03/31/2011

The History of Child Abuse


The Journal of Psychohistory


Psychohistory, the science of historical motivations, combines the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present. The center of psychohistorical research around the globe is The Institute for Psychohistory, which is headquartered in New York City and has 18 branches in other countries. The Institute is chartered by the State of New York as a not-for-profit educational corporation, the Association for Psychohistory, Inc., and for the past 40 years has published The Journal of Psychohistory, various books by The Psychohistory Press, and has been affiliated with the International Psychohistorical Association, which holds an annual convention. Its director is Lloyd deMause, whose work (see below for full texts) is used in most college courses in psychohistory. This website contains extensive material reproduced from The Journal of Psychohistory and from deMause's books: Foundations of Psychohistory, Reagan's America, The Emotional Life of Nations and The Origins of War in Child Abuse. It also contains addresses of Institute branches and links to the International Psychohistorical Association and other websites and discussion lists.

by Lloyd deMause

Childhood in China has historically had the same institutionalized rape rituals as in India, including the pederasty of boys, child concubinage, the castration of boys to be used sexually as eunuchs, marriage of young girls to a number of brothers, widespread boy and girl prostitution and the regular sexual use of child servants and slaves. So prevalent was the rape of little girls that Western doctors found that, as in India, few girls entering puberty had intact hymens. Even the universal practice of foot binding was for sexual purposes, with a girl undergoing extremely painful crushing of the bones of her feet for years in order that men could make love to her big toe as a fetish, a penis-substitute.

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The crucial relationship in this evolution is the mother-daughter relationship. If little girls are treated particularly badly, they grow up to be mothers who cannot rework their traumas, and history is frozen. For instance, although China was ahead of the West in most ways during the pre-Christian era, it became "frozen" and fell far behind the West in evolutionary social and technological change after it adopted the practice of footbinding girls. Similarly, the cliterodectomy of girls in Moslem societies has inhibited their social development for centuries, since it likewise puts a brake on the ability of the next generation of mothers to make progress in caring for their children. Clearly, different groups have moved different distances up the ladder of psychological evolution, since some contemporary groups still practice brain-eating as our Paleolithic ancestors did, and different subgroups of our more advanced nations still terrorize and abuse their children in ways identical to those that were commonplace centuries ago, producing the "historical fossils" (early "psychoclasses") we now call borderline personalities and other severe character disorders. Your neighbor is as likely to be a result of medieval parenting as of modern parenting, so modern societies contain a full range of childrearing modes and psychoclasses. The "generational pressure" for psychological change is not only an independent historical force--originating in inborn adult-child striving for relationship--it occurs independent of social and technological change, and can be found even in periods of economic stagnation. My "psychogenic theory of history" posits that a society's childrearing practices are not just one item in a list of cultural traits, but--because all other traits must be passed down from generation to generation through the narrow funnel of childhood--instead makes childrearing the very basis for the transmission and development of all other cultural traits, placing definite limits on what can be achieved in the material spheres of history. The main source of childhood evolution is, I believe, the process I call psychogenesis, by which parents--mainly the mother for most of history--revisit a second time around the stages of childhood and undo to some extent the traumas they themselves endured. It is in this sense that history is like a psychotherapy of the generations, undoing trauma and giving historical personality a chance at a new start with every baby born. Only humans have brain networks that allow this miracle to take place. All cultural changes in the past 100,000 years of Homo sapiens sapiens are epigenetic, not genetic. Regardless of changes in the environment, it is only when changes in childhood occur that epigenetic changes in the brain can occur and societies can begin to progress and move in unpredictable new directions that are more adaptive. That more individuated and loving individuals are ultimately more adaptive is understandable--because they are less under the pressures of infantile traumas and are therefore more rational in reaching their goals. But that this childhood evolution--and therefore all social evolution--is terribly uneven is also understandable, given the varying conditions under which parents all over the world have to conduct their childrearing tasks

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That periodic sacrifices are in fact lawful is suggested by the regularity with which they occur, nearly every state producing a major war on the average of about every 25 years throughout the past two millennia. In between wars, periodic economic sacrifices serve to relieve our guilt for too much prosperity and to cleanse us of our dangerous economic and social progress. Depth psychology has shown that in individuals progress toward individuation and success often produces regression, including both fears of leaving mommy and wishes for maternal re-engulfment, along with fears of losing one's self. In nations, the same thing occurs after periods of rapid change and prosperity, and is defended against by the sacrificial ritual called war.

Read more at The Journal of Psychohistory

Mar 31, 2011 12:58:18 PM | Culture, History

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