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The Woman Who Lived in Pain

The Broken Myth of Alice Miller: 

We could have anticipated it in astrological terms. Even if just as little is known about her birth time as almost everything else in her biography. And not because the psychologist would have wanted to turn herself into the myth that she then became. But due to her suppression of what was her own. She was a woman with an earthly-earthy Capricorn-Sun, a pragmatist who was aloof, highly intelligent, deep and imaginative with this very difficult Scorpio-Moon that always had to exploit the depths and, above all, the crashes of the emotional down to the primal ground, where there is emptiness. Where either the ascent begins anew or death results.

With Jupiter at this sensitive, tormented predetermined breaking point between intensity, own power, and trauma. Scorpio. A catalyst that over-expands both possible poles of the Plutonian in life as the voice of all traumatized children until the endlessly possessive sensation turns in a giant, controlling cage of feelings and suppresses everything that is real. In addition to Lilith-Chiron in Aries square Pluto in Cancer. The crazy wound of the Black Eve in the battle with the abyss in her baggage. Her war trauma caused Miller to dissociate.

The woman, the daughter who always lived in pain – without any witnesses because she did not allow them in her Saturnian clarity and boundaries to the Sun and the controlling Moon. Until she gave birth to her son, who turned this myth into a mother and confronted her with her deficits alone through his existence as a baby, in 1950. Power and helplessness; narcissistic slight when the infant does not want to drink from her breast – from the dark worlds of her own Pluto, the Moon. This watches hermetically over the Scorpio-Moon when things get bad. A boy who must live with all of the shadows of her shadows throughout his entire life. Who can only uplift them when Alice Miller, the mother, uplifts them. But she does not do this. Who pulls the invisible iceberg beneath them from the darkness in which Alice Miller lives decades later – a part of the human being, the vulnerable woman, with all of her burdens. Jupiter places a luster and perspective over everything that pushes him from behind, from the unconscious corner of Sagittarius, its 12th house, the Scorpio. Whatever remains blind chokes when it is not voluntarily opened.

My father openly lived out his violence against and sometimes almost beat me to death. No, she witnessed everything but could not live with this guilt. And she therefore fended off her errors. (Martin Miller, interview in the Berner Zeitung newspaper)

Alice and Martin Miller, mother and son. She is the driven one, the appointed one, the goddess of non-childrearing, and revealer of what is done to children – talented or not. Who gives away her own son, bosses him around, or even psychologically bullies him. The voice of all the voiceless ones who have ever been overlooked, unloved, punished, or hit. Who apparently sacrificed her own experiences, encounters, pain, and yes, almost her entire biography of an extremely difficult childhood in the trauma of war and a distanced mother to the darkness of her demanding Moon. From which she – varnished with Jupiter's luster – above, in the visibility and then philosophy, made her accusation and her claim. He, the boy who came into the world under the severe transits across her natal chart, has his own Chiron in Sagittarius, which points to the mother's Moon-Jupiter. The injury through the view of the world, exaggeration, and colonialization in which Sagittarius and Scorpio are so similar to each other. She had Pluto on Jupiter-Neptune at that time and Saturn opposition Uranus. The chalk circle. And so she gives the boy away after his birth and silences a part of her past by pushing away his helplessness. The information about Martin Miller is limited to his birth month.

But he published his book on mother Alice as Pluto-Uranus, three years after her death, moved across the disruptive constellation of Lilith-Chiron-Pluto in her natal chart. This is not an accusation and certainly not a reckoning. Just a protocol, a description of what really was, and the person Miller beneath her theses. The True Drama of the Talented Child with the subtitle of The Tragedy of Alice Miller is about how suppressed war trauma had its effects in the family. The grief, needs, wish, and forgiveness of the child, lost behind the brittleness of the record-keeper. Alice Miller, the mother, as she undemonstratively becomes the "case." Toppled from the hopes deep down into the pitfalls of her own soul. Tripped by the trap of denial.

The horoscope of this mother is not complete since it has no time information. But the keys are quite obvious: A Scorpio-Moon, hyper-controlling, overwhelmed by nearby Jupiter, a so-called "bulkhead" according to Wolfgang Döbereiner, which has the effect of a congestion. Sagittarius is the antiscion of Cancer. Aspects of such mutual "shadows" in the zodiac with each other can become an autonomous complex in psychological terms, which circles almost hermetically within a horoscope. There is no access to the cocoon, except through Pluto in the mother's sign, which is in turn ruled by the Moon. Rocking in the trauma, forward and back, without a way out except through conscious access.

