In the beginning there was education

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In the Beginning Was Education (English title: For Your Own Good ) is the second book by the former psychoanalyst and childhood researcher Alice Miller , which was published in 1980 .

Black pedagogy

Miller suggests in the book the ways in which, in her opinion, people can find emotional openness. (It speaks of a “path of mourning”.) In the first chapter, however, it first explains the way in which parents and educators ensured that children were blocked from seeing their own possibilities.

Miller cites numerous quotations from texts that she attributes to black pedagogy . She draws on the text collection that Katharina Rutschky brought out under the title Black Pedagogy .

A consistent characteristic of the texts of black pedagogy is that humiliation for children is expressly advocated. The authors want to convey techniques with which one can achieve that children alienate themselves from their own inner drives and become command recipients without inner support.

Anyone who uses “black pedagogy” can rely on the fact that a child will forget it if he was harmed in the first two years of life. They do not have to fear that the child will later take revenge on them for the repression they have suffered.

A central point to which Miller comes up again and again in her remarks throughout the book is that "You shouldn't notice" (this phrase will also be the title of her next book, published in 1981). This means an experience that writers of black pedagogy writings have passed on to their readers: educators who keep explaining to a child that all the humiliation and torment they experience is for their own good achieve a numbing effect with their tips . A child with the remark that all things be done for his own good, conditioned was very difficult to do with it, ever to capture what actually happened to him (= what was done to him).

Miller assumes that black education was still at its peak around 1900. It also assumes that black pedagogy will still be effective towards the end of the 20th century, but in a more subtle way.

In the book she also deals in detail with the story of a drug addict, a political criminal and a child killer:

Case studies

Christiane F.

Miller quotes longer passages from the book Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo by Christiane F. The quotations make it clear that Christiane F. lived under her father's regiment of terror in childhood.

Although she suffered badly from her father's brutality, she wrote in the book:

I had never hated him, I was just afraid of him. I was always proud of him too. Because he loved animals and because he had such a powerful car, his '62 Porsche. (P. 142)

Miller notes that the author expresses something that generally applies to a child's behavior towards their parents:

His [the child's] tolerance knows no bounds, he is always loyal and even proud that his father, who brutally beats him, would never harm an animal; he is ready to forgive him everything, to always take all the guilt on himself, not to feel hatred, to quickly forget everything that has happened, not to add anything, not to tell anyone anything, (...) (p. 142)

In short, this means that children strive not to lose the parents' attention even when the parents behave in an extreme way against the interests of the child.

The drug addiction of Christiane F. Miller explains in the early stages as the attempt to establish the connection to one's own living energies. Later, according to Miller, the aspect that Christiane F. wanted to keep her own body and mood under control through the influence of chemical agents came to the fore.

The childhood of Adolf Hitler

When it comes to Hitler's childhood , different views collide. Part of Hitler's research explains that Hitler grew up in a normal home. Erich Fromm asked something like this:

How can it be explained that these two well-meaning, stable, very normal and certainly not destructive people brought the later monster Adolf Hitler into the world? (quoted from Miller, p. 208)

This contrasts with statements like these by John Toland:

Many years later, Hitler told one of his secretaries that he had once read in an adventure novel that it was a sign of courage not to show one's pain. And so “I made up my mind not to make a sound during the next beating. And when that was done - I remember my mother was standing outside anxiously at the door - I counted every blow. " (Quoted from Miller, p. 185)

Miller can cite a number of pieces of evidence showing that Hitler grew up beating around the clock.

In his volume Conversations with Hitler, Hermann Rauschning reproduces reports that are questionable in their authenticity. One of the reports is about nocturnal seizures that Hitler had. Rauschning gives the report like this:

He had stood staggering in the room, looking around. "He! He! He's been there, ”he gasped. The lips were blue. The sweat just dripped down on him. Suddenly he was saying numbers. Totally pointless. Individual words and chunks of sentences. (quoted from Miller, p. 205)

Miller has dealt extensively with the material available on Hitler's childhood and, with a view to the last quotation, comes to the conclusion that the wandering Hitler relived the torments he had to endure when his father beat him. The quote says that Hitler said numbers. Miller assumes that in situations like this the feelings of desperation rose again in Hitler, which he tried to push away when he tried to count the blows of his father soberly.

Explained largely based on Miller's theses on Hitler's childhood, the film Mein Führer was created by film director Dani Levy as a tragic comedy, which was released in cinemas in 2007 .

Jürgen Bartsch

When it comes to the childhood story of the child killer Jürgen Bartsch , she can fall back on the work Das Selbstportrait des Jürgen Bartsch by Paul Moor . (Moor later published an expanded version of the book; Miller did not yet have it.)

The court experts in the trial against Bartsch spoke of inexplicable phenomena in the behavior of the accused. However, after Bartsch's conviction, Moor did extensive research and exchanged hundreds of letters with Bartsch. The result was a portrait of a person whose childhood was marked by physical and emotional abuse of the worst kind, including serious sexual abuse.

Some basic notions

Alice Miller's concept of upbringing assumes that upbringing means (has) exercising power at all times and should therefore be rejected. In her representations she conforms to the anti-pedagogy of Ekkehard von Braunmühl .

She stresses throughout the book that hate must be seen as a reactive mode of feeling. She rejects all speculation about a death drive . If there is hatred, then one must ask where the hatred originated, and it assumes that a hating person is always one who has experienced persecution and oppression.

From her experience as a psychoanalyst, she knows that the consequences of child abuse can be lessened if the child is given the opportunity to reveal their inner reactions to what has been suffered to a sensitive person. "The greatest cruelty that one inflicts on children," she says, "is probably that they are not allowed to articulate their anger and pain without running the risk of losing the love and affection of their parents" (p. 128 )

Intentions of the author

Miller's intention with the book is to make the knowledge and insights she has gained in her work as a psychoanalyst comprehensible to a broader public. In particular, she is concerned with raising public awareness of early childhood suffering.

With the book she is primarily aimed at laypeople in psychology. In the beginning, education is therefore not a textbook , but on the other hand it is not one of the psychological guides for life issues.

Miller wants to be socially effective. It assumes that societies change when the viewpoints it offers readers are adopted by many people.

Your attempt to raise awareness of the public goes hand in hand with the endeavor to help the reader gain a changing emotional knowledge :

Can emotional knowledge be achieved with the help of a book? I don't know, but the hope that reading it might start an inner process for one or the other reader seems to me well founded not to leave it untried. (P. 10)

literature

  • Alice Miller: In the beginning there was education. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-518-37451-6 .

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