The Untouched Key Read online

  By Alice Miller

  THE DRAMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD:

  The Search for the True Self

  (originally published as PRISONERS OF CHILDHOOD)

  FOR YOUR OWN GOOD:

  Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence

  THOU SHALT NOT BE AWARE:

  Society’s Betrayal of the Child

  PICTURES OF A CHILDHOOD:

  Sixty-six Watercolors and an Essay

  THE UNTOUCHED KEY:

  Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness

  BANISHED KNOWLEDGE:

  Facing Childhood Injuries

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 1991

  Copyright © 1990 by Alice Miller

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published as Der gemiedene Schlüssel by Suhrkamp Verlag am Main, copyright © 1998. Any variations from the original German text are a result of the author’s wishes. The Untouched Key was published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday in 1990. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  FRONTISPIECE: Picasso, Guernica

  1990 ARS. N.Y./SPADEM

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Miller, Alice.

  [Gemiedene Schlüssel. English]

  The untouched key: tracing childhood trauma in creativity and destructiveness / Alice Miller; translated from the German by Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum.

  p. cm.

  Translation of: Der gemiedene Schlüssel.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Child psychology. 2. Parent and child. 3. Psychic trauma in children. I. Title.

  BF408.M4913 1990 89-25623

  155.9—dc20

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81692-4

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  PART ONE Repressed Childhood Experiences in Art

  1 Pablo Picasso: The Earthquake in Málaga and the Painter’s Eye of a Child

  2 Käthe Kollwitz: A Mother’s Dead Little Angels and Her Daughter’s Activist Art

  3 Buster Keaton: Laughter at a Child’s Mistreatment and the Art of Self-Control

  4 Despot or Artist?

  PART TWO Friedrich Nietzsche: The Struggle Against the Truth

  A Mistreated Child, a Brilliant Mind, and Eleven Years of Darkness

  PART THREE The No Longer Avoidable Confrontation with Facts

  1 When Isaac Arises from the Sacrificial Altar

  2 The Emperor’s New Clothes

  Appendix The Newly Recognized, Shattering Effects of Child Abuse

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Preface

  Whenever I leaf through a biography of a creative person, I find information on the first pages of the book that is especially helpful in my work. The information has to do with one or more childhood events whose traces are always apparent in the person’s creative work, usually running through it like a continuous thread. In spite of this, the individual childhood events usually are not given any prominence by the biographer. The facts surrounding them could be likened to a key ring we have found but have no use for. We don’t know who the owner is, and we suspect the person has long since moved to another house and therefore will no longer have the slightest interest in the lost keys.

  Is it permissible, then, for me to take these keys and try to match them to the doors of old houses to discover a life that has long been waiting to be recognized? It may be considered indiscreet to open the doors of someone else’s house and rummage around in other people’s family histories. Since so many of us still have the tendency to idealize our parents, my undertaking may even be regarded as improper. And yet it is something that I think must be done, for the amazing knowledge that comes to light from behind those previously locked doors contributes substantially toward helping people rescue themselves from their dangerous sleep and all its grave consequences.

  ONE

  Repressed Childhood Experiences in Art

  1

  PABLO PICASSO:

  The Earthquake in Málaga and the Painter’s Eye of a Child

  The throngs of people at the exhibit of Picasso’s late works in Basel make it difficult to get a good look at the pictures. Groups of students are being told by experts how they should interpret Picasso. They are trying hard to understand something they could learn about just as well at home from Picasso reproductions—for example, his skill in composition. Many of them yawn, turn away from the pictures, look at their watches, and probably think of the cup of coffee that will come to their rescue. The expert who is instructing them doesn’t give up; he tries the theory of color, explaining how the orange makes the blue stand out and how well Picasso knew which colors to use for a strong effect. This too seems to bore the students. They are making a visible effort to take in what their instructor is saying and to be sure not to forget it, but the Picasso who is being explained here is somehow dead, one artist among others who have great skill and a mastery of color and form.

  Yet along with the many bored and yawning faces, I think I can detect some that are curious, fascinated, and disquieted. I myself feel something like gratitude for this great festival of color I am permitted to feast my eyes on and for Picasso’s courage, from which I take inspiration. This man, nearly ninety when he painted these pictures, disregarded all convention as well as his own technical ability and attained what he had wished for all his life: the spontaneity and freedom of a child, which his perfectionism robbed him of in childhood.

  It may have been precisely this inspiring power of Picasso’s late works that helped me gradually forget the great crowds of bored people around me until finally I was fully able to enter inwardly on this adventure. I seemed to be sensing a man’s last strenuous efforts to express the most hidden secrets of his life with every means at his disposal before it’s too late, before death takes the brush from his hand.

