Lloyd deMause is director of The Institute for Psychohistory, which is in New Yo

rk City and has 17 branches in various countries. He is editor of The Journal of

Psychohistory and president of the International Psychohistorical Association.
He was born in Detroit, Michigan on September 19, 1931. He graduated from Columb
ia College and did his post-graduate training in political science at Columbia U
niversity and in psychoanalysis at the National Psychological Association for Ps
ychoanalysis. He has taught psychohistory at the City University of New York and
the New York Center for Psychoanalytic Training, is a member of the Society for
Psychoanalytic Training, and has lectured widely in Europe and America. He has
published over 80 scholarly articles in such periodicals as The Nation, Psycholo
gy Today, The Guardian, The Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, The Journal
of Psychohistory, Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, Psyche, Kindheit, Texte zur
Kunst, Psychologie, Psychologos: International Review of Psychology, Psychoanal
ytic Beacon and Psychologie Heute. He is on the editorial board of Familiendynam
ik, The International Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine
and Mentalities/Mentalites. His books include The History of Childhood, A Biblio
graphy of Psychohistory, The New Psychohistory, Jimmy Carter and American Fantas
y, Foundations of Psychohistory, Reagans America, The Emotional Life of Nations, an
d The Origins of War in Child Abuse. His work has been translated into nine lang
uages. He has three children: Neil, Jennifer and Jonathan.
www.lloyddemause.com http://www.psychohistory.com/ http://www.geocities.ws/kidhi
story/ja/somein.htm http://www.kidhistory.org/ http://primal-page.com/psyhis.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgtRAYfroTQ&feature=related http://www.youtube.c
om/watch?v=tgtRAYfroTQ&feature=related
1
Psychohistory: Childhood and the Emotional Life of Nations
by Lloyd deMause
http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln00_preface.html
2
Table of Contents
Preface.........................................................................
............................................................................ 4 C
hapter 1 The Assassination of Leaders ............................................
................................................. 6 Chapter 2 The Gulf War as a Me
ntal Disorder ..................................................................
................ 16 Chapter 3 The Childhood Origins of Terrorism .................
................................................................ 39 Chapter 4 Rest
aging Early Traumas in War and Social Violence .................................
..................... 46 Chapter 5 The Psychogenic Theory of History .............
................................................................... 100 Chapter
6 War as Righteous Rape and Purification .........................................
............................... 177 Chapter 7 Childhood and Cultural Evolution ...
...............................................................................
274 Chapter 8 The Evolution of Childrearing.......................................
.................................................. 362 Chapter 9 The Evolution of
the Psyche and Society .........................................................
.............. 460
3
Preface
The purpose of this book is to reveal for the first time how the ultimate cause
of all wars and human misery is the parental holocaust of children throughout hi
story--an untold story of how literally billions of innocent, helpless children
have been routinely killed, bound, battered, mutilated, raped and tortured and t
hen as adults have inflicted upon others the nightmares they themselves experien
ced. Most of what you will read here will be new, upsetting and difficult to bel
ieve, despite the extensive historical, anthropological, clinical and neurobiolo
gical evidence I will present. But after you read it I think you will be able to
understand for the first time why what Kierkegard called "the slaughterbench of
history" happened, where we are today in the evolution of humanity and what we
can do tomorrow to bring about a peaceful, happier world. In these pages I hope
to accomplish the following ten goals: (1) to provide a new psychogenic theory o
f history as an alternative to the sociogenic theories of all other social scien
ces, (2) to show that childrearing evolution is an independent cause of historic
al change, with love as the central force in history, creating new kinds of pers
onalitiesnew psychoclasses-that then change societies, (3) to demonstrate that h
istorical progress depends less on military conquests and more on the migration
patterns of innovative mothers and "hopeful daughters," (4) to show how politica
l, religious and social behavior restage early traumas, even those occurring bef
ore birth, recorded in separate areas of our minds called social alters, (5) to
show that social institutions are not just utilitarian but are also designed to
be self-destructive, representing shared ways of dealing with emotional problems
caused by deep personal anxieties surrounding growth and individuation, (6) to
explain how a new historical tool, fantasy analysis, can objectively discover sh
ared emotions and group-fantasies that occur in lawful stages which determine th
e sequence of political events,
4
(7) to show that groups go to war to rid themselves of shared feelings of sinful
ness and fears of disintegration, cleansing their feelings by sacrificing victim
s containing rejected parts of themselves, (8) to show why we need enemies, why
we feel depressed when enemies disappear, and what this has to do with our perio
dic need for wars and economic crises whose purpose is to reduce our anxieties a
bout success and prosperity, (9) to show why history is now a race between too s
lowly improving childrearing and too fast evolving destructive technology, and (
10) to demonstrate that new ways for more advanced parents to help other parents
-such as parenting centers with home visiting programs, which have been shown ca
pable of eliminating child abuse-and allow us to avoid global genocide. The firs
t third of the book is devoted to describing how early personal experiences dete
rmine political behavior. It begins with three chapters describing recent Americ
an political events-the shooting of two American presidents, the groupfantasies
leading up to the Gulf War and the childhood origins of terrorism-in order to sh
ow how hidden shared emotions cause political violence. The second third of the
book is devoted to detailing a psychohistorical theory of history, first as it a
pplies to politics, secondly as it explains the causes of war and thirdly as it
shows the connections between childhood and the evolution of the psyche and soci
ety. The final third of the book is a history of how childhood in the West evolv
ed, era by era, and how better childrearing produced new psychoclasses, who then
created new social, religious and political institutions. I have tried to inclu
de in this book most of what I have learned about childhood and history during t
he past four decades. I would welcome hearing from you what you think about what
I say here, and I promise you a personal reply to your email or letter.
5
Chapter 1 The Assassination of Leaders
"Peace is a helluva letdown." ---- Field Marshall Montgomery When Ronald Reagan
became president in 1981, America was in a strange mood. The country had been ex
periencing a period of peace and prosperity. The Americans held hostage in Iran
had been safely returned home without requiring military action. Our Gross Natio
nal Product per person was the highest of any nation in history. Although Americ
a should have felt strong and happy, it instead felt weak and impoverished. The
strongest nation on earth, with the highest personal income at any time in its h
istory and the greatest human freedoms anywhere on earth, America during the Rea
gan election was filled with visions of imminent moral and economic collapse. 1
Our new president voiced our fears: we were not strong at all, he said, but "wea
k and disintegrating," in a "ship about to go over the falls," and "in greater d
anger today than we were the day after Pearl Harbor." We had become so impotent,
in fact, that we were in immediate danger of being overcome by "an evil force t
hat would extinguish the light we've been tending for 6,000 years." 2
Rysunek 1 1:1 As Reagan became president, America felt it was sinking and besieg
ed by evil for ces
During the early months of the Reagan presidency, I was teaching a course in psy
chohistory at the City University of New York. To show the class how to discover
the shared moods of nations, I asked them to bring in current political cartoon
s, magazine covers, presidential speeches and newspaper columns in order to see
what images and emotional words were being circulated in the body politic. When
Reagan said in his Inaugural Address that we felt "terror" (of inflation), "doom
ed," "frightened" and "disintegrating" (as a nation), and full of "pent-up furie
s" (toward government), the class was asked to consider what the psychological s
ources might be for such apocalyptic language at this particular point in time i
n America's history.
6
The class had been studying earlier historical material on national moods, in or
der to learn how to decode the fantasies that might affect the nation's politica
l decisions. They learned that leaders are often expected to sense the irrationa
l wishes and fears of their nations and do something to deflect or relieve their
anxieties. In studying our book, Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy,3 they saw h
ow nations go through emotional cycles that are lawful and that affect political
and economic decisions. They discovered, for instance, that American presidents
regularly started their first year being seen as strong, with high approval rat
ings in the polls, and then were depicted as weakening and eventually as collaps
ing as their polls decline, which they regularly did, regardless of how successf
ul they actually were. Since leaders are imagined to be the only ones that can c
ontrol the nation's emotional life, the nation's emotional life seems to be gett
ing "out of control" as its leader is imagined to be growing more and more impot
ent. The class studied how major decisions by presidents over the past several d
ecades were influenced by the four fantasized leadership stages of strong, crack
ing, collapse and upheaval. Wars, for instance, have never begun in the first ye
ar of the president's term, when he was seen as strong and in control.4 Furtherm
ore, the class saw the disappointment that had been felt when leaders refuse to
take nations to war when they were emotionally ready, i.e., when the leader seem
ed to be "collapsed" and impotent. The main case-study they examined to demonstr
ate this disappointment with the leader who was "too impotent to go to war" was
the Cuban Missile Crisis. Early in President Kennedy's term of office, Robert Mc
Namara said,5 the President had become so "hysterical" about having Fidel Castro
in power in Cuba that he first helped the refugees invade Cuba and then ordered
a military embargo before Soviet missiles were discovered. The embargo against
Cuba was a particularly gratuitous act, done only to feed the growing war demand
s of the nation. Kennedy told a reporter that it was something that "the country
rather enjoyed. It was exciting, it was a diversion, there was the feeling we w
ere doing something."6 After the embargo was announced, eight thousand members o
f the Conservative Party met in Madison Square Garden and roared out to Kennedy,
"Fight! Fight! Fight!"7 When Soviet missiles were later discovered in Cuba put
there as the Soviet's response to the invasion of Cuba Kennedy's advisors admitt
ed that "militarily it doesn't mean that much,"8 since Soviet submarines with nu
clear warheads had long been in Cuban waters. Yet the president maintained that,
rather than feeling "humiliated," he was ready to risk a nuclear war over their
immediate removal, vowing "If Khrushchev wants to rub my nose in the dirt, it's
all over." 9 He bragged to
7
his associates that he would "cut off the balls" of Khrushchev,10 saying "he can
't do this to me"11 and that it was "like dealing with Dad. All give and no take
."12 Even though he admitted he was risking plunging the world into "a holocaust
," he said that Americans wanted military action so badly that if he didn't act
immediately to have them removed, he would risk being impeached.13 Massing a qua
rter of a million men and 180 ships at the tip of Florida, the president put 156
ICBM's at "ready for launch" and sent up bombers containing 1,300 nuclear weapo
ns with Soviet cities as targets.14 The nation was "ready to go." Only 4 percent
of Americans opposed Kennedy's actions, even though 60 percent thought they wou
ld lead to World War III,15 probably even an American apocalypse, since the Sovi
ets had armed nuclear missiles in Cuba that Khrushchev had given his local comma
nders instructions to launch on their own authority toward the U.S. should a mil
itary confrontation begin.16 When Khrushchev then backed down (thankfully, other
wise you might not be alive and reading this book) and removed the missiles and
the crisis suddenly ended without any war, Americans felt an enormous letdown.17
The media reported on "The Strange Mood of America Today Baffled and uncertain
of what to believe..." 18 It began to ask what were seen as frightening question
s: "Will It Now Be A World Without Real War? Suddenly the world seems quiet...Wh
y the quiet? What does it mean?"19 The prospect of peaceful quiet felt terribly
frightening. Americans from all parties were furious with Kennedy for various pr
etexts. Many began calling for a new Cuban invasion, agreeing with Barry Goldwat
er's demand that Kennedy "do anything that needs to be done to get rid of that c
ancer. If it means war, let it mean war."20 Kennedy was accused of being soft on
Communism for living up to his no-invasion pledge to the Soviets, and when he t
hen proposed signing a Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with them, his popularity
dropped even further.21 The nation's columnists expressed their fury towards th
e president, and political cartoonists pictured Kennedy with his head being chop
ped off by a guillotine (above). Richard Nixon warned, "There'll be...blood spil
led before [the election is] over,"22 and a cartoon in The Washington Post portr
ayed Nixon digging a grave. Many editorialists were even more blunt. The Delawar
e State News editorialized: "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. His name rig
ht now happens to be Kennedy let's shoot him, literally, before Christmas."23 Po
tential assassins all over the country-psychopaths who are always around looking
for permission to kill-saw all these media death wishes as signals, as delegati
ons to carry out a necessary task, and began to pick up these fantasies as permi
ssion to kill Kennedy.24
8
Rysunek 21:2 America felt death wishes toward Kennedy for not starting a war wit
h Cuba
Kennedy's aides warned him of an increase in the number of death threats toward
him. His trip to Dallas, known as the "hate capital of Dixie," was seen as parti
cularly dangerous. His aides begged him to cancel his trip. Senator J. William F
ulbright told him, "Dallas is a very dangerous place...I wouldn't go there. Don'
t you go."25 Vice President Lyndon Johnson, writing the opening lines of the spe
ech he intended to make in Austin after the Dallas visit, planned to open with:
"Mr. President, thank God you made it out of Dallas alive!"26 Dallas judges and
leading citizens warned the President he should not come to the city because of
the danger of assassination. The day before the assassination, as handbills were
passed out in Dallas with Kennedy's picture under the headline "Wanted For Trea
son," militants of the John Birch Society and other violent groups flooded into
Dallas, and hundreds of reporters flew in from all over the country, alerted tha
t something might happen to the president.27 Kennedy himself sensed consciously
he might be shot. Two months before the actual assassination, he made a home mov
ie "just for fun" of himself being assassinated.28 The morning of his assassinat
ion, an aide later recalled, Kennedy went to his hotel window, "looked down at t
he speaker's platform...and shook his head. 'Just look at that platform,' he sai
d. 'With all those buildings around it, the Secret Service couldn't stop someone
who really wanted to get you.'"29 When Jackie Kennedy told him she was really a
fraid of an assassin on this trip, JFK agreed, saying, "We're heading into nut c
ountry today....You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assass
inate a President. I mean it...suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase." He po
inted his index finger at the wall and jerked his thumb. "Then he could have dro
pped the gun and briefcase and melted away in the crowd."30 Despite all the warn
ings, however, Kennedy unconsciously accepted the martyr's role. He was, after a
ll, used to doing all his life what others wanted him to do.31 So although a Sec
ret Service man told him the city was so dangerous that he had better put up the
bulletproof plastic top on his limousine, he specifically told him not to do so
.32 In fact, someone instructed the Secret Service not to be present ahead of ti
me in Dallas and check out open windows such as those in the Book Depository, as
they normally did whenever a president traveled in public as Kennedy did.33 Onl
y
9
then, with the nation, the assassin, the Secret Service and the president all in
agreement, the assassination could be successfully carried out. By this point i
n our studies, my class began to see how assassinations might be delegated by na
tions to individuals for purely internal emotional reasons. We noted that six of
the seven assassination attempts on American presidents took place either after
unusually long peaceful periods, like the assassination of James Garfield on Ju
ly 2, 1881, or after a peace treaty at the end of a war,34 like the assassinatio
n of Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1965, six days after the end of the Civil War.
35 It was as if peace was experienced by the nation as a betrayal, that nations
expressed their rage at their leaders for bringing peace, and that assassins pi
cked up the subliminal death wishes and tried to kill the leaders. In studying t
he nation's anger that followed Kennedy's aborted war in Cuba, the class could n
ot help but compare the nation's emotional mood in 1963 to the feelings at that
moment in 1980 following the recently aborted war in Iran, just before Reagan wa
s elected president. Furious with Iran over the long hostage crisis, America had
been whipped into a war frenzy similar to the earlier one against Cuba by the m
edia. "Kids Tell Jimmy to 'Start Shooting" the New York Post headlined, while a
commentator summarized the bellicose mood by saying that "seldom has there been
more talk of war, its certainty, its necessity, its desirability." 36 Polls show
ed most Americans favored invasion of Iran even if it meant that all the hostage
s would be killed, since war, not saving lives, was what the country wanted. 37
When the rescue attempt floundered because of a helicopter crash and Carter refu
sed to send in the American troops, planes and ships that were massed for attack
, the nation turned its fury toward him, just as it had toward Kennedy after the
Cuban confrontation failed to produce war. Carter was buried in a landslide, ra
ther than in a coffin like Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan was elected president. The
students wondered (as did their teacher) if the nation's fury had really subsid
ed, or if their rage might continue toward the new president. Even though this m
ade no rational sense-all the hostages, after all, had already been returned saf
ely-it made sense emotionally. That Reagan might be a target for our death wishe
s after the aborted Iranian invasion was hinted at by widespread speculation dur
ing his campaign regarding a "death jinx" that might strike him. As I mentioned
previously, someone had figured out that no American president elected since 184
0 in a year ending in zero had lived out his term. Bumper stickers had appeared
joking "Re-elect Bush [Reagan's running mate] in 1984." Newspapers began running
political cartoons and headlines with subliminal messages similar to those that
had appeared before Kennedy's
10
assassination, such as the cartoon of a guillotine being constructed on Reagan's
inauguration platform and an Anthony Lewis column in The New York Times headlin
ed "The King Must Die." The climax for these shared fantasies that "the king mus
t die" came in the final week of March. That week, my students brought in numero
us magazine covers, political cartoons and newspaper articles that clearly showe
d these death wishes. Time and Newsweek ran scare stories about a "wildly out of
control" crime wave that was supposed to be occurring--although they had paid l
ittle attention to crime in previous months and in fact the actual crime rate ha
d been decreasing during those months38--illustrating our angry fantasies and de
ath wishes with identical covers depicting menacing guns pointed at the reader.
Rysunek 3 1:3 Guns were on our mind the week before the assassination
The New Republic cover featured graves in Washington. One cartoonist showed Amer
icans constructing a guillotine being built for Reagan (the same guillotine that
had been shown off the head of President Kennedy before his assassination).
Rysunek 4 1:4 Death wishes toward Reagan
Other cartoonists showed Reagan next to targets and guns in the White House, wit
h the odd suggestion that perhaps his wife might want to shoot him with guns
11
she has stored beneath their bed. The cover illustration of U.S. News & World Re
port pictured "Angry Americans" with a subhead that was seemingly unrelated but
in fact that carried the message of what all "angry Americans" should now do. Th
e headline read: "FEDERAL WASTE-REAGAN'S NEXT TARGET," a wording that contains t
wo hidden embedded messages: "WASTE REAGAN" (slang for "Kill Reagan") and "REAGA
N'S [THE] NEXT TARGET." In order to see if our upsetting findings were just our
own selection process creating a personal bias, we checked them out with another
psychohistory class--one taught by Prof. David Beisel of Rockland Community Col
lege--who was also using the fantasy technique to monitor the media and who had
also been collecting media material. They told us that they had independently be
en recently finding a predominance of these death wishes in cartoons and covers.
39 The next day, one of the president's staff confirmed to the nation that assas
sination was "in the air." The President's most excitable aide, Alexander Haig,
unexpectedly began to discuss in the media "who will be in charge of emergencies
" should the president be shot, saying he himself would be next in line of succe
ssion, as though succession to the presidency were for some reason about to beco
me a vital question in America. A great furor arose in the press and on TV talk
shows as to just who would be "in charge" should the President be incapacitated.
That the topic of succession seemed to come out of the blue was totally ignored
by the media. Reagan's death just seemed to be an interesting political topic.
The students grew increasingly uneasy as they watched the escalating fantasy. Th
e class wondered if potential assassins might not also be sensing these sublimin
al messages, since there are always a large number of psychopathic personalities
around the country waiting to be told when and whom to shoot, willing to be the
delegate of the nation's death wishes. Some students wondered if we should phon
e the Secret Service and warn them about our fears, but thought they might consi
der a bunch of cartoons and magazine covers insufficient cause for concern. The
class was not wrong about a potential assassin picking up the death wishes and e
lecting himself our delegate. John Hinckley had been stalking President Carter,
President-elect Reagan and other political targets during the previous six month
s, but just couldn't "get himself into the right frame of mind to actually carry
out the act," as he later put it. After all the media death wishes toward Reaga
n appeared, he finally got what he called "a signal from a newspaper" on March 3
0th and told himself, "This is it, this is for me," and, he said, decided at tha
t moment to shoot the president.40
12
I was sitting in our classroom, waiting for the students to arrive, looking over
some of the Reagan death wish material we had collected. I had been busy during
the past few hours and hadn't listened to the radio before coming to class. Sud
denly, I heard a group of students running down the hallway. They burst into the
room. "Prof. deMause!" they shouted, terribly upset. "They did it! They shot hi
m! Just like we were afraid they would!"41
FOOTNOTES
1. See Lloyd deMause, Reagan's America. New York: Creative Roots, 1984, pp. 1-5.
2. All presidential speeches quoted in this book are taken from the Weekly Tran
script of Presidential Documents. 3. Lloyd deMause and Henry Ebel, Eds., Jimmy C
arter and American Fantasy: Psychohistorical Explorations. New York: Two Contine
nts, 1977. 4. See Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creativ
e Roots, 1982, pp. 172-243; no American war began in the first year of any presi
dent except Lincoln, but in reality the first military actions of the American C
ivil War and the secession of seven Southern states occurred before he was inaug
urated, so the war actually began during the final phase of President Buchanan.
5. Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963. Ne
w York: HarperCollins, 1991, p. 375. 6. Ibid., p. 549. 7. Ibid., p. 487. 8. "A&E
Investigative Reports." March 29, 1997; Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and
the Preservation of Peace. New York: Doubleday, 1995, p. 508. 9. Richard Reeves
, President Kennedy: Profile of Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993; Theodor
e C. Sorensen, The Kennedy Legacy. New York: Macmillan, 1969; James N. Giglio, T
he Presidency of John F. Kennedy. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas,
1991; deMause, Foundations, p. 190. 10. Beschloss, The Crisis Years, p. 375. 11.
Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace. New York: Do
ubleday, 1995, p. 521. 12. Ibid., p. 234.
13
13. Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New
York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1969, p. 67. 14. William L. O'Neill, Coming Apart: An
Informal History of America in the 1960's. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971, p. 6
9; Robert S. Thompson, The Missiles of October: The Declassified Story of John F
. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. 15.
Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties. New York: Fa
rrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980, p. 292. 16. William E. Burrows and Robert Windrem, C
ritical Mass: The Dangerous Race for Superweapons in a Fragmenting World. New Yo
rk: Simon & Schuster, 1994, p. 94. 17. DeMause, Foundations, pp. 216-220. 18. U.
S. News & World Report, February 25, 1963, p. 31. 19. U.S. News & World Report,
December 17, 1962, p. 54. 20. Beschloss, The Crisis Years, p. 381. 21. Ibid., p.
641. 22. Time, November 22, 1963, p. 1. 23. Delaware State News, October 18, 19
63, cited in William Manchester, The Death of a President: November 20-November
25, 1963. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 46. 24. For the unconscious relations
hip between assassins and their victims, see Charles W. Socarides, "Why Sirhan K
illed Kennedy: Psychoanalytic Speculations on an Assassination," The Journal of
Psychohistory 6(1979): 447-460; and James W. Hamilton, "Some Observations on the
Motivations of Lee Harvey Oswald," The Journal of Psychohistory 14(1986): 43-54
. 25. Manchester, The Death of a President, p. 39. 26. Beschloss, The Crisis Yea
rs, p. 665. 27. Woffard, Of Kennedys and Kings, p. 343. 28. Aaron Latham, "The D
ark Side of the American Dream," Rolling Stone, August 5, 1982, p. 18. 29. Rober
t MacNeil, Ed. The Way We Were: 1963--The Year Kennedy Was Shot. New York: Carro
ll & Grof Publications, 1988, p. 185.
14
30. Manchester, The Death of a President, p. 121. 31. Doris Kearns Goodwin, The
Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987; Thomas C. Reev
es, A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy. New York: The Free Press
, 1991; Nancy Clinch, The Kennedy Neurosis: A Psychological Portrait of an Ameri
can Dynasty. New York: Grosset, 1973. 32. MacNeil, The Way We Were, p. 189. 33.
"The Men Who Killed the President." The History Channel, June 19, 1996. 34. This
period is termed an "introvert Phase" of American history in Jack E. Holmes, Th
e Mood/Interest Theory of American Foreign Policy. Lexington: The University Pre
ss of Kentucky, 1985, p. 32. 35. The other assasination attempts during peaceful
periods besides Kennedy, Lincoln and Jackson were Franklin D. Roosevelt, Februa
ry 15, 1933, and Gerald Ford, September 22, 1975, both peaceful periods; only Ha
rry S. Truman, November 1, 1950, was shot at during a military action. 36. New Y
ork Post, January 8, 1980, p. 3; Village Voice, February 25, 1980, p.16. 37. For
press frenzy and polls on Iran invasion, see deMause, Reagan's America, pp. 28-
35 and deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, pp. 304-310. 38. See Frank Brownin
g, "Nobody's Soft on Crime Anymore," Mother Jones, August, 1982, pp. 25-31; Chri
stopher Jencks, "Is Violent Crime Increasing? The American Prospect , Winter, 19
91, pp. 96-106. 39. See Robert Finen and Jonathan Glass, "Two Student Views." Th
e Journal of Psychohistory 11(1983):113, where they report that "classes had bee
n picking up traces of a fantasy for Reagan's death in the media...[When] the ne
ws came: a shooting in Washington! I was in shock. Here, in less than a week, wa
s confirmation of a psychohistorical prediction!" 40. Latham, "The Dark Side of
the American Dream," p. 54.
15
Chapter 2 The Gulf War as a Mental Disorder
"He's going to get his ass kicked!" ---- George Bush Not every American presiden
t has been able to resist his nation's call for war. Studies have shown the main
determinant is the kind of childhood the president has experienced.1 Jimmy Cart
er was unusual in being able to draw upon his having had fairly loving parents,
in particular a mother who encouraged his individuality and independence, a very
unusual quality for a parent in the 1920s. 2 It is no coincidence that when I o
nce collected all the childhood photos I could find of American presidents I not
iced that only those of Jimmy Carter and Dwight Eisenhower (another president wh
o resisted being drawn into war) showed their mothers smiling. Ronald Reagan's c
hildhood, in contrast, was more like that of most presidents: a nightmare of neg
lect and abuse, in his case dominated by an obsessively religious mother and a v
iolent, alcoholic father who, he said, used to "kick him with his boot" and "clo
bber" him and his brother.3 The result, as I have documented in my book, Reagan'
s America, was a childhood of phobias and fears "to the point of hysteria," buri
ed feelings of rage and severe castration anxieties (the title of his autobiogra
phy was Where Is The Rest of Me?). As an adult, Reagan took to carrying a loaded
pistol, and once considered suicide, only to be saved by the defensive maneuver
of taking up politics and becoming an anti-communist warrior, crusading against
imaginary "enemies" who were blamed for the feelings he denied in himself.4 THE
PRESIDENTIAL STYLE OF GEORGE BUSH George Bush's childhood, though not as chaoti
c as Reagan's, was also full of fear and punishments. Psychohistorian Suzy Kane,
interviewing George's brother, Prescott, Jr., discovered that Bush's father oft
en beat him on the buttocks with a belt or a razor strap, the anticipation of wh
ich, Prescott, Jr. recalled, made them "quiver" with fear.5 "He took us over his
knee and whopped us with his belt," Prescott said. "He had a strong arm, and bo
y, did we feel it."6 As he admitted to Kane, "We were all scared of him. We were
scared to death of Dad when we were younger." Childhood classmates of George de
scribed his father as "aloof and distant...formidable and stern...very austere a
nd not a warm person." "Dad was really scary," George himself once admitted.7 As
a result, a desperate need to please was George's main trait as a child, and a
depressive personality with an overwhelming need to placate became his trademark
s as president.
16
The mood of America as Bush ran for the presidency was also quite depressed, whi
ch favored his election over his less depressed opponent. During the Eighties, i
n what was often misnamed "A Decade of Indulgence," America had had an unprecede
nted period of peace and prosperity, the latter based mainly on manic spending b
inges on the military and on financial speculation, both financed by borrowing.8
As will be shown, manic periods such as these usually climax in wars. In 1989,
however, America's traditional enemy, the Soviet Union, had collapsed, and a per
iod of unprecedented world peace without any real enemies had "broken out all ov
er," as Newsweek put it.9 Soon after the end of the Evil Empire, both America an
d Europe were plunged into depression. Beisel summarized the feeling: The New Yo
rk Times speaks of "An Empty Feeling...Infecting Eastern Europe." An authority o
n Britain finds the British undergoing "self-doubt and self-humiliation...greate
r now than at any time...over the last thirty years." The cover of the World Pre
ss Review speaks of "Germany's Reunified Blues"...Europe is depressed. Just thre
e years ago, Germans were "delirious in the days before and after reunification,
" said Current History. "A couple of months later, their euphoria had turned to
gloom."10 America, too, felt just terrible after the downfall of the Berlin Wall
. "Democracy is winning," said The New York Times on March 4, 1990. "The arms ra
ce is over. Villains are friendly now...the jackpot so long desired was America'
s. So then why doesn't it feel better?"11 Everywhere were predictions of doom, d
ecline and the death of the American dream. The media wondered why, despite the
fact that world peace had been achieved and the American economy was expanding,
"People are incredibly depressed" (The New York Times), "In the past month, ther
e has been a distinct odor of collapse and doom around the city," (New York Post
), and "There is something catastrophic coming" (Washington Post).12 With no for
eign enemy into whom we could project our fears, America had only one choice to
end its feelings of depression: have a sacrificial economic recession that would
punish ourselves and our families for our peace and prosperity. One reason for
Bush's election was his oft-stated statement that "we must all sacrifice."13 Wit
h the economy still expanding during 1989 and 1990, he unconsciously realized th
at he had to do something dramatic to stop this growth by making people feel eve
n more depressed, so they would stop buying goods and making investments and the
reby precipitate an economic downturn. His own mood had been affected by the gui
lty messages the media was repeating daily, as well as by
17
his taking Halcion, a mind-altering drug that could make users so depressed and/
or manic they became suicidal.14 Bush's prescription for America was to make it
feel depressed by raising taxes, cutting spending and repeatedly vetoing all the
legislation that was needed to keep the economy moving forward. Just as Preside
nts did before previous recessions, Bush produced an economic downturn by raisin
g taxes and reducing spending, costing jobs and destroying consumer demand. Alth
ough he knew that a big tax increase would make him unpopular15 and would violat
e the promise he made in his "Read my lips: no new taxes" acceptance speech, at
a deeper level he was giving the nation the punishment it unconsciously wanted.
