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Category: Child abuse

Categories
Child abuse

WN ∩ child abuse = Ø?

Let’s remember the Venn Diagrams that we were taught in school. Many people believe that the issue of the mistreatment of children by their parents has nothing to do with white preservation. In set theory, that claim could be visualised by saying that the circles of white nationalism (WN) and child abuse don’t share any area, that they form an empty subset (symbolically, WN ∩ child abuse = Ø).

But that isn’t true. Let’s also remember my old essay ‘A body-snatched Spaniard’. And now that I was reviewing Erectus Walks Amongst Us I noticed that in Chapter 33, ‘Re-Classifying the Left’, Richard Fuerle wrote (square brackets are mine):

Before leaving this chapter, let us address the important question of why so many whites are anti-white. It has not escaped notice that the most fervent of the white white-haters are not only on the left politically, but many are Marxist. When the working class did not rise up against the exploiting capitalists, as predicted by Marx, the Marxists ideologues of the Frankfort school (Frankfort, Germany, which moved to Columbia University in New York City when Hitler came to power) sought out other classes of exploited victims who could be induced to rebel against the hated establishment. They settled on women, homosexuals, and minorities. The [Jewish] Marxists have no real concern with these oppressed classes, but find them handy weapons for weakening white societies so that they can be more easily overthrown. Why so many whites eagerly embrace white-hating, however, remains to be explained.

If you have been reading this book, you know that egalitarianism is clearly false—populations are not genetically the same and that is obvious even to small children. To hold a view that so clearly conflicts with reality is surely psychopathological, i.e., these people are mentally ill. Nor is it a trivial illness, as it perverts their most important biological function—passing on their alleles. It is only because psychologists and psychiatrists are also mired in the same psychopathology that egalitarians [as I have said elsewhere, psychiatry is pseudoscientific] do not have their own special place in the Manual [the shrinks’ DSM].

I have written elsewhere on this subject, where I argue that the problem has its genesis in the inevitable conflicts that children have with their parents. If children decide that it is the parents who are wrong, unfair, even evil, they readily identify with those whom they see as similarly oppressed, urging them to overthrow the ruling class, i.e., initially their white parents but, by projection, all whites, including themselves. The parent’s justification for ruling over them, that there are biological classes, in this case, children and adults, must be refuted, hence fervently held egalitarianism, that there are no biological classes. Marxism, which promotes class warfare and hatred of those who have and rule (i.e., for children, their parents), is just an extension of this psychopathology. Unfortunately, the egalitarians will be with us forever unless children can be raised to see their parents as wise and loving guardians, not as arbitrarily frustrating obstacles.

Never mind what Fuerle later said in endnotes 25-27 (he was no expert on the subject). Although the subject is huge, only those who have read my Day of Wrath will know what I have in mind. Suffice it to say that while Christian ethics is the basic aetiology of the dark hour, in cases of abject self-hatred like the Antifas I could assure that they were devastated by their parents, and presently are transferring their wrath onto a scapegoat: their own race.

Categories
Child abuse Martin Luther

A response…

to what Walsh says: here.

Even racialist Americans choose Christian suicide. This is a screenshot of what Wallace’s site looks like today. Every day he changes images for it. Remember that Luther introduced the Old Testament to the Aryan mind by translating it to German. Taking into account what Jamie says below (in that thread, after Walsh’s comment), Wallace is one of those typical men who doesn’t realise that the parental abuse he suffered as a lad—he was involuntarily committed by his parents to a psychiatric ward—is unconsciously related to his clinging to their religion.

This psychological phenomenon is called ‘identifying with the perpetrator’, instead of rebelling (what I do in my 11-book autobiography).

Categories
Child abuse Neanderthalism

Neanderthals

A week ago I posted ‘A psychotic Christian’ and today I visited the comment thread of a new article by the author I criticised a week ago. A Neanderthal opined:

I believe, with all my heart, that both genders need corporal punishment from time to time as children, from their fathers (and sometimes, though less so, from their mothers). I’m of the belief that this is especially true of boys, but to spare the rod with our daughters is to ruin them…

If it is possible to educate a dog without beating it, it must be possible to educate your own offspring without beating them (the Neanderthal later says that he beats his children). People like him are unaware that it’s precisely this type of upbringing that, in our time, makes grown children take revenge on their parent by indulging in the suicidal liberalism of our time, as I have said elsewhere. Independently of the commenter, the author is another Neanderthal. In the comment thread he said:

But yeah, subjugating the female id and transforming females into women is a society-wide project, which will have to involve the state and official church.

An official church! Remember that the author is an Orthodox Christian. The ideology of both commenters is nothing other than the old, long-established traditional morality as if such morality, including the official church that for centuries dominated Europe, hadn’t led to the situation we have now.

I said that once a week I visit Counter-Currents. I think I should stop. Neanderthalism disgusts me. For new visitors I must say that child abuse is my specialty, or rather the havoc that abuse causes in their adult life. Read my Day of Wrath on the sidebar as an introduction to my point of view.

Categories
Child abuse Trolls

Who will comment on this site?

The day after tomorrow I could pay for the post office box (now the offices are closed) but I still don’t know if I’ll actually rent that box to receive mail. Before I come to a conclusion, I would like to explain again why the way of commenting in this forum should be different from how I allowed it for a decade.

