BO to Forum, discussion about Alice Miller and Therapy
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Beyond_Ideologies
Sep 28, 2011, 3:22:57 PM9/28/11
to Beyond_Ideologies
Reply to some people on another forum, some people getting rather
hostile. But also, I answer for the second time someone who takes the
position that Alice Miller was an advocate of Therapy.
*********************
Freedom to Express means that people can talk about their own stuff,
with no ideological restrictions being imposed. In particular,
Recoveryist and Liberal Pedagogy doctrine will not be imposed. People
will not be told that they should not be angry, that they should heal,
not anything of the sort. Freedom to Express means that people can
share their own stuff in safety. They will not be questioned, asked
for clarification, or ever given any kind of advice. What they say
stands. There is no rebuttal, no discussion of any type. No words
will be put into their mouths. The only allowable responses are
simply affirmations to let people know that their posts have been
read.
People who want to give advice do so because that supports their own
denial systems. People who want to ask questions or ask for
clarifications do so because that casts the conversation into a
framework which fits with their own denial systems. At Freedom to
Express and all the forums that I run people can post knowing that
they won’t have to risk dealing with such stuff.
You wrote:
“
First off, have you ever been in therapy?
Secondly, I wonder who you are really angry with? I think if you
searched deep instead, who you are angry with isn't Born Again
Christians or Family systems in general. Granted religion, the family
etc all play a role in shaping society and thus peoples views. But
they do not cause people to abuse, that is a decision the person
themselves makes.
“
I would never be so presumptuous as to ask someone such things, not in
any social situation.
You also wrote:
“
I realise it is not as black and white as that. Its a very grey area.
But I think it would be better for you as an individual if you could
channel your energy into healing yourself (however that might be best
for you).
“
I consider that type of a statement as tantamount to subjecting a rape
victim to another rape.
******************************
If you read what I have written you will see that I am very very
guarded about personal disclosures or saying anything which would
amount to a claim of abuse. You will also see that I don’t even
really like the abuse model. It is predicated on the idea that
something aberrational has occurred. You have not heard me say any
such thing. So you are trying to cast something on to me which comes
from you, not me.
If you read what I have written you will also see that the last thing
in this world that I want is therapy, conseling, or to “find peace”.
So again you are trying to put on to me something which comes from
you.
*****************************
Yes, I do wish to understand you. It is possible that I have have
missed what you are saying.
Consider this, a rape victim goes to the local police precinct to
report it. She is told,
“
… one must look at oneself and change, rather than expecting others to
change for them.
”
You wrote:
“
As an example....I will never change the behaviours of my mother, that
does not mean I condone them or accept them, but I cannot change them.
I can try, and I can remove myself, or expect redress. But if the
other person is not willing then ultimately I am left with no chance
of changing that person. I am talking about changing individuals, not
about standing up and being counted.
“
Who every said anything about standing up and being counted? I want
actual tangible victory.
It sounds like you are talking about dealing with people by voluntary
means. I certainly have never said anything about dealing with people
by voluntary means.
You can’t really expect people to become voluntary until they have
seen what has happened to someone else who was not. Fighting against
the Family System really is just this simple. Mostly I’m talking
about conservative outer directed types. They will change, once they
realize that they have no other choice as people are being held
accountable.
The problem is that those who support Recovery and Therapy are not on
board for the fight because it means facing the pain and giving up
their idolatry of the Holy Family. It means they would have to stop
seceding and dissociating. They would have to give up Live and Let
Live.
You wrote:
“
You can within ones mind and self know and be confident about a
situation without the need to inflict ....perhaps the internal knowing
is 'good enough' for some people. That again does not mean I agree
with live and let live, but appreciate others stance and need.
“
So lets go back to our example of the rape case. She is also told,
“You can within ones mind and self know and be confident about a
situation without the need to inflict”.
I consider this to be rape also.
Your statement is the quintessential Live and Let Live. What it
amounts to is telling people to seek enlightenment, instead of seeking
redress, instead of reclaiming their place in the world of lived
experience. Its secession, and its dissociation too.
