Alice Miller

Da ihre Theorien ja doch immer wieder von Kirk in die Kommentare getragen werden ist es vielleicht an der Zeit, da mal einen eigenen Artikel zu zu machen.

Die deutsche Wikipedia zu Alice Millers Ansätzen:

Millers Auffassung zufolge sind jahrelange, oft unbewusst erlebte Auswirkungen elterlicher psychischer Einflüsse auf das Kind und die für die beteiligten Personen unsichtbaren Wirkmechanismen die Ursache so genannten kindlichen Fehlverhaltens und psychosomatischer wie psychischer Krankheiten auch im Erwachsenenalter. Werden diese nicht aufgearbeitet, so argumentiert Miller, werden sie unreflektiert an die Umwelt weitergegeben – z. B. als Eltern an die eigenen Kinder (wobei das Kind mitunter in die Elternrolle gedrängt wird) oder als Politiker an das Volk – oder beispielsweise durch Drogenkonsum oder Kriminalität kompensiert.

Miller ist der Ansicht, dass auch in spektakulären Fällen von Kindesmisshandlung (Trauma)[20] oder Kindesmord immer anhand der Kindheitsgeschichten der Täter[21] nachgewiesen werden kann, dass die Ursache der Tat in den eigenen Erlebnissen als Kind zu suchen ist.[22] Gerichtlich bestellte Gutachter im Strafverfahren stellen diesen Zusammenhang in der Regel jedoch nicht her.[23]

Alice Miller wendet sich gegen Schwarze Pädagogik,[24] worunter sie eine Erziehung versteht, die darauf abzielt, den Willen des Kindes mit Manipulation, Machtausübung und Erpressung zu brechen. Der von ihr geprägte Begriff wissender Zeuge bezeichnet eine Person, die von dem Leiden des Kindes mehr wisse als andere, wie z. B. ein Anwalt oder Psychologe. Der Begriff helfender Zeuge meint eine Person, die das Kind aktiv unterstützt, wie z. B. ein Lehrer, Nachbarn oder Geschwister.

Lernen aus Erfahrung

Miller betonte die Wichtigkeit der konkreten Lebenserfahrung als Quelle von Lernen:

„Denn jedes Kind lernt durch Nachahmung. Sein Körper lernt nicht das, was wir ihm mit Worten beibringen wollten, sondern das, was dieser Körper erfahren hat. Daher lernt ein geschlagenes, verletztes Kind zu schlagen und zu verletzen, während das beschützte und respektierte Kind lernt, Schwächere zu respektieren und zu beschützen. Weil es nur diese Erfahrung kennt.“
– Dein gerettetes Leben[GL-07 1]

Das Böse verstand Miller im Sinne der Destruktivität geschädigter Menschen. Dass es Menschen gibt, die ursachenlos böse auf die Welt kommen, lehnte sie als falsche Behauptung ab: „Ganz im Gegenteil, alles hängt davon ab, wie diese Menschen bei der Geburt empfangen und später behandelt wurden.“[GL-07 1]

Die Rolle von Ideologien bzw. Religionen bezüglich der Erzeugung eines Untertanengeistes[Bearbeiten]
Nach Millers Auffassung spielte es nicht die geringste Rolle, welche Ideologien oder Religionen dazu benutzt werden, Menschen zu blinden, naiven Untertanen zu machen:

„Wie wir wissen, eignet sich fast jedes Gedankengut dazu, den in der Kindheit mißhandelten Menschen als Marionette für die jeweiligen persönlichen Interessen der Machthaber zu gebrauchen. Auch wenn der wahre ausbeuterische Charakter der verehrten und geliebten Führer nach deren Entmachtung oder Tod zu Tage tritt, ändert das kaum etwas an der Bewunderung und bedingungslosen Treue ihrer Anhänger. Weil er den ersehnten guten Vater verkörpert, den man nie hatte.“
– Dein gerettetes Leben[GL-07 2]

Aus der englischen Wikipedia zu Alice Miller:

Miller extended the trauma model to include all forms of child abuse, including those that were commonly accepted (such as spanking), which she called poisonous pedagogy, a non-literal translation of Katharina Rutschky’s Schwarze Pädagogik (black or dark pedagogy/imprinting).

Drawing upon the work of psychohistory, Miller analyzed writers Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and others to find links between their childhood traumas and the course and outcome of their lives.[24]

The introduction of Miller’s first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, first published in 1979, contains a line that summarizes her core views:

“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.”

In the 1990s, Miller strongly supported a new method developed by Konrad Stettbacher, who himself was later charged with incidents of sexual abuse.[26] Miller came to know about Stettbacher and his method from a book by Mariella Mehr titled Steinzeit (Stone Age). Having been strongly impressed by the book, Miller contacted Mehr in order to get the name of the therapist. From that time forward, Miller refused to make therapist or method recommendations. In open letters, Miller explained her decision and how she originally became Stettbacher’s disciple, but in the end she distanced herself from him and his regressive therapies.

