Lloyd deMause

[HERO]

IEI

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Here are the quotes:

-from What the British Can Do To End Child Abuse (2006) by Lloyd deMause; pp. 13-16 [ADDITIONAL PROGRAMS THAT CAN HELP ELIMINATE CHILD ABUSE]: There are three different programs beyond anti-hitting laws and financial aid that have been shown to drastically reduce child abuse. All have been regularly reported upon in my Journal of Psychohistory (...) The first is what has been called Community Parenting Centers, like the one started 23 years ago in Boulder, Colorado. Their mission is "to relieve isolation, reduce the stress of parenting and prevent child abuse and neglect by providing outreach and a place where families can receive support, education and develop a sense of community." Unlike the British Sure Start centers -- which are more day care oriented and aim mainly at helping poor parents find child care while they work -- Community Parenting Centers (a) give lectures by more experienced parents for new parents, (b) have play groups for children with puppet shows that demonstrate parent-child interactions, (c) give post-partum depression assistance, (d) provide help for immigrants and unmarried mothers, (e) give talks on how to set limits for toddlers, and (f) even have free home visits to new mothers by volunteers who give pediatric and psychological help (home visits have been found to cut child abuse in half). The centers are free to all and quite inexpensive to run, especially since it has been shown that for every dollar invested in better parenting by the Center the state saves over a hundred dollars in later costs of social services, hospital costs and jails. The reduction of child abuse in Boulder and in other centers, such as the Parent Child Center Network in Vermont and the Hawaii Healthy Start Program, has been substantial.
A second child support program is the Home Visiting Programs run in Boulder and several other cities that visit weekly in their homes mothers who have shown by their fears of handling their newborn or by post-partum depression that they are potentially neglectful or abusive and need more help in parenting. Home Visiting is preventive, not intrusive; it is not at all the same as social workers visiting homes to see if they need to remove the children to protect them. It involves paraprofessionals who can visit hundreds of families and who can give person-to-person help in working through emotional problems. In Colorado, the cost of operating both the Community Parenting Centers and Home Visiting Program can be covered by a 0.1% "Children's Sales Tax," surely a tiny amount when one recognizes that the costs to society of a career criminal or drug user is over a million dollars for each youth who has been abused as a child.
A third effective program for parenting was recently started in New York City by Margaret R. Kind, M.D., a psychiatrist, who taught a course on parenting in the city school system to 30 high school classes. It is, of course, revealing of our priorities that although parenting is one of the most important jobs in every nation in the world, there has until now never been as far as I am aware any actual courses teaching it in any school. Students taking Kind's course learn about children's needs for love, attachment, commitment, admiration, toleration and empathy, and learn how to create discipline without distress-causing punishment, discomfort or physical pain. Students are surprised to learn how important early relationships are to the infant, and go through the parenting stages with an excellent textbook, The Six Stages of Parenthood. They are frequently surprised by how much time caring for an infant takes, and begin during their teens to plan their own lives so they can be available to the child as they grow up. What is most promising is how enthusiastic the students are about taking the course. I myself read a large stack of the final comments about the course, and they not only praised how much they learned -- both what to do and what not to do -- even if it was different from what their parents did, but they wrote things like, "Now I can be a successful parent! I was not sure before that I could" and "I think more people should have the opportunity to take a course like this, and avoid a lot of mistakes...mistakes that are a matter of life and death." As Kind puts it, "The students loved the course, and they, themselves, suggested that it be mandated to be taught to all high school students! Their enthusiasm was remarkable, well expressed, and gratifying."

- pp. 18-20 [SURE START ISN'T ENOUGH]: Indeed, the end of child abuse could eventually mean the end of much of the criminal system. As James Gilligan, a prison psychiatrist who has spent his life interviewing criminals, says in his findings:

In the course of my work with the most violent men in maximum-security settings, not a day goes by that I do not hear reports of how these men were victimized during childhood. Physical violence, neglect, abandonment, rejection, sexual exploitation, and violation occurred on a scale so extreme, so bizarre, and so frequent that one cannot fail to see that the men who occupy the extreme end of the continuum of violent behavior in adulthood occupied an extreme end of the continuum of violent child abuse earlier in life. As children, these men were shot, axed, scalded, beaten, strangled, tortured, drugged, starved, suffocated, set on fire, thrown out of windows, raped, or prostituted by mothers who were their pimps.

Obviously the costs of improving child care are small compared to the enormous costs of the crimes produced by creating time bombs rather than useful citizens. Even the costs of the mental health system are a result of child abuse. As Brett Kahr found when he began to work in the back wards of a British psychiatric hospital with people diagnosed as "schizophrenics,"

I soon discovered that many of my patients had experienced profound death threats and attempts on their lives in childhood...One of my patients first entered a psychiatric hospital at the age of eighteen because his mother kept chasing him around the family home wielding a carving knife and shouting, 'I will kill him. I will kill him.'"

Brett's insights have recently been confirmed by major studies showing that the overwhelming majority of schizophrenics and other serious psychiatric patients were horribly abused as children and that their hallucinations were simply flashbacks to dissociated early abusive events. Saving the costs of maintaining psychiatric hospitals and the additional costs of other emotional disorders -- such as depression, delinquency and other anti-social behavior -- adds to the results that can be expected as the programs I have suggested become implemented.
Beyond all these internal costs, the trillions of pounds spent on unnecessary wars are, according to the findings of psychohistory, outcomes of abusive childrearing. When parents abuse their children -- especially their boys -- they grow up insecure and fearful of again being dominated, and re-enact their childhood fears by turning their nations into "Killer Motherlands" they can fuse with and then finding "Bad Boy enemies" in other countries to punish for their own forbidden needs. Those nations -- like Sweden -- who reduce child abuse to negligible quantities simply do not need wars to restore their "anxious masculinities." The cost savings from the ending of war are obvious, and far, far more than the costs of reducing child abuse.


- from The History of Childhood (Edited by Lloyd deMause); pp. 1-2 [Chapter 1: The Evolution of Childhood by Lloyd deMause]: The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused. It is our task here to see how much of this childhood history can be recaptured from the evidence that remains to us.
That this pattern has not previously been noticed by historians is because serious history has long been considered a record of public not private events. Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy sandbox of history, with its fantastic castles and magnificent battles, that they have generally ignored what is going on in the homes around the playground. And where historians usually look to the sandbox battles of yesterday for the causes of those today, we instead ask how each generation of parents and children creates those issues which are later acted out in the arena of public life.
At first glance, this lack of interest in the lives of children seems odd. Historians have been traditionally committed to explaining continuity and change over time, and ever since Plato it has been known that childhood is a key to this understanding. The importance of parent-child relations for social change was hardly discovered by Freud; St. Augustine's cry, "Give me other mothers and I will give you another world," has been echoed by major thinkers for fifteen centuries without affecting historical writing.

- from The New Psychohistory [1975] (Lloyd deMause, Editor); pp. 9-10 [Chapter 1 - The Independence of Psychohistory by Lloyd deMause]: This matter of psychohistory "ignoring" other fields when it specializes is a matter of some importance, since it is so often repeated by historians when criticizing psychohistorical works. In my own work, for instance, I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant...), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science). What seems not to have occurred to the critics of psychohistory is that we might choose to focus on the historical evolution of the psyche because only thereby can we reach the unsolved problems of precisely these same fields of politics, economics and sociology, fields which are shot through with unproven psychological assumptions and which have failed to become reliable sciences precisely because of the unsolved psychohistorical problems within them. Professionals in each of these fields recognize this quite well, and even admit it to each other in their journals -- it is only historians, ignorant of the shaky psychological underpinnings of the fields from which they uncritically borrow, who imagine there can be "economic, political, and social factors" which are somehow apart from "psychological" factors in history. As one instance, it is probably true that my own work on the evolution of childhood was at least partly a response to problems encountered in the theory of economic development, as set forth in such books as Everett E. Hagen's On the Theory of Social Change: How Economic Growth Begins, where the crucial link needed to produce a take-off in economic development is shown to be just the kind of personality which I was later able to trace in the history of childhood as the result of the "intrusive mode" of parenting. Just as surely is the study of class intimately tied up with evolving psychohistorical patterns of dominance and submission, and the study of power dependent upon an understanding of group-fantasy needs and defenses. The notion that psychohistory somehow "ignores" economics, sociology or political science is possibly the most ignorant charge that could be leveled against it.

- from The History of Childhood [1974] (Lloyd deMause, Editor); pp. 2-3 [Chapter 1 - The Evolution of Childhood by Lloyd deMause]: Since the repetition compulsion, by definition, cannot explain historical change, every attempt by Freud, Roheim, Kardiner, and others to develop a theory of change ultimately ended in a sterile chicken-or-egg dispute about whether child-rearing depends on cultural traits or the other way around. That child-rearing practices are the basis for adult personality was proven again and again. Where they originated stumped every psychoanalyst who raised the question.
In a paper given in 1968 before the Association for Applied Psychoanalysis, I outlined an evolutionary theory of historical change in parent-child relations, and proposed that since historians had not as yet begun the job of writing childhood history, the Association should sponsor a team of historians who would dig back into the sources to uncover the major stages of child-rearing in the West since antiquity. This book is the outcome of that project.
The "psychogenic theory of history" outlined in my project proposal began with a comprehensive theory of historical change. It posited that the central force for change in history is neither technology nor economics, but the "psychogenic" changes in personality occurring because of successive generations of parent-child interactions. This theory involved several hypotheses, each subject to proof or disproof by empirical historical evidence:

1. That the evolution of parent-child relations constitutes an independent source of historical change. The origin of this evolution lies in the ability of successive generations of parents to regress to the psychic age of their children and work through the anxieties of that age in a better manner the second time they encounter them than they did during their own childhood. The process is similar to that of psychoanalysis, which also involves regression and a second chance to face childhood anxieties.

2. That this "generational pressure" for psychic change is not only spontaneous, originating in the adult's need to regress and in the child's striving for relationship, but also occurs independent of social and technological change. It therefore can be found even in periods of social and technological stagnation.

3. That the history of childhood is a series of closer approaches between adult and child, with each closing of psychic distance producing fresh anxiety. The reduction of this adult anxiety is the main source of the child-rearing practices of each age.

4. That the obverse of the hypothesis that history involves a general improvement in child care is that the further back one goes in history, the less effective parents are in meeting the developing needs of the child. This would indicate, for instance, that if today in America there are less than a million abused children, there would be a point back in history where most children were what we would now consider abused.

5. That because psychic structure must always be passed from generation to generation through the narrow funnel of childhood, a society's child-rearing practices are not just one item in a list of cultural traits. They are the very condition for the transmission and development of all other cultural elements, and place definite limits on what can be achieved in all other spheres of history. Specific childhood experiences must occur to sustain specific cultural traits, and once these experiences no longer occur the trait disappears.

- from The New Psychohistory [1975] (Lloyd deMause, Editor); pp. 16-21 [Chapter 1 - The Independence of Psychohistory by Lloyd deMause]: Needless to say, I was still extremely reluctant to accept the reality of such an unlikely, even bizarre group-fantasy as "war as birth." Yet even a provisional emotional acceptance of the basic birth thesis made all the difference in the world to how I proceeded with my research. For one thing, only now could I begin to use my knowledge of the psychoanalytic literature on common birth images in dreams, in which suffocation and claustrophobia always represent being trapped in the birth canal, facts which completely eluded me during the prior year while trying to make sense of the historical material. I had noticed, of course, that leaders said they felt "small and helpless" during the slide towards war, but had thoroughly blocked out the importance of the imagery. That there was a life-and-death struggle going on for "some breathing space" was apparent -- as Bethmann-Hollweg told the Reichstag in announcing war on August 4, 1914: "He who is menaced as we are and is fighting for his highest possession can only consider how he is to hack his way through." But there was also present all the imagery of birth-dreams familiar to psychoanalysts--choking, drowning, hanging, suffocating, being crushed in rooms or tunnels. In psychoanalysis, these images represent the patient's attempt to repeat and by repeating to master the fearful pressure of labor contractions and the gasping for air after birth. This reliving indicates that birth traumata are still very much alive in most adults, especially those whose regressive need to re-emerge with the mother has been kept alive by inadequate parenting. Not only have psychoanalysts traditionally found these images in dreams, but more recently Arthur Janov has discovered that patients in Primal therapy regularly have "birth Primals" in which they re-experience their own births in great detail, and with enormous psychological and physical changes taking place after these re-livings.
In somehow trying to make sense out of all these strands of thought, I noticed that it didn't seem as though reality--physical reality--was forcing leaders to feel like strangled babies. Henry Kissinger, and the Kaiser were actually no more in danger of war when they began voicing feelings of choking in a birth canal than they had been a year earlier when they did not voice such feelings. What was actually "strangling" the American economy was more the effects of the 1.5 trillion dollars spent on war goods in the previous two decades than the current oil situation, and the notion that little Serbia was actually able to "strangle" central Europe was wholly fantastic. In fact, when I checked my material I found that nations who were actually surrounded, like Serbia herself, or Poland in 1939, did not voice such images, while countries which do say they feel encircled when going to war, like Germany in 1939, do not then say so when the war goes against them and they in fact become encircled (for instance there is not a single birth image in ******'s Secret Conversations, running from July 1941 to November 1944). It is group-reality, a psychic reality, not material reality, which for reasons yet unknown causes nations to pour into their leaders feelings of being strangled in a birth canal, and which causes these leaders to then feel that only the extreme solution of going to war and hacking their way through offers the possibility of relief.
It was now not long before I became aware that wars proceed in the same sequence as birth. They develop out of a condition resembling pregnancy, the air heavy with feelings of great expectancy, what William Yancey, head of the Alabama delegation to the secessionist Democratic Convention in 1860, before a hushed convention, referred to as "a dormant volcano" which threatened to become "a great heaving volcano." Soon it seems that "every day is pregnant with some new event." The nation's leaders find themselves in what Kaiser Wilhelm termed "the nervous tension in the grip of which Europe has found itself during the last two years," or what Admiral Shimada in a pre-Pearl Harbor meeting described as a "tight, tense, and trapped feeling" in the air. The nation soon found that it had to "relieve herself of the inexorable pressure to which she has been subjected ... to extricate herself from the desperate position in which she was entangled . . . to at least gain a breathing spell." The nation seems to be gripped, as Congressman Brinton said in 1917, in what felt like an "invisible energy-field." "There is something in the air, gentlemen," he told his fellow Congressmen, "something stronger than you and I can realize or resist, that seems to be picking us up bodily and literally forcing us to vote for this declaration of war..." Shortly thereafter, diplomatic relations are "ruptured," "the past placed its hand on the shoulder of the present and thrust it into the dark future" and the "descent into the abyss" begins as the nation starts its "final plunge over the brink."
When war is finally decided upon, the feeling is inevitably one of enormous relief. When Germany declared war on France in 1914, it came, said the Crown Prince, as a welcome end to the ever-increasing tension, an end to the nightmare of encirclement. "It is a joy to be alive," rejoiced a German paper the same day; Germany was "exulting with happiness." And in America, half a century earlier, when Fort Sumter fell, both North and South experienced the same relief that "something unendurable had ended." Crowds went wild with laughter, waving banners, being swept up in the excitement. "The heather is on fire. I never before knew what a popular excitement can be," wrote a Boston merchant, watching the jubilant crowds, and the London Times's correspondent described the same thing in the South -- "flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths" outshouting the bands playing "Dixie."
If the announcement of war was equivalent to the actual moment of birth, I wondered to myself how far this concreteness of detail could be carried. For instance, would it be too far-fetched to imagine that one might find in the historical material evidence of the actual explosive first gasp for breath of the newborn, usually accompanied by a slap on the back. I did not have to look far for confirmation of my hunch. Searching my notes once again for the actual feelings expressed by those present at the precise moment that war had been declared, I discovered several clear instances where an actual birth explosion had been hallucinated. For instance, when Lincoln issued his proclamation calling for troops to defend the Union, an action recognized by all as the beginning of the Civil War, he retired to his room alone, "and a feeling came over him as if he were utterly deserted and helpless...he suddenly heard a sound like the boom of a cannon... The White House attendants, whom he interrogated, had heard nothing... He met a few persons on the way [outside], some of whom he asked whether they had not heard something like the boom of a cannon. Nobody had heard anything, and so he supposed it must have been a freak of his imagination." Similarly, when Chamberlain stood before the British Cabinet in 1939 and announced: "Right, gentlemen, this means war," one of those present remembered: "Hardly had he said it, when there was the most enormous clap of thunder and the whole Cabinet Room was lit up by a blinding flash of lightning. It was the most deafening thunder-clap I've heard in my life. It really shook the building." The birth-explosion seemed to take place only after the emotional recognition that the birth crisis was terminated--it did not take place, for instance, upon the first actual shooting, at the siege of Fort Sumter. In fact, the birth-explosion could be hallucinated even if the message that war had started was in error. When ****** in 1938 was handed the message that Czech forces were mobilizing, and it looked as though the long-avoided European war would begin, Paul Schmidt, his interpreter said it seemed as though a "big drum-bang" had sounded in the dead silence of those few minutes. This birth-explosion was so necessary, in fact, that leaders, including both Woodrow Wilson and F.D.R., always carefully delayed bringing their countries into wars until they could feel the exaltation (and exhalation) of the war-cry of birth. As Wilson put it, when one of his Cabinet told him in early 1917 that America would follow him if he led them to war:

Why that is not what I am waiting for; that is not enough. If they cannot go
in with a whoop, there is no use of their going in at all.

The more I examined the words of leaders the more I recognized that all of them seemed to realize that war was a group-fantasy of birth against which one struggled almost in vain. During the Cuban missile crisis, for example, it was only after Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy pleading that the two nations not "come to a clash, like blind moles" battling to death in a tunnel that war between them could be averted. Even more explicit is the code-word used by Japanese ambassador Kurusu when he phoned Tokyo to signal that negotiations had broken down with Roosevelt and that it was all right to go ahead with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Forced to invent a voice code on the spot which Tokyo would recognize as meaning that war should begin, Kurusu announced that the "birth of a child" was imminent and asked how things were in Japan. "Does it seem as if a child might be born?" "Yes," came the reply, "the birth of the child seems imminent." The only problem was that American intelligence, listening in, spontaneously recognized the meaning of the war-as-birth code.
The imagery of war as birth seemed to reach back to earliest times. Numa erected a bronze temple to Janus, the Roman god of doorways and archways, and whenever Rome went to war the huge double doors were opened, a common dream-image of birth. Thereafter, whenever a war began, nations borrowed the Roman imagery and declared, as did the Chicago Tribune the day Lincoln called for troops: "The gates of Janus are open; the storm is on us." Certainly no American war has seemed to lack birth-imagery, beginning with the American Revolution, filled with images of birth and separation from the mother-country and what Samuel Adams termed the fight for "the child Independence...now struggling for birth" right down to the Vietnam war, which began as "a swampy hole you got sucked into," soon turned into a "bottomless pit" and a "tar baby" you couldn't let go of, and ended with a baby airlift.
While some of the symbolism of war is quite open and transparent--it hardly needs a psychoanalyst to interpret the message General Groves cabled to President Truman to report that the first A-bomb was successful ("The baby was born") or to see the imagery of the Hiroshima bomb being called "Little Boy" and the plane from whose belly it dropped being named after the pilot's mother -- still some of the symbolism of war only becomes intelligible when one becomes familiar with psychoanalytic clinical research into dreams of birth. Although I was familiar with much of this literature, from Rank's essay on the birth-trauma to Janov's extensive work on the re-experiencing of birth during primal therapy, I discovered a whole new range of images once I had sensitized myself by reading more extensively in the research on birth dreams. For instance, I discovered a little-known book written 25 years ago by the psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor entitled The Search for the Beloved: A Clinical Investigation of the Trauma of Birth and Pre-Natal Conditioning, a book which was ignored at the time it was published only because it was so far in advance of its time. It includes, for example, a complete description of the violence of "normal" birth methods that anticipates at every point that of Frederick Leboyer, plus a proposal for psychotherapy to heal the birth trauma that spells out in advance much of the work of Arthur Janov.
One of the birth symbols that Fodor calls attention to is the image--or rather more often the nightmare--of fire. According to both Leboyer and Fodor, the neonate's skin is extremely sensitive, and feels as though it is burning up both during the long hours of labor and immediately after birth, especially when the room is colder than 98 degrees Fahrenheit or when the baby is wrapped in rough clothes. Once this is realized, the historical image of war as a "ravaging fire" is more easily comprehended. Moreover, just as in dreams birth can be symbolized by being caught in a burning house, much of warfare involved simply setting fire to people and things, even when it costs more to do so than the benefit involved, as in the case of the "strategic bombing" of Europe in World War II. War and burning seem so intimately connected that troops are driven to set fire to villages even when the latter belong to those who are supposedly allies, as in Vietnam. The impulse to set people and places afire seemingly transcends any other objective in war.
Similarly, Fodor's book contains many references to another dream image for birth--falling or jumping out of towers. This is, of course, a repetition of the moment of birth itself, which involves falling upside down and activates the baby's instinctual fear of falling and reflexive hand-grasping. Only if one keeps one's "inner ear" tuned for this imagery does it become obvious that leaders at crucial moments use the "jumping out of towers" theme to convey war-as-birth messages. For instance, just as Japan was deciding to go to war with America, its leaders were presented with a voluminous report containing well-documented evidence that Japan was outnumbered by America in every area of war potential and actuality by at least 10 to 1 and therefore couldn't possibly win. Since they were in the group-process stage that made the "slide to war" inexorable, Tojo looked at this overwhelming proof that Japan couldn't win the war and announced: "There are times when we must have the courage to do extraordinary things--like jumping, with eyes closed, off the veranda of the Kiyomizu Temple!" Similarly, the French Foreign Minister, at the time of the Munich Agreement, referred to war as "jumping from the Eiffel Tower."

- from The History of Childhood [1974] (Lloyd deMause, Editor); pp. 4-5 [Chapter 1 - The Evolution of Childhood by Lloyd deMause (Previous Works on Children in History)]: Although I think this book is the first to examine seriously the history of childhood in the West, historians have undeniably been writing about children in past ages for some time. Even so, I think that the study of the history of childhood is just beginning, since most of these works so badly distort the facts of childhood in the periods they cover. Official biographers are the worst offenders; childhood is generally idealized, and very few biographers give any useful information about the subject's earliest years. The historical sociologists manage to turn out theories explaining changes in childhood without ever bothering to examine a single family, past or present. The literary historians, mistaking books for life, construct a fictional picture of childhood, as though one could know what really happened in the nineteenth-century American home by reading Tom Sawyer.
But it is the social historian, whose job it is to dig out the reality of social conditions in the past, who defends himself most vigorously against the facts he turns up. When one social historian finds widespread infanticide, he declares it "admirable and humane." When another describes mothers who regularly beat their infants with sticks while still in the cradle, she comments, without a shred of evidence, that "if her discipline was stern, it was even and just and leavened with kindness." When a third finds mothers who dunk their infants into ice water each morning to "strengthen" them, and the children die from the practice, she says that "they were not intentionally cruel," but simply "had read Rousseau and Locke." No practice in the past seems anything but benign to the social historian. When Laslett finds parents regularly sending their children, at age seven, to other homes as servants, while taking in other children to serve them, he says it was actually kindness, for it "shows that parents may have been unwilling to submit children of their own to the discipline of work at home." After admitting that severe whipping of young children with various instruments "at school and at home seems to have been as common in the seventeenth century as it was later," William Sloan feels compelled to add that "children, then as later, sometimes deserved whipping." [...] Masses of evidence are hidden, distorted, softened, or ignored. The child's early years are played down, formal educational content is endlessly examined, and emotional content is avoided by stressing child legislation and avoiding the home. And if the nature of the author's book is such that the ubiquity of unpleasant facts cannot be ignored, the theory is invented that "good parents leave no traces in the records." When, for instance, Alan Valentine examines 600 years of letters from fathers to sons, and of 126 fathers is unable to find one who isn't insensitive, moralistic, and thoroughly self-centered, he concludes: "Doubtless an infinite number of fathers have written to their sons letters that would warm and lift our hearts, if we only could find them. The happiest fathers leave no history, and it is the men who are not at their best with their children who are likely to write the heart-rending letters that survive." Likewise, Anna Burr, covering 250 autobiographies, notes there are no happy memories of childhood, but carefully avoids drawing any conclusions.

