Acting out…

from rehearsal yesterday with two of my students. Is it the anger's angel on the altar-piece, commanding: fall down?

I am thinking further on what I see around me in society, not least among politicians, and the politicians in our current government in particular. Wonder what is driving them? How they can resonate as they do. And of course: why do they need power? Why have they chosen political work? What are their actual intentions and motives, both the conscious and unconscious? Yes, what are their drives?

And I for instance found something Miller has written at page 168-169 in the Swedish edition of ”Paths of Life” about acting out ones hatred on scapegoats. She writes that it’s impossible for a child to consciously experience the abuse (physical, sexual and emotional) without aware witnesses. The knowledge about what it has been exposed to (or the meaning of it: this was no love, but hate and rejection) has to become suppressed. But what happened doesn’t disappear even if it is dispatched to the unconscious. The unconscious memories drive the human being once and again to reproduce the suppressed scenes to liberate her/himself from the agony the early abuse has left in the body.

But not even this gives him/her liberation. Once and again he becomes perpetrator and finds new victims. So long as he projects the hatred and fear on scapegoats one can’t master these feelings. Not until one realizes the true cause(s) and understands the natural reaction on injuries the blind, on innocent projected hatred can get dissolved. Its function, to hide the truth, is no longer necessary. And she also writes on another place that you can’t dissolve things symbolically either. If one could, all we with artistic and creative works would be liberated from neurosis (my free interpretation of Miller), but we are certainly not. But it’s possible our work helps many of us to survive.

Miller writes that perpetrators of sexual abuse are no longer at risk re-enacting their traumas (committing sexual abuse) in a destructive way if they get help and opportunity in therapy to process what they have been through. Where do they get this help I wonder? Does that sort of help exist? Or it is still very rare? Because people still try to invent a lot of other explanations, than abuse from parents and other caretakers and to what degree they actually occur and what is actually harmful? One ascribes or attributes the causes and roots to for instance sexual abuse other things than early childhood abuse in many, many cases still? There is still a lot of denial about those things, both in people in general as in professionals. People deny that these things are ALWAYS, with no exception, a question of mistreatment, from the mildest forms to the most severe? There are small islands of awareness and knowledge only in the world.

Miller also writes that so long as the anger against a parent remains unconscious and denied, it cannot get dissolved. It can only be pushed over onto scapegoats, on the own children (if one has any) or supposed enemies. Masked as ideology (as for instance in politics and political parties) the anger transformed to hate can become especially dangerous.

What I originally was searching for this time was ideas about he child’s evilness because earlier today I skimmed “Paths of Life” in the middle of doing other things and read those words somewhere and put them on my mind.

Yes, she writes about this at page 186 in the Swedish edition, something in the style: punishment is built on the assumption that the child is acting with an evil intention (I can see the horrified adult watching the child! But what is he/she actually seeing?? An evil child? A monster? But what is this “evil” or “monster” about?)

She writes on the next page (187) that the latter adult will miss a compass of experiences (achieved through consciously experiencing things and not having to suppress things) which would help her/him to orientate in the life and the being. Therefore he will bow for authorities and play master over the weaker; all in accordance with what he/she has experienced as a child with his/her educators. I came to think of an older acquaintance in my parents age, blindly admiring all people with a position, never questioning them or capable of seeing them as human beings as all other human beings. I wonder what ort of father (and mother) she and her six siblings had. She is the child in the midst? With three before her and three after her? I still get very surprised when I am confronted with this in her, can’t understand how one can be SO uncritical and seeing up to THAT degree, and that this person does.