In her writings, Miller is careful to clarify that by „abuse“ she does not only mean physical violence or sexual abuse, she is also concerned with a much more insidious form of abuse: psychological abuse perpetrated by one or both parents on their child; this is insidious because the difficulty of identifying and dealing with it lies in the fact that the abused person is likely to conceal it from themselves and may never be aware of it until some dramatic event, or the onset of depression, requires it to be treated. Miller blamed psychologically abusive parents for the majority of neuroses and psychoses. She maintained that all instances of mental illness, addiction, crime and cultism were ultimately caused by suppressed rage and pain as a result of subconscious childhood trauma that was not resolved emotionally, assisted by a helper, which she came to term an „enlightened witness.“ In all cultures, „sparing the parents is our supreme law,“ wrote Miller. Even psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists were unconsciously afraid to blame parents for the mental disorders of their clients, she contended. According to Miller, mental health professionals were also creatures of the poisonous pedagogy internalized in their own childhood. This explained why the command „Honor thy parents“ was one of the main targets in Miller’s school of psychology.[29]

Miller called electroconvulsive therapy „a campaign against the act of remembering.“ In her book Abbruch der Schweigemauer (The Demolition of Silence), she also criticized psychotherapists‘ advice to clients to forgive their abusive parents, arguing that this could only hinder recovery through remembering and feeling childhood pain. It was her contention that the majority of therapists fear this truth and that they work under the influence of interpretations culled from both Western and Oriental religions, which preach forgiveness by the once-mistreated child. She believed that forgiveness did not resolve hatred, but covered it in a dangerous way in the grown adult: displacement on scapegoats, as she discussed in her psycho-biographies of Adolf Hitler and Jürgen Bartsch, both of whom she described as having suffered severe parental abuse.[30]

A common denominator in Miller’s writings is her explanation of why human beings prefer not to know about their own victimization during childhood: to avoid unbearable pain. She believed that the unconscious command of the individual, not to be aware of how he or she was treated in childhood, led to displacement: the irresistible drive to repeat abusive parenting in the next generation of children or direct unconsciously the unresolved trauma against others (war, terrorism, delinquency).,[31][32] or against him or herself (eating disorders, drug addiction, depression).

The roots of violence
According to Alice Miller, worldwide violence has its roots in the fact that children are beaten all over the world, especially during their first years of life, when their brains become structured.[31] She said that the damage caused by this practice is devastating, but unfortunately hardly noticed by society.[33] She argued that as children are forbidden to defend themselves against the violence inflicted on them, they must suppress the natural reactions like rage and fear, and they discharge these strong emotions later as adults against their own children or whole peoples: „child abuse like beating and humiliating not only produces unhappy and confused children, not only destructive teenagers and abusive parents, but thus also a confused, irrationally functioning society.“[16] Miller stated that only through becoming aware of this dynamic can we break the chain of violence.[16]

Also im Wesentlichen das, was auch schon hier in den Kommentaren anklang: Alles ist eine Folge von Traumata, die man in der frühen Kindheit erlebt und nicht verarbeitet hat.

Diese Besprechung fand ich noch ganz interessant:

Psychoanalysis claimed the opposite: children are born as “white sheets of paper”, they are conditioned to be who they are during the first few years of their lives. This belief manifested itself in “anti-authoritarian” upbringing of children meaning that no limitations whatsoever were set to hinder the child’s creative and personal development. The idea was dropped quickly as most parents were intolerant to smashed furniture and drawings on the ceiling.  Important research discovered, however, that the early years of childhood are indeed crucial for who we will become, and how we view the world. In my opinion, the most important book written in this era was “I’m ok, you’re ok” by Thomas Harris which, 40 years after it’s first publication, remains a must-read for anyone searching for answers on why we act like we act.

Psychoanalysis lead to the conclusion that actually none of someone’s actions are their own “fault” – it’s the parents or, more broadly, the environment, that is to blame. Alice Miller sent me into a deep depression for a while before I realized she was wrong by claiming that not only are we “programmed” by our environment to do what we do after birth but we are also unable to reverse it in our lifetimes, leaving us with a margin of perhaps 20 – 30% room for individuality and 70 – 80% of induced behavior. A horrible thought and simply unacceptable to me.

Luckily, further studies carried out on twins who were separated at birth (by circumstance, not experimental design) showed a surprising amount of similarities despite of the completely different environments they grew up in, effectively refuting psychoanalysis altogether, which was the end of it.

What remains is the realization of human beings as hybrids of a mix of things:

1. We aren’t born as white sheets of paper. We are born with a “pre-existing” personality of which we aren’t quite sure where it’s coming from.
2. We are also born with specific physical and psychological conditions resulting from the time we were in our mother’s wombs. Stress, drugs, alcohol, traumatic situations or the opposite of those affect who we are.
3. We are then filled to the top with our parent’s values, views of the world and behavioral patterns until the age of 5 or 6 at which we start discovering the outside world, thereby benchmarking what we learned from our parents against the reality we perceive.
4. The really good news is: there is a LOT of room to change who we are after comprehending who we are. It’s hard and painful for most but doable.

Which is why, despite of her fundamental errors, I think Alice Miller’s work was so important: it helped spread an invalid theory far enough to prompt research to the contrary. Without the migraines she gave me as a teenager I wouldn’t have set off so persistently to prove her wrong. Thank you.

Das scheint mir eine Kritik zu sein, die wesentliches behandelt: Alice Miller ist erst einmal eine „Blank Slate“-Vertreterin, was ihre Theorien schon nicht sehr überzeugend macht. Sie übersieht, dass verschiedenste Punkte ganz andere Ursachen haben müssen und das hinter allem versteckte Traumata zu sehen eher „Traumatologismus“ (in Anlehnung an Biologismus“) ist, sie scheint aber gar keine anderen Ursachen mehr zu akzeptieren.

Ich vermute, dass ihr Studienunterbau auch eher sehr eingeschränkt ist, habe dazu aber nichts gelesen.