美国国家公共电台 NPR A Father's Cruel Mission To Create 'The Only Girl In The World'

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Maude Julien's childhood was so horrible it's difficult to read about in her new memoir¹. Her father wanted to turn his daughter into some kind of superhuman, so he treated her in a subhuman way. He forced his daughter to stay in a dark cellar at night to meditate² on death. He made her hold onto an electric fence to strengthen her will. And he kept her from most contact with the outside world for years. She somehow survived to become a world-renowned psychotherapist and to write this memoir, "The Only Girl In The World."

Maude Julien joins us from Paris. Thank you so much for being with us.

MAUDE JULIEN: Thank you so much for having me. I feel very honored to be with you today.

SIMON: Well, we're honored to be with you. The story, in a sense, begins with - even how your father met your mother. Not exactly a love story, is it?

JULIEN: Oh, not at all because my father took my mother away from her family when she was 6 years old. And my mother was from a poor family, and my father had made a deal with her parents. He would take good care of their daughter in exchange for this. Her parents had to agree never to see her again. He sent my mother to the university because - this is so sad - when he would let her have a daughter, the little girl would not have to go to school. And my father's mission was to create a superhuman uncorrupted by this world.

SIMON: As you were growing up, your father wouldn't even let you sit back in a chair.

JULIEN: My father believed the world was divided between those who were mentally and physically³ strong and those who were weak and lazy. For this, I had to undergo a physical and psychological training.

SIMON: Can you tell us about those nights in the cellar?

JULIEN: From the age of 6, I had to spend one night a month in the basement meditating⁴ on death. I sat on a stool, alone, in the dark, surrounded by rats. And I had a cardigan with small bells on it. I wasn't allowed to let the bells tinkle⁵, as it meant that I was moving. It was one of his exercises.

SIMON: There are just too many instances of abuse and cruelty to recount - I mean, the way he didn't turn on the heat, the way he made you bathe in his dirty water. He said he gave you his energy that way or something.

JULIEN: Yes. There was a lot of violence in what my father made me do. We could describe it as sadistic⁶. For him, violence was meant to make me stronger and to remind me that life was horrible.

SIMON: I can't bring myself to feel anything other than contempt for your father, and I never knew him. You're a professional. I mean, you're a psychotherapist. Why did your father act the way he did?

JULIEN: Oh, my father had a megalomaniac personality. And from a psychopathological point of view, we can consider that he was paranoiac⁷.

SIMON: I will leave it to readers to discover how you finally got out when you were a teenager. But I gather you still have nightmares about your father.

JULIEN: Oh, for a very, very, very, very long time because, you know, this kind of controlling and psychological indoctrination is very, very difficult to overcome. So I had to learn a lot to get out of my mental prison. I needed to understand what happened to me. And eventually, I became a psychotherapist. And I have now been working for 23 years in order to help victims to get out of the basement.

SIMON: Maude Julien - her memoir, "The Only Girl In The World" - thank you for being with us.

JULIEN: Thank you very much.

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