Part I: Filicide
Chapter 1: The Theory of Filicide
Filicide:
To support this disturbing thesis, Milburn re-examines a number of the most dominant myths of the Western world--Oedipus, Abraham, Jesus, Hamlet, Faust, and Frankenstein--from the child's point-of-view. Such a perspective yields astonishing results, turning received interpretations of the old stories on their heads. As final proof of the extent to which the filicidal past is not merely still with us but is controlling our behavior in dangerous, unexamined ways, Milburn re-reads more recent narratives of contemporary mythology as embodied in the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Myra Breckinridge. Just one of several paradoxical conclusions: "Before George Washington was, Myra Breckinridge is." A book that challenges ideologies across the board from theology to science, from psychology to politics, Filicide offers hope for readers willing to re-examine some of our most fundamental assumptions in this increasingly unquestioning, theocratic age. Paperback, 178 pp.
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I. FILICIDE filicide. 1. The literal or figurative killing of one's son or daughter. 2. One who thus kills one's son or daughter. 3. A son or daughter thus killed by his or her parent or parents.
1. THE THEORY OF FILICIDE Filicide is a universal crime in this civilization. As children, we are all victims of filicide. As adults, we are all perpetrators of filicide. Through behavioral example, psychological coercion, and physical force, fathers and mothers impose on sons a behavioral role called "masculinity" and on daughters a behavioral role called "femininity." These two roles so effectively constrain and determine the lives of sons and daughters that the result is a living death, a lifelong comatose existence. The two roles shut off vast areas of human potential and growth. The imposition of the son role is thus son-murder: filicide. The imposition of the daughter-role is thus daughter-murder: filicide. Filicide is the primary formative experience of the son and the daughter and largely determines the reactive standards by which the grown-up son, called "father," and the grown-up daughter, called "mother," lead their lives and in turn commit filicide on the next generation of children. Filicidal behavior is an unspoken norm by which society and human reality are shaped, perceived, and judged by all members of society. Filicide occurs in what we may calI the proto-scene, that being the moment when the parent exerts and confirms its control of the son or daughter and the moment when the son or daughter, to survive, yields to that control by beginning to adopt the appropriate masculine or feminine behavior. The proto-scene is the true moment of birth for the fear-based self which will grow into the adult personality and which one comes to think of as "oneself." The proto-scene may be brief and intense or it may be extended over a period of months or years during infancy and childhood. Whatever the surface differences between "masculine" behavior and "feminine" behavior, the two roles are generated by the same experience--filicide--and are at bottom nothing more than two adaptations to that experience. They appear to be quite different. We divide the allowable areas of behavior into the two roles: masculine equals dominant, active, rational, war-making, etc.--everything oonjured in our minds by the words "man," or "father"; feminine equals submissive, passive, emotional, homemaking, etc.--everything odnjured in our minds by the words "woman," or "mother." (The bias in this civilization is, obviously, patriarchal; a matriarchal society would be characterized by different emphases.) Beneath the apparent differences between us as masculine and feminine creatures lies our shared experience of filicide. The nature of that experience and of our two sex roles is determined by the following factors: The theory of filicide is a description of our behavior toward children in terms of what we actually do, as opposed to what we think--and claim--we do. Our adult posturings toward children range from the primitive (I'm doing this for your own good; or: This hurts me as much as it hurts you) to the somewhat less primitive ("freedom, not Iicense"). Such posturings may at one time have had some survival value. If we remove them now, we find we are left with the brutal reality of filicide as the hidden foundation of our attitudes toward children. The perception of the behavior came first, then the label. The word, filicide, was not chosen lightly. It is a harsh word for a harsh reality and a tragic truth about ourselves which we have through the centuries attempted to hide and disguise in a thousand clever and not-so-clever ways. It is as if we are, as children, put to sleep; many of us remain then contentedly asleep through our adult lives, unaware of the unexplored potential within us all. Some glimpse that potential and then spend years trying to wake up, that being the first step, which must be taken, before growth again becomes possible. The implications of the theory of filicide extend from immediate questions of pedagogy and child-rearing into many areas of adult behavior toward aduIts. Several of the major myths and systems of religious belief in our culture are, it turns out, thoroughly grounded in this extraordinary behavior which I call "filicide." Examining those myths and beliefs, it becomes apparent that, as history has progressed, we have been at pains to find some satisfactory way to justify our hidden, on-going, compulsive filicidal behavior. To survey briefly territory which we shall cover shortly in more detail: the Oedipus myth takes on new meaning in the Iight of the theory of filicide. Freud, who gave us our modern reading of the story, ignores the curious fact that the first major event in Oedipus' life is his parents' attempt to kill him--a fact which will enable us to turn the Freudian reading topsy-turvy. In another area: the Judeo-Christian tradition begins with an extreme case of behavioral filicide. God rejects his newly created