Alice Miller was trained as a psycoanalyst. So she had had multiple
extensive courses of therapy. In her third book, Thou Shalt Not Be
Aware, she denounced ALL THERAPY without any exceptions. We are
talking Freud, Jung, Reich, Janov, Erickson, Existential Therapy, you
name it. She also resigned from all psychoanalytic professional
associations. She then went on to apologize to her readers, as some
who had read her first two books had in fact entered into therapy.
She made it clear that she was opposed to all therapy and regretted
having led some of her earlier readers into it.
Books 4 thru 7 are in large measure an explication of the
ramifications of book 3. Book 6, Banished Knowledge does in someways
a better job of showing just how banished and forbidden the experience
of the child is. I wrote a paper about Augustine’s Confessions,
drawing upon books 1 thru 7, just as the American edition of 7 was
coming out. Most of my quotes are from book 6, as it puts things so
well.
Book 7, Breaking Down the Walls of Silence does deal more with
sociopolitical issues. She specifically indicts the state pronatalism
if Romania’s Ceausescu Regime and the Catholic Anti-Abortion Movement.
She shows that all of these things are just more denial, the result
of denial of childhood experience. She indicts Catholic religious
celibacy too, just as I had in my Augustine paper. So in terms of
touching broad political issues, this was the high water mark.
In terms of denouncing therapy in particular, book 3 was the one.
Book 5, Pictures of a Childhood, is mostly a book of her watercolors.
The small text is interesting. She explains that in her 60’s she was
approached by a child, a child that was mute and could speak in no way
except through these paintings. She laments that her two full courses
of therapy while she was in training, were useless.
Now, there is also a problem in books 6 and 7. She still held out for
there being some sort of therapy which could be good. She accepted
one J. Konrad Stettbacher, a primalist. His book, Making Sense of
Suffering, is interesting to read. Though I never really did what he
suggested, and I certainly would never submit to any therapist doing
that to me, I do still continue a personal meditation practice which
is influenced by his writing.
She felt that Stettbacher’s method would be safe. Eventually though
she went with someone else who practiced their own version of Primal
Therapy. The results were disastrous..
She had written in book two about a German serial killer who preyed on
children, Jurgen Bartsch. To me the description of Bartsch made me
think of another German serial killer from Hanover in the 1920s, Fritz
Harmon. It seems that he had been an adjan provocateur working with
Gustav Noske and the Hanover Police. It was a kind of psychological
warfare. The trial was used to humiliate those Wiemar figures who
defended homosexuality, with the ultimate objective of helping to
promote the Nazi Party. You can read about this in a book called the
Pink Triangle.
http://www.amazon.com/Pink-Triangle-Nazi-Against-Homosexuals/dp/0805006001/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1316807387&sr=8-1
Then when Jeffrey Dahmer of Milwaukee surfaced I was taken with just
how similar he sounded to both these two. I was assuming that Alice
Miller would want to write about him, as she had about Bartsch. I
waited and waited and waited.
Her writing had stopped.
When it finally started again, she was not the same. She never was
the same.
I am still hoping someone will be able to shed light on Dahmer. His
mother, Joyce Flint, is now desceased. She did work with someone to
prepare a book to try and defend herself from all the aspersions she
felt were being directed at her. Then she decided not to allow it to
be published. But I believe it still exists.
The father Lionel Dahmer has written his own book and has given
interviews. He is interesting. He hides behind Born Again
Christianity. He is trying though to tell the truth as best he is
able. To go further though one must have the mother’s book.
There is a younger brother too. He might end up holding the rights to
that book. He might also have things to contribute to our
understanding as well.
Some people only started reading Alice Miller when these later books
were published. I had been reading the early books, and I read them
in order and was keeping up with her. The early books are intense, as
they are about denial. The emotional experience of reading them is
overwhelming. You can tell that she is someone who is looking Evil
straight in the eye.
The later books are not like this. She lost something. She lost her
own ability to face the pain. Her web site never was much. It talks
about “child abuse”. This is not really what her early books are
about. She started No-Spank. While this is laudable, this also has
very little to do with her earlier books. The real import of For Your
Own Good is not how horrible the overtly violent pedagogy is. Rather,
its that Liberal Pedagogy amounts to the same thing, its how our
society justifies the parental role and uses children.
Unfortunately in her later books she did become something of a liberal
pedagogue herself. As such, the books are of little worth.
