I note that the psychoanalyst, Alice Miller, has died at the age of 87. You can find her obituary in the New York Times. One of my funnier moments—though you’d have to be a complete nerd to appreciate the humour—happened fifteen years ago when I gave my mom a copy of Miller’s book, The Drama of the Gifted Child. You see, Miller believed that much of our dysfunctional behaviour as adults can be attributed to the way we were treated by our parents. The gift in the title of her book has nothing to do with cognitive gifts (as in: “my child was just accepted to the gifted program at school”); it is the gift of dysfunctional behaviours to cope with dysfunctional parenting. After my mom read the book, she was none too pleased with me. Actually, the incident only seems funny in retrospect. At the time, I was deeply depressed and was grasping for any explanation. Mom was an easy target and I was a smart-assed intellectual who had read too many books moderated by too little experience.
I have ambivalent feelings about Miller’s work. It can have important application in some situations. Battering a fourteen-year-old with a dumbbell and cracking his skull seems to fall within her description of “poisonous pedagogy.” At the other extreme, seemingly innocuous actions can sometimes traumatize a sensitive child in ways that would have been impossible to predict. But with Miller, there seems to be an absolute weight given to actions, and little allowance for the wide range of ways in which those actions might be received. The kid with the cracked skull might prove enormously resilient while a more sensitive kid might become morose and withdrawn after receiving a mild reprimand. In my view, Miller doesn’t offer an explanatory account that would distinguish between these responses.
Even if we assume that Miller provides an adequate account, so what? As someone who has left significant ass-dents in the analyst’s chair, I can assure you that an explanatory account is the least of a client’s concerns. “Why?” is such a boring question. If all I ever do is try to answer the question “Why am I feeling like this?” then the best I’ll ever do with a therapist like Miller is nurture a resentment of my parents. That’s not a helpful outcome.
There is an ethical dimension to therapy – not the professional ethics of the therapist, but the practical ethics of the client: “Now that I have this insight, what is my responsibility?” Even if it is true that my dysfunctional behaviour has been caused by my parents, my challenge as an adult is to live in the present moment, to take my circumstances as I find them now and move them forward into a future for which I assume responsibility. Otherwise, the most I’ll ever achieve is a pervasive feeling of bitterness. The ethical dimension may be compounded by the fact that I’m a parent now, too. What kind of a parent would I be if I could never conceive of myself as anything but a victim? As a parent, I sometimes make poor decisions, but at least they’re my poor decisions.
Miller’s gift is to provide an etiology of complicity. She describes how it is that an abused child can feel that they deserved their abuse. Consider the defense counsel’s arguments in the case of Peter Harvey: the kid was a trouble maker (translation: it’s no wonder a teacher took a dumbbell to his head). The fact that we would print such arguments illustrates that there is a social dimension to the child’s treatment. In fact, the child has probably internalized this “newspaper morality.” We (and him along with us) accept that there is a causal relationship between the child’s behaviour and his cracked skull, and we accept that this causal relationship somehow matters. The challenge, from the child’s perspective, is to discover the flipside of grace—to recognize that his behaviour is irrelevant here—no matter how badly he may have behaved, he did not deserve a cracked skull. (I hope somebody points out to the judge that defense counsel’s argument is the same argument as: “she was asking to be raped; just look at the way she dresses.”)
An interesting question is to ask whether Miller’s etiology can be applied beyond the therapeutic relationship to social justice issues. For example, what about corporate polluters who victimize the environment? Most of us do nothing. We may suffer from asthma. We may ingest genetically modified foods or foods that have traveled thousands of miles or foods that have been sprayed by pesticides. We turn on our air conditioners even though our demand for power may produce more Chernobyls. We’re stricken by a paralysis because the abuse we witness is perpetrated by a system in which we are thoroughly embedded. We bear a “genetic” relationship to the abusers. We benefit from them. If we were to stand up to them, we would be accused of hypocrisy. The confusion of our complex relationships keeps us quiet.
But Miller’s theory takes us only so far. The challenge isn’t simply to understand; it is to act upon our understanding. To act ethically doesn’t mean we have to be pure or perfect. In matters of the environment, perfect action is probably impossible. Instead, ethical action begins in the acknowledgment of our complicity with the perpetrators, then moves forward in spite of that complicity. Ethical action means acting from within a place of ambiguity.
Another example comes from a neighbour’s son. I had the privilege of passing an afternoon last week with both him and his mother. I mention his mother because her story is much like Miller’s. Now in the advanced stages of dementia, Zofia Pakula was born in Poland three years before Miller. With the invasion of Poland in 1939, she fled into what is now the Ukraine but returned to Warsaw where she was able to pass as a Pole because she was fluent in the language and has blue eyes. Perhaps she encountered Miller at the university. Like Miller, Zofia obtained a doctorate. She practised as a physician specializing in rheumatology and later switched specialties to practise psychiatry, working with the developmentally challenged and, at one point, conducting psychiatric evaluations of Holocaust survivors.
My reason for relating this is not so much to tell her story as to present her son’s predicament. As the son of a Holocaust survivor, he believes absolutely that Jews need and are entitled to the state of Israel. But as a compassionate intellectual, his heart aches for the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and he hates the knee-jerk accusations of antisemitism that follow each attempt to criticize Israeli policy and action. Miller can help analyze how a nation of victims can produce more victims. But she has nothing to say to a man who seeks the courage to speak from within the place of ambiguity that this produces.