As it turned out, the real revenue finally produced by the higher tax rates duri
ng the recession turned out to be much less than if rates had stayed the same.16
Therefore, it was a recession, not additional tax revenue, that was the unconsc
ious motive for the tax-increase package, a recession needed to "purge the rotte
nness out of the system," as one Bush official had put it.17 PEACE, PROSPERITY A
ND POLLUTION That personal achievement and prosperity often makes individuals fe
el sinful and unworthy of their success is a commonplace observation of psychoth
erapy ever since Freud's first case studies of people "ruined by success."18 Yet
no one seems to have noticed that feelings of sinfulness are usually prominent
in the shared emotional life of nations after long periods of peace, prosperity
and social progress, particularly if they are accompanied by more personal and s
exual freedom.19 As early as 1988, American political and business leaders had b
egun to wonder if the Reagan prosperity had not lasted too long, and some called
for a cleansing recession. The Federal Reserve, pleased that their interest rat
e increase in the summer of 1987 had produced the sharpest one-day drop in the s
tock market in history, tightened rates again in the summer of 1988 in order to
get the recession going, under the rationalization they had to "cool the economy
down" the usual code for "reduce the guilt for too much success." As one percep
tive reporter described the plan in 1988, "After the election, the leadership of
this country will say to the Fed, 'Go ahead and tighten [the money supply] boys
.' The Federal Reserve tightens, interest rates rise, the economy slows. Then th
ey will tell the next president and Congress to raise taxes...It scares me."20
18
Rysunek 5 2:1 America felt sinful after the peace and prosperity of the 1980s
As my previous studies have shown,21 the image of national sinfulness is usually
pictured in political cartoons as pollution. Each time a nation feels too prosp
erous for its deprived childhood to tolerate, it imagines that it is sinful, and
a national "pollution alert" is called, where the media suddenly notices such t
hings as environmental pollution (acid rain), home pollution (dioxin) or blood p
ollution (AIDS)-all of which existed in reality before, but now suddenly became
symbols in a fantasy of inner pollution (sin, guilt). What happens in these emot
ional "pollution alerts" is that the media stops overlooking real dangers, raise
s hysterical alarms about how the world has suddenly become unsafe to live in, a
nd then avoids really changing anything-since the pollution that is frightening
the nation is actually internal, not external.22
Rysunek 6 2:2 America felt polluted in 1988
The banking community's role in 1988-9 in bringing about what the media began ca
lling "the slump we need"23 was to reduce the money supply, raise interest rates
and reduce lending. The Fed announced that they would like to push inflation "n
ear zero," a goal that has never been achieved by any nation in history without
a punishing depression. The central bank's usual role in killing prosperity was
revealed earlier by Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who, trying to make a
joke, told a reporter that the secret of central bankers everywhere was that "w
e have a haunting fear that someone, someplace may be happy."24 Many reporters r
ecognized the depressive origins of the national mood and even the guilt that en
gendered it. The Washington Post said that after eight years of
19
optimism, "America is in...an ugly spasm of guilt, dread and nostalgia. Once mor
e, America is depressed."25 A columnist accurately diagnosed the mood of America
in 1990: America is like a barroom drunk. One minute it brags about its money a
nd muscle, and then for the next hour it bleats into its beer about failure and
hopelessness...America's depression is not brought on by plague, flood, famine o
r war...We are guilty, guilty, guilty...depression, decline, depravity, dysphori
a, deconstruction, desuetude, dog days, distrust, drugs, despair..."26 There was
only one way that a lengthy economic recession need not be necessary to cure ou
r national depression: an enemy abroad could be created who could be blamed for
our "greediness" and then punished instead of punishing ourselves. At first blus
h, the idea of America starting a war for emotional reasons seems blasphemous. A
lthough most people are familiar with the notion that homicidal acts of individu
als stem from underlying emotional disorders, it is rare for anyone to inquire i
nto whether wars-homicidal acts of entire nations-might stem from shared mental
disorders. Unless they are blamed on the emotional problems of one leader, like
Hitler, wars are usually explained by economic motivations. But if this were tru
e, one should be able to find in the words and actions of leaders about to begin
wars discussions of the economic benefits of the proposed war, yet this is prec
isely what is missing in the historical documents. Instead, wars regularly start
with images of suicide. For example, when the Japanese leadership was deciding
whether to attack Pearl Harbor and begin their war with the United States, sever
al ministers were asked by Tojo to study what would happen if they attacked Amer
ica. At a meeting, each minister around the table forecast defeat by the U.S., a
nd by the time the last minister gave his assessment, it was obvious that an att
ack would be suicidal for Japan. Whereupon Tojo told those present, "There are t
imes when we must have the courage to do extraordinary things-like jumping, with
eyes closed, off the veranda of the Kiyomizu Temple! [This was the Tokyo temple
where people regularly committed suicide.]"27 Hitler, too, spoke in suicidal, n
ot economic, imagery as he went to war,28 promising Germans glorious death on th
e battlefield and calling himself a "sleepwalker" as he led the German people ov
er the suicidal cliff. This is how real wars begin. All the historical evidence
suggests that there were strong irrational reasons in America's decision to go t
o war in the Gulf in 1991. To begin with, the President had earlier floated a tr
ial balloon for the acceptability of a military solution to the nation's
20
emotional problems by sending 25,000 U.S. troops to Panama, ostensibly to captur
e Manuel Noriega for his role in drug trade. Although the Panama invasion seemed
to the military an embarrassment, calling it ridiculous because "the whole godd
am operation depends on finding one guy in a bunker,"29 the American people love
d the show, Bush's polls went up and permission was given for future military ac
tion. Yet preparing for a new sacrificial war first and foremost requires avoidi
ng the guilt for starting it; even Hitler thought it necessary to dress up some
of his soldiers in Polish uniforms and have them pretend to attack Germans so he
could present an excuse for his invasion of Poland. America, in its own mind, h
ad never attacked another country at any time in its history; it had only defend
ed itself or rescued others who were being attacked. So when the nation's depres
sed mood deepened in 1990, Bush's task was to find someone who was willing to st
art a war against a weaker country so America could come to their rescue in a li
berating war that would make us feel better again. THE SACRIFICE OF CHILDREN Mea
nwhile, American magazine covers and political cartoons in the months before the
Middle East crisis began expressing subliminal death wishes toward America's yo
uth, suggesting that they be sacrificed. Children were shown shot, stabbed, stra
ngled, and led off cliffs as trial fantasies for the coming war.
Rysunek 7 2:3 Child sacrifice suggestion prior to the Middle East crisis
Money magazine, writing a story on how easy it was toget into college, used as i
ts cover illustration a wholly gratuitous drawing of a youth being stabbed by pe
nnants with the headline: "THE SACRIFICE OF THE CHILDREN," imagery exactly oppos
ite to the main point of the story but accurately illustrating the main fantasy
of the nation. Children were increasingly shown on covers of magazines and newsp
apers as being killed in "War Zones," even though homicide had actually decrease
d in the past decade.30 A United Nations World Summit for Children conference wa
s depicted in a cartoon with Bush saying that America's children deserved electr
ocution for being naughty.
21
Rysunek 8 2:4 Children were felt to be so naughty they deserved electrocution
That it was mainly the death of our own that was being suggested was made partic
ularly clear early in 1990 by the sudden media focus on a physician who had long
advocated assisted suicide and who had built a "suicide machine" to administer
a lethal dose of poison. One cartoon even showed Bush himself as the "suicide do
ctor" suggesting that he was willing to help the nation commit suicide. The nati
on's mood had hit bottom. In two decades of collecting visual material, this was
the first cartoon out of over 100,000 I had collected that showed a president a
bout to kill the nation's citizens.
Rysunek 9 2:5 Bush was seen as a killing doctor
THE SPECTER OF THE TERRIFYING MOMMY When a patient walks into a psychiatric clin
ic suffering from severe depression unrelated to life events and reports he has
been having dreams of children being hurt and suicidal thoughts, the clinician b
egins to suspect a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is particul
arly so if-as with America in 1990the patient has been experiencing extreme mood
swings, frequent panic attacks, exaggerated fears for the future, manic episode
s of frantic spending and borrowing, drug abuse, and feelings of unreality and d
etachment. As these are all symptoms of PTSD, one of the first questions the psy
chiatrist might ask about is whether the patient has been experiencing "flashbac
ks" to childhood traumas, in particular if he has had intrusive images of harmfu
l parental figures, particularly of cruel or neglectful mothers. When these fant
asies are widespread-as they are prior to most wars-it is an indication of a ret
urn to the traumas of infancy, evidence that the nation
22
is going through a PTSD-type crisis, one which can only be defended against by i
nflicting their fears upon enemies.
Rysunek 10 2:6 Terrifying women were featured in the media
The cartoon images and media preoccupations in America during these months show
frightening female images in quantity. A bitchy, castrating Madonna dominated ma
gazine covers. Ivanna Trump, wife of real estate magnate Donald Trump, was depic
ted as having castrated her estranged husband. Dozens of Fatal Attraction-type m
ovies were currently popular, featuring cruel women who were both seductive and
murderous.31 Political cartoons proliferated feateruing the biting mouths of ani
mals. So prevalent were the media images of terrifying, castrating and engulfing
mommies and the subliminal suggestions of a child sacrifice that I published an
article entitled "It's Time to Sacrifice...Our Children," detailing the evidenc
e for America's wish to sacrifice their youth and forecasting that a new militar
y venture might be started soon to accomplish this sacrifice. 32 The article, wr
itten four months before Iraq invaded Kuwait, said: Subliminal suggestions that
children should be sacrificed have been exceptionally prevalent in American medi
a during the past year. At our Institute for Psychohistory, we carefully analyze
the kinds of images found in thousands of political cartoons and magazine cover
s in order to give us clues as to what our shared fantasies are about and what w
e are up to as a nation. What we have discovered is an upsurge in images of chil
dren being shot, stabbed, strangled, pushed off sacrificial cliffs and in genera
l being punished for the sins of their elders. These media images, we find, are
like trial balloons for actions the nation is about to undertake but that are sp
lit off and denied because they are so repugnant to our moral sense. In fact, we
have found that these images in the media are an extremely important way for th
e nation to share its most powerful emotional fantasies. They resemble the repet
itive dreams an individual may have-for instance, a
23
series of dreams that their spouse might die-in that they represent wishes from
deep in the unconscious. When media images of children being sacrificed prolifer
ate, therefore, we are floating trial balloons on a subliminal level suggesting
that it is time for our children to pay for our sinful excesses during our recen
t Decade of Indulgence. What I couldn't figure out at the time was this: since t
he Evil Empire fantasy had collapsed, who would be our enemy in our next sacrifi
cial war? SEARCHING FOR AN ENEMY President Bush soon began to sense that he was
being sent unconscious messages that a new war had to be found soon. His masculi
nity began to be questioned. He began to be pictured by cartoonists wearing a dr
ess and was referred to more often as a "wimp." Cartoons began showing him being
attacked and devoured by monsters.33 He sensed the nation's distress and rage,
and decided he had better act soon. In such a peaceful post-Cold War world, wher
e could he find an enemy crazy enough to be willing to fight the most powerful m
ilitary force on earth, yet small enough for us to defeat easily? Since it is th
e task of a leader to provide enemies when required, Bush was not about to be ca
ught short when his nation asked him to find an enemy. Iraq's leader, Saddam Hus
sein, had long been a U.S. satrap. Bush, as Vice President, had personally conta
cted Saddam in 1986 in a covert mission to get him to escalate the air war with
Iran.34 America had been secretly and illegally building up Iraq's military forc
es, including their nuclear weapons program, for over a decade, including arrang
ing billion-dollar "loan guarantees" that the U.S. would end up paying off.35 Se
cret arms transfers to Iraq, money sent to Iraq via Italian banks, official appr
oval of U.S. exports of military equipment, even shipment of weapons from our NA
TO stockpiles in Germany were all part of the clandestine buildup, all illegal a
nd all covered up by the Reagan administration.36 Iraq, for its part, felt behol
den to the U.S. As Kenneth Timmerman put it in his definitive book, The Death Lo
bby: How the West Armed Iraq, The arming of Iraq was a 15-year love affair [for
America]. Saddam Hussein was our creation, our monster. We built him up and then
tried to take him down.37 Saddam Hussein, like so many dictators, had an unbeli
evably traumatic childhood.38 His mother tried to abort him by hitting her abdom
en with her fists and cutting herself with a kitchen knife, yelling, "In my bell
y I'm carrying a Satan!" She gave the infant Saddam away to his uncle, a violent
man who beat the boy regularly,
24
calling him "a son of a cur" and training him to use a gun and steal sheep. Sadd
am committed his first homicide at eleven. His political career centered on the
murder of his fellow countrymen, and he particularly enjoyed watching the tortur
e and execution of officers who had fought with him. Saddam would obviously make
an ideal enemy to whom America could delegate the task of starting a new war so
that we could remain guiltless. In early 1990, before the Gulf crisis began, th
e U.S. military unexpectedly undertook four war games that rehearsed fighting Ir
aq, premised on their invasion of Kuwait.39 At the same time, Kuwait's rulers su
ddenly adopted a provocative stance toward Iraq, refusing to discuss outstanding
issues over disputed lands and loans, an attitude that even Jordan's King Husse
in called "puzzling"40 and regarding which one Middle East expert stated that "i
f the Americans had not pushed, the royal family [of Kuwait] would have never ta
ken the steps that it did to provoke Saddam." 41 In addition, the U. S. provided
$3 billion in "agricultural loans" to Saddam, which he promptly used for milita
ry equipment. A special investigative report, based on leaked documents, publish
ed by the London Observer and ignored by the rest of the world press, revealed t
hat early in 1990 "Bush sent a secret envoy to meet with one of Hussein's top of
ficials. According to a summary of this report,42 "the envoy told the dictator's
confidant 'that Iraq should engineer higher oil prices to get it out of its dir
e economic fix'...Hussein took the envoy's advice, and moved his troops to the b
order of Kuwait...'The evidence suggest that U.S. complicity with Saddam went fa
r beyond miscalculation of the Iraqi leader's intentions [and included] active U
.S. support for the Iraqi President'" in his military threat toward Kuwait. So o
verwhelming was the evidence that the U.S. financed, provided equipment for and
encouraged Saddam's aggressive military venture that Al Gore, when running for V
ice President, said, "Bush wants the American people to see him as the hero who
put out a raging fire. But new evidence now shows that he is the one who set the
fire. He not only struck the match, he poured gasoline on the flames."43 Saddam
reacted predictably to Bush's encouragement, publicly threatened to use force a
gainst Kuwait and moved his troops to the border. To be certain he had U.S. back
ing for the invasion, he then summoned U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie to his offi
ce and asked her what Washington's position was on his dispute with Kuwait. Glas
pie, acting on Bush's cable of the previous day, gave Saddam the barely disguise
d go-ahead by saying that "the President had instructed her to broaden and deepe
n our relations with Iraq" and to deliver America's warm sympathy with his probl
ems. She then stated, "We have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your
25
border disagreement with Kuwait....[Secretary of State] James Baker has directed
our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction."44 Senior Pentagon offici
als had feared Bush's cabled instructions would send a signal that it was all ri
ght with the U.S. if Iraq invaded Kuwait.45 "This stinks," one said about the ca
ble. But Bush had prevented a Pentagon effort to draft a sterner message that mi
ght have shown American opposition to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Just in case th
ere was any question about the American signal to Hussein, on July 31, after Ira
qi forces had moved fuel and ammunition to front-line Iraqi military units on Ku
wait's border, Assistant Secretary of State Kelly was asked at a public House su
bcommittee hearing what would happen "if Iraq...charged across the border into K
uwait, for whatever reason, what would our position be with regard to the use of
U.S. forces?" Kelly first replied, "I cannot get into the realm of 'what if' an
swers." Then, when the Congressman asked, "Is it correct to say, however, that w
e do not have a treaty commitment which would obligate us to engage U.S. forces?
" Kelly replied, "That is correct."46 Yet General Norman Schwarzkopf had been pl
anning and practicing through war games for nearly a year a massive attack by U.
S. forces in case of Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.47 Nevertheless, the green light w
as given to Saddam that an attack on Kuwait would not be countered by the U.S. O
n August 2, Iraq invaded Kuwait. THE GULF WAR AS TRAUMATIC REENACTMENT Because i
t takes time for unconscious fantasies to become linked up with reality, Iraq's
invasion of Kuwait went almost unnoticed at first. The day of the invasion, The
Washington Post reported it in an unemotional article in a single column on the
lower half of the page. Bush himself took a while to become conscious of his opp
ortunity to go to war and initially saw no urgency to intervene, saying, "We're
not discussing intervention. I'm not contemplating such action."48 It was not un
til Bush met the next day with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Aspen
, Colorado that he recognized he must turn the Iraqi invasion into an American w
ar, Thatcher telling him that he was Churchill, Saddam was Hitler, and Kuwait wa
s Czechoslovakia.49 After Mrs. Thatcher told Bush Saddam was "evil," he reversed
his opinion; as one Thatcher adviser put it, "The Prime Minister performed a su
ccessful backbone transplant" on Bush.50 Bush abruptly appeared on TV and told A
mericans they had to "stand up to evil," proclaimed a policy of "absolutely no n
egotiations" with Iraq, and ordered American troops and planes into the Middle E
ast. America felt reinvigorated to once again have an enemy to lift it out of it
s depression. "We've felt bad for months," said one commentator. "Suddenly we fe
el
26
like we have a purpose....Americans like action."51 The New Republic agreed, say
ing, "Saddam Hussein did the world a favor by invading Kuwait," since it provide
d us relief from our depression.52 "Thanks, Saddam. We Needed That" another repo
rter headlined his column on the Iraqi invasion.53 Our shared emotions in a mael
strom, we would become a "Desert Storm" to live out our fears and rage. Bush's r
ationalizations about his reasons for going to war shifted with the desert sands
, first saying it was about "our jobs," then "our way of life" and then "our fre
edom."54 The real reason was a psychological one: we would cure ourselves of our
depression and flashbacks of punitive mommies by inflicting the punishment we f
elt we deserved upon other people's children.
Rysunek 11 2:7 Saddam Hussein as Terrifying Mommy
Children were the real emotional focus of the Gulf War from the very start. Whil
e the images of terrifying American mommies completely disappeared from cartoons
and magazine covers, we instead projected them into Saddam Hussein, and he was
pictured as a terrifying parent, a "child abuser" who liked to kill children. Th
e "child killer" theme was soon spread by the media. Particularly convincing was
a wholly invented story told by a 15-year-old girl, who testified before the Se
curity Council and Congress that a surgeon in Kuwait had seen Iraqi soldiers tak
ing hundreds of babies from incubators, "leaving them on the cold floor to die."
55 None of those hearing this testimony and none of the hundreds of reporters wh
o swallowed the story thought to check out any of its details, since it confirme
d the nation's unconscious fantasies that they shared. It wasn't until after the
war ended that it was revealed that the "surgeon" and the girl had used false n
ames and identities, that the girl was really the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambass
ador to the U.S.a fact known to the organizers of the meeting-and that the story
was completely fabricated, as were other stories of mass rape and torture by Ir
aqis. 56 But we needed stories of child abuse. We were about to reenact our chil
dhood traumas, just as PostTraumatic Stress patients often hurt their children o
r themselves in order to achieve temporary relief from their inner emotional dis
tress. We therefore had to objectify our fantasies of terrifying mommies and hur
t children in order to prepare ourselves for starting the war.
27
WAR AS RENEWAL THROUGH RITUAL COMBAT The Gulf War was hardly the first to be sta
rted by creating an enemy and then engaging in combat with him. America has a lo
ng history of going to war with dictators it has previously armed.57 The goal wa
s national renewal through combat, as in early civilizations, where, when countr
ies felt depressed, "polluted," they often openly arranged battles in order to "
cleanse" themselves and "rebirth" their sinful people.58 The Aztecs, for instanc
e, would periodically decide that they had become polluted and would set up "Flo
wer Wars," dividing their own armies into two sides and fighting a Cosmic Battle
between them in order to revitalize their country. During this ritual combat, t
hey not only slaughtered thousands to assuage their bloodthirsty female goddess
an early version of the Terrifying Mommy but they also took victorious warriors
from the battle and ripped out their hearts in a ritual blood sacrifice to the g
oddess.59 War in early civilizations often began by making the leader undergo a
ritual humiliation, the purpose of which was to symbolically reenact the humilia
tion that they had experienced as children. The Babylonian king, for instance, w
ould be slapped on the face, forced to kneel in abasement before a sacred image
and made to confess his sinfulness.60 In America, in the months prior to the Gul
f war, President Bush was forced to undergo a similar humiliation ritual by bein
g called a "wimp" (the national cartoonist Oliphant pictured Bush in cartoons we
aring a woman's purse on his limp wrist) before he could regain his lost masculi
nity by going to war. At the end of 1989, Time magazine even showed him on their
cover as two George Bushes, one strong and one weak-a device identical to that
used by early societies who appointed a "double" of the king before wars in orde
r to represent his weaker half and to emphasize his strong and weak aspects.61
Rysunek 12 2:8 George Bush as a "double," both a strong leader and a weak leader
28
The sacrificial war ritual, then, had three main elements: (1) A sinful, pollute
d world, with a leader who is depicted as becoming more and more impotent in con
taining the nation's depressed, angry feelings, (2) Terrifying mommy fantasies,
with images of angry goddesses threatening to devour the country unless a ritual
sacrificial victim is provided, and (3) Sacrificial child victims, whose blood
will revitalize the country's emotional life and who ultimately represent the "g
uilty" child who was the victim of the original traumas. Elements of these child
hood traumas can be seen in the Gulf War. Since George Bush had been beaten on h
is posterior during childhood, he threatened to "kick the ass" of Saddam Hussein
. Many Americans, who had also had their posteriors beaten during childhood,62 m
ultiplied the image: "Kick Ass" T-shirts, flags and belt buckles flooded the cou
ntry; Americans told reporters they wanted to "whip that guy's butt" and "get hi
m with his britches down"; and cartoons showed the U.N. building decorated with
the words "KICK BUTT."63 Saddam Hussein, for his part, saw the coming war in ter
ms of the typical childhood traumas he and his countrymen had experienced. For i
nstance, most male Iraqis endured a bloody, terrifying circumcision around the a
ge of six, and Saddam used metaphors that reflected fears of bloody castration,
saying that it was Iraq's mission to "return the branch, Kuwait, to the root, Ir
aq" and vowing Americans would be made to "swim in their own blood."64 It was hi
s mission, he said, to return to Iraq "the part that was cut off by English scis
sors."65 Both nations saw the war as a sacred combat between Good and Evil. Iraq
said that Americans had "desecrated Mecca" and that the war would "purify our s
ouls" in a "showdown... between Good and Evil."66 U.S. Congressman Stephen Solar
z, as he led the pro-war forces in the vote for invasion, said, "There is Evil i
n the world."
67
The conflict certainly wasn't about economics; the U.S. spends $50 billion a yea
r to maintain its military in the Gulf, while only importing $15 billion a year
from the area.68 The war and embargo were for purely internal emotional purposes
, not economic. Like most modern nations, America had gone to war once every two
decades, and it had been two decades since the Vietnam War. Since war was an ad
diction, an emotional disorder, America had to have a new war to clean out the p
rogress and prosperity of the 1980s, and Saddam had provided a willing enemy to
give us the feeling of being cleansed, reborn.
29
Bush told the country it was fighting for a "New World Order" that would produce
a "New Era of Peace" everywhere in the world. Americans interviewed before the
invasion told reporters, "The course of history has changed...I don't know exact
ly what that means, but I know things are going to be different...The country ha
d crossed a threshold...This [is] one of those events that marks the end of an o
ld era and the start of a new one."69 Like the ancient societies, America fantas
ized the world would be reborn through human sacrifice. Since sacrificial ritual
s are scripted by God, they have a compulsive quality that make them feel like t
hey are inevitable and out of the hands of those carrying them out. Although som
e Americans who had had better childhoods-including Jimmy Carter and Chief of St
aff General Colin Powell70 thought sanctions should be given a chance before sta
rting the war, Bush rejected proposals from Gorbachev and Saddam agreeing to rem
ove Iraqi troops from Kuwait in exchange for a pledge to leave Saddam in power.7
1 Even though this was precisely what the war accomplished, a peaceful solution
was unacceptable. "There was always an inevitability about this," Bush said as h
e gave the order for invasion. On the first night of the war, he was reported as
"watching the nation go to war-almost exactly following his script-as he sat in
a little study off the Oval Office, clicking his TV remote control...[He] calml
y remarked: 'Just the way it was scheduled.'"72 America began the war by droppin
g 88,000 tons of bombs on Iraq, seventy percent of them missing their targets an
d killing civilians.73 One veteran newsman at NBC was fired for trying to report
the slaughter of Iraqi civilians. 74 Illegal fuel air explosives which before t
he war the press feared Saddam would use against Americans were exclusively and
widely used by American troops on both military and civilian areas.75
Rysunek 13 2:9 Americans felt reborn by war
Americans watched B-52s carpet bomb whole cities on TV, entranced literally in a
trance devouring images of missiles going down air intakes, hospitals blown up,
water reservoirs and filtration plants being destroyed and schools being demoli
shed.76 Soldiers said it was like "shooting fish in a barrel."77 Despite efforts
to deny the reality of the killing by calling the carpet bombings "surgical str
ikes" and tens of thousands of mangled Iraqi civilian bodies "collateral damage,
" the Pentagon
30
later admitted it massively targeted civilian structures, in order, they said, "
to demoralize the populace."78 The dissociation in our heads, however, was almos
t complete. We were killing people, but they weren't real. One TV reporter told
us after the first eight thousand sorties had pulverized Iraqi civilian areas, "
Soon we'll have to stop the air war and start killing human beings," 79 Rivited
to our TV sets in our war trance, we found it had "an eerie, remote-control qual
ity...it seemed that we were watching a war about technology..."80 or a scene ou
t of the movie Star Wars, with Luke Skywalker blasting Darth Vader bunkers with
high-tech laser bombs that only destroyed machines, not people. The human carnag
e revived the nation. Bush's approval rating soared. Oliphant drew a cartoon of
Bush's woman's handbag being "retired into the closet" in honor of his role as a
potent war leader. Political cartoons were joyful, showing Americans holding ha
nds and dancing while bombs fell on the enemy. Continuing the acting-out of the
"kick ass" fantasy, one cartoon on Valentine's Day showed an American missile ab
out to hit a terrified Saddam Hussein in the rear. Restaging of our childhood tr
aumas with others as victims was very exciting. The war was vicious, as promised
. In 43 days of war plus the years of embargo afterward, America achieved what t
he U.N. termed "the near apocalyptic destruction" of Iraq. Starting with 42 days
of bombing, there were 110,000 aerial sorties, the equivalent of seven Hiroshim
a bombs. Over 120,000 soldiers were killed plus over 1,000,000 children81 most o
f whom died of malnutrition and epidemics caused by our systematic targeting of
Iraqi irrigation canals and food-proceesing plants and of our continuing embargo
, a genocidal violation of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits the starvation
of civilians.82 Killing civilians though claimed as something America explicite
ly avoids doing is actually an American specialty, from the genocide of Native A
mericans (almost all innocent civilians) to the bombing of Hiroshima (totally ci
vilians). After 100 billion dollars wasted killing Iraqis, we found we hadn't ki
lled the "evil" Saddam at all in fact, Bush elected to pull back from pursuing h
im supposedly to "provide a counterweight" against other countries. We had mainl
y killed innocent women and children, representatives of the Dangerous Mommies a
nd Bad Children in our own unconscious minds. We had merged with the perpetrator
s of our childhood traumas, cleaned out the buried violence in our heads, and as
a result of our ghastly human sacrifice of the innocent we felt much better abo
ut ourselves as a nation.83 Empathy for the innocent dead was totally missing. W
e didn't even notice the genocide of children was happening. The civilians who d
ied were, of course, not just
31
"collateral damage," since, according to one authority, "the Pentagon has admitt
ed it targeted civilian structures both to demoralize the populace and exacerbat
e the effects of sanctions."84 As a result, five years later water was polluted,
garbage had to be dumped into the streets and hospitals were nearly inoperative
. An estimated 1,000,000 to 6,000,000 more Iraqis would eventually die, accordin
g to the Atomic Energy Authority again mostly children both from the embargo and
from the effects over decades of American use of depleted uranium wastes in the
65,000 uraniumtipped missiles that were fired.85 Those children still alive des
pite our genocidal efforts were reported by War Watch as being "the most traumat
ized children of war ever described."86 The war had accomplished our purpose. Am
erica held a massive victory parade, and the President told the American people
that "the darker side of human nature" had been defeated more accurately, the da
rker side of our own psyche had been restaged-assuring us that our nation had en
tered a New World Order. The sacrificial ritual had been carried out exactly as
planned: by a genocide of women and children. The nation had been cleansed of it
s emotional pollution. The president's popularity rating rose to 91 percent, the
highest of any American leader in history. The stock market soared. "Bush...res
tored America's can-do spirit....It felt good to win."87 The country had been un
ited by slaughter as it had never been by any positive achievement. Editorials a
cross the country congratulated the President on his having "defeated Evil," and
speculated on what the New World Order would look like and when it might begin.
The victors no longer felt depressed. America's twenty-eighth war-perhaps manki
nd's millionth-had again restored our potency. We felt as if we had been reborn.
FOOTNOTES
1. The best single study is Glenn David, Childhood and History in America. New Y
ork: Psychohistory Press, 1976. For bibliography of psychobiographical studies,
see Henry Lawton, The Psychohistorian's Handbook. New York: Psychohistory Press,
1988, pp. 161176. 2. See Paul H. Elovitz, "Three Days in Plains," and David Bei
sel, "Toward a Psychohistory of Jimmy Carter," in Lloyd deMause and Henry Ebel,
Eds., Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy: Psychohistorical Explorations. New York
: Two Continents, 1977, pp. 33-96. 3. Ronald Reagan, Where's the Rest of Me? New
York: Karz Publishers, 1981, pp. 9 and 11.
32
4. See extensive psychobiography of Reagan in Lloyd deMause, Reagan's America. N
ew York: Creative Roots, 1984, pp. 36-50. 5. Suzy T. Kane, "What the Gulf War Re
veals About George Bush's Childhood." The Journal of Psychohistory 20(1992): 149
-166. 6. Barbara T. Toessner, "Obedience, Diligence, and Fun: Bush's Extraordina
ry Family Life." Jacksonville, Florida, Times Union, January 15, 1989, p. A3. Se
e also J. Hyams, Flight of the Avenger: George Bush at War. New York: Harcourt B
race Jovanovich, 1991. 7. Gail Sheehy, Character: America's Search for Leadershi
p. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1988, p. 160. 8. See deMause, Foundations, pp
. 172-243. 9. "Is Peace Really Breaking Out All Over?" Newsweek, August 1, 1988.