- from What the British Can Do To End Child Abuse [2006] by Lloyd deMause; pp. 1-3: That Donald Winnicott sometimes treated abused children is evident from his saying that they often come to him "clinging to mother in dread of the white-coated doctor who will surely be a monster who eats children" and by his admitting that children's fears were often the result of what he termed "the mother's unconscious (repressed) hate of the child." Yet, since he mainly saw parents and children in his office, where they tended not to openly abuse their children, and since he relied on his child abuse figures on grossly understated British official statistics that claimed only a tiny percentage of children were abused, Winnicott regularly stated that "most babies get good-enough care," and "the majority of babies have their basic needs met." In fact, Winnicott is most often remembered for coining the "good-enough mother" concept -- even though he once surprised everyone by estimating that only half of British children had mothers who gave them sufficient love to become emotionally mature enough to run a democracy.

The "good-enough mother" phrase was foremost in my mind when, five decades ago, I began intense historical and sociological research for my book The History of Childhood. I was forced to conclude that, as the opening words of my book put it,

The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently
begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of
child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten,
terrorized and sexually abused.

I have in the past four decades been so impressed with the overwhelming evidence for this conclusion that I have offered a prize for anyone who could find evidence of even one mother prior to the 18th century anywhere in the world who could be called a "good-enough mother" -- the definition for which being a mother who would not today be thrown in jail for child abuse. No one has yet claimed the prize.
In the three decades since my first book on the history of childhood appeared, over a hundred articles and books by myself and fellow psychohistorians have been published -- most of them articles in my Journal of Psychohistory -- giving overwhelming evidence of the truth of this astonishing view of how common child abuse has been throughout history. According to Judith Issroff's new book on Winnicott and Bowlby, it was only after my work appeared that British psychoanalysts were able to "recognize how prevalent the incidence of actual abuse, neglect and torture" has been in the U.K. The denial of the facts about British child abuse has been so pervasive that John Bowlby once had to stand up at a psychoanalytic meeting and insist to the audience, "But there is such a thing as a bad mother!"

- p. 7: The rates of physical child abuse in the U.K. are about the same as those of the U.S., but far higher than the rates of most other West European nations. In the past 25 years, 16 European nations have outlawed the corporal punishment of children, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has recently called upon all the other European nations to make Europe "a corporal punishment-free zone for children." Hungary, the Netherlands, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia are about to join the abolitionist states, and others are considering doing so.
The results of outlawing the hitting of children are dramatic. In Sweden, the first country to abolish corporal punishment of children by everyone, public support for hitting children--even in its mildest forms--has been reduced from 53% to only 11%. In addition, only 6% of younger Swedes today say they support corporal punishment. More importantly, practice as well as attitude has changed, with only 3% of school children today reporting they had been slapped by their parents, and only one child in 25 years having been killed by their parent. The results of this dramatic decrease in hitting have been spectacular. The number of children needing social work care has decreased by 26%, the number of youth convicted of theft declined by 21%, the rates of alcohol and drug abuse by youths have declined dramatically, and the rate of youth suicide has declined.

pp. 11-13: After WWII ended, even though economic recovery made family life difficult in Central Europe, by 1960 German and Austrian mothers began to be given help by the state in their childrearing tasks, and the traditional authoritarian model of the family that had been going on for centuries changed rapidly. In 1964, for instance, 80 percent of German and Austrian parents admitted to beating their children, but for the past decade there has been a law against hitting children which has improved childrearing so much that careful personality studies today show both Germans and Austrians are now less abusive toward children and less authoritarian in personality than British and Americans. Mothers are today given paid leave for up to three years when they have their children, and now feel able to show love and support for the independence of their growing children that would have shocked their grandparents. This and other state-supported help to parents has led to a less violent, more humane society, one that is rarely anti-Semitic and to a great extent is beyond the kind of violent nationalism that led to WWII. After all, studies of the effect of abusive childrearing since Adorno's Authoritarian Personality studies have shown how harsh childrearing leads to fearful, violent adults who repeat their early abuse in politics and wars -- people who Winnicott termed "hidden anti-socials," who identify with violent authority because they have no inner selves. The recent studies of Milburn at the University of Massachusetts show individuals who reported high levels of childhood punishment held far more punitive political attitudes, including a more consistent use of military force to settle disputes. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Austrians I met regularly on my speaking tour considered themselves not as nationalist Austria-first political actors but as Europeans -- even just as humans -- and were far more peaceful politically than most people in my own country.

- from The New Psychohistory (Lloyd deMause, Editor); pp. 7-9 [Chapter 1 - The Independence of Psychohistory by Lloyd deMause]: Ever since 1942 when the philosopher Carl Hempel published his essay "The Function of General Laws in History," it has been recognized by most philosophers of history that history cannot be a science in any strict sense of the term and that history can never regard it as part of its task to establish laws in the Hempelian sense. Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why.
Psychohistory, it seems to me, is on the contrary specifically concerned with establishing laws and discovering causes in precisely the Hempelian manner. The relationship between history and psychohistory is parallel to the relationship between astrology and astronomy, or if that seems too pejorative, between geology and physics. Astrology and geology are disciplines seeking sequential orders in the sky and the earth, while astronomy and physics are not narrative at all, but are sciences attempting to establish laws in their own respective areas. Psychohistory, as the science of historical motivation, may concentrate on the same historical events that written history covers, but its purpose is never to tell what happened one day after another. When the first astronomers came along and found astrologers describing the positions of the stars day by day and trying to explain all the relationships between them, they created a revolution by saying, "Forget about the sequence of the skies. What interests us qua scientists is this one dot of light and whether it goes in a circle or an ellipse--and why. In order to find this out, we will have to drop the narrative task of astrology."
What is more, science never did pick up this task of narration--because it couldn't. Astronomy, even if it finally discovers all the laws of the universe, will still not narrate the sequences of skies, any more than psychohistory will ever narrate the events of this or that period. Psychohistory, as a science, will always be problem-centered, while history will always remain period-centered. They are simply two different tasks.
It does not, of course, follow that psychohistory simply uses the facts historians have narrated up to now in order to construct laws of historical motivation. Like astronomy and physics, psychohistory finds it necessary to conduct its own search for material peculiar to its own interests in both past and present society. Whole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians--childhood history, content analysis of historical imagery, and so on--suddenly expand from the periphery to the center of the psychohistorian's conceptual world, simply because his or her own new questions require material nowhere to be found in history books.
Now I am well aware that in claiming the field of historical motivation exclusive for the psychohistorian I immediately run up against the oft-repeated claim by historians that they work with motivations all the time, so there is nothing new in that. I had heard this claim so often in the two decades since I first studied the philosophy of history that I was finally moved to measure exactly how often historians actually do examine motivations in their works. I therefore kept a tally-sheet as I read 100 history books of varying kinds and recorded exactly how many sentences were devoted to any kind of motivational analysis whatsoever--not just psychoanalytic, but any level of attention at all. In no case did this motivational content reach as much as 1% of the book -- so the field seemed to be ours by default. What wasn't pure narrative of one event after another turned out to be mainly the recitation of as many economic facts as possible in the hopes that their mere conjunction with the historical narrative would be mistaken for explanation.
Now anyone who has read any portion of the over 1,300 books and articles contained in the "Bibliography of Psychohistory" will soon realize that psychohistory has reversed this 1-to-99 ratio, so that the bulk of psychohistorical writing is devoted to an intense concentration on motivational analysis while the physical events of history are necessarily given quite sketchy background treatment. There is, for instance, only one page at the beginning of Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades describing how the participants decided to begin four hundred years of wars, and then several thousand pages devoted to the routes, battles and other events which make up the "history" of the Crusades. A psychohistorian would assume the history, and spend his decades of research and thousands of pages in the most fascinating question for psychohistory -- why so many set off on such a strange task as relic-saving. That the historian, when reviewing such a psychohistory, would accuse it of "ignoring" the full history of the Crusades should bother the psychohistorian as little as the accusation by the astrologer that Galileo "ignored" all the other stars in describing the path of one mere planet. It wasn't his task, and narrative history isn't ours.

- pp. 310-313 [Chapter 10 - Psychohistory and Psychotherapy by Lloyd deMause]: What we found in examining diaries, letters, autobiographies, pediatric and pedagogical literature back to antiquity was that good parenting appears to be something only historically achieved, and that the further one goes back into the past the more likely one would be to find children killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused by adults. Indeed, it soon appeared likely that a good mother, one who was reasonably devoted to her child and more or less able to empathize with and fulfill its needs, was nowhere to be found prior to modern times. In the book which resulted from the project, entitled The History of Childhood, I wrote that it seemed to me that childhood was one long nightmare from which we have only gradually and only recently begun to awaken.
Now it is no secret to you as psychiatrists that childhood in many homes even today remains a nightmare, but what is most fascinating is that each type of family with which you are familiar from your practice was once the predominant type of family in the past. When you arrange parenting modes on a scale of decreasing health, from empathic down to the most destructive child-battering parents, you have also listed historical modes of child care reaching back into the past. It is as though today's child abuser were a sort of "evolutionary arrest," a psychological fossil, stuck in a personality mode from a previous historical epoch when everyone used to batter children.
Parents in antiquity, for instance, were found to have murdered their newborn children, regardless of economic situation, and in many other ways to have transmitted powerful death wishes to their children. Only when the strength of the infanticidal mode is recognized does it become understandable why early religions focused so exclusively on sacrificial themes. Early Christianity, for example, directly acted out the killing of a Son under orders of his Father. Believers were "buried with Christ" and then resurrected as first a repetition and then a denial of infanticide, were baptised as a repetition of the washing of those newborn babies who were going to be allowed to live, and anticipated a Last Judgment which was as real to them as the First Judgment which every newborn experienced, laying on the ground and waiting for the father to lift it up into life or to cast it into Hell (which the Jews named Gehenna, after the Valley of Hinnom, where children were sacrificed to Moloch). By joining in Christ's death, believers avoided being killed by the Father, as they in their childhood watched their real-life siblings being killed by their fathers after being born, joining the millions of infants who filled the rivers and latrines of antiquity and medieval times.
During the medieval period, the infanticidal wishes of parents toward their legitimate offspring decreased, and the emotional reality of childhood began to evolve more around the fear of abandonment, either emotional or actual, to wet-nurse, monastery, nunnery or foster family. As in badly abandoned and abused children today, who have never had a stable relationship and who from their earliest years have been forced to take care of themselves, the average medieval child grew up to be a psychopathic personality, unable to develop mature attachments, developing instead personal dominance-submission patterns known to historians as feudalism. The feudal bond of personal loyalty, an attempt to deny the possibility of abandonment, combined with the typical psychopathic need for violence, gives medieval Europe its restless, marauding character, centering on the psychopath's world view of everything as consisting solely of exploiting or being exploited.
The Renaissance and early modern period was one of enormous ambivalence toward children, the child being more highly cathected than previously, but also, because emotionally closer, more dangerous, a container for parental projections, a devil or animal which had to be beaten into human shape, molded at every step, and generally made to feel that he or she was essentially bad inside. The result, again like contemporary highly ambivalent families, was a manic-depressive personality, continuously guilty and often self-destructive, under the attack of a severely rejecting superego. The paradigmatic depressive character, Hamlet, provided the characteristic list of depressive symptoms; but what is most interesting is his feeling that his melancholy is an achievement, an advance on the psychopathic medieval personality. And, of course, he is right -- in the sense that being loved and hated by ambivalent parents is indeed a step higher than being abandoned by unloving and uncaring parents, even today.
The eighteenth century saw a new kind of parent, closer than ever before to the child, but over-controlling and intrusive to a degree only rarely seen in today's families. The child, it is true, was no longer swaddled, nor was it usually sent out to a wet-nurse, but was instead made an active part of the mother's ongoing interpsychic defense system. It began to be both toilet-trained in its earliest months and severely punished for masturbation for the first time in history, and, as with the children of intrusive and over-demanding parents today, the predominant personality type which resulted was the obsessive-compulsive character, Freud's "anal personality," Erich Fromm's "hoarding character." It is this compulsive personality which has dominated the modern world, with its Faustian drive to control nature and its massive need to displace interpersonal aggression onto the social sphere. Only in the twentieth century are we slowly beginning to overcome the compulsive personality through a less intrusive, more helpful and empathic mode of parenting for some of our children.
Perhaps my brief summary of the findings of our little project in psychohistory will convey to you a taste of the excitement we have felt in using the tools and concepts of modern psychotherapy in a wider context. New kinds of questions have been generated at every turn, questions which can only be asked and answered within the conceptual framework of psychotherapy: Exactly what causes changes in parent-child relations over a series of generations? Why do some family lines show progress and others seem to stagnate? Why do some areas seem to lag far behind others? How can we better describe childhood modes and resulting personality-types? How might these concepts better explain our social problems? And, finally, merging into the field of contemporary family therapy, how can we facilitate those life-enhancing factors in childhood which further its evolution, applying our leverage for change where it is most meaningful, to childhood? Until we can extend our psychotherapy into a new science of psychohistory which can begin to give us answers to questions like these, we will no doubt continue our habit of giving highly destructive weapons to infantile leaders, who may yet use them to solve their personal problems and thereby end both our psychohistory and our psychotherapy together in one big bang.

- pp. 23-24: For many years I wondered why I, a radical and anti-nationalist, was nevertheless moved almost to tears when I stood with my son watching a parade with marching bands. The temptation was to shrug off the feeling or to give it a label that would deflect the discomfort, but I was so concerned with this feeling of being swept up by military music that I took to leaving my table at the New York Public Library each time I heard music from a military band going down Fifth Avenue just to see if I could catch my feeling and locate its power over me. If I seemed a little bit odd to associates who were with me at the time, so be it -- I had to try to answer this question, which was psychohistorical to its core. It was only after the discovery of the war-as-birth thesis that my mind returned to the question of why the bands move me so -- I now had a hunch that I knew the answer. I took a stop-watch out to the next parade and timed the beats of the band. They occurred at about 110-130 beats per minute. Then I timed some popular music, of the usual soothing quality, on the radio -- from 70 to 80 beats per minute. When I checked my wife's obstetrician, I found that the normal heart-beat is about 75 beats per minute and that the elevated heart-beat of a woman during a contraction in labor is between 110-150 beats per minute. I obviously was a baby being born while watching the parade, being picked up and carried along my mother's heart-beat whether I felt like it or not, and the tears in my eyes were for the impending separation from my mother! Perhaps not the most important discovery in the world, but one thoroughly psychohistorical -- and though its confirmation might be open to anyone using scientific canons of truth, its discovery was only open to the psychohistorian with the quite peculiar personality patterns and even lifestyle necessary for using one's emotions as tools for the investigation of group reality.

Here are some links:
"Heads and Tails" Money As a Poison Container LLOYD DEMAUSE - Journal of Psychohistory 16(1) Summer 1988

The Universality of Incest

'He [Freud] even called his own memories "genuine" of having been sexually molested as a little boy by his nurse [...] (24)

Therefore, regardless of all that has been written about the subject, an unbiased reading of Freud's works shows that whenever he confronted clear evidence of sexual molestation, he called it seduction, not fantasy. There was no "great reversal," no "suppression of seduction," no "betrayal of the child," no "assault on truth."

Freud's courage in acknowledging the extent of childhood sexual molestation was not shared by the majority of his colleagues. Most, like Jung, simply avoided the topic. Others, who noted that large numbers of their patients had clear memories of incestuous rape, blamed the victim, saying, like Abraham, that the molestation "was desired by the child unconsciously [because of an] abnormal psycho-sexual constitution..." (25)'

CITATIONS - The Universality of Incest Lloyd DeMause

"Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes: 1887-1902. New York: Basic Books, 1954, p.220."

Chapter 2: Why Males Are More Violent

The Institute for Psychohistory

CH 3 pp 105 - 115 - FOUNDATIONS OF PSYCHOHISTORY


Here's a video:


YouTube - LloydDeMause's Channel

[HERO]

Does anyone here have an opinion on the (Socionics/personality) type of Lloyd deMause, or was I right?

[HERO]

- from The History of Childhood (Lloyd deMause, Editor); 47-50 [The Evolution of Childhood by Lloyd deMause]: Christianity introduced a new concept into the discussion—childhood innocence. As Clement of Alexandria said, when Christ advised people to “become as little children” in order to enter into Heaven, one should “not foolishly mistake his meaning. We are not little ones in the sense that we roll on the floor or crawl on the ground as snakes do.” What Christ means was that people should become as “uncontaminated” as children, pure, without sexual knowledge. Christians throughout the Middle Ages began to stress the idea that children were totally innocent of all notions of pleasure and pain. A child “has not tasted sensual pleasures, and has no conception of the impulses of manhood . . . one becomes as a child in respect of anger; and is as the child in relation to his grief, so that sometimes he laughs and plays at the very time that his father or mother or brother is dead . . .” Unfortunately, the idea that children are innocent and cannot be corrupted is a common defense by child molesters against admitting that their abuse is harming the child, so the medieval fiction that the child is innocent only makes our sources less revealing, and proves nothing about what really went on. Abbot Guibert of Nogent said children were blessed to be without sexual thoughts or capacities; one wonders what he then was referring to when he confessed to “the wickedness I did in childhood. . . .” Mostly, servants are blamed for abusing children; even a washerwoman could “work wickedness.” Servants often “show lewd tricks . . . in the presence of children [and] corrupt the chief parts of infants.” Nurses should not be young girls, “for many such have aroused the fire of passion prematurely as true accounts relate and, I venture to say, experience proves.”
Giovanni Dominici, writing in 1405, tried to set some limits to the convenient “innocence” of childhood; he said children after the age of three years shouldn’t be allowed to see nude adults. For in a child “granted that there will not take place any thought or natural movement before the age of five, yet, without precaution, growing up in such acts he becomes accustomed to that act of which later he is not ashamed . . .” That parents themselves are often doing the molesting can be seen in the language he used:

He should sleep clothed with a night shirt reaching below the knee, taking care as much as possible that he may not remain uncovered. Let not the mother nor the father, much less any other person, touch him. Not to be tedious in writing so fully of this, I simply mention the history of the ancients who made full use of this doctrine to bring up children well, not slaves of the flesh.

That some change in the sexual use of children was going on in the Renaissance can be seen not only in the rising number of moralists who warned against it (Jean Gerson, like Louis XIII’s nurse, said it was the child’s duty to prevent others from molesting him), but also in the art of the time. Not only were Renaissance paintings full of nude putti, or cupids taking off blindfolds in front of nude women, but in addition real children were shown more and more often chucking the chin of the mother, slinging one of their legs over hers, both conventional iconographic signs for sexual love, and the mother was often painted with her hand very near the genital area of the child.
The campaign against the sexual use of children continued through the seventeenth century, but in the eighteenth century it took an entirely new twist: punishing the little boy or girl for touching its own genitals. That this, like early toilet-training, was a late psychogenic stage is suggested by the fact that prohibitions against childhood masturbation are found in none of the primitive societies surveyed by Whiting and Child. The attitude of most people toward childhood masturbation prior to the eighteenth century can be seen in Fallopius’s counsel for parents to “be zealous in infancy to enlarge the penis of the boy.” Although masturbation in adults was a minor sin, medieval penitentials rarely extended the prohibition to childhood; adult homosexuality, not masturbation, was the main obsession of pre-modern sexual regulation. As late as the fifteenth century Gerson complains how adults tell him they never heard that masturbation was sinful, and he instructs confessors to ask adults directly: “Friend, do you touch or do you rub your rod as children have the habit of doing?”
But it was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century, as a climax of the effort to bring child abuse under control, that parents began severely punishing their children for masturbation, and doctors began to spread the myth that it would cause insanity, epilepsy, blindness, and death. By the nineteenth century, this campaign reached an unbelievable frenzy. Doctors and parents sometimes appeared before the child armed with knives and scissors, threatening to cut off the child’s genitals; circumcision, clitoridectomy, and infibulation were sometimes used as punishment; and all sorts of restraint devices, including plaster casts and cages with spikes, were prescribed. Circumcision became especially widespread; as one American child psychologist put it, when a child of two rubs his nose and can’t be still for a moment, only circumcision works. Another doctor, whose book was the bible of many an American nineteenth-century home, recommended that little boys be closely watched for signs of masturbation, and brought in to him for circumcision without anaesthetic, which invariably cured them. Spitz’s graphs on different advice given for masturbation, based on 559 volumes surveyed, show a peak in surgical intervention in 1850-1879, and in restraint devices in 1880-1904. By 1925, these methods had almost completely died out, after two centuries of brutal and totally unnecessary assault on children’s genitals.
Meanwhile, sexual use of children after the eighteenth century was far more widespread among servants and other adults and adolescents than among parents, although when one reads of the number of parents who continued to let their children sleep with servants after previous servants had been found abusing them sexually, it is obvious that the conditions for child abuse still remained within the control of the parents. Cardinal Bernis, remembering being sexually molested as a child, warned parents that “nothing is so dangerous for morals and perhaps for health as to leave children too long under the care of chambermaids, or even of young ladies brought up in the chateaux. I will add that the best among them are not always the least dangerous. They dare with a child that which they would be ashamed to risk with a young man.” A German doctor said nursemaids and servants carried out “all sorts of sexual acts” on children “for fun.” Even Freud said he was seduced by his nurse when he was two, and Ferenczi and other analysts since his time have thought unwise Freud’s decision in 1897 to consider most reports by patients of early sexual seductions as only fantasy. As psychoanalyst Robert Fleiss puts it, “No one is ever made sick by his fantasies,” and a large number of patients in analysis even today report using children sexually although only Fleiss builds this fact into his psychoanalytic theory. When one learns that as late as 1900 there were still people who believed venereal disease could be cured “by means of sexual intercourse with children,” one begins to recognize the dimensions of the problem more fully.
It goes without saying that the effects on the child in the past of such severe physical and sexual abuse as I have described were immense. I would here like to indicate only two effects on the growing child, one psychological and one physical. The first is the enormous number of nightmares and hallucinations by children which I have found in the sources. Although written records by adults which indicate anything at all about a child’s emotional life are rare at best, whenever discovered they usually reveal recurring nightmares and even outright hallucinations. Since antiquity, pediatric literature regularly had sections on how to cure children’s “terrible dreams,” and children were sometimes beaten for having nightmares. Children lay awake nights terrorized by imaginary ghosts, demons, “a witch on the pillow,” “a large black dog under the bed,” or “a crooked finger crawling across the room”. In addition, the history of witchcraft in the West is filled with reports of children’s convulsive fits, loss of hearing or speech, loss of memory, hallucination of devils, confession of intercourse with devils, and accusations of witchcraft against adults, including their parents. And finally, even further back in the Middle Ages, we encounter children’s dancing mania, children’s crusades and child-pilgrimages, subjects which are simply too vast to discuss here.
A final point I wish only to touch upon is the possibility that children in the past were actually retarded physically as a result of their poor care. Although swaddling by itself usually does not affect the physical development of primitive children, the combination of tight swaddling, neglect, and general abuse of children in the past seemed often to have produced what we would now regard as retarded children. One index of this retardation is that while most children today begin to walk by 10-12 months, children in the past generally walked later.