The later editions of books 6 and 7 have the endorsements of
Stettbacher removed. Book 8, Path’s of Life, denounces all such
Primal Therapy Cults.
From Book 3 forward she is calling for something sometimes called an
Enlightened Witness. But there is question as to how to translate
this. I am sure that the German is clear. But translation to English
is notoriously difficult. Its not like translating Augustine’s Latin.
The German word have multiple meanings when translated to English.
Some say it should be “helping witness”. The Spanish publishers
translate it as something which means “accomplice witness”.
Accomplice usually means someone who helps you do something which is
illegal. Alice Miller had been interned in the Warsaw Ghetto. She
escaped and found accomplices who would hide her. She then learned
how to move in and out in order to smuggle food.
As far as we can tell, she never was able to tell a living soul of
what all went on during those years.
I am not interested in enlightenment or enlightened witnesses. I am
calling for comrades. This means people who want to fight to bring
about a revolution.
One person who is critical of some of Alice Miller’s writings is one
James M. Glass. His specialty is the psycho dynamics of political
groups. He does not completely go along with Miller’s explanations
about the German people and Hitler. He feels that there’s a whole
dimension she is missing, that of political leadership. The way I
look at it is like this. The United States and Great Britain are not
really that much different from Germany. Things could have gone very
differently.
http://www.amazon.com/Private-Terror-Public-Life-Psychosis/dp/0801497698/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3
It is also interesting that Glass has written another book about
Jewish Resistance, something Miller’s writings in Book 8 suggest that
she has trouble with. Glass has also written about the possibility of
a credible pacifism. Meaning I think that he is not endorsing simple
escapism, disengagement, dissociation. These are also areas where
Miller has trouble.
In her first 7 books you get the feeling that the pages might
spontaneously ignite. The feelings are that intense. She is not
actually telling people that there is anything specific they should
do, but she is showing people how severe the situation is and bringing
up pain of an excruciating nature. To go further she would have had
to have called for action. This she did not do.
Nothing is as intense and as painful than to face the pain without any
Live and Let Live, Seek Enlightenment, or Holy Family denial system as
a shield.
But going the next step, taking action, was not something Miller was
ever able to do. She betrayed what she had revealed in the early
books, with her later books. She did tell people to seek enlightened
witnessing via therapy, even though earlier she had made it clear that
the type of witnessing she was calling for never could have been
provided in any kind of therapy and that therapy was always a
betrayal.
She did in effect tell people not to act and instead to seek
enlightenment. She could not face what she was able to before, after
having been manipulated by a primal therapist.
Later she would go with another therapist, Jean Jenson, and then later
revoke that endorsement too.
I don’t hold any of this against her personally. Rather, I want to
draw upon the best of what she has written, and ignore the rest of it.
Nothing is more painful than to see how one has been used and how
one’s life has been impacted. Its not in the repressed memories which
might be recovered. No, its in the malicious intent within the Family
System, and the social consequences of such. When one faces the pain
one will want redress. One will see just how hard it is, and how the
society sanctions it all. This multiplies the pain many fold. This
is what the early Miller was able t face.
Such discussions provoke people like nothing else. They will turn to
every approbation that they can, New Agism, conventional Religisoity,
Therapy, Recoveryism, Live and Let Liveism, and then some just go for
drugs and alcohol.
“
You can within ones mind and self know and be confident about a
situation without the need to inflict ....perhaps the internal knowing
is 'good enough' for some people. That again does not mean I agree
with live and let live, but appreciate others stance and need.
“
Peace in Our Time
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_gHp1HTY4xKY/SZnXiGm2WqI/AAAAAAAAEQ8/p_E1DLGEQ98/s400/chamberlain2.jpg
****************************
If you’ve been convinced that the things to battle against are purely
personal problems, instead of society wide injustice, then the
therapists already have “fixed” you to be just as they want you.
Former director of the Sigmund Freud Archives Jeffrey Masson explains
that indoctrination is exactly what therapy and the training to become
a therapist are. He explains that to do therapy upon someone is an
attack on their autonomy, and it is wrong.
http://www.amazon.com/Against-Therapy-Jeffrey-Moussaieff-Masson/dp/1567510221/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1316812252&sr=1-1
******************************
Not in any of her writings, the old or the new does Alice Miller every
talk about someone making people less angry. Never does she endorse
such an objective in any way shape or form.
