and was deeply delighted with the Benedictus. It was not just a childish impulse that led him at fourteen, in Schulpforta, to write in all seriousness motets, chorale melodies and fugues and even try a Missa for solo, chorus and orchestra. At sixteen Nietzsche outlined a Miserere for five voices and, finally, began a Christmas oratory on which he worked for two years.

At seventeen, the son of the pastor received confirmation. His classmate Deussen, also a son of pastor says the two maintained a pious attitude, away from the world. They were willing to die immediately to go to meet Jesus. When his friend Wilhelm Pinder received confirmation, Nietzsche wrote: “With the promise you walk into the line of Christian adults who are considered worthy of the most precious legacy of our Savior, and through their enjoyment of life, achieve happiness of the soul.” Not even from the pastor’s pen would have come such pious words.

In High School Nietzsche had an “excellent” in religion. The commentary reports confirm that the student has shown, along with a good understanding of the New Testament, a keen interest in the doctrine of Christian salvation which he has easily and solidly assimilated, and is also able to express himself clearly on the subject.

♣

The above was extracted from one of the first chapters of Ross’ book. Unlike Curt Paul Janz, hundreds of pages later Ross only dedicates a few paragraphs to Nietzsche’s life after his breakdown. He writes:

 

Nietzsche’s biography ends in the early days of 1889, although his life was extended until August 25, 1900. Paralyzed and demented, he died of pneumonia.

On August 10, 1889 Nietzsche entered the psychiatric clinic of the University of Basel; a week later he is taken to the Jena University Clinic where he remains for about fifteen months, and on March 24, 1890 he is discharged in writing and sent home. Nietzsche remains under the care of his mother until her death in 1897. In July 1897 the sister purchases a Weimar villa, “Silberblick,” for the Nietzsche Archive and in it she installs the patient.

About the demented Nietzsche several persons issued reports: (1) Turin dentist, Dr. Bettmann, who with Overbeck brought Nietzsche to Basel; (2) the diaries of Basel and Jena for the sick by the physician (and later professor) Ziehen; (2) the mother in his letters to Professor Overbeck, and (4) friends and visitors, from Gast to Deussen and from Overbeck to Resa von Schirnhofer.

The extracts that follow from 1889-1892 show on one hand the state of the disorder, but on the other they shed light on the “healthy” Nietzsche, specifically those oppressed and repressed aspects that madness liberated.

Dentist Bettmann’s opinion, in Turin:

The patient is usually excited, he asks much food but is unable to do something and take care of himself. He claims to be a famous man, and constantly asks a woman for him.

Basel journal for the sick, January 1889:

He only answers partially and incompletely or not at all to the questions addressed to him, insisting in his confused verbiage nonstop.

First day at Jena, January 19, 1889:

The patient walks on the department with many bows of courtesy. With majestic step, staring at the ceiling, enters the room and gives thanks for the “great reception.” He doesn’t know where he is.

Extracts from the diary for the sick at Jena, from January to October 1889:

He wants his compositions to be premiered. He has little understanding or memory of ideas or passages from his works. He always identifies the physicians correctly. He proclaims himself now Duke of Cumberland, now Emperor, etc… “At last I have been Frederick William IV,” “My wife Cosima Wagner has brought me here.” “At night they have uttered curses against me, have used the most horrible mechanisms.” “I want a gun if there is any truth in the suspicion that the very Grand Duchess commits these filthy acts and attacks on me.”

At night we always have to isolate him. He often smears himself with excrement. He eats excrements. He urinates in his boot or glass and drinks the urine or smears himself with it. Once he smeared a leg with excrement. He wraps excrements in paper and puts it all in the drawer of a table.