The fact is that we live in the darkest hour for the white race since prehistory. The founding story that westerners created after World War II is a story that makes whites feel so guilty that they can only atone for their purported sins through racial self-immolation. I believe that even so-called white nationalists share, in some way, this suicidal passion: as we saw from my entry on January 1st a few years ago, which I later chose in my collection of essays Daybreak.

If today’s whites are insane, the only way to save them is for at least some Aryan males to wake up and find out what’s happening. This is very difficult, since doing so requires to transvalue Christian values to National Socialist values: something that, as we have seen, normies and even white nationalists simply won’t do.

But since salvation depends on the chain reaction I was talking about in my post yesterday, it is essential that these Aryan men are perfectly in line with what we are talking about. Otherwise, the chain reaction won’t ever happen.

In other words: I cannot allow anyone, no matter how intelligent, to comment because handing the microphone to those who don’t believe in Hitler’s ideals would only demoralise the candidates for the priesthood of the fourteen words. It’s as simple as that, and I could illustrate it with the antinatalism we’ve been discussing the last few days.

In my Christmas present I said that I have practically not interacted with Jews in my life. It’s true, but I was referring to the people I met personally, not those I’ve met on the internet. Before discovering pro-white forums I only interacted on forums that address the issue of parental abuse of their children.

When I was living in Gran Canaria in January 2009, I wrote one of my first posts for The West’s Darkest Hour (WDH) while it was still on Blogspot. The entry was about one of the most prominent figures among the readers of Alice Miller, the psychologist and former therapist Daniel Mackler, and the post can still be read: here (the brief hatnote of that article is of 2010). Mackler disappointed me, and I didn’t understand why: as he is very smart and knows a lot about the subject of child abuse. Mackler was then, and I suppose he still is, a consummate antinatalist and although I never met him personally we argued a lot in his bulletin board that, in time, Mackler himself took down.

A year after my disappointment with Mackler I learned about the Jewish question, which revolutionised the way I saw the West. Although in the above video Mackler is right that Jordan Peterson sides with the perpetrators (the parents), in the past I never fully understood why I hated Mackler, who never treated me badly in his forum.

It was only until I understood the Jewish question that I realised that Mackler’s antinatalism might also have a more sinister motive, though probably an unconscious drive in his mind. The point is, Mackler is ethnically Jewish and we already know what Jews do: try to convince whites to become extinct. Mackler, as far as I know, was not preaching his antinatalist philosophy to the Orthodox Jewish community of New York, where he lived when we met online. He used to preach antinatalism to the Gentiles, although he himself won’t have children.

I broke all contact with Mackler since I wrote my article on him linked above. Nowadays I wouldn’t even try to argue with a Jew about Aryan preservation. But I’ve been arguing with a couple of antinatalists in the present incarnation of WDH. Their antinatalism cannot contrast more with what can be read by the end of On Exterminationism where we saw how the SS treasured the purely Aryan birth-rate.

Do you see where we go from here? I am not accusing that pair of antinatalists with whom I recently argued of being Jews. They are simply subscribing to an ethnically suicidal ideology that has no place on this site. As what I wish is for WDH to become a kind of nuclear reactor so that the force of the first neutrons will hit other neutrons I cannot allow a single voice of dissent. The fourteen words are not on the table of negotiation: we must secure the existence of Aryan people and a future for white children and that means natalism, not antinatalism.

By Monday I will have concluded how I will solve this problem: whether or not to rent a postal box for non-SS commenters, or if it will be enough to receive emails. At the moment you can write to me by email but let it be clear: if you send me an email, that doesn’t automatically mean that I will upload it in the comments section.

Categories
Child abuse Evil Racial right

On Scott Peck

Thanks to an article by Greg Johnson, almost a decade ago I got to know the work of M. Scott Peck (1936-2005). I even wrote a post on this site about it, ‘My evil parents’ which, over time, I changed the status from a public article to a private article. Peck, who also had abusive parents—and also when he was in his middle teens—tried to define evil scientifically. He didn’t make it, as we’ll see at the end of this post.

I would like to quote what Wikipedia says about Peck’s philosophy to illustrate something I say in one of my books in Spanish: it is useful to understand abusive parents to know why the white race commits suicide.

Peck discusses evil in his book People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, and also in a chapter of The Road Less Traveled. Peck characterises evil as a malignant type of self-righteousness in which there is an active rather than passive refusal to tolerate imperfection—sin—and its consequent guilt.

This attitude is the Leitmotif of the phenomenon I analyse in the sixth of my eleven books, titled Padre. But it is also typical of those anti-Semites who, not wanting to repudiate their parents’ religion, continue to obey the New Testament commands of the god of the Jews. The self-righteousness of my late father and those anti-Semites who see nothing wrong in Judeo-Christianity is limitless.

This syndrome results in a projection of evil onto selected specific innocent victims, often children; which is the paradoxical mechanism by which the People of the Lie commit their evil.

Interestingly, in his article Johnson uses this observation from Peck to talk about another topic, the self-righteous Jews. But Peck used it when talking about abusive parents.

Peck argues that these people are the most difficult of all to deal with. He describes in some detail several individual cases involving his patients. In one case which Peck considers as the most typical because of its subtlety, he describes Roger, a depressed teenage son of respected, well-off parents. In a series of parental decisions justified by often subtle distortions of the truth, they exhibit a consistent disregard for their son’s feelings, and a consistent willingness to destroy his growth.

