Pessimistic therapy laws #4: Thrice-changed adolescents

1. Children of neurotic parents (abusive, sociopathic, solipsistic or other-dissociated; simply put: immature) are, without an “enlightened witness,”* wounded and can’t ascend through right development in terms of ownership of their true feelings, independent thinking, organic self-esteem, autonomy and maturity. They become suspended, falsely re-balancing entities: attitude-heavy and attitude-bent, based on pain and self-medication and the emotionalized attitudes of their parents and others.

2. These young people become immersed in a technological and commercial culture formed by the neurotic adultosphere – childish and false-self adults (parents, media, teachers, advertisers, gurus like Jenna Marbles, Logan Paul, Mark Zuckerberg, rap musicians, etc.) who did not achieve right development and therefore did not ascend beyond their children, cannot conceive of children as children. This culture is exactly like the Borderline mothers who cultivate their twelve-year-old daughters to be snarling and contemptuous intellectuals, pseudo-savvy, equals of their parent in the slough of id. These youngsters, fed synthetic sophistication by adults who do not know what children need, are bent again. We have a race of teenagers with virus-like, pompous ideas and beliefs they do not really own, infantile sex, a mirage of wisdom, kids in pundits’ garb. Don Lemon, ask the fourteen-year-old what Congress should do about DACA.

3. And now: our new, contemporary theme of school shootings. These doubly-impaired youth are now forced into the worst faux-adult mentality, stripping them of the last shred of the child's spirit and innocence, forging their minds with the final failure of adult nurturant protection. No longer children, they are unmoored. Our culture has created life forms, in twelve- to nineteen-year-olds, that are far removed from what normal, healthy development would have created. Falsified selves from early on, they’ve swallowed and become a false culture, and now must absorb a quotidian trauma, a universal meaning that will taint their minds from morning awakening to bedtime. The last cultural hypnosis I remember was the ’60s hippie-and-anti-war movement. But that faded, and the young people had to be disenchanted to the (more or less) adult realm. Today’s commonplace murder of children in schools may be a stage that does not pass. What kinds of life forms will we see, when these thrice-annulled children are in their twenties and thirties?

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* Alice Miller's concept of an empathic witness for the child. In her discussion of Dostoyevsky, she writes: “Dostoyevsky, for example, had a brutal father, but a loving mother. She wasn’t strong enough to protect him from his father, but she gave him a powerful conception of love, without which his novels would have been unimaginable. Many have also been lucky enough to find later both enlightened and courageous witnesses, people who helped them to recognize the injustices they suffered, to give vent to their feelings of rage, pain and indignation at what happened to them. People who found such witnesses never became criminals.” (Alice Miller’s website.)