- pp. 51-54 (PERIODIZATION OF MODES OF PARENT-CHILD RELATIONS): Since some people still kill, beat, and sexually abuse children, any attempt to periodize modes of child rearing must first admit that psychogenic evolution proceeds at different rates in different family lines, and that many parents appear to be “stuck” in earlier historical modes. There are also class and area differences which are important, especially since modern times, when the upper classes stopped sending their infants to wet-nurses and began bringing them up themselves. The periodization below should be thought of as a designation of the modes of parent-child relations which were exhibited by the psychogenically most advanced part of the population in the most advanced countries, and the dates given are the first in which I found examples of that mode in the sources. The series of six modes represents a continuous sequence of closer approaches between parent and child as generation after generation of parents slowly overcame their anxieties and began to develop the capacity to identify and satisfy the needs of their children. I also believe the series provides a meaningful taxology of contemporary child-rearing modes.
1. Infanticidal Mode (Antiquity to Fourth Century A.D.): The image of Medea hovers over childhood in antiquity, for myth here only reflects reality. Some facts are more important than others, and when parents routinely resolved their anxieties about taking care of children by killing them, it affected the surviving children profoundly. For those who were allowed to grow up, the projective reaction was paramount, and the concreteness of reversal was evident in the widespread sodomizing of the child.
2. Abandonment Mode (Fourth to Thirteenth Century A.D.): Once parents began to accept the child as having a soul, the only way they could escape the dangers of their own projections was by abandonment, whether to the wet nurse, to the monastery or nunnery, to foster families, to the homes of other nobles as servants or hostages, or by severe emotional abandonment at home. The symbol of this mode might be Griselda, who so willingly abandoned her children to prove her love for her husband. Or perhaps it would be any of those pictures so popular up to the thirteenth century of a rigid Mary stiffly holding the infant Jesus. Projection continued to be massive, since the child was still full of evil and needed always to be beaten, but as the reduction in child sodomizing shows, reversal diminished considerably.
3. Ambivalent Mode (Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries): Because the child, when it was allowed to enter into the parents’ emotional life, was still a container for dangerous projections, it was their task to mold it into shape. From Dominici to Locke there was no image more popular than that of the physical molding of children, who were seen as soft wax, plaster, or clay to be beaten into shape. Enormous ambivalence marks this mode. The beginning of the period is approximately the fourteenth century, which shows an increase in the number of child instruction manuals, the expansion of the cults of Mary and the infant Jesus, and the proliferation in art of the “close-mother image.”
4. Intrusive Mode (Eighteenth Century): A tremendous reduction in projection and the virtual disappearance of reversal was the accomplishment of the great transition for parent-child relations which appeared in the eighteenth century. The child was no longer so full of dangerous projections, and rather than just examine its insides with an enema, the parents approached even closer and attempted to conquer its mind, in order to control its insides, its anger, its needs, its masturbation, its very will. The child raised by intrusive parents was nursed by the mother, not swaddled, not given regular enemas, toilet trained early, prayed with but not played with, hit but not regularly whipped, punished for masturbation, and made to obey promptly with threats and guilt as often as with other methods of punishment. The child was so much less threatening that true empathy was possible, and pediatrics was born, which along with the general improvement in level of care by parents reduced infant mortality and provided the basis for the demographic transition of the eighteenth century.
5. Socialization Mode (Nineteenth to Mid-twentieth Centuries): As projections continued to diminish, the raising of a child became less a process of conquering its will than of training it, guiding it into proper paths, teaching it to conform, socializing it. The socializing mode is still thought of by most people as the only model within which discussion of child care can proceed, and it has been the source of all twentieth-century psychological models, from Freud’s “channeling of impulses” to Skinner’s behaviorism. It is most particularly the model of sociological functionalism. Also, in the nineteenth century, the father for the first time begins to take more than an occasional interest in the child, training it, and sometimes even relieving the mother of child-care chores.

6. Helping Mode (Begins Mid-twentieth Century): The helping mode involves the proposition that the child knows better than the parent what it needs at each stage of its life, and fully involves both parents in the child’s life as they work to empathize with and fulfill its expanding and particular needs. There is no attempt at all to discipline or form “habits.” Children are neither struck nor scolded, and are apologized to if yelled at under stress. The helping mode involves an enormous amount of time, energy, and discussion on the part of both parents, especially in the first six years, for helping a young child reach its daily goals means continually responding to it, playing with it, tolerating its regressions, being its servant rather than the other way around, interpreting its emotional conflicts, and providing the objects specific to its evolving interests. Few parents have yet consistently attempted this kind of child care. From the four books which describe children brought up according to the helping mode, it is evident that it results in a child who is gentle, sincere, never depressed, never imitative or group-oriented, strong-willed, and unintimidated by authority.


Here’s a link:

http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln05_psychogenic.html

‘THE SOCIAL ALTER IN SMALL GROUPS
All groups, even small face-to-face groups, organize group-fantasies out of the pooled social alters of its members. Because even in small groups we feel vulnerable to the shame and humiliation that reminds us of our earlier helplessness, we defend ourselves by switching into our social alters and preparing ourselves for expected attacks. Although groups can also be used for utilitarian purposes, they more often form so that people can act out their persecutory social alters. When people construct a group-fantasy, they give up their idiosyncratic defensive fantasies and become entrained in the social trance. Group analysts have found that even small groups collude in delusional notions: that the group is like a disapproving mother, that the group is different from and superior to all other groups, that it has imaginary boundaries that can protect it, that it can provide endless sustenance to its members without their individual efforts, that its leader should be deified and should be in constant control of its members, that scapegoating is useful and sacrifice necessary for cleansing the group's emotions, that it is periodically besieged by monstrous enemies from without and stealthy enemies from within, that no individual is ever responsible for any of the group's actions and so on--all defensive structures organizing and restaging shared traumatic content.’

‘When I gave an address at the American Psychiatric Association Convention in Philadelphia on the subject "The History of Child Assault," I gave extensive evidence showing that the majority of children today in the countries for which we have statistics were sexually abused. The audience eventually seemed to admit that what I said could be true. Then they discussed among themselves the following proposition: "If childhood sexual abuse has been so widespread for so long, then perhaps we are wrong, and we shouldn't be creating a conflict in children's minds. Since everyone does it, maybe sex between children and adults isn't wrong at all." In addition, they asked the question: "What might gentle incest be like? Might it not be OK?" I was not surprised when, a few months later, the American Psychiatric Association classified pedophilia as a disorder only if it bothered the pedophile, professing, according to one dissident psychiatrist, that "a person is no longer a pedophile simply because he molests children...He is a pedophile only if he feels bad or anxious about what he's doing." Otherwise, having sex with children can be healthy.’

‘Before adolescence, one will often restage traumas by identifying with the persecutor and triumphing rather than being the helpless one. Thus, the 8-year-old girl who had been hit by a truck when she was 18 months old would repeatedly charge into classmates, knocking them over as she restaged her accident. Or a 7-year-old girl whose father strangled her mother would force her friends to play the "mommy game" where they played dead and she picked them up. But after adolescence, the restaging more often includes self-persecution, bringing about the dreaded event oneself either through hypervigilant action or actual self-harm--as in the self-cutting or self-injury of those who were physically abused as children, the fights and anti-social activities of delinquents who were neglected as infants or the sexual promiscuity of young girls who had been seduced.’

‘Revictimization is actually the central cause of anti-social behavior, and addiction to trauma is at its core. It is not surprising that prison psychiatrists find violent criminals invariably repeat in their crime the emotional traumas, abuse and humiliation of their childhood, or that women who have been sexually abused in childhood are more than twice as likely as others to be raped when they become adults. As one prostitute who had been sexually victimized as a child said, "When I do it, I'm in control. I can control them through sex." What Freud was puzzled by when he coined the term "the repetition compulsion" -- puzzled because it violated the pleasure principle -- is actually a self-protective device, protective against being helpless against the overwhelming anxiety of unexpected trauma. Traumas are therefore restaged as a defense, with the persecutory self as the stage director. Restaging as a defense against dissociated trauma is the crucial flaw in the evolution of the human mind understandable from the viewpoint of the individual as a way of maintaining sanity, but tragic in its effects upon society, since it means that early traumas will be magnified onto the historical stage into war, domination and self-destructive social behavior. And because we also restage by inflicting our childhood terrors upon our children, generation after generation, our addiction to the slaughterbench of history has been relentless.’

‘Indeed, my conclusion from a lifetime of study of the history of childhood is that society is founded upon the abuse of children, and that the further back in history one studies the subject the more likely children are to have been abused and neglected. Just as family therapists today find that child abuse often functions to hold families together as a way of solving their emotional problems, so, too, the routine assault, torture and domination of children has been society's most effective instrument of collective emotional homeostasis. Most historical families once practiced infanticide, incest, beating and mutilation of their children to relieve anxieties. We continue today to arrange the killing, maiming, molestation and starvation of our children through our military, social and economic institutions.

This is why domination and violence in history has such continuity: betrayal and abuse of children has been a consistent human trait since our species began. Each generation begins anew with fresh, eager, trusting faces of babies, ready to love and create a new world. And each generation of parents tortures, abuses, neglects and dominates its children until they become emotionally crippled adults who repeat in nearly exact detail the social violence and domination that existed in previous decades. Should a minority of parents decrease the amount of abuse and neglect of its children a bit and begin to provide somewhat more secure, loving early years that allow a bit more freedom and independence, history soon begins to move in surprising new directions and society changes in innovative ways. History needn't repeat itself; only the traumas demand repetition.’

[HERO]

bump

[GuavaDrunk]

Reading in progress. The premise of his work (that I know about) is pretty Ni-Fe.

[HERO]

I see him as a Beta NF with pretty strong Ti, in my opinion. I could be wrong.

[HERO]

Lloyd deMause: (Beta) NF










- from The New Psychohistory (Lloyd deMause, Editor); pp. 7-9 [Chapter 1 - The Independence of Psychohistory by Lloyd deMause]: Ever since 1942 when the philosopher Carl Hempel published his essay "The Function of General Laws in History," it has been recognized by most philosophers of history that history cannot be a science in any strict sense of the term and that history can never regard it as part of its task to establish laws in the Hempelian sense. Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why.
Psychohistory, it seems to me, is on the contrary specifically concerned with establishing laws and discovering causes in precisely the Hempelian manner. The relationship between history and psychohistory is parallel to the relationship between astrology and astronomy, or if that seems too pejorative, between geology and physics. Astrology and geology are disciplines seeking sequential orders in the sky and the earth, while astronomy and physics are not narrative at all, but are sciences attempting to establish laws in their own respective areas. Psychohistory, as the science of historical motivation, may concentrate on the same historical events that written history covers, but its purpose is never to tell what happened one day after another. When the first astronomers came along and found astrologers describing the positions of the stars day by day and trying to explain all the relationships between them, they created a revolution by saying, "Forget about the sequence of the skies. What interests us qua scientists is this one dot of light and whether it goes in a circle or an ellipse--and why. In order to find this out, we will have to drop the narrative task of astrology."
What is more, science never did pick up this task of narration--because it couldn't. Astronomy, even if it finally discovers all the laws of the universe, will still not narrate the sequences of skies, any more than psychohistory will ever narrate the events of this or that period. Psychohistory, as a science, will always be problem-centered, while history will always remain period-centered. They are simply two different tasks.
It does not, of course, follow that psychohistory simply uses the facts historians have narrated up to now in order to construct laws of historical motivation. Like astronomy and physics, psychohistory finds it necessary to conduct its own search for material peculiar to its own interests in both past and present society. Whole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians--childhood history, content analysis of historical imagery, and so on--suddenly expand from the periphery to the center of the psychohistorian's conceptual world, simply because his or her own new questions require material nowhere to be found in history books.
Now I am well aware that in claiming the field of historical motivation exclusive for the psychohistorian I immediately run up against the oft-repeated claim by historians that they work with motivations all the time, so there is nothing new in that. I had heard this claim so often in the two decades since I first studied the philosophy of history that I was finally moved to measure exactly how often historians actually do examine motivations in their works. I therefore kept a tally-sheet as I read 100 history books of varying kinds and recorded exactly how many sentences were devoted to any kind of motivational analysis whatsoever--not just psychoanalytic, but any level of attention at all. In no case did this motivational content reach as much as 1% of the book -- so the field seemed to be ours by default. What wasn't pure narrative of one event after another turned out to be mainly the recitation of as many economic facts as possible in the hopes that their mere conjunction with the historical narrative would be mistaken for explanation.
Now anyone who has read any portion of the over 1,300 books and articles contained in the "Bibliography of Psychohistory" will soon realize that psychohistory has reversed this 1-to-99 ratio, so that the bulk of psychohistorical writing is devoted to an intense concentration on motivational analysis while the physical events of history are necessarily given quite sketchy background treatment. There is, for instance, only one page at the beginning of Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades describing how the participants decided to begin four hundred years of wars, and then several thousand pages devoted to the routes, battles and other events which make up the "history" of the Crusades. A psychohistorian would assume the history, and spend his decades of research and thousands of pages in the most fascinating question for psychohistory -- why so many set off on such a strange task as relic-saving. That the historian, when reviewing such a psychohistory, would accuse it of "ignoring" the full history of the Crusades should bother the psychohistorian as little as the accusation by the astrologer that Galileo "ignored" all the other stars in describing the path of one mere planet. It wasn't his task, and narrative history isn't ours.

pp. 9-10: This matter of psychohistory "ignoring" other fields when it specializes is a matter of some importance, since it is so often repeated by historians when criticizing psychohistorical works. In my own work, for instance, I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant...), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science). What seems not to have occurred to the critics of psychohistory is that we might choose to focus on the historical evolution of the psyche because only thereby can we reach the unsolved problems of precisely these same fields of politics, economics and sociology, fields which are shot through with unproven psychological assumptions and which have failed to become reliable sciences precisely because of the unsolved psychohistorical problems within them. Professionals in each of these fields recognize this quite well, and even admit it to each other in their journals -- it is only historians, ignorant of the shaky psychological underpinnings of the fields from which they uncritically borrow, who imagine there can be "economic, political, and social factors" which are somehow apart from "psychological" factors in history. As one instance, it is probably true that my own work on the evolution of childhood was at least partly a response to problems encountered in the theory of economic development, as set forth in such books as Everett E. Hagen's On the Theory of Social Change: How Economic Growth Begins, where the crucial link needed to produce a take-off in economic development is shown to be just the kind of personality which I was later able to trace in the history of childhood as the result of the "intrusive mode" of parenting. Just as surely is the study of class intimately tied up with evolving psychohistorical patterns of dominance and submission, and the study of power dependent upon an understanding of group-fantasy needs and defenses. The notion that psychohistory somehow "ignores" economics, sociology or political science is possibly the most ignorant charge that could be leveled against it.

- from The History of Childhood (Lloyd deMause, Editor); pp. 6-12 [The Evolution of Childhood by Lloyd deMause (Psychological Principles of Childhood History: Projective and Reversal Reactions)]: In studying childhood over many generations, it is most important to concentrate on those moments which most affect the psyche of the next generation: primarily, this means what happens when an adult is face to face with a child who needs something. The adult has, I believe, three major reactions available: (1) He can use the child as a vehicle for projection of the contents of his own unconscious (projective reaction); (2) he can use the child as a substitute for an adult figure important in his own childhood (reversal reaction); or (3) he can empathize with the child’s needs and act to satisfy them (empathic reaction).
The projective reaction is, of course, familiar to psychoanalysts under terms which range from “projection” to “projective identification,” a more concrete, intrusive form of voiding feelings into others. The psychoanalyst, for instance, is thoroughly familiar with being used as a “toilet-lap” for the massive projections of the patient. It is this condition of being used as a vehicle for projections which is usual for children in the past.
Likewise, the reversal reaction is familiar to students of battering parents. Children exist only to satisfy parental needs, and it is always the failure of the child-as-parent to give love which triggers the actual battering. As one battering mother put it: “I have never felt loved all my life. When the baby was born, I thought he would love me. When he cried, it meant he didn’t love me. So I hit him.”
The third term, empathic reaction, is used here in a more limited sense than the dictionary definition. It is the adult’s ability to regress to the level of a child’s need and correctly identify it without an admixture of the adult’s own projections. The adult must then be able to maintain enough distance from the need to be able to satisfy it. It is an ability identical to the use of the psychoanalyst’s unconscious called “free-floating attention,” or, as Theodor Reik terms it, “listening with the third ear.”
Projective and reversal reactions often occurred simultaneously in parents in the past, producing an effect which I call the “double image,” where the child was seen as both full of the adult’s projected desires, hostilities, and sexual thoughts, and at the same moment as a mother or father figure. That is, it is both bad and loving. Furthermore, the further back in history one goes, the more “concretization” or reification one finds of these projective and reversal reactions, producing progressively more bizarre attitudes toward children, similar to those of contemporary parents of battered and schizophrenic children.
The first illustration of these closely interlocking concepts which we will examine is in an adult-child scene from the past. The year is 1739, [and] the boy, Nicolas, is four years old. The incident is one he remembers and has had confirmed by his mother. His grandfather, who has been rather attentive to him the past few days, decides he has to “test” him and says, “Nicolas, my son, you have many faults, and these grieve your mother. She is my daughter and has always obliged me; obey me too and correct these, or I will whip you like a dog which is being trained. Nicolas, angry at the betrayal “from one who has been so kind to me," throws his toys into the fire. The grandfather seems pleased.

“Nicholas . . . I said that to test you. Did you really think that a grandpapa, who had been so kind to you yesterday and the day before could treat you like a dog today? I thought you were intelligent . . .” “I am not a beast like a dog.” “No, but you are not as clever as I thought, or you would have understood that I was only teasing. It was just a joke . . . Come to me.” I threw myself into his arms. “That is not all,” he continued, “I want to see you friends with your mother; you have grieved, deeply grieved her . . . Nicolas, your father loves you; do you love him?” “Yes, grandpapa!” “Suppose he were in danger and to save him it was necessary to put your hand in the fire, would you do it? Would you put it . . . there, if it was necessary?” “Yes, grandpapa.” “And for me?” “For you? . . . yes, yes.” “And for your mother?” “For mamma? Both of them, both of them!” “We shall see if you are telling the truth, for your mother is in great need of your little help! If you love her, you must prove it.” I made no answer; but, putting together all that had been said, I went to the fireplace and, while they were making signs to each other, put my right hand into the fire. The pain drew a deep sigh from me.” [Nicholas Restif de la Bretonne, Monsieur Nicolas; or, The Human Heart Unveiled, Vol. 1, R. Crowder Mathers, trans. (London, 1930), p. 95.]

What makes this sort of scene so typical of adult-child interaction in the past is the existence of so many contradictory attitudes on the adult’s part without the least resolution. The child is loved and hated, rewarded and punished, bad and loving, all at once. That this puts the child in a “double bind” of conflicting signals (which Bateson and others believe underlie schizophrenia), goes without saying. [Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York, 1972).] But the conflicting signals themselves come from adults who are striving to demonstrate that the child is both very bad (projective reaction) and very loving (reversal reaction). It is the child’s function to reduce the adult’s pressing anxieties; the child acts as the adult’s defense.
It is also the projective and reversal reactions which make guilt impossible in the severe beatings which we so often encounter in the past. This is because it is not the actual child who is being beaten. It is either the adult’s own projections (“Look at her give you the eye! That’s how she picks up men—she’s a regular sexpot!” a mother says of her battered daughter of two), or it is a product of reversal (“He thinks he’s the boss—all the time trying to run things—but I showed him who is in charge around here!” a father says of his nine-month-old boy whose skull he has split). [Barry Cunningham, “Beaten Kids, Sick Parents,” New York Post, February 23, 1972, p. 14.] One can often catch the merging of beaten and beater and therefore lack of guilt in the historical sources. An American father (1830) tells of horsewhipping his four-year-old boy for not being able to read something. The child is tied up naked in the cellar:

With him in this condition, and myself, the wife of my bosom, and the lady of my family, all of us in distress, and with hearts sinking within us, I commenced using the rod . . . During this most unpleasant, self denying and disagreeable work, I made frequent stops, commanding and trying to persuade, silencing excuses, answering objections . . . I felt all the force of divine authority and express command that I ever felt in any case in all my life . . . But under the all controlling influence of such a degree of angry passion and obstinacy, as my son had manifested, no wonder he thought he “should beat me out,” feeble and tremulous as I was; and knowing as he did that it made me almost sick to whip him. At that time he could neither pity me nor himself. [Samuel Arnold, An Astonishing Affair! (Concord, 1830), pp. 73-81.]

It is this picture of the merging of father and son, with the father complaining that he himself is the one beaten and in need of pity, which we will encounter when we ask how beating could have been so widespread in the past. When a Renaissance pedagogue says you should tell the child when beating him, “you do the correction against your mind, compelled thereunto by conscience, and require them to put you no more unto such labour and pain. For if you do (say you) you must suffer part of the pain with me and therefore you shall now have experience and proof what pain it is unto both of us” we will not so easily miss the merging and mislabel it hypocrisy. [Powell, Domestic Relations, p. 110]
Indeed, the parent sees the child as so full of portions of himself that even real accidents to the child are seen as injuries to the parent. Cotton Mather’s daughter Nanny fell into the fire and burned herself badly, and he cried out, “Alas, for my sins the just God throws my child into the fire!” [Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, vol. 1 (New York, n.d.), p. 283.] He searched everything he himself had recently done wrong, but since he believed he was the one being punished, no guilt toward his child could be felt (say, for leaving her alone), and no corrective action could be taken. Soon two other daughters were badly burned. His reaction was to preach a sermon on “What use ought parents to make of disasters befallen their children.”
This matter of “accidents” to children is not to be taken lightly, for in it lies hidden the clue to why adults in the past were such poor parents. Leaving aside actual death wishes, which will be discussed later, accidents occurred in great numbers in the past because little children were so often left alone. Mather’s daughter Nibby would have been burned to death but for “a person accidentally then passing by the window,” because there was no one there to hear her cries. A colonial Boston experience is also typical:

“After they had supped, the mother put two children to bed in the room where they themselves did lie, and they went out to visit a neighbor. When they returned . . . the mother [went] to the bed, and not finding her youngest child (a daughter about five years of age), and after much search she found it drowned in a well in her cellar . . .” [Carl Holliday, Woman’s Life in Colonial Boston (Boston, 1922), p. 25.]
The father blames the accident on his having worked on a holy day. The point is not only that it was common to leave little children alone right up to the twentieth century. More important is that parents cannot be concerned with preventing accidents if guilt is absent because it is the adult’s own projections that they feel have been punished. Massive projectors don’t invent safety stoves, nor often can they even see to it that their children are given the simplest care. Their projection, unfortunately, insures repetition.
The use of the child as a “toilet” for adult projections is behind the whole notion of original sin, and for eighteen hundred years adults were in general agreement that, as Richard Allestree (1676) puts it, “the new-born babe is full of the stains and pollution of sin, which it inherits from our first parents through our loins . . .” [Richard Allestree, The Whole Duty of Man (London, 1766), p. 20] Baptism used to include actual exorcism of the Devil, and the belief that the child who cried at his christening was letting out the Devil long survived the formal omission of exorcism in the Reformation. [Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), p. 479; Beatrice Saunders, The Age of Candlelight: The English Social Scene in the 17th Century (London, 1959), p. 88; Traugott K. Oesterreich, Possession, Demoniacal and Other Among Primitive Races, in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times (New York, 1930); Grunewald’s “St. Cyriakus” shows a girl being exorcised, her mouth being forced open to let the devil out.] Even where formal religion did not stress the devil, it was there; here is a picture of a Polish Jew teaching in the nineteenth century:

He derived an intense joy from the agonies of the little victim trembling and shivering on the bench. And he used to administer the whippings coldly, slowly, deliberately . . . he asked the boy to let down his clothes, lie across the bench . . . and pitched in with the leathern thongs . . . “In every person there is a Good Spirit and an Evil Spirit. The Good Spirit has its own dwelling-place—which is the head. So has the Evil Spirit—and that is the place where you get the whipping.” [Shmarya Levin, Childhood in Exile (New York, 1929), pp. 58-59.]
The child in the past was so charged with projections that he was often in danger of being considered a changeling if he cried too much or was otherwise too demanding. There is a large literature on changelings, but it is not generally realized that it was not only deformed children who were killed as changelings, [Carl Haffter, “The Changeling: History and Psychodynamics of Attitudes to Handicapped Children in European Folklore.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 4 (1968), 55-61 contains the best bibliography; see also Bayne-Powell, English Child, p. 247; and Pearson, Elizabethans, p. 80.] but also those who, as St. Augustine puts it, “suffer from a demon . . . they are under the power of the Devil . . . some infants die in this vexation . . .” [39. St. Augustine, Against Julian (New York, 1957), p. 117.]