I rarely translate intimate passages from my autobiographical books, but this willingness to stop the growth of a lad reminds me of the very first page of the first of my eleven books. On the other hand, by repudiating National Socialism, white nationalists also show a willingness to stop their growth because WN is merely a stepping-stone that helps us cross the psychological Rubicon, from Normieland to NS.

With false rationality and normality, they [the parents] aggressively refuse to consider that they are in any way responsible for his resultant depression, eventually suggesting his condition must be incurable and genetic.

In my research of psychiatry I found academic studies of millions of kids on Ritalin to force them to study stupid subjects. Pseudoscientific psychiatry blames the genes of Aryan boys who rebel against the traditional school program. Similarly, as I said in ‘Christmas Eve’, it is abhorrent for some nationalists to blame their genes for pathological altruism rather than the religion of their parents: where the problem lies.

Peck makes a distinction between those who are on their way to becoming evil and those who have already crossed the line and are irretrievably evil… Those who have crossed the line and are irretrievably evil are described as having malignant narcissism.

It was my parents’ malignant narcissism that rendered them incapable of seeing what they were doing to me and my sister (the subject of my first, sixth, seventh and eighth books). But there is also evil narcissism in those American nationalists who don’t want to see that the axes on which their nation was founded, capitalism and a branch of Protestantism that admired the Old Testament, would have devastating consequences on their history.

Evil is described by Peck as ‘militant ignorance’… Peck argues that while most people are conscious of this, at least on some level, those that are evil actively and militantly refuse this consciousness. Peck considers those he calls evil to be attempting to escape and hide from their own conscience through self-deception.

This reminds me very strongly of my essay on ‘God’ that I have linked several times on this site. But most white nationalists also militate in their ignorance by not wanting to ponder on what we say on the masthead of this site.

According to Peck, an evil person is consistently self-deceiving, with the intent of avoiding guilt and maintaining a self-image of perfection; deceives others as a consequence of his own self-deception and projects his or her evils and sins onto very specific targets—scapegoats—while being apparently normal with everyone else; maintains a high level of respectability, and lies incessantly to [conceal] his or her sins.

What better portrait of my parents when they were abusive towards us! But aren’t anti-Semites fooling themselves with their scapegoats while at the same time they, the anti-Semites, bend their knees to the god of the Jews?

An evil person is characterised not so much by the magnitude of their sins, but by their consistency of destructiveness; is unable to think from the viewpoint of their victim (scapegoating), and has a covert intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury.

Once again, what a perfect description of what I wrote about my father in my sixth book (or about my mother in my first and eighth books)! But why don’t American nationalists back down and recognise that their nation started wrong; in the words of Sebastian Ronin, predestined to become New Zion?

Most evil people realise the evil deep within themselves, but are unable to tolerate the pain of introspection, or admit to themselves that they are evil.

It’s amazing how Peck’s psychological insights continue to perfectly describe what I wrote in my sixth book, which recounts several of my confrontations with my father à la Toxic Parents. But can those nationalists who exclusively blame the kikes tolerate enough introspection and receive my Christmas present?

Thus, they constantly run away from their evil by putting themselves in a position of moral superiority and putting the focus of evil on others. Evil is an extreme form of what Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, calls a character and personality disorder.

Indeed: my parents used to project the evil of the family on me and my late sister. Similarly, some American southern nationalists use terms like WN 101 and WN 102 as if their repudiation of Rockwell’s neo-Nazism were an advance (‘moral superiority’), not a regression.

Though the topic of evil has historically been the domain of religion, Peck makes great efforts to keep much of his discussion on a scientific basis, explaining the specific psychological mechanisms by which evil operates. He was also particularly conscious of the danger of a psychology of evil being misused for personal or political ends. Peck considered that such a psychology should be used with great care, as falsely labelling people as evil is one of the very characteristics of evil.

In the Letter to Mother Medusa (see sidebar) we read that my mother began to see the devil in me when I reached puberty, but my only sin was that I had started to transvalue my Christian values. There are still some people in the racialist right who falsely label Nazi Germany as evil: the only European nation that had begun to transvalue Judeo-Christian values.

He argued that a diagnosis of evil should come from the standpoint of healing and safety for its victims, but also with the possibility, even if remote, that the evil themselves may be cured.

My father died unredeemed but in theory nationalists may be cured as they’re still alive. But this would require that they swallowed their pride by recognising they are stuck in the middle of the psychological Rubicon, and that Uncle Adolf’s way was and is the only way.

Ultimately, Peck says that evil arises out of free choice. He describes it thus: Every person stands at a crossroads, with one path leading to God, and the other path leading to the devil.

Peck was another American who got stuck in the middle of the river until he died. He never realised that the religion of his Quaker parents was inherently perverse. For his ‘scientific’ definition of sin to be truly scientific, the word devil would have to be replaced by evil. Always keep in mind my article ‘God’ linked above, which also appears in Day of Wrath.

