Alice Miller: Ni-INFp (Harmonizing subtype)
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For Your Own Good by Alice Miller; pp. 97-100: When children are trained, they learn how to train others in turn. Children who are lectured to, learn how to lecture; if they are admonished, they learn how to admonish; if scolded, they learn how to scold; if ridiculed, they learn how to ridicule; if humiliated, they learn how to humiliate; if their psyche is killed, they will learn how to kill—the only question is who will be killed: oneself, others, or both.
All this does not mean that children should be raised without any restraints. Crucial for healthy development is the respect of their care givers, tolerance for their feelings, awareness of their needs and grievances, and authenticity on the part of their parents, whose own freedom—and not pedagogical considerations—sets natural limits for children.
It is this last point that causes great difficulty for parents and pedagogues, for the following reasons:
1. If parents have had to learn very early in life to ignore their feelings, not to take them seriously, to scorn or ridicule them, then they will lack the sensitivity required to deal successfully with their children. As a result, they will try to substitute pedagogical principles as prostheses. Thus, under certain circumstances they may be reluctant to show tenderness for fear of spoiling the child, or, in other cases, they will hide their hurt feelings behind the Fourth Commandment.
2. Parents who never learned as children to be aware of their own needs or to defend their own interests because this right was never granted them will be uncertain in this regard for the rest of their life and consequently will become dependent on firm pedagogical rules. This uncertainty, regardless of whether it appears in sadistic or masochistic guise, leads to great insecurity in the child in spite of these rules. An example of this: a father who was trained to be obedient at a very early age may on occasion take cruel and violent measures to force his child to be obedient in order to satisfy his own need to be respected for the first time in his life. But this behavior does not exclude intervening periods of masochistic behavior when the same father will put up with anything the child does, because he never learned to define the limits of his tolerance. Thus, his guilt feelings over the preceding unjust punishment will suddenly lead him to be unusually permissive, thereby awakening anxiety in the child, who cannot tolerate uncertainty about the father’s true face. The child’s increasingly aggressive behavior will finally provoke the father into losing his temper. In the end, the child then takes on the role of the sadistic opponent in place of the grandparents, but with the difference that the father can now gain the upper hand. Such situations, in which the child “goes too far,” prove to the pedagogue that disciplining and punishment are necessary.
3. Since a child is often used as a substitute for one’s own parents, he or she can become the object of an endless number of contradictory wishes and expectations that cannot possibly be fulfilled. In extreme cases, psychosis, drug addiction, or suicide may be the only solution. But often the child’s feeling of helplessness leads to increasingly aggressive behavior, which in turn convinces parents and educators of the need for strict countermeasures.
4. A similar situation arises when it is drilled into children, as it was in the anti-authoritarian upbringing of the sixties, to adopt certain ways of behavior that their parents wished had once been allowed them and that they therefore consider to be universally desirable. In the process, the child’s real needs can be totally overlooked. In one case I know, for example, a child who was feeling sad was encouraged to shatter a glass when what she most wanted to do was to climb up onto her mother’s lap. If children go on feeling misunderstood and manipulated like this, they will become genuinely confused and justifiably aggressive.
- pp. 105-128:
Introduction
It is difficult to write about child abuse without taking on a moralizing tone. It is so natural to feel outrage at the adult who beats a child and pity for the helpless child that, even with a great deal of understanding of human nature, one is tempted to condemn the adult for being cruel and brutal. But where will you find human beings who are only good or only cruel? The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they were mistreated themselves and were not permitted to defend themselves. There are countless people...who are kind, gentle, and highly sensitive and yet inflict cruelty on their children every day, calling it childrearing. As long as child beating was considered necessary and useful, they could justify this form of cruelty. Today such people suffer when their “hand slips,” when an incomprehensible compulsion or despair induces them to shout at, humiliate, or beat their children and see their tears, yet they cannot help themselves and will do the same thing again next time. This will inevitably continue to happen as long as they persist in idealizing their own childhood.
Cruelty can take a thousand forms, and it goes undetected even today, because the damage it does to the child and the ensuing consequences are still so little known . . .
The individual psychological stages in the lives of most people are:
1. To be hurt as a small child without anyone recognizing the situation as such
2. To fail to react to the resulting suffering with anger
3. To show gratitude for what are supposed to be good intentions
4. To forget everything
5. To discharge the stored-up anger onto others in adulthood or to direct it against oneself
The greatest cruelty that can be inflicted on children is to refuse to let them express their anger and suffering except at the risk of losing their parents’ love and affection. The anger stemming from early childhood is stored up in the unconscious, and since it basically represents a healthy, vital source of energy, an equal amount of energy must be expended in order to repress it. An upbringing that succeeds in sparing the parents at the expense of the child’s vitality sometimes leads to suicide or extreme drug addiction, which is a form of suicide. If drugs succeed in covering up the emptiness caused by repressed feelings and self-alienation, then the process of withdrawal brings this void back into view. When withdrawal is not accompanied by restoration of vitality, then the cure is sure to be temporary. Christiane F., subject of an international bestseller and film, paints a devastatingly vivid picture of a tragedy of this nature.
The War of Annihilation against the Self
The Lost Opportunity of Puberty
Parents often have such success with the numerous methods they use to subdue their children that they don’t encounter any problems until the children reach puberty. The “cooling off” of feelings and drives during the latency period abets parents in their desire to have model children. In the book The Golden Cage by Hilda Bruch, parents of anorexic daughters describe how gifted, well-mannered, successful, well-adjusted, and considerate these children had been. The parents cannot understand the sudden change; they are left helpless and uncomprehending by an adolescent who seems to be rejecting all norms and whose self-destructive behavior cannot be modified by logical arguments or by the subtle devices of “poisonous pedagogy.”
At puberty, adolescents are often taken totally by surprise by the intensity of their true feelings, after having succeeded in keeping them at a distance during the latency period. With the spurt of biological growth, these feelings (rage, anger, rebelliousness, falling in love, sexual desire, enthusiasm, joy, enchantment, sadness) seek full expression, but in many cases this would endanger the parents’ psychic balance. If adolescents were to show their true feelings openly, they would run the risk of being sent to prison as dangerous terrorists or put in mental institutions as insane. Our society would no doubt have nothing but a psychiatric clinic to offer Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Goethe’s Werther, and Schiller’s Karl Moor would probably face the same fate. This is why drug addicts attempt to adapt to society by struggling against their authentic feelings, but since they cannot live entirely without them in the storm of puberty, they try to regain access to them with the help of drugs, which seem to do the trick, at least in the beginning. But society’s views, which are represented by the parents and which the adolescent has long ago internalized, must prevail: the consequences of having strong, intense feelings are rejection, isolation, ostracism, and threat of death, i.e., self-destruction.
The drug addict punishes himself for seeking his true self—certainly a justifiable and essential goal—by destroying his own spontaneous feelings, repeating the punishment that was inflicted on him in early childhood when he showed the first signs of vitality. Almost every heroin addict describes having initially experienced feelings of hitherto unknown intensity, with the result that he becomes even more conscious of the vapidity and emptiness of his usual emotional life.
He simply can’t imagine that this experience is possible without heroin, and he understandably begins to long for it to be repeated. For, in these out-of-the-ordinary moments, the younger person discovers how he might have been; he has made contact with his self, and as might be expected, once this has happened, he can find no rest. He can no longer act as though his true self had never existed. Now he knows that it does exist, but he also knows that ever since early childhood this true self has not had a chance. And so he strikes a compromise with his fate: he will encounter his self from time to time without anyone finding out. Not even he will realize what is involved here, for it is the “stuff” that produces the experience; the effect comes “from outside” and is difficult to bring about. It will never become an integrated part of his self, and he will never have to or be able to assume responsibility for these feelings. The intervals between one fix and the next—characterized by total apathy, lethargy, emptiness, or uneasiness and anxiety—bear this out: the fix is over like a dream that one can’t remember and that can have no effect on one’s life as a whole.
The Search for the Self and Self-destruction through Drugs
THE LIFE OF CHRISTIANE F.
For the first six years of her life, Christiane lived in the country on a farm, where she spent the whole day with the farmer, fed the animals, and “romped in the hay with the others.” Then her family moved to Berlin, and she, her sister, who was a year younger, and her parents lived in a two-and-a-half-room apartment on the twelfth floor in Gropius City, a high-rise housing development. The sudden loss of a rural setting, of familiar playmates, and of all the free space that goes with living in the country is in itself hard enough for a child, but it is all the more tragic if the child must come to terms with this loss all by herself and if she is constantly faced with unpredictable punishment and beatings.
I would have been quite happy with my animals if things with my father hadn’t kept getting worse. While my mother was at work, he sat around at home. Nothing had come of the marriage agency they wanted to open. Now he was waiting for a job to turn up that was to his liking. He sat on our worn-out sofa and waited. And his insane fits of rage became more frequent.
My mother helped me with my homework when she came home from work. For a while I had trouble telling the letters H and K apart. One evening my mother was taking great pains to explain the difference to me. I could scarcely pay attention to what she was saying because I noticed my father getting more and more furious. I always knew exactly when it was going to happen: he went and got the hand broom from the kitchen and gave me a trouncing. Now I was supposed to tell him the difference between H and K. Of course, by that time I didn’t know anything anymore so I got another licking and was sent to bed.
That was his way of helping me with my homework. He wanted me to be smart and make something of myself. After all, his grandfather had had loads of money. He’d owned a printing company and a newspaper in East Germany, and more besides. After the war, it had all been expropriated by the GDR. Now my father flipped out whenever he got the idea I wouldn’t make it in school.
