I became curious as to why therapists fought so hard against me having my needs (vs wants) met. It felt like the more I expressed my needs the greater was the withdrawal by the therapists mentally and emotionally until they finally left physically. How could a relationship created to promote Self growth and maybe even healing feel so repressing, punitive and sadistic? In psychoanalytic training myself at the time, I read paper after book and opened up online discussions with other practitioners, but instead of finding answers to my questions or other curious professionals, I found practitioners who either ignored or attacked me, perhaps terrified of something I had unconsciously reminded them of? I could not understand how people in the helping profession, those who were supposed to be open minded, curious, empathic and analytic, could suddenly close down, become extremely defensive and in some cases even bullying. It seemed I had become a mirror that reflected something horrific...something needed to be protected from this monster, a reflection of their own inner turmoil. At the time I took it on board as something abhorrent within me, something that was abnormal and ill. Supported by my analytic training, the breakdown of my analysis and the Freudian notion of the innate Death drive, I experienced my Self increasingly evil and unable or unwilling to be "tamed" as one therapist called it. My belief to be evil and dangerous was intensified by the therapist's need to stay away from her own repressed rage and guilt towards the adults of her early childhood. I have paid a very high price, mentally and financially, to find the answer to my questions as after many broken down, traumatic and deeply tragic 'therapeutic' encounters I became very bitter, angry, resentful and suicidal; equally profound, however, was my move into consciousness which brought with it a deep sense of empathy and acceptance of my Self and therefore the Other. I have now realised that the reason my therapies had ended so abruptly and unethically was not because I was mentally ill, evil or dangerous but because I had unconsciously been kept from raging against my parents, as the therapist herself was still stuck in childish guilt and shame of having "betrayed" her parents with her own rage and hatred for what had been done to her - in the name of care and "for your own good". I fought against this oppression, my parents' oppression, her parents' oppression which had now become her oppression. I wanted to become me, why was I not allowed? The following chapter out of Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child By Alice Miller which, I feel, illustrates beautifully the painful dilemma of the growing child and patient alike, might shed some light onto this question:
The reports of all three analysands gave me the impression that all four analysts devoted themselves to their patients, tried to understand them, and place their entire professional knowledge at the patients disposal. Why are the results so different? Can it be explained simply by calling an analysand incurable if the analysis was a four-year-long misunderstanding?
Formulations such as "negative therapeutic reaction" or "resentful patients" remind me of the "wicked" (because "willful") child of "poisonous pedagogy," according to which children are always guilty if their parents don't understand them. Yet patients are just as little to blame for our lack of understanding as children for the blows administered by their parents. We owe this incomprehension to our professional training, which can be just as misleading as those "tried and true" principles of our upbringing we have taken over from our parents. In my opinion, the difference between Cardinal's successful analysis on the one hand and Moser's and Drigalski's tragedies on the other is that in the first case the seriously ill patient, whose life was in danger, found out in analysis what her parents had done to her and was able to relive her tragic childhood. Her description is so vivid that the empathic reader goes through the process with her. The boundless rage and deep sorrow she felt at what she had been forced to endure as a child led to relief from the dangerous and chronic haemorrhaging that had preciously been unsuccessfully treated by surgery.
The result of her sorrow was the full blossoming of her creativity. It is obvious to the professionally trained reader that Cardinal's case psychoanalysis - not family therapy or transactional analysis, for instance - was used, for the connections can be traced between her tragic emotional discovery about her childhood and what happened in the transference. The other therapists also used a psychoanalytic approach, but we can sense in them an attempt to interpret whatever the patient says and does from the perspective of the drive theory. If it is an axiom of psychoanalytic training that everything that happened to the patient in childhood was the result of his drive conflicts, then sooner or later the patient must be taught to regard himself as wicked, destructive, megalomaniac, or homosexual without understanding the reasons for his particular behaviour.
For those narcissistic traumas - humiliation, rejection, mistreatment - inflicted on the child and traditionally considered a normal part of child-rearing are not touched upon and thus cannot be experienced by the patient. Yet it is only by addressing these concrete situations that we can help the patient acknowledge his feelings of rage, hatred, indignation, and eventually, grief. There are unquestionably many analysands who "successfully" survive the pedagogical approach inherent in their therapy because they are completely unaware of it. As a result of "poisonous pedagogy" they are so accustomed to not being understood and frequently even blamed for their fate that they are unable to detect the same situation when it occurs in analysis and will adapt themselves to their new mentor. They will leave analysis having substituted one superego for another. It should not surprise us that Tilmann Moser and Doerte von Drigalski, both creative people, are reduced to despair as a result. In Moser's case, it is true, the despair is still concealed behind idealisation of the analyst, but his next book, Gottesvergiftung (God Poisoning), shows that he was not able to experience his aggression toward his parents in analysis because obviously the analyst as well as the parents had to be spared. In Drigalski's case, her disappointment with both analyses leads to a rejection of the psychoanalysis per se, which is understandable although regrettable, for the case of Cardinal for one demonstrates that psychoanalysis can contribute positively to a person's creative growth.