The mother to Overbeck, April 8, 1889:

About an hour ago my son has been taken to the department of the peaceful sick… The greatest joy you can provide is to speak in Italian or French to him… Gone are the ideas of grandeur that initially made him so happy…

On March 24, 1890 the mother takes Nietzsche out of the center to live with him in Jena. On one occasion Nietzsche undresses in public with intent of swimming and a guard is hired, who follows at a distance mother and son when they go for a walk. On June 17, 1890 she writes to Overbeck:

He plays a little of music every day, partly his small compositions or songs of an old book of songs… The religious sentiment is asserted more and more in him. During Pentecost, when we were sitting quietly in the balcony with me holding an old Bible [he says] that in Turin he had studied the whole Bible and taken thousands of notes, when I read this or that psalm; this or that chapter, I expressed surprise that he knew the Bible so thoroughly.

From 1892 Nietzsche can no longer feed himself. He has to be washed and dressed. The walks have to be abandoned because Nietzsche shouts and hits everything on his way. In 1894 Nietzsche recognizes Deussen, but in 1895 he no longer recognizes Overbeck.

In madness it clearly appears a regression to infantile and juvenile stages. In the time of megalomania Dionysus and Zarathustra are totally excluded. Instead it reappears Frederick William IV [discussed in Ross’ earlier chapters], and Nietzsche says to his mother he is twenty-two. The last letter to Jacob Burckhardt is written by a “student.” His fears (the light should remain lit at night, the door must be closed) belong to an early childhood stage, like the “magic of the pieces of glass.” It is also noteworthy the return to the old religion and a fearful, even radical avoidance of everything philosophical. As a sick man Nietzsche is an obedient or uninhibited child.

At the end he completely sinks into apathy.

nietzsche_dementedThe mother, fearful, “limited” (as seen in the Basel clinic) was at first mean, although she continued to receive Nietzsche’s pension. But when he was with her she cared for him, protected and looked after him with motherly love. Friedrich then again became what in her opinion should have always been: her little child.

Categories
Alice Miller Autobiography Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book) Pedagogy

Pinocchio, 2

Why I am starting this new series is explained: here.

pinocchiohanged


Mankind sees things in photographic negative about childrearing: it’s all backwards, and only those who have deeply assimilated Alice Miller’s legacy have noticed it. Perhaps the most splendid paradigm, in stories, of what Miller called poisonous pedagogy or adult-child projection is precisely the original story by Carlo Collodi.

Pinocchio is nothing more than the transformation of the pure feelings of a child into adult madness; for example, by going to schools where children’s souls are murdered and the child is socialized so that he finally sacrifices his sanity in search for the affection of parental figures, symbolized by the carpenter and the Blue Fairy.

Let’s see. The heading of Chapter IV states: “The story of Pinocchio and the Talking Cricket, in which one sees that bad children do not like to be corrected by those who know more than they do.”

Head over heels—everything in photographic negative! How I wish that my Whispering Leaves were sold out so that I could, by now, be writing the book I had dreamt since the beginning: pure narrative without using hundreds of pages to introduce the reader to the legacy of Miller, deMause and the critics of psychiatry.

Here is a passage of the Collodi tale, poisonous pedagogy in its purest form:

“Woe to boys who refuse to obey their parents and run away from home!” [Chapter IV]

The passage obviously presupposes that the parents (who beat their children or torment them emotionally and ocassionally even rape them) are always right and benign with their children: the opposite of what we saw in the previous entry showing the dark side of Geppetto, a side only noticed by the neighbors who knew him in the story. And what is worse, the domestic abuse is often supported by the abuse at school, so Pinocchio says to the cricket:

“If I stay here the same thing will happen to me which happens to all other boys and girls. They are sent to school, and whether they want to or not, they must study…” [Ibid]

To which the voice of the system, symbolized by the cricket who wants to instill a consciousness of black pedagogy into the child, responds:

“If you do not like going to school, why don’t you at least learn a trade…?” [Ibid]

That is a great insult; not bona fide council as adults often utter these sort of words not out of genuine empathy for the kids.

