What About Alice Miller?

Reader Neil Samuels has queried my unwillingness to accept Alice Miller’s views on physical punishment as necessarily correct, and has asked what I mean by the “Alice Miller belief system.” Before I go on to talk about these matters, let me state once more my position that mild physical punishment (open hand, one or two smacks on buttocks or upper legs) for preschool children may be effective and harmless when used very occasionally to enforce important rules. I have argued in an earlier post that there is no support for the claim that this parental behavior models a general tendency to violence. I have also argued for many years against genuinely abusive practices like those recommended by the Pearls and the “Babywise” books.

So, why do I not accept Alice Miller’s statements as unarguably correct? My reasoning is that those statements are based on a series of abstractions that lack empirical support, rather than on systematically-collected information about parenting practices and child development outcomes.

Alice Miller was a European lay-analyst and shared the attitudes and views of many such people, who have tended to reason from what they regard as first principles rather than to consider the necessity of working with reliable information. Much of Miller’s work resembles closely that of Marguerite Sechehaye and of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Like those authors, Miller emphasized the psychoanalytic principles of repression and regression, and by doing so placed the essential events in personality formation early in childhood and outside of consciousness. In addition, her view completely ignored the concept of transactional processes by which changing interactions between a specific child and a specific adult have developmental outcomes that would be different if either individual were different.

The psychoanalytic concept of repression claims that memories of disturbing experiences can be removed from conscious awareness and inaccessible to the individual except through psychoanalytic treatment, but can continue to influence mood, behavior, and motivation in ways that feel foreign to the personality. Although this idea has become almost universally accepted in Western popular culture, there is in fact no empirical support for such a mechanism. As Susan Clancy and Richard McNally have pointed out, ordinary mechanisms of memory and forgetting are perfectly adequate explanations of events that have been categorized as repression (for example, Clancy, McNally, Schachter, Lenzenweger, Pitman. [2002]. Memory distortion in people reporting abduction by aliens. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 111, 455-461).

The psychoanalytic concept of regression claims that earlier versions of personality and experience can be re-accessed through psychoanalytic techniques, and that such re-accessing allows the individual to change a developmental trajectory that went wrong at a given time. In fact, as I have shown in my own work (Mercer [2011]. The concept of psychological regression: Metaphors, mapping, Queen Square, and Tavistock Square. History of Psychology, 14, 174-196), the idea of personality regression is a metaphor drawn from 19th century work on the results of physical damage to the nervous system. Although psychoanalytically-oriented practitioners over the years encouraged the acting-out of apparent regression (and this was especially true of proponents of “wild psychoanalysis” like Ferenczi), there is no empirical support for the existence of such a mechanism.

Thus, there is no evidence for the existence of Miller’s two major personality mechanisms repression and regression, and I believe this is a strong argument against the general accuracy of her claims. However, there are additional problems in her thinking. As is well known, Miller spent some years of involvement with and commitment to primal therapy, a form of treatment suggesting that psychological treatment must depend on regression to very early stages and intense acting-out of pain and distress posited to have been part of those stages ( an idea associated with Otto Rank’s and later with Wilhelm Reich’s views of development). Primal-related thinkers such as the “psychohistorian” Lloyd DeMause; David Chamberlain,who claims that all babies remember their births; and William Emerson, who massages babies until they cry as a way of working through the notional birth trauma, are all enthusiasts of Miller’s beliefs.

I see two major problems in this association. The first is that the concepts of early development espoused by primal therapists are based on adult experiences under LSD or hyperventilation rather than any systematic and replicable evidence about infancy and early childhood. When there are conflicts between LSD-based ideas and those derived from systematic study (for example, our understanding of infants’ memory and forgetting), I would hold that the latter source is more trustworthy, and I don’t believe it’s necessary to spell out why I take that position.

A second problem has to do with the assumption of the primal group, shared by Miller, that mechanisms characteristic of the individual (and speculative mechanisms at that) are sufficient to explain behavior of a group-- for example, that repressed anger and fear, were they in existence in members of a group, would be the reason for abusing children, going to war, etc. This belief ignores decades of work on, for example, economic factors in racial conflict, and fails to note that there must be some way in which such notional individual mechanisms would be translated into coordinated behavior of a group. Like the primal therapists, Miller chooses to ignore the complexities of social behavior in favor of discussion of the poorly-documented personal backgrounds of a few historical figures. Although this makes for entertaining reading, it is a very weak basis for a world-view.

