1. Ford, Gerald R., A Time To Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 178.Google Scholar The text of the pardon speech is in Lankevich, George J., Gerald R. Ford, 1913–: Chronology–Documents–Bibliographical Aids (Dobbs Ferry, N. Y.: Oceana Publications, Inc., 1977), pp. 115–18.Google Scholar Like many public figures, Ford relied heavily on writers close to him, who knew both the tone and substance of what he wanted, to draft speeches and publications. Since he regularly provided his own ideas, images, and emphasis, always approving the final version, it appears valid to treat important and personal materials issued under Ford's name – including the pardon statement itself – as his own expression. (After Harper & Row sued The Nation over first publication rights to Ford's autobiography, the manner in which it had been composed and released became the focus of a controversial Supreme Court decision in May 1985.)

2. Hersh, Seymour M., “The Pardon: Nixon, Ford, Haig, and the Transfer of Power,” The Atlantic (08, 1983), 76.Google Scholar Laird had resigned as Nixon's Secretary of Defense late in 1972 and returned to the administration after White House advisors H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were forced to resign in April 1973. (A half century earlier Laird's father had been the minister at the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Omaha, two blocks from the house where Gerald Ford was born.)

3. In discussing why the framers expressly withheld the pardon power from impeachment cases, Justice Story explained: “The power of impeachment will generally be applied to persons holding high offices under the government; and it is of great consequence, that the President should not have the power of preventing a thorough investigation of their conduct, or of securing them of the disgrace of a public conviction by impeachment, if they should deserve it. The constitution has, therefore, wisely interposed this check upon his power, so that he cannot, by any corrupt coalition with favourites, or dependents in high offices, screen them from punishment.” Story, Joseph, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, 3 volumes (Boston: Hilliard, Gray and Co., 1833), vol. 3, section 1495.Google Scholar

4. Hill, Christopher, A Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (New York: Norton, 1966), pp. 60, 196, 257, 279Google Scholar; Stone, I. F., “On Pardons,”Google Scholar Op Ed page of the New York Times, 10 9, 1974.Google Scholar In 1923 Governor John C. Walton of Oklahoma was removed from office by impeachment for abuse of his executive pardoning powers. See the impressive article of Boudin, Leonard B., “The Presidential Pardons of James R. Hoffa and Richard M. Nixon: Have the Limitations of the Pardon Power Been Exceeded?” University of Colorado Law Review, 48 (1976), 1–39.Google Scholar On the grounds for a post-resignation impeachment, see p. 36, note 184. Boudin also discusses the unusually general nature of Ford's pardon and points out (p. 36, note 185): “The House Judiciary Committee inquiry into the pardon of Mr. Nixon neglected to delve into the reason for the failure to specify the offenses pardoned.”

5. Stone, , “On Pardons”; New York Times, 10 18, 1974, p. 19.Google Scholar Cf. Labovitz, John R., Presidential Impeachment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 21, 93, 168, 229.Google Scholar Boudin, in the article cited in the previous note, observes (pp. 37–38): “While the Attorney General's views might have been dispensed with, a more serious question arises because of the conflict between the President's exercise of his pardon power and the Charter of the Special Prosecutor. That Charter clearly gave the Special Prosecutor the power to investigate, seek the indictment of, and prosecute Mr. Nixon during his term as President and thereafter.” After elaborating on this point, Boudin concludes: “All this makes inexplicable the failure to consult the Special Prosecutor. It is a nice question, of course, whether the President's violation of the Charter rendered the pardon void.”

6. Gallup, George, “Time Has Not Changed Views On Nixon Pardon,”Google Scholar Greensboro, N. C. Daily News, 07 25, 1976Google Scholar; Newsweek, 07 26, 1976, 15–19.Google Scholar

7. “Pardon Lost Vote for Ford, Says Betty,” UPI Story in Raleigh, N. C., News and Observer, 09 21, 1978Google Scholar; terHorst, Jerald F., Gerald Ford and the Future of the Presidency (New York: The Third Press, 1974), p. 227.Google Scholar

8. Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 179.Google Scholar

9. See Stone, I. F., “The Ford-Nixon Fix,” The New York Review of Books, 10 3, 1974Google Scholar; New York Times, 10 18, 1974, p. 1.Google Scholar