There were some evenings I can still remember down to the last detail. One time I was assigned to draw houses in my arithmetic notebook. They were supposed to be six squares wide and four squares high. I had one house finished and was doing just fine when my father suddenly came and sat beside me. He asked me where the next house should go. I was so scared I stopped counting the squares and started guessing. Every time I pointed to the wrong square, he pasted me one. All I could do was bawl and couldn’t answer at all anymore, so he went over to the rubber plant. I knew very well what that meant. He pulled the bamboo stick supporting the plant out of the flowerpot. Then he thrashed my behind with the stick until you could literally peel off the skin.
I was even scared at mealtimes. If I spilled anything, I got smacked for it. If I knocked something over, he tanned my behind. I hardly dared to touch my glass of milk. I was so scared that I did something wrong at almost every meal.
After supper I’d ask my father quite sweetly if he wasn’t going out. He went out quite often, and then we three females could finally breathe deep sighs of relief. Those evenings were marvelously peaceful. Of course, then when he came home late at night, there could always be another catastrophe. Usually he had had something to drink. Then any little thing sent him off on a rampage. It might be toys or clothes we had left lying around. My father always said the most important thing in life was to be neat and tidy. And if he found any untidiness when he came home, he’d drag me out of bed in the middle of the night and give me a beating. My little sister got the tail end of it, too. Then my father threw our things on the floor and ordered us to put them all away again neatly in five minutes. We usually didn’t manage it in that short a time and so we got another licking.
My mother usually stood at the door crying while this was going on. She hardly ever dared to stand up for us, because then he would hit her, too. Only Ajax, my dog, often tried to intervene. He whined shrilly and had very sad eyes whenever one of us was being given a beating. He was the most likely one to bring my father to his senses, because he loved dogs, as we all did. He yelled at Ajax once in a while, but he never hit him.
I somehow loved and respected my father in spite of it all. He towered above other fathers in my eyes. But more than anything else I was afraid of him. At the same time I found it quite normal that he was always hitting us. It was no different at home for other children in Gropius City. Sometimes they even had a black eye, and so did their mothers. Some fathers would lie on the street or the playground in a drunken stupor. My father never got that drunk. And sometimes on our street, furniture would come flying out of the high-rise windows, women would cry for help and the police would come. So we didn’t have it all that bad. . . .
Of course, in those days I didn’t have any idea of what was wrong with my father and why he was always going on a regular rampage. It only dawned on me later when I used to have talks with my mother about my father. I gradually figured out a thing or two. He simply wasn’t making it. He kept trying to get ahead and was always falling flat on his face. His father despised him for it... [Christiane F.: Autobiography of a Girl of the Streets and Heroin Addict]
Christiane, who is beaten often by her father for reasons she does not understand, finally begins to act in ways that give her father “good reason to beat her.” By so doing, she improves his character by making an unjust and unpredictable father into one who at least punishes justly. This is the only way she has to rescue the image of a father she loves and idealizes. She also begins to provoke other men and turn them into punitive fathers—first the building superintendent, then her teachers, and finally, during her drug addiction, the police. In this way she can shift the conflict with her father onto other people. Because Christiane cannot talk with her father about their conflicts or settle them with him, she relegates her fundamental hatred for him to her unconscious, directing her hostility against surrogate male authority figures. Eventually, all the child’s bottled-up rage at being humiliated, deprived of respect, misunderstood, and left alone is turned against herself in the form of addiction. As time goes by, Christiane does to herself what her father had done to her earlier: she systematically destroys her self-respect, manipulates her feelings with the use of drugs, condemns herself to speechlessness (this highly articulate child!) and isolation, and in the end ruins body as well as soul.
When I read Christiane’s account of her childhood, I sometimes was reminded of descriptions of life in a concentration camp . . .
One time one of my [pet] mice ran into the grass, which we weren’t allowed to walk on. We couldn’t find it again. I was a little sad, but I was comforted by the thought that the mouse would like it much better outside than in the cage.
My father picked that evening to come into my room and look into the mouse cage. He asked in a funny voice: “How come there are only two? Where’s the third one?” I didn’t even notice there was anything wrong when he asked in such a funny way. My father never did like the mice and he kept telling me I should give them away. I told him the mouse had run away outside on the playground.
My father looked at me as though he had gone crazy. Then I knew he was going to go on one of his wild rampages. He shouted and started right in hitting me. He kept on hitting me, and I was trapped on my bed and couldn’t get away. He had never hit me like that before, and I thought he was going to kill me. Then, when he started letting my sister have it too, I had a few seconds to get free and I instinctively tried to get to the window. I think I really would have jumped from the twelfth floor.
But my father grabbed me and threw me back on the bed. My mother was probably crying in the doorway again, but I didn’t even see her. I didn’t see her until she threw herself between me and my father and started pummeling him.
He was beside himself. He knocked my mother down onto the floor. All of a sudden I was more afraid for her than for myself. I went over to them. She tried to escape into the bathroom and bolt the door. But my father was holding her by the hair. As usual, there was wash soaking in the bathtub, because so far we hadn’t been able to afford a washing machine. My father stuck my mother’s head into the tub full of water. Somehow or other, she managed to get loose. I don’t know whether he let her go or whether she got herself free.
My father disappeared into the living room. He was white as a sheet. My mother went and got her coat. She left the apartment without saying a word.
That was without a doubt one of the most awful moments of my life when my mother simply walked out of the apartment without a word and left us alone. My first thought was, Now he’s going to come back and start hitting me again. But everything was quiet in the living room except for the television, which was on.
No one seriously doubts that the inmates of a concentration camp underwent terrible suffering. But when we hear about the physical abuse of children, we react with astonishing equanimity. Depending on our ideology, we say, “That’s quite normal,” or “Children have to be disciplined, after all,” or “That was the custom in those days,” or “Someone who won’t listen has to be made to feel it,” etc...Such lack of empathy for the suffering of one’s own childhood can result in an astonishing lack of sensitivity to other children’s suffering. When what was done to me was done for my own good, then I am expected to accept this treatment as an essential part of life and not question it.
This kind of insensitivity thus has its roots in the abuse a person suffered as a child. He or she may be able to remember what happened, but in most cases the emotional content of the whole experience of being beaten and humiliated has been completely repressed.
...it may well be that the plight of a little child who is abused is even worse and has more serious consequences for society than the plight of an adult in a concentration camp. The former camp inmate may sometimes find himself in a situation where he feels that he can never adequately communicate the horror of what he has gone through and that others approach him without understanding, with cold and callous indifference, even with disbelief, [William G. Niederland’s book Folgen der Verfolgung (The Results of Persecution) (1980) presents a penetrating analysis of the uncomprehending reception given former inmates as reflected in psychiatric diagnoses.] but with few exceptions he himself will not doubt the tragic nature of his experiences. He will never attempt to convince himself that the cruelty he was subjected to was for his own good or interpret the absurdity of the camp as a necessary pedagogical measure; he will usually not attempt to empathize with the motives of his persecutors. He will find people who have had similar experiences and share with them his feelings of outrage, hatred, and despair over the cruelty he has suffered.
The abused child does not have any of these options. As I have tried to show in the example of Christiane F., she is alone with her suffering, not only within the family but also within her self. And because she cannot share her pain with anyone, she is also unable to create a place in her own soul where she could “cry her heart out.” No arms of a “kind aunt” exist there; “Keep a stiff upper lip and be brave” is the watchword. Defenselessness and helplessness find no haven in the self of the child, who later, identifying with the aggressor, persecutes these qualities wherever they appear.
A person who from the beginning was forced, whether subjected to corporal punishment or not, to stifle, i.e., to condemn, split off, and persecute, the vital child within himself will spend his whole life preventing this inner danger that he associates with spontaneous feelings from recurring. But psychological forces are so tenacious that they can rarely be thoroughly suppressed. They are constantly seeking outlets that will enable them to survive, often in very distorted forms that are not without danger to society. For example, one person suffering from grandiosity will project his own childish qualities onto the external world, whereas another will struggle against the “evil” within himself. “Poisonous pedagogy” shows how these two mechanisms are related to each other and how they are combined in a traditional religious upbringing.
In addition to the degree of maturity and those elements of loyalty and of isolation involved in the case of a child, there is another fundamental difference between abuse of children and of adults. The abused inmates of a concentration camp cannot of course offer any resistance, cannot defend themselves against humiliation, but they are inwardly free to hate their persecutors. The opportunity to experience their feelings, even to share them with other inmates, prevents them from having to surrender their self. This opportunity does not exist for children. They must not hate their father—this, the message of the Fourth Commandment, has been drummed into them from early childhood; they cannot hate him either, if they must fear losing his love as a result; finally, they do not even want to hate him, because they love him. Thus, children, unlike concentration-camp inmates, are confronted by a tormenter they love, not one they hate, and this tragic complication will have a devastating influence on their entire subsequent life. Christiane F. writes:
"I never hated him but was just afraid of him. I was always proud of him, too. Because he loved animals and because he had such a terrific car, his ’62 Porsche."