- from THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD (Lloyd deMause, Editor); pp. 17-18 [CHAPTER 1 – The Evolution of Childhood by Lloyd deMause]: It is, of course, not love which the parent of the past lacked, but rather the emotional maturity needed to see the child as a person separate from himself. It is difficult to estimate what proportion of today’s parents achieve with any consistency the empathic level. Once I took an informal poll of a dozen psychotherapists and asked them how many of their patients at the beginning of analysis were able to sustain images of their children as individuals separate from their own projected needs; they all said that very few had that ability. As one, Amos Gunsberg, put it: “This doesn’t occur until some way along in their analysis, always at a specific moment—when they arrive at an image of themselves as separate from their own all-enveloping mother.”
Running parallel to the projective reaction is the reversal reaction, with the parent and child reversing roles, often producing quite bizarre results. Reversal begins long before the child is born – it is the source of the very powerful desire for children one sees in the past, which is always expressed in terms of what children can give the parent, and never what the parent can give them.
Medea’s complaint before committing infanticide is that by killing her children she won’t have anyone to look after her:

What was the purpose, children, for which I reared you?
For all my travail, and wearing myself away?
They were sterile, those pains I had in the bearing of you.
Oh surely once the hopes I had, poor me,
Were high ones; you would look after me in old age,
And when I died would deck me well with your own hands;
A thing which all would have done. Oh but it is gone,
That lovely thought. [Euripides, The Medea, 1029-36; Jason, too, pities only himself, 1235-7.]

Once born, the child becomes the mother’s and father’s own parent, in either positive or negative aspect, totally out of keeping with the child’s actual age. The child, regardless of sex, is often dressed in the style of clothes similar to that worn by the parent’s mother, that is, not only in a long dress, but in one out of date by at least a generation. [Aries, Centuries of Childhood, p. 57; Christian Augustus Struve, A Familiar Treatise on the Physical Education of Children (London, 1801), p. 299.] The mother is literally reborn in the child; children are not just dressed as “miniature adults” but quite clearly as miniature women, often complete with décolleté.
The idea that the grandparent is actually reborn in the baby is a common one in antiquity, [Agnes C. Vaughan, The Genesis of Human Offspring: A Study in Early Greek Culture (Menasha, Wisconsin, 1945), p. 107; James Hastings, ed., A Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels (New York, 1911), p. 533] and the closeness between the word “baby” and the various words for grandmother (baba, Babe) hints at similar beliefs. [Kett, Adolescence, pp. 35, 230.] But evidence exists for more concrete reversals in the past, ones that are virtually hallucinatory. For instance, the breasts of little infants were often kissed or sucked on by adults. Little Louis XIII often had both his penis and nipples kissed by people around him. Even though Heroard, his diarist, always made him the active one (at thirteen months “he makes M. de Souvre, M. de Termes, M. de Liancourt, and M. Zamet kiss his cock”) [74. E. Soulie and E. de Barthelemy, eds., Journal de Jean Heroard sur l’Enfance et la Jeunesse de Louis XIII, vol. 1 (Paris, 1868), p. 35], it later becomes evident that he was being passively manipulated: “He never wants to let the Marquise touch his nipples, his nurse had said to him: ‘Sir, do not let anyone touch your nipples or your cock; they’ll cut them off.’” Yet the adults still couldn’t keep their hands and lips off his penis and nipples. Both were the mother’s breast returned.

- p. 21: The need of the parent for mothering placed an enormous burden on the growing child. It was sometimes even the cause of its death. One of the more frequent reasons given for infant death was “overlaying,” or suffocation in bed, and although this was often just an excuse for infanticide, pediatricians admitted that when it was genuine it was due to the mother’s refusal to put the child in a separate bed when she went to sleep; “not wanting to let go of the child, [she] holds him even tighter as she sleeps. Her breast closes off the nose of the child.” [88. Most, Mensch, p. 74]. It was this reversal image of the child-as-security-blanket that was the reality behind the common medieval warning that parents must be careful not to coddle their children “like the ivy that certainly kills the tree encircled by it, or the ape that hugs her whelps to death with mere fondness.” [Charron, Wisdom, p. 1338; Robert Cleaver, A godlie forme of household government . . . (London, 1598), p. 296.]

- pp. 23-24: Another example of the double image was in circumcision. As is well known, Jews, Egyptians, Arabs, and others circumcised the foreskin of boys. The reasons given for this are manifold, but all of them can be covered by the double image of projection and reversal. To begin with, such mutilations of children by adults always involve projection and punishment to control projected passions. As Philo put it in the first century, circumcision was for “the excision of passions, which bind the mind. For since among all passions that of intercourse between man and woman is greatest, the lawgivers have commended that that instrument, which serves this intercourse, be mutilated, pointing out, that these powerful passions must be bridled, and thinking not only this, but all passions would be controlled through this one.” [Felix Bryk, Circumcision in Man and Woman: Its History, Psychology and Ethnology (New York, 1943), p. 94.] Moses Maimonides agrees:

I believe one of the reasons for circumcision was the diminution of sexual intercourse and the weakening of the sexual organs; its purpose was to restrict the activities of this organ and to leave it at rest as much as possible. The true purpose of circumcision was to give the sexual organ that kind of physical pain as not to impair its natural function or the potency of the individual, but to lessen the power of passion and of too great desire.

The reversal element in circumcision can be seen in the glans-as-nipple theme embedded in the details of one version of the ritual. The infant’s penis is rubbed to make it erect, and the foreskin is split, either by the mohel’s fingernail or with a knife, and then torn all around the glans. Then the mohel sucks the blood off the glans. This is done for the same reason that everyone kissed little Louis’s penis – because the penis, and more particularly the glans, is the mother’s nipple returned, and the blood is her milk. [Even present day self-cutters experience the flow of blood as milk; see John S. Kafka, “The Body as Transitional Object: A Psychoanalytic Study of a Self-Mutilating Patient,” British Journal of Medical Psychology, 42 (1969), p. 209.] The idea of the child’s blood as having magic-milk qualities is an old one, and underlies many sacrificial acts, but rather than examine this complex problem here I would like to concentrate on the main idea of circumcision as the coming-out of the glans-as-nipple. It is not generally known that the exposure of the glans was a problem for more than just the circumcising nations. To the Greeks and Romans, the glans was considered sacred; the sight of it “struck terror and wonder in the heart of man,” [Eric J. Dingwall, Male Infibulation (London, 1925), p. 60; and Thorkil Vanggaard, Phallos: A Symbol and its History in the Male World (New York, 1969), p. 89] and so they either tied up the prepuce with a string, which was called kynodesme, or else pinned it closed with a fibula, a clasp, which was called infibulation. [Dingwall, Infibulation, p. 61; Celsus, De Medicina, vol. 3, W. B. Spencer, trans. (Cambridge, 1938), p. 25; Augustin Cabanes, The Erotikon (New York, 1966), p. 171; Bryk, Circumcision, pp. 225-27; Soranus, Gynecology (Baltimore, 1956), p. 107; Peter Ucko, “Penis Sheaths: A Comparative Study,” Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland for 1969 (London, 1970), p. 43.] Evidence of infibulation, both for “modesty” and “to restrain lust,” can also be found in the Renaissance and modern times.
When the foreskin wasn’t sufficiently long to cover the glans, an operation was sometimes performed whereby the skin was cut around the base of the penis and the skin drawn forward. In ancient art, the glans was usually shown covered, either with the penis coming to a point, or else clearly showing the tied foreskin, even when erect. I have only found two cases where the glans showed: either when it was meant to inspire awe, as in the representations of the phallus which were used to hang in doorways, or when the penis was shown being used in fellatio. Thus, to Jew and Roman alike, the image of reversal was imbedded in their attitude toward the glans-as-nipple.

- p. 25 (INFANTICIDE AND DEATH WISHES TOWARD CHILDREN): In a pair of books rich in clinical documentation, the psychoanalyst Joseph Rheingold examined the death wishes of mothers toward their children, and found that they are not only far more widespread than is commonly realized, but also that they stem from a powerful attempt to “undo” motherhood in order to escape the punishment they imagine their own mothers will wreak upon them. [Joseph C. Rheingold, The Fear of Being a Woman: A Theory of Maternal Destructiveness (New York, 1964); and Rheingold, The Mother, Anxiety, and Death: The Catastrophic Death Complex (Boston, 1967).] Rheingold shows us mothers giving birth and begging their own mothers not to kill them, and traces the origin of both infanticidal wishes and post-partum depression states as not due to hostility toward the child itself, but rather to the need to sacrifice the child to propitiate their own mothers. Hospital staffs are well aware of these widespread infanticidal wishes, and often allow no contact between the mother and child for some time. Rheingold’s findings, seconded by Block, Zilboorg, and others,* are complex and have far-reaching implications; here we can only point out that filicidal impulses of contemporary mothers are enormously widespread, with fantasies of stabbing, mutilation, abuse, decapitation, and strangulation common in mothers in psychoanalysis. I believe that the further back in history one goes, the more filicidal impulses are acted out by parents.

* Dorothy Bloch, “Feelings That Kill: The Effect of the Wish for Infanticide in Neurotic Depression,” The Psychoanalytic Review, 52 (1965); Bakan, Slaughter; Stuart S. Asch, “Depression: Three Clinical Variations,” in Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 21 (1966) pp. 150-71; Morris Brozovsky and Harvey Falit, “Neonaticide: Clinical and Psychodynamic Considerations,” Journal of Child Psychiatry, 10 (1971); Wolfgang Lederer, The Fear of Women (New York, 1968); Galdston, “Dysfunctions,” and the bibliography in Rheingold.

The history of infanticide in the West has yet to be written, and I will not attempt it here. But enough is already known to establish that, contrary to the usual assumption that it is an Eastern rather than a Western problem, infanticide of both legitimate and illegitimate children was a regular practice of antiquity, that the killing of legitimate children was only slowly reduced during the Middle Ages, and that illegitimate children continued regularly to be killed right up into the nineteenth century. [For bibliographies, see, Abt-Garrison, History of Pediatrics; Bakan, Slaughter; William Barclay, Educational Ideas in the Ancient World (London, 1959), Appendix A; H. Bennett, “Exposure of Infants in Ancient Rome,” Classical Journal, 18 (1923), pp. 341-45; A. Cameron, “The Exposure of Children and Greek Ethics,” Classical Review, 46 (1932), 105-14; . . . A. R. W. Harrison, The Law of Athens: The Family and Property (Oxford, 1968); William L. Langer, “Checks on Population Growth: 1750-1850,” Scientific American (1972), 93-99; . . . A. J. Levin, “Oedipus and Sampson, the Rejected Hero-Child,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 38 (1957), 103-10; John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1965); Payne, Child; Juha Pentikainen, The Nordic Dead-Child Traditions (Helsinki, 1968); Max Raden, “Exposure of Infants in Roman Law and Practice,” Classical Journal, 20 (1925), 342-43; Edward Shorter, “Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution, and Social Change in Modern Europe,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1971), 237-72; Edward Shorter, “Infanticide in the Past,” History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory 1 (1973), 178-80; Edward Shorter, “Sexual Change and Illegitimacy: The European Experience,” in Modern European Social History, ed., Robert Bezucha (Lexington, Massachusetts, 1972), pp. 231-69; John Thrupp, The Anglo-Saxon Home: A History of the Domestic Institutions and Customs of England. From the Fifth to the Eleventh Century (London, 1862); Richard Trexler, “Infanticide in Florence,” History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory, 1 (1973), 98-117; . . . Oscar H. Werner, The Unmarried Mother in German Literature (New York, 1966) . . .]

- from The History of Childhood (Lloyd deMause, Editor); p. 2 (Chapter 1—The Evolution of Childhood by Lloyd deMause): Since Freud . . . our view of childhood has acquired a new dimension, and in the past half century the study of childhood has become routine for the psychologist, the sociologist, and the anthropologist. It is only beginning for the historian. Such determined avoidance requires an explanation.
Historians usually blame the paucity of the sources for the lack of serious study of childhood in the past. Peter Laslett wonders why the “crowds and crowds of little children are strangely missing from the written record. . . . There is something mysterious about the silence of all these multitudes of babes in arms, toddlers and adolescents in the statements men made at the time about their own experience. . . . We cannot say whether fathers helped in the tending of infants. . . . Nothing can as yet be said on what is called by the psychologists toilet training. . . . It is in fact an effort of mind to remember all the time that children were always present in such numbers in the traditional world, nearly half the whole community living in a condition of semi-obliteration.” [Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York, 1965), p. 104] As the family sociologist James Bossard puts it: “Unfortunately, the history of childhood has never been written, and there is some doubt whether it ever can be written [because] of the dearth of historical data bearing on childhood.” [James H. S. Bossard, The Sociology of Child Development (New York, 1948), p. 598.]
This conviction is so strong among historians that it is not surprising that this book began not in the field of history at all but in applied psychoanalysis. Five years ago, I was engaged in writing a book on a psychoanalytic theory of historical change, and, in reviewing the results of half a century of applied psychoanalysis, it seemed to me that it had failed to become a science mainly because it had not become evolutionary.

- pp. 5-6 (Previous Works on Children in History): Of all the books on childhood in the past, Philippe Aries’s book Centuries of Childhood is probably the best known; one historian notes the frequency with which it is “cited as Holy Writ.” [Frank E. Manuel, “The Use and Abuse of Psychology in History,” Daedalus, 100 (1971), 203.] Aries’s central thesis is the opposite of mine: he argues that while the traditional child was happy because he was free to mix with many classes and ages, a special condition known as childhood was “invented” in the early modern period, resulting in a tyrannical concept of the family which destroyed friendship and sociability and deprived children of freedom, inflicting upon them for the first time the birch and the prison cell.
To prove this thesis, Aries uses two main arguments. He first says that a separate concept of childhood was unknown in the early Middle Ages. “Medieval art until about the twelfth century did not know childhood or did not attempt to portray it” because artists were “unable to depict a child except as a man on a smaller scale.” [Aries, Centuries of Childhood, pp. 33, 10.] Not only does this leave the art of antiquity in limbo, but it ignores voluminous evidence that medieval artists could, indeed, paint realistic children. [An enormous bibliography and many examples of paintings of the child in early medieval art can be found in Victor Lasareff, “Studies in the Iconography of the Virgin,” Art Bulletin, 20 (1938), pp. 26-65.] His etymological argument for a separate concept of childhood being unknown is also untenable. [Natalie Z. Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule,” Past and Present, 50 (1971), 61-62. Frank Boll, Die Lebensalter: Ein Beitrag zur antiken Ethologie und zur Geschichte der Zahlen (Leipzig and Berlin, 1913) has the best bibliography on “Ages of Man”; for all the variations in Old English on the word “child,” see Hilding Back, The Synonyms for “Child,” “Boy,” “Girl” in Old English (London, 1934).] In any case, the notion of the “invention of childhood” is so fuzzy that it is surprising that so many historians have recently picked it up. His second argument, that the modern family restricts the child’s freedom and increases the severity of punishment, runs counter to all the evidence.
Far more reliable than Aries is a quartet of books, only one of them written by a professional historian: George Payne’s The Child in Human Progress, G. Rattray Taylor’s The Angel Makers, David Hunt’s Parents and Children in History, and J. Louise Despert’s The Emotionally Disturbed Child—Then and Now. Payne, writing in 1916, was the first to examine the wide extent of infanticide and brutality toward children in the past, particularly in antiquity. Taylor’s book, rich in documentation, is a sophisticated psychoanalytic reading of childhood and personality in late eighteenth-century England. Hunt, like Aries, centers mostly on the unique seventeenth-century document, Heroard’s diary of the childhood of Louis XIII, but does so with great psychological sensitivity and awareness of the psychohistorical implications of his findings. And Despert’s psychiatric comparison of child mistreatment in the past and present surveys the range of emotional attitudes toward children since antiquity, expressing her growing horror as she uncovers a story of unremitting “heartlessness and cruelty.”

- from What The British Can Do To End Child Abuse by Lloyd deMause: The reason the British have not moved to ban smacking is they really want to smack their children. As family campaigner Lynette Burrows said recently, "Children need smacking. If we do not have a small input of pain, children would never survive the first two years of their lives when they are learning to walk." Even Tony Blair has said he smacked his child when he was little. ("Blair Says He Smacked His Children." CNN.com, January 11, 2006.) http://articles.cnn.com/2006-01-11/w...en?_s=PM:WORLD


- from The History of Childhood (Lloyd deMause, Editor) [The Evolution of Childhood by Lloyd deMause]; pp. 43-47 (‘TOILET TRAINING, DISCIPLINE, AND SEX’): The child in antiquity lived his earliest years in an atmosphere of sexual abuse. Growing up in Greece and Rome often included being used sexually by older men. The exact form and frequency of the abuse varied by area and date. In Crete and Boeotia, pederastic marriages and honeymoons were common. Abuse was less frequent among aristocratic boys in Rome, but sexual use of children was everywhere evident in some form. Boy brothels flourished in every city, and one could even contract for the use of a rent-a-boy service in Athens. Even where homosexuality with free boys was discouraged by law, men kept slave boys to abuse, so that even free-born children saw their fathers sleeping with boys. Children were sometimes sold into concubinage; Musonius Rufus wondered whether such a boy would be justified in resisting being abused: “I knew a father so depraved that, having a son conspicuous for youthful beauty, he sold him into a life of shame. If, now, that lad who was sold and sent into such a life by his father had refused and would not go, should we say that he was disobedient . . .” Aristotle’s main objection to Plato’s idea that children should be held in common was that when men had sex with boys they wouldn’t know if they were their own sons, which Aristotle says would be “most unseemly.” Plutarch said the reason why freeborn Roman boys wore a gold ball around their necks when they were very young was so men could tell which boys it was not proper to use sexually when they found a group in the nude.
Plutarch’s statement was only one among many which indicate that the sexual abuse of boys was not limited to those over 11 or 12 years of age, as most scholars assume. Sexual abuse by pedagogues and teachers of smaller children may have been common throughout antiquity. Although all sorts of laws were passed to try to limit sexual attacks on school children by adults, the long heavy sticks carried by pedagogues and teachers were often used to threaten them. Quintillian, after many years of teaching in Rome, warned parents against the frequency of sexual abuse by teachers, and made this the basis of his disapproval of beating in schools:

When children are beaten, pain or fear frequently have results of which it is not pleasant to speak and which are likely to be a source of shame, a shame which unnerves and depresses the mind and leads the child to shun and loathe the light. Further, if inadequate care is taken in the choices of respectable governors and instructors, I blush to mention the shameful abuse which scoundrels sometimes make of their right to administer corporal punishment or the opportunity not infrequently offered to others by the fear thus caused in the victims. I will not linger on this subject; it is more than enough if I have made my meaning clear.

Aeschines quotes some of the Athenian laws which attempted to limit sexual attacks on schoolchildren:

. . . consider the case of the teachers . . . it is plain that the lawgiver distrusts them . . . He forbids the teacher to open the schoolroom, or the gymnastics trainer the wrestling school, before sunrise, and he commands them to close the doors before sunset; for he is exceeding suspicious of their being alone with a boy, or in the dark with him. [Aeschines, The Speeches of Aeschines, Charles Darwin Adams, trans. (London, 1919), pp. 9-10.]

Aeschines, when prosecuting Timarchus for having hired himself out as a boy prostitute, put several men on the stand who admitted having paid to sodomize Timarchus. Aeschines admitted that many, including himself, were used sexually when they were children, but not for pay, which would have made it illegal.
The evidence from literature and art confirms this picture of the sexual abuse of smaller children. Petronius loves depicting adults feeling the “immature little tool” of boys, and his description of the rape of a seven-year-old girl, with women clapping in a long line around the bed, suggests that women were not exempt from playing a role in the process. Aristotle said homosexuality often becomes habitual in “those who are abused from childhood.” It has been assumed that the small nude children seen on vases waiting on adults in erotic scenes are servants, but in view of the usual role of noble children as waiters, we should consider the possibility that they may be children of the house. For, as Quintillian said about noble Roman children: “We rejoice if they say something over-free, and words which we should not tolerate from the lips even of an Alexandrian page are greeted with laughter and a kiss . . . they hear us use such words, they see our mistresses and minions; every dinner party is loud with foul songs, and things are presented to their eyes of which we should blush to speak.” [Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Cambridge, 1947), p. 403; Quintilian, Institutio, p. 43; Ove Brusendorf and Paul Henningsen, A History of Eroticism (New York, 1963), plate 4.]
Even the Jews, who tried to stamp out adult homosexuality with severe punishments, were more lenient in the case of young boys. Despite Moses’s injunction against corrupting children, the penalty for sodomy with children over 9 years of age was death by stoning, but copulation with younger children was not considered a sexual act, and was punishable only by a whipping, “as a matter of public discipline.” [Louis M. Epstein, Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism (New York, 1948), p. 136.]
It must be remembered that widespread sexual abuse of children can only occur with at least the unconscious complicity of the child’s parents. Children in the past were under the fullest control of their parents, who had to agree to give them over to their abusers. Plutarch muses on how important this decision was for fathers:

I am loathe to introduce the subject, loathe too to turn away from it . . . whether we should permit the suitors of our boys to associate with them and pass their time with them, or whether the opposite policy of excluding them and shooing them away from intimacy with our boys is correct. Whenever I look at blunt-spoken fathers of the austere and astringent type who regard intimacy with lovers as an intolerable outrage upon their sons, I am circumspect about showing myself a sponsor and advocate of the practice. [Yet Plato] declares that men who have proven their worth should be permitted to caress any fair lad they please. Lovers who lust only for physical beauty, then, it is right to drive away; but free access should be granted to lovers of the soul.

Like the adults we have previously seen around little Louis XIII, the Greeks and Romans couldn’t keep their hands off children. I have only turned up one piece of evidence that this practice extended, like Louis’s abuse, back into infancy. Suetonius condemned Tiberius because he “taught children of the most tender years, whom he called his little fishes, to play between his legs while he was in his bath. Those which had not yet been weaned, but were strong and hearty, he set at fellatio . . .” Suetonius may or may not have made up the story, yet he obviously had reason to think his readers would believe him. So, apparently, did Tacitus, who told the same story. [Suetonius, Caesars, p. 148; Tacitus, The Annals of Tacitus (New York, 1948), p. 136.]
The favorite sexual use of children, however, was not fellatio, but anal intercourse. Martial said one should, while buggering a boy, “refrain from stirring the groin with poking hand . . . Nature has separated the male: one part has been produced for girls, one for men. Use your own part.” This, he said, was because the masturbating of boys would “hasten manhood,” an observation Aristotle made some time before him. Whenever a pre-pubertal boy was shown being used sexually on erotic vases, the penis was never shown erect. [Martial, Epigrams, vol. 2, Walter C. A. Kerr, trans. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1968), p. 255; Aristotle, Historia Animalium, trans. R. Cresswell (London, 1862), p. 180.] For men of antiquity were not really homosexuals as we know them today, but a much lower psychic mode, which I think should be termed “ambisexual” (they themselves used the term “ambidextrous”). While the homosexual runs to men as a retreat from women, as a defense against the oedipal conflict, the ambisexual has never really reached the oedipal level, and uses boys and women almost without distinction. In fact, as psychoanalyst Joan McDougall observes, the main purpose of this kind of perversion is to demonstrate that “there is no difference between the sexes.” She says that it is an attempt to control childhood sexual traumata by reversal, with the adult now putting another child in the helpless position, and also an attempt to handle castration anxiety by proving that “castration does not hurt and in fact is the very condition of erotic arousal.” This well describes the man of antiquity. Intercourse with castrated children was often spoken of as being especially arousing, castrated boys were favorite “voluptates” in imperial Rome, and infants were castrated “in the cradle” to be used in brothels by men who liked buggering young castrated boys. When Domitian passed a law prohibiting castration of infants for brothels, Martial praised him: “Boys loved thee before . . . but now infants, too, love thee, Caesar.” Paulus Aegineta described the standard method used in castrating small boys:

Since we are sometimes compelled against our will by persons of high rank to perform the operation . . . by compression [it] is thus performed; children, still of a tender age, are placed in a vessel of hot water, and then when the parts are softened in the bath, the testicles are to be squeezed with the fingers until they disappear.