In Alice Miller's natal chart, this Moon-Jupiter in the shock-susceptible Scorpio has the effect of a barrier, a palisade against the rest of the world, and, above all, for the Moon's sake, also against the person's own sensation. It is a defense and dam against the person's own feelings, memories, thoughts, and images of childhood. All of this water is solidified within itself and simultaneously boils due to Jupiter's ignition. If necessary, also manipulative against oneself. Empowerment and absorption are the connecting link between Sagittarius and Scorpio. On the one hand as a compulsively optimistic expansion, and on the other as an emotional act of taking possession. While Scorpio pushes Sagittarius ahead of itself like a shield, senses it like a carrot in front of the nose, or can drive it through the inner landscapes, Sagittarius does not see Scorpio behind itself. The situation is similar with the compulsive belief concepts of a riotous Jupiter-Pluto which vents on behalf of the mission. And then the Capricorn-Sun square Saturn. The rule of the rule, the discipline of the discipline, with priority of the form over content. One must after all. Must, must. Stoop down? Conform? Survive? There is a context of fear and a hunger for structure behind this.

Perpetrators can only become aware of their guilt when they remember how it was when they were the victim. (Martin Miller, Der Spiegel)

And then the radical Mercury: The leading role, the sharp perception, and each of its disorders for Miller's pedagogic position of the necessary confirmed perception in how a child grows up are attested to by the broad opposition to Neptune. Here, in Aquarius and Leo, is also the source of her dominant distancing talent and simultaneously its subjective dissolution of boundaries that always flows into it. Experiences enter through this channel: deceived perception or the eternal question about reality. To her own son, she could confirm little of what he then experienced with her: rejection, suppression, and denials. His pain, as a child, at precisely the points of her failure could possibly have brought her own wounds back home – into the consciousness of Alice as a human being, and not as the theorist. She dissociated herself with Martin. Because the Moon is also the relationship to our own motherliness and not just to the mothers.

The Shunted and Displaced Child

The cool or radicalized distance of the perspectively evaluating mother and psychologist (also a question of the Scorpio-Sagittarius portions) led – as described by Martin Miller – into a foreign, false world in which Alice Miller, the great psychologist, collided with the mother who had herself once been the devalued and maltreated child. Her control by Capricorn and Scorpio ensured that this inner child (mainly the Moon in the natal chart) wants to know nothing about herself and the son if they are needy. This may also be a question of capability instead of wanting. Alice Miller grew up in an orthodox Jewish family in Poland, which only became clear much later to the son when he searched for her biography that she had hidden. She had made a secret of herself. Pisces-Mars, which rules Lilith-Chiron -- the wounds of anger about the chronically attacked and repeatedly broken backbone of autarky (Pluto square) -- frequently lets sugarcoating or other veils fall over consciousness. Until consciousness disguises itself in confusing settings. One of its headlines can be "self-deception." Another: Highest redemption of the self. A person has the choice. Both bring pain through perception. But many reflections of the ego monument, chaos in the subjective, which flows into Jupiter (and the Moon) and even the sharp Mercury and calms the latter with Neptune in Leo.

I had to erase my entire biography (Alice Miller to her son).

Alice Miller apparently had a strict mother with whom she did not experience warmth and who sent the eight-year-old to a relative in Berlin; for the first time, the restricted and regimented girl (who would later pass the control to the children) under Jupiter Trine Moon-Jupiter after a transit of Saturn to the Capricorn-Sun. During Saturn square the Scorpio constellation, Alice had to return two years later. After all, the Pisces-Mars does not have its own aquarium: It swims, flows, and often moves through borrowed territory. Closely connected with the South Node, the accustomed reaction remains blurred and not conscious of itself. It is difficult to come out of chaotic, preconscious rituals. In a now foreign homelike cosmos full of compulsion, pressure, and persecution, Alice was now completely alone again. In the middle of the war, in Poland, where her family is persecuted. She later "plays" this displacement and shunting of the child out with her son by giving him away when the bed-wetter becomes difficult. No one suspects this. Because Miller is an institution and not a private person. Not a human being but just a voice. She ensures this herself in the dissociation between the brain-Mercury and the Plutonian Moon portions. 

...All my life, I had to hear from the fan community that many people would have wanted such a mother. People actually do wish this as readers of her books. But I thought I was in the wrong film because I had this mother and she was jointly responsible for the drama that I had experienced in my childhood, which resulted in my book title: The True Drama of the Gifted Child. (Martin Miller,Berner Zeitung)

Moon-Neptune – into which Jupiter drags its intensive, painful, and repeatedly overriding Scorpio sensation – speaks for gender competition in the family. The world of motherly feeling as a superimposition until the individual liberates himself or herself. Alice Miller's Moon aspects present her with the greatest challenge that we can imagine on the astrological and psychological level. In such constellations, only those who reveal, honor, and allow their own pain to be personal instead of transcendent can heal it.