In Drigalski's report, the tragic traces of "poisonous pedagogy" are particularly striking. They can be seen not only in the approaches of the psychoanalytic training institutes, which often appear to have a veritable horror of originality, but, most tragically, in the years of wasted effort on the part of the patient and both analysts, all of whom were prevented from gaining access to the narcissistic traumas of early childhood because they were inhibited by the unspoken commandment to spare the parents and blame the child. For this reason, what the other reports about her childhood, her parents, and her brothers remains sketchy and devoid of strong feelings, as in the case of Moser, but very unlike that of Cardinal. Now all Drigalski's outrage is directed against psychoanalysis and her second analyst, who did not understand her.Would this woman have been able to struggle against her feelings for four years and bear such torment if she had not been brought up to ignore her inner Voice and keep a stiff upper lip? The adults who figured in her early childhood are spared her rage, however.
This is the rule for the more or less conscious gaol of adult in rearing infants is to make sure they will never find out later in life that they were trained not to become aware of how they were manipulated. Without "poisonous pedagogy" there would be no "poisonous psychoanalysis," for patients would react negatively from the very beginning if they were misunderstood, ignored, not listened to, or belittled in order to be forced into a Procrustean bed of theories.
There is a good deal else that would not exist without "poisonous pedagogy." It would be inconceivable, for example, for politicians mouthing empty clichés to attain the highest positions of power by democratic means. But since voters, who as children would normally have been capable of seeing through these clichés with aid of their feelings, were specifically forbidden to do so in their early years, they lose this ability as adults. The capacity to experience the strong feelings of childhood and puberty (which are so often stifled by child-rearing methods, beatings, or even drugs) could provide the individual with important means of orientation with which he or she could easily determine whether politicians are speaking from genuine experience or are merely parroting time-worn platitudes for sake of manipulating voters.
Our whole system of raising and education children provides the power-hungry with a ready-made railway network they can use to reach the destination of their choice. They need only push the buttons that parents and educators have already installed. [...] I looked into the background of Sophie and Hans Scholl, two university students in Hitler's Germany who became famous as a result of their activities in the resistance movement, "The White Rose," and were both executed by the Nazis in 1944. I discovered that the tolerant and open atmosphere of their childhood had enabled them to see through Hitler's platitudes at the Nuremberg Rally, when the brother and sister were members of the Nazi youth organisations. Nearly all their peers were completely won over by the Fuehrer, whereas Hans and Sophie had other, higher expectations of human, not shared by their comrades, against which they could measure Hitler. Because such standards are rare, it s also very difficult for patients in therapy to see through the manipulative methods they are subjected to; the patient doesn't even notice such methods because the are inherent in a system he takes completely for granted.
[...] It is essential for us to perceive the unintentional persecution of children by their parents, sanctioned by the society and called child-rearing, if our patients are to be freed from the feeling imposed on them from an early age that they are to blame for their parents' suffering. In order for this to happen, the analyst has to be free from guilt feelings toward his won parents and be sensitise to the narcissistic wounds that can be inflicted in early childhood. If he lacks this sensitivity, he will minimize the extent of persecution. He will not be able to empathise with a child's humiliation, since his own childhood humiliation is still repressed. If, in keeping with the saying "You'll be the death of me yet," he has learned to accept all the guilt in order to spare his parents, he will try to allay his patient's aggression, which he cannot understand, by repeatedly empathising the parents' good sides; this method is referred to as "the establishment of good objects" in the patient.
If the mother sees her infant as wicked and destructive, then she will have to bring him under control and train him. But if she recognises his rage and hatred as reactions to painful experiences, whose significance may still escape her, she will not try to train the child but will permit him to experience his feelings. The same is true of the psychoanalytic process. The example of Marie Cardinal demonstrates why it is not necessary to "establish a good object in the patient" and keep telling him that his parents also had their positive sides and were concerned for his welfare. He had never questioned that; on the contrary, the child does not need to repress what is positive for the sake of survival (see my book The Drama of the Gifted Child). When anger of early childhood and the ensuing grief have been experienced, affirmative feelings, which are not based on denial or feelings of duty or guilt, can emerge of their own accord, assuming the right preconditions are present. These affirmative, more mature feelings must be clearly distinguished from the small child's unconditional, dependent, all-forgiving, and therefore tragic love for his or her parents.