As far as doing it alone, no you should not have to. Trying to
contend with the oppression of the family system is far beyond what
anyone of us could ever hope to do. That we might think we should
have to go it alone, only means that the psycho therapists have
already gotten to us.
The later Alice Miller is not what the early Alice Miller was. The
early Miller does not try to create, “peace and comfort”. She makes
people burn. She does not specifically tell people what to do from
there though. She goes as far as she is able to and I recognize her
for that and acknowledge the impact she has had on my life.
In the later books she is in effect discouraging action and telling
people to seek enlightenment. She lost it. Therapists had their way
with her. The later books are of very little worth.
******************************
I’ve expressed my views, as you are now doing. My soap box is no
higher than yours. People need to express their views to further
develop them, not to recover, but to be able to strike blows.
Yes I want to strike at the Family System and strike at it hard.
Recovery is an idea adopted from substance addiction and the doctrine
of Original Sin. The sooner it is lost, the better.
The Family System gets to abuse because the whole society sanctions
it. This is why it is so painful. This is why people turn to
recovery and therapy, in order to escape the pain.
Alice Miller was interned in the Warsaw Ghetto simply because she was
a Jew and was living in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thou Shalt
Not Be Aware is subtitled, “society’s betrayal of the child”. She was
not talking about what we call “child abuse” or “bad parenting”. She
was talking about Good Families. She refers to it once as Bourgeois
Family Happiness. Her books are painful to read because they bring up
painful experiences, and the pain is so intense because the society
legitimates the Family System.
My life has been impacted by severe things. I do not have the liberty
to make casual disclosures. I do not seek group approval or
sociability. I do maintain and defend a Privacy Firewall. I don’t do
anything which could compromise my chance of victory.
BO
Redress for Wrongs, not Recovery and Religion. Tangible Results, not
Therapeutic Release. There is no such thing as Healing without first
restoring Honor. wars are won by Strategically Engaging with the
enemy, not by Seeking Enlightenment. Victory, not continuing
Victimization.
Michael Moore
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/28/here_comes_trouble_michael_moore_tells
hostile. But also, I answer for the second time someone who takes the
position that Alice Miller was an advocate of Therapy.
*********************
Freedom to Express means that people can talk about their own stuff,
with no ideological restrictions being imposed. In particular,
Recoveryist and Liberal Pedagogy doctrine will not be imposed. People
will not be told that they should not be angry, that they should heal,
not anything of the sort. Freedom to Express means that people can
share their own stuff in safety. They will not be questioned, asked
for clarification, or ever given any kind of advice. What they say
stands. There is no rebuttal, no discussion of any type. No words
will be put into their mouths. The only allowable responses are
simply affirmations to let people know that their posts have been
read.
People who want to give advice do so because that supports their own
denial systems. People who want to ask questions or ask for
clarifications do so because that casts the conversation into a
framework which fits with their own denial systems. At Freedom to
Express and all the forums that I run people can post knowing that
they won’t have to risk dealing with such stuff.
You wrote:
“
First off, have you ever been in therapy?
Secondly, I wonder who you are really angry with? I think if you
searched deep instead, who you are angry with isn't Born Again
Christians or Family systems in general. Granted religion, the family
etc all play a role in shaping society and thus peoples views. But
they do not cause people to abuse, that is a decision the person
themselves makes.
“
I would never be so presumptuous as to ask someone such things, not in
any social situation.
You also wrote:
“
I realise it is not as black and white as that. Its a very grey area.
But I think it would be better for you as an individual if you could
channel your energy into healing yourself (however that might be best
for you).
“
I consider that type of a statement as tantamount to subjecting a rape
victim to another rape.
******************************
If you read what I have written you will see that I am very very
guarded about personal disclosures or saying anything which would
amount to a claim of abuse. You will also see that I don’t even
really like the abuse model. It is predicated on the idea that
something aberrational has occurred. You have not heard me say any
such thing. So you are trying to cast something on to me which comes
from you, not me.
If you read what I have written you will also see that the last thing
in this world that I want is therapy, conseling, or to “find peace”.