10. Hersh, , “The Pardon,” 55, 56, 58–59.Google Scholar

11. Hartmann, Robert T., Palace Politics: An Inside Account of the Ford Years (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), pp. 126–31Google Scholar; Hersh, , “The Pardon,” 60–61.Google Scholar

12. Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 4.Google Scholar

13. Hersh, , “The Pardon,” 61Google Scholar; New York Times, 10 18, 1974, p. 18.Google Scholar

14. Ford, , A Time to Heal, pp. 9–10Google Scholar; Hartmann, , Palace Politics, p. 135.Google Scholar

15. Hersh, , “The Pardon,” 55.Google Scholar

16. McCarthy, Mary, “Postscript to Nixon,” The New York Review of Books, 10 17, 1974.Google Scholar Psychological postscripts on Nixon were already being published by the time of the pardon and have continued to appear. See, for example, Fox, Frank and Parker, Stephen, “Why Nixon Did Himself In: A Behavioral Examination of His Need to Fail,” New York (09 9, 1974), 26–32Google Scholar; Renshon, Stanley A., “Psychological Analysis and Presidential Personality: Richard Nixon,” History of Childhood Quarterly 2 (Winter, 1975), 415–30Google Scholar; Abrahamsen, David, Nixon vs. Nixon–A Psychological Inquest (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976)Google Scholar; Brodie, Fawn M., Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character (New York: Norton, 1981).Google Scholar

17. When one journalist pointed to a link between Ford's boyhood experience with an adoptive father and the decision to pardon Nixon, his brief suggestion was ignored. Reeves, Richard, A Ford, Not a Lincoln (New York, 1975), pp. 114–15.Google Scholar And when another used published sources for a speculative potboiler suggesting Ford “might well be the most troubled President in our lifetime,” it was generally brushed aside. Rhodes, Richard, “The Demons of Gerald Ford,” Playboy (05, 1976), 82–84, 209–17.Google Scholar Conservative radio commentator Paul Harvey delivered a brief, upbeat version of Ford's story in his program of May 10, 1976.

18. During these hearings, one negative witness told the Senate committee that Ford had received treatment for depression from a New York specialist, but Ford and the doctor both denied this. TerHorst, , Gerald Ford, pp. 159–60.Google Scholar This same internist, an expert in psychosomatic illnesses, had treated Nixon for “stress” when he was Vice President, and in 1973 he was preparing a book dealing with political motivations. See Hutschnecker, Arnold A., M. D., The Drive for Power (New York, 1974), pp. 3–10, 20–32.Google Scholar

19. New York Times, 10 18, 1974, p. 19.Google Scholar Overt friction and jealousy within his own family (or staff, or team) always seemed the surest thing to draw forth Ford's well-contained emotions. Although shunning self-scrutiny, Ford discussed this topic with writer John Hersey, who spent a week at the White House in 1975. The generally affable President commented that nothing could get him angrier than “people feuding” around him. “It's so senseless,” Ford protested. “I just can't tolerate it, and it's more disturbing to me than anything.” Hersey, John, The President (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 87.Google Scholar (This profile originally appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, 04 20, 1975.)Google Scholar

20. Ford, Gerald R. and Stiles, John R., Portrait of the Assassin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), pp. 7–8.Google Scholar Undoubtedly Ford's personal story can add insights to his handling of other presidential decisions not mentioned here, such as the nomination of Nelson Rockefeller for Vice President (as suggested to him by Nixon), the handling of the Mayaguez case, or the treatment of draft evaders. For example, on the termination of the conflict in Vietnam, see Casserly, John J., The Ford White House: The Diary of a Speechwriter (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1977), pp. 80–81.Google Scholar (Ford's background may even suggest for some why a resort in the Rocky Mountains and a spot among the wealthy in Southern California, outside Los Angeles, became his preferred family retirement locations.)

21. Ford, , A Time to Heal, pp. 42–44Google Scholar; terHorst, Gerald Ford, pp. 27–28.Google Scholar For the ancestry of Ford's parents, see the vertical file marked “GRF: Genealogy,” Gerald R. Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Though the divorce was actually complete by the time he was six months old, it seems Ford either did not learn or never consciously acknowledged that fact. He described the first childhood picture in the autobiography as “taken when I was two, soon, after my mother and father were separated.”