These remarks are so moving because they are true: this is just the way a child feels. Her tolerance has no limits; she is always faithful and even proud that her father, who beats her brutally, never would do anything to hurt an animal; she is prepared to forgive him everything, always to take all the blame herself, not to hate him, to forget quickly everything that happens, not to bear a grudge, not to tell anyone about it, to try by her behavior to prevent another beating, to find out why her father is dissatisfied, to understand him, etc. It is rare for an adult to have this attitude toward a child unless the adult happens to be the psychotherapist, but for a dependent, sensitive child, what I have just described is almost the rule. And what happens to all this repressed affect? It cannot simply disappear from the face of the earth. It must be directed toward substitute objects in order to spare the father...The displacement of “bad” affect onto people she is indifferent to enables her to preserve a “good” relationship with her father on a conscious level. Once Christiane could have her fights with Klaus, her father seemed “like a different person.” “He acted awfully nice. And he really was, too. He gave me another dog. A female.” And somewhat later she writes:
My father was terrific. I could tell that he loved me, too, in his way. Now he treated me almost like a grown-up. I was even allowed to go out at night with him and his girl friend.
He had become really reasonable. Now he had friends his own age and he told them he’d been married before. I didn’t have to call him Uncle Richard anymore. I was his daughter and he seemed to be really proud of having me for a daughter. Of course, typical for him—he arranged his vacation to suit himself and his friends. At the tail end of my vacation. And I got back to my new school two weeks late. So I started skipping school from the beginning.
The resistance she never showed when her father beat her now emerges in the struggle with her teachers.
I felt I wasn’t accepted in school. The rest of them had that two weeks’ head start. In a new school, that makes a big difference. I tried my routine from elementary school here, too. I interrupted my teachers and contradicted them. Sometimes because I was right, and sometimes just for the hell of it. I was back in the fray. Against the teachers and against the school. I wanted to be accepted.
Later the struggle extends to the police as well. This way Christiane can forget her father’s rage—to the extent that she even writes:
Building superintendents were really the only [!] authoritarian types I knew. You had to hate them because they were always bugging you when you were having fun. The police still represented an authority you didn’t question, as far as I was concerned. Then I learned that the superintendents in Gropius City were really the same as cops. Only, the cops were much more dangerous. Whatever Piet and Kathi [Here, a boy’s nickname] said was the last word for me anyway.
The others offered her hashish, and she realized that she “couldn’t say no.”
Kathi began to fondle me. I didn’t know what I ought to think of it.
A child conditioned to be well-behaved must not notice what she is feeling, but asks herself what she ought to feel.
I didn’t resist. It was like I was paralyzed. I was scared as hell of something. At one point I wanted to split. Then I thought, “Christiane, this is the price you have to pay for being one of the crowd now.” I just let it all happen and didn’t say anything. Somehow I had terrific respect for this guy.
Christiane was forced to learn at an early age that love and acceptance can be bought only be denying one’s own needs, impulses, and feelings (such as hate, disgust, and aversion)—at the high price of surrender of self. She now directs all her efforts toward attaining this loss of self, i.e., to being cool. That is why the word cool occurs on nearly every page of the book. In order to reach this state and be free of unwanted feelings, she starts using hashish.
The guys in our crowd weren’t like the alchies, who were aggressive and tense even when they were at the club. Our guys could turn off completely. After work they changed into wild clothes, smoked dope, listened to cool music, and it was all perfectly peaceful. Then we forgot all the shit we had to put up with out there the rest of the day.
I still didn’t feel quite like the others. For that, I thought, I was still too young. But the others were my models. I wanted to be—or to become—as much like them as possible. I wanted to learn from them because I thought they knew how to be cool and not let all the assholes and all the shit get to you.
With great effort, Christiane is consciously developing and perfecting her false self, as illustrated by these sentences:
"I thought the guys [at the Disco] must be incredibly cool. . . . Somehow [Micha] was even cooler than the guys in our crowd."
"There wasn’t any contact at all among the people."
"I met a guy on the stairs . . . he was unbelievably relaxed. . . ."
Yet the ideal of being completely relaxed is least likely to be attained by someone in puberty. This is the very period when a person experiences feelings most intensely, and the use of a pill to aid the struggle against these feelings verges on psychic murder. In order to preserve something of her vitality and her capacity to feel, Christiane has to take another drug, not a tranquilizer this time, but just the opposite, one that arouses her, peps her up, and restores the feeling of being alive. The main thing, however, is that she can regulate, control, and manipulate everything herself. Just as her father previously succeeded in bringing the child’s feelings under control, in keeping with his needs, by beating her, the thirteen-year-old girl now attempts to manipulate her mood by taking drugs:
At “The Sound” disco scene there was every kind of drug. I took everything except H[eroin]. Valium, Mandrax, Ephedrine, Cappis—that’s Captagon—of course lots of shit and a trip at least twice a week. We took uppers and downers by the handful. The different pills tore your body apart, and that gave you a crazy feeling. You could give yourself whatever mood you felt like having. When I felt like dancing my head off at “The Sound,” I swallowed more Cappis and Ephedrine; when I just wanted to sit quietly in a corner or in the Sound Cinema, I took a lot of Valium and Mandrax. Then I was happy again for a few weeks.
How does it continue?
In the days that followed, I tried to deaden any feeling I had for others. I didn’t take any pills or do a single trip. I drank tea with hashish in it all day and rolled one joint after another. After a few days I went back to being real cool again. I had gotten to the point where, except for myself, I didn’t love or like anyone or anything. I thought, Now I have my feelings under control.
I became very placid. That was because I was always taking downers, and uppers only once in a while. I wasn’t wired anymore. I hardly ever went out on the dance floor anymore. I really only danced like crazy when I couldn’t dig up any Valium.
At home, I must have been a pleasure to have around for my mother and her boyfriend. I didn’t talk back and I didn’t fight with them anymore. I didn’t complain about anything anymore either because I had given up trying to change things at home. And I realized that this made the situation easier. . . .
I kept taking more pills.
One Saturday when I had some money and the scene had all kinds of pills to offer, I OD’d. For some reason I was very low, so I washed down two Captagons, three Ephedrines and then a few caffies, that’s caffeine pills, with a beer. Then, when I got totally high, I didn’t like that either. So I took some Mandrax and a whole bunch of Valium.
Christiane goes to a David Bowie concert, but she doesn’t allow herself to get excited about it, and before going she has to take a large amount of Valium, “not to turn on but to stay cool at the David Bowie concert.”
When David Bowie began to sing, it was almost as fantastic as I had expected. It was terrific. But when he got to the song “It’s Too Late,” I came down with a thud. All of a sudden I was really out of it. Over the past few weeks, when I didn’t know what life was all about anymore, “It’s Too Late” had been getting to me. I thought the song described my situation exactly. Now “It’s Too Late” really killed me. I sure could have used some Valium.
When the drugs Christiane has been using no longer give her the desired control over her emotions, she switches to heroin at the age of thirteen, and at first everything goes as she had hoped.
I was feeling too good to think about it. There aren’t any withdrawal symptoms when you’re just beginning. With me, the cool feeling lasted all week. Everything was going great. At home there were no more fights at all. I was completely relaxed about school, studied sometimes, and got good grades. In the weeks that followed, I raised my grades in a lot of subjects from D to B. I suddenly had the feeling that I could handle everybody and everything. I was floating through life in a really cool way.
Children who were unable to learn to recognize their authentic feelings and to be comfortable with them will have a particularly difficult time in puberty.
I was always carrying my problems around with me but didn’t really know what problems they were. I snorted H and the problems were gone. But it had been a long time since one snort lasted for a whole week.
I didn’t have any connection with reality anymore. Reality was unreal for me. I didn’t care about yesterday or tomorrow. I had no plans, all I had were dreams. What I liked best was to talk with Detlef about how it would be if we had a lot of money. We would buy a big house and a big car and some really cool furniture. The one thing that never appeared in these pipe dreams was heroin.
The first time she goes cold turkey, that ability she had coveted to manipulate her feelings and be free of them collapses. We witness complete regression to the infantile stage:
Now I was dependent on H and on Detlef. It upset me more to be dependent on Detlef. What kind of love is that if you are totally dependent? What if Detlef made me ask and beg for dope? I knew how junkies begged when they went cold turkey. How they demeaned themselves and allowed themselves to be humiliated. How they went to pieces. I didn’t want to have to ask for it. Especially not Detlef. If he was going to make me beg, then it was all over between us. I had never been able to ask anyone for anything.
I remembered the way I had demolished junkies when they went cold turkey. I had never really figured out what was the matter with them. I only noticed that they were terribly sensitive, easily hurt, and completely powerless. A junkie gone cold turkey hardly dares to talk back, he’s such a nothing. Sometimes I had made them the brunt of my power trips. If you really went about it the right way, you could tear them to pieces, scare the hell out of them. You just had to keep hammering away at their weakness, keep rubbing salt into their wounds, and they fell apart. When they were cold turkey, they were able to see what miserable meatheads they were. Then their whole cool junkie act was all over; then they didn’t feel superior to everything and everyone anymore.
I said to myself, Now they’ll demolish you when you go cold turkey. They’ll find out how lousy you really are.
There is no one Christiane can talk to about her panic at the thought of going cold turkey. Her mother “would simply flip out if you tell her that.” “I couldn’t do that to her,” Christiane says, and she perpetuates the tragic loneliness of her childhood in order to spare the adult, in this case her mother.
She doesn’t think of her father again until the first time she goes out to “hustle” and tries to keep this a secret.
Me hustle? Before I do anything like that I’d stop shooting up. Honestly. No, my father finally remembered he has a daughter and gave me some pocket money.
Whereas hashish had still offered her hope of being free and “coolly” independent, it soon becomes clear that in the case of heroin she has to contend with total dependence. The “stuff,” the hard drug, eventually takes over the function of the unpredictable, hot-tempered father of her childhood, who had her completely at his mercy just the way heroin does now. And just as her true self had to remain hidden from her parents in those days, now too her real life is lived secretly, underground, kept secret from her school and from her mother.