When I was a child I wanted to be a filmmaker. Kubrick, who dropped out from school, was my idol. Alas, in my late teens my parents put me in a medieval school system and I could not become either (1) a filmmaker or (2) get what they wanted: a college degree either. The mandatory school system was the barrier that destroyed my professional life. Unlike Kubrick, no “Uncle Jacob” appeared in my life to sponsor my filming career since Christian families don’t help their relatives as much as kike families do (cf. MacDonald’s first book of his trilogy).

More recently, this year in fact, I heard my brother angrily telling his child that if my nephew did not want to study at a conventional school, he should seek a trade, and mentioned a supermarket boy (something similar to what the Cricket proposed). My brother’s advice was not directed in an empathic way: it was an obvious act of psychological aggression as no one in his right mind wants to be an errand kid that only earns a few cents.

Going back to my life, if my parents had any empathy with the potential filmmaker I was as a kid, they would have supported my immigration to the US, and instead of spending money at a Mexican school, send me those scarce funds to complete my expenses near Hollywood. But no: the unconscious desire of my mother was to destroy the individualistic mind of her firstborn, as I recount in my Leaves.

Disney’s film is nonsense intended to beautify the crudeness of the Italian text. In Collodi’s original story the cricket’s advice was so insulting that Pinocchio grabbed a hammer of Geppetto’s workshop and threw it toward the damned bug, who “stayed stiff and flat against the wall”: precisely what I did as an adolescent.

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Pedagogy

Pinocchio, 1

Why I am starting this new series is explained: here.

>Pinocho y Alice Miller


In my blog in Spanish I said that I had recently watched again Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence. Well, now that I lost my computer for a while, while it is in the shop and still write in a borrowed laptop, I decided to return to my childhood classics. (Sometimes it’s refreshing to forget the net and have direct contact with printed books.)

Artificial Intelligence is clearly a fairy tale inspired, in part, in Pinocchio and set in the future. I would suggest fans of Alice Miller to read the original story in an edition whose drawings respect Carlo Collodi’s tale.

Here is my Spanish-English translation of a passage from the preface of the splendid 1965 edition in Spanish that my father read to me and my brothers when we were little ones:

The error or the superficiality of many editions of Pinocchio lies mainly in the fact that the illustrations give primary attention for graphic designs, but without a clear interlocking with the text. In our edition, by contrast, the drawings have been made expressly in Tuscany, where the author imagined his masterpiece.

I sent the old serial installments of Editorial Codex to be bound by a traditional bookbinder: the very same issues that my father read us decades ago. Here I quote some passages that portray why the original story of Pinocchio is a perfect case of what Alice Miller called poisonous pedagogy:

“Geppetto had a very bad temper.” [Chapter II]

Pinocchio has not yet appeared and the story reveals the personality of its maker. Like many other distortions, the image of Geppetto in the Disney film as a kind old man grossly distorts Collodi’s tale.

But the Collodi tale distorts reality too, reversing colors like a photographic negative of what happens in the real world. Consider for example the following passage of poisonous pedagogy, in the sense of adult projections on a child unsure of himself, represented by the wooden puppet who aspires to become real. Anyone who has assimilated a little psychohistory knows that it is the parents who, over the millennia, have abused their children; not vice versa. As narrated in the birth of Pinocchio:

At that unexpected trick, Geppetto became very sad and downcast, more so than he had ever been before.

“Pinocchio, you wicked boy!” he cried out. “You are not yet finished, and you start out by being impudent to your poor old father. Very bad, my son, very bad!”
And he wiped away a tear. [Chapter III]

Of course: in real life it is parents who abuse the newborns; never, ever the other way. Collodi’s story is fiction, obviously, but in my opinion it perfectly reflects aspects in the dynamics Collodi had to bear with his own mother, with whom he lived all his life. After Pinocchio was “born” and escaped into the streets, the story goes:

“Poor Marionette,” called out a man. “I am not surprised he doesn’t want to go home. Geppetto, no doubt, will beat him unmercifully, he is so mean and cruel!”

