Sylvie Shene - Articles - Vantage Point

View this website in:

Português/Portuguese

Español/Spanish

ARTICLES: VANTAGE POINT

1990

Almost ten years have passed since my first three books were published: The Drama of the Gifted Child, For Your Own Good, and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware. Nevertheless, the facts and interconnections which I then presented, on the basis of my many years of practice, have lost neither in validity nor, unfortunately, in immediacy. On the other hand, what has radically changed is my hopeful attitude toward psychoanalysis, from which, in 1988, I officially broke away by resigning from the Swiss as well as the International Psychoanalytical Association. I was forced to take this step when I realized that psychoanalytical theory and practice obscure---i.e., render unrecognizable---the causes and consequences of child abuse, by (among other things) labeling facts as fantasies, and, furthermore, that such treatments can be dangerous, as in my own case, because they cement the confusion deriving from childhood instead of resolving it.

Ten years ago I was not yet so clear about this, my study of philosophy as well as my training in and practice of psychoanalysis having long prevented me from recognizing many facts. Only when I was prepared to end my repression, to liberate my childhood from the prison of pedagogic notions and psychoanalytical theories; when I rejected the ideology of forgetting and forgiving, allied myself with the abused child, and, thanks to my therapy, learned to feel: only then did I gradually discover my hitherto concealed history.

I have described my path to this history and to my new insights in books published after 1985: The Untouched Key (1990), Banished Knowledge (1990) and Breaking Down the Wall of Silence (1991). My first three books mark the beginning of this development, for it was only as I was writing them that I began systematically to explore childhoods, including my own. It was thanks to my work on those books, and later also thanks to the success of a carefully and systematically uncovering therapy, that I could see what, despite my critical attitude toward the drive theory, still had remained concealed from me during the twenty years of my analytical practice.

I owe this information to my readers because I have learned from their letters to me that, unfortunately, some individuals, after reading my early books, decided to undergo psychoanalytical training or treatment, assuming that my views as expressed therein reflect the views of contemporary analysts.

This assumption is completely erroneous and misleading. The teaching structure of psychoanalysis has remained unchanged over the past ten years, and I have not met a single person who, having assimilated the insights of my books, would still be willing to describe himself as a psychoanalyst. Nor in my view would this be possible, since a therapist who has gained emotional access to his childhood---a process that I regard as essential---cannot remain blind to the fact that it is precisely this access that psychoanalysis prevents at all costs. Whenever I am---frequently and mistakenly----described as a psychoanalyst, it is only because I do not always hear about in time to correct such a notion.

Although, understandably enough, I feel a desire to incorporate my fresh insights in the new editions of my first three books and rework some passages, I decided against this in order not to obscure my further development. Thus I have to refer the reader to my later publications in which possible questions and apparent contradictions are dealt with and clarified in detail. There, too, the reader will find material to substantiate the statements contained in this preface.

The fight against the truth is gradually losing significance now that the new therapeutic possibilities to which I allude in my most recent books have come into existence. For each person wishing to end his repression, they offer access to the truth. This puts paid to psychoanalysis, even if its practitioners are not yet aware of this because they are still confined within their system of self-deception. Many of those seeking help are beginning to look more carefully at their potential “helpers” and their views, and no longer uncritically subject themselves to psychoanalytic treatment. However, after many years of analysis, it is very difficult ever to escape from the labyrinth of self-deception and self-accusation. It took me fifteen years to accomplish this liberation process---from 1973, when spontaneous painting allowed me vaguely to sense the truth, until 1988, when I was finally able to articulate it completely.

Patients and adepts at psychoanalysis, who in their circles are cut off almost hermetically from advance in knowledge, do not know, just as for years I did not know, that there is already a means of access to one’s own childhood that is not (as is unfortunately very often the case) dangerous, confusing, haphazard, fragmentary, and irresponsible but, on the contrary, comprehensive, systematic, clarifying, helpful, and committed solely to the truth. How should they know this when their teachers refuse to find out anything about it because this access to childhood fills them with fear? It is the fear of one’s own history, of the truth of the naked facts that can be brought to light by this therapy. Sigmund Freud banished this fear by denying the possibility of a verifiable access to childhood reality and restricting the analyst’s work to the field of the patients’ fantasies.

The Swiss therapist J. Konrad Stettbacher has described the therapy he developed, and which I tested on myself, in a work entitled Wenn Leiden Einen Sinn Haben Soll (Sense in Suffering). This therapy can enable many people to approach their childhood step by step and to assimilate the knowledge they had banished. With the knowledge of one’s own history, susceptibility to such irrational help as ideologies, speculations, and sacrosanct lies vanishes because blindness is no longer required as a protection from fear. Someone who has faced facts needs no longer fear reality or flee from it. This completely cuts the ground from under the power of pedagogy and of the psychoanalytical and philosophical speculations that conceal reality. It must give way to what is transparent and verifiable.

Alice Miller

Translated by Leila Vennewitz

Home About Me Thoughts Poems Articles Donations Links

Website Design and Maintenance by Arizona Web Group