When Christiane describes her first meeting with Max the Stutterer, the return of the father in the psychological dynamics of the situation may not be obvious to Christiane, but it is to the outsider. Her simple and forthright report gives the reader a better understanding of the tragic nature of a perversion than do many theoretical psychoanalytical treatises.
I had heard the sad story of Max the Stutterer from Detlef. Max was an unskilled laborer in his late thirties and came from Hamburg. His mother was a prostitute. He had been beaten terribly as a child. By his mother and her pimps and in the homes where he had been put. They beat him to such a pulp that he was so scared he never learned to talk right, and he had to be beaten even now to get off sexually.
The first time I went to his place I asked for the money in advance, although he was a regular customer and you didn’t need to be careful with him. He actually gave me 150 marks, and I was kind of proud that I was cool enough to take so much money from him.
I took off my T-shirt, and he handed me a whip. It was just like in the movies. It wasn’t really me. At first I didn’t hit him hard. But he whimpered that he wanted me to hurt him. Then at some point I really let him have it. He cried out, “Mommy,” and I don’t know what-all. I didn’t listen, and I tried not to look. But then I saw how the welts on his body kept swelling, and then the skin actually burst in some places. It was simply disgusting and it lasted nearly an hour.
When he was finally finished, I put my T-shirt back on and ran. I ran out the door, down the stairs, and barely made it. In front of the building I lost control of my goddamn stomach and had to throw up. After I vomited, that was it. I didn’t cry, and I didn’t feel the least bit sorry for myself either. Somehow I realized that I had brought this situation on myself, that I sure had screwed up. I went to the station. Detlef was there. I didn’t tell him much. Just that I had done the job with Max alone.
Max the Stutterer was now a regular customer for both Detlef and me. Sometimes we both went to his place, sometimes just one of us. Max was really O.K. And he loved us both. Of course, with what he earned as a laborer he couldn’t keep on paying 150 marks. But he always managed somehow to scrape together 40 marks, the cost of a fix. Once he even broke open his piggy bank and took some change from a bowl, then counted out exactly 40 marks. When I needed money in a hurry, I could always stop by his place and collect 20 marks. I’d tell him I would be back the next day at such and such a time and do it for him then for a twenty. If he still had twenty, he’d agree to it.
Max was always waiting for us. He always had peach juice, my favorite drink, for me. Detlef’s favorite pudding was always in the refrigerator for him. Max made the pudding himself. In addition, he always offered me a choice of yogurt flavors and chocolate because he knew I liked to eat after the job. The whippings I gave him had become strictly routine for me, and afterwards I ate and drank and rapped with Max for a while.
He kept getting thinner. He was really spending his last cent on us and didn’t have enough to buy food for himself. He had gotten so used to us and was so happy that he hardly stuttered anymore when he was with us.
Soon after that, he lost his job. He was completely down and out, even without ever having been on dope. Junkies had demolished him. Meaning us. He begged us to at least stop by once in a while. But friendly visits aren’t part of the deal where junkies are concerned. Partly because they are incapable of that much feeling for someone else. But then mainly because they are on the go all day to hustle money for dope and honestly don’t have time for anything like that. Detlef explained this to Max when Max promised to give us a lot of money as soon as he got some. “A junkie is like a businessman. Every day you have to see to it that you make ends meet. You just can’t give credit out of friendship or sympathy.”
Christiane and her boyfriend Detlef are behaving here like working parents who profit from their child’s (in this case, their customer’s) love and dependence and ultimately destroy him. Max the Stutterer’s touching selection of yogurt flavors for Christiane, on the other hand, was probably a reenactment of his “happy childhood.” It is easy to imagine that his mother was still concerned about what he ate even after she had given him a beating. As for Christiane, without her previous history with her father she might never have been able to “cope” with her first encounter with Max as well as she did. Now she had her father in her, and she whipped her customer not only because he told her to but also as an expression of all the pent-up misery of a battered child. In addition, this identification with the aggressor helps her to split off her weakness, to feel strong at someone else’s expense, and to survive, whereas Christiane the human being, the alert, sensitive, intelligent, vital, but still dependent child, is being increasingly suffocated.
- pp. 129-130: Christiane’s story awakens such feelings of despair and helplessness in sympathetic readers that they probably would like most of all to forget about it as quickly as possible by passing it all off as a fabrication. But they are unable to, because they sense that she has told the unvarnished truth. If they go beyond the outer trappings of the story and permit themselves, as they read, to consider why it happened, they will find an accurate description of the nature not only of addiction but of other forms of human behavior as well that are conspicuous at times for their absurdity and that our logic is unable to explain. When we are confronted with adolescent heroin addicts who are ruining their lives, we are all too readily inclined to try to reach them with rational arguments or, still worse, with efforts to “educate” them. In fact, many therapeutic groups work in this direction. They substitute one evil for another instead of trying to help these young people see what function addiction actually has in their lives and how they are unconsciously using it to communicate something to the outside world.
. . . In spite of its enormous resources, classical psychiatry is essentially powerless to help as long as it attempts to replace the harmful effects of early childhood training with new kinds of training. The whole penal setup in psychiatric wards, the ingenious methods of humiliating patients, have the ultimate goal—as does the disciplining of children—of silencing the patient’s coded language.
- pp. 201-220 [Jurgen Bartsch: A Life Seen in Retrospect]: A patient’s father, who himself had had a very difficult childhood that he never talked about, often treated his son, in whom he kept seeing himself, in an extremely cruel way. Neither he nor his son was conscious of this cruelty; they both regarded it as a “disciplinary measure.” When the son, who had severe symptoms, began his analysis, he was, as he said, “very grateful” to his father for the strict upbringing and “severe punishment” he had received. While in analysis, my patient, who had at one point been studying education at the university, discovered Ekkehard von Braunmuhl and his anti-pedagogical writings and was strongly impressed by them. During this period he went home for a visit and for the first time experienced with great clarity the way his father continually hurt his feelings, either by not listening at all to what he was saying or by ridiculing everything he said. When his son pointed this out to him, the father, who was a professor of education, said in all seriousness: “You ought to thank me for that. You’ll have to put up with people all your life who won’t pay any attention to you or won’t take what you say seriously. This way you’re already used to it, having learned it from me. What you learn when you’re young, you know for the rest of your life.” The twenty-four-year-old son was taken aback by this reply at first. How often he had heard his father make similar statements without ever questioning their validity! This time, however, he became indignant, and on the basis of something he had read in Braunmuhl, he said: “If you intend to continue treating me according to these principles, to be consistent you would then actually have to kill me, for someday I will have to die too. That would be the best way you could prepare me for it.” His father accused him of being impertinent and acting as though he knew all the answers, but this was a very decisive experience for the son. From that point on, his studies took an entirely different direction.
It is difficult to decide whether this story serves as an example of “poisonous” or so-called harmless pedagogy. It occurred to me here because it provides a transition to the case of Jurgen Bartsch. My gifted twenty-four-year-old patient was so tormented in his analysis by cruel and sadistic fantasies that he sometimes thought in his panic that he might become a child murderer. But as a result of working through his fantasies in therapy and experiencing his early relationship with his father and mother, these fears disappeared along with his other symptoms, and he could begin to develop in a free and healthy way. His recurrent fantasies of revenge, in which he wanted to murder a child, were in my interpretation a compressed expression of hatred for his father, who was repressing his vitality, and of identification with this aggressor who was murdering a child (i.e., the patient himself). I have given this example before presenting Bartsch’s case because I am struck by a similarity in the psychodynamics of the two men even though the outcome of their stories is so different.
“Out of the Clear Blue Sky?”
In the late 1960s the trial of a so-called sex offender by the name of Jurgen Bartsch caused a great stir in West Germany. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty this young man had murdered a number of children in an indescribably cruel manner. In Das Selbstportrat des Jurgen Bartsch (The Self-Portrait of Jurgen Bartsch), which appeared in 1972 and is now unfortunately out of print, Paul Moor presents the following facts.
Born November 6, 1946, the illegitimate son of a tubercular war widow and a Dutch seasonal worker, Karl-Heinz Sadrozinsky—later Jurgen Bartsch—was abandoned by his mother in the hospital, which she surreptitiously left ahead of schedule; she died a few weeks later. Several months thereafter, Gertrud Bartsch, the wife of a well-to-do butcher in Essen, entered the same hospital to have major surgery. She and her husband decided to take the abandoned baby, in spite of the reservations voiced by the adoption officials in the welfare office on account of the child’s dubious background—such strong reservations that the actual adoption did not take place until seven years later. The new parents raised the child very strictly and isolated him completely from other children because they didn’t want him to find out that he was adopted. When the father opened a second butcher shop (with the idea of setting Jurgen up with a business of his own as soon as possible) and Frau Bartsch had to work there, the child was taken care of first by his grandmother and then by a series of maids.
When Jurgen was ten, his parents put him in a Children’s Home in Rheinbach, where approximately twenty children were living. At the age of twelve he was taken out of this relatively pleasant atmosphere and put in a Catholic school in which three hundred boys, problem children among them, were subjected to strict military discipline.
Between 1962 and 1966 Jurgen Bartsch murdered four boys, and he estimated that in addition he made more than a hundred unsuccessful attempts. There were minor deviations in each murder, but the basic procedure was the same: after he had lured a boy into a former air-raid shelter, now empty, on Heeger Street, not far from the Bartsch home in Langenberg, he beat the child into submission, tied him up with butcher’s string...killed the child either by strangulation or by blows, cut open the body, completely emptied out the stomach and breast cavities, and buried the remains. The variations included: cutting the corpse up into little pieces, cutting off the limbs, decapitation, castration, putting out the eyes, slicing sections of flesh... With the fourth and last murder he finally attained what he had always had in mind as his ultimate goal: he tied his victim to a post and butchered the screaming child without killing him first.
