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For Your Own Good. Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence

In the aftermath of two world wars, we have watched the Wordsworthian vision of childhood as a time of innocence and unspoiled goodness fade away, to be replaced by a new version of the concept of original sin based on the theories of Melanie Klein and the experience of evermore precocious, worrying, and disillusioning juvenile delinquency. Our reaction has been on the one hand to blame parents or society, or both, and on the other to regard human beings as innately prone to what we see as evil. These contrasting attitudes could be thought of as exemplified in the psychoanalytic theories of Winnicott and Klein who, of course, knew, respected, and learned from each other; and it may be no accident that the former was an Englishman brought up in the era of Edwardian optimism whereas the latter was a German Jewish emigre from a defeated and already antisemitic country. Alice Miller's book is an attempt to explain the behaviour of so many Germans in the Nazi era as a consequence of the pedagogic theories accepted and practised by their parents in the Prussian hegemony and based on the idea that children need to be trained for the duties and responsibilities of adult life. It is interesting in this context that Winnicott should have said that 'the word training always seems to me to be something that belongs to the care of dogs but a dog doesn't have to grow up eventually into a human being'. But German training could be said to have been remarkably successful in producing obedient and industrious citizens and the most effective armed forces that we have seen in action in our century, though in the end they lost out by virtue of their vices. From a British point of view, we might set in apposition to Mrs Miller's book about the corruption of a whole nation, that by Erin Pizzey, Prone to violence, which describes the similar corruption of an unfortunate subgroup of our population by parents also inclined to control their children by force majeure. Alice Miller remarks at one point in her book that the English were able to export the products of repressive homes to the Empire-implying that the violence that in Germany was directed against the Jews was used to hold down native populations by the British; but this is to oversimplify one's view of the two cultures (though it must be admitted that, for instance, our Wesleys preached what many German parents seem to have practised and we should perhaps remember that the United Kingdom, which led the world in proscribing slavery and judicial torture, is now about the only country to permit the formal corporal punishment (torture!) of young children by teachers for what are usually menial offences, despite having long ago abandoned the flogging of presumably hardened adult criminals). But what the reader wants of a reviewer is an answer to the question 'should I expend any of my limited reading time and energy on this book?', and sadly the answer must in this instance be a qualified 'no'. Mrs Miller has arrived at an interesting, plausible, and, if true, important hypothesis regarding the induction of violent propensities in individuals and the societies that they belong to, but she has not subjected it to the available test of its validity. Those of us who mistrust the statistical approach to child psychiatry adopted by Professor Rutter and his disciples must nevertheless admit that while statistics seldom generate useful hypotheses, they are essential for testingespecially for testing the more simplistic hypotheses, such as that propounded by Mrs Miller. What carries conviction these days is not the amassing of every scrap of evidence in support of a theory, it is a rigorous subjection of the theory to the evidence against it. However, failure to prove is not disproof and Mrs Miller and Mrs Pizzey are probably right in that their explanations of human violence would seem altogether more likely than alternative ones; and if they are right, the implications are large and urgent action on them would be prudent in the light of the hundred dollar topical question 'whose hand on the atomic trigger?' Our society does not at the moment provide for most of its citizens the facilitating environment that enables parents in their turn, or indeed teachers, to provide a facilitating environment for children to grow up in, capable of love and work-that is, able to deal with persons and things in a human way. Mrs Miller and Mrs Pizzey have warned us about how things have gone and still do go wrong; Winnicott tells us how they can be allowed to go right; meanwhile we should acknowledge that psychoanalysis has more to teach us than Mrs Whitehouse or Lord Justice Lane about the origins of criminality.