These are the reasons that I do not accept Miller’s broad prohibition on all forms of physical punishment as necessarily correct. Her position is not in any way empirically based. Her thinking in general has the Platonic form so appealing to those who would prefer not to engage deeply with a topic, but instead are attracted to statements of what “must be”. I would suggest that people who are genuinely interested in how disciplinary methods influence children’s development should seek out the work of Grace Kochanska, who has shown how child personality differences interact with parental behavior to produce predictable outcomes.

Understanding Prenatal Life: For Best Results, Choose Your Sources

Ideas about the experiences of babies before and during birth are a part of some ways of thinking about mental health and about psychotherapy. Some treatments, like regression therapies, focus on the belief that prenatal experiences help to determine individual development and may need to be recalled and processed so a person can move beyond lifelong difficulties. Practitioners of these treatments often claim that they know what prenatal life was like-- even back to conception (or before!)—and can help patients understand and recover from problems that result from that early part of life.

What makes anyone think that they know the experiences of an unborn child, particularly of one who is still constituted of a small number of cells? Major claims about this have come from people who believe that their experiences when taking LSD were accurate depictions of what they had experienced in the earliest parts of their lives. Frank Lake, the author of Clinical Theology, considered that experiences resulting from LSD represented the trauma of birth as well as of separation from the mother. His colleague Stanislav Grof , again using LSD revelations as sources, proposed that there were four stages of experience before birth. The first is at least potentially blissful, although it may be spoiled by the mother’s smoking, drinking, etc. This period lasts until the birth process itself begins, when the infant is said to feel stuck and under inescapable pressure as the uterus begins to contract rhythmically. Third, the passage through the vagina is experienced as a life-death struggle which may also be ecstatic. Finally, birth itself is experienced ecstatically, with a sense of release of pressure and radiant light (although paradoxically some of Grof’s followers have emphasized birth as involving a sense of loss as the physical connection with the mother is broken.)

Later in his career, Lake gave up the LSD method and depended on re-enactments of birth and deep breathing exercises to induce experiences that he believed were representations of prenatal life and the birth experience. His follower William Emerson ( 2002; Somatotropic therapy. Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, Vol. 5, pp. 65-90) clarified some of this belief system when he stated that one “of the central concepts in this field is the notion that mind pre-exists the nervous system; that there is a level at which the conceptus is aware of essential qualities of feeling present in its inception; and that this awareness records its struggles to survive the hazards of implantation, the history of its gestation, and the detailed drama of its birth at an energetic and cellular level”.

Looking at these ideas, we see that the notion of distinct memories going back to conception is based not on scientific study of early development but on drug-induced experiences and fantasies during group re-enactments. We also see that such beliefs are related to the idea of a soul or nonmaterial animating entity that exists prior to, and separate from, the material body. In addition, we see that these beliefs reject the function of the nervous system as holder of memories and instead ascribe memory to a nonmaterial energy (perhaps the World Soul or some other form of “nonlocal mind”) and to properties of individual cells outside the nervous system.

Anyone considering prenatal experience from the psychological or other science-based viewpoint would reject the perspective I’ve just described. The experiences of adults, however vivid or interesting, would not be taken to indicate anything about the nature of prenatal experience. No nonmaterial entity would be included in a discussion of either prenatal or post-natal functioning, and it would be assumed that all such functioning has the potential to be understood from a materialist viewpoint, even if it is not presently well understood. Memory, in particular, would be thought of as a function of the nervous system and not of other body parts or of nonmaterial elements.

One particularly important assumption about the psychology of prenatal life would be that until injury, disease, or old age interfere, development goes from a less advanced to a more advanced state. In other words, adults have more capacities than children, older children more capacities than infants, and infants more capacities than unborn babies. As a consequence, if an infant does not have the capacity to remember an experience, an unborn baby, who is less advanced in development, will not have that ability either. So, for instance, as a young baby does not have the capacity to understand many adult motives and wishes (like the ones Emerson called “essential qualities of feeling present at its inception”), an unborn infant will also be unable to perceive or remember such adult mental states. Although the baby could be affected by the mother’s physical condition, by stress hormones, etc., it would not actually be able to respond to the mother’s pleasure or displeasure about the pregnancy.

The capacities of newborn babies to show some recognition of sounds they heard a few weeks before birth are of great interest, and no one who has an interest in early development would argue that the fetus is “anesthetized” in some way, or that sensation and memory suddenly and instantly emerge when the baby takes its first breath. But those early abilities are a far cry from the telepathic communication of adult emotion sometimes claimed, and the evidence for them is a far cry from descriptions of drugged states.