“Geppetto looks like a good man,” added another, “but with boys he’s a real tyrant. If we leave that poor Marionette in his hands he may tear him to pieces!” [Chapter III]

He may tear him to pieces! The neighbors knew that this was how an acquaintance of them behaved. Although in that passage Collodi puts Geppetto as the victim, and Pinocchio as a miscreant who despised a loving father, the neighbors knew better. In real life, of course, runaway children do so because of horrific abuse at home. As I have had dealings with these children in Mexico City I have the impression that behind every street child, even those who I haven’t interviewed, there is a horror story at home.

It is very instructive that Collodi inverts reality in a story meant to subjugate the will of the child before the omnipotent adult. That is precisely the reason that his story became a bestseller in a world dominated by parents who want to “educate” their children through poisonous pedagogy.

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Friedrich Nietzsche Pedagogy

WDH’s recent focus

I have been asked why the recent focus of The West’s Darkest Hour on Nietzsche. I replied that my intention is to explain (1) the “transvaluation of all values” (Nietzsche’s ultimate philosophy) and (2) “poisonous pedagogy” which goes together with the “trauma model of mental disorders” (illustrated in Nietzsche’s life).

As to #2, I believe that one of the ingredients of the witches’ brew that is killing whites is the toll of child abuse in the adult. In the white nationalist movement no one has suspected this. A few months ago Alex Kurtagic wrote on The Occidental Observer that the engulfing behavior of Jewish mothers towards their male children explained the haughty behavior of the grown-up Jew. But Kurtagic and the rest of writers of the pro-white blogosphere have failed to ask what could the engulfing behavior of white mothers cause on their white children.

I am the only one in the movement who has written on the implications of the trauma model on white pathology. See for example my seminal article, “A body-snatched Spaniard.” I even plan to translate to English the rest of my book Hojas susurrantes, the most didactic and comprehensive explanation of the model under a single cover.

However, since that kind of literature is very strong meat indeed, and since pro-white advocates are uninterested in the subject, I better start introducing it by means of baby steps, like my next series of entries on Carlo Collodi’s novel for children.

Pinocchio

The original Pinocchio tale by Collodi is must reading. A 1880 magazine series (Disney’s 1940 film is a betrayal of the original Italian tale), Collodi projected his feelings for his abusive parents onto the characters of the very manipulative Blue Fairy and Geppetto.

In chapter XV Pinocchio is hanged in front of the Blue Fairy mansion and the motherly Fairy didn’t help him at all. The wooden puppet exclaimed Jesus-like words on the cross:

The editor asked Collodi to rescue Pinocchio in the following issue of the magazine.

♣

As a child Collodi had been tormented in a Jesuit school (incidentally, as a child my father was also tormented in a Jesuit school). Since Collodi (like my father) never settled accounts with the perpetrators, he later identified himself with them; hated the children, illustrated boring school textbooks for them and always lived with his manipulative “Blue Fairy” mother.

The original Le Avventure di Pinocchio is poisonous pedagogy at its worst. The parents and the school system are idealized at the expense of the child’s true self. (Later in my series on Nietzsche you will see the relevance of the Prussian pedagogy applied to the child Nietzsche by his mother and other female figures and his adult breakdown.) A major bestseller, Collodi’s novel was used to manipulate and socialize children in the early 20th century.

In future entries I will show that together with the German biographers of Nietzsche I will be quoting, Alice Miller is the obliged reference to understand “poisonous pedagogy” and ultimately my interpretation of both Pinocchio and many people who have suffered mental breakdowns.

Categories
Alice Miller Autobiography Child abuse Feminism Hojas Susurrantes (book) Islamization of Europe Liberalism Psychiatry Psychology Women

A body-snatched Spaniard

I have edited and moved this entry here (see also here).