The alternative, he said, was to put them on a bench and cut their testicles out. Many doctors in antiquity mentioned the operation, and Juvenal said they were often called upon to perform it. [Paulus Aegineta, Aegeneta, pp. 379-81.]
Signs of castration surrounded the child in antiquity. In every field and garden he saw a Priapus, with a large erect penis and a sickle, which was supposed to symbolize castration. His pedagogue and his teacher might be castrated, castrated prisoners were everywhere, and his parents’ servants would often be castrated. St. Jerome wrote that some people had wondered whether letting young girls bathe with eunuchs was a wise practice. And although Constantine passed a law against castrators, the practice grew so rapidly under his successors that soon even noble parents mutilated their sons to further their political advancement. Boys were also castrated as a “cure” for various diseases and Ambroise Pare complained how many unscrupulous “Gelders,” greedy to get children’s testicles for magical purposes, persuaded parents to let them castrate their children.

- from What the British Can Do To End Child Abuse by Lloyd deMause: I witnessed the dramatic results of programs outlawing hitting and providing real support for parents when I recently toured Austria giving a speech on "The Childhood Origins of the Holocaust." My speech began by giving the massive evidence accumulated by myself and my fellow psychohistorians on child abuse in Germany and Austria during the first half of the 20th century. Parents killed their newborn over a third of the time, so that siblings watched their mothers strangle babies and throw them in latrines. Breastfeeding was infrequent, so infant mortality rates ranged up to 58%. During their first year of life, infants were bound up tight with swaddling bandages and rarely changed, left in their own feces and urine, covered with lice and other vermin and hung on a peg on the wall. Parents routinely called their little children "lice" because they were full of lice and "useless eaters" because they didn't contribute to the family income. Battering was routine from birth, "to stop them from being a 'tyrant,' so that one is master of the child forever." Parents were often described as being in a "righteous rage" while they "hammered obedience" into their children. Painful enemas were routinely used to "remove the impurities" from children. Then, when the children were five or so, they were sent out to be servants, where beating and sexual abuse was the rule. That these children became "time bombs" ready to explode as adults was not surprising.
During the Weimar period, a phobic group-fantasy became so widespread that the population was convinced that their blood was about to be infected by lice, which had to be exterminated in order to save the nation's bloodstream from being poisoned -- re-experiencing the dread of poisonous lice they had as helpless, swaddled infants. Eight hundred thousand children had their blood taken to see if it was "impure." Tens of thousands of homeless children were then exterminated as "useless eaters" in the first gas chambers and crematorium ovens, in the 1920s, before the Holocaust began. Long before ******, biologists and doctors advocated doing away with millions of sick people who lived what they termed "useless lives." [30]. Jews were called "tormentive lice that must be exterminated" (Goebbels) and "parasites on the body of other peoples who had to be exterminated to purify Germany" (******). Projecting onto Jews their own memories as babies in their shit-bandages, Austrians and Germans by the millions rounded them up and put them into over ten thousand death camps, subjecting them to "excremental assault" and telling them: "You'll be eaten by lice, you'll rot in your own shit. You are all going to die." Every name their own parents called them as children was repeated with the Jews. Official documents termed them "useless eaters" and "filthy lice who were infecting our pure blood." ****** himself was clinically phobic and sat for hours watching leeches suck his own blood out to get rid of what he termed its "poisons;" he then ordered Jews exterminated as "parasites." [33]. As the Nazis locked Jews into death camps, they called them "you filthy shitface"--as their parents had called them--and threw them into latrine pits, forcing feces into their mouths.
As Himmler put it, the Holocaust "is exactly like delousing. The removal of lice is not an ideological question, but a matter of hygiene….we have exterminated a bacterium because we do not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it." The elimination of Jews was begun by a medical and health official, Dr. Kroll, who was termed a "Sanitation Leader." Germany needed to become "like Pasteur," he said, eliminating the "bacillus that was the cause of innumerable diseases." The Holocaust was called "pest control." Indeed, the entire war was dominated by overpopulation experts who deemed it crucial that 30 million Poles and Soviets be starved to death in order to eliminate "useless mouths" — the term used for newborns as German mothers kill them. [37]. Watching your mother strangle your newborn baby sister while blaming her for being a "useless eater" who wanted to "gobble up" her breast is of course a highly traumatic event, and since the majority of Germans and Austrians were actually traumatized in this way, it is not surprising that they later re-enacted the infanticide of their siblings by fusing with their Killer Mommies and murdering helpless, "useless" Jews who they said were going to "reproduce twice as fast as Germans" and "gobble up" the breast of Germany! Anyone who has read the hundreds of pages of documents showing this kind of bizarre reasoning going on with every aspect of the war and Holocaust cannot help but conclude that these were clinically insane nations — made insane by the horrors of their early lives. Concentration camps were families restaged — master/slave torture chambers.
After WWII ended, even though economic recovery made family life difficult in Central Europe, by 1960 German and Austrian mothers began to be given help by the state in their childrearing tasks, and the traditional authoritarian model of the family that had been going on for centuries changed rapidly. In 1964, for instance, 80 percent of German and Austrian parents admitted to beating their children, but for the past decade there has been a law against hitting children which has improved childrearing so much that careful personality studies today show both Germans and Austrians are now less abusive toward children and less authoritarian in personality than British and Americans. Mothers are today given paid leave for up to three years when they have their children, and now feel able to show love and support for the independence of their growing children that would have shocked their grandparents. This and other state-supported help to parents has led to a less violent, more humane society, one that is rarely anti-Semitic and to a great extent is beyond the kind of violent nationalism that led to WWII.

30. James M. Glass, "Life Unworthy of Life": Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in ******'s Germany. New York: Basic Books, 1997, p. 34.

33. George Victor, ******: The Pathology of Evil. Washington: Brassey's, 1998, p. 23.

37. Goetz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 6.



- from The History of Childhood (Edited by Lloyd deMause); pp. 1-2 [Chapter 1: The Evolution of Childhood by Lloyd deMause]: The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused. It is our task here to see how much of this childhood history can be recaptured from the evidence that remains to us.
That this pattern has not previously been noticed by historians is because serious history has long been considered a record of public not private events. Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy sandbox of history, with its fantastic castles and magnificent battles, that they have generally ignored what is going on in the homes around the playground. And where historians usually look to the sandbox battles of yesterday for the causes of those today, we instead ask how each generation of parents and children creates those issues which are later acted out in the arena of public life.
At first glance, this lack of interest in the lives of children seems odd. Historians have been traditionally committed to explaining continuity and change over time, and ever since Plato it has been known that childhood is a key to this understanding. The importance of parent-child relations for social change was hardly discovered by Freud; St. Augustine's cry, "Give me other mothers and I will give you another world," has been echoed by major thinkers for fifteen centuries without affecting historical writing.






http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/06a1_incest.html

"Although most comparisons of male and female victimization show molestation of boys only about a third the rate of girls, there is evidence that males are far more reluctant to reveal their molestation, partly because it usually occurs earlier for boys than for girls and partly because victimization may be even more difficult for boys to recall and report than for girls. Because it was conducted by interviews, the 30 percent rate of Landis' study undoubtedly is the most reliable we have for boys. Therefore, the best estimates for memories of childhood sexual abuse we now have for the United States are 40 percent for girls and 30 percent for boys, almost half directly incestuous for girls and about a quarter directly incestuous for boys. [51. Some authors think boys may be sexually abused as often as girls; the literature is reviewed by Kee MacFarlane, et al., Sexual Abuse of Young Children: Evaluation and Treatment. New York: The Gullford Press, 1986, pp.9-10; also see Robert L. Johnson and Diane K. Shrier, "Sexual Victimization of Boys: An Adolescent Medicine Clinic's Experience." Ms., Newark: University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, n.d. and Mic Hunter, Abused Boys: The Neglected Victims Of Sexual Abuse. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1990.]

Yet even these astonishingly high figures are only a portion of the hidden true incidence rates. Four additional factors raise the actual rates even higher:

1. The groups interviewed do not include many people in the American population who have far higher than average sexual molestation experiences, including institutionalized criminals, prostitutes, juveniles in shelters and psychotics (52); 2. the studies only count admissions to the interviewer of abuse, and it is unlikely that no conscious memories were ever suppressed during the interviews; 3. a large percent of each study refused to be interviewed, and these may have been the most victimized of all, (53); 4. and most importantly, these studies include only clear conscious memories of events--unconscious memories, which are usually only uncovered during psychotherapy, would increase these rates.
It is possible to correct the incidence rates statistically for these factors. Although only 11 percent of Russell's respondents recalled being victimized before the age of five, another study shows the most common age of sexual abuse reported to authorities is four years, while other studies report that from 21 to 50 percent of reported sexual abuse victims involve children under five. [54. MacFarlane, Sexual Abuse of Young Children, p.7; Crewdson, By Silence Betrayed, p.162.] Since few people consciously recall traumatic events of any kind before the age of five, and since the graph for sexual abuse distribution by age runs roughly level from ages two to sixteen, the incidence figures stated above should be increased by at least an additional 50 percent (56) to account for these three factors. Therefore, the corrected incidence rates are at least 60 percent for girls and 45 percent for boys. Until someone is courageous enough to directly question the children themselves whether they have been molested - a simple procedure that has never been done in any published study to date -- 60 and 45 percent should be considered as the most reliable national incidence rates we now have available for the U.S."

'The time when one could deny that sexual seduction is extremely traumatic for children appears to have ended. The more studies that come out on the effects of childhood sexual abuse, the more severe the damage is found to be. The flood of books and articles documenting the emotional problems of victims both in childhood and in later life has to be read in detail to appreciate the profound sense of betrayal and the terrifying fears felt by the child, so that even single incidents have the power to permanently ravage their lives. Severe somatic reactions, depersonalization, self-hatred, hysterical seizures, depression, borderline personality formation, promiscuity, sexual dysfunctions, suicide, self-mutilation, night terrors and flashbacks, multiple personalities, post-traumatic stress disorders, delinquency, bulimia, and the overall stunting of feelings and capacities have all been documented - the earlier and the more often the abuse, the worse the damage.(76)

Outside the U.S., there has been only one comparably reliable study published: a thirteen-hundred-page report on face-to-face interviews of over 2,000 men and women done for the Canadian government by the Gallup organization, which concludes with incidence rates approximately the same as the U.S. studies.(77)"

'Even though there are no reliable statistics for most European countries, a recent flurry of books, articles and telephone "hotlines" has begun to reveal widespread sexual molestation. A recent BBC "ChildWatch" program asked its female listeners -- a large though biased sample -- if they remembered sexual molestation, and, of the 2,530 replies analyzed, 83 percent remembered someone touching their genitals, 62 percent of the full sample recalling actual intercourse.(85) Official estimates of German children sexually abused and raped each year now number over 300,000, and sexual abuse hot lines are becoming more widespread.(86) The establishment of Italian "SOS-infanzia" hotlines - initially much resented by the public - have begun to reveal widespread pedophile networks, baby prostitution and Boy Scout/Girl Guide molestation, as well as the widespread sexual abuse of children within families, with a particular emphasis on the pederasty of boys. (87) Finally, the most careful European study to date is a recent unpublished German survey by the Iinstitut fuer Kindheit that for the first time anywhere dared to ask the children themselves about their sexual experiences. I have been told that these researchers found an 80 percent childhood sexual molestation rate among Berlin school children. (88) The exact details of this study will certainly be revealing when it is published. It may be that direct questioning of children rather than relying on retrospective memory may produce even higher real incidence rates of sexual molestation than our 60 percent and 45 percent estimates for the U.S.'




http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/06a1_incites.html

52. The evidence for the higher incidence of childhood sexual abuse in these populations is reviewed in Crewdson, By Silence Betrayed, p.208; Rush, The Best Kept Secret, p. 5; Adele Mayer, Sexual Abuse: Causes, Consequences and Treatment of Incestuous and Pedophilic Acts. Holmes Beach, Florida: Learning Publications, 1985, pp.64; M. Serrill, "Treating Sex Offenders in New Jersey." Corrections 1(1974): 13-24; Mimi H. Silbert and Ayala M. Pines, "Early Sexual Exploitation as an Influence in Prostitution." Social Work 28(1983): 285-9; Cathy Spatz Widom, "Does Violence Beset Violence? A Critical Examination of the Literature," Psychological Bulletin 106(1989): 3-28; Elaine Carmen, Patricia Perri Rieker and Trudy Mills, "Victims of Violence and Psychiatric Illness," American Journal of Psychiatry 141(1984): 378383.

53. Russell thinks her numbers are underestimated since 36 percent of the households in her study refused to be interviewed and these probably had higher vitimilation rates. See Diana Russell, lecture, May 17, 1988, Waukesha, Wisconsin, reported in Carol Poston and Karen Lison, Reclaiming Our Lives: Hope for Adult Survivors of Incest. Boston: Litfie, Brown and Co., 1989, p.259.

56. The first two factors, the higher-rate populations excluded from the studies and the suppression of memories, only account for a few additional percentage points. The third factor, the higher rate for households refusing to participate in the studies, is impossible to quantify, so I have here not corrected for this fact. The fourth factor can, however, be quantified, since the recovery of repressed memories for an estimated 90 percent of the incidents prior to age five and for an estimated 35 percent of the incidents after age five would boost the overall rate by almost 50 percent. For a study which concludes that patients "who were abused early in childhood" were the most likely to suffer "massive repression" of memories, see Judith L. Herman and Emily Schatzow, "Recovery and Verification of Memories of Childhood Sexual Trauma." Psychoanalytic Psychology 4(1987): 1-14. The figures I use, therefore, should be considered conservative.

76. John Leopold Weil, Instinctual Stimulation of Children: From Common Practice to Child Abuse. Two Vols. Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1989; Gail Elizabeth Wyatt and Gloria Johnson Powell, Eds., Lasting Effects of Child Sexual Abuse. Newbury Park, Cauf.: Sage, 1988; Brandt F. Steele, "Notes on the Lasting Effects of Early Child Abuse Throughout the Life Cycle." Child Abuse & Neglect 10(1986): 283-91; Liz Tong, Kim Oates and Michael McDowell, "Personality Development Following Sexual Abuse." Child Abuse & Neglect 11(1987): 37143; Alison Ftshman Gartner and John Gartner, "Borderline Pathology in Post-Incest Female Adolescents." Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 52(1988): 101-113; Anathony P. Mannariarino and Judith A. Cohen, "A Clinical-Demographic Study of Sexually Abused Children." Child Abuse & Neglect 10(1986): 17-23; Wendy Maltz and Beverly Holman, Incest and Sexuality: A Guide to Understanding and Healing. Lexington.

77. R. F. Badgley, Sexual Offenses Against Children. 2 Vol". Ottawa: Canadian Government Publishing Center, 1984.

85. Jean S. La Fontaine, "Child Sexual Abuse and the Incest Taboo: Practical Problems and Theoretical Issues." Man n.s. 23(1988): 1-18.

86. Wetriarer Newt Zeitung, October 13, 1988, p.1; Iris Galey, 'Ich weinie nicht, als Vater sfarb. Bern: Zytglogge Verlag, 1988; see also infant t. issues 1988 to 1990.

88. Personal communication from Karin Wellenkotter and Detlef Iterenawi of the Institute fuer Kindheit, Berlin.


http://www.psychohistory.com/origins...reviolent.html

[Absurd]

Where's the third Lloyd deMause thread? If it were three threads, I would have substantial info to type that guy. Not much info in two threads so far.

[HERO]

- from Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy by Lloyd deMause; p. 9: The first question . . . that one should ask of a new President is obviously: “Will he take us into war?”

pp. 11-19: . . . . our empathy—which is the first condition of our task as professional psychohistorians—has allowed us over the past year of research to so continuously identify with him, both as a growing child and as an adult, that by now he seems like one of us, a friend, hardly someone we could unfeelingly “attack.” Besides, he is our leader—we are the passengers on the ship he is piloting through international waters, and we would ourselves be participating in the common group-fantasy that no one really dies in wars if we wished him anything but well. Let it be said at the outset: Jimmy Carter is a decent, personally attractive, well-intentioned human being. But matters of war and peace involve the very deepest layers of the personality, and it is unfortunately likely that if the day should come when we are all evaporated by that bright orange glow on the horizon, it will be a decent, well-intentioned man who will have pushed the button.


STAGES OF AMERICAN GROUP-FANTASY

The political roles each of us plays within the shifting group-fantasies of our national life are, of course, roles both derived from and acting as defenses against childhood anxieties. But even though one person may tend to take on liberal roles and another conservative ones, depending on the respective amounts of strictness and support in childhood, there is a higher fantasy level which views these roles as merely two parts played in a drama that encompasses both, one whose “script” transcends the usual left-right political dichotomy of modern politics. Thus, America may split on temporary issues, but as a rule the vast majority of the country unites on major political assumptions: we unite in wanting our leader and nation “strong,” we unite in feeling that the leader is often too strong and the government too big, we unite in agreeing to split over minor matters so as to make certain that no substantial changes can take place, we unite on who the “enemy” is and how dangerous he is, we unite on when it is time to go to war, and when it is time to end a war.
It is this higher level of group-fantasy which I have attempted in recent years to conceptualize and then measure. The tool for this measurement I have termed “Fantasy Analysis.” The detailed technical criteria for the Fantasy Analysis of any historical document will be found in another of my essays,* but suffice it to say here that it involves extracting from the historical document all the operative fantasy terms, including all the metaphors, similes, feeling states, body images, and other key emotional terms present. This produces a series of words describing deep body feelings, which then can be analyzed and placed in psychohistorical perspective.

* Lloyd deMause, “The Fetal Origins of History” The Journal of Psychohistory
http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/p244x263.htm

As just one example out of hundreds I elsewhere detail, here is a passage from the minutes of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing in 1949 discussing our posture vis-a-vis the Russians in Germany:

We understand that there are powerful pulls in the other direction and that there are things which the Russians would do which would be important in any such situation as that. We have no doubt that at some time or other the Russians are going to get ready to sell the Poles down the river on the eastern boundary.

A Fantasy Analysis of this passage would pick up only two terms: “pulls . . . down the river.” (Generally a Fantasy Analysis condenses documents to about 1% of their total verbiage.) The rest of the words are considered non-operative in motivational terms, essentially defensive in purpose, “rational” covers serving to distract one’s attention from the emotionally powerful fantasy language buried within.
Now this may appear at first sight thoroughly arbitrary, and I admit that with any less than 50 pages of illustration and discussion it will be difficult for me to convey the accuracy and trustworthiness of this new psychohistorical tool. But even in the case of this 1949 hearing, it turns out that the words “pulls . . . down the river” sound the emotional theme of the whole meeting, and condense very well its main historical group-fantasy: that the group’s actions in taking a harder line against the Russians on Germany may result in its being pulled down a dangerous, “squeezing” passageway against its wishes, and that something terrifying might happen. Thus, although the full text of the Hearing reads in a rather controlled and even dull tone, the Fantasy Analysis of the opening sections reads as follows:

hurting . . . face saver . . . riposte . . . large voice . . . horse’s mouth . . . lay down . . . undermine . . . pussyfoot . . . terrified . . .terror . . . terror . . . pull . . . pulled . . . pulls . . . down the river . . . forced . . . driven . . . afraid . . . pull . . . run out . . . down the river . . . war . . . pull . . . fear . . . break . . . insane . . . squeezed . . . corridor . . . corridor . . . corridor . . . corridor . . .

What I found from performing Fantasy Analyses of hundreds of historical documents—including newspaper and magazine articles, committee hearings, speeches, press conferences, political cartoons, even the Nixon Watergate tapes—is that hidden within every group communication is the skeleton of an emotionally powerful set of body feelings, and that a large part of the time this message has to do with body memories stemming from the primary trauma of all our lives: birth.
Although this discovery of birth as the key to group-fantasy appears at first to be a rather astonishing and even bizarre finding, it is the outcome of several years of analytic effort, and was in fact produced “by the material” rather than being imposed upon it for any theoretical reasons. (Indeed, I was so thoroughly disbelieving for some time of the nature of the results, that I retested the Fantasy Analysis technique with people unfamiliar with my earlier work to be certain I wasn’t reading into the material something that wasn’t there.) The selection above is one typical version or stage of this body memory, one which regularly occurs as the result of Fantasy Analyses of historical material. It depicts a moment prior to the onset of actual birth, when the fetus is just beginning to feel the pull “down the river” and “into the corridor,” when the “squeeze” of the mother’s contractions is just beginning to produce “terror” of what lies ahead—the seemingly endless hours of enormous persecutory pressure of the birth itself.
. . . . the results of my Fantasy Analysis of hundreds of public documents from recent American history show a regular, lawful pattern of stages of group-fantasy, a pattern which repeats itself over and over again every three or four years . . .