Categories
Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book) Psychiatry

Nobody wanted to listen, 10

The pathetic survivors

Finally, I can be told that since the mental health professions are inherently corrupt, I shouldn’t have considered even anti-psychiatrists but only survivor groups. Common sense tells us that, unlike the professionals who are part of the system, in self-help groups we will find the much sought after help. But let’s remember what happened with those filmmakers when I said that the Alcoholics Anonymous therapies were skin deep because they omitted the issue of parental abuse. This omission is endemic in self-help groups and even in less superficial associations than AA and its countless imitations of the twelve steps. For example, in the texts that are circulated in a group called Co-counselling I was stunned by the absolute omission of the role that parents play in the emotional problems of their children. Nothing is more alien from the ideology of this group than to fight for the legislative milestones of those countries that have prohibited corporal punishment of children. And exactly the same can be said for any other self-help group. Needless to say, not attacking the root cause is, as I told the AA believer who went mad at me, an epidermal remedy.

Laing was a philosopher of disturbed minds. But philosophical sophistication often serves as a smokescreen to hide the mistakes of a thinker. In psychiatric survivor circles it is common to hear that Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America, published in 2001, is considered the most educational book against psychiatry ever written. Whitaker definitely gets off the philosophical tower of Foucault, Szasz, and Laing. But in his book, Whitaker doesn’t say a word about whether parents could be the agents of trauma. Mad in America’s deficiency was exposed when a guest in the guest house I lived in, read some passages from the book in my library and came across a favourite Whitaker quote among psychiatrists themselves: ‘Little is known about what causes schizophrenia’. My friend repeated this psychiatric slogan, omitting my footnote: ‘It bothers me that, after quoting Modrow, Whitaker didn’t want to see that the cause of the insanity has been known for decades’. And that’s the ‘best critical book’ on psychiatry, written not by a mental health professional but by an acclaimed journalist.

A word now about the most structured organisation of survivors of psychiatry: Mind Freedom International, which has invited Whitaker to its events (I don’t take into account the activism of the Church of Scientology against psychiatry because it’s mixed with Scientology quackery). This organisation publishes a magazine that bears the same name, Mind Freedom. In its winter 2002 issue, which features a photograph of Breggin on the cover, the magazine listed dozens of books critical of the psychiatric profession. But in the review of Modrow’s book it omitted to mention his central thesis: extremely abusive parents can cause ‘schizophrenia’ in the child. What has Modrow opined about such omission? It is pertinent to point out that, although I have consulted the Mind Freedom page many times, I have never come across a phrase that affirms that parental abuse may be involved in the child’s crisis. This is surprising when you consider that David Oaks, the director of the organisation, had a psychotic breakdown when he was in his twenties; and it is also surprising because a grassroots movement like Mind Freedom doesn’t have to comply with the political correctness of the most academic authors (the contributors to Simon’s journal for example). When I confronted Oaks about this omission, like Breggin he hid behind a wall of silence.

I must say that one of the aspects of Mind Freedom that caught my attention is its insistence on speaking of insanity as something to be proud of: similar to, say, the sexual identity advocated in the so-called gay movement. In fact, from the correspondence he sends me, I realised that Oaks is very interested in having the idea of ‘Mad Pride’ promulgated, including parades, imitating those of ‘Gay Pride’. This is a grotesque idealisation: we can already imagine Modrow feeling proud in 1960 because he was John the Baptist! With honourable exceptions the survivors of psychiatry, including those who demonstrate on the street, appear pathetic. In some internet reviews I recommended books by Szasz, Simon’s journal that Breggin originally created, Whitaker’s Mad in America, and Mind Freedom’s web page. Now I’m not so sure of the wisdom of these recommendations. None of them have dared to see the most terrible event in life: the maddening panic of a child assaulted at home. It is a splendid irony that, like their psychiatric foes, parental toxicity is a taboo subject for many anti-psychiatrists.

In How to Murder Your Child’s Soul I tried to cut a weed at ground level. But the extirpation that I do here reaches a root untouched in my previous book. In our culture it is strictly forbidden to get to the root of evil in the world. Breggin has written that we have to wait for the moment when critics of psychiatry are able to galvanise public opinion. He doesn’t realise that for that moment to come, Miller’s revolution in psychology must first be consolidated. Psychiatry doesn’t re-victimise children who are beaten at home by accident. It does it out of necessity. It is just one of the most recent institutions of an ancient social heritage that recreates evil in each generation. Psychiatry is part of an ancient cultural fabric: from the biblical ‘wise’ Solomon who advises beating the child, to the ‘educator’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau who abandoned his babies in an orphanage. Laing himself abused his family terribly. What people like Breggin don’t want to understand is that it is impossible to convince society of the falsehood of psychiatry if his editors don’t even tolerate the word ‘trauma’ in the manuscripts that come to them. Some of that trauma can be glimpsed in the TV talk show subculture with all the simplicity and vulgarity that these shows represent. But there is no chair in any university in the world that formally addresses the subject.

This is the most astonishing fact that I have come across in Alice Miller’s work.

Categories
Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book) Psychiatry Sigmund Freud

Nobody wanted to listen, 9

Ronald Laing and anti-psychiatry

What’s written above leads me to a corollary to my book How to Murder Your Child’s Soul. The universal stubbornness or blindness about the ravages resulting from parental abuse is the cause of the existence of psychiatry. Because parents are taboo, for more than a century the profession has tried to find the source of mental disorders on the wrong side, the body. Parents are not only publicly untouchable: we are not even allowed to see their actions in the solitude of our bedrooms. So, when uncontaminated by social underpinnings, a child dares to say that his parental kings go naked, society completely loses its cool and labels the sane one who has told the truth as crazy. Through the involuntary administration of drugs it assaults the brain not of the disturbed parents, but of the child (analogously, in the former Soviet Union it was the sanest people, the dissidents, who were injected with antipsychotics). This was the tragedy that I tried to denounce in my previous books, and it is perfectly explainable if we start from the fact that the whole society strives to be blind on this matter.