22. Folder marked “Vice Presidential Personal and Legal Affairs (Parents' Divorce Case)” in box 88 of the Ford vice presidential papers, Ford Library (cited hereafter as “Parents' Divorce Case” File). In act I, scene ii of The Tempest, Shakespeare deals perceptively with the interaction between a protective parent and an adolescent regarding unpleasant events that occurred before the child was three. Fifteen-year-old Miranda notes that her father has “often begun to tell” her about her background but has always stopped, and that she has never pressed for details. (“More to know did never meddle with my thoughts.”) Prospero, who assumes his daughter to be ignorant of the time before they came to their current home since she was then less than three years old, finds that in fact she has retained images of how she was nurtured, though they are “far off, and rather like a dream.” As Prospero tells her more about the quarrels that broke apart the wealthy family and forced them into exile, Miranda reacts, as children often do in such circumstances, by feeling she must have been a terrible burden to the parent: “Alack, what trouble was I then to you!”

23. TerHorst, , Gerald Ford, p. 49nGoogle Scholar; Ford, , A Time to Heal, pp. 42–43.Google Scholar

24. Shearer, Lloyd, “President Ford's ‘Other’ Family,” Parade, 09 15, 1974, 4–7.Google Scholar

25. Shearer, , “President Ford's ‘Other’ Family,” 7Google Scholar; Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 47.Google Scholar

26. Shearer, , “President Ford's ‘Other’ Family,” 7.Google Scholar

27. Ford, , A Time to Heal, pp. 42–43.Google Scholar

28. Letter to the author from Wilson, Don W., Director of the Ford Library and Museum, 03 19, 1985Google Scholar; Hersey, , The President, p. 90.Google Scholar A copy of the elder Ford's Selective Service registration, listing no “child under 12” to support, was mailed to the White House in 1976; in his note of thanks for the document President Ford stated, “It certainly is interesting to study it.” The form lists the registrant's birth year as 1889 (though it is recalled as 1890 elsewhere) and gives his employment as “Secy-Treas., Century Fuel and Material Co.” See “GRF: Genealogy” file, Ford Library.

29. Rhodes, , “The Demons of Gerald Ford,” 83Google Scholar; terHorst, Gerald Ford, p. 28.Google Scholar

30. Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 43.Google Scholar

31. TerHorst, , Gerald Ford, p. 34Google Scholar; Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 45.Google Scholar

32. Quoted in Sheridan, Terence, “Portrait of the Next President as a Young Man,” New Times, 06 14, 1974, p. 16.Google Scholar

33. Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 45.Google Scholar After he became President, a woman at a dinner party observed to Ford: “You're one of the few odd people who do things left-handed when you sit down, but you're right-handed when you stand up.” Until then, he had never noticed this aspect of his ambidexterity. Hersey, , The President, p. 91.Google Scholar (The slight speaking problems which remained with Ford in adult life could also have had some relation to personal uncertainties or emotions he felt but could not fully express.)

34. Hersey, , The President, p. 86Google Scholar; Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 44.Google Scholar

35. TerHorst, , Gerald Ford, p. 39.Google Scholar

36. “I grew up in Karlsruhe in southern Germany as the son of a pediatrician,” Erikson relates. “All through my earlier childhood, they kept secret from me the fact that my mother had been married previously; and that I was the son of a Dane who had abandoned her before my birth. They apparently thought that such secretiveness was not only workable (because children then were not held to know what they had not been told) but also advisible, so that I would feel thoroughly at home in their home. As children will do, I played in with this and more or less forgot the period before the age of three, when mother and I had lived alone.” When he discerned the truth as a young man, he “became intensely alienated” from his family, created a new Danish name for himself, and eventually dedicated decades to understanding his own identity crisis and those of others. (Erikson's approach of consciously confronting his inherited dilemma was, as we shall see, in marked contrast to Ford's response to a similar situation.) Erikson, Erik H., “‘Identity Crisis’ in Autobiographic Perspective” in Life History and the Historical Moment (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 27–28.Google Scholar On Lewis Mumford's distance from an unknown father, see Sketches From Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford, The Early Years (Boston: Beacon, 1983), pp. 25–26.Google Scholar