. . . The conditions within each stage were consistently correlated in historical documents subjected to Fantasy Analysis. In stage one, when the leader is strong—often but not always at the beginning of a presidential term—the nation seems safe and the “enemy” is kept at bay. Politics seems to be centered around the personality of a nurturant fantasy-leader, and to consist of discussions of how strong he is, whether he is too strong, whether government is doing enough, or is too big, and so on. In time, the ability of the leader to sustain a role of total magical nurturance to his people begins to deteriorate, and the “Cracking” stage two begins. News articles proliferate on how the internal strains in our country are threatening our national strength, on how a sudden collapse of values is to be feared, and on how the enemy too (projectively) seems to be “cracking at the seams,” with crises of leadership that may make them unstable and therefore dangerous. Stage three, “Collapse,” often begins with a specific event that can be viewed as a “collapse of values” which the fantasy-leader is helpless to prevent—whether a set of local events, such as riots, or an external event, such as a foreign policy reverse. During this stage, the central focus of anxiety is: Can the helpless leader protect us against possible upheavals and catastrophes? Articles are written on how crowded the world (or the cities or the highways) is getting, how slender the food supply is, how polluted the environment has become, and how sheer chaos is just around the corner. Finally, with stage four, “Upheaval,” birth itself begins, and the nation looks for some crisis, usually involving war or the threat of war, to get into. The nation feels trapped, choking, claustrophobic, and must engage in a “struggle for freedom” in order to fight its way out of an intolerable situation. After a crisis situation is located, the enemy is engaged, and the nation feels strong again—and also greatly relieved, because at least it is now actively fighting something in the real world rather than passively suffering the fantasied intolerable pressures. (Political cartoons of the head hurting from painful pressures, and of the body being stretched and twisted, mark this stage.) But if the leader cannot “win” the war within a year or so, the nation fears it is not so tough after all and may actually die during its birth-crisis, and the leader is then instructed by the fantasy-language of all the media at once that somehow the birth pains must be ended. The leader then ends the war (at least in fantasy), the leader is once again strong, and the cycle repeats itself all over again.
. . . The international crisis has usually been provided by whatever was handy at the time, and in every case the fantasy preceded the reality. That is, the fantasy language first went up to stage four, and the nation was crying for relief from intolerable pressures, and then whatever crisis was around was deemed important enough to produce action on our part. To emphasize this point, I have also put below the line some of the international crises which occurred during the first three stages, just a few of many that actually occurred, to show how many crises we did not choose to get into. Most of these, like the fall of the French forces in Indo-China, the Suez invasion, and various Arab-Israeli wars, were just as “important,” often even more so, than the events we chose to jump into, but we were not under sufficient psychological pressure to respond with war-like action until we reached the fourth or “Upheaval” stage.
. . . Kennedy’s single cycle reached the fourth level early in 1961, and although for a time it looked as if we would be able to act it out in an armed confrontation with the Russians over Berlin, they seemed reluctant (for their own reasons) to get into a fight at that time, and built the Berlin Wall instead, thus ending the “crisis”—but leaving America “hanging” in mid-air at the “Upheaval” level. As we moved into 1962, we were therefore badly in need of something to fight about, but with no active war around to get into, the media began to comment on the “strange calm” the world seemed to be afflicted by—there was such cognitive dissonance between the upheaval and terror of the group-fantasy in our heads and the “quiet” of the world outside that we thought we might be insane. By the summer of 1962, we found the solution: Cuba. Long before we even suspected there might be missiles there, we began to use war-like language against Cuba, passing war resolutions, calling Cuba a “cancer” on America, declaring a blockade of the island, terming Castro’s existence and a “Red Cuba” intolerable to us, and then sending U-2 planes over to see what we could discover. The actual finding of the missiles after all this fantasy came as a great emotional relief, and when the Russians agreed to remove them in exchange for what we admitted were totally useless missiles in Turkey, which we had decided to remove anyway, we turned down the offer, gave the order to invade the island, and risked starting World War III—all so we could actually engage or at least thoroughly humiliate the poisonous “enemy” and experience the catharsis of fantasied birth.
Johnson’s crisis was of course the Vietnam war, and although we may have “inched” our way into it, the fact is that our first actual combat troops were sent to Vietnam only a week after the group-fantasy language reached stage four in every periodical in the country. Yet Vietnam, like both world wars before it, was a very unsatisfactory catharsis—it didn’t seem to want to follow its fantasy script and to end when we “felt” it should. So after months of articles and protests in 1968, demonstrating how many of “our boys” were dying there (at the fantasy level, no one seems to die early on in a war), Johnson “ended the war” by announcing its de-escalation and his own retirement. Immediately, two things happened to the group-fantasy. First, fantasy language went right back to stage one, and the war virtually disappeared from the media. It was as though, by common consent, we had agreed to pretend that it was over, though of course in fact it was still escalating, and the biggest battles and most destructive bombings lay in the future. Those who still protested, the same protesters that earlier captured fond media attention, were now vilified as nuts and crazies—why protest when the war had ended?
Nixon was elected, and went through the usual cycle of strong and then weakening leadership, and when at length in 1970 we got back up to stage four again, we began looking around for a new crisis in which to act out our birth fantasies. We looked at the world situation and discovered—lo and behold—Vietnam! Three weeks after the group-fantasy language again reached stage four, Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia, and the media quite rightly declared that “a new war” had begun.
By 1971, this “new war” again began to be painful enough to end, and the U.S. Senate did what it could easily have done years earlier; it voted to terminate the war. The fantasy language immediately dropped back to stage one again (although, as with Korea before it, the war actually dragged on for another year and a half after our fantasy declared it had ended). Nixon got the peace message from the nation and announced his purely symbolic trip to China—since he was now a “strong” leader again and could easily bargain with “the enemy.”
But by the time the sixth cycle on our chart again reached stage four, Nixon found he had no crisis anywhere around to get into; indeed, he was just in the process of actually ending the Vietnam war. The Middle East was once again very tempting, but just managed to evade becoming a real crisis. Therefore, Nixon made the ultimate sacrifice—if the weak leader can’t prevent the crisis, he will become the crisis, and by removing himself give a new leader a chance to go through the strong-weakening-helpless-tough cycle. Watergate, which previously had been buried in the back pages, now moved to the “front burner” of national attention, and Nixon, trained in self-sacrifice from birth, threw himself into the flames “to relieve the intolerable pressures.” Here the Watergate tapes are invaluable evidence of the movement of group-fantasy over the months, and a long analysis of the tapes and other documents from the Watergate “crisis” are part of my “Fetal Origins of History” article, along with a discussion of the special conditions under which a nation can substitute the replacement of a leader for the catharsis of war. But even during the Watergate period, the fourth stage crisis in 1973 did involve a plunge into a near-war action. After the last Arab-Israeli war had ended, Nixon ordered a full “Red Alert,” and two million American troops prepared for war, including the arming of nuclear weapons—all over a thoroughly insignificant Russian message about U.N. peace-keeping forces. The Russians didn’t respond, of course, so the crisis was kept at a fantasy level until the impeachment vote finally removed the weak leader.
After Nixon’s removal, Ford became our stage one leader, and was everywhere shown as strong and nurturant, at least until he had been in office for some time and was shot at by two different women. He then appeared weak and ineffectual (stage two), a joke to many. When Jimmy Carter became President, because of the length of time since the last crisis, he started out at stage two in group-fantasy—which explains why he has barely had any “honeymoon” period in which he could get programs through Congress, as has been common with the beginning of other presidencies. Carter’s Gallup Poll after four months in office shows only 66% of those polled approving of the way he does his job, compared to 82% for Truman, 74% for Eisenhower, 76% for Kennedy and 73% for Johnson after a similar period. [“Polls in Perspective: Carter—A Popular President, But—“ U.S. News and World Report, May 30, 1977, p. 24.] This “lack of strength” image is wholly due to the stage of group-fantasy we are in at the time of this writing (May, 1977), which calls for a weakening (stage two) leader. In reality terms, Carter became President at the best of times—a sharply rising economy, no war, no civil strife—and no President has worked harder to strengthen his image with the people during his first months. But in group-fantasy terms, he remains a weakening leader, certain to weaken even further during the coming year. This is why his bills are already running into trouble, even though they have been rather modest in scope compared to the early proposals of other Presidents, and this is also why those polled continue to complain that in some indefinable way they still haven’t been able to “really know” what he is like.

http://www.theprogressiveprofessor.com/?p=9889

The Progressive Professor: “Barack Obama comes out in the latest Gallup poll as having the fourth highest rating of presidents since Eisenhower after four months in office, not counting Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford, who came in by succession to the White House.
His rating is 65 percent, behind Kennedy (77), Eisenhower (74) and Reagan (68). He is tied with Carter (65), and ahead of Nixon (63) and George HW Bush (60). George W Bush’s rating was 55 and Bill Clinton the lowest at 45.
This puts Obama in a good position, but realize that Carter, Nixon and George HW Bush all were ultimately seen as failures in different ways in the Presidency, with Carter and Bush losing re-election and Nixon being forced out of office, while Bill Clinton and George W Bush finished their terms and Clinton, at least, is often seen as moderately successful in office, particularly in the latest C-Span poll of Presidents.
Meanwhile Kennedy, Eisenhower and Reagan are all rated now among the top ten Presidents, and have always been wildly popular among the general public, if not always with scholars.”


- Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy by Lloyd deMause; pp. 20-22: . . . . I have elsewhere presented evidence that the President, his advisors, the Congress and most of the people in the nation enter into what is an actual trance state while communicating and acting out these group-fantasies, a genuine trance similar to that of hypnotism or to that experienced under certain drugs. A group of presidential advisors sitting around a table in a War Room (as in the Cuban Missile Crisis) or a group of Congressmen attending hearings on war-powers legislation (as in the Gulf of Tonkin Crisis) are participating in what is technically more like a séance than a rational discussion. Their trance-like state can even be documented (with some effort—verbatim minutes are rarely kept of actual decision-making meetings, and memories of what really happened are notoriously skimpy). All the elements of a trance state can nevertheless be seen in these meetings: heightened suggestibility, increased dependence on the leader, extremes of passivity by usually forceful people, demands for group unanimity, emotional rather than logical thinking, amnesia for inconvenient facts, inability to tolerate inaction, and even an increase in such body feelings as dizziness, fears of loss of control, dry mouth, pressures in the head, increased heart rate and feelings of claustrophobia, all of which are related to birth memories. [One perceptive political psychologist calls this group trance state “groupthink”; see Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1972. Another political psychologist has even measured a sort of paranoia index through content-analysis of language used just prior to World War I; see Ole R. Holsti and Robert C. North “The History of Human Conflict” in Elton B. McNeil, ed. The Nature of Human Conflict. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1965, p. 166.]
. . . . It is, in fact, solely our fantasy needs which prevent us from seeing that internal dynamics, not external threats, govern our foreign policy.
Actual shooting wars, then, begin when two nations, in a slow, deadly dance, match group-fantasy cycles, wave for wave, crest for crest, and agree to grapple through a birth together—agreeing, as Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, to “come to a clash, like blind moles” battling to death in a tunnel. [Robert F. Kennedy. Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966, p. 89.] While group-fantasy cycles in modern times are on the general order of four or five years long, actual shooting wars occur only every fourth or fifth crisis, when the psychological dynamics are right, the military preparations are adequate, and when an “enemy” has been located who is at his own peak of birth anxiety. Actually, statistical studies of wars confirm the lawfulness of this group process rather well, at least for most of the industrially-developed world. In the past two centuries, for instance, wars have occurred on the average of every 18 years in the U.S., 18 years in England, 20 years in France, 24 years in Germany, and 18 years in Russia. [Maurice N. Walsh, ed. War and the Human Race. New York: Elsevier, 1971, p. 78.] Our ritual death-dance has a rhythm of its own which captures every generation just as it reaches its peak of youth and then throws it into the hellish maw of Moloch.

THE PERSONALITY OF PRESIDENTS

At this point, the reader is justified in stepping back and asking a pertinent question: “If we grant that all the rather outrageous things you have said so far have some measure of truth, and that so early an event as birth seems to govern politics, then why bother with all the usual psycho-historical evidence about childhood and parental influence and personality development? It all appears quite hopeless the way you present it—with these eternal cycles of birth and rebirth. What possible difference could it make what kind of personality the President has if politics depends so much on birth experiences everyone shares?”
The answer is of course that birth is only a part of the story.

- pp. 26-27: [Jimmy Carter] began by choosing his foreign policy staff out of the Rockefeller-supported Trilateral Commission, he has cooled down relations with Russia, scrapped years of effort in disarmament, discovered a “12-year decline” in NATO armament, urged a new push to build up NATO forces, scrapped his promise to reduce the American arms budget, and—lest the quiet, steady, insistent growth of atomic weaponry be completely forgotten—has added even more atomic warheads to the tens of thousands which presently exist, many of them in the new “more acceptable” form of battlefield atomic weaponry. That this new mood of belligerence has been virtually unnoted by the liberal press is to be expected—psychohistorians have learned to read U.S. News and World Report, not the New York Times, to find out what is really going on in American group-fantasy. The headlines of a recent issue of U.S. News in fact read: “THE PRESIDENT TALKS TOUGH . . . Harder Line With Russia,” and quotes Carter as follows:

Africa: “We see the possibility of war in the southern part of Africa as being ever-present.”
Mideast: “Americans would not respond well to any overt or implied threats” of an oil embargo.
Panama Canal: “There is a potential threat to the Canal. . .”
Soviet Union: “The differences between us and the Soviet Union are still wide and very significant.” [U.S. News & World Report, June 6, 1977, pp. 17, 19.]

(The New York Times, the same week, took an astonishing report from its Mideast expert, Drew Middleton, headlined “Two Sides in Middle East Speak Casually of a War As Stress Shifts From Political to Military Solution,” and buried it in the inner pages instead of giving it the first-page treatment it obviously merited.) [New York Times, June 7, 1977, p. 3.]
Carter’s language, as revealed by extensive Fantasy Analysis of his speeches, is quietly permeated with the imagery of fear and war. When it occurs in the context of a domestic issue, so that an energy program becomes “the moral equivalent of war,” the press picks up and repeats the imagery, with headlines about a world-wide oil crisis that requires “wartime urgency” and cartoons showing Carter dressed as Jesus walking with a sign saying “The End Is Near.” When his speech is about foreign matters, it bristles with the same kind of aggressive and fearful imagery, carefully hidden between noble phrases, that I have found time and again in Fantasy Analyses of Presidential speeches before other war-like actions. Here, for instance, is a Fantasy Analysis of his Notre Dame University address on May 22, 1977:

dark faith . . . strands that connect . . . confidence . . . separated . . . strength . . . arms . . . fear . . . fear . . . fought fire with fire . . . fire is better fought with water . . . confidence . . . contained . . . weakened its foundation . . . war . . . crisis . . . sapping . . . strains . . . weakened . . . crisis . . .danger . . . violence . . . combat . . . fear . . . awakening . . . powerful . . . strong . . . war . . . reduce the chase . . . war . . . hatred . . . damage, hunger and disease . . . blood . . . despair . . . reinforce the bonds . . . confidence . . . dangerous . . . freeze . . . weapons . . . attack . . . death . . . explosives . . . military intervention . . . military force . . . danger . . . arms . . . explosives . . . explosives . . . arms . . . arms . . . war [New York Post, May 16, 1977, p. 1.]

That there is a positive side to many of Carter’s words and actions which lead to increasing tensions is of course not to be denied. But that he has a deeply-felt commitment to human rights, for instance, does not negate the fact that the form and particularly the timing of his repeated attacks on Russia with respect to human rights are part of the “get tough” fantasy, and incidentally do nothing for the Russian dissidents he is defending. The same case could be made for the form and timing of his statements on Palestine, Africa, and so on.
. . . His [Jimmy Carter’s] leading symbol—his teeth—is the identical image regularly used in portraying another leader chosen for his belligerence, Theodore Roosevelt, especially in his “Big Stick,” aggressive, “biting” role. [See especially the “Teeth” cartoons of T.R. in Stephen Hess and Milton Kaplan, The Ungentlemanly Art: A History of American Political Cartoons. Rev. Ed. New York: Macmillan, 1975, p. 130.]

p. 28: Henry Kissinger has declared that America will go to war in the Middle East only “where there is some actual strangulation.” Gerald Ford has said: “In the case of economic strangulation we must be prepared to take the necessary action for our self-preservation. When you are being strangled it is a case of either dying or living.” (Ford’s definition of “strangulation” is even more fetal: “Strangulation, if you translate it into the terms of a human being, means that you are just about on your back.”) [Ford quotes in Terence McCarthy, “The Middle East: Will We Go To War?” Ramparts, April 1977, p. 21.]
. . . While the conditions that determine whether a birth-crisis takes the form of war, revolution, or other leadership crisis are yet to be presented, Carter’s personality seems to be quite closed to precipitation of a leadership crisis like Nixon’s. Nor does he have the kind of self-destructive drive and accident-proneness which made Kennedy go into Dallas while full-page ads were using the language of violence, and then ride slowly through the center of town in an open car. So the only thing that can deter Carter from responding to our next call for war, when “pressures” once again grow intolerable, is his maturity.
Might Carter’s well-known “independence” include an independence even from us? Might a man who can show physical warmth to his wife in public—and mean it—be able to tap some deep source of human warmth in his heart when the chips are down and decline to plunge us into another hellish birth? Might a man who spends whole days with his daughter, in which she plans every minute of his time, be able to remember that children really die in wars?
One hopes so. For on such a slender thread of hope hangs the existence of mankind.


- from The History of Childhood by Lloyd deMause [back cover]:

“A tour de force of vision, industry, and bold, brilliant schematizing—a monumental beginning. From here on out, childhood will have a history.”
-Dr. Rudolph Binion, Leff Professor of History,
Brandeis University, Author, Frau Lou.

“The implications of this work are revolutionary. I believe a great deal of the brutality that has occurred in macro-politics, that rulers have wielded upon their subjects and upon peoples they conquered, can be traced to the brutality they experienced themselves as children.”
-Morton Schatzman, M.D., Psychiatrist and Author,
Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family.

“An impressive departure in historical work, an enterprise that could be undertaken only by someone with a wide knowledge of the sociological and psychological literature as well as the purely historical. The result of his effort is truly impressive.”
-Dr. William L. Langer, Archibald Cary Coolidge Professor of
History, Emeritus, Harvard University, Past President, American
Historical Association.

“There is no doubt in my mind that deMause’s psychogenic theory will have an exciting future. I, for one, found it immensely stimulating, as it opened new vistas, confirmed views I had formed in a different field of inquiry (chiefly the clinical study of separating parents and adolescents), yet also raised challenges and questions. Indeed a provocative and far-reaching thesis.”
-Helm Stierlin, M.D., Ph.D. Acting Chief, Family Studies Division,
Adult Psychiatry Branch, National Institute of Mental Health,
Author, Separating Parents and Adolescents.

“His argument has a breathtaking scope and ambitiousness. Its grand sweep, the force of the logic, make it easily the major statement to date on the history of childhood.”
-Dr. Edward Shorter, Professor of History, University of Toronto.


p. iii [Editor’s Preface by Lloyd deMause]: What we found was a fascinating story in its own right, but is also a story which cannot help but have a major effect on our understanding of history and of how we got to where we are today. If perspective is all, it is surely most important in our crucial task of raising the next generation who will run the world we leave them.
Despite the psychoanalytic origin of our project, we are all historians first, and have considered it our central task to examine the sources objectively in order to reconstruct how parents and children related to each other in different time periods and different countries . . .
. . . Childhood history is not the easiest of historical fields in which to specialize. It has often seemed, after sifting through dozens of difficult manuscripts in order to discover a single golden nugget about childhood, that our field is the extreme instance of the historian’s rule that “the things that really matter are hardly ever committed to paper.” Yet in the end we found the reconstruction of childhood in the past a thoroughly fascinating enterprise, well worth our best efforts.

pp. 4, 5: . . . it is the social historian, whose job it is to dig out the reality of social conditions in the past, who defends himself most vigorously against the facts he turns up . . . When Philippe Aries comes up with so much evidence of open sexual molesting of children that he admits that “playing with children’s privy parts formed part of a widespread tradition,” he goes on to describe a “traditional” scene where a stranger throws
himself on a little boy while riding in a train, “his hand brutally rummaging inside the child’s fly,” while the father smiles, and concludes: “All that was involved was a game whose scabrous nature we should beware of exaggerating.” [Aries, Centuries of Childhood, p. 105.]


- pp. 54, 72: From the four books which describe children brought up according to the helping mode,* it is evident that it results in a child who is gentle, sincere, never depressed, never imitative or group-oriented, strong-willed, and unintimidated by authority.

* A. S. Neill, The Free Child (London, 1952); Paul Ritter and John Ritter, The Free Family: A Creative Experiment in Self-Regulation for Children (London, 1959); Michael Deakin, The Children on the Hill (London, 1972) . . .


pp. 10-17: The belief that infants were felt to be on the verge of turning into totally evil beings is one of the reasons why they were tied up, or swaddled, so long and so tightly. One feels the undertone in Bartholomaeus Anglicus (c. 1230): “And for tenderness the limbs of the child may easily and soon bow and bend and take diverse shapes. And therefore children’s members and limbs are bound with lystes [bandages], and other covenable bonds, that they be not crooked nor evil shapen . . .” It is the infant full of the parent’s dangerous, evil projections that is swaddled. The reasons given for swaddling in the past are the same as those of present-day swaddlers in Eastern Europe: the baby has to be tied up or it will tear its ears off, scratch its eyes out, break its legs, or touch its genitals. As we shall see shortly in the section on swaddling and restraints, this often includes binding up children in all kinds of corsets, stays, backboards, and puppet-strings, and even extends to tying them up in chairs to prevent them from crawling on the floor “like an animal.”

Now if adults project all their own unacceptable feelings into the child, it is obvious that severe measures must be taken to keep this dangerous “toilet-child” under control once swaddling bands are outgrown. I shall later examine various methods of control used by parents down through the centuries, but here I want to illustrate only one control device—frightening the child with ghosts—in order to discuss its projective character.
The number of ghost-like figures used to frighten children throughout history is legion, and their regular use by adults was common until quite recently. The ancients had their Lamia and Striga, who, like their Hebrew prototype Lilith, ate children raw, and who, along with Mormo, Canida, Poine, Sybaris, Acco, Empusa, Gorgon, and Ephialtes, were “invented for a child’s benefit to make it less rash and ungovernable,” according to Dio Chrysostom. Most ancients agreed that it was good to have the images of these witches constantly before children, to let them feel the terror of waiting up at night for ghosts to steal them away, eat them, tear them to pieces, and suck their blood or their bone marrow. By medieval times, of course, witches and devils took front stage, with an occasional Jew thrown in as a cutter of babies’ throats, along with hoards of other monsters and bogies “such as those [with] which nurses love to terrify them.” After the Reformation, God himself, who “holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire,”* was the major bogeyman used to terrify children, and tracts were written in baby talk describing the tortures God had in store for children in Hell: “The little child is in this red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out . . . It stamps its little feet on the floor . . .” [Brigid Brophy, Black Ship to Hell (New York, 1962), p. 361.]

* Carl Holliday, Woman’s Life in Colonial Boston (New York, 1960), p. 18.

When religion was no longer the focus of the terrorizing campaign, figures closer to home were used: the werewolf will gulp you down, Blue Beard will chop you up, Boney (Bonaparte) will eat your flesh, the black man or the chimney sweep will steal you away at night. These practices came under attack only in the nineteenth century. One English parent said in 1810 that “the custom once prevalent of terrifying young minds with stories of ghosts, is now universally reprobated, in consequence of the increasing stock of national good sense. But many yet living can place fears of supernatural agency, and of darkness, among the real miseries of childhood. . . .” Yet even today, in many villages of Europe, children continue to be threatened by parents with the loup-garou (werewolf), the barbu (bearded man), or the ramoneur (chimney sweep), or told they will be put in the basement to let the rats gnaw on them.
This need to personify punitive figures was so powerful that, following the principle of “concretization,” adults actually dressed up Katchina-like dummies to use in frightening children . . .

These fearful figures were also the favorites of nurses who wanted to keep children in bed while they went off at night. Susan Sibbald remembered ghosts as a real part of her eighteenth-century childhood:

Ghosts making their appearance were a very common occurrence . . . I remember perfectly when both the nursery maids at Fowey wished to leave the nursery one evening . . . we were silenced by hearing the most dismal groanings and scratchings outside the partition next the stairs. The door was thrown open, and oh! horrors, there came in a figure, tall and dressed in white, with fire coming out of its eyes, nose and mouth it seemed. We were almost thrown into convulsions, and were not well for days, but dared not tell.

The terrorized children were not always as old as Susan and Betsey. One American mother in 1882 told of a friend’s two-year-old girl whose nurse, wanting to enjoy herself for the evening with the other servants while the parents were out, assured herself she wouldn’t be disturbed by telling the little girl that a

horrible Black Man . . . was hidden in the room to catch her the moment she left her bed or made the slightest noise . . . to make double sure that she should not be interrupted during the evening’s enjoyment. She made a huge figure of a black man with frightful staring eyes and an enormous mouth, and placed it at the foot of the bed where the little innocent child was fast asleep. As soon as the evening was over in the servant’s hall, the nurse went back to her charge. Opening the door quietly, she beheld the little girl sitting up in her bed, staring in an agony of terror at the fearful monster before her, and both hands convulsively grasping her fair hair.She was stone dead! [Rhoda E. White, From Infancy to Womanhood: A Book of Instruction for Young Mothers (London, 1882), p. 31.]


