The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness
Alice Miller
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0385267649
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Dr. Miller explores the clues, often overlooked in biography, that connect unnoticed childhood traumas to adult creativity and destructiveness.
an enigma. The two-thousand-page biography by Janz, which appeared in 1978, devotes less than ten pages to Nietzsche’s childhood (not counting a genealogical history). Since the importance of childhood for later life is still a very controversial subject, biographers have done little investigation in this area. Nietzsche scholars search in his work for connections to the history of philosophy rather than to his life. His life, his illness, and his tragic ending, to say nothing of his work, have
had to cope with the shock of an earthquake and the birth of his first sister in a highly unusual situation and in strange surroundings. This example made clear to me once again how fruitless historical research can be if the psychological significance of external events is not taken into consideration simply because an adult is rarely able to understand the feelings of a child. Just try to imagine what it must be like for a three-year-old to have his father take him and his pregnant mother
has receded into the spiritual. The case of puberty being retarded and not developing in the organism, as a consequence of degeneration, is well known, at least to physiologists. Such a faith is not angry, does not reproach, does not resist: it does not bring “the sword”—it simply does not foresee how it might one day separate. It does not prove itself either by miracle or by reward and promise, least of all “by scripture”: at every moment it is its own miracle, its own reward, its own proof, its
were dark and nocturnal! How I could suck at the breasts of light! And even you would I bless, you little sparkling stars and glowworms up there, and be overjoyed with your gifts of light. But I live in my own light; I drink back into myself the flames that break out of me. I do not know the happiness of those who receive; and I have often dreamed that even stealing must be more blessed than receiving. This is my poverty, that my hand never rests from giving; this is my envy, that I see waiting
than concealing, the reality of universal human experience. By establishing the connection between the content, intensity, and power of Nietzsche’s thinking and his childhood experiences, I am by no means trying to call his genius into question. Nonetheless, I will probably be accused of this intent, for as a rule the significance of childhood experience is unfortunately minimized and dismissed as of no importance; what is seen as important, in this view, is to regard the abstract ideas of