Chapter:6 Biographical Blind Spots

"The Truth will Set You Free" by Alice Miller

This area of Biographies is the last of the areas of the Professional Career Fields that Alice Miller talks regarding abusive childhood memories that are avoided. The other Professional Career Fields Miller which avoid abused childhood memories are medicine, psychotherapy, politics, the penal system and religion.

Miller discussed how we are born innocent like Adam and Eve, but as we all are born under different circumstances, not all are subject to abuse. She is relating to the fact that we are inundated with religious rules, “threats and punishments”. Parents subject their children to injustices because the parent was treated that way, in return will treat their child unjustly, which is scapegoating. Punishing another for the parents pain, on those who are innocent of creating the pain, is not the right way to proceed with parenting. The parents were hurting parents and how far back and how long can we know this has been going on for? Scapegoating can be conscious or unconscious as correction, because the parents pass down unaware patterns of abuse, due to the fact that they were furious of how the parent themselves were treated as a child. The parent was not able to stand up to their care providers for fear of losing their love, which was not really love. So they were/are confused about what love really is. The child also takes on these patterns of abuse also as legitimate corrections of wrong doing. The parent also hid from themselves their true feelings to be able to “survive” the abuse, as Alice Miller states and has given us the fact that no one who has or had ever been treated with respect and caring in childhood, ever turned violent.

Miller in the section of Chapter 6 talks about political leaders who were brought up under strict punishment laden abuse. She emphasized that there are few biographers who have delved into the childhood abuse of political leaders namely Hitler and Stalin. Miller tells us that psychohistorians will discuss early childhood abuse and once and a while there are political biographers who relate childhood abuse in their books. Alice Miller went into great detail about the differences between how Stalin grew up and how Gorbachev grew up in their families. There was a stark difference between these two leaders childhoods.

Here is what Miller says of Stalin’s childhood: “Stalin was the only child of an alcoholic father who beat him soundly everyday and a mother who never protected him, was herself beaten and usually stayed away from home. When he grew up, his suppressed panic was transformed into paranoia, the maniacal conviction that everyone was out to destroy him. In the 1930’s, as absolute ruler of the Soviet Union, he had millions of people slaughtered or put into concentration camps”. In contrast Miller tells us about Gorbachev childhood experience, “the Gorbachev family, which had no tradition of child beating but instead typically showed respect for children and their needs. As an adult, Mikkail Gorbachev has given ample evidence of qualities hardly any other living statesman has demonstrated to the same degree: courage to look facts in the face and to seek flexible solutions, respect for others, give-and-take in the course of dialogue, absence of hypocrisy, and a complete lack of grandiosity in the conduct of his personal life. Both his parents and grandparents (the latter looked after him during the war years) appear to have been people with an unusual capacity for love and affection.” Miller goes on to say the Gorbachev’s father was a “loving, modest man, amiable and peaceable in his dealings with others, a man who was never heard to raise his voice. The mother is described as “sturdy, sincere, and cheerful.” Gorbachev’s mother was still “living modestly and happily in her small farmhouse” when her son had become a statesman. The war years and the poverty that Gorbachev grew up with did not adversely affect him because in his youth he was treated with respect in his childhood, Miller recounts. Alice Miller identifies that Gorbachev had emotional security at home which made a big difference in his personality and character.

Alice Miller indicated in this chapter that we would be able to understand our world better if biographers would include in their biographies additional information regarding their subject’s childhood experiences in the child’s family. Not enough biographers do this.

University Chairs and Professors mostly do not teach about the subject of child abuse and cruelty to children. Miller addresses this fact because childrearing is masked as parenting and eduction of the child and is successful in hiding the cruelty to children.

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