Now when infants are terrorized with masked figures when they merely cry, want food, or want to play, the amount of projection, and the adult’s need to control it, has reached massive proportions only found in overtly psychotic adults today. The exact frequency of use of such concrete figures in the past cannot as yet be determined, although they were often spoken of as common. Many forms, however, can be shown to be customary. For instance, in Germany until recently there would appear in shops before Christmas time stacks of stick brooms, tied in the middle, and making a stiff brush at both ends. These were used to beat children; during the first week in December, adults would dress up in terrifying costumes and pretend to be a messenger of Christ, called the Pelz-nickel, who would punish children and tell them if they would get Christmas presents or not. [Anna C. Johnson, Peasant Life in Germany (New York, 1858), p. 353. Several informants have told me this continued into the twentieth century.]
It is only when one sees the struggle which parents go through to give up this practice of concretizing frightening images that the strength of their need to do so is revealed. One of the earliest defenders of childhood in nineteenth century Germany was Jean Paul Richter. In his popular book Levanna, he condemned parents who kept children in order “by images of terror,” claiming medical evidence that they “frequently fall victims to insanity.” Yet his own compulsion to repeat the traumas of his own childhood was so great that he was forced to invent lesser versions for his own son:

As a person can be terrified only once by the same thing, I think it possible to spare children the reality by sportive representations of alarming circumstances. For instance: I go with my little nine-year-old Paul to walk in the thick wood. Suddenly three blackened and armed ruffians rush out and fall upon us, because I had hired them for the adventure with a small thieves’ premium the day before. We two are only provided with sticks, but the band of robbers are armed with swords and a pistol without bullets . . . I turn away the pistol, so that it may miss me, and strike the dagger out of one of the thieves’ hand with my stick . . . But (I add in this second edition) all such games are of doubtful advantage . . . although similar cloak and dagger pieces . . . might be tried advantageously in the night, in order to bring the fancies, inspired by a belief in ghosts, to common everyday light. [John Paul Friedrich Richter, Levana; or the Doctrine of Education (Boston, 1863), p. 288.]

Another whole area of concretization of this need to terrorize children involves the use of corpses. Many are familiar with the scenes in Mrs. Sherwood’s novel, History of the Fairchild Family, in which the children are taken on visits to the gibbet to inspect rotting corpses hanging there, while being told moral stories. What is not often realized is that these scenes are taken from real life and formed an important part of childhood in the past. Classes used to be taken out of school to hangings, and parents would often take their children to hangings and then whip them when they returned home to make them remember what they had seen. Even a humanist educator such as Mafio Vegio, who wrote books to protest the beating of children, had to admit that “to let them witness a public execution is sometimes not at all a bad thing.” [Maffio Vegio, “De Educationa Liberorum,” p. 644.]


The effect on the children of this continuous corpse-viewing was of course massive. One little girl, after her mother showed her the fresh corpse of her nine-year-old friend as an example, went around saying “They will put daughter in the deep hole, and what will mother do?” Another boy woke at night screaming after seeing hangings, and “practiced hanging his own cat.” [C. S. Peel, The Stream of Time: Social and Domestic Life in England 1805-1861 (London, 1931), p. 40.] Eleven-year-old Harriet Spencer recorded in her diary seeing dead bodies everywhere on gibbets and broken on the wheel. Her father took her to see hundreds of corpses which had been dug up to make room for more.

. . . Papa says it is foolish and superstitious to be afraid of seeing dead bodies, so I followed him down a dark narrow steep stair-case that wound round and round a long way, till they opened a door into a great cavern. It was lit by a lamp hanging down in the middle, and the friar carried a torch in his hand. At first I could not see, and when I could I hardly dared look, for on every side there were horrid black ghastly figures, some grinning, some pointing at us, or seeming in pain, in all sorts of postures, and so horrid I could hardly help screaming, and I thought they all moved. When Papa saw how uncomfortable I was, he was not angry but very kind, and said I must conquer it and go and touch one of them, which was very shocking. Their skin was all dark brown and quite dried up on the bones, and quite hard and felt like marble.

The picture of the kindly father helping his daughter overcome her fear of corpses is an example of what I term “projective care,” to distinguish it from true empathic care which is the result of the empathic reaction. Projective care always requires the first step of projection of the adult’s own unconscious into the child, and can be distinguished from empathic care by being either inappropriate or insufficient to the child’s actual needs. The mother who responds to her child’s every discomfort by nursing it, the mother who gives great attention to her infant’s clothes as she sends it away to the wet-nurse, and the mother who takes a full hour to tie up a child properly in swaddling clothes are all examples of projective care.
Projective care is, however, sufficient to raise children to adulthood. Indeed, it is what is often called “good care” by anthropologists studying primitive childhood, and it is not until a psychoanalytically-trained anthropologist re-studies the same tribe that one can see that projection and not true empathy is being measured. For example, studies of the Apache* always give them the highest ratings on the “oral satisfaction” scale so important for the development of feelings of security. The Apache, like many primitive tribes, feeds on demand for two years, and this is what the rating was based upon. But only when psychoanalytic anthropologist L. Bryce Boyer visited them was the true projective basis of this care revealed:

The care afforded infants by Apache mothers nowadays is startlingly inconsistent. They are usually very tender and considerate in the physical relationships with their babies. There is much bodily contact. Nursing times are generally determined by the baby’s cry, and every distress is greeted first by the nipple of a breast or a bottle. At the same time, mothers have a very limited sense of responsibility so far as child care is concerned, and the impression gained is that the mother’s tenderness for her baby is based upon her bestowing upon the infant care she herself desires as an adult. A great many mothers abandon or give away children—babies they had been nursing lovingly only a week before. Apaches very accurately name this practice “throwing the baby away.” Not only do they feel scant conscious guilt for this behavior, but at times they are overtly delighted to have been able to rid themselves of the burden. In some instances, mothers who have given children away, “forget” they ever had them. The usual Apache mother believes physical care is all an infant requires. She has little or no compunction about leaving her baby with just anyone at all while she impulsively leaves to gossip, shop, gamble or drink and “fool around.” Ideally, the mother entrusts her baby to a sister or older female relative. In aboriginal times, such an arrangement was almost always possible. [L. Bryce Boyer, “Psychological Problems of a Group of Apaches: Alcoholic Hallucinosis and Latent Homosexuality Among Typical Men,” in The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 3 (1964), p. 224.]

* John W.M. Whiting and Irvin L. Child, Child Training and Personality: A Cross-Cultural Study (New Haven, 1953), p. 343.

Even such a simple act as empathizing with children who were beaten was difficult for adults in the past. Those few educators who, prior to modern times, advised that children should not be beaten generally argued that it would have bad consequences rather than that it would hurt the child. Yet without this element of empathy, the advice had no effect whatsoever, and children continued to be beaten as before. Mothers who sent their infants to wet-nurses for three years were genuinely distressed that their children then didn’t want to return to them, yet they had no capacity to locate the reason. A hundred generations of mothers tied up their infants in swaddling bands and impassively watched them scream in protest because they lacked the psychic mechanism necessary to empathize with them. Only when the slow historical process of parent-child evolution finally established this faculty through successive generations of parent-child interaction did it become obvious that swaddling was totally unnecessary. Here is Richard Steele in The Tatler in 1706 describing how he thought an infant felt after being born:

I lay very quiet; but the witch, for no manner of reason or provocation in the world, takes me and binds my head as hard as she possibly could; then ties up both my legs and makes me swallow down an horrid mixture. I thought it an harsh entrance into life, to begin with taking physic. When I was thus dressed, I was carried to a bedside where a fine young lady (my mother, I wot) had like to have me hugged to death . . . and threw me into a girl’s arms that was taken in to tend me. The girl was very proud of the womanly employment of a nurse, and took upon her to strip and dress me anew, because I made a noise, to see what ailed me; she did so and stuck a pin in every joint about. I still cried, upon which, she lays me on my face in her lap; and, to quiet me, fell to nailing in all the pins, by clapping me on the back and screaming a lullaby. . . . [Asa Briggs, ed., How They Lived, vol. 3 (New York, 1969), p. 27.]

I have not found a description with this degree of empathy in any century prior to the eighteenth. It was not long thereafter that two thousand years of swaddling came to an end.
One imagines that there would be all kinds of places to look to find this missing empathic faculty in the past. The first place to look, of course, is the Bible; certainly here one should find empathy toward children’s needs, for isn’t Jesus always pictured holding little children? Yet when one actually reads each of the over two thousand references to children listed in the Complete Concordance to the Bible, these gentle images are missing. You find lots on child sacrifice, on stoning children, on beating them, on their strict obedience, on their love for their parents, and on their role as carriers of the family name, but not a single one that reveals any empathy with their needs. Even the well-known saying, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me” turns out to be the customary Near Eastern practice of exorcising by laying on of hands, which many holy men did to remove the evil inherent in children: “Then there were brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray . . . he laid his hands on them, and departed thence.” (Mat. 19.13.)
All of this is not to say that parents didn’t love their children in the past, for they did. Even contemporary child-beaters are not sadists; they love their children, at times, and in their own way, and are sometimes capable of expressing tender feelings, particularly when the children are non-demanding. The same was true for the parent in the past; expressions of tenderness toward children occur most often when the child is non-demanding, especially when the child is either asleep or dead . . .
It is only at the moment of death that the parent, unable to empathize before, cries out to himself, with Morelli (1400): “You loved him but never used your love to make him happy; you treated him more like a stranger than a son; you never gave him an hour of rest . . . You never kissed him when he wanted it; you wore him out at school and with many harsh blows.”

pp. 25-32: Infanticide during antiquity has usually been played down despite literally hundreds of clear references by ancient writers that it was an accepted, everyday occurrence. Children were thrown into rivers, flung into dung-heaps and cess trenches, “potted” in jars to starve to death, and exposed on every hill and roadside, “a prey for birds, food for wild beasts to rend”. To begin with, any child that was not perfect in shape and size, or cried too little or too much, or was otherwise than is described in the gynecological writings on “How to Recognize the Newborn That is Worth Rearing,” was generally killed. Beyond this, the first-born was usually allowed to live, especially if it was a boy. Girls were, of course, valued little, and the instructions of Hilarion to his wife Alis (1 B.C.) are typical of the open way these things were discussed: “If, as may well happen, you give birth to a child, if it is a boy let it live; if it is a girl, expose it.” The result was a large imbalance of males over females which was typical of the West until well into the Middle Ages, when the killing of legitimate children was probably much reduced. (The killing of illegitimate children does not affect the sex ratio, since both sexes are generally killed.)

Until the fourth century A.D., neither law nor public opinion found infanticide wrong in either Greece or Rome. The great philosophers agreed. Those few passages which classicists consider as a condemnation of infanticide seem to me to indicate just the opposite, such as Aristotle’s “As to exposing or rearing the children born, let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared; but on the ground of number of children, if the regular customs hinder any of those born being exposed, there must be a limit filed to the procreation of offspring.” Similarly, Musonius Rufus, sometimes called “The Roman Socrates,” is often quoted as opposing infanticide, but his piece “Should Every Child That Is Born Be Raised?” quite clearly only says that since brothers are very useful they should not be killed. But more ancient writers openly approved of infanticide, saying, like Aristippus, that a man could do what he wants with his children, for “do we not cast away from us our spittle, lice and such like, as things unprofitable, which nevertheless are engendered and bred even out of our own selves.” [Bartholomew Batty, The Christian Man's Closet, William Lowth, trans. (1581), p. 28.] Or like Seneca, they pretend only sickly infants are involved:

Mad dogs we knock on the head; the fierce and savage ox we slay; sickly sheep we put to the knife to keep them from infecting the flock; unnatural progeny we destroy; we drown even children who at birth are weakly and abnormal. Yet it is not anger, but reason that separates the harmful from the sound. [Seneca, Moral Essays, John W. Basore, trans. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1963), p. 145.]


The theme of exposure loomed large in myth, tragedy, and the New Comedy, which is often built around the subject of how funny infanticide is. In Menander’s Girl from Samos, much fun is made of a man trying to chop up and roast a baby. In his comedy The Arbitrants, a shepherd picks up an exposed infant, considers raising it, then changes his mind, saying, “What have I to do with the rearing of children and the trouble.” He gives it to another man, but has a fight over who got the baby’s necklace. [Menander, The Principal Fragments, Frances G. Allinson, trans. (London, 1921), p. 33; Philip E. Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family (Boston, 1968).]
It must be noted, however, that infanticide was probably common since prehistoric times. Henri Vallois, who tabulated all the prehistoric fossils dug up from the Pithecanthropines to the Mesolithic peoples, found a sex ratio of 148 to 100 in favor of men.* The Greeks and Romans were actually an island of enlightenment in a sea of nations still in an earlier stage of sacrificing children to gods, a practice which the Romans tried in vain to stop. The best documented is Carthaginian child sacrifice, which Plutarch describes:

. . . with full knowledge and understanding they themselves offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or moan; but should she utter a single moan or let fall a single tear, she had to forfeit the money, and her child was sacrificed nevertheless; and the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of wailing should not reach the ears of the people. [Plutarch, Moralia, Frank C. Babbitt, trans. (London, 1928), p. 493.]

* Henri V. Vallois, “The Social Life of Early Man: The Evidence of Skeletons,” in Social Life of Early Man, Sherwood L. Washburn, ed. (Chicago, 1961), p. 225.

Child sacrifice is, of course the most concrete acting out of Rheingold’s thesis of filicide as sacrifice to the mother of the parents. It was practiced by the Irish Celts, the Gauls, the Scandinavians, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Moabites, the Ammonites, and, in certain periods, the Israelites.* Thousands of bones of sacrificed children have been dug up by archeologists, often with inscriptions identifying the victims as first-born sons of noble families, reaching in time all the way back to the Jericho of 7,000 B.C.** Sealing children in walls, foundations of buildings, and bridges to strengthen the structure was also common from the building of the wall of Jericho to as late as 1843 in Germany. [H. S. Darlington, “Ceremonial Behaviorism: Sacrifices For the Foundation of Houses,” The Psychoanalytic Review, 18 (1931); Henry Bett, The Games of Children: Their Origin and History (London, 1929), pp. 104-5; Joyce, Social History, p. 285; George Payne, The Child in Human Progress, p. 154; Anon., “Foundations Laid in Human Sacrifice,” The Open Court, t. 23 (1909), 494-501.] To this day, when children play “London Bridge is Falling Down,” they are acting out a sacrifice to a river goddess when they catch the child at the end of the game. [Henry Bett, Nursery Rhymes and Tales: Their Origin and History (New York, 1924), p. 35.]

* E. Wellisch, Isaac and Oedipus (London, 1954), pp. 11-14; Payne, Child, pp. 8, 160; Robert Seidenberg, “Sacrificing The First You See,” The Psychoanalytic Review, 53 (1966), 52-60; Samuel J, Beck, “Abraham’s Ordeal: Creation of a New Reality,” The Psychoanalytic Review, 50 (1963), 175-85; . . . Tertullian, “Apology,” The Anti-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3 (New York, 1918), p. 25; P. W. Joyce, A Social History of Ancient Ireland, Vol. 1, 3rd ed. (London, 1920), p. 285; William Burke Ryan, M.D., Infanticide: Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention, and History (London, 1862), pp. 200-20; Eusebius Pamphili, Eclesiastical History (New York, 1955), p. 103; J. M. Robertson, Pagan Christs (New York, 1967), p. 31; Charles Picard, Daily Life in Carthage, A. E. Foster, trans. (New York, 1961), p. 671; Howard H. Schlossman, “God the Father and His Sons,” American Imago, 29 (1972), 35-50.

** William Ellwood Craig, “Vincent of Beauvais, On the Education of Noble Children,” University of California at Los Angeles, Ph.D. thesis, 1949, p. 21; Payne, Child, p. 150; Arthur Stanley Riggs, The Romance of Human Progress (New York, 1938), p. 284; E. O. James, Prehistoric Religion (New York, 1957), p. 59; Nathaniel Weyl, “Some Possible Genetic Implications of Carthaginian Child Sacrifice,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 12 (1968), 69-78; James Hastings, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. 3 (New York, 1951), p. 187 . . .

Even in Rome, sacrifice of children led an underground existence. Dio said Julianus “killed many boys as a magic rite;” Suetonius said because of a portent the Senate “decreed that no male born that year should be reared;” and Pliny the Elder spoke of men who “seek to secure the leg-marrow and the brain of infants.” [Dio’s Roman History, Vol. 9, Earnest Cary, trans. (London, 1937), p. 157; Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Joseph Gavorse, ed. (New York, 1931), p. 108; Pliny, Natural History, vol. 8, H. Rockham, trans. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1942), p. 5.] More frequent was the practice of killing your enemy’s children, often in great numbers, so that noble children not only witnessed infanticide in the streets but were themselves under continual threat of death depending on the political fortunes of their fathers.
Philo was the first person I have found who spoke out clearly against the horrors of infanticide:

Some of them do the deed with their own hands; with monstrous cruelty and barbarity they stifle and throttle the first breath which the infants draw or throw them into a river or into the depths of the sea, after attaching some heavy substance to make them sink more quickly under its weight. Others take them to be exposed in some desert place, hoping, they themselves say, that they may be saved, but leaving them in actual truth to suffer the most distressing fate. For all the beasts that feed in human flesh visit the spot and feast unhindered on the infants, a fine banquet provided by their sole guardians, those who above all others should keep them safe, their fathers and mothers. Carnivorous birds, too, come flying down and gobble up the fragments . . . [Philo, Works, Vol. 7, F. H. Colson, trans. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1929), p. 549]

Although in the two centuries after Augustus, some attempts were made to pay parents to keep children alive in order to replenish the dwindling Roman population, it was not until the fourth century that real change was apparent. The law began to consider killing an infant murder only in 374 A.D. [Noonan, Contraception, p. 86.] Yet even the opposition to infanticide by the Church Fathers often seemed to be based more on their concern for the parent’s soul than with the child’s life. This attitude can be seen in Saint Justin Martyr’s statement that the reason a Christian shouldn’t expose his children is to avoid later meeting them in a brothel: “Lest we molest anyone or commit sin ourselves, we have been taught that it is wicked to expose even newly-born children, first because we see that almost all those who are exposed (not only girls, but boys) are raised in prostitution.”* When the Christians themselves were accused of killing babies in secret rites, however, they were quick enough to reply: “How many, do you suppose, of those here present who stand panting for the blood of Christians—how many, even, of you magistrates who are so righteous against us—want me to touch their consciences for putting their own offspring to death?” [Tertullian, Apologitical Works (New York, 1950), p. 452.]

* St. Justin Martyr, Writings (New York, 1949), p. 63; also Dio Chrysostom, Discourses, p. 151; Tertullian, Apology, p. 205; Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, Books 1-8 (Washington, D.C. 1964), p. 452.

After the Council of Vaison (442 A.D.), the finding of abandoned children was supposed to be announced in church, and by 787 A.D., Dateo of Milan founded the first asylum solely for abandoned infants. Other countries followed much the same pattern of evolution. Despite much literary evidence, however, the continued existence of widespread infanticide in the Middle Ages is usually denied by medievalists, since it is not evident in church records and other quantitative sources. But if sex ratios of 156 to 100 (c. 801 A.D.) and 172 to 100 (1391 A.D.) are any indication of the extent of the killing of legitimate girls,* and if illegitimates were usually killed regardless of sex, the real rate of infanticide could have been substantial in the Middle Ages. Certainly, when Innocent III began the hospital of the Santo Spirito in Rome at the end of the twelfth century he was fully aware of the number of women throwing their babies into the Tiber. As late as 1527, one priest admitted that “the latrines resound with the cries of children who have been plunged into them.” [Trexler, “Infanticide,” p. 99] Detailed studies are just beginning, but it is possible that infanticide may have been only sporadically punished prior to the sixteenth century.** Certainly when Vincent of Beauvais wrote in the thirteenth century that a father was always worrying about his daughter “suffocating her offspring,” when doctors complained of all the children “found in the frost or in the streets, cast away by a wicked mother,” and when we find that in Anglo-Saxon England the legal presumption was that infants who died had been murdered if not proved otherwise, we should take these clues as a signal for the most vigorous sort of research into medieval infanticide. And just because formal records show few illegitimate births, we certainly shouldn’t be satisfied with assuming that “in traditional society people remained continent until marriage,” since many girls managed to hide their pregnancies from their own mothers who slept beside them, and they certainly can be suspected of hiding them from the church. [John Brownlow, Memoranda: Or Chronicles of the Foundling Hospital (London, 1847), p. 217.]

* Emily R. Coleman, “Medieval Marriage Characteristics: A Neglected Factor in the History of Medieval Serfdom,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2 (1971), 205-20; Josiah Cox Russell, British Medieval Population (Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1948), p. 168.

** . . . F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life and Disorder (Chelmsford, England, 1970), pp. 7-8, 155-7; Pentikainen, Dead-Child: Werner, Mother, pp. 26-29; Ryan, Infanticide, pp. 1-6; Barbara Kellum, “Infanticide in England in the Later Middle Ages”, History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory, 1 (1974) 367-88 . . .

What is certain is that when our material becomes far fuller, by the eighteenth century,* there is no question that there was high incidence of infanticide in every country in Europe. As more foundling homes were opened in each country, babies poured in from all over, and the homes quickly ran out of room. Even though Thomas Coram opened his Foundling Hospital in 1741 because he couldn’t bear to see the dying babies lying in the gutters and rotting on the dung-heaps of London, by the 1890s dead babies were still a common sight in London streets. [C. H. Rolph, “A Backward Glance at the Age of ‘Obscenity,’” Encounter, 32 (June, 1969), 23.] Late in the nineteenth century Louis Adamic described being brought up in an Eastern European village of “killing nurses,” where mothers sent their infants to be done away with “by exposing them to cold air after a hot bath; feeding them something that caused convulsions in their stomachs and intestines; mixing gypsum in their milk, which literally plastered up their insides; suddenly stuffing them with food after not giving them anything to eat for two days . . .” Adamic was to have been killed as well, but for some reason his nurse spared him. His account of how he watched her do away with the other babies she received provides a picture of the emotional reality behind all those centuries of infanticide we have been reviewing.

In her own strange, helpless way, she loved them all . . . but when the luckless infants’ parents or the latter’s relatives could not or did not pay the customary small sum for their keep . . . she disposed of them. . . . One day she returned from the city with an elongated little bundle . . . a horrible suspicion seized me. The baby in the cradle was going to die! . . . when the baby cried, I heard her get up, and she nursed it in the dark, mumbling, “Poor, poor little one!” I have tried many times since to imagine how she must have felt holding to her breast a child she knew was fated to die by her hand . . . “You poor, poor little one!” She purposely spoke clearly so I would be sure to hear. “. . . fruit of sin through no fault of your own, but sinless in yourself . . . soon you will go, soon, soon, my poor one . . . and, going now, you will not go to hell as you would if you lived and grew up and became a sinner.” . . . The next morning the child was dead . . . [Louis Adamic, Cradle of Life: The Story of One Man’s Beginnings (New York, 1936), pp. 11, 45, 48.]

* Shorter, “Sexual Change”; David Bakan, Slaughter of the Innocents; Edward Shorter, “Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution, and Social Change in Modern Europe”; Shorter, “Infanticide”; . . . Robert J. Parr, The Baby Farmer (London, 1909); . . . Ryan, Infanticide; Langer, “Checks;” and an enormous bibliography Langer has to support this article, but which is only in mimeograph form, although it is partially reproduced in his article “Infanticide: A Historical Survey,” History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory, 1 (1974), 353-65.

Once the infant in the past was born, he was regularly surrounded by the aura of death and counter-measures against death. Since ancient times, exorcisms, purifications, and magic amulets have been thought necessary to rout the host of death-dealing powers felt to lurk about the child, and cold water, fire, blood, wine, salt, and urine were used on the baby and its surroundings.* Isolated Greek villages even today retain this atmosphere of warding off death:

The new-born child sleeps tightly swaddled in a wooden rocking cradle which is enveloped from end to end in a blanket, so that he lies in a kind of dark airless tent. Mothers are fearful of the effects of cold air and evil spirits . . . the hut or house after dark is like a city under siege, with windows boarded, the door barred, and salt and incense at strategic points such as the threshold to repel any invasion of the Devil. [J. K. Campbell, Honour, Family and Patronage (Oxford, 1964), p. 154.]

* Royden Keith Yerkes, Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religions and Early Judaism (New York, 1952), p. 34; Ernest Jones, Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis, vol. 2 (New York, 1964), pp. 22-109; Gorman, Nurse, p. 17.

