Customer Reviews

The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness

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In The Untouched Key, the great psychiatrist Alice Miller has written another penetrating work about the manifestation of subconscious experiences into the conscious world. As far as I am concerned, most of the more recent modern writers on the subject have little to add to works like this one. Here is a highly respected and successful therapist, who went out on a limb and confessed to her colleagues, at a time when she could have been basking in the glory of seniority, that she finally realized she only went into the field to learn how to heal her own pain; and then had the courage to withdraw her membership from psyciatric associations once she realized their hypocrisy (which she took full responsibility for in herself, as well).

In this very fine but brief work, Alice Miller studies pivotal works of art and compares their content with the life stories of their creators. The resulting analysis is impeccably true-to-life and highly plausible. She does not trivialize art in doing so, but makes a sound case for how artistic expression could be the great liberator of mankind, and brings us to even greater respect of the artists she discusses. Whether they knew it or not (probably not?) their unrestrained creativity is presented as a gift to teach and inspire us all, subconsciously or consciously, whether or not we choose to analyze it ourselves.

I think it is time that ALice Miller recieve the credit due her for her enormous efforts in uncovering coded childhood trauma. Her tireless work has had an transformative and empowering impact on my life and the way I view my childhood and children. In this book Alice uncovers what some people want to view as a "masterpieces" of "ART". "What is really going on here?"she asks. "Look deeper..what is this artist trying to communicate". At times Alice observes and brings to light that the artist is screaming. THis book is SO important!

This is one of the most important books you could ever read. It takes the world of childhood to a place you will never forget. As Miller walks you through her interpretations of the lives and self expression of Keaton, Nietzsche, Picasso, Kollwitz and others, you will learn intuitively how to interpret things the way she does. There is a loss of innocence in this process so it is a kind of initiation which comes to the depths of your soul. Your life will be much richer for this knowlege and your understanding of children and the inner child of every adult you know will be that much riper. Once you have read this book, you will wonder how you could ever have been so DEAF and so DUMB and so BLIND!!

A few years ago the therapist I had gone to see durnig a particularly harrowing period of my life recommended I buy a copy of Alice Miller's "The Drama of the Gifted Child" since she was certain that it would speak to the particular challenges I faced. "Wow," I thought, feeling flattered, "here's one intuitive lady. She can tell right off I'm a 'gifted' individual, one of the special ones." I headed to the nearest bookstore directly after the session and bought a copy and read half of it on the bus before I even got home.

No insult, no rejection, no critical barb that I'd ever experienced so quickly, nor so thoroughly deflated my ego--nor, as it turned out, so permanently.

I think I had some notion that the book was going to confirm my lifelong notion that I was some sort of exceptional creature of starlight that my dimwitted and immature parents, so ill-suited for parenting, had all but managed to snuff out with their psychological buffooneries. Oh, they had crushed me alright, or nearly so, twisted me, stifled me to the point where I am practically beyond normal human functioning, but the culture wasn't thereby losing any luminous polestar of immortal significance. Ha! I was just a normal, abused little boy. There was nothing special about me except my terrible and unrelenting need to be special. If you took any ten people, the only difference between me and the other nine was that I thought there was a difference. I had to be different; I had to be special in order to win my parent's love; in order to justify to myself their ill-treatment of me, I had to be the disguised prince, the Cinderella mistreated like a dirty scullery maid.

That was my drama: the drama of the "gifted" child.

Unlike me, and yet, at the same time, also like me, the artists, poets, philosophers, and dictators that Alice Miller treats in her book "The Untouched Key" did become world-renowned, did achieve a cultural immortality for their achievemens, whether for good or evil--and they were also all abused as children.

Ordinarily I wouldnt subscribe to this sort of psychological reductivism, the kind that traces an artist's or philosopher's ouvre backwards to the beatings he used to get as a six-year-old or his mother's pathological coldness or whatever. But Miller's argument is not only compelling it also acknowledges that the work of the adult artist is by no means invalidated because their worldview can be traced to their mistreatment as a child. The world can be understood just as Nietzsche understood it; indeed, the fact that Nietzsche's philosophy speaks to so many, seems so dead-on accurate, is because the world--full of grown-up abused children as it is--really does operate along lines of power and submission, of the strong and the weak.

Somewhat more controversial, however, is Miller's claim that the wellsprings of so much human creativity up to this point in history are almost exclusively to be found in childhood trauma. Art and history are, in a sense, a record of child abuse!