So again you are trying to put on to me something which comes from
you.
*****************************
Yes, I do wish to understand you. It is possible that I have have
missed what you are saying.
Consider this, a rape victim goes to the local police precinct to
report it. She is told,
“
… one must look at oneself and change, rather than expecting others to
change for them.
”
You wrote:
“
As an example....I will never change the behaviours of my mother, that
does not mean I condone them or accept them, but I cannot change them.
I can try, and I can remove myself, or expect redress. But if the
other person is not willing then ultimately I am left with no chance
of changing that person. I am talking about changing individuals, not
about standing up and being counted.
“
Who every said anything about standing up and being counted? I want
actual tangible victory.
It sounds like you are talking about dealing with people by voluntary
means. I certainly have never said anything about dealing with people
by voluntary means.
You can’t really expect people to become voluntary until they have
seen what has happened to someone else who was not. Fighting against
the Family System really is just this simple. Mostly I’m talking
about conservative outer directed types. They will change, once they
realize that they have no other choice as people are being held
accountable.
The problem is that those who support Recovery and Therapy are not on
board for the fight because it means facing the pain and giving up
their idolatry of the Holy Family. It means they would have to stop
seceding and dissociating. They would have to give up Live and Let
Live.
You wrote:
“
You can within ones mind and self know and be confident about a
situation without the need to inflict ....perhaps the internal knowing
is 'good enough' for some people. That again does not mean I agree
with live and let live, but appreciate others stance and need.
“
So lets go back to our example of the rape case. She is also told,
“You can within ones mind and self know and be confident about a
situation without the need to inflict”.
I consider this to be rape also.
Your statement is the quintessential Live and Let Live. What it
amounts to is telling people to seek enlightenment, instead of seeking
redress, instead of reclaiming their place in the world of lived
experience. Its secession, and its dissociation too.
Alice Miller was trained as a psycoanalyst. So she had had multiple
extensive courses of therapy. In her third book, Thou Shalt Not Be
Aware, she denounced ALL THERAPY without any exceptions. We are
talking Freud, Jung, Reich, Janov, Erickson, Existential Therapy, you
name it. She also resigned from all psychoanalytic professional
associations. She then went on to apologize to her readers, as some
who had read her first two books had in fact entered into therapy.
She made it clear that she was opposed to all therapy and regretted
having led some of her earlier readers into it.
Books 4 thru 7 are in large measure an explication of the
ramifications of book 3. Book 6, Banished Knowledge does in someways
a better job of showing just how banished and forbidden the experience
of the child is. I wrote a paper about Augustine’s Confessions,
drawing upon books 1 thru 7, just as the American edition of 7 was
coming out. Most of my quotes are from book 6, as it puts things so
well.
Book 7, Breaking Down the Walls of Silence does deal more with
sociopolitical issues. She specifically indicts the state pronatalism
if Romania’s Ceausescu Regime and the Catholic Anti-Abortion Movement.
She shows that all of these things are just more denial, the result
of denial of childhood experience. She indicts Catholic religious
celibacy too, just as I had in my Augustine paper. So in terms of
touching broad political issues, this was the high water mark.
In terms of denouncing therapy in particular, book 3 was the one.
Book 5, Pictures of a Childhood, is mostly a book of her watercolors.
The small text is interesting. She explains that in her 60’s she was
approached by a child, a child that was mute and could speak in no way
except through these paintings. She laments that her two full courses
of therapy while she was in training, were useless.
Now, there is also a problem in books 6 and 7. She still held out for
there being some sort of therapy which could be good. She accepted
one J. Konrad Stettbacher, a primalist. His book, Making Sense of
Suffering, is interesting to read. Though I never really did what he
suggested, and I certainly would never submit to any therapist doing
that to me, I do still continue a personal meditation practice which
is influenced by his writing.
She felt that Stettbacher’s method would be safe. Eventually though
she went with someone else who practiced their own version of Primal
Therapy. The results were disastrous..