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Homosexuality Islam Tom Sunic

Protected minorities

The point I was trying to make in my previous post and in a related discussion is that during my first internet experience in 2006-2008, for the group of Alice Miller’s fans the subject of child abuse in the Muslim world was taboo. These pseudo-followers of Miller had in their minds a protected minority—Muslims—even when these Sub-Saharan Africans practice genital mutilation on pubescent girls on a massive scale.

The next internet group I became active was the counter-jihad blogsites, where I was active from the latest months of 2008 to the beginning of 2010. These people too had a protected minority in their little minds: Jews. They would not argue with me even when I typed long excerpts from an academic Jew that demonstrated that the Jewish problem was not a gentile hallucination at all.

Finally, when I arrived to white nationalism after distancing myself from Jew-blind counter-jihadists I expected that this later movement wouldn’t have protected minorities. I was wrong. Many of them still have a protected minority that, like the other minorities, is deleterious to our interests as Guillaume Faye knows: homosexuals.

homonegroThe fact that Tom Sunic and Robert Stark have interviewed Counter-Currents’ philosophical catamite James O’Meara without asking him tough questions during their respective interviews, proves that at least some of today’s nationalists don’t have the moral caliber to say what the Nazis said about faggotry, or even the first American incarnation of white nationalism one or two generations ago.

That this “new generation” is fond of what my beloved Nazis called “degenerate music” means that they have a rotten soul compared to the one which flourished not so long ago.

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Emigration / immigration Hojas Susurrantes (book) Infanticide Liberalism Psychohistory Racial studies

My challenge to Alice Miller’s fans

A few years ago I parted ways with my former friends: the fans of the late Alice Miller, who claim to side the abused child during conflicts with their parents. It always bothered me that these people were incapable of honestly discussing my interpretation of Psychohistory, which main finding is that non-western cultures treat their children worse than we westerners do. If my former friends truly sided the child, they would make an effort to approach Psychohistory either to refute my interpretation of it, or, conversely, to use the findings of Psychohistory to expand their worldview.

The do neither. And the question is why.

It is my belief that present-day westerners are plugged in a thought-controlling matrix. It all started right after the Second World War with a barrage of ubiquitous, malicious propaganda directed against Germany. The truth is that, whatever sins the Germans committed during the war, the Allied forces surpassed them in times of peace, from 1945 to 1947 (see e.g., my excerpts of Hellstorm).

The same goes with the Jews and their holocaust. When Hitler became chancellor a Jew named Yagoda, the chief of the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency, killed more civilians than the later killings attributed to Himmler, and precisely for ethnic reasons. Never before had an entire white nation been ruled mostly by Jewry, and just see what happened in Russia. Hitler and the Nazis merely reacted against such killing.

These historical facts move me to think that Germany continues to be dishonestly demonized by an ongoing, twenty-four hours a day campaign of enumeration of her crimes. Demonized I say because the comparatively larger crimes of the Allies have been hidden from the public view in the soft totalitarian System we are living in.

I call this socio-political scheme a mind-controlling matrix, a prison for the white mind. Not only the crimes committed by the Allies are taboo. As an unwritten law, after the Second World War race studies also became forbidden in the mainstream media and the academia—with the exception of the continuing demonization of the Reich and, through intellectual fads of “historical grievances,” even the entire West. And not only the previous, perfectly respectable field of racial studies is now considered beyond the pale. An entire school of charlatanic thought, Boasian anthropology, has become axiomatic in the academia. Presently it is considered heretical to state the obvious: that there are cultures more primitive than others. Just one example: academicians are not even allowed to condemn the Amazonian tribes that still bury their children alive.

For the sake of using a handy word, let us call “liberalism” the religion that the leftist elites have been imposing on us after the Second World War. It is the perspective that comes after this knowledge—the exposé of a new civil religion that has been imposed upon the white psyche—what explains why I have distanced myself from my former friends. Consciously or unconsciously, these people are liberals first and child advocates second. Their true religion is liberalism, and egalitarianism, not child advocacy. If they prioritized child interests, they would side the children in cases of parental abuse among non-Caucasian immigrants, who, according to the data collected by Psychohistory, are more serious abusers than white families.