The Untouched Key

But Martin Miller grew up in a mudflat of suppression because Alice may have lastingly banned the mother of her own shadow from a rejected childhood and kept her out of her own feelings by turning them into theorems, but she could not deal with them. The yesterday that is not translated into today continues to boil on its own. Pluto ruled in Cancer, the sign of the family of origin and homeland, Miller's Moon and Jupiter – both the vision of the other person to which her own feelings are attached, as well as the fiery surface – the fighter under whose philosophy the actual helplessness of her core family (and, above all, the mother) can be found. Alice Miller had avoided this key to herself (The Untouched Key is one of her book titles) and reforged it in Jupiter's fire into a purely energetic perspective of what trauma can do to the life of strangers, other children, and other circumstances. Her own perspective got lost in the process. She rejected her own children as she shunted, formed, or controlled them.

When the boy is born and Pluto sits on Miller's Neptune and presumably moves into the square to the Moon and opposition Mercury, all of this must have surfaced in her again. The accumulation of a past, herself shunted, and her father in the ghetto. What she lacks, what she requires, what she has not learned as a woman and a mother takes the same path. Away. Time and again, Martin, the son who had immediately "refused her breast," was given away; the daughter who was born with Down syndrome was welcomed to the world six years later with horror at her genetic deficiencies. Pluto. Also the gene problem. Also the inherited old burdens. Martin is sent to an institution because he disturbs and later to a boarding school because he runs away and knows no other way – resolution through distance, through objectification: the principle of Aquarius. Mother's Mercury, the only category that can be depended on. He admires her; he loves her and is proud when she – rarely – takes him seriously and shares her opinion, ideology, and social thesis with him. Opinion is not dangerous.

The father, Andreas Miller – with Sun and Mars in Gemini and Moon-Saturn in Libra – is a Swiss sociologist who is intellectual to the core and purely identifies with the mind. He offers little support to counteract the concealed feelings of helplessness in his wife Alice with her dominant, intensive water Moon. But she also demonstrates that she is not a "victim" of her circumstances. When the boy is beaten, she stands there in order to later "prohibit" it. Control, Scorpio, and whatever this Moon has to offer his surging memories that are overheated by Jupiter. If he does not finally find himself and develop with himself and in close contact to his own, old feelings. The tragic aspect: The excessiveness of the experience in social questions prevents precisely this within Alice Miller. Because it satiates the Plutonian pressure on the personal trauma. Scorpio, the first sign that can always be seduced into going into the "one" form, the supra-personal, transpersonal, the concept, or the general representative judgment instead of resolving the personal experience within itself. Scorpio, the predetermined breaking point and basis of a self-distancing Aquarius as an abstract.

Eternal caterpillar and eternal chrysalis

Scorpio-Moon is a hard, intensive position – especially for every woman. Its passion easily turns into a court ruling. About the self and others. After all, the Moon as a counterpart to the Sun in the male horoscope contains the archetype of the inner luminescence that also comes out of the mother experience. While many men still identify more with their Sun and also live this identification with the worldly self, women (but also children) often more strongly connect the qualities of the Moon image in the natal chart with what they feel to be their self when they are asked about it. In addition to considerable development opportunities and challenges, the Scorpio-Moon also represents what is deeper and sometimes helpless, an emotional continuum (also for the mothers) that easily touches and superimposes upon the soul of the child in this position.

She feared losing me as the sensitive counterpart. That had always been her fear; even as a child, she always had to be there for her parents and rescue her family. [...] But she never tolerated the parity with me on an equal footing. (Martin Miller, Berner Zeitung)

The Plutonian reflects commitment and bonding. The emotional commitment between Scorpio-Moons and their mothers is often vehement for a long time, subliminally just as dominant as the individual's later commitment in the realm of emotions. If there is also a Moon-Neptune, mother's wounds may be so sharp, serious, lasting and dramatically inflexible that a child is unintentionally fixated on this cocoon. Eternal caterpillar and chrysalis. And this means that what belongs to this individual only rises up very late or too late from the inner compulsions. Recriminations against the mothers are often inevitable -- even though it is very important here that the child with Scorpio-Moon mother frequently simply looks through the glasses of the Plutonian. So they actually do not even have to "be that way." This purely involves very fine channels for certain aspects of life that are brought along and confirmed by the family settings. However, the trauma that is connected with the Scorpio-Moon as a possibility may exist of a sustained loyalty (in the system) of very deep, pure experience. This is an open channel in the child for the power and helplessness problem in the heritage, for processes of dying and becoming, and for the classic proximity of the life principle and the death principle. The parents' Pluto positions on the Moon of a child usually sends even clearer signals for the trauma that has actually been suffered due to the parents than a simple Scorpio-Moon.

