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If that's even a good assumption about whole swaths of society. I noticed this once when I had to fill out a psych questionnaire for tests I needed to have done. They assumed everything traumatic enough to profoundly affect my psyche happened as a child.
Taking a family history is quite routine. Also, the questions can be intrusive, but that does not mean that important things will be decided about your mental health soley on the basis of that history.
Yes, you are correct that some psychologists assume all behaviors have their roots in childhood, but certainly they do not discount your current situation -- not even most of them. They have tests for that as well. You do not say when this was. If it is earlier than the 90s then psychiatry and psychology was practiced differently then.
That might be true of faculty, students, and staff at an elite academic institution, their prime clinical base, but is certainly wasn't true with me, nor with tons of people in society. For combat troops who've seen war, it is most certainly false.
Elite academic institutions? What's going on with you here. So you imagine privileged people have had no challenges? You are saying I think that some harsh stuff happened to you as an adult and affected you. No one, least of all Alice Miller, is saying that bad adult traumas cause nothing. No problems at all? Hardly.
I told you, I am willing to entertain that her ideas that the behavior arises from treatment they received in childhood if, and only if, we are talking about the people at the top of the food chain, and if we are talking about particular (and apparently somewhat irregular) propagation of techniques and very specific orders downward.
Why? I don't get that? Why only at the top of the food chain?
So if you want to talk about Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo, Addington, et al.'s childhood, fine. If you want to talk about the implementing torturers in the prisons, then respectfully, no.
Why not ordinary people? You think childhood only influences those at the top of the food chain?
AKA Smith mentioned Zimbardo. It isn't true he doesn't have causal theories, they are in his book, The Lucifer Effect, Chapter 16, starting on page 445 (in the paperback edition). He has charts and a multistep plan and the whole works.
My hardback has pretty much the same paging as your paperback.
On p. 445 of my hardback Zimbardo says: "Bad systems" create "bad situations" create "bad apples" create "bad behavior" even in good people.
I don't believe that anyone one is saying that people are born bad or that people are not influenced by life beyond their childhoods. Clearly Zibardo wants to say that grunts who torture ended up in a bad situation where they were give inappropriate power and that those people are not inherently bad. Leaving aside whether it is even possible to be inherently bad, he does not really contradict Miller. He might try if he read her, but I suspect he does not define normal childhoods as she does.
You are trying to compare apples to oranges.
Most people will behave cruelly if ordered to in the circumstances that exist in the prisons America has set up (see Gray, for instance, http://www.irct.org/Default.aspx?ID=1038 and scroll down).
But not all.
That isn't because everyone was treated cruelly in schools, it's because most people will behave cruelly, because, as Zimbardo notes, disobeying that order to torture is heroic, not normal. Torture stops when the system that causes it is dismantled (that is really Rejali's point, but could also be Zimbardo, or Arendt or many others), not when we put superior individuals in.
Ondelette, define normal. If normal means usual, then I agree with you but usual is not optimal.
A family is a system. A school is a system.
Families and schools understand children so little, and the rights and freedoms that should be given to children, that very few superior individuals are produced, who are not defying more than carrying through the lessons of childhood.
Causes do not begin with the adult situation/system that introduces torture. I find it odd that you wish to deny the impact of childhood trauma. I believe that people like Zimbardo have found some contributing causes.
When I said that he did not find root causes, I meant the causes that lie in childhood and influence all of us all of our lives.
Maybe you were full born from the head of Zeus?
Assigning cause is not the same thing as assigning blame.