They do nothing of the sort. The sole mention of “race,” “inferior cultures” or “psychoclasses” freaks them out they and shun any frank discussion on the subject.

In other words, the followers of the late Alice Miller are deceiving themselves. Despite claims to the contrary they do not always side the children against their surrounding culture, even in cases of mind-destroying parental abuse (think of the surviving offspring after watching how their parents buried their little sister alive…).

If you are a Miller fan and believe I am wrong, you are invited to challenge my interpretation of Psychohistory.

I predict that this challenge will fall on deaf ears. By experience I know that Miller’s fans are no men of honor. They are too coward, and dishonest, to discuss Psychohistory’s most relevant finding: the grim consequences for child interests after the ongoing, massive non-white immigration in their respective countries—at the same time that the peoples of European origin, including my former friends, are refusing to breed.

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Christendom Hate Homosexuality Psychology

Against the Fourth Commandment

In the “Saturday Afternoon with Carolyn Yeager: Kairos on The German Character,” a man called to rebut the German blogger Kairos arguing that Christianity is good because of the Fourth Commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother.”

What the caller ignored is that the Fourth Commandment is intrinsically intertwined with the Monsters from the Id that are destroying our civilization.

I don’t want to explain the subject at length. Suffice it to say that the late Alice Miller discussed how religion can contribute to the guilt that prevents us from being conscious adults. In The Body Never Lies Miller urges us to realize that the Fourth Commandment offers immunity to abusive parents, and argues it is healthier not to extend forgiveness to parents whose tyrannical childrearing methods have resulted in ruined adult lives.

Below, a page
about the poet Arthur Rimbaud from The Body Never Lies that I stole from Miller’s webpage:

Self-Hatred and Unfulfilled Love

Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 and died of cancer in 1891, a few months after his right leg had been amputated. In other words, he only lived to be 37 years old. Yves Bonnefoy tells us that his mother was harsh and brutal, a fact on which all the available sources are unanimous.

Bonnefoy describes her as ambitious, proud, stubbornly self-opinionated, arid, and full of covert hatred. He calls her the classic case of someone fired by the pure energy derived from bigoted religiosity. The astonishing letters she wrote around 1900 reveal that she was enamored of death and destruction. She was fascinated by graveyards, and at the age of 75 she had gravediggers lower her into the grave she was later to share with her dead children Vitali and Arthur, so that she could have a foretaste of the eternal night that was to come.

What must it have been like for an intelligent and sensitive child to grow up in the care of a woman like this? We find the answer in Rimbaud’s poetry. Bonnefoy tells us that his mother did everything in her power to curb and thwart his development as a poet, albeit to no avail. Failing that, she nipped in the bud every desire for independence on his part, every premonition of liberty. The boy took to regarding himself as an orphan, and his relationship to his mother split up into hatred, on the one hand, and obsequious dependency on the other. From the fact that he received no token of affection Rimbaud concluded that he must be in some way guilty: “With all the strength of his innocence, he rebelled fiercely against the judgment passed on him by his mother.”

Rimbaud’s mother maintained total control over her children and called this control motherly love. Her acutely perceptive son saw through this lie. He realized that her constant concern for outward appearances had nothing to do with love. But he was unable to admit to this observation without reserve, because as a child he needed love, or at least the illusion of it. He could not hate his mother, particularly as she was so obviously concerned for him. So he hated himself instead, unconsciously convinced that in some obscure way he must have deserved such mendacity and coldness. Plagued by an ill-defined sense of disgust, he projected it onto the provincial town where he lived, onto the hypocrisy of the system of morality he grew up in (much like Nietzsche in this respect), and onto himself. All his life he strove to escape these feelings, resorting in the process to alcohol, hashish, absinth, opium, and extensive travels to faraway places. In his youth he made two attempts to run away from home but was caught and restored to his mother’s “care” on both occasions.

