Quotes About Childhood

This is an astounding statement, because I know of literally no one who suffers from psychic symptoms and seeks treatment for them without having at least been beaten and humiliated in childhood.

The life-saving function of repression in childhood is transformed in adulthood into a life-destroying force.

In what is described as depression and experienced as emptiness, futility, fear of impoverishment, and loneliness can usually be recognized as the tragic loss of the self in childhood, manifested as the total alienation from the self in the adult.

people who were never respected as children and thus do their utmost to earn that respect at a later stage with the assistance of the gigantic power apparatus they have built up around them.

People who were loved in childhood will love their parents in return. There is no need of a commandment to tell them to do so. Obeying a commandment can never be the basis for love.

As the sociologist Lucien Lombardo wrote in his introduction to a chapter of my recent book, The Truth Will Set You Free, "childhood is not the shortest age in our life but rather the longest because it stays with us until our death.

Six years after I began to paint I wrote my first three books in three years (The Drama of the Gifted Child, For Your Own Good, and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware), in which I tried to explain the connections between denied suffering in childhood and adult violence.

Today, I believe that to mistreat children as I was mistreated—to punish them, to forbid them to weep, to speak, to defend themselves, to revolt against brutal treatment—is the greatest crime that there is. It is a crime to discipline children so much that they become blind, dumb, lifeless and then, later, to deny the whole thing. No wonder such children would later as doctors rather subject others to electroshock treatment than confront the repressed misery of their past.

Ultimately, though, what was painfully lacking in childhood cannot be made good by repression and the fulfillment of substitute gratifications. Even when the acquisition of power fuels the illusion, allowing it to swell to staggering proportions, the number of victims will always be too small to sate the deadly, unconscious rage of the child that was prevented from living.

In therapy Katya realized how much her relationship with her son had been burdened by the shadows of her childhood, and memories of her mother came back to her more and more clearly, memories of the way she had refused to relate to her eldest daughter. Katya was now able to feel her infant needs and express them in a diary, from which her friend sent me an excerpt after Katya's death:

They remained trapped in the position of small children who believe they love their parents but in fact allow themselves to be controlled all their lives by the internalized parents and ultimately develop some kind of illness that leads to premature death. Such dependency actively fosters the hatred that, though repressed, remains active, and it drives them to direct their aggression at innocent people. We only hate as long as we feel totally powerless.

At the very first you were quite obviously and incomprehensibly indifferent toward me and probably for this reason seemed familiar.

No, we need precisely the opposite: a partial companion, someone who can share with us the horror and indignation that is bound to arise when our emotions gradually reveal to her, and to us, how the little child suffered, what it went through all alone when body and soul were fighting for years on end to preserve a life threatened by constant danger.

Frequently, parents withhold such communication from the child, not because they are in any way malevolent but because they themselves never experienced such a token of affection in childhood and consequently do not know that such a thing exists. They can learn to communicate meaningfully with their children, but only if those children have the full support of a therapist who has shaken off the influence of poisonous pedagogy and is totally and unreservedly on the children's side.

The child's dependence on his or her parents' love also makes it impossible in later years to recognize these traumatizations, which often remain hidden behind the early idealization of the parents for the rest of the child's life.

Then, however, comes 'the work of forgiveness, which is apparently necessary if one is to heal. Many young people who have AIDS or are drug-addicted die in the wake of their effort to forgive so much. What they do not realize is that they are trying to keep the repression of their childhood intact.

However, it may also be true that there is still a small, unintegrated child living within, whose panic and fear have never been admitted, never consciously experienced, and thus direct themselves at others. These fears can suddenly assail us without apparent reason and cause us to panic. Unconscious fear of one's father or mother can last for decades if it has not been consciously experienced in the company of an enlightened witness.

It has now been proved that though repression may be crucial for a child, it should not necessarily be the fate of adults. A small child's dependency on her parents, her trust in them, her longing to love and be loved, are limitless. To exploit this dependency, to deceive a child in her longing, confuse her, and then proceed to sell this as child rearing is a criminal act—a criminal act committed hourly and daily out of ignorance, indifference, and the refusal to give up such behavior.

His asthma was an expression of this dilemma: "I breathe in so much air but I must not breathe it out again, everything she gives me must be good for me, even if it stifles me." A look back at Proust's childhood casts light on the origins of this tragedy. It explains why he was inextricably bound up with his mother for so long and could not free himself of her influence, although he undoubtedly suffered as a result. Proust

Empathizing with a child's unhappy beginnings does not imply exoneration of the cruel acts he later commits. (This is as true for Alois Hitler as it is for Adolf.)

Every criminal was humiliated, neglected, or abused in childhood, but few of them can admit to it. Many genuinely do not know that they were. Thus denial gets in the way of statistical surveys based on the question-and-answer method, none of which will have any practical prophylactic effect as long as our eyes and ears remain closed to the issues posed by childhood.

Because the victims are "only children," their distress is trivialized. But in twenty years' time these children will be adults who will feel compelled to pay it all back to their own children.

Their access to the emotional world of their own childhood, however, is impaired—characterized by a lack of respect, a compulsion to control and manipulate, and a demand for achievement. Very often they show disdain and irony, even derision and cynicism, for the child they were. In general, there is a complete absence of real emotional understanding or serious appreciation of their own childhood vicissitudes, and no conception of their true needs—beyond the desire for achievement.

These people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her.