When deeds such as these are brought to light, they understandably elicit a wave of outrage, indignation, even horror. People are also amazed that such cruelty is possible at all, especially in the case of a youth who was friendly, likable, intelligent, and sensitive and who did not show any signs of being a vicious criminal. In addition, his entire background and childhood did not at first glance reveal any special indications of cruelty. He grew up in a conventional middle-class home like many others, with his share of stuffed animals, in a family it is easy to identify with. People could well say, “Things were not all that different for us; that’s all very normal. Everyone would become a criminal if a childhood like his is supposed to be responsible for what he became.” There scarcely seemed to be any other explanation than that this youth had been born “abnormal.” Even the neurological experts stressed again and again that Bartsch had not been neglected as a child but came from a “sheltered background,” from a family that had taken good care of him, and he therefore bore full responsibility for his actions.
. . . Paul Moor, who grew up in the United States and then lived in West Germany for thirty years, was very surprised at the view of human nature held by the officials participating in Bartsch’s first trial. He could not understand why the people involved were not aware of all those aspects of Bartsch’s case that immediately struck him, a foreigner. Naturally, the norms and taboos of a given society are reflected in every courtroom. What a society is not supposed to see will not be seen by its judges or prosecutors either. But it would be too easy to speak only of “society” here, for the experts and judges are, after all, human beings as well. Perhaps their upbringing was similar to Jurgen’s; they idealized this system from the time they were little and found appropriate methods of discharge. How could they be expected to notice the cruelty of this upbringing without having the whole edifice of their beliefs come tumbling down? It is one of “poisonous pedagogy’s” main goals to make it impossible from the very beginning to see, perceive, and evaluate what one has suffered as a child. Over and over in the testimony of the experts we find the characteristic statement that, after all, “other people” were brought up similarly without becoming sex criminals. In this way the existing system of child-rearing is justified if it can be shown that only a few “abnormal” people who are its product become criminals.
There are no objective criteria that would permit us to designate one childhood as “especially bad” and another as “not so bad.” The way children experience their situation depends in part on their sensitivity, and this varies from person to person. Furthermore, in every childhood there are tiny saving as well as shattering circumstances that can be overlooked by an outside observer. Little can be done to alter these fateful factors.
What can and must be changed, however, is our state of awareness of the consequences of our actions. Protecting the environment is no longer a matter of altruism or “do-goodism” now that we know that air and water pollution affect our very survival. Only as a result of this knowledge can laws be implemented that will put a stop to the reckless polluting of our environment. This has nothing to do with morality; it is a matter of self-preservation.
The same can be said for the findings about psychic development. As long as the child is regarded as a container into which we can safely throw all our “emotional garbage,” little will be done to bring about any change in the practice of “poisonous pedagogy.” At the same time we will be struck by the rapid increase in psychosis, neurosis, and drug addiction among adolescents; we will be outraged and indignant at acts of sexual perversion and violence and will become accustomed to regard mass murders as an unavoidable aspect of our present world.
. . . with increasing public understanding of the relationship between criminality and the experiences of early childhood, it is no longer a secret known only to the experts that every crime contains a concealed story, which can then be deciphered from the way the misdeed is enacted and from its specific details. The more closely we study this relationship, the more quickly we will break down the protective walls behind which future criminals have heretofore been bred with impunity. The ensuing acts of revenge can be traced back to the fact that the adult can freely take out his or her aggressions on the child, whereas the child’s emotional reactions, which are even more intense than the adult’s, must be suppressed by force and by the strongest sanctions.
Once we realize how many pent-up feelings and aggressions people who function well and who behave unobtrusively must live with and the toll this takes on their health, we might well regard it as fortunate—and by no means a matter of course—that everyone does not become a sex offender. There are, to be sure, other ways of learning to live with these pent-up feelings, such as psychosis, addiction, or a perfect adjustment that still enables parents to pass on their bottled-up feelings to their child, but behind every sexual offense there are specific factors that occur much more frequently than we are usually ready to admit. They often come to the surface in analysis in the form of fantasies that do not have to be translated into actions for the simple reason that experiencing these impulses permits their integration and maturation.
What Does a Murder Tell Us about the Childhood of the Murderer?
Through a lengthy correspondence, Paul Moor made an effort to understand Jurgen Bartsch as a human being; he also spoke with many people who knew something about Bartsch and were willing to talk about him. Moor’s inquiries about the boy’s first year of life brought the following to light.
Jurgen Bartsch found himself in pathogenic surroundings the very day he was born: November 6, 1946. Immediately after the delivery, he was taken away from his tubercular mother, who died a few weeks later. There was no ersatz mother for the baby. In Essen I found a nurse named Anni, still working in the same maternity ward, who remembers Jurgen very clearly: “It was so unusual to keep children in the hospital longer than two months. But Jurgen stayed with us for eleven months.” Modern psychology knows that the first year in the life of a human being is the most important one. Maternal warmth and body contact are of irreplaceable value for the child’s later development.
While the baby was still in the hospital nursery, the economic and social attitudes of his future adoptive parents were already beginning to influence his life. Nurse Anni: “Frau Bartsch paid extra so he could stay here with us. She and her husband wanted to adopt him, but the authorities were hesitant because they had reservations on account of the baby’s background. His mother was illegitimate like him. She had also been raised by the state for a time. No one was sure who the father was. Normally, we sent children without parents to another ward after a certain amount of time, but Frau Bartsch didn’t want that to happen. In the other ward there were all sorts of children, including some from lower-class parents. I still remember today how the baby’s eyes shone. He smiled at a very early age, followed objects with his eyes, raised his head, all at a very, very early age. At one point he discovered that the nurse would come when he pushed a button, and that amused him greatly. He didn’t have any problems eating then. He was a thoroughly normal, well-developed baby who related well to those around him.”
On the other hand there were some early pathological developments. The nurses on the ward had to devise special methods for caring for him, since it was an exception to have such a big baby there. To my astonishment I learned that the nurses had toilet trained him before he was eleven months old. Anni obviously found my astonishment strange. “Please don’t forget the way things were then, just one year after a lost war. We didn’t even have shifts.” With some impatience, she answered my questions about how she and the other nurses had managed that. “We simply put him on the potty, beginning at six or seven months. We had children here in the hospital who were already walking at eleven months, and they were nearly toilet trained too.” Under the circumstances, a German nurse of her generation, even as kind a one as she . . . could hardly be expected to use more enlightened methods of child training.
After eleven long months of this pathogenic existence the child, now called Jurgen, was taken by his adoptive parents. Everyone who knows Frau Bartsch more than slightly says that she is a “demon for cleanliness.” Shortly after being released from the hospital, the baby regressed in the matter of his abnormally early toilet training. This disgusted Frau Bartsch.
Acquaintances of the Bartsch family noticed around that time that the baby was always black and blue. Frau Bartsch had a different explanation for the bruises each time, but it was never very convincing. At least once during this period the downcast father, Gerhard Bartsch, confessed to a friend that he was considering divorce: “She beats the baby so badly I simply can’t stand it anymore.” Another time, when he was taking his leave, Herr Bartsch excused himself for being in such a hurry: “I have to get home or she will beat the child to death.”
Jurgen, of course, is unable to report about this period, but we can assume that the frequent anxiety attacks he tells of are the result of these beatings. “When I was very little, I was always terribly afraid of my father’s lumbering way. And I have hardly ever seen him laugh, which I noticed even way back then.”
“Why this fear I wrote about? It was not so much of confession as it was of the other children. You don’t know that I was the scapegoat in the early grades or all the things they did to me. Defend myself? Just try it if you are the smallest one in the class! I was too afraid even to sing in school or to do gymnastics! A few reasons why: classmates who aren’t seen outside of school aren’t accepted, in line with the idea, ‘He doesn’t want to bother with us!’ Children don’t make a distinction between whether he doesn’t want to or he can’t. I couldn’t. A couple of afternoons with my teacher Herr Hunnemeier, a couple of days in Werden at my grandma’s, where I slept on the floor, the rest of the afternoons in Katernberg in the shop. The end result: at home everywhere and nowhere, no pals, no friends, because I didn’t know anyone. Those are the main reasons, but there’s something else that’s very important. Until I started going to school I was locked up, most of the time, in the old underground prison [his grandmother’s cellar] with barred windows and artificial light. Walls ten feet high. All that. I was allowed out only if my grandma had me by the hand; wasn’t allowed to play with another child. For six years. I might get dirty, ‘and anyway so-and-so is no one for you!’ So I resign myself to it, but I’m only in the way there and pushed from one corner to another, get a beating when I don’t deserve it and get away with it when I deserve one. My parents don’t have any time. I’m afraid of my father because he starts yelling right away, and my mother was hysterical even then. But more than anything else: no contact with others of the same age because, as I said, it’s forbidden? So how do you fit in? Get rid of my shyness, which sometimes happens when I’m playing? After six years it’s too late!”
Being locked up is an important factor. Later, Bartsch will lure little boys into an underground shelter and murder them there. Because he had no one as a child who understood his unhappiness, he was unable to experience it and had to repress his pain, “not letting anyone see [his] misery.”