She had written in book two about a German serial killer who preyed on
children, Jurgen Bartsch. To me the description of Bartsch made me
think of another German serial killer from Hanover in the 1920s, Fritz
Harmon. It seems that he had been an adjan provocateur working with
Gustav Noske and the Hanover Police. It was a kind of psychological
warfare. The trial was used to humiliate those Wiemar figures who
defended homosexuality, with the ultimate objective of helping to
promote the Nazi Party. You can read about this in a book called the
Pink Triangle.
http://www.amazon.com/Pink-Triangle-Nazi-Against-Homosexuals/dp/0805006001/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1316807387&sr=8-1
Then when Jeffrey Dahmer of Milwaukee surfaced I was taken with just
how similar he sounded to both these two. I was assuming that Alice
Miller would want to write about him, as she had about Bartsch. I
waited and waited and waited.
Her writing had stopped.
When it finally started again, she was not the same. She never was
the same.
I am still hoping someone will be able to shed light on Dahmer. His
mother, Joyce Flint, is now desceased. She did work with someone to
prepare a book to try and defend herself from all the aspersions she
felt were being directed at her. Then she decided not to allow it to
be published. But I believe it still exists.
The father Lionel Dahmer has written his own book and has given
interviews. He is interesting. He hides behind Born Again
Christianity. He is trying though to tell the truth as best he is
able. To go further though one must have the mother’s book.
There is a younger brother too. He might end up holding the rights to
that book. He might also have things to contribute to our
understanding as well.
Some people only started reading Alice Miller when these later books
were published. I had been reading the early books, and I read them
in order and was keeping up with her. The early books are intense, as
they are about denial. The emotional experience of reading them is
overwhelming. You can tell that she is someone who is looking Evil
straight in the eye.
The later books are not like this. She lost something. She lost her
own ability to face the pain. Her web site never was much. It talks
about “child abuse”. This is not really what her early books are
about. She started No-Spank. While this is laudable, this also has
very little to do with her earlier books. The real import of For Your
Own Good is not how horrible the overtly violent pedagogy is. Rather,
its that Liberal Pedagogy amounts to the same thing, its how our
society justifies the parental role and uses children.
Unfortunately in her later books she did become something of a liberal
pedagogue herself. As such, the books are of little worth.
The later editions of books 6 and 7 have the endorsements of
Stettbacher removed. Book 8, Path’s of Life, denounces all such
Primal Therapy Cults.
From Book 3 forward she is calling for something sometimes called an
Enlightened Witness. But there is question as to how to translate
this. I am sure that the German is clear. But translation to English
is notoriously difficult. Its not like translating Augustine’s Latin.
The German word have multiple meanings when translated to English.
Some say it should be “helping witness”. The Spanish publishers
translate it as something which means “accomplice witness”.
Accomplice usually means someone who helps you do something which is
illegal. Alice Miller had been interned in the Warsaw Ghetto. She
escaped and found accomplices who would hide her. She then learned
how to move in and out in order to smuggle food.
As far as we can tell, she never was able to tell a living soul of
what all went on during those years.
I am not interested in enlightenment or enlightened witnesses. I am
calling for comrades. This means people who want to fight to bring
about a revolution.
One person who is critical of some of Alice Miller’s writings is one
James M. Glass. His specialty is the psycho dynamics of political
groups. He does not completely go along with Miller’s explanations
about the German people and Hitler. He feels that there’s a whole
dimension she is missing, that of political leadership. The way I
look at it is like this. The United States and Great Britain are not
really that much different from Germany. Things could have gone very
differently.
http://www.amazon.com/Private-Terror-Public-Life-Psychosis/dp/0801497698/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3
It is also interesting that Glass has written another book about
Jewish Resistance, something Miller’s writings in Book 8 suggest that
she has trouble with. Glass has also written about the possibility of
a credible pacifism. Meaning I think that he is not endorsing simple
escapism, disengagement, dissociation. These are also areas where
Miller has trouble.
In her first 7 books you get the feeling that the pages might
spontaneously ignite. The feelings are that intense. She is not
actually telling people that there is anything specific they should
do, but she is showing people how severe the situation is and bringing
up pain of an excruciating nature. To go further she would have had
to have called for action. This she did not do.
Nothing is as intense and as painful than to face the pain without any
Live and Let Live, Seek Enlightenment, or Holy Family denial system as
a shield.