This seems a pretty preposterous proposition until you pause, take a good look at the world, and ask yourself if there is another more plausible explanation for the universal trainwreck that is humanity's lot, and always has been humanity's lot...and will continue being our lot for whatever future we still have as a species. What, after all, Miller argues, is the single most important common experience every human being everywhere shares? A childhood is her answer. We come out of the womb naked and innocent, knowing neither hatred nor cruelty...so how could things possibly have gotten to the point they have? Where do things go off the rails? To Miller it seems obvious. It's the way we're raised...by and large by parents who were also traumatized as children, and so it goes, and will continue going.

Among others, Miller turns her attention to Picasso, Stalin, Celan, Soutine, but it's Nietzsche to whom she devotes most of her book--and a good deal of the space she devotes to him is taken up with extensive excerpts from his work meant to illustrate the effect his awful childhood had on him--an effect, she asserts, eventually drove him insane.

Miller does not deny that a Picasso or a Nietzsche were indeed special; she doesn't deny that special people do exist, or that they don't possess aptitudes beyond the ordinary; they do. But she wonders what they might have been able to produce if they had been able to use their magnificent talents unencumbered by their unhappy pasts, if they hadn't been reflecting back to the world the story of their personal abuse which is also, in microcosm, the history of humanity's abuse towards its children, an abuse so many of endured at the hands of those who had the most influence in forming our view of the world and how to survive in it.

Alice Miller examines in this work the early childhood of a number of creative figures, Picasso, Kathe Kollwitz, Buster Keaton, Paul Celan, Nietzsche .She also has an essay called 'When Isaac Arises From the Sacrificial Fire' and one on 'The Newly Recognized Effects of Child Abuse'.
She says in her opening sentence, that she 'wanted to demonstrate that the works of writers,poets and painters tell the encoded story of childhood traumas no longer consciously remembered in childhood.' She also claims that her effort to share her findings with fellow psychiatrists was by and large rejected.
My problem with her in this work is not with her general principle but rather with the way she illustrates and proves it. She begins with the life of Picasso. She says there is little material on his early childhood a period ordinarily skimmed over by biographers. But she in researching the life came across the information that when he was three years old Picasso along with his parents survived an earthquake in Malaga. She connects this with the fact that Picasso's second sister was born three weeks later. These two pieces of information then become the basis of her understanding Picasso's 'trauma' of birth .She claims that his parents enabled him to freely play and use his imagination. But Picasso resisted the discipline of school of any kind of restriction which would bring him back to the world of his trauma. I found here her argument to be both skimpy in evidence and loose in its connections.
So too her treatment of Buster Keaton explains that as a child actor he was traumatized when laughing on stage. This laughing somehow led the audience to laugh less and so was strongly disapproved of by his parents. Keaton was taught he must not laugh and the deadpan disguises and suppresses his emotional life.
In reading Neitzsche's life she claims that what he wrote ' was his hopeless attempt , which he didn't abandon until his breakdown, to free himself from his prison by expressing his unconscious but present hatred for those who raised and mistreated him.His hatred and his fear of it, became all the more vehement the less he succeeded in becoming independent of its objects, his mother and sister."
My question would not be whether this claim is valid, but rather how far it goes in explaining the whole complex of Nietzsche's world of ideas.
Moreover and this a key point it seems to me that these kinds of explanations could be used in each and every person's life. They do not really provide a key to the 'special gift' of the person.
Nonetheless the book contains much interesting information and speculation. A brief, easy and largely enjoyable read. I would recommend it not be taken as the 'Bible' but rather as another interpretative essay which adds to our understanding of the figures in question.

This book is what I consider, next to the Bible, required reading for anyone who was born, is now a parent, will be a parent, or any of the other possibilities. It gives us a clue as to why 90 percent of what we know we learned by age five! What we learned by age one is the most important!!! Just an enormously important book. Want to figure out why our kids are screwed up? Read it!

While I found a few of her assumptions giant leaps of faith, and the examination of Nietzsche's writings overly-long, this was a very provocative and informative book that made me question many "truths" society takes for granted.

I am now reading two more of her books which I hope fill in some gaps and flesh out more of her theories.

This book, along with Drama of the Gifted Child, is one of Miller's best. It provides tremendous insights into the family lives and traumas of Nietzsche, Hitler, Stalin and others. Her insights into the hidden or unrecognized abuses that go on in families are tremendous--but not everyone can accept what she writes, because it requires some painful recognitions about our own family lives.

Buster Keaton was NOT abused as a child. He himself had stated this many times in his life. He was literally strip-searched in front of both the mayor and governer of New York of his time to show the brusies and injuries on his person which were NOT THERE. Also to think about, Buster's father, Joe Keaton, was mostly angered by the fact that the social group going after their stage act, didn't protect or help the homeless and penniless children of 1910s New York and instead went after Buster who had both parents, friends, a steady job, and thought the roughhousing was a lot of fun. Remember this while reading.