“I wasn’t a coward about everything, but I would have been one if I had let anyone notice how I suffered. Maybe that was wrong, but that’s what I thought anyway. Because every boy has his pride, you surely know that. No, I didn’t cry every time I got a licking—I thought that was being a ‘sissy’—and so at least I was brave about one thing, not letting anyone see my misery. But in all seriousness now, whom should I have gone to, whom should I have poured my heart out to? My parents? As fond as I am of them, I am sorry to say that they never, but really never, could come up with even a tiny fraction of an ounce of understanding in this regard...”
Not until he is in prison does Jurgen reproach his parents for the first time:
“You never should have kept me apart from other children, then I wouldn’t have been so chicken in school. You never should have sent me to those sadists in their black cassocks, and after I ran away because the priest mistreated me, you shouldn’t have brought me back to that school. But you didn’t know that. Mama shouldn’t have thrown into the stove the book about reproduction that I was supposed to get from Aunt Martha when I was eleven or twelve. Why didn’t you play with me one single time in twenty years? But maybe other parents would have been the same way. At least I was a wanted child. Even though I didn’t know it for twenty years, only today when it’s too damned late.
“Whenever my mother flung the curtain in the doorway to one side and came charging out of the shop like an amazon and I was in the way, then slap! slap! slap! I got it in the face. Simply because I was in the way, often enough that was the only reason. A few minutes later I was suddenly the dear boy you put your arm around and kissed. Then she was surprised that I resisted and was afraid of her. I was already afraid of that woman when I was very little, just the same as I was of my father, except that I saw less of him. Today I ask myself how he ever stood it. Sometimes he was at work from four in the morning till ten or eleven at night without a break, usually in the kitchen where he made his sausages. For days at a time I didn’t see him at all, and if I did hear or see him it was only when he went rushing around shouting. But when I was a baby and made a mess in my diapers, he was the one who tended to me. He would say himself: ‘I was the one who always had to wash and change the diapers. My wife never did it. She couldn’t; she couldn’t bring herself to do it.’
“I don’t mean to run my mother down. I’m fond of my mother, I love my mother, but I don’t believe she is a person who is capable of the slightest understanding. My mother must love me very much. I find it really astonishing, otherwise she wouldn’t be doing everything for me that she is. I used to get it in the neck a lot. She’s broken coat hangers on me, like when I didn’t get my homework right or didn’t do it fast enough.
“It got to be a routine with my bath. My mother always bathed me. She never stopped doing it, and I never griped about it, although sometimes I would have liked to say, ‘Now, for heaven’s sake . . .’ But I don’t know, it’s also possible that I accepted it as a matter of course till the very end. In any case, my father wasn’t allowed to come in. If he had, I would have yelled.
“Until I was arrested when I was nineteen, it went like this: I washed my hands and feet myself. My mother washed my head, neck, and back. That might have been normal, but she also went over my stomach, all the way down, and my thighs too, practically everything from top to bottom. You can certainly say that she did much more than I did. Usually I didn’t do anything at all, even though she said, ‘Wash your hands and feet.’ But usually I was pretty lazy. Neither my mother nor my father ever told me I should keep my penis clean under the foreskin. My mother didn’t do that when she washed me either.
“Did I find the whole thing peculiar? It was the kind of feeling that wells up periodically for seconds or minutes and perhaps is close to breaking through, but it doesn’t quite come to the surface. I felt it, but never directly. I felt it only indirectly, if it’s even possible to feel something indirectly.
“I can’t remember ever being affectionate with my mother in a spontaneous way, ever putting my arm around her and trying to hug her. I can vaguely remember her doing that when I was lying in bed between my parents, watching television in the evening, but that may have happened twice in four years, and I resisted it. My mother was never especially happy about that, but I always had a sort of horror of her. I don’t know what to call it, perhaps an ironic twist of fate, or even sadder than that. When I dreamed about my mother when I was a little boy, either she was selling me or she was coming at me with a knife. Unfortunately, the latter really came true later on.
“It was in 1964 or 1965. I think it was a Tuesday; at that time my mother was in the shop in Katernberg only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. At noontime the meat was removed so the counters could be washed off. My mother washed one half and I the other. The knives, which were kept in a pail, were also washed off. I said I was finished, but she was having a bad day and she said, ‘You’re not finished by a long shot!’ ‘Yes, I am,’ I said. ‘Take a look.’ She said, ‘You take a look at the mirrors, you’ll have to do all of them over again.’ I said, ‘I won’t do them over again because they’re already nice and shiny.’ She was standing in the back by the mirror. I was standing three or four yards away from her. She bent over to the pail. I thought to myself, what’s going on? Then she took a nice long butcher knife out and threw it at me, at about shoulder height. I don’t remember whether it bounced off a scale or what, but it landed on a shelf in any case. If I hadn’t ducked at the last moment, she would have hit me with it.
“I just stood there stiff as a board. I didn’t even know where I was. It was so unreal somehow. That was something you simply couldn’t believe. Then she came up to me, spit in my face, and began yelling that I was a piece of shit. Then she yelled, ‘I’m going to call up Herr Bitter’—the head of the Essen Welfare Office—‘and have him come right over and get you so you can go back where you came from, because that’s where you belong!’ I ran into the kitchen to Frau Ohskopp, who worked in the shop. She was washing the things from lunch. I stood next to the cupboard and held on to it. I said, ‘She threw a knife at me.’ ‘You’re crazy,’ she said, ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I ran downstairs to the toilet and sat down and cried like a baby. When I went back upstairs, my mother was running around in the kitchen and had the telephone book open. Probably she really was looking for Herr Bitter’s number. For a long time she didn’t speak to me. I guess she thought, ‘He’s a bad fellow who lets someone throw a knife at him and simply jumps aside,’ I don’t know.
“You should hear my father sometime! He has a pretty extraordinary pair of lungs, a regular drill sergeant’s voice. Awful! There can be different reasons for it—his wife or some little thing that displeases him. Sometimes the shouting was something awful, but I’m sure he didn’t think of it that way at all. He can’t help it, but it was horrible for me as a child. I remember a lot of things like that.
“He was always one for issuing military commands and blaming me for something. He simply can’t help it, I’ve often said that. But he has a hell of a lot on his mind, and so we won’t hold it against him.
“In the first trial the lawyer said, ‘Herr Bartsch, what was it like in the school in Marienhausen? Your son is supposed to have been given so many beatings. Conditions are supposed to have been so brutal there.’ My father answered, in these very words, ‘Well, after all, he wasn’t beaten to death.’ That was a straightforward answer.
“As a rule my parents were never available during the day. Of course my mother rushed past me from time to time like greased lightning, but it was understandable that she had no time for a child. I hardly dared open my mouth because wherever I was, I was in the way, and what’s called patience is something my mother never had any of. I often got hit for the simple reason that I got in her way because I wanted to ask her something.
“I never was able to understand what was going on inside her. I know how much she loved me and still loves me, but a child, I always thought, should be able to sense that as well. Just one example (this is by no means an isolated case; it happened often): my mother thought absolutely nothing of it to put her arm around me and kiss me one minute and the next minute, if she saw that I had left my shoes on by mistake, she took a coat hanger from the closet and hit me with it till it broke. Things like that happened often, and every time something inside me broke too . . .
“I feel the saddest when I’m at home, where everything is so antiseptic you think you have to walk around on tiptoe. On Christmas Eve everything is sooo clean. I go down to the living room, and there are lots of presents there for me. It’s really fantastic, and at least on this evening my mother somewhat controls her temper that otherwise blows hot and cold, so you think maybe tonight you can forget a little your (I mean my) own wickedness for once, but somehow there’s tension crackling in the air so you know there’ll be hell to pay again. If we could at least sing a Christmas carol. My mother says, ‘Now go ahead and sing a Christmas carol,’ and I say, ‘Oh, go on, I can’t, I’m much too big for that,’ but I think, ‘A child murderer singing Christmas carols, that’s enough to drive you crazy.’ I unwrap my presents and am ‘pleased,’ at least I act that way. Mother unwraps her presents, the ones from me, and really is pleased. In the meantime, supper is ready, chicken soup with the chicken in it, and Father comes home, two hours after me. He’s been working till now. He tosses some kind of household appliance at Mother, and she’s so touched she has tears in her eyes. He mutters something that sounds like ‘Merry Christmas’; then he sits down at the dining table: ‘Well, what is it, are you coming or not?’ The soup is eaten in silence. We don’t even touch the chicken.
“Not a word is spoken the whole time, there’s just the radio playing softly as it has been for hours. ‘Hope and steadfastness bring strength and consolation in these times. . . .’ We’re finished eating. Father straightens up and bellows at us, ‘Excellent! And what are we going to do now?’ as loud as he can. It sounds really awful. ‘We’re not going to do anything now!’ my mother screams and runs crying into the kitchen. I think, ‘Who’s punishing me, fate or the good Lord?’ but I know immediately that that can’t be it, and I’m reminded of a scene I saw on television: ‘The same as last year, Madame?’ — ‘The same as every year, James!’
“I ask softly, ‘Don’t you at least want to look at your presents?’ – ‘No!’ – He just sits there staring at the tablecloth with an empty gaze. It’s not even eight o’clock yet. There’s nothing to keep me down here anymore, so I head up to my room. I pace up and down and I seriously ask myself, ‘Are you going to jump out the window now or not?’ Why am I living in hell, why would I be better off dead instead of going through something like this? Because I’m a murderer? That can’t be all there is to it because today was no different from every other year. This day was always the worst, mostly of course in recent years when I was still at home. Then everything, but really everything, came together all at once on one day.