10. David R. Beisel, "Europe's Feelings of Collapse 1990-1993." The Journal of
Psychohistory 21(1993): 133. 11. New York Times, March 3, 1990, p. D1. 12. The N
ew York Times, January 2, 1990, p. D11; New York Post, April 26, 1990, p. 4; Was
hington Post, October 2, 1990, p. A19. 13. Lloyd deMause, "It's Time to Sacrific
e...Our Children." The Journal of Psychohistory 18(1990): 135-144. 14. Benjamin
J. Stein, "Our Man in Nirvana." The New York Times, January 22, 1992, p. A21. 15
. The Washington Post, October 5, 1992, p. A8. 16. The result of the $165-billio
n tax increase was to decrease tax receipts and push the deficit in 1991 to the
highest level in American history, $385 billion, rather than the projected defic
it of $63 billion, an error of $322 billion; see Lewis H. Lapham, "Notebook: Was
hington Phrase Book. " Harper's Magazine, October 1993, p. 9; also see Dean Bake
r, "Depressing Our Way to Recovery." The American Prospect, Winter 1994, pp. 108
-114. 17. The phrase is from the Federal Reserve in 1929, cited in William Greid
er, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country. New York: S
imon and Schuster, 1987, p. 300. The only economist who recognize the depressive
intent of the 1991 budget deal was Robert Eisner, The Mistunderstood Economy: W
hat Counts and How to Count It. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1994, p.
83.
33
18. Sigmund Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams," The Standard Edition of The C
omplete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. IV., p. 260. 19. See Lloyd de
Mause, "'Heads and Tails'": Money As a Poison Container." The Journal of Psychoh
istory 16(1988): 1-18. 20. William Greider, "The Shadow Debate on the American E
conomy." Rolling Stone, July 14-28, p. 85. 21. For evidence, see Chapter 7, "The
Poison Builds Up: "There's a Virus in our Bloodstream," in deMause, Reagan's Am
erica, pp. 114-135. 22. Ibid. 23. Paul Blustein, "Squeeze Play: The Slump We Nee
d Has Started," Washington Post, February 7, 1988, p. C1; Maxwell Newton, "Fed M
ust Move to Stem Growth in U.S. Economy," New York Post, January 26, 1988, p. 35
; "The Inevitable Tax Hike," U.S. News & World Report, July 11, 1988, p. 17; Gre
ider, "The Shadow Debate," Rolling Stone, p. 85. 24. Paul Volcker, cited in Grei
der, Secrets of the Temple, p. 70. 25. Washington Post, November 26, 1990, p. B1
. 26. Henry Allen, "America, the Bummed." Newsday, December 4, 1990, p. 82. 27.
John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1
945. New York: Random House, 1970, p. 112. 28. See David Beisel, The Suicidal Em
brace: Hitler, The Allies and The Origins of the Second World War, forthcoming,
a book that is the most thoroughly-documented study of the emotional basis of na
tions going to war. 29. U.S. Army Chief of Staff Carl Vuono, cited in Rick Atkon
son, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Co., 1993, p. 273. 30. Christopher Jencks, "Is Violent Crime Increasing?" The A
merican Prospect, Winter, 1994, pp. 98-107; Richard Morin, "Crime Time: The Fear
, The Facts." The Washington Post, January 30, 1994, p. C1. 31. Miles Harvey, "H
ollywood's mega-monster horror hits and misses." In These Times, March 20-26, 19
91, pp. 22-25. 32. Lloyd deMause, "It's Time to Sacrifice...Our Children." The J
ournal of Psychhistory 18(1990): 142.
34
33. Lloyd deMause, "The Gulf War as a Mental Disorder." The Journal of Psychohis
tory 19(1991): 1-22; also see the other articles in this Special Gulf War Issue
(Fall 1990) of the Journal. 34. Murray Waas and Craig Unger, "In the Loop: Bush'
s Secret Mission." New Yorker, November 2, 1992, pp. 64-84; Kenneth Timmerman, T
he Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992; Alan
Friedman, Spider's Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Arme
d Iraq. New York: Bantam Books, 1993. 35. "Iraqgate." U.S. News & World Report,
May 18, 1992, pp. 42-51; "Did Bush Create This Monster?" Time, June 8, 1992, pp.
41-42; Stephen Pizzo, "Covert Plan." Mother Jones, July/August, 1992, pp. 20-22
. 36. Alan Friedman, "The President Was Very, Very Mad." The New York Times, Nov
ember 7, 1993, p. E15; Friedman, Spider's Web. 37. Ibid. 38. Anna Aragno, "Maste
r of His Universe." The Journal of Psychohistory 19(1991): 96-108; Peter Waldman
, "A Tale Emerges of Saddam's Origins That Even He May Not Have Known." The Wall
Street Journal, February 7, 1991, p. A10; Gail Sheehy, "How Saddam Survived." V
anity Fair, August 1991, pp. 31-53; J. Miller and L. Mylroie, Saddam Hussein and
the Crisis in the Gulf. New York: Times Books, Random House, 1990. 39. Ramsey C
lark, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf. New York: Thunder's Mouth
Press, 1992, pp. 12-16. 40. Ibid., p. 15. 41. Ibid. 42. Jonathan Vankin, Conspi
racies, CoverUps, and Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America
. New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1991, p. 203. 43. Peter Mantius, "Iraqgate
: Shell Game." In These Times, January 22, 1996, p. 28. 44. Ibid., p. 23; also s
ee Clark's description of how Glaspie lied to Congress on what she said to Husse
in, p. 24. 45. The New York Times, October 25, 1992, p. A1; 46. Ibid;.;The New Y
ork Times, September 23, 1990, pp. L18 and L19; The Washington Post, September 1
9, 1990, p. A19; Paul A. Gigot, "A Great American Screw-Up: The U.S. and Iraq, 1
980-1990," The National Interest, Winter 1990/91, pp. 3-10.
35
47. Ramsey Clark, War Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq.
Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1992, p. 67. 48. Jean Edward Smith, George B
ush's War. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1992, p. 64. 49. Robert B. McFarland, "
War Hysteria and Group-Fantasy in Colorado." Journal of Psychohistory 19(1991):
36; Smith, George Bush's War, pp. 7-8. 50. Jean Edward Smith, George Bush's War.
New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1992, p. 68. 51. DeMause, "It's Time to Sacrifice
," p. 143. 52. The New Republic, September 3, 1990, p. 9. 53. Ben Wattenberg, "T
hanks Saddam. We Needed That." New York Post, January 17, 1991, p. 8. 54. Theodo
re Draper, "The True History of the Gulf War." The New York Review of Books, Jan
uary 30, 1992, p. 41. 55. The entire deception is described in Clark, The Fire T
his Time, pp. 31-32 and in John R. MacArthur, "Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuw
ait?" The New York Times, January 6, 1991, A17. 56. Ibid. 57. DeMause, "America'
s Search for a Fighting Leader," pp. 122-123. 58. DeMause, "Gulf War," pp. 12-14
; Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, pp. 244-332. 59. Burr C. Brundage
, The Fifth Sun: Aztec Gods, Aztec World. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Pre
ss, 1979; Patricia R. Anawalt, "Understanding Aztec Human Sacrifice." Archaeolog
y 35(1982): 38-45; Elizabeth P. Benson and Elizabeth H. Boone, Eds. Ritual Human
Sacrifice in MesoAmerica. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 19
85; Burr C. Brundage, The Jade Steps: A Ritual Life of the Aztecs. Salt Lake Cit
y: University of Utah Press, 1985. 60. Details of the combat ritual are document
ed in Theodore H. Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth and Drama in the Ancient Near Ea
st. New York: Harper and Row, n.d.; Valerio Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritu
al and Society and Ancient Hawaii. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 198
5; Brundage, The Jade Steps; deMause, "Gulf War," pp. 12-14. 61. Valeri, Kingshi
p and Sacrifice, p. 165. 62. DeMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, pp. 1-83.
36
63. New York Post, June 11, 1991, p. 16; WABC-TV, February 28, 1991; Washington
Post, February 24, 1991, p. A26. 64. Rafael Patai, The Arab Mind. New York: Char
les Scribners Sons, 1983; The Wall Street Journal, Febrauary 7, 1991, p. A1; The
New York Times, January 7, 1991, p. A1. 65. The New York Times, October 11, 199
4, p. A13. 66. New York Post, August 11, 1990, p. 3; New York Newsday, January 1
2, 1991, p. 10. 67. New York Post, January 17, 1991, p. 31. 68. Ramsey Clark, Th
e Children Are Dying. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1996, p. 113. 69. The N
ew York Times, January 16, 1991, p. A1 and January 18, 1991, p. A1. 70. David Ro
th, Sacred Honor: The Biography of Colin Powell. Zondervan Books, 1993; Howard M
eans, Colin Powell: A Biography. Ballantine Books, 1992. 71. Jean Edward Smith,
George Bush's War, p. 8; Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian
Gulf War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1993, p. 347-348. 72. The Washington Po
st, January 16, 1991, p. A1; new York Post, January 17, 1991, p. 8. 73. Ramsey C
lark, War Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq. Washington,
DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1992, p. 15. 74. Beth Sanders, "Fear and Favor in the Ne
wsroom." California Newsreel, KTEH, San Jose Public Television. 75. Ibid., p. 17
. 76. U.S. bombs hit 28 civilian hospitals, 52 community health centers, 676 sch
ools, and 56 mosques; see Clark, The Fire This Time, pp. 66. On the psychohistor
ical role of American TV, see Daniel Dervin, "From Oily War to Holy War: Vicissi
tudes of Group-Fantasy Surrounding the Persian Gulf Crisis." The Journal of Psyc
hohistory 19(1991): 67-83. 77. Elizabeth Drew, "Letter from Washington." New Yor
ker, May 6, 1991, p. 101. 78. Ibid., p. 69. 79. WCBS-TV, January 21, 1991. 80. T
he New Yorker, January 28, 1991, p. 21.
37
81. Ramsey Clark, The Children Are Dying. Washington DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1996
. 82. Out Now, "Weapons of Mass Destruction." War Watch, November-December 1991,
pp. 1-10; Kane, "What the Gulf War Reveals About George Bush's Childhood," pp.
149-140; Robert Reno, "Heck, Let's Drop a Few More if The Allies Are Buying." Ne
w York Newsday, May 16, 1991, p. 50; William M. Arkin, "The Gulf 'Hyperwar'--An
Interim Tally." The New York Times, June 22, 1991, p. 23; Nina Burleigh, "Watchi
ng Children Starve to Death." Time, June 10, 1991, p. 56; Ross B. Mirkarimi, "Di
sease, despair, destruction still plague Iraq." In These Times, June 10-23, 1992
, p. 10; Clark, The Fire This Time, p. 43; Draper, "The True History of the Gulf
War." pp. 36-45. 83. The U.S. government has used illegal blockade sanctions ag
ainst the civilians populations in Cuba, Panama, Libya, Iran, Vietnam, Nicaragua
and Korea as well as Iraq. 84. Clark, The Fire This Time, p. 69. 85. Kemp Houck
, "Tank-Plinking in the Gulf." Z Magazine, July/August, 1994, pp. 70-72. 86. Jul
ia Devin, executive director of the International Commission on Medical Neutrali
ty, November 13, 1991, cited in Draper, "True History of the Gulf War," p. 40. 8
7. Ann McFeatters, "The Good Guys Won, and America's Can-do Spirit Was Restored,
" Chicago Tribune, March 1, 1991.
38
Chapter 3 The Childhood Origins of Terrorism
"He who washes my body around my genitals should wear gloves so that I am not to
uched there." --Will of Mohammed Atta
Because so much of the world outside the West has for historical reasons fallen
behind in the evolution of their childrearing modes, the resulting vast differen
ces between national personality types has recently turned into a global battle
of terrorism against liberal Western values. In order to understand this new bat
tle, it would be useful to know what makes a terroristwhat developmental life histo
ries they share that can help us see why they want to kill "American infidels" a
nd themselvesso we can apply our efforts to removing the sources of their violence
and preventing terrorism in the future. The roots of current terrorist attacks l
ie, I believe, not in this or that American foreign policy error but in the extr
emely abusive families of the terrorists. Children who grow up to be Islamic ter
rorists are products of a misogynist fundamentalist system that often segregates
the family into two separate areas: the men's area and the woman's area, where
the children are brought up and which the father rarely visits.1 Even in countri
es like Saudi Arabia today, women by law cannot mix with unrelated men, and publ
ic places still have separate women's areas in restaurants and work places, beca
use, as one Muslim sociologist put it bluntly: "In our society there is no relat
ionship of friendship between a man and a woman."2 Families that produce the mos
t terrorists are the most violently misogynist; in Afghanistan, for instance, gi
rls cannot attend schools and women who try to hold jobs or who seem to "walk wi
th pride" are shot.3 Young girls are treated abominably in most fundamentalist f
amilies. When a boy is born, the family rejoices; when a girl is born, the whole
family mourns. 4 The girl's sexuality is so hated that when she is five or so t
he women grab her, pin her down, and chop off her clitoris and often her labia w
ith a razor blade or piece of glass, ignoring her agony and screams for help, be
cause, they say, her clitoris is "dirty," "ugly," "poisonous," "can cause a vora
cious appetite for promiscuous sex," and "might render men impotent."5 The area
is then often sewed up to prevent intercourse, leaving only a tiny hole for urin
ation. The genital mutilation is excruciatingly painful. Up to a third die from
infections, mutilated women must "shuffle slowly and painfully" and usually are
unable to orgasm.6 Over 130 million
39
genitally mutilated women are estimated to live today in Islamic nations, from S
omali, Nigeria and Sudan to Egypt, Ethiopia, and Pakistan. A recent survey of Eg
yptian girls and women, for instance, showed 97 percent of uneducated families a
nd 66 percent of educated families still practicing female genital mutilation. 7
Although some areas have mostly given up the practice, in otherslike Sudan and Uga
ndait is increasing, with 90% of the women surveyed saying they planned to circumci
se all of their daughters.8 The mutilation is not required by the Quan; Mohammad,
in fact, said girls should be treated even better than boys.9 Yet the women have
inflicted upon their daughters for millennia the horrors done to them, re-enact
ing the abuse men inflict on them as they mutilate their daughters while joyfull
y chanting songs such as this: "We used to be friends, but today I am the master
, for I am a man. LookI have the knife in my handYour clitoris, I will cut it off and
throw it away for today I am a man."10 As the girls grow up in these fundamental
ist families, they are usually treated as though they were polluted beings, veil
ed, and sometimes gang-raped when men outside the family wish to settle scores w
ith men in her family.11 Studies such as a recent survey of Palestinian students
show that the sexual abuse of girls is far higher in Islamic societies than els
ewhere, with a large majority of all girls reporting that they had been sexually
molested as children.12 Even marriage can be considered rape, since the family
often chooses the partner and the girl is as young as eight. 13 The girl is ofte
n blamed for her rape, since it is assumed that "those who don't ask to be raped
will never be raped."14 Wife-beating is common and divorce by wives rarein fact, w
omen have been killed by their families simply because they asked for a divorce.
15 It is no wonder that Physicians for Human Rights found, for instance, that "
97 percent of Afghan women they surveyed suffered from severe depression."16 It
is not surprising that these mutilated, battered women make less than ideal moth
ers, reinflicting their own miseries upon their children. Visitors to families t
hroughout fundamentalist Muslim societies report on the "slapping, striking, whi
pping and thrashing" of children, with constant shaming and humiliation, often b
eing told by their mothers that they are "cowards" if they don't hit others. 17
Physical abuse of children is continuous; as the Pakistani Conference on Child A
buse reports: A large number of children face some form of physical abuse, from
infanticide and abandonment of babies, to beating, shaking, burning, cutting, po
isoning, holding under water or giving drugs or alcohol, or violent acts like pu
nching, kicking, biting, choking, beating, shooting or stabbing.18
40
Islamic schools regularly practice corporal punishmentparticularly the religious sc
hools from which terrorist volunteers so often comechaining up their students for d
ays "in dark rooms with little food and hardly any sanitation."19 Sexual abusedescr
ibed as including "fondling of genitals, coercing a child to fondle the abuser's
genitals, masturbation with the child as either participant or observer, oral s
ex, anal or vaginal penetration by penis, finger or any other object and [child]
prostitution"is extensive, though impossible to quantify.20 Even mothers have been
reported as often "rubbing the penis [of their boys] long and energetically to
increase its size."21 According to the recent survey of Palestinian students, bo
ys report having been used sexually even more often than girlsmen choosing to rape
little boys anally to avoid what they consider the "voracious vaginas" of women.
22 In some areas, children are reported to have marks all over their bodies fro
m being burned by their parents with red-hot irons or pins as punishment or to c
ure being possessed by demons.23 Children are taught strict obedience to all par
ental commands, stand when their parents enter the room, kiss their hands, don't
laugh "excessively," fear them immensely, and learn that giving in to any of th
eir own needs or desires is horribly sinful.24 All these childrearing practices
are very much like those that were routinely inflicted upon children in the medi
eval West.25 The ascetic results of such punitive upbringings are predictable. W
hen these abused children grow up, they feel that every time they try to self-ac
tivate, every time they do something independently for themselves, they will los
e the approval of the parents in their headsmainly their mothers and grandmothers i
n the women's quarters. When their cities were flooded with oil money and Wester
n popular culture in recent decades, fundamentalist men were first attracted to
the new freedoms and pleasures, but soon retreated, feeling they would lose thei
r mommy's approval and be "Bad Boys." Westerners came to represent their own "Ba
d Boy" self in projection, and had to be killed off, as they felt they themselve
s deserved, for such unforgivable sins as listening to music, flying kites and e
njoying sex.26 As one fundamentalist put it, "America is Godless. Western influe
nce here is not a good thing, our people can see CNN, MTV, kissing."27 Another d
escribed his motives thusly: "We will destroy American cities piece by piece bec
ause your life style is so objectionable to us, your pornographic movies and TV.
"28 Many agree with the Iranian Ministry of Culture that all American television
programs "are part of an extensive plot to wipe out our religious and sacred va
lues,"29 and for this reason feel they must kill Americans. Sayyid Qutb, the int
ellectual father of Islamic terrorism, describes how he turned against the West
as he once watched a church dance while visiting America:
41
"Every young man took the hand of a young woman. And these were the young men an
d women who had just been singing their hymns! The room became a confusion of fe
et and legs: arms twisted around hips; lips met lips; chests pressed together."3
0 Osama bin Laden himself "while in college frequented flashy nightclubs, casino
s and bars [and] was a drinker and womanizer," but soon felt extreme guilt for h
is sins and began preaching killing Westerners for their freedoms and their sinf
ul enticements of Muslims.31 Most of the Taliban leaders, in fact, are wealthy,
like bin Laden, have had contact with the West, and were shocked into their terr
orist violence by "the personal freedoms and affluence of the average citizen, b
y the promiscuity, and by the alcohol and drug use of Western youth only an absolut
e and unconditional return to the fold of conservative Islamism could protect th
e Muslim world from the inherent dangers and sins of the West."32 Bin Laden left
his life of pleasures, and has lived with his four wives and fifteen children i
n a small cave with no running water, waging a holy war against all those who en
joy sinful activities and freedoms that he cannot allow in himself. From childho
od, then, Islamist terrorists have been taught to kill the part of themselvesand, b
y projection, othersthat is selfish and wants personal pleasures and freedoms. It i
s in the terror-filled homesnot just later in the terrorist training campsthat they fi
rst learn to be martyrs and to "die for Allah." When the terrorist suicidal bomb
ers who were prevented from carrying out their acts were interviewed on TV, they
said they felt "ecstatic" as they pushed the button.33 They denied being motiva
ted by the virgins and other enticements supposedly awaiting them in Paradise. I
nstead, they said they wanted to die to join Allahto get the love they never got. M
others of martyrs are reported as happy that they die. One mother of a Palestini
an suicide bomber who had blown himself to bits said "with a resolutely cheerful
countenance, "I was very happy when I heard. To be a martyr, that's something.
Very few people can do it. I prayed to thank God. I know my son is close to me."
34 Like serial killerswho are also sexually and physically abused as children terroris
ts grow up filled with a rage that must be inflicted upon others. Many even prea
ch violence against other Middle Eastern nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia "fo
r not being sufficiently fervent in the campaign against materialism and Western
values."35 If prevention rather than revenge is our goal, rather than pursuing
a lengthy military war against terrorists and killing many innocent people while
42
increasing the number of future terrorists, it might be better for the U.S. to b
ack a U.N.-sponsored Marshall Plan for themone that could include Community Parenti
ng Centers run by local people who could teach more humane childrearing practice
s36in order to give them the chance to evolve beyond the abusive family system that
has produced the terrorism, just as we provided a Marshall Plan for Germans aft
er WWII for the families that had produced Nazism.37
FOOTNOTES
1. Soraya Altorki, Women in Saudi Arabia: Ideology and Behavior Among the Elite.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 30; Mazharul Haq Khari, Purdah an
d Polygamy: A Study in the Social Pathology of the Muslim Society. Peshawar Cant
t., Nashiran-e-Ilm-oTaraqiyet, 1972, p. 91. 2. Mona AlMunajjed, Women in Saudi A
rabia Today. New York: St. Martins Press, 1997, p. 45. 3. The New York Times Octobe
r 19, 20001, p. A19. 4. Jan Goodwin, Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil
of Silence on the Islamic World. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994, p. 43. 5. Hanny Li
ghtfoot-Klein, Prisoners of Ritual: An Odyssey Into Female Genital Circumcision
in Africa. New York: Harrington Park Pres, 1989, pp. 9, 38, 39. 6. Ibid, p. 81.
7. Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Even: Women in the Arab World. Boston: B
eacon Press, 1980, p. 34; for additional references, see Lloyd deMause, "The Uni
versality of Incest." The Journal of Psychohistory 19(1991): 157-164. 8. Cathy J
oseph, "Compassionate Accountability: An Embodied Consideration of Female Genita
l Mutilation." The Journal of Psychohistory 24(1996): 5. Lindy Williams and Tere
sa Sobieszczyk, "Attitudes Surrounding the Continuation of Female Circumcision i
n the Sudan: Passing the Tradition to the Next Generation." Journal of Marriage
and the Family 59(1997): 996; Jean P. Sasson, Princess: A True Story of Life Beh
ind the Veil in Saudi Arabia. New York: Morrow, 1992, p. 137; http://www.path.or
g/Files/FGM-The-Facts.htm. 9. Mona AlMunajjed, Women in Saudi Arabia Today, p. 1
4. 10. Ibid, p. 13. 11. Eleanor Abdella Doumato, Getting Gods Ear: Women, Islam and
Healing in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000
, pp. 23, 85; Peter Parkes,
43
"Kalasha Domestic Society." In Hastings Donnan and Frits Selier, Eds., Family an
d Gender in Pakistan: Domestic Organization in a Muslim Society. New Delhi: Hind
ustan Publishing Corp., 1997, p. 46; Jan Goodwin,Price of Honor, p. 52. 12. Muha
mmad M. Haj-Yahia and Safa Tamish, "The Rates of Child Sexual Abuse and Its Psyc
hological Consequences as Revealed by a Study Among Palestinian University Stude
nts." Child Abuse and Neglect 25(2001): 1303-1327, the results of which must be
compared to comparable written responses for other areas, with allowance given f
or the extreme reluctance to reveal abuse that may put their lives in serious da
nger (p. 1305); for problems of interpretation of sexual abuse figures, see Lloy
d deMause, "The Universality of Incest." The Journal of Psychohistory 19(1991):
123-165 (also on www.psychohistory.com in full). 13. Deborah Ellis, Women of the
Afghan War. London: Praeger, 2000, p. 141. 14. S. Tamish, Misconceptions About
Sexuality and Sexual Behavior in Palestinian Society. Ramallah: The Tamer Instit
ute for Community Education, 1996. 15. "Womens Woes," The Economist August 14, 1999
, p. 32. 16. MSNBC, October 4, 2001. 17. Mazharul Haq Khari, Purdah and Polygamy
, p. 107. 18. Samra Fayyazuddin, Anees Jillani, Zarina Jillani, The State of Pak
istans Children 1997. Islamabad Pakistan: Sparc, 1998, p. 46. 19. Ibid, p. 47. 20.
Samra Fayyazuddin et al, The State of Pakistans Children 1997, p. 51. 21. Allen Edw
ardes, The Cradle of Erotica. New York: The Julian Press, 1963, p. 40. 22. Muham
mad M. Haj-Yahia and Safa Tamish, "The Rates of Child Sexual Abuse," p. 1320; Fatna
A. Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious. New York: Pergamon Press, 1984, p.
28. 23. Samuel M. Zwemer, Childhood in the Moslem World, p. 104; Hilma Natalia G
ranqvist, Child Problems Among the Arabs: Studies in a Muhammadan Village in Pal
estine. Helsingfors: Soderstrom, 1950, pp. 102-107. 24. Soraya Altorki, Women in
Saudi Arabia: Ideology and Behavior Among the Elite. New York: Columbia Univers
ity Press, 1986, pp. 72-76.
44
25. Lloyd deMause, "The Evolution of Childrearing." The Journal of Psychohistory
28(2001): 362-451. 26. Time, October 22, 2001, p. 56. 27. Jan Goodwin, Price of
Honor, p. 64. 28. MSNBC October 1, 2001. 29. Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vx. McWo
rld. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995, p. 207. 30. The New York Times, October 1
3, 2001, p. A15. 31. Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on Ame
rica. Rocklin: Forum, 1999, p. 3. 32. Ibid, p. 4. 33. "60 Minutes," September 23
, 2001. 34. Joseph Lelyveld, "All Suicide Bombers Are Not Alike." New York Times
Magazine, October 28, 2001, p. 50. 35. The New York Times, October 22, 2001, p.
B4. 36. Robert B. McFarland and John Fanton, "Moving Towards Utopia: Prevention
of Child Abuse." The Journal of Psychohistory 24(1997): 320-331. 37. Lloyd deMa
use, "War as Righteous Rape and Purification." The Journal of Psychohistory 27(2
000): 407-438.
45
Chapter 4 Restaging Early Traumas in War and Social Violence
"A just war for the true interests of the state advances its development within
a few years by tens of years, stimulates all healthy elements and represses insi
dious poison." --Adolf Lasson
When Adolf Hitler moved to Vienna in 1907 at the age of eighteen, he reported in
Mein Kampf, he haunted the prostitutes' district, fuming at the "Jews and forei
gners" who directed the "revolting vice traffic" which "defiled our inexperience
d young blond girls" and injected "poison" into the bloodstream of Germany.1 Mon
ths before this blood poison delusion was formed, Hitler had the only romantic i
nfatuation of his youth, with a young girl, Stefanie.2 Hitler imagined that Stef
anie was in love with him (although in reality she had never met him) and though
t he could communicate with her via mental telepathy. He was so afraid of approa
ching her that he made plans to kidnap her and then murder her and commit suicid
e in order to join with her in death. Hitler's childhood had been so abusive-his
father regularly beat him "with a hippopotamus whip," once enduring 230 blows o
f his father's cane and another time nearly killed by his father's whipping3 tha
t he was full of rage toward the world. When he grew up, his sexual feelings wer
e so mixed up with his revenge fantasies that he believed his sperm was poisonou
s and might enter the woman's bloodstream during sexual intercourse and poison h
er.4 Hitler's rage against "Jewish blood-poisoners" was, therefore, a projection
of his own fears that he might become a blood-poisoner. Faced with the temptati
on of the more permissive sexuality of Vienna, he wanted to have sex with women,
but was afraid his sperm would poison their blood. He then projected his own se
xual desires into Jews- "The black-haired Jewboy lies in wait for hours, satanic
joy in his face, for the unsuspecting girl"5 and ended up accusing Jews of bein
g "world bloodpoisoners" who "introduced foreign blood into our people's body."6
As is usually the case with delusional systems, Hitler's projection of his fear
s of his own poisonous sexuality into Jews and foreigners helped him avoid a psy
chotic breakdown and allowed him to function during his later life. He admitted
this quite specifically in Mein Kampf, saying that when he "recognized the Jew a
s the cold-hearted, shameless, and calculating director of this revolting traffi
c in the scum of the big city, a cold shudder ran down my back . . . the scales
dropped from my
46
eyes. A long soul struggle had reached its conclusion." 7 From that moment on, H
itler became a professional anti-Semite, ordering Nazi doctors to find out how J
ewish blood differed from Aryan blood, having his own blood regularly sucked by
leeches to try to get rid of its "poison,"8 giving speeches full of metaphors of
blood poisoning and of Jews sucking people's blood out and, eventually, orderin
g the extermination of all "world blood-poisoners" in the worst genocide and the
most destructive war ever experienced by mankind. The success of Hitler's abili
ty to use anti-Semitism to save his sanity was dependent, of course, upon there
being millions of followers who shared his fantasies about poisonous enemies inf
ecting the body of Europe. Much of Europe at that time shared Hitler's experienc
e of a severely abusive childhood,9 and many shared his fantasy that the ills of
the modern world were caused by the poisonous nature of Jews.10 When he used me
taphors of blood in his speeches, saying the world was a constant warfare of one
people against another, where "one creature drinks the blood of another," and t
hat Jews were spiders that "sucked the people's blood out," he was cheered on by
millions who shared his fantasies.11 GROUP-FANTASIES OF POISON BLOOD In studyin
g the shared fantasies of nations connected with how it feels to be part of a gr
oup at a particular historical moment-what I have termed historical group-fantas
ies12 I have regularly found images of "poison blood" prior to outbreaks of war
and violent revolution. In war, the enemy is imagined to be sucking out the bloo
d of the nation; in revolution, the state is the blood-sucker, as in the fantasy
before the French Revolution that the state was an "immense and infernal machin
e which seizes each citizen by the throat and pumps out his blood."13 Images of
poison blood are periodic in history. They are usually found in conjunction with
images of guilt for recent prosperity and progress that are felt to "pollute th
e national bloodstream with sinful excess," making men "soft" and "feminine," a
frightful condition that can only be cleansed by a blood-shedding purification.1
4 This fantasy of periodic shedding of poisoned blood through war is based on th
e same presumed cleansing effects as the bloodletting therapies physicians presc
ribed through the nineteenth century to cure many diseases, which also were beli
eved to be caused by "gluttony, luxury and lustful excesses."15 As one military
leader put it, war "is one of the great agencies by which human progress is effe
cted. [It] purges a nation of its humors...and chastens it, as sickness or adver
sity...chastens an individual;" it cures it of its "worship of comfort, wealth,
and general softness..."16 When John Adams asked Thomas Jefferson "how to preven
t...luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication,
47
extravagance, vice and folly?" Jefferson's answer was: "The tree of liberty must
be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots."17 As Sherlock Holme
s expressed it in a story set in August 1914, rapid material progress had produc
ed a feeling that "God's curse hung heavy over a degenerate world, for there was
an awesome hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant ai
r...[but] a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the sto
rm has cleared....A bloody purging would be good for the country."18 Wars have o
ften been thought of as purifying the nation's polluted blood by virtue of a sac
rificial rite identical to the rites of human sacrifice so common in early histo
rical periods. The blood of those sacrificed is believed to renew the nation. Wa
r, said those preparing for the bloody Finnish Civil War, purges guilt-producing
material prosperity through the blood of soldiers sacrificed on the battlefield
: "The idea of sacrifice permeated the war...Youth...have heard the nation's sou
l crying for its renewal, their heart's blood [because] nations drink renewal fr
om the blood of the fallen soldiers."19 Usually the blood of the soldiers is tho
ught of as being needed to feed a maternal figure, either mother earth or, like
the Aztecs, a bloodthirsty mothergoddess.20 War renewed national strength by fee
ding blood to the goddess the state was "reborn" by the soldier's blood, and war
cleansed the polluted national bloodstream as if there was a "rebirth from the
womb of history," a "bloody baptism" that removed all poisonous self-indulgence.