  A great deal has been written about the sexual themes in Picasso’s work, and they have always been understood as a sign of his virility. The fact that he depicted male and female genital organs with increasing frequency as he grew older, even right up to his death, has been attributed to his declining libido and a longing for pleasures no longer attainable. But anyone who makes the effort to discover the emotional content of Picasso’s last pictures of nude men and women will probably sense a sorrow that is much deeper and whose roots reach back much further in Picasso’s life than can be explained by an aging man’s regrets at his waning sexual vitality.

  But what is the origin of his suffering? I asked myself as I walked through the exhibit, and at first I found no answer. I sensed his suffering not only in the themes but also in the force of the brush movements, in the vehement way he sometimes applied the color and conjured up new feelings that had to be given form. I had the impression that these paintings express a struggle between what Picasso must do and what he is able to do, between the necessity of making these strokes and no other, of using this color and no other, and a highly conscious, masterful eye that cannot unlearn the laws of color theory and composition even if it would like to. The force of necessity increases with such intensity in Picasso’s late works that his ability becomes secondary. Feeling i
s no longer given a shape, as it was in the painting Guernica; now it is lived and becomes pure expression. He no longer does drawings, he no longer counts on the viewer’s comprehension; there remains only his haste to produce the unsayable, to say it with colors. But what was the unsayable for Picasso?

  I viewed the exhibit of his late works with this question in mind and found no answer. I leafed through an endless number of Picasso biographies, searching for traumatic experiences in his childhood. Since the efficiency of defense mechanisms decreases in old age, since repression works with less ingenuity, it was possible, I thought, that traces of childhood trauma not evident before might become visible in his late works. But at first such traces were undetectable; here was a child who was loved, who had a happy home life.…

  Even though I know that biographers are seldom interested in their subjects’ childhood, I nevertheless found it astonishing that in so many books about such a famous man of our time there was very little—and always the same—information about Picasso’s first years: he was born in 1881 in Málaga; his father taught drawing; his mother loved him above all else; at the age of ten he moved to Barcelona; at age fourteen he entered an art school in Madrid and was the best student there; when he was seventeen, his father gave him his palette and stopped painting. This chronology is repeated in all the biographies. Then events that took place in the Spain of that day and in the rest of the world are described in great detail. The financial difficulties of his forebears are also thoroughly discussed, but Pablo Picasso the child is scarcely to be found. The biography by Josep Palau i Fabre was the only one in which I found a few pages that could give me some insight into Picasso’s childhood. Although the facts were scattered here and there, with time they took on meaning and revealed the logical connections I was looking for. I read with amazement, for example, about Picasso’s behavior in school:

  It appears that Picasso’s reluctance to go to school was so great that it finally caused him to fall really ill. The doctor said that he had an infection of the kidneys and could not continue to attend classes in that dank building. This news was received with great enthusiasm by little Pablo, for he thought that it meant he would never have to go to school again. And even at the fairly ripe age of eighty-six, Picasso told me that he could never remember the sequence of the alphabet and could not understand how he had ever learned to read and write—or, above all, to count.

  When we look back on this childhood situation from the perspective of a famous painter, it seems understandable that the monotonous routine of school would not meet the needs of a child of genius. But it is not that simple. It may be that an alert child is not interested in the multiplication tables or in lists of spelling words because he has already mastered them, whereas the other children are still having trouble. But Picasso was having difficulty learning his ABC’s. The description of his behavior in school indicates that something entirely different was bothering him. But what?

  I continued reading and learned that a second sister was born when he was six and was just starting school. This in itself need not cause problems in school, one might argue, for his mother idolized him and his father was extraordinarily supportive. But what did the birth of his second sister mean for Pablo? Could this event have reminded him of an earlier one? One would have to know the conditions surrounding the birth of his first sister, I thought. I continued my search and was amazed when I found the answer. How is it possible, I wondered, that these facts did not find their way into all the Picasso books, that they were never linked to Guernica? Palau i Fabre writes:

  One evening in mid-December 1884—when Picasso was just three years old—there was an earthquake in Málaga. Don José was chatting with some friends in the room behind the local chemist’s shop when he saw the rows of jars on the shelves crashing to the floor. The party broke up immediately, its members hastening to their various homes. Don José was in his apartment in a very few moments and said to his wife: “These rooms are too big, María: get dressed quickly! And you, Pablo, come along with me.”

  Picasso’s own account of this incident, as told to Sabartés, went as follows: “My mother was wearing a kerchief on her head: I had never seen her like that before. My father took his cloak from its hanger, flung it over his shoulders, snatched me up and wrapped me in its folds until only my head was peeping out.”