A world that insists on seeing things in photographic negative can only (1) attack the child victim, or (2) ignore the adult in a literary search for his lost time. If such a vision in photonegative didn’t exist, bio-psychiatry wouldn’t exist: our eyes and hearts would make us see the toll that abuse entails. Psychic disturbances would be the province of the psychologist, and it would be seen as nonsense that they would be the province of the physician. It is more than ironic that the greatest critics of psychiatry have contributed, with their blindness, to perpetuate the pseudoscience they try to debunk.

To explain this situation, I would like to mention that in 2005 an American wrote me a letter. After reading ‘Why Psychiatry is a False Science’ published as an appendix to my previous book (the article that Laurence Simon refused to publish), he complained that after so many decades of activism critics of psychiatry hadn’t made a dent in the public conscience. The key to understanding this is that the critics themselves suffer from a blind spot in the centre of their vision: something similar to the black strip that appears on pay-TV channels. If the critics refuse to see what is central, that parental abuse causes neuroses and psychoses, and if it is from this black strip that it is intended to enlighten others, it shouldn’t be surprising that the public conscience hasn’t awakened.

______ 卐 ______

 
Interpolated note for this site:

Exactly the same happens to white nationalists, as Mike has told us on this site: ‘Whatever you want to call it, thinking you can aid in saving the white race while, at the same time, bending the knee to Jewish deities (Yahweh and Yeshua) is some kind of combination of insane, dishonest, cowardly, naive, or very stupid. To bottom line it, it won’t and can’t work’.

I used Mike’s words to debunk MacDonald at the end of my Daybreak.

______ 卐 ______

 
To clarify this point, I will now refer to those professionals who didn’t suffer from this blind spot. Unlike Szasz and Breggin’s epigones, Lidz, Laing, Arieti and others pointed to parents as responsible for the psychoses in their patients. But even these and many other psychiatrists didn’t sympathise with the victim with the integrity and empathy that Miller and I do. For example, in the Letter I quoted Theodore Lidz:

I also find it very distressing that because the parents’ attitudes and interactions are important determinants of schizophrenic disorders, some therapists and family caseworkers treat parents as villains who have ruined the lives of their patients.

Although I barely caught a glimpse of it when I wrote the Letter, now I clearly see in this sentence the typical fears to speak, without mincing words, of parental guilt. By resisting saying that abusive parents are what they are—the villains in the child’s movie—Lidz advised taking the victim away from his parent. The difference with Miller cannot be greater, who advises keeping the aggressor away from home. What’s the point of moving, say, a pubescent girl raped by her father if the aggressor stays at home, waiting for the next little sister to grow up to molest her too? But sexual abuse isn’t the most common.

At the time of reviewing this chapter, as of mid-2008, twenty-eight nations have prohibited corporal punishment of children. The dates indicate the year the legislation came into force, starting with the country that provided the example: Sweden (1979); Finland (1983); Norway (1987); Austria (1989); Cyprus (1994); Latvia (1998); Croatia (1999); Bulgaria, Israel and Germany (2000); Iceland (2003); Romania and Ukraine (2004); Hungary (2005); Greece (2006), Chile, Holland, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Uruguay and Venezuela (2007); Costa Rica, Italy, Japan, Malta and South Africa (2008). In Iceland, a country that illustrates Miller’s advice, the penalties for parents go up to three years in prison or a high fine. Note that these countries have omitted to include psychological and emotional abuse, which can be equally destructive, or even more so, since all bruises are internal (think of the Helfgott case and countless other schizogenic parents). Despite these legislative advances, these societies still cannot see other forms of undermining the emotional integrity of the children. Laing, who did focus on internal injuries, was closer to Miller than Lidz when he came to blatantly blame the maddening parents. But like Szasz, Laing philosophised from an ivory tower: cold and distant reason from the victim and his feelings, as was fashionable in the existential philosophy of his time. Much more reached the real person those who, without any philosophical ballast, addressed the issue of domestic violence: a revolution in psychology that began in the 1970s and 1980s and isn’t yet over. In the first chapter of The Divided Self (1960) entitled ‘The existential-phenomenological foundations for a science of persons’ Laing wrote:

It seems extraordinary that whereas the physical and biological sciences of it-processes have generally won the day against tendencies to personalize the world of things or to read human intentions into the animal world, an authentic science of persons has hardly got started by reason of the inveterate tendency to depersonalize or reify persons.

Laing refers to mental health professionals in particular and the social sciences in general.

If it is held that to be unbiased one should be ‘objective’ in the sense of depersonalizing the person who is the ‘object’ of our study, any temptation to do this under the impression that one is thereby being scientific must be rigorously resisted. Depersonalization in a theory that is intended to be a theory of persons is as false as schizoid depersonalization of others and is no less ultimately an intentional act. Although conducted in the name of science, such reification yields false ‘knowledge’. It is just as pathetic a fallacy as the false personalization of things.