21 "A nation hath been born again,/ Regenerate by a second birth!" wrote W. W. H
owe after the bloody American Civil War.22 Another American, speaking of World W
ar I, said "It was like the pouring of new blood into old veins."23 The question
immediately arises: How do such poisoned blood fears originate? And what is the
ir connection with birth? The answers to these questions will become more convin
cing only after we have examined a prior question: Why is war so often depicted
as a woman? GROUP-FANTASIES OF DANGEROUS WOMEN For the past two decades, I have
been collecting historical material from sources such as magazine covers and pol
itical cartoons on images of war. One of the most unexpected finding of was that
war was so often shown as a dangerous, bloodthirsty woman.24 Despite the fact t
hat women neither play much part in deciding on wars nor in fighting them, war h
as so often been depicted as a dangerous woman (Illustration 3:1) that a visitor
to our planet might wrongly conclude that women were our most bellicose sex. Fr
om Athena to Freyja, from Marianne to Brittannia, terrifying women have been dep
icted as war goddesses,25
48
devouring, raping and ripping apart her children. The image has become so famili
ar we no longer think to question why women are so often shown as presiding over
war rather than as its victims, as they are in reality. > Even in antiquity, wh
en the god of war was usually male, his mother was imagined to have hovered abov
e the battlefield, demanding more blood to feed her voracious appetite.26 And at
hough it was almost always men who fought the battles,27 women in early societie
s were expected to come along to watch from the sidelines, rather like cheerlead
ers at a sports match, shrieking their own battle-cries, heckling and insulting
those warriors who held back and demanding a plentiful show of blood on the batt
lefield.28
Rysunek 14 4:1 The Mother of All Wars
THE MARIE ANTOINETTE SYNDROME AND SOCIAL VIOLENCE > The French Revolution fully
demonstrates the role of the dangerous woman fantasy in social violence, being p
receded by a deluge of pamphlets and newspapers picturing Marie Antoinette-actua
lly a rather sweet-natured young woman-as a sexually voracious, incestuous, lesb
ian, murderous "bloodsucker of the French."29 The French Revolution, Terror and
revolutionary wars were accompanied by increasingly violent Marie Antoinette fan
tasies, centering on grotesque images of her imagined sexual perversities, while
the king was pictured as merely an impotent tool in her hands. Finally, the Tri
bunal, whipped up by the press, declared her a "ravening
49
beast" and chopped off her head, after she had been accused of being a "tigress
thirsty for the blood of the French," a "ferocious panther who devoured the Fren
ch, the female monster whose pores sweated the purest blood of the sans-culottes
," a "vampire who sucks the blood of the French," and a "monster who needed to s
lake her thirst on the blood of the French."30 I have found that group-fantasies
of monstrous bloodthirsty women have preceded every war I have analyzed. Even t
he most popular movies prior to wars reflect this dangerous woman fantasy. The b
iggest movie preceding W.W.II was The Wizard of Oz, which is about a wicked witc
h and how to kill her; the second biggest was Gone With the Wind, featuring a bi
tchy Scarlet and the third biggest was The Women, which boasted it featured 135
dangerous women. All About Eve before Korea and Cleopatra before Vietnam had sim
ilar dangerous women as leads, and the Persian Gulf War was preceded by a whole
string of dangerous women movies, from Fatal Attraction to Thelma and Louise,31
including a hit TV series entitled Dangerous Women. When war breaks out, these t
errifying women images disappear from the nation's fantasy life. The dangerous w
oman image now is projected into the enemy, so that the war is experienced uncon
sciously as a battle with a mother-figure. For example, when the United States a
ttacked Libya, the New York Post reported the rumor that American intelligence h
ad discovered that Moammar Khadafy was actually a "transvestite dressed in women
's clothes and high heels,"32 even touching up a photo to show how he "might loo
k...dressed in drag." Even more often, the enemy is shown as a dangerous mommy,
as in the Persian Gulf War when Saddam Hussein was depicted as a dangerous pregn
ant mother with a nuclear bomb in her womb or as the mother of a death-baby (see
Chapter 2) > Hallucinating dangerous feminine characteristics in one's enemies
goes all the way back to antiquity, when the earliest battles were imagined to h
ave been fought against female monsters, often the mother of the hero, whatever
her nameTiamat, Ishtar, Inanna, Isis, or Kali.33 Typical is the Aztec mother-god
dess Huitzilopochtli, who had "mouths all over her body" that cried out to be fe
d the blood of soldiers.34 Early Indo-European warriors had to pass through init
iatory rituals in order to attain full status in which they dressed up and attac
ked a monstrous dummy female poisonous serpent, complete with three heads.35 Alt
hough early warriors fought against men, not women, they often anally raped and
castrated their enemies, turning them into symbolic women; from ancient Norse to
ancient Egyptian societies, heaps of enemy penises on the battlefield are commo
nly portrayed.36 In addition, according to the world's leading historian of war,
"the
50
opportunity to engage in wholesale rape was not just among the rewards of succes
sful war but, from the soldier's point of view, one of the cardinal objectives f
or which he fought."37 More women have been raped and killed in some wars than e
nemy soldiers. The hero is therefore simultaneously both a self-killer, punishin
g projected parts of himself, and a mother-killer, inflicting revenge for early
traumas.38 At the same time, by restaging early traumas in wars the magical goal
is achieved of merging with the mother in a defensive maneuver to deny her as a
dangerous object. Giving one's life for one's Motherland means finally joining
with her. The soldier who dies in war, says one patriot, "dies peacefully. He wh
o has a Motherland dies in comfort...in her, like a baby falling asleep in its w
arm and soft cradle..."39 Yet even though we understand that both the Motherland
and the enemy in wars are ultimately the early mother, the question remains: wh
at could possibly be the infantile origin of fantasies of the enemy as a poisono
us blood-sucking monster? Why did Americans before the Revolutionary War feel "p
oisoned by Mother England" and fight a war rather than pay a minor tax? Why did
Hitler fear "bloodsucking Jews and foreigners," and why did Aztec soldiers go to
war to feed blood to a monstrous mother-goddess? Closer to today, why did Ameri
cans for so long fear their "national life-blood" was being "poisoned" by Commun
ists? Why do so many today feel the government and welfare recipients are "sucki
ng their blood?" Images of blood-sucking, engulfing enemies are ubiquitous throu
ghout history. Surely our blood was never really poisoned or sucked out of us by
a maternal monster in our past. Or was it? WAR AND THE FETAL DRAMA As I describ
ed in my Foundations of Psychohistory,40 when I first began collecting the emoti
onal imagery surrounding the outbreak of war I was puzzled by recurring claims b
y aggressors that they were forced to go to war against their wishes because "a
net had suddenly been thrown over their head" or a "ring of iron was closing abo
ut us more tightly every moment" or they had been "seized by the throat and stra
ngled." I piled up hundreds of these images of nations being choked and strangle
d, "unable to draw a breath," "smothered, walled-in," "unable to relieve the ine
xorable pressure" of a world "pregnant with events," followed by feelings of bei
ng "picked up bodily" in "an inexorable slide" towards war, starting with a "rup
ture of diplomatic relations" and a "descent into the abyss," being "unable to s
ee the light at the end of the tunnel" as the nation takes its "final plunge ove
r the brink," and even that wars were "aborted" if ended too soon. Given the con
creteness of all
51
this birth imagery, I concluded that war was a rebirth fantasy of enormous power
shared by nations undergoing deep regression to fetal traumas. > War has long b
een described in images of pregnancy: "War develops in the womb of State politic
s; its principles are hidden there as the particular characteristics of the indi
vidual are hidden in the embryo" (Clausewitz); "Germany is never so happy as whe
n she is pregnant with a war" (proverb).41 Wars are felt to be life-anddeath str
uggles for "breathing space" and "living room," Lebensraum, as though nations we
re reliving the growing lack of space and oxygen common to all fetuses just prio
r to and during birth (plus, for most infants right up to Hitler's generation, t
he reliving of the pain of tight swaddling). As Adzema puts it, "feelings of exp
ansion are followed by a fear of entrapment."42 Nations become paranoid prior to
wars, and feel they have to resort to violence in order to get out of what appe
ars to be a choking womb and birth canal. Bethmann-Hollweg, for example, told th
e Reichstag in announcing war in 1914 that Germany was surrounded by enemies, an
d "he who is menaced as we are and is fighting for his highest possession can on
ly consider how he is to hack his way through."43 As Hitler repeated over and ov
er again, only a violent "rebirth" could "purge the world of the Jewish poison"
and avoid it being "asphyxiated and destroyed."44 Now, the notion that war might
be a battle against a dangerous mother is difficult enough to believe. That it
in addition includes fantasies that you are hacking your way out of the engulfme
nt of your own birth is infinitely harder to accept. But what followed then in m
y psychohistorical research into imagery prior to wars was a discovery that seem
ed to be a final step into the unbelievable, revealing a depth of regression pri
or to wars greater than anything yet contemplated in the psychological literatur
e. Yet it was a discovery that for the first time seemed to explain the true ori
gin of the poison blood imagery. > What I found was that the cartoons, past and
present, of the enemy in war were dominated by an image that was even more wides
pread than that of the dangerous mommy: it was that of a sea-beast, often with m
any heads or arms, a dragon or a hydra or a serpent or an octopus that threatene
d to poison the lifeblood of the nation. Most early cultures believed in this be
ast as a dragon that was associated with watery caves or lakes; modern wars show
the beast as a bloodsucking, many-headed enemy. This serpentine, poisonous mons
ter I have termed the Poisonous Placenta, since it resembled what the actual pla
centa must have sometimes felt like to the growing fetus, particularly when the
placenta fails in its tasks of cleansing ithe fetal blood of wastes and of reple
nishing its oxygen supply. When the blood coming to the fetus from the placenta
is bright red and full of
52
nutrients and oxygen, the fetus feels it is being fed by a Nurturant Placenta, b
ut when the mother smokes, takes drugs or is hurt or frightened or otherwise str
essed, the placenta does not remove the wastes from the fetal blood, which there
fore becomes polluted and depleted of oxygen. Under these stressful conditions,
the helpless fetus experiences an asphyxiating Poisonous Placenta, the prototype
for all later hate relationships, including the murderous mother, the castratin
g father or the dangerous enemy. It is even likely that the fetus, like Oedipus,
feels it is actually battling with the dangerous beast (Sphinx means "strangler
" in Greek) in order to restore connections with the Nurturant Placenta. This ba
ttle, one that I have termed the fetal drama, is repeated in death-and-rebirth r
estagings of traumatic battles in all wars and other social violence.
Rysunek 15 4:2 War as a Battle with the Poisonous Plants
> The cosmic battle with the Poisonous Placenta (the capitals are in honor of it
being the prototype for God and Nation), where we repeat the fetal drama of a p
aradise lost, of being sucked into the whirlpool and crushing pressures of birth
, and where we fight the placental dragon, is well depicted in a comic-book char
acter, Conan the Barbarian, although I could just as easily have used pictures a
nd texts
53
from ancient myths of battles with sea-beasts such as Tiamat, Rahab, Behemoth, H
umbaba, Apophis, Hydra, Gorgon or Typhon.45 In this version, a baby is first sho
wn abandoned, beginning his watery birth passage between head-crushing bones, go
ing down the whirlpool of birth after the amniotic waters break, and then being
choked by the Poisonous Placenta, a black sea-monster that tries to asphyxiate i
t. The hero, an imaginary powerful version of the fetus, battles with the Poison
ous Placenta and frees the fetus, who reaches the safety of land. The final pane
l shows that the goal, however, is not birth, the arrival on land, but the reuni
ting with the placenta. That it is the Nurturant and not the Poisonous Placenta
that holds the baby in its embrace is depicted by its being shown as a white sea
beast. > In most cultures, the placenta is considered very much alive after del
ivery; it is felt to be so dangerous to the community that unless it is buried s
omewhere deep the whole tribe will fall sick.46 The fantasy of the Poisonous Pla
centa is even present in most small groups. As one group analyst describes his c
onclusions from a lifetime of studying unconscious group images: One of the most
active, or rather paralyzing, unconscious group representations is that of Hydr
a: the group is felt to be a single body with a dozen arms at the ends of which
are heads and mouths, each functioning independently of the others...incessantly
searching for prey to be squeezed and suffocated, and ready to devour one anoth
er if they are not satisfied.47 Obviously, full understanding of the placental s
ource of "poison blood" imagery and of the fetal origins of war and social viole
nce is going to have to wait until we investigate more fully the psychology of d
angerous wombs, Poisonous Placentas and asphyxiating births which is to say, unt
il we understand more about both the psychology and neurobiology of fetal life.
54
Rysunek 16 4:3
The Fetal Drama
55
THE ORIGINS OF FETAL PSYCHOLOGY After Freud initially proposed that mental life
began after birth, he later admitted that he had come to believe he was wrong, s
aying that "the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety."48 Although mos
t other psychoanalysts believed mental life began only with infancy, there were
a number of exceptions, beginning with Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth in 1923,4
9 which began the investigation of birth anxiety derivatives in adult life and c
ulture. After Rank, Donald Winnicott wrote in the early 1940s a paper on "Birth
Memories, Birth Trauma, and Anxiety,"50 which, however, was little noticed, sinc
e, as he said, "It is rare to find doctors who believe that the experience of bi
rth is important to the baby, that it could have any significance in the emotion
al development of the individual, and that memory traces of the experience could
persist and give rise to trouble even in the adult." While still a pediatrician
, Winnicott saw that newborn babies varied enormously and that prolonged labor c
ould be traumatic to the fetus, resulting in extreme anxiety-so much so that he
thought "some babies are born paranoid, by which I mean in a state of expecting
persecution..."51 He was even able to conclude that "at full term, there is alre
ady a human being in the womb, one that is capable of having experiences and of
accumulating body memories and even of organizing defensive measures to deal wit
h traumata..." He sometimes would allow his child patients to work through birth
anxiety directly, having one child sit in his lap and "get inside my coat and t
urn upside down and slide down to the ground between my legs; this he repeated o
ver and over again....After this experience I was prepared to believe that memor
y traces of birth can persist."52 He also encouraged some adult patients to reli
ve the breathing changes, constrictions of the body, head pressures, convulsive
movements and fears of annihilation experienced during their births, with dramat
ic therapeutic results.53 After Winnicott, psychotherapists such as Fodor, Mott,
Raskovsky, Janov, Grof, Verny, Fedor-Freybergh, Janus and others published exte
nsive work showing how their patients relived birth trauma in therapy and remove
d major blocks in their emotional lives.54 These traumatic birth feelings of bei
ng trapped, of crushing head pressures and cardiac distress, of being sucked int
o a whirlpool or swallowed by terrifying monsters, of explosive volcanoes and de
ath-rebirth struggles appear regularly in the 60 percent of our dreams that have
been found to contain overt preand perinatal images,55 although most therapists
continue to overlook their connections with actual birth memories. Perhaps one
of the most important results of clinical research by therapists sensitive to pe
rinatal trauma-as described particularly in the work of Linda Share56 is how reg
ularly early trauma produces an overwhelming fear of all progress in life. It
56
is as though the fetus concludes, "Going forward in life led to disaster; I must
remain 'unborn' all my life to avoid a repetition of this horrible start." > Fe
tuses that experience injuries in the womb, premature births, birth complication
s, and many other medical conditions as newborns regularly live the rest of thei
r lives in fear of all growth and individuation.57 For instance, one baby who wa
s born with a congenital atresia of the esophagus, so that she choked on feeding
s, was seen to have multiple fears of dying all during a 30-year followup study
into her life.58 Another, who often dreamed of lying in a refrigerator, asked hi
s parents about the image, and they told him that as a newborn the window of his
room had mistakenly been left open on an extremely cold winter night, and they
"had thawed him out of his urine, feces and vomitus."59 Interpretation of this c
ontinuing fear led to a turning point in the treatment and in the patient's life
. Another baby was born with an intestinal obstruction that prevented digestion,
so she vomited up all her milk. Although the condition was repaired at one mont
h, for the rest of her life she was concerned with disaster fantasies every time
growth was imminent. As Share described her, "Each new opportunity for advancem
ent stood for a metaphorical 'birth.' To be born in any kind of way meant to hav
e to reexperience the disaster of her infancy: starvation, pain, surgery, and ne
ar-death. These, then, were the disasters she fantasized, the panic attacks each
time she headed for something new and creative."60 As with all early trauma, an
y progress threatened repetition of disaster. RECENT RESEARCH INTO FETAL MEMORY
Much has changed in our knowledge of the fetus during the decades since the earl
y pioneering excursions into perinatal psychology. Neurobiologists have made sta
rtling advances in the understanding of how the brain develops in the womb, expe
rimental psychologists have discovered a great deal about fetal learning, pediat
ricians have linked all kinds of later problems to fetal distress, and one psych
oanalyst has even begun to compare thousands of hours of ultrasound observations
of individual fetuses with their emotional problems during infancy in therapy w
ith her. There are now thousands of books and articles on the subject, as well a
s two international associations of pre- and perinatal psychology, each with its
own journal.61 I will here only be able to summarize some of the main trends of
this extensive recent research. Biologists used to think that because the fetus
had incomplete myelination of neurons it couldn't have memories.62 This notion
has been disproved, since impulses can be carried quite efficiently in the thinl
y myelinated nerves of fetuses, only at a somewhat slower velocity, which is off
set by the shorter distances traveled. 63 Indeed,
57
far from being an unfeeling being, the fetus has been found to be exquisitely se
nsitive to its surroundings, and our earliest feelings have been found to be cod
ed into our early emotional memory system centering in the amygdala, the central
fear system, quite distinct from the declarative memory system centering in the
hippocampus, the center of consciousness, that becomes fully functional only in
later childhood.64 These early emotional memories are usually unavailable to co
nscious, declarative memory recall, so early fears and even defenses against the
m are often only recaptured through body memories and by analyzing the consequen
ces of the traumas.65 The fetal nervous system is so well developed that by the
end of the first trimester it responds to the stroking of its palm by a light ha
ir by grasping, of its lips by sucking, and of its eyelids by squinting.66 It wi
ll jump if touched by the amniocentesis needle and turn away from the light when
a doctor introduces a brightly lit fetoscope.67 By the second trimester, the fe
tus is not only seeing and hearing, it is actively tasting, feeling, exploring a
nd learning from its environment, now floating peacefully, now kicking vigorousl
y, turning somersaults, urinating, grabbing its umbilicus when frightened, strok
ing and even licking its placenta, conducting little boxing matches with its com
panion if it is a twin and responding to being touched or spoken to through the
mother's abdomen.68 Each fetus develops its own pattern of activity, so that ult
rasound technicians quickly learn to recognize each fetus as a distinct personal
ity.69 Even sensual life begins in the womb; if a boy, the fetus has regular ere
ctions of his penis, coinciding with REM sleep phases, and baby girls have been
seen masturbating during REM sleep.70 THE EMOTIONAL EFFECTS OF FETAL STRESS In a
ddition to what we know about the disastrous effects on the fetus of prenatal ex
posure to drugs and alcohol,71 we now have considerable evidence on how maternal
stress and other emotions are transmitted to the fetus. When a pregnant mother
is offered a cigarette after having been deprived of smoking for 24 hours there
is a significant acceleration in fetal heartbeat even before the cigarette is li
t, and maternal smoking during pregnancy has been found to triple the rate of At
tention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders later in the child.72 The fetus has been
found to be sensitive to a wide range of maternal emotions in addition to any d
rugs or other physical traumas she endures.73 When the mother feels anxiety, her
increased heartbeat, frightened speech, and alterations in neurotransmitter lev
els are instantly communicated to the fetus, and her tachycardia is followed wit
hin seconds by the fetus's tachycardia; when she feels fear, within 50 seconds t
he fetus can be made hypoxic (low oxygen). Pregnant monkeys stressed by simulate
d threatening
58
attack had such impaired blood circulation to their uteruses that their fetuses
were severely asphyxiated.74 Alterations in adrenaline, plasma epinephrine and n
orepinephrine levels, high levels of hydroxycortico-steriods, hyperventilation a
nd many other products of maternal anxiety are also known to directly affect the
human fetus. Numerous other studies document sensory, hormonal and biochemical
mechanisms by which the fetus is in communication with the mother's feelings and
with the outside world.75 Even baby monkeys have been found to be hyperactive,
with higher levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, after birth from a mother wh
o was experimentally stressed during her pregnancy.76 While positive maternal em
otions have been experimentally shown to increase later growth, alertness, calmn
ess and intelligence the fetus even benefits from the mother singing to it in th
e womb and prenatal infant stimulation, particularly being bathed in pleasant mu
sic, improves fetal development compared to control groups,77 maternal distress
and chemical toxins have been shown to produce low birth weights, increased infa
nt mortality, respiratory infections, asthma and reduced cognitive development.7
8 Ultrasound studies record fetal distress clearly, as it thrashes about and kic
ks in pain during hypoxia and other conditions. One mother whose husband had jus
t threatened her verbally with violence came into the doctor's office with the f
etus thrashing and kicking so violently as to be painful to her, with an elevate
d heart rate that continued for hours.79 The same wild thrashing has been seen i
n fetuses of mothers whose spouses have died suddenly. Maternal fright can actua
lly cause the death of the fetus, and death of the husband and other severe emot
ional distress within the family during the mother's pregnancy have been associa
ted with fetal damage in large samples in several countries. 80 Marital discord
between spouses has been correlated "with almost 100 per cent certainty...with c
hild morbidity in the form of ill-health, neurological dysfunction, developmenta
l lags and behavior disturbance."81 Margaret Fries has conducted a 40-year longi
tudinal study predicting emotional patterns that remain quite constant throughou
t the lives of those studied, correlating the patterns to the mother's attitude
toward the fetus during pregnancy. 82 Maternal emotional stress, hostility towar
d the fetus and fetal distress have also been statistically correlated in variou
s studies with more premature births, lower birth weights, more neonate neurotra
nsmitter imbalances, more clinging infant patterns, more childhood psychopatholo
gy, more physical illness, higher rates of schizophrenia, lower IQ in early chil
dhood, greater school failure, higher delinquency and greater propensity as an a
dult to use drugs, commit violent crimes and commit suicide.83 This increase in
social violence due to pre- and perinatal
59
conditions has recently been confirmed by a major Danish study showing that boys
of mothers who do not want to have them (25 percent of pregnant mothers admit t
hey do not want their babies)84 and who also experience birth complications are
four times more likely when they get to be teenagers to commit violent crimes th
an control groups.85 American studies also show similar higher violent crime rat
es correlated with maternal rejection during pregnancy.86 THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF EA
RLY TRAUMA There are sound neurobiological reasons for this correlation between
fetal trauma and social violence. Early brain development is determined both by
genes and by cellular selection and self-organizational processes that are cruci
ally dependent upon the uterine environment.87 Since fetal and early infantile t
raumas and abdonments occur while the brain is still being formed, while cell ad
hesion molecules are still determining the brain's initial mapping processes and
while synaptic connections are still undergoing major developmental changes, me
mories of early traumas cannot be handled as traumas are later in life and inste
ad are coded in separate neuronal networks that retain their emotional power wel
l into adulthood. 88 Fetal abuse can be direct, either from drugs or from the pr
egnant mother being abused by her mate. According to the Surgeon General, "one i
n three pregnant women in America is slapped, kicked or punched by their mates."
89 In addition, maternal emotional stress produces such biochemical imbalances a
s an overactivation of the pituitary-adrenal cortical and sympathetic-adrenal me
dullary systems with consequent increases of adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH)
, cortisol, pituitary growth hormone and catecholamine levels. Maternal emotiona
l stress has even been correlated with damage to the hippocampus, the center, al
ong with the thalamus, of conscious memory and self feelings. 90 Furthermore, th
e emotions of the mother can be directly transmitted through the neurotransmitte
rs and other hormones in her blood to the fetal blood and then to DNA-binding re
ceptors in the fetal cells that turn genes on and off, thus programming her stre
ss directly into the developing fetal brain.91 This bath of maternal hormonal im
balances can produce severe fetal traumatic emotional dysfunctions.92 Baby rats,
for instance, whose mothers had been frightened by loud noises during pregnancy
, were found to have copious supplies of stress hormones, plus fewer receptors f
or benzodiazepines and fewer GABA receptors, both needed for calming action duri
ng stress.93 The results of the mother not wanting her baby can prove lethal: on
e study of eight
60
thousand pregnant women found that unwanted babies were 2.4 times more likely to
die in the first month of life.94 Infants traumatized in utero and during birth
are those Winnicott referred to as "born paranoid," and can remain hypersensiti
ve to stress, over-fearful, withdrawn and angry all of their lives. Fetal trauma
s and abandonments result in overstimulation of neurotransmitters, producing hyp
ersensitivity and other imbalances in such important neurotransmitters as the ca
techolamines. The most important of these imbalances is low serotonin levels, wh
ich have been demonstrated to lead to persistent hyperarousal and compulsive ree
nactment in violent social behavior, including both homicide and suicide.95 Beca
use of this, reenactment in later life can be an even more potent source of viol
ent behavior in the case of fetal trauma than it has been found to be in the cas
e of childhood or war trauma.96 The same neurobiological factors have been found
to be responsible for the increase in violence against self. Suicide patterns a
re so strongly linked to birth that epidemiologists have found higher suicide ra
tes in areas of the country that a few decades earlier had had higher birth inju
ries.97 What probably happens is that birth traumas reset life-long serotonin an
d noradrenaline levels to lower levels, since there is a strong statistical link
between low serotonin and noradrenaline and violent suicides.98 Other studies h
ave shown that even the types of suicides were correlated with the kinds of peri
natal traumas, asphyxia during birth leading to more suicides through strangulat
ion, hanging and drowning, mechanical trauma during birth correlated with mechan
ical suicide elements, drugs given during birth being correlated to suicide by d
rugs, and so on. The rise in adolescent drug addiction and suicide recently, mai
nly connected with drug use, is believed to be at least partially due to the mor
e frequent use of drugs prescribed by obstetricians during birth in recent decad
es.99 The same principle may hold for the rise of violent crimes during the 1970
s and 80s, which has been connected with the rise of the extremely painful rite
of circumcision in newborn boys during the 1950s and 60s;100 it could equally ha
ve contributed to the rise of teenage suicides, since perinatal trauma can also
be turned against the self. Violence done to babies always returns on the social
level. > Far from being the safe, cozy haven to which we all supposedly want to
return, the womb is in fact often a dangerous and often painful abode, 101 wher
e "more lives are lost during the nine gestational months than in the ensuing 50
years of postnatal life."102 Few fetuses, for instance, escape experiencing pai
nful drops in oxygen levels when the mother is emotionally upset, smokes, drinks
alcohol or takes other drugs. As the placenta stops growing during the final mo
nths of pregnancy, it regresses in efficiency, becoming tough and fibrous, as it
s cells and blood vessels
61
degenerate and it becomes full of blood clots and calcifications, making the fet
us even more susceptible to hypoxia as it grows larger and making the late-term
fetus "extremely hypoxic by adult standards."103 Furthermore, the weight of the
fetus pressing down into the pelvis can compress blood vessels supplying the pla
centa, producing additional placental failure.104 Practice contractions near bir
th give the fetus periodic "squeezes," decreasing oxygen level even further,105
while birth itself is so hypoxic that "hypoxia of a certain degree and duration
is a normal phenomenon in every delivery," not just in more severe cases.106 The
effects on the fetus of this extreme hypoxia are dramatic: normal fetal breathi
ng stops, fetal heart rate accelerates, then decelerates, and the fetus thrashes
about frantically in a life-anddeath struggle to liberate itself from its terri
fying asphyxiation.107 In addition, fetal abuse is often the result of the pregn
ant mother's wish to hurt or punish her unborn child. One study showed 8 percent
of 112 pregnant American women openly acknowledged this wish, often hitting the
ir abdomen or otherwise purposely abusing their fetus.108 The real figure is lik
ely to be higher than this, particularly in the past. THE REALITY OF FETAL MEMOR
Y That the fetal memory system is sufficiently mature not only to learn in the w
omb but also to remember prenatal and birth experiences is confirmed by a growin
g body of experimental, observational and clinical data. Neonates can remember l
ullabies learned prenatally109 and can pick out at birth their mothers' voices f
rom among other female voices and respond differently (by the increased ratre of
sucking on a pacifier) to familiar melodies they had heard in utero. 110 Sallen
bach played simple melodies to the fetus in utero, based on four notes, and foun
d that the fetus was able not only to move to the beat but continued to mark the
beat when the notes were discontinued.111 As evidence of even more complex memo
ries, DeCasper had 16 pregnant women read either The Cat in the Hat or a second
poem with a different meter to their fetuses twice a day for the last six weeks
of their pregnancy.112 When the babies were born, he hooked up their pacifiers t
o a mechanism that allowed them to chose one of two tape recordings by sucking s
lowly or quickly, choosing either the tape in which their mothers read the famil
iar poem or the tape where she read the unfamiliar poem. The babies soon were li
stening to the tape of the familiar poem, indicating their mastery of the task o
f remembering complex speech patterns learned in utero. Chamberlain sums up his
extensive work on birth memories, which he found very reliable when comparing th
em with both the memories of the mother and hospital records, "They demonstrate
the same clear awareness of violence, danger, and breech of trust which any of u
s adults might
62
show in a similar situation...Even three-year-olds sometimes have explicit and a
ccurate birth recall."113 Distress during birth is particularly able to be later
remembered during dreams, when dissociated early neural emotional memory system
s are more easily accessed. For instance, one child who had been a "blue baby" a
nd near death while tangled in his umbilicus during birth and had had a forceps
delivery had the following revealing nightmare during most of his childhood: I w
ould be kneeling down, all bent over. I am frantically trying to untie knots in
some kind of rope. I am just starting to get free of the rope when I get punched
in the face.114 With the number of recent experiments demonstrating fetal compe
tence, classical conditioning and more advanced learning ability,115 it is not s
urprising that some parents have recently begun to make the fetus a "member of t
he family," playing with them, massaging them and calming them down when they th
ought they had communicated distress by excessive movement and kicking, and trad
ing light pokes in return for fetal kicks, in what they call "The Kicking Game."
