7 – The complicated legacy of Alice Miller
For much of my life, I've felt different from my peers. I would be surrounded by them and yet remain an island of my own thought and emotion. I felt so far removed from the daily struggles and fears my friends were experiencing, and the difference between my thought life and theirs was deeply alienating. For many years of my life, I was desperately lonely, even when I had dear friends.
There were likely several reasons for this—one of them being my continuing struggle to figure out how to invite people into my inner world, which is a galaxy in itself—but one of the reasons was something I didn't fully understand until nearly a decade later, when my college therapist handed me a copy of a book called "The Drama of the Gifted Child" by Alice Miller.
Alice details at deep, painful length about children who are "emotional prodigies" of sorts, who are hyperintuitive to the thoughts and feelings of others, and how they manage the feelings of their parents in order to survive and receive the care they need. Many of these intuitive children were forced to grow up at a very early age, and many eventually become therapists themselves.
And then I came across this quote:
"It is one of the turning points in therapy when the patient comes to the emotional insight that all the love she has captured with so much effort and self-denial was not meant for her as she really was, that the admiration for her beauty and achievements was aimed at this beauty and these achievements and not at the child herself. In therapy, the small and lonely child that is hidden behind her achievements wakes up and asks: “What would have happened if I had appeared before you sad, needy, angry, furious? Where would your love have been then? And I was all these things as well. Does this mean that it was not really me you loved, but only what I pretended to be?"
And I wept and wept until I couldn't breathe.
There aren't words for the grief we experience when we allow ourselves to feel the pain of the wounds our parents have given us. And we all have them—even those of us who believe that we come from "good", "happy" families. The stages of grief, in many ways, are the stages of shifting your relationship with your parents in adulthood: Denial that your family has any dysfunction, then an onslaught of anger when you fully realize the extent of the hurt you've experienced, then the bargaining process for the relationship you always wanted with them but never had, depression when those needs, again, go unmet, and finally acceptance of the imperfect, raw, brutiful life you will always be living.
Alice gave me this gift—the gift of having language for my life, why I felt and still feel so different from others, helping me engage with my grief. Her book is controversial, but it gave me language to better understand my own reality.
So you can imagine my horror when I discovered that, in fact, Alice neglected and emotionally abused her own son, Martin. Martin, now a psychotherapist in his own right, wrote a memoir about living life in her shadow and the ways the trauma of World War II (Alice and Martin are Polish Orthodox Jews) wreaked havoc on his upbringing. In an interview, Martin says,
"My mother broke with me all the rules you must adhere to as therapist. I almost killed myself. And I am saying today if my mother had not passed onto me the knowledge of how you deal with this kind thing, I would not have survived. So on the one hand she almost killed me but on the other hand thanks to her understanding, her theories, she saved my life. So, I was stronger and I used her knowledge. My mother refused to get engaged in any kind of discussion. She never really apologised. She never understood the mistake."
How confusing it must be, to be both nearly killed but also rescued by your own mother.
For me and those of us who were changed by the beautiful works of traumatized people who did horrible things, this raises a few important questions: Can you ever truly separate a work from the person who wrote it? Is it ethical to do so? Is it even possible to create something that doesn't come out of the overflow of who you are? Does her failure to live these things out in real life jeopardize the credibility of her voice as expert?
In her book, "Problematic: How Toxic Callout Culture is Destroying Feminism," Dianna Anderson writes,
"Some new piece of art, movie, or fashion trend will come out and everyone will love it for a few days, until that definitive piece of criticism makes us look at it in a different way. Suddenly it’s not okay, it’s not right, and we can no longer enjoy that thing. . . . Our affections, our predilections toward the problematic things, our enjoyment of something in spite of our feminist politics often causes us to behave in secretive ways around those things we enjoy and, on the other hand, to view both ourselves and others as pariahs, as toppled from this inhuman pedestal of perfect feminism once we screw up. The problematic must be acknowledged, must be atoned for, must be issued in a cautionary genuflection lest we be seen as imperfect feminists. We have made the perfect the enemy of the good."
While Alice Miller's book is not a feminist masterpiece and was never claimed to be, we're still inclined to reject it entirely due to its "problematic" legacy. Is it possible that Alice could have stumbled across Truth in the midst of her utter brokenness?
I don't have answers to any of these questions. I still recommend this book to people. It changed my life, and it would be dishonest to say otherwise. But I'm trying my hardest to pave another way, a third way: one that doesn't demand perfection of all of us, but instead chooses to engage with a person's contributions to humanity with discernment and nuance. Perhaps somewhere between idolatry and condemnation we can find balance.