Old women, symbols, according to Rheingold, of the grandmother whose death wishes were warded off, were thought to have an “evil eye,” under whose gaze the child could die. Amulets, generally in the form of a penis or of phallus-shaped coral, are given the infant to ward off these death wishes. As the child grew up, death wishes toward it kept breaking through. Epictetus said, “What harm is there if you whisper to yourself, at the very moment you are kissing your child, and say ‘Tomorrow you will die?’” [Epictetus, Discourses, vol. 2, p. 213.] An Italian during the Renaissance would say, when a child does something clever, “that child is not meant to live.” Fathers of every age tell their sons, with Luther, “I would rather have a dead son than a disobedient one.” Fenelon says to ask a child questions such as, “Would you let your head be cut off in order to get into heaven?” [H. C. Barnard, ed., Fenelon On Education (Cambridge, 1966), p. 63.] Walter Scott said his mother confessed she was “under a strong temptation of the Devil, to cut my throat with her scissors, and bury me in the moss.” [Edward Wagenknecht, When I Was a Child (New York, 1946), p. 5.] Leopardi said of his mother, “When she saw the death of one of her infants approaching, she experienced a deep happiness, which she attempted to conceal only from those who were likely to blame her.” [Iris Origo, Leopardi, p. 16.]


Urges to mutilate, burn, freeze, drown, shake, and throw the infant violently about were continuously acted out in the past. The Huns used to cut the cheeks of newborn males. Robert Pemell tells how in Italy and other countries during the Renaissance parents would “burn in the neck with a hot iron, or else drop a burning wax candle” on newborn babies to prevent “falling sickness.”* In early modern times, the string underneath the newborn’s tongue was usually cut, often with the mid-wife’s fingernail, a sort of miniature circumcision. The mutilation of children throughout the ages has excited pity and laughter in adults, and was the basis for the widespread practice in every age of mutilating children for begging, going back to Seneca’s “Controversy,” which concludes that mutilating exposed children was not wrong:

Look on the blind wandering about the streets leaning on their sticks, and those with crushed feet, and still again look on those with broken limbs. This one is without arms, that one has had his shoulders pulled down out of shape in order that his grotesqueries may excite laughter . . . Let us go to the origin of all those ills—a laboratory for the manufacture of human wrecks—a cavern filled with the limbs torn from living children . . . What wrong has been done to the Republic? On the contrary, have not these children been done a service inasmuch as their parents had cast them out? [George Henry Payne, The Child in Human Progress (New York, 1916), pp. 242-3.]

* Margaret Deanesly, A History of Early Medieval Europe (London, 1956), p. 23; Robert Pemell, De Morbis Puerorum, or, A Treatise of the Diseases of Children . . . (London, 1653), p. 8, a practice reminding one of the Japanese practice of burning children’s skin with moxa, which is still used for health as well as disciplinary purposes; see Edward Norbeck and Margaret Norbeck, “Child Training in a Japanese Fishing Community,” in Douglas C. Haring, ed., Personal Character and Cultural Milieu (Syracuse, 1956), pp. 651-73.


pp. 34-38: . . . it was the sending of children to wet-nurse which was the form of institutionalized abandonment most prevalent in the past. The wet-nurse is a familiar figure in the Bible, the Code of Hammurabi, the Egyptian papyri, and Greek and Roman literature, and they have been well organized ever since Roman wet-nurses gathered in the Colonna Lactaria to sell their services. Doctors and moralists since Galen and Plutarch have denounced mothers for sending their children out to be wet-nursed rather than nursing themselves. Their advice had little effect, however, for until the eighteenth century most parents who could afford it, and many who couldn’t, sent their children to wet-nurse immediately after birth. Even poor mothers who could not afford sending their children out to nurse often refused to breast-feed them, and gave them pap instead. Contrary to the assumptions of most historians, the custom of not breast-feeding infants at all reaches back in many areas of Europe at least as far as the fifteenth century. One mother, who had moved from an area in northern Germany where nursing infants was more common, was considered “swinish and filthy” by Bavarian women for nursing her child, and her husband threatened he would not eat if she did not give up this “disgusting habit.” [Green, Galen’s Hygiene, p. 24; Foote, “Infant Hygiene,” p. 180 . . . . Juan de Mariana, The King and the Education of the King (Washington, D.C., 1948), p. 189; Craig R. Thompson, trans., The Colloquies of Erasmus (Chicago, 1965), p. 282; . . . . John Knodel and Etienne Van de Walle, “Breast Feeding, Fertility and Infant Mortality: An Analysis of Some Early German Data,” Population Studies 21 (1967), pp. 116-20.]
As for the rich, who actually abandoned their children for a period of years, even those experts who thought the practice bad usually did not use empathic terms in their treatises, but rather thought wet-nursing bad because “the dignity of a newborn human being [is] corrupted by the foreign and degenerate nourishment of another’s milk.” That is, the blood of the lower-class wet-nurse entered the body of the upper-class baby, milk being thought to be blood frothed white. Occasionally the moralists, all men of course, betrayed their own repressed resentment against their mothers for having sent them out to wet-nurse. Aulus Gellius complained: “When a child is given to another and removed from its mother’s sight, the strength of maternal ardour is gradually and little by little extinguished . . . and it is almost as completely forgotten as if it had been lost by death.” [Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, p. 361.] But usually repression won and the parent was praised. More important, repetition was assured. Though it was well known that infants died at a far higher rate while at wet-nurse than at home, parents continued to mourn their children’s death, and then helplessly handed over their next infant as though the wet-nurse were a latter-day avenging goddess who required yet another sacrifice. [Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli, Ricordi, V. Branca, ed. (Florence, 1956), pp. 144, 452.] Sir Simonds D’Ewes had already lost several sons at wet-nurse, yet he sent his next baby for two years to “a poor woman who had been much misused and almost starved by a wicked husband, being herself also naturally of a proud, fretting and wayward disposition; which together in the issue conduced to the final ruin and destruction of our most sweet and tender infant . . .” [James O. Halliwell, ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (London, 1845), p. 108; see also William Bray, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 1 (London, 1952), pp. 330, 386; Henry Morley, Jerome Cardan: The Life of Girolamo Cardano of Milan, Physician, 2 vols. (London, 1854), p. 203.]


Except in those cases where the wet-nurse was brought in to live, children who were given to the wet-nurse were generally left there from 2 to 5 years. The conditions were similar in every country. Jacques Cuillimeau described how the child at nurse might be “stifled, over-laid, be let fall, and so come to an untimely death; or else may be devoured, spoiled, or disfigured by some wild beast, wolf or dog, and then the nurse fearing to be punished for her negligence, may take another child into the place of it.” Robert Pemell reported the rector in his parish told him it was, when he first came to it, “filled with suckling infants from London and yet, in the space of one year, he buried them all except two.” [Wickes, “Infant Feeding,” p. 235.] Yet the practice continued inexorably until the eighteenth century in England and America, the nineteenth century in France, and into the twentieth century in Germany.* England was, in fact, so far in advance of the continent in nursing matters that quite wealthy mothers were often nursing their children as early as the seventeenth century. Nor was it simply a matter of the amorality of the rich; Robert Pemell complained in 1653 of the practice of “both high and low ladies of farming out their babies to irresponsible women in the country,” and as late as 1780 the police chief of Paris estimated that of the 21,000 children born each year in his city, 17,000 were sent into the country to be wet-nursed, 2,000 or 3,000 were placed in nursery homes, 700 were wet-nursed at home and only 700 were nursed by their mothers.

* Hitchcock, Memoirs, pp. 19, 81; Ian Wickes, “A History of Infant Feeding,” p. 239; Bayne-Powell, The English Child in the Eighteenth Century, p. 168; Barbara Winchester, Tudor Family Portrait (London, 1955), p. 106; Gordon Taylor, The Angel-Makers: A Study in the Psychological Origins of Historical Change, p. 328; Clifford Stetson Parker, The Defense of the Child by French Novelists (Menasha, Wisconsin, 1925), pp. 4-7; . . . . T. G. H. Drake, “The Wet Nurse in the Eighteenth Century,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 8 (1940), 934-48; Luigi Tansillo, The Nurse, A Poem, William Roscoe, trans. (Liverpool, 1804), p. 4; . . . . Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick, Home Life in Germany(Chatauqua, New York, 1912), p. 8.


Tying the child up in various restraint devices was a near-universal practice. Swaddling was the central fact of the infant’s earliest years. As we have noted, restraints were thought necessary because the child was so full of dangerous adult projections that if it were left free it would scratch its eyes out, tear its ears off, break its legs, distort its bones, be terrified by the sight of its own limbs, and even crawl about on all fours like an animal.* Traditional swaddling is much the same in every country and age; it “consists in entirely depriving the child of the use of its limbs, by enveloping them in an endless length bandage, so as to not unaptly resemble billets of wood; and by which, the skin is sometimes excoriated; the flesh compressed, almost to gangrene; the circulation nearly arrested; and the child without the slightest power of motion. Its little waist is surrounded by stays . . . Its head is compressed into the form the fancy of the midwife might suggest; and its shape maintained by properly adjusted pressure . . .” [William P. Dewees, A Treatise on the Physical and Medical Treatment of Children (Philadelphia, 1826), p. 4; for further bibliography on swaddling, see Wayne Dennis, “Infant Reactions to Restraint: an Evaluation of Watson’s Theory,” Transactions New York Academy of Science, Ser. 2, vol. 2 (1940); Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York, 1950); . . . . Phyllis Greenacre, “Infant Reactions to Restraint,” in Clyde Kluckholm and Henry A. Murray, eds., Personality in Nature, Society and Culture, 2nd ed. (New York, 1953), pp. 513-14; Charles Hudson, “Isometric Advantages of the Cradle Board: A Hypothesis,” American Anthropologist, 68 (1966), pp. 470-4.]

* Hassall, How They Lived, p. 184; Benedict, “Child Rearing,” p. 345; Geoffrey Gorer and John Rickman, The People of Great Russia: A Psychological Study, p. 98 . . . .

Swaddling was often so complicated it took up to two hours to dress an infant. [Hester Chapone, Chapone on the Improvement of the Mind (Philadelphia, 1830), p. 200.] Its convenience to adults was enormous—they rarely had to pay any attention to infants once they were tied up. As a recent medical study of swaddling has shown, swaddled infants are extremely passive, their hearts slow down, they cry less, they sleep far more, and in general they are so withdrawn and inert that the doctors who did the study wondered if swaddling shouldn’t be tried again. [Earle L. Lipton, Alfred Steinschneider, and Julius B. Richmond, “Swaddling, A Child Care Practice: Historical Cultural and Experimental Observations,” Pediatrics, Supplement, 35, part 2 (March, 1965), 521-67.] The historical sources confirm this picture; doctors since antiquity agreed that “wakefulness does not happen to children naturally nor from habit, i.e., customarily, for they always sleep,” and children were described as being laid for hours behind the hot oven, hung on pegs on the wall, placed in tubs, and in general, “left, like a parcel, in every convenient corner.” [Turner Wilcox, Five Centuries of the American Costume (New York, 1963), p. 17; . . . . Christian A. Struve, A Familiar View of the Domestic Education of Children (London, 1802), p. 296.] Almost all nations swaddled. Even in ancient Egypt, where it is claimed children were not swaddled because paintings showed them naked, swaddling may have been practiced, for Hippocrates said the Egyptians swaddle, and occasional figurines showed swaddling clothes. [Hippocrates, trans. W. H. S. Jones (London, 1923), p. 125; Steffen Wenig, The Woman in Egyptian Art (New York, 1969), p. 47; Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (New York, 1963), p. 32.] Those few areas where swaddling was not used, such as in ancient Sparta and in the Scottish highlands, were also areas of the most severe hardening practices, as though the only possible choice were between tight swaddling or being carried about naked and made to run in the snow without clothes. Swaddling was so taken for granted that the evidence for length of swaddling is quite spotty prior to early modern times. Soranus says the Romans unswaddled at from 40 to 60 days; hopefully, this is more accurate than Plato’s “two years.” [Soranus, Gynecology, p. 114; Plato, The Laws (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1926), p. 7.] Tight swaddling, often including strapping to carrying-boards, continued throughout the Middle Ages, but I have not yet been able to find out for how many months. [Dorothy Hartley, Mediaeval Costume and Life (London, 1931), pp. 117-19.] The few source references in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, plus a study of the art of the period, suggest a pattern of total swaddling in those centuries for between one to four months; then the arms were left free and the body and legs remained swaddled for between six to nine months.* The English led the way in ending swaddling, as they did in ending outside wet-nursing. Swaddling in England and America was on its way out by the end of the eighteenth century, and in France and Germany by the nineteenth century. [Cunnington, Children’s Costume, pp. 68-69; Magdelen King-Hall, The Story of the Nursery (London, 1958), pp. 83, 129; . . . . Robert Sunley, “Early Nineteenth-Century Literature on Child Rearing,” in Childhood in Contemporary Cultures, Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein, eds. (Chicago, 1955), p. 155; Kuhn, Mother’s Role, p. 141; . . . . Alice M. Earle, Two Centuries of Costume in America, vol. 1 (New York, 1903), p. 311; . . . . Lipton, “Swaddling,” pp. 529-32 . . . .]

* Cunnington, Children’s Costume, pp. 35, 53-69; Macfarlane, Family Life, p. 90; . . . . M. St. Clare Byrne, ed., The Elizabethan Home Discovered in Two Dialogues by Claudius Hollyband and Peter Erondell (London, 1925), p. 77. It is interesting to note that over a century before Candogan’s campaign against swaddling, mothers began to reduce the age of unbinding, and that early doctors like Glisson were opposed to this change, tending to confirm its psychogenic origin in the family itself.

pp. 39-43: Although chairs with chamber pots underneath have existed since antiquity, there is no evidence for toilet training in the earliest months of the infant’s life prior to the eighteenth century. Although parents often complained, like Luther, of their children’s “befouling the corners,” and although doctors prescribed remedies, including whipping, for “pissing in the bed” (children generally slept with adults), the struggle between parent and child for control in infancy of urine and feces is an eighteenth-century invention, the product of a late psychogenic stage.
Children, of course, have always been identified with their excrements; newborn infants were called ecreme, and the Latin merda, excrement, was the source of the French merdeux, little child. [Theodore Thass-Thienemann, The Subconscious Language, p. 59.] But it was the enema and the purge, not the potty, which were the central devices for relating to the inside of the child’s body prior to the eighteenth century. Children were given suppositories, enemas, and oral purges in sickness and in health. One seventeenth-century authority said infants should be purged before each nursing so the milk wouldn’t get mixed up with the feces. [Hunt, Parents and Children, p. 144. Hunt’s section on purges is his most perceptive.] Heroard’s diary of Louis XIII is filled with minute descriptions of what goes into and comes out of Louis’s body, and he was given literally thousands of purges, suppositories, and enemas during his childhood. The urine and feces of infants were often examined in order to determine the inner state of the child. David Hunt’s description of this process clearly reveals the projective origin for what I have termed the “toilet-child”:

The bowels of children were thought to harbor matter which spoke to the adult world insolently, threateningly, with malice and insubordination. The fact that the child’s excrement looked and smelled unpleasant meant that the child himself was somewhere deep down inside badly disposed. No matter how placid and cooperative he might appear, the excrement which was regularly washed out of him was regarded as the insulting message of an inner demon, indicating the “bad humors” which lurked within. [David Hunt, Parents and Children in History (New York, 1970), pp. 144-5.]

It was not until the eighteenth century that the main focus moved from the enema to the potty. Not only was toilet training begun at an earlier age, partly as a result of diminished use of swaddling bands, but the whole process of having the child control its body products was invested with an emotional importance previously unknown. Wrestling with an infant’s will in his first few months was a measure of the strength of involvement by parents with their children, and represented a psychological advance over the reign of the enema. By the nineteenth century, parents generally began toilet training in earnest in the earliest months of life, and their demands for cleanliness became so severe by the end of the century that the ideal child was described as one “who cannot bear to have any dirt on his body or dress or in his surrounding for even the briefest time.” Even today, most English and German parents begin toilet training prior to six months; the average in America is more like nine months, and the range is greater. [Josephine Klein, Samples From English Cultures, vol. 2, Child-rearing Practices (London, 1965), pp. 449-52; David Rodnick, Post War Germany: An Anthropologist’s Account (New Haven, 1948), p. 18; Robert R. Sears, et al., Patterns of Child Rearing (New York, 1957), p. 109; Daniel Miller, Changing American Parent, pp. 219-20.]


The evidence which I have collected on methods of disciplining children leads me to believe that a very large percentage of the children born prior to the eighteenth century were what would today be termed “battered children.” Of over two hundred statements of advice on child-rearing prior to the eighteenth century which I have examined, most approved of beating children severely, and all allowed beating in varying circumstances except three, Plutarch, Palmieri, and Sadoleto, and these were addressed to fathers and teachers, and did not mention mothers. [Plutarch, “The Education of Children,” in Moses Hadas, trans., Plutarch: Selected Essays on Love, the Family, and the Good Life (New York, 1957), p. 113; F. J. Furnivall, ed., Queen Elizabethes Achademy, Early English Text Society Extra Series no. 8 (London, 1869), p. 1; William Harrison Woodward, Studies in Education During the Age of the Renaissance 1400-1600 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1924), p. 171.]

Beating instruments included whips of all kinds, including the cat-o’-nine-tails, shovels, canes, iron and wooden rods, bundles of sticks, the discipline (a whip made of small chains), and special school instruments like the flapper, which had a pear-shaped end and a round hole to raise blisters. Their comparative frequency of use may be indicated by the categories of the German schoolmaster who reckoned he had given 911,527 strokes with the stick, 124,000 lashes with the whip, 136,715 slaps with the hand, and 1,115,800 boxes on the ear.* The beatings described in the sources were generally severe, involved bruising and bloodying of the body, began early, and were a regular part of the child’s life.

* Preserved Smith, A History of Modern Culture, vol. 2 (New York, 1934), p. 423.

Century after century of battered children grew up and in turn battered their own children. Public protest was rare. Even humanists and teachers who had a reputation for great gentleness, like Petrarch, Ascham, Comenius, and Pestalozzi, approved of beating children.* Milton’s wife complained she hated to hear the cries of his nephews when he was beating them, and Beethoven whipped his pupils with a knitting needle and sometimes bit them. [Christina Hole, The English Housewife in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1953), p. 149; Editha and Richard Sterba, Beethoven and His Nephew (New York, 1971), p. 89.] Even royalty was not exempt from battering, as the childhood of Louis XIII confirms. A whip was at his father’s side at table, and as early as 17 months of age, the dauphin knew enough not to cry when threatened with the whip. At 25 months regular whippings began, often on his bare skin. He had frequent nightmares about his whippings, which were administered in the morning when he awakened. When he was king he still awoke at night in terror, in expectation of his morning whipping. The day of his coronation, when he was eight, he was whipped, and said, “I would rather do without so much obeisance and honor if they wouldn’t have me whipped.” [Soulie, Heroard, pp. 44, 203, 284, 436; Hunt, Parents and Children, pp. 133ff.]

* Morris Bishop, trans. Letters From Petrarch (Bloomington, Ind., 1966), p. 149; Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (London, 1940), p. 35; James Turner, “The Visual Realism of Comenius,” History of Education, 1 (June, 1972), p. 132; John Amos Comenius, The School of Infancy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956), p. 102; Roger DeGuimps, Pestalozzi: His Life and Work (New York, 1897), p. 161; . . . . Renee Neu Watkins, trans., The Family in Renaissance Florence (Columbia, S.C., 1969), p. 66.

Since infants who were not swaddled were in particular subjected to hardening practices, perhaps one function of swaddling was to reduce the parent’s propensity for child abuse. I have not yet found an adult who beat a swaddled infant. However, the beating of the smallest of infants out of swaddling clothes occurred quite often, a sure sign of the “battering” syndrome. Susannah Wesley said of her babies: “When turned a year old (and some before), they were taught to fear the rod, and to cry softly.” Giovanni Dominici said to give babies “frequent, yet not severe whippings. . . .” Rousseau said that babies in their earliest days were often beaten to keep them quiet. One mother wrote of her first battle with her 4-month-old infant: “I whipped him til he was actually black and blue, and until I could not whip him any more, and he never gave up one single inch.” The examples could easily be extended. [Giovanni Dominici, On The Education of Children, Arthur B. Cote, trans. (Washington, D.C., 1927), p. 48; Rousseau, Emile, p. 15; Paul Sangster, Pity My Simplicity: The Evangelical Revival and the Religious Education of Children 1738-1800 (London, 1963), p. 77.]


References to detailed modes of discipline are even harder to find in the Middle Ages. One thirteenth-century law brought child-beating into the public domain: “If one beats a child until it bleeds, then it will remember, but if one beats it to death, the law applies.” Most medieval descriptions of beating were quite severe, although St. Anselm, as in so many things, was far in advance of his time by telling an abbot to beat children gently, for “Are they not human? Are they not flesh and blood like you?” [Eadmer, R. W. Southern, trans. The Life of St. Anselm—Archbishop of Canterbury (Oxford, 1962), p. 38.]
Some attempts were made in the seventeenth century to limit the beating of children, but it was the eighteenth century which saw the biggest decrease. The earliest lives I have found of children who may not have been beaten at all date from 1690 to 1750.* It was not until the nineteenth century that the old-fashioned whipping began to go out of style in most of Europe and America, continuing longest in Germany, where 80% of German parents still admit to beating their children, a full 35% with canes. [See the final chapter in this book for bibliography on England and France; see Lyman Cobb, The Evil Tendencies of Corporal Punishment as a Means of Moral Discipline in Families and Schools (New York, 1847), and Daniel Miller, Changing American Parent, pp. 13-14, for American Conditions; see Walter Havernick, Schlage als Strafe (Hamburg, 1964), for Germany today.]

* Bossuet, Account, pp. 56-7; Henry H. Meyer, Child Nature and Nurture According to Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzindorf (New York, 1928), p. 105; Bedford, English Children, p. 238; . . . . Rev. Bishop Fleetwood, Six Useful Discourses on the Relative Duties of Parents and Children (London, 1749).


p. 54: Psychogenic theory can, I think, provide a genuinely new paradigm for the study of history.* It reverses the usual “mind as tabula rasa,” and instead considers the “world as tabula rasa,” with each generation born into a world of meaningless objects which are invested with meaning only if the child receives a certain kind of care. As soon as the mode of care changes for enough children, all the books and artifacts in the world are brushed aside as irrelevant to the purposes of the new generation, and society begins to move in unpredictable directions . . . .
If the measure of a theory’s vitality is its ability to generate interesting problems, childhood history and psychogenic theory should have an exciting future. There is still a lot to learn about what growing up in the past was really like. One of our first tasks will be to investigate why childhood evolution proceeds at different rates in different countries and different class and family lines. Yet we already know enough to be able for the first time to answer some major questions on value and behavior change in Western history. First to benefit from the theory will be the history of witchcraft, magic, religious movements, and other irrational mass phenomena. Beyond this, psychogenic theory should eventually contribute to our understanding of why social organization, political form, and technology change in specific times and directions and not in others. Perhaps the addition of the childhood parameter to history may even end the historian’s century-long Durkheimian flight from psychology, and encourage us to resume the task of constructing a scientific history of human nature which was envisioned so long ago by John Stuart Mill as a “theory of the causes which determine the type of character belonging to a people or to an age.” [See Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth Century Thought (Baltimore, 1971), chapter 11, for Mill’s abortive attempt to invent a historical science of human nature.]

* Despite the single line of evolution described, the psychogenic theory of history is not uni-linear but multi-linear, for conditions outside the family also affect to some extent the course of parent-child evolution in each society. There is no claim here for reducing all other sources of historical change to the psychogenic. Rather than being an example of psychological reductionism, psychogenic theory is actually an intentional application of “methodological individualism,” as described by F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science (Glencoe, Illinois, 1952); Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, 1950); J. W. N. Watkins, “Methodological Individualism and Non-Hempelian Ideal Types,” in Leonard I. Krimerman, ed., The Nature and Scope of Social Science (New York, 1969), pp. 457-72. See also J. O. Wisdom, “Situational Individualism and the Emergent Group Properties,” Explanation in the Behavioral Sciences, Robert Borger and Frank Cioffi, eds. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970), pp. 271-96.