116 One father taught his baby to kick in a circle; a mother played a nightly ga
me where she tapped her abdomen three times and the fetus bumped back three time
s.117 Another father who called out "Hoo hoo!" next to his pregnant wife's belly
nightly found his child pushing with a foot into his cheek on whichever side he
called; father and baby played this game for 15 weeks; he found his next baby w
as able to learn the same game.118 These parents tried to avoid maternal stress,
loud arguments and loud noises especially rock music because they became aware
it produced fetal distress. Recent insights into fetal learning have led to some
impressive research on fetal enrichment that demonstrates that prenatal stimula
tion produces advances in motoric abilities and intelligence that last for years
. Experimental groups of pregnant women and their fetuses who participated in pr
enatal stimulation enrichment were investigated in parallel with carefully selec
ted control groups not involved in any prenatal program. The postnatal evaluatio
n of both groups on standard developmental tests shows highly significant enhanc
ement from fetal sensory stimulation in motoric performance, visual skills, emot
ional expression and early speech.119 Even more impressive, when these prenatall
y-induced enrichment effects are consolidated by immediate post-natal enrichment
experiences, they produce improvements over the control group in Stanford Binet
IQ tests at age three ranging from 38 percent for language and 47 percent for m
emory to 51 percent for social intelligence and 82 percent for reasoning, a feta
l Head Start program of astonishing efficiency.
63
THE FINDINGS OF ULTRASOUND RESEARCH Perhaps the most impressive observational wo
rk on the personality of the fetus is being done by the Italian psychoanalyst Al
essandra Piontelli, by combining thousands of hours of ultrasound observations w
ith clinical psychoanalytic work with young children. Her research into pre- and
perinatal memories began after she encountered an eighteen-month-old child who
was reported by sensitive parents as being incessantly restless and unable to sl
eep: I noted that he seemed to move about restlessly almost as if obsessed by a
search for something in every possible corner of the limited space of my consult
ing room, looking for something which he never seemed able to find. His parents
commented on this, saying that he acted like that all the time, day and night. O
ccasionally Jacob also tried to shake several of the objects inside my room, as
if trying to bring them back to life. His parents then told me that any mileston
e in his development (such as sitting up, crawling, walking, or uttering his fir
st words) all seemed to be accompanied by intense anxiety and pain as if he were
afraid, as they put it, 'to leave something behind him.' When I said very simpl
y to him that he seemed to be looking for something that he had lost and could n
ot find anywhere, Jacob stopped and looked at me very intently. I then commented
on his trying to shake all the objects to life as if he were afraid that their
stillness meant death. His parents almost burst into tears and told me that Jaco
b was, in fact, a twin, but that his co-twin, Tino, as they had already decided
to call him, had died two weeks before birth. Jacob, therefore, had spent almost
two weeks in utero with his dead and consequently unresponsive co-twin.120 Verb
alization of his fears that each step forward in his development might be accomp
anied by the death of a loved one for whom he felt himself to be responsible "br
ought about an incredible change in his behavior," says Piontelli. Similarly, Le
ah La Goy, an American psychotherapist, has documented seventeen children who we
re her patients who had lost a twin in utero and who "consistently create enactm
ents of fearing for their own life [which] can and often does weaken the parent-
child bonding process" because they believe their mother might try to get rid of
them too.121 Piontelli, like many other child therapists, began to be struck by
the frequency and concreteness of children's "fantasies" about their life befor
e birth. Unlike most therapists, who, however, ignore their accurate observation
s because their training taught them the mind only begins after birth, she caref
ully recorded them and tried to confirm their reality, first by consultation wit
h the family and eventually by her own extensive ultrasound observations of feta
l life. The correlations and continuities between fetal experiences and childhoo
d personality "were often so dramatic," she says, "that I was amazed that I had
not been more aware of them at the time." 122 One
64
set of twins often stroked each others' heads in the womb through the dividing m
embrane; at the age of one, they could often be seen playing their favorite game
of using a curtain as a kind of membrane through which they stroked each other'
s heads.123 Another set of twins whose mother considered abortion because of her
fear they might be jealous of each other-punched each other all the time in the
womb and continued to do so after birth. One fetus, who often buried his face i
n the placenta as if it were a pillow, as a child insisted that his mother get h
im a pencil case shaped like a pillow that he used similarly. Still other childr
en played out various obstetrical distress problems in later life in dramatic de
tail, such as one child who had nearly died because her umbilical cord had been
tightly knotted around her neck and who spent most of her early childhood wrappi
ng ropes, strings and curtain cords around her head and neck, playing with them
and licking them in a frenzy.124 The enormous importance of being able to use fe
tal insights such as these in the therapy of both children and adults for profou
nd relief and personality change has been carefully documented by Piontelli and
other therapists.125 THE POISONOUS PLACENTA Piontelli's pioneering use of ultras
ound to observe actual fetal behavior has, in fact, for the first time confirmed
my own conclusions made from historical material about the relationship between
the fetus and its placenta. Even birth therapists have objected to my theory th
at "the fetus begins its mental life in active relationship with its own placent
a." Thomas Verny, author of the pioneering book The Secret Life of the Unborn Ch
ild, said that although he agreed that "mental life begins in the womb with a fe
tal drama," he disagreed that the placenta has any role in this drama, saying, "
Personally, in fifteen years of doing intensive, regressive type of psychotherap
y I have never yet heard one of my patients refer in any way at all to his or he
r placenta."126 David Chamberlain, author of Babies Remember Birth, agrees, sayi
ng, "I have heard complaints about all these things in hypnosis but never agains
t a 'poisonous placenta.' The reaction is always against the mother herself."127
Until birth is complete, the fetus, of course, has never met a "mother," only a
womb and a placenta and an umbilicus. Piontelli's ultrasound observations revea
l the complex relationship between the fetus and its placental/umbilical "first
object." Fetuses stroke and explore the placenta all the time, and grab the umbi
licus for comfort when distressed. Their behavior toward the placenta and umbili
cus correlates with later behavior patterns in their infancy, so that, for insta
nce, when Piontelli watches one fetus use the placenta as a pillow in the womb,
observing it
65
"sucking the cord [and] resting on the placenta as if it were a big pillow...bur
ying himself in the placenta...as if it were a pillow," she then notices it has
difficulty sucking the mother's breast after birth, preferring to use it as a pi
llow instead: "He is not sucking...he is leaning against it...it's not a pillow
you know!"128 Another fetus Piontelli watched in utero by ultrasound constantly
licked her placenta and umbilicus while holding her hands between her legs on he
r vagina. The mother, who was both very overweight and whose "rather vamp-lookin
g, lownecked, black velvety dress, together with her smeared and bright make-up,
made her look quite 'whorish,' though in an outdated and clumsy way, like a cha
racter out of a Fellini film,"129 kept saying her baby girl would turn out to be
"whorish" and had many conflicts about having her. The fetus responded to the m
aternal rejection by licking her placenta and masturbating: She is licking the p
lacenta now...look at what she is doing with her other hand...it is still there
right in between her legs...licking the placenta again...my God...she is really
wild this time...look...it just goes on and on...Look how she licks it!...we can
almost hear the noise...look...she is pulling it down towards her mouth...my Go
d!...her tongue is really strong...look she is doing it again...and again...and
again.130 That this "seducing" of the placenta by this fetus plus her auto-eroti
cism might have been defensive maneuvers designed to ward off fear is indicated
by her later actions in therapy with Piontelli as a child. In therapy, said Pion
telli, she seemed to have only two modes of being: (1) fear of everything as bei
ng persecutory and poisoning, so that she spent her early therapy sessions terri
fied and screaming, and (2) in "orgies," like a "whore," eating and licking ever
ything and masturbating. 131 Apparently her mother's rejecting attitude and poor
uterine conditions had affected the fetal amygdalan early emotional memory syst
em. In monkeys, destroying their amygdalae causes them to mouth everything they
come into contact with and try to have sex with everything they meet, exactly th
e same mouthing and masturbating orgies this child engaged in both as a fetus an
d infant. So intent on licking and seducing everything was this baby that she co
uldn't even suck her mother's breast: The breast...seems to be a despicable obje
ct...she absolutely refuses milk...Her mother says, "What are you doing?...you a
re not sucking it, you are playing...she is not sucking it...she is licking it!"
...she starts licking her mother's chest vigorously with the same wild motions I
had previously noticed when she licked the placenta...She licked any surface or
fabric which came into contact with her face. I saw her licking her mother's ch
est, her shoulders, her chin, her arms and the clothes covering them.132
66
As an alternative to her screaming and paranoid fear, the baby had developed a p
attern of seducing both placental objects and herself, filling her abyss of anxi
ety with wild, orgiastic licking and masturbating: She sits on the table with he
r legs wide open looking rather obscene. She inserts a finger inside her cup and
licks it. Then she puts her hands between her legs while moving her tongue over
her lips. She looks very excited and her face is all red now. I say that she's
filling herself with prohibited excitement now. She puts her finger in her mouth
and then almost inside her vagina, saying, "This or this, they are both nice...
" Piontelli's little children with fetal problems did not, of course, say their
persecutors were "Poisonous Placentas," any more than did the adult patients of
Verny or Chamberlain. Yet there is little question that it was the placenta that
they felt had persecuted them while in the womb and that they still felt persec
uted by after birth; in both cases their defensive oral and genital "orgies" wer
e the same. Psychotherapists regularly encounter placental images in their pract
ice, yet, because they cannot conceive of fetal mental life in the womb, they as
cribe these images to other sources. The most famous placental images are known
to psychoanalysts as "the Isakower phenomenon," which often occurs when falling
asleep. It consists of a sense that one is floating, with a "shadowy and undiffe
rentiated, usually round [object] which gets nearer and larger." 133 The floatin
g and the round object are not, as therapists have assumed, memories of the moth
er's breasts; breasts come in twos and are rarely found floating. Isakower himse
lf described the image accurately as a "disc," lying on top of him, an object an
other person said was shaped like a "balloon:" Other patients described it as fo
llows: I'm as small as a point-as if something heavy and large was lying on top
of me-it doesn't crush me...I can draw in the lump as if it was dough-then I fee
l as if the whole thing was in my mouth...it's like a balloon...it's not unpleas
ant...134 a small cloud...became larger and larger. It enveloped everything...So
mebody said it was poisonous...135 A large, black plastic container, which resem
bled a garbage bag...136 Besides the regression involved in falling asleep or ha
llucinations on the analytic couch, overt placental images are also found by cli
nicians in deeply
67
regressed patients, who often hallucinate blood-sucking monsters persecuting the
m. Most of these monster-phobias are extremely frightening, the patients fearing
bloodsucking spiders or vampires or octopuses or Medusas or sphinxes. 137 It si
mply makes no sense to call these blood-sucking beasts and spiders "phallic moth
ers," as Freud and Abraham did,138 particularly when they are accompanied by umb
ilical droplines.139 The vampire as a blood-drinking woman is another widespread
fantasy; even when the vampire is Dracula, he is feminized by wearing a black s
atin cloak. 140 Only the memory of the Nurturant Placenta can fully explain why
we drink Christ's blood, and only the memory of a Poisonous Placenta can explain
why the Erinys suck blood and why devils are blood-red. Often both images are p
resent at the same time in psychotics, as in the following description by Wilhel
m Reich of his schizophrenic patient's hallucination of drinking from a bloody,
round table: They were drinking gallons of blood in front of me. The devil is re
d because of that and he gets redder and redder and then the blood goes to the s
un and makes it on fire. Jesus was dripping blood on the cross by drops and this
was being swallowed then he was seated on the side of the devil and drinking to
o-the table was round oblong of flowing thick blood (no feet on it). Mother Mary
was at the corner watching. She was white as a sheet-All her blood had been dra
ined off and consumed. She saw her son drinking that and suffered.141 Rosenfeld
finds that images of being drained of blood are frequent in regressed patients,
involving concrete "primitive psychotic body images" based on the notion that "t
he body contains nothing but liquids or blood and is enveloped by one or more ar
terial or venous walls...the experience of draining of blood and being emptied c
orresponds to the breakdown of this psychological image of a wall or membrane co
ntaining liquid or blood."142 A better image of the placenta cannot be imagined,
though Rosenfeld didn't notice its uterine source. These patients often imagine
that the analyst or others are literally sucking blood out of them. Mahler desc
ribed a typical young patient of hers: He was preoccupied with the fear of losin
g body substance, of being drained by his father and grandfather, with whom his
body, he believed, formed a kind of communicating system of tubes. At night the
father-grandfather part of the system drained him of the 'body juices of youth.'
Survival depended on who was most successful in draining more life fluid from t
he others...He invented an elaborate heart machine which he could switch on and
connect with his body's circulatory system so that he would never die.143
68
THE FETAL DRAMA IN HISTORY However disguised, the Poisonous Placenta and the Suf
fering Fetus are the most important images of the fetal drama, and the restaging
of their violent encounter is a central religious and political task of society
. I suggest that this battle with the persecuting placental beast constitutes th
e earliest source of war and social violence, traumas that must be restaged peri
odically because of the neurobiological imperatives of early brain development.
The center of society is wherever the fetal drama is restaged-as at Delphi, it i
s often called the "navel of the world," and is associated with placental World
Tree worship.144 The evolution of society occurs as this fetal drama moves from
the tribe to the kingdom to the nation and is enacted with larger and larger num
bers of people emotionally entrained by its sacrificial rituals. Group-fantasies
of poisonous blood become most widespread during periods of progress and prospe
rity. They are particularly ubiquitous during apocalyptic millenarian periods. T
raditional historians have blamed these apocalyptic fantasies, such as the perio
dic "Great Awakenings" in America145 or the millenarian movements in England,146
upon "collective stress."147 The problem is that these movements always occur d
uring periods of progress, peace and prosperity, so these authors have had diffi
culty in locating the source of the social stress. When British millenarianists
became entranced to a 64-year-old woman who said she was about to give birth to
a second Christ,148 or when Americans expected the end of the world in a final c
ombat with the Great Beast of the Apocalypse and destroyed their goods in expect
ation of their coming rebirth149 they did so during periods of prosperity, not s
ocial stress. What is feared and what leads to the deepest regression is growth
and new challenges, a growth that threatens a repetition of early traumas. Ancie
nt societies used to believe that because of growing pollution the universe peri
odically threatened to dissolve in primordial waters, and unless a war was fough
t between a hero-an avenging fetus-and an asphyxiating sea-monster, the world wo
uld disappear.150 The purpose of war and all other sacrificial blood-letting, sa
ys Frazer, was "to reinforce by a river of human blood the tide of life which mi
ght grow stagnant and stale in the veins of the dieties."151 We believe the same
right up into modern times; most nations have repeated the cleansing war ritual
four times a century for as far back as historical records have survived.152 TH
E NEUROBIOLOGY OF EARLY TRAUMA The neurobiological effects of trauma and neglect
both prenatal and during childhood and the compulsion to restage early traumati
c violence and inflict it upon
69
others and upon one's self are becoming fairly well understood through recent ad
vances in neuroscience. Inescapable dangers and intolerable stresses subject the
brain to massive secretions and subsequent depletions of a variety of neurotran
smitters, including norephinephrine, dopamine and serotonin, which lead to hyper
vigilance, explosive anger and excessive sensitivity to similar events in the fu
ture, which are experienced as though they were as dangerous as the earlier inci
dent.153 In addition, the hormones that flood the brain to mobilize it in the fa
ce of threats, especially cortisol, have been found to be toxic to cells in the
hippocampus, the part of the brain that, along with the thalamus, is the center
of the neural system for consciousness, actually killing neurons and reducing th
e size of the hippocampus, making retrieval and therefore modification of early
traumas nearly impossible. 154 It is this process that constitutes "repression,"
which is really dissociation, an inability to retrieve memories rather than a f
orgetting. Thus, without the ability to remember and modify early traumas throug
h new experiences, the brain continues to interpret ordinary stressors as recurr
ences of traumatic events long after the original trauma has ceased. Paranoid re
sults are particularly true of the earliest traumas of fetal and infantile life.
This is so because the hippocampus is quite immature until the third or fourth
year of life, and therefore the early trauma is encoded in the emotional memory
system centering in the amygdala and extending particularly to the prefrontal co
rtex, the center of emotions155 memories which have been described as being near
ly "impervious to extinction."156 Early traumas, coded in this thalamoamygdalan-
cortical memory system, record fearful memories that remain powerful for life, l
ong after the cognitive memories of the traumatic event itself are forgotten. 15
7 Infants, for instance, who experience premature births or eating disorders at
birth often fear all new arousals, as though they represented the same threat to
life as birth once did.158 This is why Piontelli's fetus, who licked her placen
ta and masturbated in utero, continued compulsively to lick her mother's breast
and masturbate after birth, warding off her earliest uterine dangers. It is also
relevant to our hypothesis that early emotional traumas are intimately linked w
ith social behavior to note that the amygdala-where these early trauma are recor
ded-is recognized as playing a central role in the social behavior of animals. F
or instance, removal of the amygdalae produces social isolates in most nonhuman
primates, while having devastating consequences on their ability to mother, ofte
n resulting in death for their infants.159 In addition, the continuing low serot
onin levels and high noradrenaline levels produced by trauma decrease normal agg
ressive inhibitions (serotonin being the main soothing neurotransmitter and nora
drenaline being the main stress hormone)
70
to such an extent that low serotonin and high noradrenaline have been reliably s
hown to be central to social violence of both humans and other primates.160 Monk
eys who have early traumas have low serotonin and high noradrenaline levels, and
are "nasty, hostile, crazy," often killing their peers for no reason,161 while
traumatized children with low serotonin have more disruptive behavior162 and com
pulsively restage their traumas in their play with peers, both in order to maint
ain some control over its timing anything to avoid re-experiencing their helples
sness and also because they can thereby identify with the aggressor.163 Others r
epeat their original traumas by self-injury, as did the patient who tried to com
mit suicide by putting his head beneath his car and causing it to crush his skul
l, saying God had told him "to kill myself to be reborn," thus concretely restag
ing his earlier experience of having his head stuck in the birth passage.164 The
amount of maternal stress necessary for traumatizing the fetus and child is ast
onishingly little: Monkeys born to mothers who listened to ten minutes of random
noise each day during mid-and late pregnancy had higher noradrenaline livels th
an normal mokeys. The hyped-up monkeys were impulsive, overresponsive, and had f
ewer social skills as infants. When the prenatally stressed monkeys got to be th
e equivalent of preteens, their noradrenaline was till high and their behavior s
till abnormally hostile and aggressive...165 Later traumas, abandonments and bet
rayals of childhood are then recorded in the same amygdalan early emotional memo
ry system laid down by fetal traumas. Evidence for this fetal matrix for later t
rauma is everywhere to be found, only we have so far been unaware of its meaning
and overlooked it. For instance, when a gunman came into Cleveland Elementary S
chool in 1989 and fired wave after wave of bullets at children in the playground
, killing many of them, the trauma was "seared into the children's memory...When
ever we hear an ambulance on its way to the rest home down the street, everythin
g halts...The kids all listen to see if it will stop here or go on," said one te
acher.166 But the childhood trauma also stirred up the fetal level of fear, that
of the Poisonous Placenta: "For several weeks many children were terrified of t
he mirrors in the restrooms; a rumor swept the school that 'Bloody Virgin Mary,'
some kind of fantasized monster, lurked there."167 All danger appears to tap in
to our earliest fetal fears, even though most of our developmental history stems
from events of childhood proper. Childhood itself, of course, particularly its
earliest years, provides most of the content for the restagings in history. Ther
e is evidence that good childrearing can reverse the long-term effects of fetal
stress. In a study of 698 infants born in Hawaii in
71
1955 with pre- or perinatal complications, it was found that those who experienc
ed both fetal trauma and childhood rejection were twice as likely to have receiv
ed some form of mental health help before age ten due to learning or behavioral
problems, including repeated delinquencies, while those who had a close bond wit
h at least one caretaker responded by showing a decrease in the effects of the e
arly trauma. 168 So even though fetal trauma has long-lasting effects, and even
though few historical events are without traces of fetal imagery, the main sourc
e of historical change is still the evolution of childhood. CULTURE AND HISTORY
AS HOMEOSTATIC MECHANISMS The social restaging of early trauma and neglect, pred
icated upon damaged neuronal and hormonal systems, is thus a homeostatic mechani
sm of the brain, achieved by nations through wars, economic domination and socia
l violence. Each of us constructs a separate neural system for these early traum
as and their defenses-a dissociated, organized personality system that stores, d
efends against and elaborates these early fetal, infantile and childhood traumas
as we grow up. Once this basic concept is realized, all the rationalizations of
history become transparent; for instance, when Germans say they must start WWII
to get "revenge for the Day of Shame," one can ignore the ostensible reference
(The Treaty of Versailles) and recognize instead the real source of "German sham
e"-the routine humiliations, beatings, sexual abuse and betrayals of German chil
dren by their caretakers. The initial fetal matrix of the organization of these
traumas is obvious. Children's playgrounds are full of fetal objects, from swing
s that repeat amniotic rocking to birth tunnels and slides-all enjoyed by childr
en who must remember their fetal life, since they generally have not as yet been
told about where babies grow. Infants cling to pillows and Teddy Bears and watc
h television programs like "The Care Bears," which features baby bears with rain
bow umbilicuses coming out of their tummies and has an evil "Dr. Coldheart" who
tries to push black, poisonous wastes into their umbilicuses. Growing children o
rganize fetal games, hitting, kicking and throwing around placental membranes (o
ne, the football, even egg-shaped, that we rebirth through our legs) and reenact
ing birth when passing them through upright legs or vaginal hoops. We likewise r
elive our birth when we celebrate Christmas as a rebirth ritual, complete with a
placental tree and a Santa Claus-a chubby blood-red fetus going down his birth
chimney attached to his placental bag-not to mention such thrills as bungee-jump
ing our rebirth at the end of a long umbilicus or throwing ourselves into mosh p
its to be reborn at rock concerts. 169 Similarly, all religions contain at their
center the Suffering Fetus and its Poisonous Placenta, whether it is
72
the dismembered, suffering Osiris or the bleeding Christ on his placental cross
or the dead Elvis, at whose grave a mass veneration takes place beneath a giant
placental heart and a soundtrack of him singing the song "Hurt."170 The central
religious aim of reuniting with the placenta can even be seen in the origin of t
he word religion "religare," that is, "to unite again." History as a homeostatic
mechanism which is needed to regulate the emotional disfunctions of the brain i
s a central concept of my psychogenic theory. I consider it impossible to unders
tand historical events without an understanding of modern neurobiology. For inst
ance, the fact that damaged amygdala function is found in paranoid schizophrenic
s171 leads one to question if the paranoid mood of nations before and during war
s may be related to real, measurable diminished amygdalan functioning which, com
bined with reduced serotonin levels and other neurotransmitter imbalances, appea
r to cause our periodic searches for enemies. The leader's function is, in this
view, similar to that of a psychiatrist administering prescriptions for wars and
depressions as psychological "uppers" and "downers," designed to restore homeos
tatic equilibrium in the brains of a nation ravaged by surging neurotransmitters
and other hormones. THE LEADER AS POISON CONTAINER Because the fetus's umbilicu
s is like a pulsing fifth limb and because the placenta is the fetus's first lov
e object, I believe we so deeply experience the loss of our umbilicus/placenta t
hat we walk around feeling we have still a "phantom placenta"-the same phenomeno
n as the "phantom limb" experienced by amputees172 and are constantly looking fo
r a leader or a flag or a god to serve as its substitute. Just as gods are imagi
ned as beings "from whom all blessings flow," leaders are seen as beings "from w
hom all power flows." In ancient Egypt, people saved the actual placenta of the
Pharaoh and put it on a pole which they carried into battle; it was the first fl
ag in history.173 In America, we still ritually worship our placental flag with
its red arteries and blue veins at the end of a umbilical flagpole-in public gat
herings. In Baganda, they put the king's placenta on a throne, pray to it and re
ceive messages from it through their priests.174 We do the same when we look to
the sky for UFOs high-tech placental disks that we hope might have messages for
us.175 Lawson has even experimentally correlated UFO abduction scenarios with th
e actual birth experiences of the abducted, those who had normal vaginal births
imagining tunnel experiences during abduction while those who had caesarean birt
hs experienced being yanked up by the UFO without the tunnel images.176
73
Rysunek 17 4:4 The leader as a poisonous container
The yearning for a phantom placenta a "poison container" for our dangerous emoti
ons to be our leader, and the search for a Poisonous Placenta to be our enemy wi
th whom we can fight, are the central tasks of all social organizations, prior t
o any utility they may have. Leaders are not mothers or fathers, and they are no
t always idealized. They are poison containers for our feelings. Poison containe
rs are objects into which we can dump our disowned feelings, just as we once pum
ped our polluted blood into the placenta, hoping for it to be cleansed. We ascri
be to poison containers all kinds of magical placental significances, including
the power to cleanse our emotions, which are felt to be like polluted blood in a
ccordance with their fetal origin. When the leader appears unable to handle thes
e emotions, when he appears to be weakening and abandoning us, when our progress
in life seems to involve too much independence and we re-experience our early a
bandonment by our placenta and our parents, we begin to look for enemies to infl
ict our traumas upon.177 WAR AS A SACRIFICIAL RITUAL War, then, is a sacrificial
ritual designed to defend against fears of individuation and maternal engulfmen
t by restaging our early traumas upon scapegoats. This theory is the exact oppos
ite of the "social stress" theories of all other social scientists, since it is
usually successes freedom and new challenges that are experienced as triggers fo
r wars, not economic distress or political stresses. The war ritual is the final
chapter of the reshearsing of early traumas that we all experience as we grow u
p, from the 18,000 murders the average child sees on TV to the bullying of scape
goats children practice on school playgrounds and the sports we play in which we
rehearse the mental mechanisms necessary to dominate other groups and turn them
into "enemies" (the truth reflected in the saying that "British wars are won on
the Rugby fields"). That war is sacrifical, not utilitarian, and aims at reduci
ng progress and prosperity is shown by the finding that major wars almost always
occur after a sustained economic upswing. Not only are there many more wars aft
er periods of prosperity, but they are much longer and bigger, "six to twenty ti
mes bigger as indicated by battle fatalities."178 Wars sacrifice youth symbols o
f our potency and
74
hopefulness because it is our striving, youthful, independent selves that we bla
me for getting us into trouble in the first place. Wars are always preemptive at
tacks on enemies we create-enemies we must find "out there" to relieve the paran
oia of having enemies "inside our heads" who resent our good fortunes. Most wars
start "for the sake of peace" because we really believe we can have inner peace
if we stop our progress and individuation, if we sacrifice our striving self. O
nly if we can stop growing can we protect ourselves from our most horrible fear-
the repetition of our earliest tragedies. War, then, is a cleansing ritual sacri
fice that is staged as a four-act drama: 1. We begin to reexperience our early t
raumas when we fee too much freedom, prosperity and individuation-wars are usual
ly fought after a period of peace, prosperity and social progress produced by a
minority who have had better childrearing, producing challenges that are experie
nced as threatening by the majority whose childrearing is so traumatic that too
much growth and independence produces an abandonment panic, fears of a persecuto
ry motherfigure, a defensive merging with the engulfing mother and then fears by
men of having been turned into women.179 2. We deify a leader who is a poison c
ontainer into whom we can pump our frightening feelings, our "bad blood" you can
see this blood-transfer concretely when Nazis put up their arms like an umbilic
us and throw their bad feelings their "bad blood" into Hitler for cleansing, whi
le he catches their feelings with an open palm, standing under a swastika (the a
ncient symbol of the placenta) imprinted upon a blood-red flag, the hypermasculi
ne leader becoming society's protector by finding an enemy to persecute rather t
han individuals reliving their early tragedies alone and helpless. 3. We restage
our early helplessness, humiliation and revenge-terror fantasies with another n
ation who needs to act out their violence-minor insults are experienced as so hu
miliating that even a holocaust can be worth their revenge-as President Kennedy
said as he considered whether to risk an apocalyptic nuclear war in the Cuban Mi
ssile Crisis, "If Krushchev wants to rub my nose in the dirt, it's all over."180
When progress and new challenges evoke paranoid fears of jealous enemies and wi
shes/fears of engulfing mommies, nations collude in a trance-like state to fight
to defend against their delusional loss of potency. 4. We go to war by restagin
g our terrors in the social sphere, inflicting our traumas upon our most vital s
elves, our youth wars are not, as often said, "outlets for human aggression" in
fact, nations usually feel a new strength as they go to war,
75
just as wife-beating husbands become calm and self-righteous as they beat up the
ir spouses;181 so, too, nations experience a manic strength as they fight to des
troy the poisonous enemy, revenge their traumas, regain their lost virility and
be reborn into a New World Order. These stages on the road to war can be monitor
ed through a fantasy analysis of a nation's emotional life. Whether they can als
o be confirmed by changes in neurobiological markers for instance, whether natio
ns prior to wars experience measureable surges in adrenaline and noradrenaline s
tress hormones and a manic surge in dopamine levels-is yet to be investigated. T
he imagery of war as a restaging of birth is ubiquitous. Consider just the birth
imagery surrounding the nuclear bomb. When Ernest Lawrence telegramed to his fe
llow physicists that the bomb was ready to test, his cable read, "Congratulation
s to the new parents. Can hardly wait to see the new arrival."182 When the bomb
was exploded at Los Alamos, a journalist wrote, "One felt as though he had been
privileged to witness the Birth of the World...the first cry of the newborn worl
d." 183 When President Truman met with world leaders at Postdam just before drop
ping the bomb on Japan, General Grove cabled him reporting that its second test
was successful: "Doctor has just returned most enthusiastic and confident that T
he Little Boy is as husky as his big brother...I could have heard his screams fr
om here..."184 When the Hiroshima bomb, named "Little Boy," was dropped from the
belly of a plane named after the pilot's mother, General Groves cabled Truman,
"The baby was born." Even the survivors of the Hiroshima explosion usually refer
red to the bomb as "the original child."185 Similarly, when the first hydrogen b
omb, termed "Teller's baby," was exploded, Edward Teller's telegram read, "It's
a boy."186 Obviously nukes are felt to be powerful babies perfect avenging fetus
es. With them, our revenge for our early traumas can now be infinite: war finall
y can destroy every "dangerous mother" on earth. One can see why Truman, hearing
that the world's first nuclear bomb had just been dropped, exclaimed, "This is
the greatest thing in history!"187 PROSPERITY PANICS AND INTERNAL SACRIFICES War
s are sacrificial defenses that have proven to be effective in reducing fears of
ego disintegration due to prosperity panic. But even more effective than sacrif
icing mothers and children in external wars is the internal, institutionalized w
ars against mothers and children that nations conduct periodically as social pol
icy. Structural violence (excess deaths because of poverty alone) amount to 15 m
illion persons a year world wide, compared to an average 100,000 deaths per year
from wars.188
76
Economic recessions hurt and kill more mothers and children as sacrificial victi
ms than most wars.189 As in foreign wars (external sacrifices), political and ec
onomic wars against mothers and children (internal sacrifices) are regularly con
ducted during periods of peace and prosperity. These internal wars parallel the
regressive images we have been discussing; for instance, as William Joseph found
in studying the 1929 and 1987 stock market crashes, images of dangerous women p
roliferated in the media, indicating that the time for internal sacrifice was ne
ar.190 In America, in the mid-90s, after a period of peace and prosperity and pa
rticularly after the demise of The Evil Empire that can be blamed for the nation
's emotional disorders dangerous women images multiplied in the media, and enemi
es were felt to be inside rather than abroad. Reductions in food, welfare, educa
tion and health care for women and children became the national goal. After bein
g obsessed with watching for an entire year the trial of someone accused of bein
g a mothermurderer, O. J. Simpson, it is no coincidence that Americans were then
united in wanting to cut welfare for mothers and their children, acting out the
ir own mothermurder scenario. Europe, too, began feeling that the Welfare State-
imagined as a dangerous, engulfing Medusa-was an enemy that had to be destroyed.
