The body never lies, Alice Miller
-
Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Total Eclipse
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.
" -
ranc1 — 10 months ago(May 31, 2025 10:00 PM)
More:
Rimbaud’s friendship with Paul Verlaine is well known in literary history.
His longing for love and genuine communication initially appeared to find
gratification in this friendship. But the mistrust rooted in his childhood gradually
poisoned their intimacy, and this, coupled with Verlaine’s own difficult past,
prevented the love between them from achieving any permanence. Ultimately,
their recourse to drugs made it impossible for them to live the life of total
honesty that they were in search of. Their relationship was crippled by the
psychological injuries they inflicted on each other. In the last resort, Verlaine
acted in just as destructive a way as Rimbaud’s mother, and the final crisis came
when Rimbaud was shot by the drunken Verlaine, who was sentenced to two
years in prison for his crime.
To salvage the genuine love he was deprived of in childhood, Rimbaud
turned to the idea of love embodied in Christian charity and in understanding
and compassion for others. He set out to give others what he himself had never
received. He tried to understand his friend and to help Verlaine understand
himself, but the repressed emotions from his childhood repeatedly interfered
with this attempt. He sought redemption in Christian charity, but his implacably
perspicacious intelligence would allow him no self-deception. Thus he spent his
whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he
had learned at a very early age to hate himself for what his mother had done to
him. He experienced himself as a monster, his homosexuality as a vice (this was
easy to do given Victorian attitudes toward homosexuality), his despair as a sin.
But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true
culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she
could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of
drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to
open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained
obstinately shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his
childhood, to the feelings of the little child who was forced to grow up with a
severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her.
Rimbaud’s biography is a telling instance of how the body cannot but seek
desperately for the early nourishment it has been denied. Rimbaud was driven to
assuage a deficiency, a hunger that could never be stilled. His drug addiction, his
compulsive travels, and his friendship with Verlaine can be interpreted not
merely as attempts to flee from his mother, but also as a quest for the
nourishment she had withheld from him. As his internal reality inevitably
remained unconscious, Rimbaud’s life was marked by compulsive repetition.
After every abortive escape attempt, he returned to his mother, doing so both
after the separation from Verlaine and at the end of his life
The body never lies, Alice Miller -
ranc1 — 10 months ago(June 01, 2025 03:22 PM)
Rimbaud is an especially harrowing example of this. Drugs were unable to
act as a substitute for the emotional nourishment he really needed, and his body
was not to be deceived about its true feelings. If he had met someone who could
have helped him fully understand the destructive influence of his mother, he
would no longer have needed to punish himself for it, and his life might have
taken a different course. As it was, all his attempts to escape were doomed to
failure, and he was constantly forced to return to his mother.
Like Rimbaud’s, Paul Verlaine’s life also came to a premature end, as we
have learned. He died in misery at the age of fifty-one, due, on the face of it, to
drug addiction and alcoholism that completely consumed his financial resources.
But, as with so many others, the real cause was a lack of awareness and the selfsubjection to a generally accepted commandment that forced him to endure
without resistance his mother’s control and manipulation (frequently with the
help of money). Although in his younger years Verlaine had fervently hoped that
he could free himself of his mother’s control with the aid of self-manipulation
and substance abuse, by the end he lived off women who gave him money, many
of them prostitutes.
The body never lies, Alice Miller