“Of course my father (and of course my mother too) is one of those people who are convinced that the Nazis’ ways of ‘educating’ had their good side too. ‘No doubt about it,’ I would almost say. I even heard my father say (in conversation with other older people, who almost all think that way!): ‘Then we still had discipline, we had order; they didn’t get stupid ideas when they were harassed,’ etc. I think most young people feel the same way I do and would rather not look into their family history under the Third Reich because every one of us is afraid something or other might come out in the process that we would rather not have to know about.
“ . . . She always got furious when I warded off the blows. I was supposed to stand more or less at attention and accept the blows. From about sixteen and a half to nineteen, when she was about to hit me with something she had in her hand, I simply took it away from her. That was just about the worst thing for her. She took that as rebelliousness, although it was only self-defense, because she’s by no means weak. And at such moments she had no qualms about injuring me. You can just tell about something like that.
“Those were always times when I had either offended her love of order (‘The front room has been cleaned, I don’t want anyone going in there today!’) or talked back to her.” [Moor]
I have let Jurgen Bartsch tell his story for a while without interrupting him, in order to give the reader an idea of the atmosphere of a therapeutic session. You sit there, you listen, and if you believe the patient and don’t tell him what to think or offer him any theories, sometimes a hell will open up right in the midst of a sheltered home, a hell whose existence neither parents nor patient suspected till now.
. . . Everything that Jurgen tells about Marienhausen in his letters to Paul Moor, everything that came to light in the testimony of witnesses during the trial shows the degree to which “poisonous pedagogy” still prevails today. A few examples:
“In comparison, Marienhausen was a hell—even though a Catholic one; that doesn’t make it any better—and not just on [Pater Pulitz’s] account. I only have to think of the constant beatings given by the priests in their cassocks when we were in school, at choir, or—and they didn’t think twice about it—in church. Of the sadistic punishments (having to stand in a circle in the courtyard in our pajamas for hours at a time until the first one collapsed), of the illegal child labor in the fields every afternoon for weeks in extreme heat (pitching hay, harvesting potatoes, pulling turnips, a thrashing for children who were slow), the merciless way they demonized the oh so wicked ‘nastiness’ among the boys (necessary for one’s development!), the unnatural ‘silentium’ during meals and after a certain time of day, etc., and the confusing, unnatural things they said to children, such as, ‘Anyone who so much as looks at one of the girls working in the kitchen will be given a thrashing!’
“One evening Deacon Hamacher gave me such a wallop in our sleeping quarters (I had said something, and in the evening there was a rule of strict silence) that it sent me sliding under the length of several beds. Just before that, ‘Pater Catechist’ had broken a yardstick on my behind and said in all seriousness that I would have to pay for it."
Here we see how a child must learn to accept the absurdities and whims of the educators without any opposition and without any feelings of hatred and at the same time condemn and stifle any desire for the physical or emotional closeness of another human being, which would have eased the burden. This is a superhuman accomplishment that is demanded only of children, never expected of adults.
“First PaPu [Pater Pulitz] said, ‘If we ever catch two of you together!’ And when that did happen, then first came the usual thrashing, only probably even worse than usual, and that’s really saying something. Then of course, first thing the next day, expulsion. God, we were less afraid of being expelled than of those thrashings. And then the usual clichés about how you could tell boys like that, etc.; something like—anyone who has damp hands is homosexual and does nasty things, and whoever does those nasty things is a criminal. That’s pretty much what they told us and, above all, that these criminal offenses were second only to murder—yes, in those very words: second only to murder.
“PaPu talked about it almost every day, as though he couldn’t possibly have the temptation himself sometimes. He said that it was actually natural for ‘the blood to back up,’ as he put it. I always thought that was a terrible expression. . . . He said he had never given in to Satan, and he was proud of the fact. We heard that practically every day, not in class, but always in-between times.
“Personal contact, friendships as such were forbidden. It was forbidden to play with another boy too frequently. To a certain extent you could get around that because they couldn’t have their eyes everywhere at once, but it was still forbidden. They thought friendship was suspicious because someone who made a real friend would be sure to reach inside his pants. They immediately sensed something sexual behind every glance.
“When PaPu wanted to find something out, like who had done something, he herded us down into the school courtyard and made us keep running until some of us got completely out of breath and collapsed.
“He told us very often (actually even more often than that) in great detail about the horrible mass murders of the Jews in the Third Reich and also showed us a lot of pictures of it. He seemed to enjoy doing this.
“In choir PaPu liked to strike indiscriminately at anyone he could reach and at the same time he would foam at the mouth. His stick would often break when he hit us, and then too this incomprehensible frenzy and foaming at the mouth.”
The same man who always warns the boys against sexuality and threatens them with punishment for it lures Jurgen into his bed when the boy is ill:
“He wanted to have his radio back. The beds were quite far apart. I got out of bed with my fever and took the radio over to him. And all of a sudden he said, ‘As long as you’re here, you might as well get into bed with me!’
“I still didn’t realize what was going on. First we just lay next to each other for a while, and then he pulled me up against him and put his hand down inside the back of my pants...I don’t remember how often it happened, it may have been four times, it can also have been seven times, mornings when we were sitting side by side in the choir, he kept making certain movements so he could reach my shorts.
“There in bed he pushed his hand down inside the back of my pajamas and ‘stroked’ me. He did the same thing in front and tried to masturbate me, but it didn’t work, probably because I had a fever.
“I don’t remember the words he used but he told me he would finish me off if I opened my trap.”
How difficult it is for a child to extricate himself from a situation like this without help. And yet Jurgen summons the courage to run away, which makes him sense even more clearly than before how hopeless his situation is, how altogether lonely he is.
“In Marienhausen, before the thing with Papu, I really never felt homesick, but when my parents brought me back to Marienhausen, all of a sudden I got terribly homesick. I was around PaPu a lot, and I couldn’t imagine having to stay there. Now I was gone from Marienhausen and couldn’t imagine going back there again. On the other hand, I figured, if you go home now you’ll get a terrible beating. That’s why I was afraid. I couldn’t move in either direction.
“Near the grounds there’s a big woods, and I went in there. I wandered around there practically all afternoon. Then at dusk, all of a sudden my mother was in the woods. Someone had probably seen me. I saw her from behind a tree. She was calling, ‘Jurgen? Jurgen? Where are you?’ And so I went with her. Of course she started right in scolding and yelling in a big way.
“My parents telephoned Marienhausen immediately. I didn’t tell them anything. They kept telephoning Marienhausen for days. Then they came to me and said: ‘Well, they’ve given you another chance! You’re going back again!’ Naturally, I yammered and wailed, ‘Please, please, I don’t want to go back.’ But anyone who knew my parents would know it was no use.
- pp. 222-229: . . . Jurgen was already toilet trained at eleven months. He must have been an especially gifted child to have accomplished this so early, especially in a hospital where there was not a regular care giver. Jurgen proved by this that he was capable of “controlling his drives” to a very great degree. But that was his undoing. If he had not controlled himself so well and for such a long time, then his foster parents might not have adopted him at all or might have given him to someone else who had more understanding for him.
Jurgen’s gifts helped him primarily to adapt to his situation in order to survive: to suffer everything in silence, not to rebel against being locked up in the cellar, and even to do well in school. But the eruption of feelings in puberty proved too much for his defense mechanisms . . . It would be tempting to say “fortunately,” if the consequences of this eruption had not led to a continuation of the tragedy.
“Naturally, I often said to my mother, ‘Just wait till I’m twenty-one!’ That much I dared to say. Then of course my mother would say: ‘Yes, yes, I can just imagine. In the first place you’re too stupid to get by anywhere except with us. And then, if you really did go out into the world, you’d see, after two days you’d be back here again.’ The minute she said it, I knew it was true. I wouldn’t have trusted myself to get by alone out there for more than two days. Why I don’t know. And I knew for sure that when I turned twenty-one I would not go away. That was crystal clear to me, but I had to let off a little steam once in a while. But to think that I might have had any really serious intentions about it is completely absurd. I never would have done it.
“When I started my job I didn’t say, ‘I like it’; I didn’t say, ‘It’s horrible’ either. I didn’t actually think that much about it.”
Thus, any hope for a life of his own was nipped in the bud. How else can this be described but as soul murder? So far, criminology has never concerned itself with this kind of murder, has never even been able to acknowledge it, because as a part of child-rearing it is perfectly legal. Only the last link in a long chain of actions is punishable by the court. Often this link reveals in minute detail the crime’s entire sorrowful prehistory without the perpetrator being aware of it.
The exact descriptions of his “deeds” that Bartsch gives Paul Moor show how little these crimes actually had to do with the “sex drive,” although Bartsch was convinced of the opposite and eventually decided for this reason to have himself castrated. From Bartsch’s letters, the analyst can learn something about the narcissistic origins of a sexual perversion, something that has not yet been adequately treated in the professional literature.
Bartsch didn’t actually understand this himself and wonders repeatedly why his sex drive was separate from what he did. There were boys his age whom he was attracted to, whom he loved, and whom he would have liked to have as close friends, but he distinctly separated all that from what he did to the little boys. He hardly even masturbated in front of them, he writes. He was acting out here the deep humiliation, intimidation, destruction of dignity, loss of power, and torment of the little boy in lederhosen he had once been. It particularly excited him to look into his victim’s frightened, submissive, helpless eyes, in which he saw himself reflected. With great excitement he repeatedly went through the motions of destroying his self in his victims—now he is no longer the helpless victim but the mighty persecutor!