191 That women and children were the real enemies of the "G.O.P. Revolution" was
not denied. As Newt Gingrich put it, "The Welfare State has created the moral d
ecay of the world. We have barbarity after barbarity...brutality after brutality
. And we shake our heads and say, 'Well, what's going wrong?' What's going wrong
is a welfare system which subsidized people for doing nothing...And then we end
up with the final culmination of a drug-addicted underclass with no sense of hu
manity..."192 Simpson and Gingrich, both our delegates were somehow uncanny, but
nontheless caried out the nation's unconscious sacrificial group-fantasies all
the same. That a prosperous America has arranged to have so many people needing
welfare is a clue to why nations need poor people to punish for their prosperity
. Since it is prosperity and the fear of intolerable growth that triggers the re
staging of trauma, it makes psychohistorical sense that America today-the most p
rosperous and freest nation of any in history-has more women and children living
in poverty than any other industrialized nation. American child poverty rates a
re four times those of most European nations, and are getting worse recently.193
It is national policy: "children do not catch poverty but are made poor by stat
e neglect."194 While France manages to afford excellent child care centers for p
reschoolers, child care in America is a disaster, with only 15 percent of the ce
nters of "high quality," while the bottom 15 percent are in "childcare centers o
f such poor quality that their health or development is threatened."195 Nor is i
t coincidental that the world's wealthiest
77
country has the highest child homicide rate196 and outside of Israel the most ne
wborn boys circumcised,197 both indices of society's hostility towards children.
Economic success gives people increased opportunities for individuation; nation
al prosperity and peace are therefore dangerous ("If I grow and enjoy myself, so
mething terrrible will happen"). Periods of extended prosperity without excterna
l "enemies" therefore produce prosperity panics that require sacrificial victims
, whether in Hebrew or Aztec ritual sacrifice yesterday or in today's economic c
ycles. In good economic times, such as in 1996, legislators in America, with the
support of the majority of citizens, vigorously cut all kinds of aid to childre
n. In New York City, 39 percent of the children are on welfare; in Chicago, 46 p
ercent, in Detroit, 67 percent, and anti-welfare legislation was everywhere put
into effect.198 With the largest Gross Domestic Product of any nation at any tim
e in history, America has 75 percent of the world's child deaths by homicide, su
icide and firearms, overwhelmingly leading the way for violence-related deaths o
f children.199 In 1996, at the peak of our current prosperity, Americans of both
parties, with the approval of the President, cut nutrition assistance for 14 mi
llion children and Social Security for 750,000 disabled children, along with cut
s in school lunches, Head Start, child protection, education, child health care
and aid to homeless children-what the president of the Children's Defense Fund d
escribed as "an unbelievable budget massacre of the weakest."200 The media notic
ed the posperity panic, but are puzzled as to its cause, after four prosperous y
ears. The magazine cover that showed a depressed Uncle Sam with the headline "If
the Economy Is Up, Why Is America Down?" could more accurately have been worded
, "Because the Economy Is Up, America Is Feeling Down."201 Cutting funds for Hea
d Start was in fact necessary to punish the striving child in ourselves. Sen. Pa
trick Moynihan, calling the legislation "an obscene act of social regression tha
t visits upon children the wrath of an electorate," predicted the cuts in Aid to
Families with Dependent Children alone will put millions of children on the str
eet.202 "It is beyond imagining that we will do this," Moynihan said. "In the mi
ddle of the Great Depression, we provided a Federal guarantee of some provision
for children, dependent children. In the middle of the roaring 90's, we're takin
g it away."203 We were so bent on punishing children for our own prosperity that
we cut even funds for school lunches, despite there being 12 million American c
hildren today who are so malnourished that it has damaged their brains.204 But s
capegoating children in prosperous times isn't paradoxical; it's a psychohistori
cal regularity. That the group-fantasies behind cutting benefits for women and c
hildren are similar to the blood-sucking fantasies discussed above could be seen
in any of the
78
flood of vampire movies that appeared at the same time, often featuring bloodthi
rsty mother figures, or in the fantasies of those in Congress and the media who
claimed that welfare recipients were "bleeding us dry" and "sucking the blood ou
t of the citizenry [like] a giant leech"-punishment for which was for the govern
ment to "suck the blood" out of welfare recipients (Illustration 3:6).205 As Pre
sidential candidate Sen. Phil Gramm said, "If we continue to pay mothers who hav
e illegitimate children, the country will soon have more illegitimate than legit
imate children," all feeding off of him, a scenario that is his projection of th
e needy "baby Phil" demanding "MORE!" who was threatening to "eat up American re
sources." Bad, sinful babies were seen as deserving to be punished as scapegoats
for the country's guilty prosperity. Historically, during every period of prosp
erity and peace in American history (such as in the 1850s and the 1890s), there
has been legislation by the newly wealthy to stop welfare for what they called "
the undeserving poor." Anti-welfare legislation, now as then, had nothing to do
with saving money; in fact, the cuts would cost a hundred times more than their
savings through increases in drug addiction, theft and murder. Each time legisla
tors condemn "moral decay" and "a breakdown in family values"code words for fear
of freedom-they only mean that in fantasy social collapse can be avoided by "en
ding dependency"-code words for punishing poor children, symbols of their own de
pendency needs.
Rysunek 18 4:5 Government as Devouring Vampire
That punishing children, not saving money, is the aim of the legislation becomes
clear when the effects of each cutback is actually costed out. For instance, th
e cuts in the Federal Supplemental Security Income program not only reduce allow
ances for poor crippled children by 25 percent, they also throw hundreds of thou
sands of disabled children off the program. This means, as one commentator put i
t, that their families are so marginal economically that the additional cost of
caring for a child with spina bifida or profound mental retardation is literally
unbearable. So the kids will get dumped into state homes, thus costing the taxp
ayers significantly
79
more than the allowances that enable their families to care for them. Not only c
ruel, but dumb as well.206 But legislators are not dumb at all, only cruel, purp
osely cruel, for the sake of all of us. Which is why we elect them to "balance t
he budget," that is, to conduct a restaging of all the early cruelties done to u
s, a warding off of the punishment we expect for our prosperity, inflicting our
early terrors upon society's scapegoats: helpless, vulnerable children. Like war
, the sacrifice of women and children is promised to result in a magical "rebirt
h of national vitality" that is well worth the difficult "labor pains" of passin
g the new welfare legislation.207 ENDING FETAL AND CHILD ABUSE Although these co
nclusions about the relative permanence of early trauma and its inevitable resta
ging in war, social violence and economic injustice admittedly appear to be disc
ouraging, an awareness of the source of human violence can actually be enormousl
y hopeful. For if early traumas rather than "aggressive human nature" are the ca
use of our violence, then efforts to radically reduce these traumas can be reaso
nably expected to reduce war and social domination. If, rather than continuing t
he millennia-old historical cycle of traumatized adults inflicting their inner t
errors upon their children, we try kindness instead, effectively helping mothers
and children as a society rather than burdening, abandoning or punishing them,
we will soon be able to end our need to reenact our traumatic memories on the so
cial stage. Let me describe why I believe this radical reduction of violence is
possible in our society today. The studies that I cited earlier on maternal reje
ction included solid statistical evidence showing that when babies are unwanted
by their mothers and have birth complications they will, when they become teenag
ers, commit four times the number of violent crimes as those who are wanted. If
this four-to-one ratio holds for most restagings of early trauma, then reducing
this trauma to just a small fraction of what it is today can be expected to save
almost 75 percent of the cost of social violence. I estimate the yearly cost of
American social violence, external and internal sacrifices combined, to be over
$1 trillion per annum, adding up the cost of most of the military, the interest
on the debt, which is all for recent wars, most of the criminal justice system,
the loss of life and property in crime, and so on. The savings, then, would be
75 percent of $1 trillion, or $750 billion per annum. The only question is: How
is it possible to eliminate most early trauma and child abuse, and what would it
cost to do this?
80
The answer to this question is no longer merely theoretical. A decade ago, a psy
chohistorian, Robert McFarland, M.D., reasoned that if my psychogenic theory of
history is right, he should be able to improve both the health and the wealth of
his community in Boulder, Colorado, by reaching out to every new mother before
her baby was born and help her to welcome and then parent her child, a task soci
ety usually believes does not require help from the community. Two issues of our
Journal of Psychohistory, entitled "Ending Child Abuse," and "Changing Childhoo
d,"208 were devoted to showing how effective parent outreach centers can be cent
ers which have been replicated in several other states describing such activitie
s as facilities to new mothers, prenatal services, parenting discussion groups,
baby massage courses, single mother help, fathering courses, puppet shows, lectu
res on how to discipline children without hitting, psychotherapy referrals and h
ome visiting during early years. All these are provided on a shoestring budget,
mainly with volunteer and paraprofessional help, using local community resources
. By providing this prenatal and early childhood help, fetal and child abuse-as
measured by physical and sexual abuse reports, hospital records of injuries, and
followup studies-have been drastically reduced. No new mother or father wants t
o reject or abuse their baby, the formula for baby battering being, "I had my ba
by to give me the love I never got; but instead she cried and sounded like my mo
ther yelling at me, so I hit her." What McFarland and others found was that prov
iding new parents with help and hope allowed their underlying affection to repla
ce the abuse that comes from fear, abandonment and despair. The cost? Since McFa
rland stresses local community resources and volunteer labor, very little. Even
when he has expanded his parenting centers to include day care facilities, he ex
pects a local sales tax of one-tenth of one percent to be sufficient to run the
entire enterprise, a very small "children's tax" that would represent the commun
ity's commitment to invest in their children's future. A similar sales tax in ev
ery community in the nation would produce .1 percent times $5 trillion in yearly
retail sales in America or $5 billion a year in tax revenues, about the cost of
two of the B2 bombers the military is building that they admit are not needed.
The savings, then, 15 to 20 years from now, if we should decide to save our chil
dren from early traumas, would be $750 billion per year saved, less $5 billion i
nvested annually, or $745 billion per year net savings, far more than enough to
end poverty forever in America. This does not even begin to consider the additio
nal trillions we currently spend on drugs, gambling and other addictions that ha
ndle the pain of early traumas, activities which are likely to wither away witho
ut their traumatic underpinnings.
81
INVESTING IN THE REAL WEALTH OF NATIONS We regularly decide to invest hundreds o
f billions of dollars in technology hoping for future benefits, under the notion
that material investments invariably produce prosperity. But Adam Smith was not
radical enough when he said the wealth of nations lay in its investment in tech
nology. The real wealth of nations is its children, since every scientific and t
echnological revolution has been preceded by a childrearing revolution. Investin
g in the mental and physical health of children by preventing damage to their br
ains from early traumatic experiences must accompany investments in material tec
hnologies, or else any resulting prosperity will continue to be destroyed in war
s and social violence. Few people realize that the cost of eliminating poverty e
ntirely for all children in America is only $39 billion, one-half of one percent
of our gross domestic product, or about the same amount as we waste financing t
he CIA.209 A healthful, loving childhood without trauma isn't expensive; in fact
it saves trillions of dollars. And it's the most important goal of mankind. In
the past two prosperous decades, we have purposely brought about through our soc
ial policies an increase in the percentage of children living in spiritcrushing
poverty in America by over one-third, from 15 percent to 22 percent, which will
soon make life in America more violent than it had been when we were much less p
rosperous. "We are underinvested in our childre," says Frederick Goodwin. "We sp
end seven times more per capita on the elderly than we do on children....we are
wasting a tremendous resource."210 The connections between early traumas and neg
lect are everywhere, yet we continue to insist on policies that are guaranteed t
o increase social violence and to undo the progress and prosperity we work so ha
rd to achieve. It may seem simplistic to conclude that most of human destructive
ness is the restaging of early traumas and that what we must do if we wish to pu
t an end to war and social violence is teach adults how to stop abusing and negl
ecting and begin respecting and enjoying their children, but I believe this is p
recisely what our best scientific evidence shows. Our task, then, is clear and o
ur resources sufficient to make the world safe for the first time in our long, v
iolent history. All it takes now is the will to begin.
FOOTNOTES
1. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971, p. 59.
82
2. Norbert Bromberg and Verna Volz Small, Hitler's Psychopathology. New York: In
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's Near-Death Experiences. New York: Signet, 1995, p. 117. 115. D. Spelt, "The C
onditioning of the Human Fetus in Utero." Journal of Experimental Psychology 38(
1948): 338-346; David B. Chamberlain, "Babies Are Not What We Thought: Call for
a New Paradigm." International Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Studies 4 (1992
): 168-169; Erna Osterweil, "A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Fetal Mental Develo
pment and Its Role in the Origin of Object Relations." Dissertation Submitted to
the Faculty of the California Graduate Institute. 1990; Linda Carter-Jessop and
Barbara Keller, "Early Maternal Bonding." In Thomas R. Verny, Pre- and Perinata
l Psychology: An Introduction. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1987, pp. 107-127
. 116. M. Colleen Stainton, "The Fetus: A Growing Member of the Family." Family
Relations 34 (1985): 321-326; R. Van DeCarr and M. Lehrer, The Prenatal Classroo
m: A Parent's Guide for Teaching Their Preborn Baby. Atlanta: Humanics Publishin
g Group, 1992. 117. Ibid., p. 324.
92
118. M. Freeman, "Is Infant Learning Egocentric or Duocentric? Was Piaget Wrong?
" Preand Perinatal Psychology Journal 2 (1987): 25-42. 119. A full bibliography
is contained in Thomas Blum, "Early Proto-Developmental Enrichment Stimulations
and Possible Changes in the Functional Morphology of the Brain." In Thomas Blum
and David Yew, Eds. Human Prenatal Brain Development. Berlin: Leonardo Publisher
s, 1993. 120. Alessandra Piontelli, From Fetus to Child: An Observational and Ps
ychoanalytic Study. London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992, p. 18. 121. Leah LaGoy, "
The Loss of a Twin In Utero's Effect on Pre-Natal and Post-Natal Bonding." Inter
national Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine 5(1993): 439-
444. 122. Piontelli, From Fetus to Child, p. 15. 123. Ibid., p. 146. 124. Alessa
ndra Piontelli, "Pre-Natal Life and Birth as Reflected in the Analysis of a 2-Ye
arOld Psychotic Girl." International Review of Psycho-Analysis. 15(1988): 73-81.
125. Nandor Fodor, The Search for the Beloved: A Clinical Investigation of the
Trauma of Birth and Prenatal Condition. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1
949; Stanislav Grof, Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychot
herapy. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York, 1985; Arthur Janov, The Feel
ing Child. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973; Arnaldo Rascovsky, El psiquismo F
etal. Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidos, 1977; Lynda Share, If Someone Speaks, It G
ets Lighter: Dreams and the Reconstruction of Infant Trauma. Hillsdale, N.J.: Th
e Analytic Press, 1994; E. V. Subbotsky, Foundations of the Mind: Children's Und
erstanding of Reality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993; Thomas
R. Verny, Ed. Pre- and Peri-natal Psychology: An Introduction. New York: Human S
ciences Press, 1987; David Chamberlain, Babies Remember Birth. Los Angeles: Jere
my P. Tarcher, 1988; Thomas Blum, Ed. Prenatal Perception Learning and Bonding.
Berlin: Leonardo Publishers, 1993; K. Schier, "The Analysis of Appearance and Me
aning of Prenatal and Perinatal Phantasies in the Psychoanalytically Oriented Ps
ychotherapy of Children." International Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psycho
logy and Medicine 5(1993): 433-438; Michael Maiwald and Ludwig Janus, "Developme
nt, Behavior and Psychic Experience in the Prenatal Period and the Consequences
for Life History-A Bibliographic Survey." International Journal of Prenatal and
Perinatal Psychology and Medicine 5(1993): 451-485. 126. Thomas R. Verny, "Somet
imes a Cigar Is Just a Cigar." The Journal of Psychohistory 10(1982): 214.
93
127. David B. Chamberlain, "Commentary on Lloyd deMause's 'Fetal Origins of Hist
ory.'" The Journal of Psychohistory 10(1982): 224. 128. Allessandra Piontelli, F
rom Fetus to Child, pp. 114, 120. 129. Ibid., p. 41. 130. Ibid., pp. 46-47. 131.
Ibid., pp. 185-191. 132. Ibid., pp. 58, 60, 67. 133. Geraldine Fink, "Analysis
of the Isakower Phenomenon." Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
15(1967): 282. 134. Otto Isakower, "A Contribution to the Patho-Psychology of Ph
enomena Associated With Falling Asleep." International Journal of Psycho-Analysi
s 19(1938): 331-34. 135. Otto E. Sperling, "A Psychoanalytic Study of Hypnagogic
Hallucinations." Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 5(1957): 11
5-123. 136. Ibid., pp. 424-425. 137. Ralph B. Little, "Spider Phobias." Psychoan
alytic Quarterly 36(1967): 51-60. 138. Leonard Shengold, "The Effects of Oversti
mulation: Rat People." International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 48(1967): 409. 1
39. Ralph B. Little, "Umbilical Cord Symbolism of the Spider's Dropline." Psycho
analytic Quarterly 35(1966): 587-590. 140. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine
: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, p. 63. 141. Willhelm Reich,
Character-Analysis. Third, enlarged Edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Girou
x, 1949, pp. 501-502. 142. David Rosenfeld, The Psychotic: Aspects of the Person
ality. London: Karnac Books, 1992, p. 237. 143. Margaret S. Mahler, The Psycholo
gical Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation. New York: Basic Bo
oks, 1975, p. 266. 144. E. A. S. Butterworth, The Tree at the Navel of the Earth
. Berlin: Walter DeGruyter & Co., 1970.
94
145. Michael Barkun. Disaster and the Milenium. New Haven: Yale University Press
, 1974. 146. J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780-1
850. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. 147. Michael Barkun. Crucible of the
Millennium: The Burned-Over District of New York in the 1840s. Syracuse: Syracus
e University Press, 1986, p. 143. 148. J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming, pp.
62, 97. 149. Michael Barkun, The Second Coming," p. 50. 150. Mircea Eliade, The
Myth of the Eternal Return; or, Cosmos and History. Princeton: Princeton Univer
sity Press, 1954; Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries
of Birth and Rebirth. New York: Harper & Row, 1958; Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos a
nd the World to Come. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993; Joseph L. Henderso
n and Maud Oakes, The Wisdom of the Serpent: Myths of Death, Rebirth, and Resurr
ection. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. 151. James George Frazer, T
he Golden Bough. Third Edition. Part VI. The Scapegoat. New York: St. Martin's P
ress, 1913, p. vi. 152. Frank H. Denton and Warren Phillips, "Some Patterns in t
he History of Violence." Conflict Resolution 12(1968): 182-195. 153. John P. Wil
son, Trauma, Transformation and Healing: An Integrative Approach to Theory, Rese
arch, and Post-Traumatic Therapy. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1989, pp. 27-33; Bess
el A. van der Kolk and Jose Saporta, "The Biological Response to Psychic Trauma:
Mechanisms and Treatment of Intrusion and Numbing." Anxiety Research 4(1991): 1
99-212; M. Michele Murburg, Ed. Catecholamine Function in Posttraumatic Stress D
isorder: Emerging Concepts. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1994.
154. J. Douglas Bremner et al., "MRI-Based Measurement of Hippocampal Volume in
Patients With Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder." American Journal of
Psychiatry 152(1995): 973-980; The New York Times, August 1, 1995, p. C3. 155.
Anthony Demasio, Decartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York
: Bantam, 1995. 156. Michael Davis, "The Role of the Amygdala in Conditioned Fea
r." In John P. Aggleton, Ed., The Amygdala: Neurobiological Aspects of Emotion,
Memory, and Mental Dysfunction. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992, pp. 255-305;
Joseph E LeDoux, "Emotion and the Amygdala." In Ibid., p. 344.
95
157. Joseph E. LeDoux, "Emotion, Memory and the Brain." Scientific American, Jun
e, 1994, pp. 50-57.Van der Kolk and Saporta, "The Biological Response to Psychic
Trauma," p. 204. LeDoux's two memory systems are divided somewhat differently i
nto thalamocortical and limbic systems in Gerald M. Edelman, The Remembered Pres
ent: A Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books, 1989, p. 152.
For multiple memory systems, see Daniel L. Schacter and Endel Tulving, Memory Sy
stems 1994. Cambridge, Mass. The MIT Press, 1994. 158. Linda Share, If Someone S
peaks, It Gets Lighter: Dreams and the Reconstruction of Infant Trauma. New York
: The Analytic Press, 1994. 159. Arthur S. Kling and Leslie A. Brothers, "The Am
ygdala and Social Behavior." In John P. Aggleton, Ed., The Amygdala, pp. 353-377
. 160. Ronald Kotulak, Inside the Brain: Revolutionary Discoveries of How the Mi
nd Works. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1996; Jan Volavka, Neurobiology of Vi
olance. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1995; Bessel A. van der Ko
lk, et al, Eds. Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind
, Body, and Society.New York: Guilford Press, 1996. 161. Bessel A. van der Kolk,
"The Trauma Spectrum: The Interaction of Biological and Social Events in the Ge
nesis of the Trauma Response." Journal of Traumatic Stress 1(1988): 276; G. W. K
raemer, et al., "Hypersensitivity to D-Amphetamine Several Years After Early Soc
ial Deprivation in Rhesus Monkeys." Psychopharmacology 82(1984): 266-271 162. Gr
egory L. Hanna, et al., "Whole Blood Serotonin and Disruptive Behaviors in Juven
ile Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder." Journal of the American Academy of Child and
Adolescent Psychiatry 34(1995): 28-35. 163. A. W. Burgess, et al., "Abused to A
buser: Antecedents of Socially Deviant Behavior." American Journal of Psychiatry
144(1987): 1431-1436. 164. L. Bryce Boyer, The Regressed Patient. New York: Jas
on Aronson, 1983, pp. 127-129. 165. Ronadl Kotulak, Inside the Brain, p. 81. 166
. Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books, 1995, p. 201.
167. Ibid.. 168. Emmy Werner, "Children of the Garden Island." Scientific Americ
an 260(1989): 106111. 169. Alvin H. Lawson, "Placental Guitars, Umbilical Mikes,
and the Maternal Rock-Beat: Birth Fantasies and Rock Music Videos." The Journal
of Psychohistory 21(1994): 335-354.
96
170. Ron Rosenbaum, "Among the Believers." New York Times Magazine, September 24
, 1995, p. 50. 171. Gavin P. Reynolds, "The Amygdala and the Neurochemistry of S
chizophrenia." In John P. Aggleton, Ed., The Amygdala, pp. 561-574. 172. Amputee
s feel pain in the missing limb, a pain which disappears only when the physician
provides a "mirror box" that allows the amputee to "see" his phantom limb resto
red; see U.S. News & World Report, October 2, 1995, p. 78. It is thus reasonable
to assume that people join groups to restore their phantom placentas. 173. Lloy
d deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, p. 289.
174. John Roscooe, The Baganda: An Account of Their Native Customs and Beliefs.
New York: Frank Cass & Co, 1965 (1911). 175. Alvin H. Lawson, "Perinatal Imager
y in UFO Abduction Reports." The Journal of Psychohistory 12(1984): 211-239. 176
. Ibid., p. 218. 177. Lloyd deMause, Reagan's America. New York: Creative Roots,
1984. 178. Joshua S. Goldstein, "Kondratieff Waves as War Cycles." Internationa
l Studies Quarterly 29(1985): 425. 179. Charles W. Socarides, "On Homosexual Dre
ad and Homosexual Desire." Presentation at the American Psychoanalytic Associati
on Meeting December 17, 1995, New York City. 180. Lloyd deMause, Foundations of
Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, pp. 190, 218. 181. The New York T
imes, June 22, 1994, p. C11. Most homicides involve "righteous slaughter" in rev
enge for humiliation; see Jack Katz, Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attr
actions in Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books, 1988, p. 22. 182. Herbert Childs,
An American Genius: The Life of Ernest Orlando Lawrence. New York: Dutton, 1968,
p. 340. 183. Ira Chernus, Dr. Strangegod: On the Symbolic Meaning of Nuclear We
apons. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986, p. 86. 184. Charles L
. Mee, Jr. Meeting at Postsdam. New York: Evans and Co., 1975, p. 29. 185. Thoma
s Merton, Original Child Bomb. New York: New Directions, 1962.
97
186. Carol Cohn, "'Clean Bombs' and Clean Language." In Jean Bethke Elshtain and
Sheila Tobias, Eds. Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics, an
d Social Theories. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990, p. 41. 187. Robert J.
Lifton, The Broken Connection. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979, p. 371. 188. J
ames Gilligan, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes. New York: G. P. Put
nam's sons, 1992, pp. 195-6. 189. Lloyd deMause, Reagan's America. New York: Cre
ative Roots, 1984, p. 66. 190. William K. Joseph, "Prediction, Psychology and Ec
onomics." The Journal of Psychohistory 15(1987): 110-111. 191. Juha Siltala, "Th
e Welfare State as a Suffocating Medusa." The Journal of Psychohistory 23(1996):
412-414. 192. Liberal Opinion Weekly, December 1, 1995, p. 5. 193. Duncan Linds
ey, The Welfare of Children. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 224. 19
4. Ibid., p. 214. 195. The Nation, May 12, 1997, p. 7. 196. James W. Prescott, "
Deprivation of Human Affection As A Primary Process. In David Gil, Ed., Child Ab
use and Violence. New York: AMS Press, p. 104. 197. Ronald Goldman, Circumcision
:: The Hidden Trauma. Forthcoming. 198. Lars-Erik Nelson, "Welfare Plan Will Dum
p Children on the Streets." Liberal Opinion Week, September 18, 1995, p. 3. 199.
Chicago Sun Times, February 10, 1997, p. 22. 200. The New York Times, October 2
3, 1995, p. A15; The New York Times, November 6, 1995, p. A17. 201. The Atlantic
Monthly, October 1995. 202. The New York Times ,November 13, 1995, p. A29. 203.
The New York Times, May 14, 1995, p. 22.
98
204. J. Larry Brown and ERnesto Pollitt, "Malnutrition, Poverty and Intellectual
Development." Scientific American, February 1996, pp. 38-43. 205. The Washingto
n Post, February 26, 1995, p. C7. 206. Molly Ivins, "Many Horrors in GOP Budget.
" Liberal Opinion Week, December 18, 1995, p. 7. 207. The New York Times, Januar
y 6, 1996, p. A1. 208. The Journal of Psychohistory Vol. 21, No. 1, Summer 1993
and Vol. 24, No. 4, Spring 1997. 209. Arloc Sherman, Wasting America's Future: T
he Children's Defense Fund Report on the Costs of Child Poverty. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1994, p. 62. 210. Ronald Kotulak, Inside the Brain: Revolutionary Discove
ries of How the Mind Works. Kansas City: Andres and McMeel, 1996, p. 8.
99
Chapter 5 The Psychogenic Theory of History
"Trauma demands repetition." -Selma Fraiberg
Social scientists have rarely been interested in psychology. Using the model of
Newtonian physics, they have usually depicted individuals as opaque billiard bal
ls bouncing off each other. That individuals might have their own complex intern
al motivations for the way they act in society-that they have emotions that affe
ct their social behavior-has rarely been acknowledged. The most interesting ques
tion about any group, one which we asked even as children-"Why are they doing th
at?"-is rarely asked in academia. Durkheim, in fact, founded sociology with stud
ies of suicide and incest that claimed these very private acts were wholly witho
ut individual psychological causes, claiming that understanding individual motiv
ations is irrelevant to understanding society.1 By eliminating psychology from t
he social sciences, Durkheim laid down the principle followed by most social the
orists today: "The determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the
social facts preceding it and not among the states of individual consciousness.
