The roots of violence in child rearing

I see my mission as involving alerting the public to the pain of early childhood, a task I pursue on two different levels. On both levels, I strive to reach the child the adult reader was once. I explore this in the first section of the book through an exposition of "black education," that is, the educational methods our parents and grandparents were raised with. The first chapter may arouse in some readers feelings of excitement and anger that could have a beneficial therapeutic effect. In the second section, I will describe the life of a drug addict, then the life of a famous political leader, and finally, a child murderer. All three were victims of profound abuse and humiliation during their early years. In two of these three cases, I draw directly on stories told to me by the people concerned about their childhood and subsequent lives, and I wish to help the reader understand these painful testimonies as a psychoanalyst. These three destinies condemn the destructive effects of education, its denial of the living part within us, and expose its danger to society. Even within the framework of psychoanalysis, and particularly within the framework of the instinctual model, traces of this educational stance remain. I initially considered making the study of this specific point a chapter to include in this book, but due to the magnitude of the subject, it became the subject of a third book published in Germany (Du sollst nicht merken, Suhrkamp, --1981). In it, I also demonstrated, more precisely than I have done until now, the points of disagreement between my positions and the various psychoanalytic theories and models.