37. Hersey, , The President, p. 89Google Scholar; Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 47.Google Scholar

38. Ford, , A Time to Heal, pp. 46–47.Google Scholar In recent years the early lives and autobiographical recollections of many famous figures have been scanned for clues of adult behavior. For a good introduction to the problems and possibilities of this approach, see the chapter on Brown, John in Davidson, James West and Lytle, Mark Hamilton, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (New York: Knopf, 1982).Google Scholar In Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Knopf, 1975)Google Scholar, chapter 2, Michael Paul Rogin cites relevant literature in discussing a president who grew up with no living father and a mother who encouraged him to fight – in contrast to Ford, with two fathers and a mother who taught that rage must be channeled or suppressed.

39. Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 47.Google Scholar The scouting reference appears in the affidavit of Ford, Dorothy G. of 10 10, 1930Google Scholar, “Parents' Divorce Case” File, Ford Library.

40. The following paragraphs combine the account given in A Time to Heal, pp. 47–48Google Scholar, with related interviews in the works by terHorst, Hersey, and Shearer cited above.

41. TerHorst, , Gerald Ford, p. 40.Google Scholar

42. Ford, , A Time to Heal, pp. 48–49.Google Scholar Since the company was apparently founded late in 1929, this recollection of the summer of 1930 seems confused on some count. Cf. note 47 below.

43. Ibid. Whether or not it is significant that President Ford campaigned to lower the national highway speed limit to fifty-five miles per hour, there is no doubt that cars often had a symbolic importance to him. Judging by his own accounts of the first encounter with Mr. King, from then on he identified his real father closely with the shiny new Lincoln he had been driving. Years later, when thrust into national office, he told the public pointedly, “I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln.” On the surface the remark seemed a clever declaration of modesty. It may indeed have been a reference to the famous midwestern Republican who observed that a house divided against itself could not long endure, but at another level it referred less to a former president than to a deceased King. Since the purchase of a Lincoln had brought Jerry face to face with Leslie King, his own subsequent acquisition of a Ford may suggest an ambivalent effort to imitate, compete with, and distance himself from his real father – all at once.

44. Ibid., p. 49.

45. “The most revealing anecdote I know about Ford's character,” wrote Ron Nessen, the White House press secretary who worked with him closely for several years, “concerns an incident that occurred one Christmas when he was taking a vacation from the White House with his family at Vail, Colorado. One night while the family was eating dinner at their rented stone and glass chalet, one of their dogs had an accident on the floor. A red-jacketed White House steward rushed to clean up the mess. Ford got up from the table, took the rag away from the steward and wiped up the mess himself. ‘No man should have to clean up after another man's dog,’ the president told the steward. To use an inelegant, but accurate, metaphor, Ford's role in history was to clean up other people's messes.” According to another Nessen vignette: “Ford's suit was stained by cow manure during a visit to a dairy farm in Wisconsin. ‘A cow just shit on the president,’ one member of the president's entourage whispered. ‘Why not?’ a Secret Service agent quipped. ‘Everybody else does.’” Nessen, Ron, It Sure Looks Different from the Inside (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1978), pp. xiv, 341.Google Scholar Cf. Hartmann, , Palace Politics, pp. 159–60.Google Scholar

46. “Parents' Divorce Case” File, Ford Library.

47. TerHorst, , Gerald Ford, p. 37Google Scholar (cf. Hersey, , The President, p. 63)Google Scholar; Shearer, , “President Ford's ‘Other’ Family,” 6.Google Scholar In his autobiography, Ford's only reference to the summer of 1931 concerns working at the paint factory to earn money for college; he says nothing about the following summers, when he would have been 19 and 20.

48. Ford, , A Time to Heal, pp. 50–51, 54–55.Google Scholar Cf. Hersey, , The President, pp. 89–90.Google Scholar

49. Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 55Google Scholar; Shearer, , “President Ford's ‘Other’ Family,” 6Google Scholar; “Parents' Divorce Case” File, Gerald R. Ford Library. Ford's half-sister, Marjorie King Werner, recalled his 1936 visit clearly for Shearer: “I sort of heroworshipped Jerry that summer. He was the big man from Yale. We used to take long walks in Riverton together before he went up to Yellowstone. He was understanding and sympathetic, and I was a wide-eyed teenager. I've always remembered him with fondness and kindness. He looks just like our father.”

50. Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 56Google Scholar; “Parents' Divorce Case” File, Ford Library.

51. “Parents, Divorce Case” File, Ford Library.

52. “Parents' Divorce Case” File, Ford Library.

53. Ford, , A Time to Heal, pp. 56–57.Google Scholar

54. Ibid., p. 57.

55. TerHorst, , Gerald Ford, pp. 55, 44–51.Google Scholar

56. Ibid., p. 56.

57. During his week inside the White House, John Hersey was struck by a talk Ford gave to model high school students who had won a trip to Washington, as he had a generation before. “This Government of ours has three coequal branches,” Ford told them, discarding the briefing notes from his staff to deliver a personal civics lesson. “We have a system of checks and balances,” he continued, in a manner that must have seemed patronizing to some of the young visitors. The Founding Fathers “had very strong feelings that the best way to protect individual freedom and to meet challenges from day to day was to keep this system of checks and balances in each branch strong—.…” Hersey, who had been following the President's every word for several days, remarked that Ford delivered “the central passage of this simple lecture with an intensity of emotion that I have not heard in anything he has said up to this time.” Hersey, , The President, p. 63.Google Scholar

58. TerHorst, , Gerald Ford, p. 56Google Scholar; Brodie, , Richard Nixon, pp. 28, 31–32, 99.Google Scholar

59. Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 34.Google Scholar

60. Ibid., p. 68; Terhorst, , Gerald Ford, p. 63.Google Scholar Ford's mother (who died in 1967—as did Nixon's somewhat similar mother) put a sign over her bed after Ike's and Nixon's 1952 victory stating, “The Vice President Slept Here.”

61. TerHorst, , Gerald Ford, pp. 66, 69–70, 73Google Scholar; Hersh, , “The Pardon,” 56.Google Scholar

62. Hersh, , “The Pardon,” 56.Google Scholar For Ford's recollections, stressing party pressures, see Hersey, , The President, pp. 140–41.Google Scholar For the view that Ford was not simply a “patsy or clever hod carrier for the Nixon Administration” in this instance, but was also moved by personal forces, see Rhodes, , “The Demons of Gerald Ford,” 216.Google Scholar

63. Interestingly, Ford's piece stressed the value of impeachment for creating order, not disrupting it. He traced its origins in the Constitution to the need felt by the framers for “protection from the arbitrary abuse of executive power” and for “an extraordinary way of removing a President” as “the last recourse against presidential abuse.” Noting that the “literature of impeachment is limited and the precedents are few,” Ford challenged the common misconception “tha't the impeachment process, or even the prospect of its use by Congress, is somehow destructive of the cherished constitutional principle of separation of powers.” He concluded that, “Far from being a threat to the tripartite system of federal government, impeachment is an integral part of it.” Representative Ford, Gerald R., “Impeachment: A Mace for the Federal Judiciary,” Notre Dame Lawyer, 46 (Summer, 1971), 671, 676.Google Scholar

64. Rhodes, , “The Demons of Gerald Ford,” 83, 217.Google Scholar

65. Ford, and Stiles, , Portrait of the Assassin, pp. 13–25Google Scholar; Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 76Google Scholar; Hersey, , The President, pp. 33–34.Google Scholar The FBI report by Cartha D. DeLoach is quoted in Hersh, , “The Pardon,” 55.Google Scholar The working drafts and a full draft of the Oswald biography are in the John R. Stiles papers at the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

66. TerHorst, , Gerald Ford, pp. 82–83Google Scholar; Ford, and Stiles, , Portrait of the Assassin, pp. 494, 497.Google Scholar

67. Ford, and Stiles, , Portrait of the Assassin, pp. 390–91, 490–91.Google Scholar

68. Ibid., pp. 392–93. Apparently Ford did not pick up the fact that Marina, Oswald's Russian wife, was an eldest child who discovered in early adulthood that she had an unknown father. See McMillan, Priscilla Johnson, Marina and Lee (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 34–37.Google Scholar