But going the next step, taking action, was not something Miller was
ever able to do. She betrayed what she had revealed in the early
books, with her later books. She did tell people to seek enlightened
witnessing via therapy, even though earlier she had made it clear that
the type of witnessing she was calling for never could have been
provided in any kind of therapy and that therapy was always a
betrayal.
She did in effect tell people not to act and instead to seek
enlightenment. She could not face what she was able to before, after
having been manipulated by a primal therapist.
Later she would go with another therapist, Jean Jenson, and then later
revoke that endorsement too.
I don’t hold any of this against her personally. Rather, I want to
draw upon the best of what she has written, and ignore the rest of it.
Nothing is more painful than to see how one has been used and how
one’s life has been impacted. Its not in the repressed memories which
might be recovered. No, its in the malicious intent within the Family
System, and the social consequences of such. When one faces the pain
one will want redress. One will see just how hard it is, and how the
society sanctions it all. This multiplies the pain many fold. This
is what the early Miller was able t face.
Such discussions provoke people like nothing else. They will turn to
every approbation that they can, New Agism, conventional Religisoity,
Therapy, Recoveryism, Live and Let Liveism, and then some just go for
drugs and alcohol.
“
You can within ones mind and self know and be confident about a
situation without the need to inflict ....perhaps the internal knowing
is 'good enough' for some people. That again does not mean I agree
with live and let live, but appreciate others stance and need.
“
Peace in Our Time
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_gHp1HTY4xKY/SZnXiGm2WqI/AAAAAAAAEQ8/p_E1DLGEQ98/s400/chamberlain2.jpg
****************************
If you’ve been convinced that the things to battle against are purely
personal problems, instead of society wide injustice, then the
therapists already have “fixed” you to be just as they want you.
Former director of the Sigmund Freud Archives Jeffrey Masson explains
that indoctrination is exactly what therapy and the training to become
a therapist are. He explains that to do therapy upon someone is an
attack on their autonomy, and it is wrong.
http://www.amazon.com/Against-Therapy-Jeffrey-Moussaieff-Masson/dp/1567510221/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1316812252&sr=1-1
******************************
Not in any of her writings, the old or the new does Alice Miller every
talk about someone making people less angry. Never does she endorse
such an objective in any way shape or form.
As far as doing it alone, no you should not have to. Trying to
contend with the oppression of the family system is far beyond what
anyone of us could ever hope to do. That we might think we should
have to go it alone, only means that the psycho therapists have
already gotten to us.
The later Alice Miller is not what the early Alice Miller was. The
early Miller does not try to create, “peace and comfort”. She makes
people burn. She does not specifically tell people what to do from
there though. She goes as far as she is able to and I recognize her
for that and acknowledge the impact she has had on my life.
In the later books she is in effect discouraging action and telling
people to seek enlightenment. She lost it. Therapists had their way
with her. The later books are of very little worth.
******************************
I’ve expressed my views, as you are now doing. My soap box is no
higher than yours. People need to express their views to further
develop them, not to recover, but to be able to strike blows.
Yes I want to strike at the Family System and strike at it hard.
Recovery is an idea adopted from substance addiction and the doctrine
of Original Sin. The sooner it is lost, the better.
The Family System gets to abuse because the whole society sanctions
it. This is why it is so painful. This is why people turn to
recovery and therapy, in order to escape the pain.
Alice Miller was interned in the Warsaw Ghetto simply because she was
a Jew and was living in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thou Shalt
Not Be Aware is subtitled, “society’s betrayal of the child”. She was
not talking about what we call “child abuse” or “bad parenting”. She
was talking about Good Families. She refers to it once as Bourgeois
Family Happiness. Her books are painful to read because they bring up
painful experiences, and the pain is so intense because the society
legitimates the Family System.
My life has been impacted by severe things. I do not have the liberty
to make casual disclosures. I do not seek group approval or
sociability. I do maintain and defend a Privacy Firewall. I don’t do
anything which could compromise my chance of victory.
BO
Redress for Wrongs, not Recovery and Religion. Tangible Results, not
Therapeutic Release. There is no such thing as Healing without first
restoring Honor. wars are won by Strategically Engaging with the
enemy, not by Seeking Enlightenment. Victory, not continuing
Victimization.
Michael Moore
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/28/here_comes_trouble_michael_moore_tells
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