His poetry reflects not only his self-hatred but also his quest for the love so completely denied him in the early stages of his life. Later, at school, he was fortunate enough to encounter a kindly teacher who gave him the companionship and support he so desperately needed in the decisive years of puberty. His teacher’s affection and confidence enabled him to write and to develop his philosophical ideas. But his childhood retained its stifling grip on him. He attempted to combat his despair at the absence of love in his life by transforming it into philosophical observations on the nature of true love. But these ideas were no more than abstractions because despite his intellectual rejection of conventional morality, his emotional allegiance to the code of conduct it prescribed was unswerving. Self-disgust was legitimate, but detestation for his mother was unthinkable. He could not pay heed to the painful messages of his childhood memories without destroying the hopes that had helped him to survive as a child. Time and again, Rimbaud tells us that he had no one to rely on except himself. This was surely the fruit of his experience with a mother who had nothing to offer him but her own derangement and hypocrisy, rather than true love. His entire life was a magnificent but vain attempt to save himself from destruction at the hands of his mother, with all the means at his disposal.

Young people who have gone through much the same kind of childhood as Rimbaud are probably fascinated by his poetry because they can vaguely sense the presence of a kindred spirit in it. Rimbaud’s friendship with Paul Verlaine is a well-known fact of literary history. His longing for love and genuine communication initially appeared to find gratification in this friendship. But the mistrust rooted in his childhood gradually poisoned their intimacy, and this, coupled with Verlaine’s own difficult past, prevented the love between them from achieving any permanence. Ultimately, their recourse to drugs made it impossible for them to live the life of total honesty that they were in search of. Their relationship was crippled by the psychological injuries they inflicted on one another. In the last resort, Verlaine acted in just as destructive a way as Rimbaud’s mother, and the final crisis came when Rimbaud was shot twice by the drunken Verlaine, who was sentenced to two years in prison for his crime.

To salvage the genuine love he was deprived of in childhood, Rimbaud turned to the idea of love embodied in Christian charity, in understanding and compassion for others. He set out to give others what he himself had never received. He tried to understand his friend and to help him understand himself, but the repressed emotions from his childhood repeatedly interfered with this attempt. He sought redemption in Christian charity, but his implacably perspicacious intelligence would allow him no self-deception. Thus he spent his whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he had learned at a very early age to hate himself for what his mother had done to him. He experienced himself as a monster, his homosexuality as a vice, his despair as a sin. But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained obstinately shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his childhood, to the feelings of the little child that was forced to grow up with a severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her.


Verlaine (far left) and Rimbaud (second to left)
depicted in an 1872 painting
by Henri Fantin-Latour

Rimbaud’s biography is a telling instance of how the body cannot but seek desperately for the early nourishment it has been denied. Rimbaud was driven to assuage a deficiency, a hunger that could never be stilled. His drug addiction, his compulsive travels, his friendship with Verlaine can be interpreted not merely as an attempt to flee from his mother, but also as a quest for the nourishment she had withheld from him. As his internal reality inevitably remained unconscious, Rimbaud’s life was marked by compulsive repetition. After every abortive escape attempt, he returned to his mother, both after the separation from Verlaine and at the end of his life, when he had finally sacrificed his creative gifts by giving up his writing to become a business man, thus indirectly fulfilling his mother’s expectations of him. Though Rimbaud spent the last days of his life in a hospital in Marseille, he had gone back to Roche immediately before, to be looked after by his mother and sister. The quest for his mother’s love ended in the prison of childhood.

♣

For those interested in the subject, I’ve written about why forgiving our parents may invoke those Monsters from the Unconscious that are destroying our civilization. In Fallen Leaves I mention the mental issues of a poor Michael Jackson that forgave his father:

“Solitude among millions of fans”

More to the point, a few years ago I analyzed a woman who hates the West as a result of transferring her repressed, parental rage onto substitutive objects:

“A Woman Chasing after her Revenge”