" 2 THE DENIAL OF PSYCHOLOGY IN THE STUDY OF SOCIETY Sociologists still echo Dur
kheim's bias against psychology. Most agree with the sociologist C. Wright Mills
, who advised me when I was his research assistant at Columbia University, "Stud
y enough psychology to make sure you can answer the bastards when they attack yo
u." Sociologist Thomas Scheff agrees: "There is a strong tradition in modern sch
olarship in the human sciences of ignoring emotions as causes."3 Political scien
tists follow the same assumptions: "Political attitudes are generally assumed to
be the result of a rational, reflective process."4 Most anthropologists concur;
as Murdock summed up their view, "The science of culture is independent of the
laws of biology and psychology."5 Those anthropologists, from Roheim, Deveraux a
nd LaBarre to Whiting, Munroe and Spiro,6 who began studying the effects of chil
dhood on culture have been grossly ignored by other anthropological theorists. I
n fact, most anthropologists today are so opposed to psychological analysis of c
ultures the distinguished series The Psychoanalytic Study of Society has recentl
y been terminated for lack of interest, the number of psychoanalytic anthropolog
ists having dwindled in recent years. Anthropology, says
100
Clifford Geertz, isn't even a "hard science;"7 it's more like literature it's te
lling stories. Even those few anthropologists who belong to the Society for Psyc
hological Anthropology have managed to avoid emotional life so completely that t
heir journal, Ethos, which does contain psychological articles, recently had to
remind anthropologists that "culture consists of ideas in people, not meanings i
n tokens."8 Unfortunately, the anthropologist's central concept that "culture de
termines social behavior" is simply a tautology. Since "culture" only means "the
total pattern of human behavior" (Webster), to say "culture is what makes a gro
up do such and such" is merely stating that a group's behavior causes its behavi
or. Even if culture is restricted to "shared beliefs," it is purely tautological
to then speak of "cultural causation," since all this could mean is "a group of
individuals believe something because they all believe it." Culture is explanan
dum, not explanans. Ever since Kroeber launched cultural determinism as the cent
ral anthropological theory early in the century,9 tautological explanations have
dominated the social sciences as is apparent in Lowie's claim that culture is "
a thing sui generis, the formula being omnia cultura ex cultura."10 That this ta
utological circularity has made anthropological evolutionary theory sterile is s
lowly becoming evident. In fact, according to Tooby and Cosmides, the Standard S
ocial Science Model of cultural determinism has recently collapsed. This model,
they say, states that "the cultural and social elements that mold the individual
precede the individual and are external to the individual. The mind did not cre
ate them; they created the mind,"11 a theory that turns out, they say, to explai
n nothing: A large and rapidly growing body of research from a diversity of disc
iplines has shown that...the Standard Social Science Model is...impossible...It
could not have evolved; it requires an incoherent developmental biology; it cann
ot account for the observed problem-solving abilities of humans or the functiona
l dimension of human behavior...it has repeatedly been empirically falsified; an
d it cannot even explain how humans learn their culture or their language.12 Mos
t historians, too, have assiduously avoided psychology, going along with Paul Ve
yne in believing that history "consists in saying what happened," little more13
or trying to explain history by "impersonal structural forces," as though such a
passionate human enterprise as history could be "impersonal." The result is tha
t I have at least a hundred books on war on my shelf, and I don't recall seeing
the word "anger" in any of them. Nor does the word "love" appear very often in a
ny of the hundreds of books of history, sociology or political science on my she
lves, though most of history has origins in problems of insufficient human love
and all of its derivatives. Most historians are a priori relativists, avoiding a
ny attempt to see personal meaning in historical events, agreeing with Hayden
101
White, history's leading theoretician, in claiming "there are no grounds to be f
ound in the historical record itself for preferring one way of construing its me
aning over another."14 Only the recent disciplines of political psychology and p
sychohistory have begun to consider inner meanings and motivations as the focus
of causation in social theory.15 This passionate denial of the influence of indi
vidual developmental psychology on society has been at the center of the social
sciences since their beginnings. The actions of individuals in society have a pr
iori been assumed by social philosophers from Hobbes to Marx to be determined by
pure self-interest, "a war of every man against every man," based on an assumed
selfish nature of humanity.16 The same is true of economics. As one economist p
uts it, "Economic man must be both rational and greedy."17 In fact, Hobbesian mo
dels have been accepted by John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Edmund Burk
e, Karl Marx and all their contemporary followers-their theories differ only in
the arrangements of social institutions suggested by the authors to handle this
basic rational selfishness. Social behavior, using these models, cannot therefor
e be (a) irrational (because all men use only reason to achieve their goals), (b
) empathic (because empathy for others would not be totally self-interested), (c
) self-destructive (because no one can rationally ever want to hurt themselves),
nor (d) sadistic (because people don't waste their resources just to harm other
s). At most, people might be shortsighted or uninformed in their social behavior
, but not unreasonable, benevolent, suicidal or vicious-i.e., not human. The exc
lusion of the most powerful human feelings other than greed from social and poli
tical theory plus the elimination of irrationality and selfdestructiveness from
models of society explains why the social sciences have such a dismal record in
providing any historical theories worth studying. As long as "social structure"
and "culture" are deemed to lie outside human psyches, motivations are bound to
be considered secondary, reactive solely to outside conditions rather than thems
elves being determinative for social behavior. Nor have the few attempts by soci
al and political theorists to use psychoanalytic theory to explain history been
very successful. This is true whether the theorists have been sociologists, like
Marcuse or Parsons, or psychoanalysts, like Freud or Rheim.18 Outside of a handfu
l of psychoanalytic anthropologists, most rely on the same basic Hobbesian model
of society, with selfish individuals remorselessly fighting each other for util
itarian goals, rather than analyzing how individuals actually relate in groups i
n history. The reason for this failure of social and political theory bears some
scrutiny, as it will allow us to move away from an ahistorical,
102
drive-based psychology to a historical, trauma-based psychology that can be used
in understanding historical change. But first we will have to know something ab
out the effects of childrearing on adult personality. THE QUESTION OF THE EFFECT
S OF CHILD ABUSE Ever since Jeffrey Masson wrote his book The Assault on the Tru
th: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory,19 there has been a widespread m
isconception that Freud backed down from maintaining the reality of childhood se
xual abuse. The truth is exactly the opposite. Freud continued all his life to s
tate that sexual abuse of children in his society was widespread, insisting in h
is final writings that "I cannot admit [that] I exaggerated the frequency [of] s
eduction," that "most analysts will have treated cases in which such [incestuous
] events were real and could be unimpeachably established," that "actual seducti
on...is common enough," that "the sexual abuse of children is found with uncanny
frequency among school teachers and child attendants," and that "phantasies of
being seduced are of particular interest, because so often they are not phantasi
es but real memories."20 What he actually "backed down" from was his initial ide
a that hysteria could be caused by sexual abuse, since, he said, "sexual assault
s on small children happen too often for them to have any aetiological importanc
e..."21 That is, it was because children were so commonly sexually abused in his
society that Freud thought that seduction could not be the cause of hysteria. O
therwise, nearly everyone would be a hysteric! The only opinion he changed as he
gained clinical experience, Freud said, was that further information now became
available relating to people who had remained normal, and this led to the unexp
ected finding that the sexual history of their childhood did not necessarily dif
fer in essentials from that of neurotics, and, in particular, that the part play
ed by seduction was the same in both cases.22 Even though the notion is now wide
ly accepted that Freud "changed his mind" on the reality of widespread childhood
sexual abuse in his society, this is not so. A few psychoanalysts recently have
begun to read what Freud actually wrote and have discovered that "what Freud re
jected was not patients' reports of incest and seduction but rather his reconstr
uction of fragments of the patient's memories that he initially inferred to indi
cate an earlier seduction...."23 i.e., his guesses about the first three years o
f life.24 He did not change his mind and call most seduction memories fantasy; i
n fact, as one psychoanalyst concludes, "Neither Freud nor other analysts have a
pparently ever published a case in which a patient told of a parental seduction
that turned out to be a verifiable fantasy."25
103
The truth is that Freud and most everyone else in his society knew very well wha
t I have since confirmed by my research into the history of child assault: that
the overwhelming majority of all children throughout history were sexually abuse
d. 26 The sexual abuse of children today is still very widespread, though it is
now less than in the past. A century ago, the majority of children were probably
abused. In a paper called "The Universality of Incest," I have examined current
surveys of child sexual abuse around the world-defined as actual genital contac
t, usually involving penetration-with figures of about 50 percent for America, C
anada and England and much higher figures for the Near and Far East.27 The perce
ntages a century ago were likely even higher as I have documented in "The Evolut
ion of Childhood" and as will be further documented in this book since most peop
le thought having sex with children was harmless because "they soon forgot about
it." Indeed, Freud said he himself was sexually seduced as a child by his "teac
her in sexual matters," his childhood nursemaid.28 A PREVIEW OF THE RECENT HISTO
RY OF CHILD ASSAULT Both men and women have commonly used children sexually thro
ughout history. Mothers and other caretakers used their children as erotic objec
ts, and were often instructed by doctors to masturbate their little boys "to mak
e their penises grow longer."29 The author of the nineteenth century's standard
work on The Sexual Life of Children, Albert Moll, said he observed that nursemai
ds and servants often carried out "all sorts of sexual acts" on children "for fu
n."30 Freud agreed, saying that "nursemaids, governesses and domestic servants [
were] guilty of [grave sexual] abuses,"31 that "seduction is common...initiated.
..by someone in charge of the child who wants to soothe it, or send it to sleep
or make it dependent on them" and that "nurses put crying children to sleep by s
troking their genitals."32 Freud was straightforward about how common the erotic
use of children was by parents and others, referring to "the 'affection' shown
by the child's parents and those who look after him, which seldom fails to betra
y its erotic nature ('the child is an erotic plaything')..."33 Men throughout hi
story have commonly raped little boys and girls, as far back as antiquity when p
ederasty was a regular part of every boy's life and the rape of little girls was
so common that many doctors reported that intact hymens in girls were considere
d a rare abnormality.34 By Freud's time, incest was still so widespread that doc
tors visiting homes of men who had venereal diseases often discovered that their
children had the same disease on their anuses, mouths or genitals. 35 Doctors c
oncluded that "sexual acts committed against children are very frequent,"
104
particularly by fathers.36 Children including Freud, whose family lived in a one
-room apartment37 usually slept in their parents' or nursemaid's bed during chil
dhood, which made them available for taking a part in the parent's sexual interc
ourse. 38 In working-class families, where seduction was less secretive, the sex
ual abuse of girls by their fathers and brothers was so widely acknowledged that
they often joked about their babies being products of incestuous intercourse. 3
9 Most adults believed that until the age of 5 or so little children did not rea
lly remember what was done to them, so they could be sexually molested without c
onsequences.40 Child rape, including incest, was rarely prosecuted, for, as one
man said coming out of a trial during which a man had been let go after raping a
little girl, "What nonsense! Men should not be punished for a thing like that.
It doesn't harm the child."41 Incest even today is usually considered a minor fe
lony, probation-eligible, similar to adultery; in fact, virtually all child sexu
al abuse today goes unpunished, because it is either undiscovered or unprosecute
d or routinely plea-bargained.42 Nor was the massive sexual use of children in F
reud's time so hidden. Just as today there are 100 million child prostitutes aro
und the world,43 during the nineteenth century they were even more prevalent, si
nce every city had child prostitutes available in quantity for any man who had a
bit of available change.44 Nor was the beating of children a practice to which
most adults in history were addicted considered traumatic to the child by Freud
and his contemporaries. Severe, routine beating under the guise of discipline ha
s been the lot of most children in most times throughout history; the further ba
ck in history one goes, the more often adults hit children.45 In Germany, a 1964
survey still showed 80 percent of parents beat their children with a panoply of
instruments that included whips, canes, bundles of sticks, shovels and cats-o'-
nine-tails.46 These beatings began in infancy, continued as the daily reality of
children's lives according to their autobiographies, 47 and were a regular prac
tice in schools.48 Freud nowhere mentioned beating as traumatic to children; his
only paper that mentions beating says it is the child's wish to be beaten that
causes emotional problems.49 Nor does he mention swaddling, the universal practi
ce common in his time of tying up infants for a year and longer so they continuo
usly lived in their own urine and feces.50 Likewise missing from his work was su
ch regular practices as the use of enemas beginning in infancy51 and the terrori
zing of children with dummies to control them,52 plus the continuous abandonment
, terrorizing, betrayal, shaming and other traumatic emotional abuse that have b
een the common practices of most parents throughout history. Unlike contemporary
psychoanalysis, Freud did not say that the tying up (swaddling), beating and se
xual molestation that his patients had all been subjected
105
to as children by their caretakers was traumatic nor that these assaults were th
e cause of their neurosis. In fact, he sometimes said seduction was beneficial,
as, for instance, when women seduce little boys, about which he wrote that "One
can regularly observe in the circle of one's acquaintances that...men who have b
een seduced by women at an early age escape neurasthenia."53 He nowhere describe
d the molestation of children as painful or as a betrayal of trust or as intense
ly humiliating to the helpless child. He believed seduction presented problems o
nly in the sense that it sometimes provided "unconsummated" excitation.54 Sexual
seductions, he said, "produced no effect on the child"55 until a later event aw
akened the memory of the assault by "deferred action."56 Even one of his biograp
hers wondered why after Freud discussed the "precocious experience of sexual rel
ations with actual excitement of the genitals resulting from sexual abuse [he] w
ith an almost absurd lack of logic...claimed that the precocious sexual exciteme
nt had little or no effect on the child."57 In fact, Freud concluded that becaus
e "sexual assaults on small children happen too often for them to have any aetio
logical importance, [hysteria] could not lie in the nature of the experiences, s
ince other people remained healthy in spite of being exposed to the same precipi
tating causes [rape]."58 Therefore, he said, when he discovered infantile sexual
ity, he decided he had "overrated the importance [note: not the incidence] of se
duction"59 and concluded that "the 'traumatic' element in the sexual experiences
of childhood [he means seduction] lost its importance [since] obviously seducti
on is not required in order to arouse a child's sexual life."60 DENIAL OF THE EF
FECTS OF SEXUAL ABUSE Freud was very much part of general opinion in considering
the seduction of children as harmless. Freud even sided with perpetrators of se
duction. In the case of Dora, for instance, who was molested at age 14 by a frie
nd of her father's, Freud said, by a "kiss upon her lips [and] the pressure of h
is erect member against her body,"61 Freud agreed with the father, who said she
should not have objected, since the molester was a friend of his. Freud declared
the girl was "hysterical" because she complained about the assault on her: "I s
hould without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexu
al excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasu
rable..."62 He blamed the children because their sensuousness provoked the sexua
l assaults by adults: "The last word on the subject of traumatic etiology [is] t
hat the sexual constitution which is peculiar to children is precisely calculate
d to provoke sexual experiences of a particular kind namely traumas."63 His psyc
hoanalytic colleagues often blamed the victim too. Karl Abraham called sexual mo
lestation of his patients by adults "desired by the child
106
unconsciously [because of an] abnormal psycho-sexual constitution,"64 concluding
they had "an abnormal desire for obtaining sexual pleasure, and in consequence
of this undergo sexual traumas."65 Many other psychoanalysts after Freud continu
ed to label patient reports of childhood sexual abuse "wishes."66 As one recalle
d, "I was taught in my...early years in psychiatry, as most of us were, to look
very skeptically upon the incestuous sexual material described by my patients...
.Any inclination on my part, or that of my colleagues in the training situation,
to look upon these productions of the patient as having some reality basis was
scoffed at and was seen as evidence of our naivet."67 This has recently begun to c
hange in a few institutes of psychoanalysis in some countries. Opinion has not r
eally changed so much, unfortunately, in either academia or psychiatry. While ma
ny give lip service to the illegality of sexual abuse of children, real opinion
is quite different, as I have found from having given many speeches on the histo
ry of child abuse to academic and mental health audiences in the past three deca
des. Academics who study human sexuality often agree with Kinsey ("It is difficu
lt to understand why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be di
sturbed at having its genitalia touched...or disturbed at even more specific sex
ual contacts"),68 his co-author Pomeroy ("incest between adults and younger chil
dren can...be a satisfying and enriching experience"),69 sexual historians Edwar
des and Masters ("there is no shame in being a...pederast or a rapist if one is
satisfied"), 70 social worker LeRoy Schultz "[incest can be] a positive, healthy
experience")71 or any of the hundreds of others in anthropology, psychology and
history who preach the pro-pedophile agenda in their fields today.72 Scholarly
academic journals have even published special issues praising pedophilia as "nur
turant" and advocating abolishing all laws against sex with children.73 The reco
rd of psychiatry is little better. When I gave an address at the American Psychi
atric Association Convention in Philadelphia on the subject "The History of Chil
d Assault," I gave extensive evidence showing that the majority of children toda
y in the countries for which we have statistics were sexually abused. The audien
ce eventually seemed to admit that what I said could be true. Then they discusse
d among themselves the following proposition: "If childhood sexual abuse has bee
n so widespread for so long, then perhaps we are wrong, and we shouldn't be crea
ting a conflict in children's minds. Since everyone does it, maybe sex between c
hildren and adults isn't wrong at all." In addition, they asked the question: "W
hat 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 a
s a disorder only if it bothered the pedophile, professing, according to one dis
sident
107
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 doi
ng." Otherwise, having sex with children can be healthy.74 What becomes evident
is that most people in every society including our own believe that sex between
adults and children is not really traumatic and is not the cause of emotional pr
oblems. Freud was not the only person to completely deny the traumatic origin of
the emotional problems his patients brought to him-they continue to be denied b
y most people even today. Because of this denial, it makes sense that so much cl
inical research during the past century into the causes of mental illness has co
nsisted mainly of investigation of repressed unacceptable wishes rather than of
dissociated traumatic memories of real events, ignoring the crucial fact that no
one gets sick because of wishes alone without the traumas that are linked to th
em. This concentration on wishes rather than traumas also explains, I think, why
depth psychology has failed to contribute much to social or political theory. F
or if the unconscious consists only of repressed wishes which have their source
in drives, psyches and therefore societies cannot change, since these "drives,"
coming from virtually unchanged gene pools, must have stayed the same while our
psyches and social patterns change over time. But if the unconscious is acknowle
dged to include both wishes and traumatic memories of abuse and neglect-memories
of real events which change as the history of childhood evolves-we can explain
social change for the first time. Massive denial of the origin of humanity's pro
blems in the traumatic abuse of children is, then, one and the same as the massi
ve denial of the psychological origins of social behavior. They are two sides of
the same historical coin. Both are rooted in the fact that our deepest fears ar
e stored in a separate brain system that remains largely unexplored by science a
nd that is the source of the restaging of these early traumas in social events.
Only when the contents and psychodynamics of these dissociated traumatic memorie
s are made fully conscious can we understand the waking nightmare that we call h
istory. To achieve this understanding, we must draw upon all the resources of ne
urobiology, experimental, clinical and evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis a
nd psychotherapy, history and the other social sciences in order to provide a fu
lly scientific theory of society.75 To begin this synthesis, I will first review
recent advances in the understanding of the neurobiology of trauma and its stor
age in separate neuronal networks in the brain.
108
THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF PSYCHOHISTORY Although history is obviously not reducible to
human biology, a psychohistorian cannot avoid contending with the hard facts of
neurobiology, since the mind-and therefore the brain-is not, as Locke thought,
a tabula rasa, but a highly complex, flawed end result of an extremely imperfect
evolutionary process. What is more, society is the way it is partly because the
brain is constructed the way it is, and this depends on the specific way the br
ain has evolved.76 Societies are not constructed in the most logical or even mos
t adaptive forms possible. Given the hominid brain we started with, even the mos
t bizarre forms of society revealed by the historical record can be understood a
s the flawed products of evolving psyches and evolving brains. It is therefore e
ssential that psychohistory understand the latest concepts in what has been call
ed the "social neurosciences"77 that are beginning to be able to understand the
effects of early interpersonal experiences between parents and children on the n
eurobiological development of the brain. Since, as the neurobiologist Gerald Ede
lman has put it, "The likelihood of guessing how the brain works without looking
at its structure seems slim," 78 we will begin with a brief overview of brain s
tructure. The brain is composed of over 100 billion neurons, with trillions of c
onnections, dendrites, which are branching extensions from the body of the neuro
n that pass stimuli received by axons on to other neurons through synapses, the
specialized connections between neurons. Since this synaptic activity is either
excitatory or inhibitory, much of mental life and therefore also of the social l
ife is either manic or depressive, and one of the main tasks of leaders, as also
of psychiatrists, is to adjust through social projects the level of excitation
of the brain. Memorization is thought to occur through repeated stimulation of s
ynapses, making them grow bigger and stronger, as neurotransmitters are released
across synaptic gaps.79 Specific memories are stored all over the brain, in a m
uch more fractured way than a computer stores memory in many files. As with a co
mputer, however, the crucial task is retrieval of the memory, using neural netwo
rks or brain modules that serve as "indexes" for the fractured memories. As disc
ussed in the previous chapter, early emotional memories are indexed in a network
centering in the amygdala, while the conscious self system is indexed more in t
he hippocampus and orbital prefrontal cortex,80 giving the brain the ability to
retrieve information stored elsewhere and providing a "working memory" system th
at receives emotional signals from the amygdala.81 A PET scan of the brain, for
instance, made during "free association" shows increased blood flow in this orbi
tofrontal area, thus showing why the psychoanalytic process can tap into uncenso
red private thoughts.82
109
Rysunek 19 5:1 The human brain
The amygdala is predominantly excitatory, stimulating externally oriented behavi
or, and the hippocampus is predominantly inhibitory, comparing current informati
on with existing knowledge. In current situations of danger, the amygdalan syste
m is the first to make your muscles tense and heart beat faster, while the hippo
campal-prefrontal cortical system will remember whom you were with and what you
were doing during the danger, so as to be able to avoid it in the future.83 It i
s the growth of the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and related areas that repres
ents the main evolutionary development of self consciousness (beyond simple grow
th of cortical storage areas), allowing Homo sapiens sapiens to delay responses
while comparing them to past experience and self concepts. When one dreams, one'
s amygdala lights up in the brain scanner like a pinball machine, as powerful ea
rly emotional memories are accessed and incorporated by the hippocampus and pref
rontal cortex with current daily events into long-term personality modules. The
hippocampal-prefrontal cortical and amygdalan memory systems are, in fact, the r
eal "two brains" that dissociate more rational conscious self systems from uncon
scious emotional memories-not a simple "right-brain," "left-brain" split. The ea
rliest regulation of emotion in a specialized amygdalan-prefrontal-orbital netwo
rk first occurs during the mother-infant mutual gaze dialogues: The common invol
vement [in infants] of orbital, temporal, and amygdala neurons in the processing
of sensory (particularly visual) information of emotional significance has sugg
ested that they 'may form part of a specialized neural system for the processing
of social stimuli.'..The furthest terminus of this circuit, the orbitofrontal c
ortex, represents the hierarchical apex of this system. This is functionally exp
ressed in its unique capacity to categorize, abstract, store, and regulate the p
racticing infant's emotional responses to the face of the attachment figure.84 W
hen emotional memories are traumatic either because the trauma was so early that
the hippocampus was not yet functional or because it was so powerful that the h
ippocampal-prefrontal cortical system couldn't fully register it-they become per
manent, dissociated fears of anything that might resemble the traumatic situatio
n. Traumas that are inescapable because of helplessness can actually severely da
mage
110
the hippocampus, killing neurons. Survivors of severe childhood abuse and vetera
ns with post-traumatic stress syndrome are found to have smaller hippocampal vol
umes than other patients.85 This damage is caused by the release during traumati
zation of a cascade of cortisol, adrenaline and other stress hormones that not o
nly damage brain cells and impair memory but also set in motion a long-lasting d
isregulation of the brain's biochemistry. Animals that are traumatized when they
are young grow up to be cowardly bullies, with less vasopressin, which regulate
s aggression, and serotonin, the calming neurotransmitter, which has been shown
to be low in delinquents and in children who have been regularly beaten by their
parents.86 Low serotonin is the most important marker for violence in animals a
nd humans, and has been correlated with high rates of homicide, suicide, arson,
antisocial disorders, self-mutilation, and other disorders of aggression.87 Earl
y emotional abandonment by the mother or significant family members regularly lo
wers the serotonin level of children. Harlow's motherless monkeys who became ext
remely fearful and socially violent as adults like Coleman's eleven-month-old pa
tient whose serotonin level dropped by half following the death of his sister, d
emonstrate the dramatic effects of trauma on serotonin levels.88 Imbalances in n
eurotransmitter levels resulting from trauma can last for decades in post-trauma
tic stress disorders and even in Holocaust survivors.89 Consciousness which Llins
believes90 is a 40-hertz oscillation in the entire brain network that binds toge
ther cortical and limbic systems is present during wakefulness and dream (REM) s
leep. Dreaming is a sort of "down-time" for current experience, when daily memor
ies are evaluated against early amygdalan emotional memories, processed into lon
g-term memory and stored in the neocortex.91 But traumatic stress seriously inte
rferes with the processing of these memories and their accessibility to consciou
sness. The fears, anxieties and hypervigilance of traumatic stress sets off a ca
scade of hormones and neurotransmitters that disrupts hippocampal functioning, l
eaving memories to be stored as dissociated affective states or body memories th
at are incapable of being retrieved through normal hippocampal indexing.92 Van d
er Kolk believes that often these memories are dissociated because they were nev
er really stored in consciousness in the first place. 93 Moreover, the "lack of
secure attachments may produce the most devastating effects," he says, "because
consistent external support appears to be a necessary condition in learning how
to regulate internal affective states....Dissociation is a method of coping with
inescapable stress [allowing] infants to enter into trance states and to ignore
current sensory input..."94 As Eigen puts it in his book, The Psychotic Core, "
The aggression perpetrated on the young in the name of upbringing is often tinge
d with
111
or masks madness. Both parent and child live out this madness in a trancelike st
ate akin to dreaming."95 It is these early trance states that are repeated in th
e social trances of history. THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF RESTAGING The massive secreti
on of norepinephrine and dopamine, serotonin and endogenous opioids that follows
inescapable trauma is followed by a subsequent depletion of hormones, presumabl
y because utilization exceeds synthesis. Eventually receptors become hypersensit
ive, leading to excessive responsiveness to even the possibility of trauma in la
ter life.96 It is this massive "false-alarm system" that leads to reenactments a
nd then to restagings of trauma reenactments with new anxietyreducing elements t
hat is at the heart of social behavior in humans. Depletion of neurotransmitters
after traumatic flooding results in hyperalertness to any situations that seem
to indicate they may lead to reexperiencing the trauma. This, of course, is true
of all animals, and they later simply avoid the dangers in the future. But huma
ns are unique in possessing a developed hippocampal-prefrontal cortical-centered
consciousness whose task it is to inhibit action so as to avoid potentially tra
umatic situations. When trauma occurseven very early trauma-humans are unique in
believing they are responsible for the trauma. It is astonishing how early and
consistently this is seen in clinical practice. Lenore Terr tells of a girl play
ing with dolls and repeating her sexual molestion by pornographers that happened
when she was 15 months old.97 She was dissociated from any conscious memories o
f the events, but accurately repeated being penetrated by an erect penis the sam
e way she had been in the pornographic films, which had been retrieved by the po
lice. The accuracy of her body memories is amazing enough, but what was most ast
onishing was what she said as she restaged the raping scene: "Who is this? My do
ll. She's laying on the bed naked. I cover her up....I'm yelling at the doll. Sh
e was bad! I yell at my doll...'You! You bad thing! Get to bed, you!'" She felt
guilty about her own rape! But children usually feel guilty about being traumati
zed. "I must have been too noisy, because mommy left me" was my sincere belief w
hen my mother left my father. I also believed I deserved my father's strappings
because I wasn't obedient enough. This is why children set up a separate, intern
al self as a "protector" to try to stop themselves from ever being noisy, pushy,
sexual, demanding, in fact, to stop them from growing and thus reexperiencing t
rauma. At first, these internal "protectors" are friendly; sometimes they are re
presented as imaginary playmates or even as protective alters if the traumas are
severe or repetitive.98 Later, particularly
112
when adolescence brings on opportunities for greater exploration and especially
dating, these protective selves become persecutory selves that "have had it" wit
h the host self and actually try to harm it.
99
The persecutory self says, "It's not happening
to me, it's happening to her, and she deserves it!" Rather than take a chance th
at the early trauma will once again catch one unaware and helpless, one might re
stage the trauma upon oneself or others, or both, at least controlling the timin
g and intensity of the trauma oneself.100 Before adolescence, one will often res
tage 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 sh
e was 18 months old would repeatedly charge into classmates, knocking them over
as she restaged her accident. 101 Or a 7year-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.102 But after adolescence, the restaging more often inclu
des self-persecution, bringing about the dreaded event oneself either through hy
pervigilant 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 activit
ies of delinquents who were neglected as infants or the sexual promiscuity of yo
ung girls who had been seduced. It is important to keep in mind that it is not "
stress" or even "trauma" alone that causes restaging of early events. If the tra
umas are not dissociated, if they can be remembered by the conscious mind, they
are not split off so they need not be repeated. For instance, 732 Jewish childre
n who survived concentration camps after having gone through literal hell for th
ree years, formed a club in England after their rescue. No greater amount of chi
ldhood trauma can be imagined that what they went through, yet, as they wrote in
their newsletter later, "our greatest achievement and tremendous source of prid
e is that we can boast of having no delinquents, criminals, revenge-seekers and
above all, none of us is consumed with hatred and venom."103 Because Jews didn't
blame themselves for their persecution, they could remember and didn't dissocia
te. So they didn't need to either revictimize themselves nor make others victims
. Revictimization is actually the central cause of anti-social behavior, and add
iction to trauma is at its core.104 It is not surprising that prison psychiatris
ts find violent criminals invariably repeat in their crime the emotional traumas
, abuse and humiliation of their childhood,105 or that women who have been sexua
lly abused in childhood are more than twice as likely as others to be raped when
they become adults.106 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."107 W
hat Freud was puzzled by108
113
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 ar
e therefore restaged as a defense, with the persecutory self as the stage direct
or. 109 Restaging as a defense against dissociated trauma is the crucial flaw in
the evolution of the human mind understandable from the viewpoint of the indivi
dual as a way of maintaining sanity, but tragic in its effects upon society, sin
ce it means that early traumas will be magnified onto the historical stage into
war, domination and selfdestructive social behavior. And because we also restage
by inflicting our childhood terrors upon our children, generation after generat
ion, our addiction to the slaughterbench of history has been relentless. FEARS O
F INDIVIDUATION AND GROWTH PANIC The crowning achievement of the human species-o
ur self-consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a private person with a past
history and future goals-has taken so long to evolve and has been so uneven that
humanity is a species with extremely fragile selves. Chimpanzees barely have en
ough self-awareness to recognize themselves in a mirror,110 and early humans beg
an to evolve selfconsciousness through slowly improving parenting, resulting mai
nly from the mother's growing empathy toward her child. Eigen observes from the
disintegrating selves of psychotics, "The way individuals are ripped apart by ps
ychotic processes brings home the realization that the emergence of a viable sen
se of self and other must be counted as one of the most creative achievements of
humankind"111 an achievement, I will show, it has taken millenia to acomplish.
