Art Shaped By Trauma Of Childhood -- Alice Miller Observes Creativity Cast In Pain

``The Untouched Key:

Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness''

by Alice Miller

Doubleday, $17.95

Psychotherapist Alice Miller writes about child abuse, society's violence and the connection between them. It is her extraordinary claim that ``the simple commonplace facts of child abuse are not given a hearing; if they were, the human race would have greater understanding and wars could be prevented.''

Her first book, ``The Drama of the Gifted Child: How Narcissistic Parents Form and Deform the Emotional Lives of Their Talented Children,'' was written in response to what she observed during more than 20 years teaching and practicing psychoanalysis in Switzerland. Two more books quickly followed: ``For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence'' and ``Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child.''

The former includes a section on Adolf Hitler, specifically on how his upbringing spawned the ``lifelong insatiable hatred'' that destroyed so many millions of lives. The latter includes a section on Franz Kafka, showing how without knowing it, Kafka told about his childhood in what he wrote. Hitler in his crime, Kafka in his art - in incomparably different ways, each revealed with horrifying precision the suffering of his own childhood.

``The Untouched Key'' continues in this vein. Miller considers individuals whose lives were marked by either special creativity or destructiveness. Their childhoods offer keys to the character of their adult lives - keys that remain largely untouched by biographers and critics. This book is briefer but no less brilliant and, if possible, even more lucid than its predecessors, its theory wholly integrated with biographical examples and with illustrations.

Miller examines the lives of several artists, including Pablo Picasso, Kathe Kollwitz, Chaim Soutine and the comedian Buster Keaton. It is not her intention to explain their lives in terms of their childhoods; rather it is to understand their work as it was shaped by trauma, and as it in turn reveals the shape of that trauma.

At greater length, Miller considers Friedrich Nietzsche, taking as her thesis that the philosopher's works ``reflect the unlived feelings, needs and tragedy of his childhood.'' Nietzsche's ideas challenged conventional morality and provided inspiration for Nazism in pre-World War II Germany; young soldiers marched to war with his writings in their knapsacks.

Here is an instance where the encoded result of a miserable childhood was both creative and destructive - creative in the formation and expression of ideas, but destructive in the ways those ideas were employed by others. However, the young soldiers and their leaders misunderstood the philosopher, Miller contends.

``The call to war has essentially only one symbolic meaning for Nietzsche: it represents nothing other than declaring battle against the deadly coercion, lies, and cowardice that constricted his life so painfully as a child.''

Alice Miller writes with rare and profound wisdom. Her keen, compassionate insights have met not so much with skepticism as with sheer resistance: We can only hope that the truth will out.

Lauren Glen Dunlap is a Seattle writer and technical editor.