In philosophising about the autobiographical genre, I came to these conclusions on my own. Animism and bio-reductionism are antithetical psychopathologies, one primitive and tribal and the other sophisticated and urban. And this objectifying people reminds me of the dehumanised language of the analyst Solbein: ‘Those are common clinical experiences’. [Interpolated note for this blog: See also Krist Krusher’s recent comment on this site.] Laing continues:

It is unfortunate that personal and subjective are words so abused as to have no power to convey any genuine act of seeing the other as person (if we mean this we have to revert to ‘objective’), but imply immediately that one is merging one’s own feelings and attitudes into one’s study of the other in such a way as to distort our perception of him. In contrast to the reputable ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’, we have the disreputable ‘subjective’, ‘intuitive’, or, worst of all, ‘mystical’. It is interesting, for example, that one frequently encounters ‘merely’ before subjective, whereas it is almost inconceivable to speak of anyone being ‘merely’ objective.

So far I’m in perfect agreement with Laing. Remember the passage of the two universes, the empirical and the interior; and that the existence of the subjective universe is so real that it is enough to think about our death to verify it [mentioned in the first part of the book]. However, Laing adds:

The greatest psychopathologist has been Freud. Freud was a hero. He descended to the ‘Underworld’ and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa’s head which turned these terrors to stone. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us.

As I pointed out in my previous book, for Jeffrey Masson psychoanalysis was born as a betrayal of women. The Oedipus complex was nothing more than a grotesque attempt to cast guilt on the victims who came to Freud’s office to tell him stories of incest. Analytic theory is the diametrically opposite of wielding the head of the Medusa. If there is such a thing as the antithesis of the hero, that was Sigmund Freud: an ethnic Jew who, although he reached the threshold, was afraid to enter the Underworld and face pure terrors (remember my dreams when commenting on Giorgio de Chirico’s painting). Laing, an idol in my twenties, portrayed Freud in photographic negative and saw the dark as bright. Like many intellectuals of his day, Laing was seduced by the apotheosis of the Vienna quack, something in which Szasz was much more cautious.

When I reread Laing, I did so with a renewed mind after reading Masson, Szasz, and other critics of the psychoanalytic movement. In my rereading of the last chapter of The Divided Self I realised that Julie, one of Laing’s patients, was admitted to a psychiatric ward for almost a decade. If Laing himself hadn’t suffered from the scientific objectivity that he criticises, he would have empathised with Julie denouncing those who locked her up. True, in stark contrast to Szasz and Simon, Laing blamed mothers like Julie’s for their daughter’s psychosis. However, in The Divided Self he never made it clear that the mere fact of locking her up could aggravate her condition. In what I am close to Laing is that when reading his essay one is left under the impression that Julie’s mother, more than psychiatry, ‘murdered a girl’. These are the words of Julie speaking parabolically about herself: she meant that her mother murdered her tender soul. Now, the person Julie, not the object of Laing’s essay, needed to be taken away from the psychiatric hospital and from the mother who committed her; to take her to live far from her ‘murderer’. When she began her psychotic crisis at seventeen years old and said ‘a little girl was murdered’ Julie thought that she should inform the police about the crime.

Her delirium was closer to Miller’s posture than to the psychiatric that locked her up. The laws of a nation should seek to lock up the maddening parent, not the victim (who, in a state of florid psychosis, would have to be cared for in a non-repressive enclosure like the one that Laing presided over). In a just society that doesn’t see reality in the photonegative, this would naturally be done through the police. But in her chapter on Julie, Laing never suggests this. In fact, both the word victim and an exhortation of justice are the great absent in The Divided Self. Also, Laing doesn’t denounce the psychiatric re-victimisation of other women clearly maddened by their family. In another of his famous books, The Politics of Experience, he limits himself to reproaching society for misunderstanding psychoses. Sometimes Laing even seems to participate in the universal fear of touching the parent. Speaking of Julie’s mother, Laing mentions one of the fashionable concepts in the 1950s, the ‘schizophrenogenic mother’ but is quick to add that, fortunately in his opinion, there was no other ‘witch hunt’ in history: an equivocal comparison with women labelled witches centuries ago. If there is one thing the world needs, through the law that Miller outlines, it is to bring to justice every parent who murders children souls. The basic pathology of our society is that this crime, and this crime alone, must remain not only unpunished but invisible. For example, Silvano Arieti, Laing’s colleague across the Atlantic, talked a lot about psychotherapy in Interpretation of Schizophrenia. But he never proposed any social engineering to redress the problem of maddening parents; and he didn’t do so despite the fact that Arieti blames them for the psychotic state of his patients.

‘To my mother and father’ reads the dedication of Laing’s The Divided Self. ‘To my parents’, the dedication of Arieti’s Interpretation of schizophrenia (etymologically, schizophrenia means a divided self). Naturally, the most sophisticated thinkers of insanity also had parents. (In my next book we will hear a class about the problem of attachment with the perpetrator that explains the lukewarmness of Laing, Arieti and others.) Not until the middle of The Divided Self Laing speaks openly about abusive parents. In contrast, Miller and I do it from the first page of our writing, and passionately.

After reading The Divided Self, the best of Laing’s essays, I was convinced that there can be no such thing as a science of subjects. Seen from the outside, the subject inevitably becomes an object: an offense for those who want to speak with their own voice. This is precisely the foundational flaw of academic psychology. If science is the study of the empirical world there can be no such thing as a ‘science of persons’, only people writing about their lives. Although Laing had much more heart than Freud, and this puts him on a higher level to understand the tragedy of the person in crisis, he starts from the same objectivist position. His essays and those of Lidz are, at best, a solidary approach to the disturbed subject. It’s funny that in The Divided Self Laing quotes Sartre: ‘I am not fond of the word psychological. There is no such thing as the psychological. Let us say that one can improve the biography of the person’. I would go further. The direct study of a soul in psychotic hell can only come from the pen of someone who, like Modrow, speaks in the first person singular.

