ranc1 — 10 months ago(May 31, 2025 09:45 PM)

Alice Miller wrote the book about how trauma - emotionally immature parents can influence our body illness.
The body feels the pain - the pain is suppressed due to inability and lack of education how to process the pain - and it comes out as physical illness later on and as compulsions through the life. It is about inability to talk it out.
It is like not being able to be frank with a parent due to fear of punishment or later in life - due to fear of making the parent sad or hurt. This inability to speak out certain problems and conflict - is what will turn into physical illness later on in life.
Writing down the pain - through poetry for example - does not help with it fully - the body will rebel as long as the ambient is toxic and we don't keep our well being as priority.
She wrote in the first part of the book many literary historic examples using famous writers.
This is how I learned about Arthur Rimbaud and Verlaine- googled their lives and here I am.
Google description of the poets life is unclear. I wondered how and how much could someone be wild in 19th century.
Considered the police state and strict boring dull Victorian mentality of that era.
The movie certainly answers that question.
I love how both poets are authentic, honest, outspoken, without holding back, just raw emotions without any filter. In todays world they would be quickly labeled as borderline and narcissistic, toxic.
In the same time -
Rimbaud no matter how much shockingly open and crudely outspoken - he could not say the words I love you - even when Verlaine begged him to say those simple 3 words that are so easy to say…
there was blockage. That part is the pain in the body - created from bad parenting early when the child is too young.
That is the illness part. The trauma. The blockage to say I love you.
That is where the body keeps the illness - this inability to express love and total vulnerability and love.
She also wrote about other examples from other historic poets and known writers - and the pain - trauma is always the same - inability to confront the truth and speak it out.
As his internal reality inevitably remained unconscious, Rimbaud’s life was marked by compulsive repetition.
The body never lies, Alice Miller
More:
"
Rimbaud’s mother maintained total control over her children and called this
control motherly love. Her acutely perceptive son saw through this lie. He
realized that her constant concern for outward appearances had nothing to do
with love. But he was unable to admit to this observation without reserve,
because as a child he needed love, or at least the illusion of it. He could not hate
his mother, particularly as she was so obviously concerned for him. So he hated
himself instead, unconsciously convinced that in some obscure way he must
have deserved such mendacity and coldness. Plagued by an ill-defined sense of
disgust, he projected it onto the provincial town where he lived, onto the
hypocrisy of the system of morality he grew up in (much like his contemporary
Nietzsche in this respect), and onto himself. All his life he strove to escape these
feelings, resorting in the process to alcohol, hashish, absinthe, opium, and
extensive travels to faraway places. In his youth he made two attempts to run
away from home but was caught and restored to his mother’s “care” on both
occasions.
His poetry reflects not only his self-hatred but also his quest for the love so
completely denied him in the early stages of his life. Later, at school, he was
fortunate enough to encounter a kindly teacher who gave him the companionship
and support he so desperately needed in the decisive years of puberty. His
teacher’s affection and confidence enabled Rimbaud to write and to develop his
philosophical ideas. But his childhood retained its stifling grip on him. He
attempted to combat his despair at the absence of love in his life by transforming
it into philosophical observations on the nature of true love. But these ideas were
no more than abstractions because, despite his intellectual rejection of
conventional morality, his emotional allegiance to the code of conduct it
prescribed was unswerving. Self-disgust was legitimate, but detesting his mother
was unthinkable. He could not pay heed to the painful messages of his childhood
memories without destroying the hopes that had helped him to survive as a child.
Time and again, Rimbaud tells us that he had no one to rely on except himself.
This was surely the fruit of his experience with a mother who had nothing to
offer him but her own derangement and hypocrisy, rather than true love. His
entire life was a magnificent but vain attempt to save himself from destruction at
the hands of his mother, with all the means at his disposal.
Young people who have gone through much the same kind of childhood as
Rimbaud are often fascinated by his poetry because they can vaguely sense the
presence of a kindred spirit in it.
"