But many factors come together here. In an analogy to their Moon position other people's children and other people's parents (Jupiter = others) was also Alice Miller's enormous topic. Immersed in the purgatory of the visions in which "something is missing somewhere" (Pluto) through the Sagittarius Ruler with Venus – which is actually so optimistic – in Sagittarius. At the same time, all of the soul substance is energetically purified, taken from the purely sensational level, and made into the topic of a "holy war" – to the mission of the female torchbearers.

However, people did not even know for decades when her own children were born and not even that Miller even had a son and daughter: Martin and Julika. Until now, everything personal about how they grew up – except for a few nuggets for the media – remained in the shadow of her works. Moon-Jupiter, the bulkhead. She did justice to this grand reputation of giving other children back their dignity and respecting them through dissociation. With attacks on psychoanalysis, behind the index finger that pushed the significance of childhood trauma into the foreground time and again. Also the defense against "childrearing" with its pressure and all of the compulsions.

But just as someone cannot not communicate (Watzlawick), it is also not possible to not raise children. This becomes blatantly obvious when Miller's undoubtedly key theories as a childrearing opponent are compared with the experiences of her record-keeping son. How intensely the mother was driven by her experience as a child, which she almost compulsively hides and how much she lacks empathy for herself is shown not only by her natal chart, but also by the son's look at an unadorned past. At some (presumably early) point she began to evaluate and diagnose her boy and forced him into therapies – a process of entanglement in her offspring's lives that undoubtedly was more closely related to her own entanglements in the life of her parents, the Pluto cocoon, than with her son. At some point, she apologized to him much, much later for her fanatic use of mental concepts and ideologies on him. Even though they were so free in principle (Aquarius-Mercury), they led back to the Moon and Pluto time and again through the chain of sign rulers. Without exception. An impressive picture of the dominant links in Alice Miller's natal chart. 

In astrology, the "charge" through the ruler and clinging to certain topics can actually be imagined like an anchor. No matter what kind of development of the disposition may also be expressed within the individual or how much a person is involved with the inner and outer images in the onionskin principle, it cannot be eliminated as the field of existence after all.

The End-Rulers of the constellations are a life task and ultimately the images of concentration from which a horoscope unfurls and explains itself time and again. Here, in the case of the woman who could not be a warm mother and therefore also fought once again against the traumatization of the children through childhood, ultimately remains like a stamp time and again: Water-Moon-water-Pluto.

This is the seal of one of the most vehement and direct emotional contacts and ability to be touched that can be found in female birth pictures. It is just as promising as debilitating and just as talented and direct as it is secret. Because what all water Moons have in common is that they are willing to experience the most intensive, deepest development and bear immense pain in the process in extreme privacy and simultaneously extreme demonstrativeness. While in case of unconfronted experiences an extreme fixation upon them as a concept simultaneously occurs in Scorpio, which frequently leads to the Moon remaining in the cage of the Plutonian. Where the directness of feeling can be avoided on behalf of an emotional system, which is a technique for repelling or controlling further pain. Sometimes until the person's own death. Alice Miller died in 2010 during the month that her son Martin turned 60. After a seemingly endless Neptune-Chiron transit square Moon and Jupiter.

I had hoped that she had so much respect for the finality of death that she would give me a sign that she now understood me. But she remained true to her pattern of suppressing the earlier problems. That I – of all people – was threatening for her as her child and that she increasingly equated me as an aggressor with her persecutors in National Socialism and war and made me into a monster was horrible for me. She had placated me like an enemy, left me with false beliefs, and at the same time fought against me behind my back. (Martin Miller, Berner Zeitung)

