The Need to Punish
I want to emphasize that the “stranger” in us is bred by a culture that won’t accept the spontaneous expression of children’s aliveness and vitality. This aspect of a culture gives rise to violent behavior and is responsible for the development of deficient identities. Personalities formed by the processes producing the inner stranger were never able to develop trust as an underlying component of their personality. Instead, they take on a “false identity” that makes them idealize repressive authorities in the hope that they will be rescued by the very people who are their tormentors.
Under such circumstances there cannot be an interior life that is able to protect us from that “abstract nakedness” of being human which Hannah Arendt (1973) spoke of. This nakedness is exposed when a true identity is prevented from developing and its place is taken by a false identity based on outer achievement, an identity that falls apart when the social context makes such achievement impossible.
[…]
What fuels this process is the obedience imprinted by parental dictates - “I am punishing you for your own good.” Attempts to counter this principle by means of progressive child-rearing theories must fail because they do not recognize its innermost core of inner alienation beginning with birth (or earlier).
We are caught in this situation and bound by it. Patients in psychotherapy are searching, however blindly, for a way out. They became ill because they are struggling against the alienation of their psyche, even though they are not conscious of doing so. Their inner rebellion keeps them from adapting entirely, with the result that they are regarded as outsiders, soilers of their own nest, even betrayers of society’s norms. They enter therapy because they are seeking support to avoid being classified as “ill.” They want to feel like those who manage to act “correctly,” to be “successful,” “free of anxiety,” “free of depression,” “free of stress.” This too is a sign of overall alienation.
I would like to turn my attention now to the well-adapted, who are classified as “not ill,” those who compete successfully, who dominate, possess, and conquer - in other words, those who appear to be free of anxiety, stress, and suffering. The attempt to divide people into categories of ill and not ill is doomed to failure because it does not take into account the real illness that being a victim produces. If this crucial aspect of our development is ignored, then our understanding of history must remain incomplete. Our desire to understand human history will be frustrated as long as we are not capable of recognizing the ubiquity of the stranger within, an inability that comes about because we are forced to deny the terror and pain we were once exposed to. This prevents us from recognizing our victimization and its source, with the result that obedience is perpetuated because it provides a false sense of security. If we disobey, then we are overwhelmed by feelings of guilt.