Categories
Child abuse Psychiatry

On akathisia

In my previous post I quoted a passage from my letter to the famous psychiatrist Peter Breggin:

I would like to thank you for your work. When I was a teenager, my mother ruined my young life by pouring neuroleptics in my orange juice without my knowing it. Thanks to your work I now know that the hellish akathisia I experienced was the direct result of the drug. I am truly grateful for enlightening me on this issue.

I have talked about many things that bother me about American racialism. But one thing I haven’t stressed enough is that most racists believe everything Big Pharma and psychiatrists say. (Incidentally, according to Breggin the American Psychiatric Association and Big Pharma are simply ‘business partners’.)

My mother couldn’t tolerate any independence when I began to question her beliefs, for example the religious beliefs of my parents. She resorted to involuntary drugging in her attempts to subdue me. In my previous posts I mentioned in passing the infamous Dr. Amara, whom my mother forced me to see in his office. (My father was always a henpecked husband who never questioned his wife’s lunatic decisions.)

Decades later I worked with Carmen Ávila, also mentioned in one of my recent posts. Ávila ran a civil association to denounce what the psychiatric profession does to perfectly sane children and adolescents. In my activism with her, I was shocked to learn that the same neuroleptics that caused so much akathisia in my teens were also prescribed for young children. That shocked me since they were exactly the same chemicals with which the Soviets, in Brezhnev’s time, tried to control political dissidents.

Ordinary westerners, and this includes white nationalists, are utterly ignorant of the inquisitorial pseudoscience called psychiatry. For those of you who are interested in the subject, I would suggest that you start by watching this video in which Jordan Peterson describes to his daughter the Via Crucis he suffered from akathisia:

Peterson’s difference with my case, or with the children whom their crazy mothers want to control, is enormous as neither the children nor I as a teenager knew that mom was secretly pouring drugs in our meals.

The most perfidious of all is that when psychiatrists recommend controlling the sane child through these draconian means, they not only don’t warn the mothers about the effects of the drug. When akathisia appears they simply rationalise the matter by claiming that ‘it’s part of the child’s mental illness’. Thus, parents and the doctor put the child in a spiral of amplifying abuse (‘let’s increase the dose’, etc.) until they destroy him. Watch Peterson’s video and imagine that these medications were administered to you without your knowledge.

When I was working in Ávila’s civil association I couldn’t believe the number of children drugged with these psychotropic drugs that cause akathisia: children who entered the shrink’s office sane and healthy and came out in terrible condition after the ‘treatment’. The age of these children was what alarmed me the most. In one of his books Breggin even claims that psychiatrists have prescribed these monstrosities to toddlers!

If, after the video, the visitor to this site wants to do a little more research, I would suggest that he reads ‘From the Great Confinement to Chemical Gulag’ which appears in my book Daybreak.

Categories
Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book) Psychiatry

Nobody wanted to listen, 8

Peter Breggin and his editor

In my previous book I had said that the psychiatrist Peter Breggin has denounced the folie à deux between the parent who abuses his child and the psychiatrist who drugs not the aggressor, but the abused one. Unfortunately, like Szasz Breggin’s successors suffer from a dire blind spot.

Critics of psychiatry who flourished around the 1960s, and the paradigm would be Ronald Laing, saw the most important thing in their profession: the family is responsible for mental disorders. However, as soon as the embryonic anti-psychiatric movement proposed by Laing and others was conceived, it was aborted. Today’s critics are much more politically correct than those of the 60s, including the associations of survivors of psychiatry. Although they fight biological psychiatry, these professionals and survivors don’t want to see what’s in front of them: abusive parents are the number one cause of mental disorders. From this angle, the criticism of the profession by Modrow and Miller, who do not suffer from this blind spot, is far superior.

EHPP stands for Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry. When I learned that a journal that Peter Breggin created was challenging psychiatry, I was delighted. That’s what the world needed! Although already in my forties, with a youthful spirit I sent to the journal’s editor an original contribution to the academic critique of psychiatry (eventually published as an appendix in my previous book under the title ‘Why psychiatry is a false science’). I was very excited and fantasised about contributing various articles and reviews to Breggin’s journal. What would be my surprise when the new editor, a certain Laurence Simon, answered me saying that it was necessary to modify some passages related to the trauma model. The condition for publishing was to tone down the idea that abusive parents could psychologically harm their child. Simon’s request surprised me because Breggin had written some texts indistinguishable from Miller’s point of view; in fact, Breggin mentions Miller several times in his books. Laurence Simon, his new editor, had turned one hundred and eighty degrees on what the journal’s founder had written. In Simon’s email to me, the trauma model ‘has long lost credibility with the scientific community as have all the older analytic theories that blame poor mother’.