The combative Lilith with Chiron in Aries (with South Nodes in Pisces) proves that Miller draws as much strength from the attack as the chaotic unconscious allows, which is a standard reaction to the world. But precisely this is not made conscious. This is difficult especially for water-Moon women who draw from the original source of the emotional richness and instinctively have a strong attachment in the positive or negative sense with the female line of the family of origin. Experience has shown that they must at some point first dissolve their identification with the wounds of all mothers and children and then move on from there. They must guard, honor, transform, and heal the pain by pealing their way out of its dogma. No one relieves especially the conceptual, Scorpionic Moon of this task. The seduction of a Jupiter -- which for Alice Miller was like a sign of the visionary at the least, if not even the actual nature in the connection with the emotional level (a question of the birth time) -- was possibly a guarantee for her immense powers of super elevation in transcending the private horizon. They are simultaneously a gift and a curse. If she lived Jupiter, she suppressed the Moon – as is clearly indicated in the Sagittarius-Scorpio sequence in the zodiac. Scorpio, power and helplessness, appears as the motive and suppressed elements of Sagittarius, its 12th house. 

It is quite difficult to understand how people can turn into predators due to inner distress. When individuals are shortchanged emotionally during childhood, they later fight like animals of prey for their emotional nourishment. My mother always fought for emotional affection. When she did not receive it, she ditched people. (Martin Miller, Berner Zeitung) 

That perpetrator-victim triangles (and therefore an inner "victim cosmos") are frequently astrologically "inherited" through the three water signs is probably undisputed. The psychological defense and denial of a person's own sense of being a victim can become especially rigid in Scorpio with a Neptune connection to the same degree as it threatens to surface in the consciousness. The problem with these processes: Without knowing about and allowing the wave of fear, guilt feelings, and massive panic in view of the individual's own helplessness as a child, the bound, psychological energy of the former victim can easily grow into the overlooked perpetrator role. Everything that is related to the autonomous complex of powerlessness and power (a special Scorpio topic) – whether passive or active – only comes to light when it is allowed to come to light. Otherwise, it often escalates – especially in this sign of what has been inherited – into the indissoluble and familial transferred knots of overlooking, denying, exaggerating, playing down, and passing on.

Thou Shalt Not Notice

It is an irony of fate that Alice Miller of all people could distinguish the victim portions in famous perpetrators better than anyone else and always brilliantly deduced how the destroyed child became a destroying child (ESSAY "The Childhood of Adolf Hitler: From Concealed to Manifested Horror"). She was also vehemently criticized for this. Her Scorpionic sensing, this boundless empathy and the resonation of her emotional side in every pain that was not her own and had to be controlled allowed her to feel her own experiencing in others. But it did not help her son.

Seen as a monster by the mother when he no longer wanted to subjugate himself to her therapeutic setting in a major life crisis even as an adult, he struggled to fight against her shadow within himself and avoid a suicide due to desperation and entanglement in a cool family system. As mundane Pluto moved through Scorpio, she attempted to force obedience, adaptation, and pure "health" through her methods, negotiating with his therapists behind his back. Committed betrayal. Manipulation of the Scorpionic on the grounds of a hierarchical-pragmatic Capricorn-Sun that sees the world as a climbable mountain peak.

Mother and son. Alice and Martin Miller. I wish that the son – who now is himself a psychologist – had not written protocols, reports, simple lists, and explanations in the case of the mother. I wish that he had presented an accusation. For his sake. That he would have screamed out what he had lacked with all of his pain. What he had desired. What was done to him. Sandra Konrad, Hamburg psychologist, once wrote a very intelligent sentence: "Whoever does not feel guilty also cannot hand down guilt." The problem with Alice Miller's story is probably that she never even allowed her son the change to get really angry at her through her life between radicalism, denial, and the compulsion for vision. And therefore unintentionally handed down a dogma to him that she had so intensely fought in others as the title of one of her books: Thou Shalt Not Notice. The blindness toward the children, who are raised to be numb to their own feelings. But it is perhaps even more controversial to prevent recriminations through ambivalence and rationalization. Scorpio: control of the control of helplessness.

A traumatized Scorpio-Moon, blind to its own self, that maintains relationships with Jupiter and Neptune sucks – when things get difficult – the loyalty from those who must emotionally nourish it. Because it cannot nourish itself when it cannot know itself. Unfortunately, it also delegates the vital feeding of its own children to others. The measure of its desperate emotional numbness then corresponds with the heaviness of the cross that it must sometimes bear for a lifetime. Yes, perhaps Scorpio's greatest burden and corruption in general is the lack of self-empathy -- a chain without end that leads further and further if it is not cut in two. There were at least two people with whom Alice Miller had no empathy. Her son is one of them. She still does not see the other person, with whom she had to live for her entire life, at the end:

I have been able to empathize with so many people, but I could not do so with my son. (Alice Miller, 1998)

Freitag, 29. März 2024

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