Since Paul Moor’s shattering book is out of print, I shall quote here some longer passages from Bartsch’s descriptions of his deeds. His first attempts were with Axel, a boy in the neighborhood:
“Then, a few weeks later, it was exactly the same. ‘Come to the woods with me,’ I said, and Axel replied, ‘No, then you’ll start acting crazy again!’ But I took him with me anyway because I promised not to do anything to him. But then I did act crazy again. Again I stripped the boy naked by force, and then sudden as a flash I had a devilish idea. I yelled at him again: ‘Just the way you are now, lie down on my lap, with your behind facing up! It’s all right to kick your legs if it hurts, but your arms and everything else must stay perfectly still! Now I’m going to hit your behind thirteen times, and each time harder than the last! If you don’t want to go along with it, I’ll kill you! ‘Killing’ was still an empty threat then, at least that’s what I believed myself. ‘Do you want to?’
“He wanted to—what choice did he have? After he had lain down on my lap with his behind facing up, I did exactly as I had said. I kept on hitting him, harder and harder, and the boy kicked his legs like mad but otherwise didn’t resist. I didn’t stop at thirteen but only when my hand hurt so much that I couldn’t go on hitting him anymore.
“Afterwards the same thing: I calmed down completely and felt incredibly humiliated for myself and for someone I liked so much, abject misery personified, so to speak. Axel didn’t cry and afterwards he wasn’t even overly upset. He was only very, very quiet for a long time.
“I offered to let him hit me. He could have beaten me to death, I wouldn’t have tried to stop him, but he didn’t want to. In the end I was the one who bawled. ‘Now you’re sure not to want to have anything more to do with me.’ I said to him on the way home. No answer.
“The next afternoon he came to my door again after all, but somehow more quietly, more cautiously than before. ‘Please—no more,’ was all he said. You won’t believe it, I didn’t believe it myself at first, but he didn’t even bear me a grudge! For some time after that, we often played together, until he moved away, but as far as I can tell, this incident I’ve just told you about made me so afraid of myself that I had some peace for a while. ‘A short while,’ as it says in the Bible.”
It is important to note what Jurgen says in passing:
“If I love a certain person, the way a boy would love a girl, then he doesn’t correspond at all to my ideal of a victim. It’s not as though I would have to make an effort to hold myself back somehow, that’s ridiculous. In a case like that, the drive simply disappeared automatically.”
It was an entirely different matter with the little boys:
“At the crucial moment I would have liked it if the boy had offered some resistance, even though the children’s helplessness generally excited me. But I was honestly convinced that the boy wouldn’t have had a chance against me.
“I tried kissing Frese, but that didn’t belong to any plan. That somehow emerged from the situation. I don’t know why, from one moment to the next the desire was there. I thought doing that between times would be terrific. That was something new for me . . . If I said today that he wanted to be kissed, everyone would say, ‘You pig, who do you expect to believe that?’—but it was actually true. In my opinion, it can be explained only by the fact that I had beaten him so terribly before that. If I try putting myself in his place, I can imagine that the only thing he cared about was which was worse, which hurt more. I mean, being kissed by somebody I detest is still preferable to having that person kick me in the balls from behind. In that sense it’s understandable. But at the time I was pretty amazed. He said, ‘More! More!' So finally I kept on. That must be it, that the only thing he cared about was which was easier to bear.”
It is striking that Bartsch, who describes what he did to his victims so openly and in such detail—even though he knows what revulsion this will arouse in others—is very reluctant to divulge his memories of when he was the helpless victim. He has to force himself to tell these things, which he does in a terse and imprecise way. At the age of eight he was seduced by his thirteen-year-old cousin, and later, at thirteen, by his teacher. Here we can observe the pronounced discrepancy between subjective and social reality. Within the framework of a little boy’s value system, Bartsch sees himself in the murder scenes as a powerful person with a strong feeling of self-confidence, although he knows everyone will condemn him for these actions and attitudes. In the other scenes, however, the warded-off pain of the humiliated victim comes to the surface and causes him unbearable feelings of shame. This is one of the reasons why so many people either can’t remember being beaten as children at all or only remember it without the appropriate feelings, i.e., quite indifferently and “coolly.”
I am not telling the story of Jurgen Bartsch’s childhood in his own words in order to “exonerate” him, something which the legal profession accuses psychotherapists of doing, or to place the blame on his parents, but to show that every one of his actions had a meaning that can be discovered only if we free ourselves from the compulsion to overlook the context. I was appalled by the newspaper accounts about Jurgen Bartsch, to be sure, but I was not morally outraged, because I know that acts similar to Bartsch’s often appear in patients’ fantasies when they are able to bring to consciousness the repressed desire for revenge stemming from their early childhood . . . But for the very reason that they are able to talk about and confide these feelings of hatred, rage, and desire for revenge to another person, they do not need to translate their fantasies into deeds. Jurgen had not had the slightest opportunity to articulate his feelings. In his first year of life he did not have a regular care giver, then he was not allowed to play with other children until the time he started school, nor did his parents ever play with him. In school he soon became a scapegoat for the other boys; it is understandable that such an isolated child, who is beaten into obedience at home, could not hold his own in the company of his peers. He had terrible fears, and this caused the other children to persecute him even more. The scene after he ran away from Marienhausen shows the boundless loneliness of this adolescent caught between his “sheltered,” middle-class home and the Catholic boarding school. The need to tell his parents everything and the certainty that they would not believe him; his fear of going back home but also his longing to cry his heart out there—isn’t this the situation of thousands of adolescents?
. . . The combination of violence and sexual arousal that the very small child whose parents treat him as their property is frequently exposed to often finds later expression in perversions and delinquent behavior. Likewise, in the murders committed by Bartsch many features of his childhood are reflected with horrifying exactitude:
1. The underground hiding place where he murdered the children is reminiscent of the cellar, with its barred windows and walls ten feet high, that Bartsch describes as the place where he was locked up.
2. Bartsch selected his victims carefully. He walked through arcades for hours looking for the right boy. His parents had also selected him, before adopting him.
3. Later (not all at once—like his victims—but slowly) he was prevented from living.
4. He sliced the children up with a butcher knife, “with our knife,” as he writes. The daily beatings his parents gave him and the sight of the animal carcasses they had butchered combined in Jurgen’s imagination to produce an ominous feeling that hung over his life like a sword of Damocles. By finally taking a butcher knife into his hands himself, he tried actively to avert his own destruction.
5. He was aroused when he looked into the children’s terrified and helpless eyes. In their eyes he saw himself, along with the feelings he had had to suppress. At the same time he experienced himself in the role of the seductive, aroused adult at whose mercy he once had been.
6. The close connection between kisses and beatings was something Bartsch knew from his mother’s way of treating him.
- p. 278: It is the tragedy of well-raised people that they are unaware as adults of what was done to them and what they do [to] themselves if they were not allowed to be aware as children. Countless institutions in our society profit from this fact, and not least among them are totalitarian regimes. In this age when almost anything is possible, psychology can provide devastating support for the conditioning of the individual, the family, and whole nations. Conditioning and manipulation of others are always weapons and instruments in the hands of those in power even if these weapons are disguised with the terms education and therapeutic treatment. Since one’s use and abuse of power over others usually have the function of holding one’s own feelings of helplessness in check—which means the exercise of power is often unconsciously motivated—rational arguments can do nothing to impede this process.
In the same way that technology was used to help carry out mass murders in the Third Reich in a very short space of time, so too the more precise kind of knowledge of human behavior based on computer data and cybernetics can contribute to the more rapid, comprehensive, and effective soul murder of the human being than could the earlier intuitive psychology. There are no measures available to halt these developments. Psychoanalysis cannot do it; indeed, it is itself in danger of being used as an instrument of power in the training institutes. All that we can do, as I see it, is to affirm and lend our support to the human objects of manipulation in their attempts to become aware and help them become conscious of their malleability and articulate their feelings so that they will be able to use their own resources to defend themselves against the soul murder that threatens them.
- pp. 279-280: In the same decade in which writers are discovering the emotional importance of childhood and are unmasking the devastating consequences of the way power is secretly exercised under the disguise of child-rearing, students of psychology are spending four years at the universities learning to regard human beings as machines in order to gain a better understanding of how they function. When we consider how much time and energy is devoted during these best years to wasting the last opportunities of adolescence and to suppressing, by means of the intellectual disciplines, the feelings that emerge with particular force at this age, then it is no wonder that the people who have made this sacrifice victimize their patients and clients in turn, treating them as mere objects of knowledge instead of as autonomous, creative beings. There are some authors of so-called objective, scientific publications in the field of psychology who remind me of the officer in Kafka’s Penal Colony in their zeal and their consistent self-destructiveness. In the unsuspecting, trusting attitude of Kafka’s convicted prisoner, on the other hand, we can see the students of today who are so eager to believe that the only thing that counts in their four years of study is their academic performance and that human commitment is not required.
The expressionistic painters and poets active at the beginning of [the 20th] century demonstrated more understanding of the neuroses of their day (or at any rate unconsciously imparted more imformation about them) than did the contemporary professors of psychiatry. During the same period, Freud’s female patients with their hysterical symptoms were unconsciously reenacting their childhood traumata. He succeeded in deciphering their language, which their conventional doctors had failed to understand. In return, he reaped not only gratitude but also hostility, because he had dared to touch upon the taboos of his time.
Children who become too aware of things are punished for it and internalize the coercion to such an extent that as adults they give up the search for awareness. But because some people cannot renounce this search in spite of coercion, there is justifiable hope that regardless of the ever-increasing application of technology to the field of psychological knowledge, Kafka’s vision of the penal colony with its efficient, scientifically minded persecutors and their passive victims is valid only for certain areas of our life and perhaps not forever. For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.