69. Ford, and Stiles, , Portrait of the Assassin, pp. 70–71, 487, 490.Google Scholar Ford must have been struck by John Pic's testimony regarding the divorce of his parents when he was an infant, his mother's suppression of the story, her later marriage to a likable man who was a strict disciplinarian, and the stepson's furtive interest in the identity of his real father. Warren Commission, Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), volume XI, pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

70. Ford, and Stiles, , Portrait of the Assassin, p. 391.Google Scholar “It is only too easy to look at someone else's life from a safe vista of comfort and success and pass judgment. Often it is the brightness of memories of a happy time that saves each and every one of us from getting lost in the plunging events of our adult lives,” the biographers stated. “Everything seems so orderly in the time of our youth. What happens in the outside world happens to ‘other people,’ not to us. Hardships, wars, assassinations-these are things that in time belong to history, not to us as individuals. But when they impinge on our lives, unexpectedly, they come as hard to one as to another.”

71. Ibid., pp. 70–71, 483–87.

72. Ibid., pp. 496–97.

73. Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 6.Google Scholar

74. Ibid., p. 9.

75. The modes of adult behavior prompted by traditional styles of childrearing have been examined suggestively in the recent works of Dr. Alice Miller. Frequently, according to Miller, , “The child's intense anger at the parents, being strictly forbidden, is simply deflected onto other people and onto himself, but not done away with.”Google Scholar She continues: “Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on. If I can feel outrage at the injustice I have suffered, can recognize my persecution as such, and can acknowledge and hate my persecutor for what he or she has done, only then will the way to forgiveness be open to me. Only if the history of abuse in earliest childhood can be uncovered will the repressed anger, rage, and hatred cease to be perpetuated. Instead, they will be transformed into sorrow and pain at the fact that things had to be that way. As a result of this pain, they will give way to genuine understanding, the understanding of an adult who now has gained insight into his or her parents' childhood and finally, liberated from his own hatred, can experience genuine, mature sympathy. Such forgiveness cannot be coerced by rules and commandments; it is experienced as a form of grace and appears spontaneously when a repressed (because forbidden) hatred no longer poisons the soul.” For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (English edition, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), p. 248.Google Scholar

76. Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 34.Google Scholar Miller observes that often, “A child cannot acknowledge the negative sides of his or her father, and yet these are stored up somewhere in the child's psyche, for the adult will then be attracted by precisely these negative, disavowed sides in the father substitutes he or she encounters.” Miller, Alice, For Your Own Good, p. 72.Google Scholar

77. Ford, , A Time to Heal, pp. 33, 35–37.Google Scholar

78. Ibid., pp. 26, 32, 41; Lankevich, , Gerald R. Ford, p. 108.Google Scholar

79. Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 17.Google Scholar

80. Lankevich, , Gerald R. Ford, p. 117Google Scholar; New York Times, 10 18, 1974, pp. 18–19.Google Scholar

81. Ford, , A Time to Heal, pp. 201–202.Google Scholar

82. Nessen, , It Sure Looks Different from the Inside, p. 36.Google Scholar

83. Ford, , A Time to Heal, p. 5.Google Scholar

84. Miller, , For Your Own Good, p. 241.Google Scholar In exploring what makes such patterns commonplace, Miller states in a sweeping but apt summary that, “The individual psychological stages in the lives of most people are:

1. To be hurt as a small child without anyone recognizing the situation as such

2. To fail to react to the resulting suffering with anger

3. To show gratitude for what are supposed to be good intentions

4. To forget everything

5. To discharge the stored-up anger onto others in adulthood or to direct it against oneself”

Miller goes on to observe that “If the tragedy of a well-meaning person's childhood remains hidden behind idealizations, the unconscious knowledge of the actual state of affairs will have to assert itself by an indirect route. This occurs with the aid of the repetition compulsion. Over and over again, for reasons they do not understand, people will create situations and establish relationships” in which they try, often at great cost to themselves or others, to rework the long buried events. Such persistent efforts of the subconscious to reconcile primary relations can be remarkably elaborate and may even bring fleeting satisfaction. “If the underlying rage has not been experienced, however, the reconciliation is an illusory one.” Ibid., pp. 106, 263, 252–53.