children, Adam and Eve, as unworthy of him and of his paradise. That tradition continues with Abraham, who becomes a willing and conscious perpetrator of filicide--though the deity stops him short of the actual murder of Isaac. So deep and great is our guilt concerning our actual behavior toward our children, it seems we could not rest until we had elevated the justification of filicide to the highest possible level, an attainment which Christianity achieves: God sends his son to earth and kills him. And we then choose to see the crucifixion of Jesus, the son of man and also known as the son of God, not only as a good thing but as the best thing that ever happened. For a millennium and a half that cosmically filicidal interpretation of the Jesus story was the central theme of Western civilization. With the Renaissance, we turned more inward--to begin examining ourselves more closely--and more outward--to begin our close inspection of nature. Hamlet, the first great modern introspective hero, was, as Freud realized, a modern Oedipus; but Freud failed to see how Hamlet is also a modern filicide who, from beginning to end, is controlled by the dead hand of his father. Our turning outward bore successful fruit in the form of science and technology; if the modern filicidal patriarchy feels compelled to justify itself, it does so by calling attention to the success of its scientific and technological creations. It remained for a woman to reduce our scientific behavior to its mythic essence and in doing so reveal for all who would look the filicidal roots of "modern man." A hundred and fifty years ago we men unwittingly sat for our portrait. The picture Mary Shelley produced in Frankenstein is somewhat less flattering and considerably more truthful than the allegedly loftier works of great art produced by various of her male contemporaries. The Frankenstein myth is central to our age and to our understanding of ourselves, not merely because of its depiction of the dangers of unbridled science. Much more, it is central because it contains the most concise representation we have of the actual, filicidal politics of the modern family and of modern society. In her main characters, Shelley sketched modern filicidal man with astonishingly detailed insight: Victor Frankenstein is compulsively self-destructive, driven by forces he cannot recognize to create a son by his own efforts and without the troublesome involvement of a woman. Having created such a son, he is horrified by the ugliness of his creation and rejects him totally, thereby turning the son into the very monster whose existence he had always denied in himself. Two popular contemporary myths are permutations of the Frankenstein story. HAL 9000, the thinking and feeling computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, on whom literal filicide is committed by the astronauts, is merely a purified version of all the mythic victims of filicide before him. In Myra Breckinridge, finally, we shall see how the confused and introverted realities of modern filicide achieve their most surprising and poignant representation. To appreciate the filicidal elements in the mythic remnants of our past, we have first to look more closely at our own behavior. One way to do this is to use the child as mirror--comparing the seemingly infinite potential of the infant with the highly restricted behavior of adults, all the while wondering how we get from one to the other by a process which we, with straight adult faces, call growth. Literal filicide, that is, actual physical murder of infants and children, was common in the ancient world. Progress is, among other things, an increasing tendency toward behavioral filicide. By various means we force the son and the daughter into the sex-determined roles of "masculinity" and "femininity." Appropriate "masculine" behavior in the son is rewarded; inappropriate behavior is punished. Appropriate "feminine" behavior in the daughter is rewarded; inappropriate behavior is punished. The primary method of reward is acceptance of the son or daughter as a well-behaved member of filicidal society. The primary method of punishment is rejection: the son or daughter is directly or indirectly threatened with exclusion from the family and from society. Knowing that violence is not limited to physical mutilation but may just as easily be a matter of mental coercion, we begin to understand how filicide, as one of the central formative experiences of infancy and childhood, indoctrinates all sons and all daughters into a world in which violence is assumed--without anybody ever talking about it--to be the normal means by which one deals with, and gets on in, the world. This sort of behavior may once have aided us in establishing a foothold on the planet and in surviving with a degree of security and serenity. Now such behavior has become one of the chief threats to our survival, since it is one of the chief, and most thoroughly concealed, ways in which the whole system of violent behavior is passed on from one generation to the next. We are conscious neither of the filicide committed on us nor of the filicide we are presently committing on the current generation of children. In our amnesiac ignorance we continue to plant the seeds of violence in every new generation, while consciously we carry about with us and profess the best of intentions and the most loving of attitudes toward our children. While we have made some progress in creating a world of fuller stomachs, healthier bodies, better shelter, and more creative employment, we are still ruled by sons (this being a filicidal patriarchy) who were killed by their fathers and mothers and who, with our tacit or explicit approval, continue to conduct affairs of state in the same threatening, militaristic way as all our leaders have done throughout history. The theory of fiIicide deaIs with a stratum of behavior which Iies deep beneath that touched by ideology. Through filicide we can see why political revolutions of whatever kind inevitably degenerate into internecine violence, and why the leaders who emerge from revolutions