  They then left the apartment and went to Muñoz Degrain’s house, at No. 60 in the Calle de la Victoria.…

  The Calle de la Victoria, which is one of the longest streets in Málaga, runs parallel to the western slope of the hill of Gibralfaro. It does not exactly lean on this slope, as has been said, but almost certainly the foundations of its houses are set upon the rocky outcrops of the hill. This was the explicit reason that led Don José to seek a refuge for his family in that house. Muñoz Degrain himself was away from home at the time, having gone to Rome on a painting trip with Moreno Carbonero.

  A few days after moving into this temporary home—on 28th December 1884, to be precise, according to the attached birth certificate—the couple’s second child was born, a girl who was given the name Lola (the most usual diminutive of Dolores).…

  The earthquake that led to the family’s removal must have been quite a considerable one, for a few days later King Alfonso XII visited Málaga to see the extent of the damage for himself.

  I didn’t find the exact date of the earthquake in any of the numerous biographies, but after making some telephone inquiries I finally learned that on December 25, 1884, Spain was shaken by a severe earthquake, with six seismic shocks occurring between nine and eleven at night. The epicenter was in Arenas del Rey, less than twenty miles from Málaga. Many years later Picasso told his friend Sabartés: “ ‘My father thought it safer to be near the rocks.’ ” Sabartés himelf adds, “There [the family] spent anxious days waiting for the earth to settle.” Picasso’s sister was born three days after the earthquake; possibly labor was induced by the fright his mother experienced. So in the space of three days the three-year-old Picasso 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 through the dark city during an earthquake to a strange house and then to be present at the birth of his sister. In Picasso’s case two additional factors were at work: being encouraged to see by his father and being told to be silent by his mother. As a little boy, he began to perfect his way of seeing, but he was not supposed to put what he saw into words. All his life, Picasso was proud of his “discretion,” the result of his mother’s warning—one of his earliest memories—“not to say anything about anybody or anything.”

  Picasso’s mother liked to tell people that her son could draw before he could walk. His first word was piz, one of whose meanings in Spanish is “pencil” in baby talk. His father took the greatest pleasure in the little boy’s progress in drawing, a fact that surely did not escape the son’s notice. When he was drawing, Pablo no doubt received the most attention and encouragement from his father, attention that in an otherwise female household was naturally very important. His father’s fondest wish was for his son to win the recognition as a painter that he himself, to his sorrow, had never been given. And the son’s wish was for his father to love him.

  By the age of three, Picasso was already drawing from his father’s models; in particular he drew doves. This taught the boy to look very carefully, to observe an object closely, and to distinguish among the variety of forms. The earlier a child masters something, the more deeply it becomes imprinted and the more certain he is of success for the rest of his life. This is why, conversely, negative messages and experiences are so difficult to un
learn.

  Picasso had just turned three in October 1884. What happens to a child who has learned so well at such an early age to use his eyes, to observe his surroundings very closely and register every change, when he is subjected to as terrible a trauma as an earthquake? Perhaps his poem about Spain, written in 1936, can give us a faint idea:

  Children’s screams screams of women bird screams flower screams screams of beams and stones screams of bricks screams of furniture of beds of chairs of curtains of frying pans of cats and of papers screams of smells that scrape at one another screams of smoke that burns in the throats of the screams cooking in the pot and screams of raining birds who flood the sea which gnaws the bone that breaks its teeth …

  Because I saw in these words the verbal and in Guernica the visual portrayal of an earthquake as experienced by a child, I thought my discovery would have to be equally exciting for others. But I was mistaken. Picasso experts said that it had happened too long ago and that biography had no significance for the work of such a great painter. Again and again, I am deeply affected by facts that do not count for others—at first. But years later, when resistance has somehow been weakened, it occasionally happens that what was once so vehemently disputed is then taken for granted by others too.

  We don’t know precisely what was taking place on the Calle de la Victoria as little Pablo was being carried down the long street by his father, but we have a good idea. No doubt the boy saw horses lying in the street, contorted faces, children wandering around; he must have heard terrible screams of fear. Unfortunately, no scholars have yet tried to find out how severe the earthquake in Málaga was, whether houses collapsed as well, and what scenes of human misery and suffering took place before the observant eyes of a child who was later to be a genius. For lack of this information, we can turn to Guernica, painted in 1937, in which Picasso portrayed the misery of a war he never was in. He painted the scene in such a way that those who see it can experience their own feelings of horror, terror, and helplessness in the face of total destruction—provided they do not let themselves be distracted by the opinions of art critics. He even painted himself over to the right as the bewildered child in the cellar.