To the poor mother! Simon didn’t answer my question if he had read the researchers of the trauma model. Nor did he respond to another of my letters where I pointed out the existence of academic books on this model published in the new century. In one of his emails Simon even complained that I kept using the word ‘trauma’ in a modified version of my text. I still had hopes of publishing in Breggin’s journal and was willing to sacrifice a few paragraphs from my article. But Simon’s anti-trauma stance made me think that, like my attackers at the Cineteca, the new editor harboured deep-seated fears about something in his past. The old work of authors who studied cases of maddening parents was left out of my article. I relented on this point, but it seemed incredible to me that references to Theodore Lidz, Ronald Laing and Silvano Arieti, widely read authors in the 1960s and 1970s, would have to be censored in the journal that Breggin had created. Simon then revealed his true colours by insisting that all references to the trauma model, including contemporary authors, should be left out of my article.

I complained to Andrew Levine, the person in charge of responding to letters sent to the organization that Breggin founded, and to co-editor Johnatan Leo. None responded. I complained to Dominick Riccio, the director of international affairs. No reply. I complained to David Cohen, the editor before Simon and a close associate of Breggin. Cohen sided with Simon. I complained in several letters to Breggin himself, the director of the organisation that publishes the journal. Breggin hid behind in a wall of silence. I insisted and his wife, Ginger Breggin, wrote a few words in her own hand in one of my missives that she returned to me. Ginger simply claimed that her husband ‘no longer worked’ at the journal. But the truth is that Breggin continued to lead the organisation that publishes it, and his attitude seemed inconsistent with his previous position, if not cowardly.

Only now do I realise that, like Szasz, I had idealised Breggin. It was very hard for the idealist that I was to wake up to the fact that, although he has dedicated himself to denouncing what psychiatrists do with minors—an issue in which Carlos García so miserably cowed—Breggin hadn’t the stature I imagined. It is impossible to convey in a few paragraphs how confused I was by this little affair. I couldn’t believe my senses: that the most important thing of all had to be censored in the pages of the journal that Peter Breggin had created. In my private diaries of those days I wrote:

18 September 2003

It seems that my article won’t be published. See what Simon tells me this day, and my response.

I had to take another long walk in the street saddened by the resistance of the world even in those who professionally criticise psychiatry. As Miller says, the greatest resistance comes from the professionals themselves. Every time I run into a jerk like Simon I enhance the figure of this woman even more. I think I should try again with Cohen and Breggin but I highly doubt it will work. As always, Caesar, the people are incomparably more Neanderthalesque than you imagined.

Hopefully this is false and Breggin understands me…

He didn’t. Even two years after the rejection of my article, I still couldn’t believe my senses: that Breggin’s editor took a position contrary to something Breggin himself had written. So in September 2005 I made one last attempt at communication. To make sure my letter got through, I sent it to him through Federal Express. Somewhat edited for this book I quote some passages of the letter:

Dear Dr. Breggin:

I would like to thank you for your work. When I was a teenager, my mother ruined my young life by putting neuroleptics in my orange juice without my knowing it. Thanks to your work I now know that the hellish akathisia I experienced was the direct result of the drug. I am truly grateful for enlightening me on this issue.

I wrote you two or three letters in 2003 and 2004. Although none were answered, I hope this one is, and directly from you. The fact is that Laurence Simon contradicts what you say in chapter 2 of Toxic Psychiatry. Allow me to quote something from your book, which in my opinion is one of the best on the subject: ‘More than one patient of mine has begun with just such anguished fragments of memory before discovering the agony of his or her abusive childhood and its relationships to current entrapments’ (p. 24). Then, saying something very similar to what Laing used to say, you wrote:

Mad persons are victims of a corrupt upbringing: Behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invented in order to live in an unlivable situation [your emphasis]. What’s wrong is not “in the patient,” but in his family and society [p. 31].

You made many other similar pronouncements in the chapter on schizophrenia under the headings ‘The Family,’ ‘Envy and Shaming in the Family,’ ‘Blaming’ and ‘Should Parents Feel Guilty?’ In fact, the view you present on what is labelled schizophrenia is identical to mine. This is why I am so puzzled that your new editor takes the opposite position: that the aetiology of psychoses is a mystery.

I am about to finish a book that includes extremely harsh criticism of Laurence Simon and EHPP because Simon’s ‘poor mother’ stance is an insult to people like Modrow and many others who have had terribly abusive mothers (and fathers alike). I would like to spare you from such criticism. Those passages above show that you are—or at least were when writing Toxic Psychiatry—a very understanding person towards survivors. They also show that you believe there is some truth to the claim that some parents drive their child mad.

So please reply to this letter. How was it possible for your editor to take exactly the opposite position from what you say in your most important book? If the topic of parental abuse is central to understanding mental disorders, why haven’t you fired him?

Respectfully,

C.T.

The years that followed the editor’s rejection and the wall of silence behind which Breggin hid from me represented a great confrontation with reality. In addition to resigning myself to publishing my article not in a specialised journal but as an appendix to my previous book, I had to swallow the bitter drink that critics of psychiatry suffer from the same fears as psychiatrists, analysts, and psychologists. To give just one example: the EHPP editors failed to publish an obituary, or even better a tribute, to Theodore Lidz: one of the most prominent Americans in the trauma model of schizophrenia in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, who died in 2001 at the age of ninety (I talked to him over the phone when I lived in Houston). Even when Breggin and Cohen were EHPP editors, I didn’t find a single article in their journal about the work of Lidz or other authors of the trauma model, not even a critical one. Just as psychiatrists do, for these ‘anti-psychiatrists’ the trauma model is not even mentioned. Clearly, in recent decades there has been a failure of the nerve among critics of psychiatry.

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’.