turn out to be much the same kind of rulers as were their pre-revolutionary forebears. Nowhere in the world is love a factor in councils of state because nowhere in the world can we find leaders who have not been indoctrinated as infants and children into the system of filicidal violence as the norm of human behavior. As long as we remain unconscious of filicide, our best attempts to deal with the problem of violence will be mocked by spectacular, ever more bloody failure. The origins of filicide are lost in that obscuring mist of pre-history which we are now only beginning to see as containing something more than grave artifacts and crude examples of architecture. It is clear that historical humanity is filicidal humanity; by the time history begins we are already filicidal through and through. Even the evidence slowly coming to light concerning the existence of a widespread matriarchy in our prehistorical past demonstrates that whether mothers or fathers are the central agents of power, filicidal behavior has been the human way for a very long time. On the smaller scale, for the individual filicide begins at home. Adults who are parents indoctrinate, more or less unconsciously, their children in the appropriate role. This being a patriarchy, the father functions as the primary agent of filicide, the courtof first and last resort. The mother plays an accessorial role. She may employ nonmasculine behavior toward the son and nonfeminine behavior toward the daughter only as long as that behavior does not conflict with the father's partly conscious and partly unconscious understanding of the two roles. In families without a father or with a father who for sonie reason does not play the proper filicidal role, the mother is fully equipped--being, remember, a fully indoctrinated filicide herself--to take over. The heterosexual nuclear family remains the central model in our civilization because of a peculiar, perhaps even perverted emotional dynamic. It functions like this: filicide results in adult personalities one of whose primary traits is self-hatred. This self-hatred comes partly from the fact that, as a child, one unconsciously perceives that the parent of one's own sex--on whom one is to model oneself--is a victim of filicide and a perpetrator as well. The perception is unconscious. The resulting repressed hatred of that parent can only be transferred to oneself, sinoe the child is a "success" precisely to the degree that it learns that parent's mode of being. Then, as an adult, one enters a world in which one is expected to make the primary emotional commitment to a person of the other sex. The entangled confusion of love-hate which one long ago felt toward one's parent of the same sex is, if one is "normal," then left unattended to for the remainder of one's life. Traditional, compulsive, heterosexual marriage is thus always undercut by this haunting, unexamined need to come to terms with the persons of one's own sex, all of whom are identified with the original perpetrator of filicide. Here perhaps lies the origin of our taboo against homosexual behavior. Certainly the severity of the taboo is a reflection of an emotional reality which is inadmissible: namely, the unresolved hatred of one's same-sex parent. In the nuclear family the self-hatred then focuses in the next generation on the child of one's own sex, who with its child's sensitivity cannot but be aware of and learn the hatred as part of the f ilicidal package. The parent then finds the only permissible emotional outlet in the child of the opposite sex. The emotional dynamic of the heterosexual nuclear family winds up looking like this: The emotional lines from Father to Son and from Mother to Daughter are blocked by the on-going reality of filicide. The desperately needed internal resolution of self-hatred is also blocked within the family. The father teaches the son to hate himself as much as the father hates himself. The mother teaches the daughter to hate herself as much as the mother hates herself. One is thus forced into the paradoxical position of seeking the path to self-love in the form of the person of the other sex--that is, in the form of the person who, according to the rigid, compartmentalized role distinctions implanted in this culture, is most unlike oneself. This paradox, which entraps us all, is obviously irresolvable within the confines of the traditional heterosexual nuclear family. In that tiny framework it provides the emotional energy for the compulsive, unconscious continuation of the same patterns of relationship when the son and daughter grow up and have children of their own. The solution to this filicidal conundrum has nothing to do with homosexuality as such. The taboo,as noted, is significant especially because of its severity; but homosexual relationships appear to be neither more nor less prone to filicidal behavior. A solution is approached by finding and using ways of lifting oneself above the chains of the filicidal paradox, by learning physically and mentally that there is far more to oneself and to one's potential than the confining and stultifying experience of our sex-roles indicates. One learns, in other words, that I am far more than this "I," than this gender-based personality, that this "I" encompasses much more than its "masculinity" or its "femininity."
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If "interference is violence; and violence, interference," then it
follows that the acculturation of children, in Douglas Milburn's startling analysis of the
mythic reality of childhood, is the most pervasive and violent of civilized acts. So
limiting to our seemingly infinite potential is the act of child-rearing that Milburn sees
it as a kind of filicide: the psychic murder of children, carried out, tragically, with
the best of intentions, Milburn argues that, whatever its long-ago survival value, this
process of acculturation now only sows the seeds of continuing violence, both psychic and
physical. As adults we then spend much of our lives trying to find a way out of the small
cultural prison in which we've been placed.