As Modell points out, 112 the emergent private self grows as the child explores
its environment with the regular help of its caretakers. Therefore, children who
se immature parents use them for their own emotional needs, and who reject them
when the child's needs do not reflect their own, develop what Winnicott calls a
"false self," or even multiple selves, which may conform to society but cannot i
mprove upon it. It is because of this that social evolution depends upon the evo
lution of the viable self, which in turn is achieved solely through the slow and
uneven evolution of childrearing. Traumas are defined as injuries to the privat
e self, rather than just painful experiences, since non-painful injuries to the
self such as parental genital manipulation or being told by a parent that they w
ished one would die are more traumatic to the self than, say, more painful accid
ents.113 Without a well-developed, enduring private self, people feel threatened
by all progress, all freedom, all new challenges, and then experience annihilat
ion anxiety, fears that the fragile self is
114
disintegrating, since situations that call for self-assertion trigger memories o
f maternal abandonment. Masterson calls this by the umbrella term "abandonment d
epression," beneath which, he says, "ride the Six Horsemen of the Psychic Apocal
ypse: Depression, Panic, Rage, Guilt, Helplessness (hopelessness), and Emptiness
(void) [that] wreak havoc across the psychic landscape leaving pain and terror
in their wake."114 Whether the early traumas or rejections were because the moth
ers were openly abandoning, over-controlling and abusive, clinging, or just thre
atened by the child's emerging individuation, the results are much the same-the
child learns to fear parts of his or her potential self that threatens the disap
proval or loss of the mother. As Socarides has observed,115 fears of growth, ind
ividuation and self assertion that carry hreatening feelings of disintegration l
ead to desires to merge with the omnipotent mother literally to crawl back into
the womb desires which immediately turn into fears of maternal engulfment, since
the merging would involve total loss of the self. When Socarides' patients make
moves to individuatelike moving into their own apartment or getting a new job-t
hey have dreams of being swallowed by whirlpools or devoured by monsters. The on
ly salvation from these maternal engulfment wishes/fears is a "flight to externa
l reality from internal reality,"116 a flight in which social institutions play
a central role, as we shall shortly discover. Many people who have been in psych
otherapy become conscious of this individuation panic and flight to external rea
lity when they begin to grow, break free of old emotional patterns and start to
feel their freedom. These fears can be characterized as an all-pervasion growth
panic that traumatized individuals (nearly everyone) constantly carry around dur
ing their daily lives. Masterson quotes one of his patients: I was walking down
the street and suddenly I was engulfed in a feeling of absolute freedom. I could
taste it. I knew I was capable of doing whatever I wanted. When I looked at oth
er people, I really saw them without being concerned about how they were looking
at me...I was just being myself and thought that I had uncovered the secret of
life: being in touch with your own feelings and expressing them openly with othe
rs, not worrying so much about how others felt about you. Then just as suddenly
as it came, it disappeared. I panicked and started thinking about the million th
ings I had to do at the studio, of errands I needed to run after work. I began t
o feel nauseous and started sweating. I headed for my apartment, running most of
the way. When I got in, I felt that I had been pursued. By what? Freedom, I gue
ss.117 It is this manic flight to action a flight that is a defense against grow
th panic that is the emotional source of much of social behavior. Manic acting-o
ut in social activity is a universal addiction, similar in its effects to the do
pamine agonistic effects
115
of cocaine. That's why leaders so often take manic drugs, like John F. Kennedy d
uring the Gulf Crisis (amphetamines) and George Bush during the Gulf War (Halcio
n). Like drugs, grandiose manic social activities such as war and political domi
nation produce a temporary elation and a dopamine surge, but not the lasting joy
of self-discovery and love. HOW TRAUMATIC IS CHILDHOOD? The incidence of trauma
in childhood, past and present, will be a central focus of the rest of this boo
k. Some idea, however, of the extent of childhood trauma would be useful in this
chapter on social and political theory. My overall conclusions have not changed
after three decades of additional research from what I wrote in The History of
Childhood: The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recen
tly begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level o
f child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten,
terrorized, and sexually abused.118 Childhood is still massively traumatic for t
he majority of the children in the world. For instance, one of the most often-ci
ted facts of American life is the exposure of children to violence in urban comm
unities-one recent study showed 40 percent of children surveyed reported exposur
e to a shooting or stabbing in the past year, 36 percent reported being threaten
ed with physical harm in the past year and 74 percent reported feeling unsafe in
their communities.119 Various studies of violence in the home reveal that over
90 percent of American parents regularly hit their children, mostly with hair br
ushes, paddles or belts,120 20 percent of them severely, with heavy instruments
that endanger their lives.121 Rates of child thrashing in European countries are
rarely much lower than this.122 And despite widespread denial by anthropologist
s of the high frequency of physical assault on children of other cultures,123 mo
st children elsewhere around the world today are still beaten unmercifully by th
eir caretakers.124 The most evolved country in the world today is Sweden, which
passed a law in 1979 against hitting children, so that a new generation of paren
ts now generally refrains from hitting their children.125 Sexual molestation of
children is still so widespread that in my world-wide survey of the subject, "Th
e Universality of Incest," I concluded that the sexual abuse of children was lik
ely to have been a universal practice for most people in most places at most tim
es in history, and that children who had not been sexually molested by their car
etakers were a recent historical achievement, experienced by only a minority of
children in a few places in the world. 126 The most careful statistics
116
of childhood seduction in America, using structured interview techniques that we
re able to acknowledge the resistances of the respondents and defining molestati
on as actual genital contact, found 38 percent (Russell) or 45 percent (Wyatt) o
f women and 30 percent of men (Landis) interviewed reported memories of sexual a
buse during their childhood.127 Adjusting these figures for such elements as the
bias introduced by the population interviewed that eliminates criminals, prosti
tutes, juveniles in shelters and psychotics-all of whom have much higher molesta
tion rate-plus the large percentage of people who refused to be interviewed and
were likely more victimized, I concluded that the true rate of childhood molesta
tion in America is about 60 percent for girls and 45 percent for boys. A Gallup
poll of Canadian childhood molestation reported about the same figures as in Ame
rica. Though most European studies are decades behind those of the U.S., when a
recent BBC "ChildWatch" program asked its female listeners if they could remembe
r sexual molestation, 62 percent recalled actual intercourse. As was mentioned e
arlier, a recent Institut fr Kindheit survey that interviewed Berlin schoolchildre
n in one neighborhood directly (direct interviews of children for any purpose ar
e extremely rare) found 80 percent said they had been sexually molested.128 Thou
gh surveys of childhood abuse are unknown in the rest of the world, my evidence
showed even higher rates were likely in the East and Middle East, where boys and
girls are masturbated and raped by the men in the family and others as a matter
of course, and, as both Indian and Chinese proverbs have it, "For a girl to be
a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers nor cousin nor father.
"129 This molestation by the family is further extended by such sexual assaults
as the estimated 100 million child prostitutes worldwide and female genital muti
lation, an extremely traumatic parental sexual assault, recently estimated at 74
million women in the circum-Mediterranean area.130 Once these beating and sexua
l abuse figures are added to fetal traumas (one in three pregnant women in Ameri
ca are hit or kicked by their mates),131 plus all the other abusive and accident
al traumas that are commonly experienced by children,132 and then added to all t
he neglect, rejection, brutal domination and other severe emotional tortures tha
t are so common they aren't even measured, plus the horrible traumatic effects o
n children of wars, social violence, malnutrition and other common mass traumati
c conditions of children in this world, one must conclude that childhood continu
es to be a nightmare for most children in most areas of the world today. Indeed,
my conclusion from a lifetime of study of the history of childhood is that soci
ety 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
117
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 mos
t effective instrument of collective emotional homeostasis. Most historical fami
lies once practiced infanticide, incest, beating and mutilation of their childre
n to relieve anxieties. We continue today to arrange the killing, maiming, moles
tation 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 spe
cies began. Each generation begins anew with fresh, eager, trusting faces of bab
ies, ready to love and create a new world. And each generation of parents tortur
es, abuses, neglects and dominates its children until they become emotionally cr
ippled adults who repeat in nearly exact detail the social violence and dominati
on that existed in previous decades. Should a minority of parents decrease the a
mount of abuse and neglect of its children a bit and begin to provide somewhat m
ore secure, loving early years that allow a bit more freedom and independence, h
istory soon begins to move in surprising new directions and society changes in i
nnovative ways. History needn't repeat itself; only the traumas demand repetitio
n.133 THE PSYCHOGENIC THEORY OF HISTORY The psychogenic theory of history is a s
cientific, empirical, falsifiable theory based upon a model that involves shared
restagings of dissociated memories of early traumas, the content of which chang
es through the evolution of childhood. It is based upon the conclusion of experi
mental and clinical psychology that psychic content is organized by early emotio
nal relationships, so that psychic structure must be passed from generation to g
eneration through the narrow funnel of childhood. Thus a society's childrearing
practices are not just one item in a list of cultural traints but are the very c
ondition for the transmission and development of all cultural elements. Childrea
ring therefore is crucial because it organizes the emotional structure that dete
rmines the transmission of all culture and places definite limits on what can be
achieved by society. Specific childhoods sustain specific cultural traits, and
once these early experiences no longer occur the trait disappears or is modified
. It is the first social theory that posits love as the central mechanism for hi
storical change-not because I happen to value love as an exemplary trait, but be
cause the clinical, experimental and social sciences of the past century have sh
own that love produces the individuation needed for human innovation-that is, fo
r cultural evolution.
118
It is also the first theory that recognizes the values of methodological individ
ualismseeing properties of groups as a result of the actions of its individual m
embers-yet that also recognizes group evolution, integrating the psychology of i
ndividuals and societies and recognizing that social behavior also has emotional
sources. I call the theory "psychogenic" rather than "economic" or "political"
because it views humans more as homo relatens than homo economicus or homo polit
icus-that is, as searching for relation, for love, more than just for money or p
ower. The theory considers evolving psychoclasses-shared childrearing modes-as m
ore central than economic classes or social classes for understanding history. T
his psychogenic theory is contrasted with the sociogenic theory of all other soc
ial scientists which sees all individual change as merely a reflection of social
change. It instead views adults as having developed new kinds of personalities
due to new childrearing modes, and then as projecting onto the historical stage
earlier traumas and feelings in such a manner that events appear to be happening
to the group rather than being internal, creating shared dreams, group-fantasie
s, that are so intense and compelling that they take on a life of their own, a l
ife that is imagined as happening in a dissociated sphere called "society"-the g
roup-fantasy sandbox of adults.
Rysunek 20 5:2 The Psychogenic Theory of History
Consider a typical example of a traumatized child growing up and joining others
in fashioning a historical group-fantasy. Timothy McVeigh, one of the Oklahoma C
ity bombers, experienced continuous maternal abandonment as a child, according t
o neighbors and relatives, as his restless mother, who regularly cheated on her
husband, kept leaving the family for weeks at a time. 134 Timothy asked friends,
"Is it something I did?" when trying to understand why his mother wasn't there.
When he was ten, he became interested in guns and became a survivalist, collect
ing rifles in case Communists took over the country. When he was sixteen and his
mother left him for good, he began to refer to her as "a bitch" and as "that no
-good whore." Neighbors reported he was often like two people, "angry and scream
ing one minute, then switching to quite normal" for no apparent reason. In the a
rmy, when
119
he failed the Green Beret test-another rejection-he quit in disgust and began ha
nging out with Right-wing militarists. After going to Waco to watch how the gove
rnment had abandoned the children during the siege, he went to Oklahoma City to
act out a scene in a Rightist novel where a group packed a truck with a homemade
bomb and set it off at F.B.I. headquarters. But four months before he acted out
this rage against authority (his mother), McVeigh visited the day care center i
n the building, pretending he had children he wanted to enroll.135 Thus he picke
d out a site where children who had been left by their mothers would be blown up
too, thus punishing abandoned children representatives of himself restaging his
own abandonment and the carrying out the punishment he thought he deserved for
his rage at his mother. The raging part of Timothy McVeigh, elaborated by militi
a group-fantasies, often made him seem, said others, like two people. The proces
s was similar to that observed in the creation of alters, or alternate personali
ties, in people who have Multiple Personality Disorders, a diagnosis recently re
named Dissociated Identity Disorders. Dissociation is defined as "a loss of the
usual interrlationships between various groups of mental processes with resultan
t almost independent function of the one group that has been separated from the
rest,"136 and is involved in such pathological syndromes as hypnosis, depersonal
ization, fugue, sleepwalking, possession and visionary experiences.137 A Dissoci
ated Identity Disorder has three criteria: (a) the personalities seem to be dist
inct and lasting, (b) the dominant personality at any particular time determines
the individual's behavior, and (c) each personality is complex and organized wi
th its own unique behavior patterns.138 There are four possible core dissociativ
e symptoms: amnesia, depersonalization, derealization and identity confusion.139
Severe, repeated child abuse and neglect almost always lie behind the full D.I.
D. disorder. Kluft says, "Most multiples, as children, have been physically brut
alized, psychologically assaulted, sexually violated, and affectively overwhelme
d."140 As Ross puts it, a multiple personality disorder is a little girl imagini
ng that the abuse is happening to someone else. The imaging is so intense and su
bjectively compelling, and is reinforced so many times by the ongoing trauma, th
at the created identities seem to take on a life of their own, though they are a
ll parts of one person.141 Alters often have different names, handwriting, voice
s, vocabularies, expressions, even EEG alpha rhythms, and are often amnesic of e
ach other's activities, although sometimes one alter is co-conscious of the acti
vities of another.142 Sometimes an alter is frozen in time, stuck in the trauma
that gave it birth, and child personalities will often expect to be sexually ass
aulted by the therapist, who is mistaken for the abuser from the past, and cower
in the corner, fearing the inevitable
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rape.143 In addition to the host personality, who is often depressed, masochisti
c, compulsively good and suffers from time losses, there are alters such as fear
ful children who recall the traumas, inner persecutors, containers of forbidden
impulses, avengers, apologists for the abusers, idealized figures who deny dange
rs and so on. The formation of such alters is life-saving, allowing the host per
sonality to defend against unbearable trauma and continue living. Their tragedy
is that these alters restage their traumas in adult life, in what Kluft calls "r
evictimization behaviors" or "the sitting duck syndrome," during which they feel
they are taking control of the abuse and ending the intolerable agony of waitin
g for it to happen.144 In many multiples, one alter is found whose task it is to
persecute the host personality or others who represent the guilty childhood sel
f. "She should die, she deserves to die. She's a loser..." said one alter to her
therapist, referring to her host personality.145 These persecutory alters start
out as protective alters, whose task it is to protect the host against re-exper
iencing early traumas and rejections. But usually some time around puberty, when
the host begins to explore the world and have sexual feelings, the alter turns
totally against the host and says, "She started becoming interested in boys and
dates and all that...I didn't want any part of it...I'd hate her for letting tha
t happen...so I'd cut her."146 From that point on, the alter persecutes the host
personality relentlessly. In this sense, persecutory alters continue to protect
the host against repetition of trauma by punishing all growth-in themselves and
in representatives of themselves. SOCIAL ALTERS AND THE SOCIAL TRANCE Although
few people are diagnosed with dissociative disorders, most people nevertheless h
ave organized, dissociated persecutory personalities whose function it is to pun
ish themselves or substitutes for themselves as "object lessons"-in order to rem
ind them that growth, pleasure and success are dangerous and might precipitate t
rauma or rejection. Child psychologists have recently suggested that perhaps "al
l children have dissociative-like states" and that abuse and neglect leads to th
e "establishment of centers of experience external to the core self during trans
ient hypnotic-like states" that act as early alters.147 As they grow up, these d
issociated parts of their psyche are organized into persecutory social scenarios
that are shared with others, which could be thought of as social alters. McVeig
h switched into and out of his angry, militarist self, his social alter, each ti
me he reexperienced further evidence for abandonment by mother figures. It is a
process we all share to some extent with McVeigh. Rather than living our lives w
holly in our private selves, we choose to live partly in our social alters, wher
e ghosts of our past are disguised as
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social roles in the present. Social alters of individuals collude to produce the
social trance and have five characteristics: (1) they are separate neural netwo
rks that are repositories for feelings, images and scenarios connected with trau
matic abuse and neglect, including the defensive fantasies that go with them; (2
) they are organized into dynamic structures containing an alternate set of goal
s, values and defenses from those of the main self, in order to help prevent the
traumas from overwhelming one's life and to to defend against the reexperiencin
g of the humiliations and persecutions of childhood; (3) they have the central t
ask of organizing and carrying out both the idealizing and the persecutory fanta
sies in society that are the result of these traumas, the idealizing mainly towa
rd male leaders (father-saviors), and the persecutory mainly toward women (perse
cuting mothers) and children (guilty self); (4) (5) they are co-conscious148 of
the central personality, yet they are split off by a seamless wall of denial, de
personalization, discontinuity of affect and disownership of responsibility that
is maintained by collusion with others pretending the alters are normal; and (6
) they are shared and restaged in historical group-fantasies that are elaborated
into political, religious and social institutions. Social alters contain memori
es of severe traumas and rejections and have their own repertoire of defensive b
ehaviors. Experiments have shown that adults who were traumatized as children ar
e more susceptible to hypnosis, to group suggestions, to hysterical religious be
havior and to paranormal experiences.149 Dissociative disorders are what Winnico
tt called "the psychosis hidden behind the neurosis."150 More organized and diss
ociated than just "false selves,"151 social alters differ from alters of multipl
e personalities in that they replace the usual denial by amnesia with denial by
dissociation of emotional connections, maintained through group collusion. Thus,
even though one may be more or less conscious of the activities of one's social
alter-knowing that the self that shoots a child who is an "enemy" is the same p
erson that values one's own child-still, the emotional connections between the t
wo selves are missing. Thus people can imagine they go to war or conduct a genoc
ide because of the chance appearance of an enemy, never because of anything emot
ional happening in their own heads. It is important to remember that a person's
social alter is based upon a fetal matrix and depends upon the early amygdalan m
emory system, repository for our
122
dissociated traumas. Social alters do not include the areas of the brain necessa
ry for conscious empathy.152 It is this missing capacity for empathy that allows
violent acting-out in the social sphere people become so filled with our projec
tions that it becomes impossible for one to "feel their feelings." You can obser
ve this lack of empathy, the fetal matrix and the persecutory agenda by studying
for instance the initiation rituals of some cultures, where boys, considered as
polluted by female fluids, are sealed inside a ritual house with their bodily w
astes, forced to put their heads out a vaginal window to recapitulated birth, an
d then beaten, smeared with blood taken from their penises and otherwise mutilat
ed and tortured. 153 The adults who put the children through the ordeal are comp
letely dissociated from the meaning of the events they enact. They cannot tell w
hy they persecute the boys and cut their penises, and they feel no empathy for t
hose they are torturing, since the boys are so full of the projections of the ad
ults' own traumas. Experimental evidence with social memories demonstrates that
our brains actually store social feelings in separate modules by time period. We
have all experienced how hearing, say, a familiar Beatles song can produce a ca
scade of emotional memories from the Sixties. One experiment showed that people
can revisit these time-bound memory modules. A group of men over seventy years o
ld was taken to a country retreat for five days in 1979 and exposed only to 1959
music, magazines, radio programs, clothes and activities. The men soon not only
held conversations as though it were 1959, their biological markers-their hand
grip, posture, hearing, etc.-actually became younger. They had switched into ear
lier memory modules and began accessing anew 1959 feelings simply by being immer
sed in earlier social material.154 Apparently there is enough room in the hundre
d billion neurons in our brain to record social emotional states by specific per
iods. Social alters are like suitcases into which we stuff our most traumatic sp
lit-off fears and rages, containing our continuing lives as traumatized children
, abuser apologists, inner persecutors, heroic avengers and other consciously in
tolerable parts of ourselves, all organized into social postures. The social alt
er is based upon fantasies that are defenses against traumas, not upon present-d
ay reality, even when it participates in present-day political or religious grou
p activities. The defensive fantasies are unreal even when the entire society ma
y agree upon their reality. When a group of men collects human heads, believing
that this will increase their genital potency, or a group of women chop off thei
r little girls' clitorises, believing that otherwise they might grow to be a foo
t long, these beliefs are obviously derived from defensive group-fantasies, not
from experience. The same people can have an excellent knowledge of reality in t
heir host personalities, with extensive hunting or
123
agricultural skills based upon the real-life experiences of their group, but in
their social alters they are nevertheless convinced of the efficacy of chopping
off heads and clitorises. Except for a few psychopaths and psychotics, most of u
s keep these suitcases for our social alters in the closet with the door locked,
seemingly away from our daily lives-but then we lend the keys to group delegate
s whom we depend upon to act out their contents for us so we can deny ownership
of the actions. Periodically, when the group and its leader are imagined to be c
ollapsing-when our despair becomes too great, our social alters seem too distant
so that we feel depleted of vital parts of ourselves, and our hypervigalence is
at an unbearable peak-the contents of these suitcases begin to break loose, we
enter a panic state, and our early fears and other emotional memories are restag
ed in wars or other forms of social violence. All the accomplishments of our con
scious personalities-self-awareness, the ablity to imagine the consequences of a
ctions and learning from experience, the capability of feeling empathy for other
s, the awareness of the passage of time, the ability to construct a realistic fu
ture, responsibity for one's actions-are missing in our social alters, and are n
ot part of the group-fantasies we act out in history. Depersonalization is exper
ienced whenever we are in our social alters, and we enter into a trance-like sta
te-what happens in "society" has a feeling of unreality or strangeness of self,
a loss of affective response. Even though, as with other dissociative disorders,
some reality testing remains intact, an absence of normal feelings and a discon
nection from one's usual range of emotions are regularly felt when in one's soci
al alter. Even the language of group-fantasies is special, since social alters m
ust communicate in elliptical form in order that their unacceptable true content
s may remain hidden to our main selves. Therefore, group-fantasies are often con
veyed by subliminal embedded messages rather than clear, overt language. We will
shortly see how to decode these embedded messages through fantasy analysis. Gro
ups speak this embedded language when they are in a social trance,155 when they
re-experience the same trance-like dissociation they felt during early traumas.
Leaders of groups must therefore be adept at trance induction techniques in orde
r to accomplish their delegated tasks. In fact, group-fantasies, like politics i
n general, are conducted in a trance atmosphere whose features are identical to
the eight "Cognitive Distortions of Dissociation" that Fine found in her dissoci
ated patients: catastrophizing, overgeneralization, selective abstraction, dicho
tomous thinking.156
124
thinking, time distortion,
misassessing causality, irresponsibility or excessive responsibility and circula
r
The social alter is the inheritor of earlier dissociated persecutory feelings an
d has as one of its roles the setting up of group punishments that are "object l
essons" to us all. McVeigh's staging of the Oklahoma City explosion was carefull
y arranged to have "abandoned" children like himself punished along with the mor
e conscious aim of punishing bad authorities. The formula for restaging early tr
aumas is: (1) Fuse with your persecutory alter ("Terrifying Mommy"), (2) find a
savior alter ("Grandiose Self") whom you follow to (3) kill the victim alter ("B
ad Child"). Empathy for victim scapegoats is lost because they are so full of ou
r negative projections and are seen as bad children-growing, striving, wanting t
oo much. The larger the success and new freedoms a society must face-the more it
s progress overreaches its childrearing evolution-the larger the historical puni
shment it must stage. When an American Senator, voting for more nuclear weapons,
said that even if a nuclear Holocaust was unleashed it wouldn't be too bad beca
use we would "win" it ("If we have to start over with another Adam and Eve, I wa
nt them to be Americans"), the weird trance logic can only be understood if nucl
ear war is seen as an "object lesson," enabling us to "start afresh with a clean
slate." THE SOCIAL ALTER IN SMALL GROUPS All groups, even small face-to-face gr
oups, organize group-fantasies out of the pooled social alters of its members. B
ecause 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 o
ur social alters and preparing ourselves for expected attacks. Although groups c
an also be used for utilitarian purposes, they more often form so that people ca
n act out their persecutory social alters. When people construct a group-fantasy
, they give up their idiosyncratic defensive fantasies and become entrained in t
he social trance. Group analysts have found that even small groups collude in de
lusional notions: that the group is like a disapproving mother, that the group i
s different from and superior to all other groups, that it has imaginary boundar
ies that can protect it, that it can provide endless sustenance to its members w
ithout their individual efforts, that its leader should be deified and should be
in constant control of its members, that scapegoating is useful and sacrifice n
ecessary for cleansing the group's emotions, that it is periodically besieged by
monstrous enemies from without and stealthy enemies from within, that no indivi
dual is ever responsible for any of the group's actions and so on-all defensive
structures organizing and restaging shared traumatic content.157 Recruiters for
cults, for instance, make use of the propensity for people to need groups to con
trol them and act out their group-fantasies; in fact, over 20 million Americans
belong to cults and
125
cult-like groups that enable them to collude with idealizing and persecutory par
ts of other people's social alters.158 Small groups, in fact, sometimes resemble
religious cults psychodynamically-ritual restagings of early trauma are one of
their goals, while utilitarian accomplishments are secondary and difficult to ac
hieve.159 It is not hard to see face-to-face group members become entrained and
switch into their social alters, forming group-fantasies. As the group first gat
hers, people chat, laugh, argue and interact with other individuals from their c
entral conscious selves. At a certain moment, however, "when the time comes for
the group to form," individuals switch into their social alters, a social trance
forms160 and the groupfantasy takes over. Language and demeanor change, and peo
ple feel somehow detached, estranged from their usual range of feelings and desk
illed of critical faculties. A leader is imagined to be "in control" even if he
isn't actually present, group boundaries are imagined, work is thought able to b
e accomplished effortlessly, magical thinking spreads, enemies arise, factions f
orm to act out splits, and empathy diminishes, since others are so full of the g
roup's projections. All this usually takes only a few minutes. It becomes accept
able to exploit and abuse others, as members were themselves once exploited and
abused. Scapegoats volunteer for sacrifice, a group bible and group history and
group spirit and other delusional group-fantasies form, and group life begins, s
eemingly a more emotionally vital life than everyday life, despite an omnipresen
t sleepiness common in groups that is a result of the social trance. When the gr
oup "ends," often with a trance-breaking clap of hands termed "applause," people
wake up, break the entrainment, switch back to their central personalities and
experience a tremendous emotional let-down as vital parts of themselves are lost
, disoriented for a moment, and the group begins to mourn its own ending-in the
same manner as multiple personalities often feel more connected to their real fe
elings when they are "in" their alters. Aristotle intuited the emotional importa
nce of the social alter when he said man was a zoon politikon and was incomplete
without his "political self," his social alter. Even when small groups are form
ed to observe the emotional processes of their members, the group analyst usuall
y misses the meaning of the switching of members into their social alters. Typic
al is a group analytic workshop held in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War as the grou
p turned to a discussion of Saddam Hussein: "D," our Arab member, suddenly chang
ed before our eyes. The man, who had until then been distant...began a heated de
fense of Saddam Hussein: "He is the real Arab hero. He stands alone against the
whole world and doesn't surrender. Saddam is fighting and
126
representing Arab pride against the capitalistic interests of the West which are
out to steal the Arab oil of Kuwait." This long speech was so strong that it wa
s immediately sensed as something truly crucial for D...it was as if D were move
d by inner forces that strongly fought for expression, almost beyond the possibi
lity of control. After a while he froze and didn't know how to go on. The outrag
e of other members was immediate. They pointed to the dark side of Saddam: the k
iller, the sadist, the oppressor of another country, the anti-Israeli aggressor
who wants to destroy us physically. Now, D was like someone waking up from hypno
sis. Slowly he regained his ability to speak. At first his speech was unclear bu
t after awhile his ability to think and speak coherently returned. He tried to e
xplain, unsuccessfully, why he was defending Saddam. In reality, he maintained,
he, too, was afraid of the SCUD missiles; and he hated Saddam with all his heart
, perhaps even more than any Jew, and would welcome news announcing his death.16
1 The group analyst passed off the spectacle of the man clearly switching into a
nd out of a social trance as without meaning for the group. OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORI
TY IN A SOCIAL TRANCE It is only when one realizes that we all carry around with
us persecutory social alters that become manifest in groups that such unexplain
ed experiments as those described in Stanley Milgram's classic study Obedience t
o Authority 162 become understandable. In this experiment, people were asked to
be "teachers" and, whenever their "learners" made mistakes, to give them massive
electric shocks. The "learners," who were only acting the part, were trained to
give out pained cries even though the "electric shocks" were non-existent. Of t
he 40 "teachers," 65 percent delivered the maximum amount of shock even as they
watched the "learners" scream out in pain and plead to be released, despite thei
r having been told they didn't have to step up the shock level. The "teachers" o
ften trembled, groaned and were extremely upset at having to inflict the painful
shocks, but continued to do so nonetheless. That the "teachers" believed the sh
ocks were real is confirmed by another version of the experiment in which real s
hocks were inflicted upon a little puppy, who howled in protest; the obedience s
tatistics were similar.163 Social scientists have been puzzled by Milgram's expe
riments, wondering why people were so easily talked into inflicting pain so grat
uitously. The real explanation is that, by joining a group-the "university exper
iment"-they switched into their social alters and merged with their own sadistic
internalized persecutor, which was quite willing to take responsibility for ord
ering pain inflicted upon others. Their "struggle
127
with themselves" over whether to obey was really a struggle between their social
alters and their main selves. Although obedience,
164
many
subsequent
experiments
varied
the
conditions
for
what Milgram did not do is try the experiment without the social
trance. If he had not framed it as a group experience, if he had simply on his o
wn authority walked up to each individual, alone, and, without alluding to a uni
versity or any other group, asked him or her to come to his home and give massiv
e amounts of electric shock to punish someone, he would not have been obeyed, be
cause they would not have switched into their social alters. The crucial element
of the experiments was the existence of the group-as-terrifying-parent, the all
-powerful university. Not surprisingly, when the experiment was repeated using c
hildren-who go into trance and switch into traumatized content more easily than
adults-they were even more obedient in inflicting the maximum shock.165 Subjects
were even obedient when they themselves were the victims: 54 percent turned a d
ial upon command to the maximum limit when they had been told it was inflicting
damage upon their ears that could lead to their own deafness, and 74 percent ate
food they thought could harm them, thus confirming that they were truly in a di
ssociated state, not just "obeying" authority or trying to hurt others, and that
it was actually an alternate self doing the hurting of the main self.166 The on
ly time they refused to obey was when experimenters pretended to act out a group
rebellion, since the social trance was broken.167 Milgram could also have teste
d whether it was simple obedience that was really being tested by asking his sub
jects to reach into their pockets and pay some money to the learners. They would
have refused to do so, because they weren't "obeying" any old command, they wer
e using the experimental situation to hurt scapegoats. It is the social trance i
tself and not "obedience to authority" that is effective in producing destructiv
e obedience. Milgram's subjects, like all of us who participate in wars and soci
al violence, lost their capacity for empathy with victims only when in a social
trance. Those who continue to replicate Milgram's experiments and who are still
puzzled as to why "the most banal and superficial of rationales...is enough to p
roduce destructive behavior in human beings"168 simply underestimate the amount
of trauma most people have experienced and the effectiveness of the social tranc
e in allowing them to restage these hurts. At one point Milgram approached the i
nsight that he was dealing with an alternate personality when he discusses what
he terms the "agentic state," which is his term for the trance that his subjects
were in. "Moved into the agentic state," Milgram wrote, "the person becomes som
ething different from his former self, with
128
new properties not easily traced to his usual personality."169 Unfortunately, ne
ither Milgram nor any of the others who have performed obedience experiments loo
ked into the childhoods of their subjects to see if those who easily obeyed hurt
ful commands differed from the minority who refused to do so.170 THE GROUP-FANTA
SIES OF NATIONS Even though no group is too small to synchronize and act out the
groupfantasies of its members, the larger the group the more deeply it can ente
r into the social trance and the more irrational the group-fantasies it can circ
ulate and act out. The dissociated shame that is operative in small groups is eq
ually there in nations, whether it is Kennedy nearly triggering a nuclear apocal
ypse in Cuba to revenge "his nose being rubbed in it" or Germany starting World
War II to revenge "the shame of Versailles" (die Sham is often used in German fo
r the genital area.)171 That nations have a central persecutory task is a widely
-denied truth. That nations are necessary for more rational enterprises than war
and brutal domination of others is a wholly unproven assumption. In truth, most
members of most nations participate in one way or another in the torture and ki
lling of others and in economic and political domination. We only deny it by col
luding in such delusions as that leaders are to blame, that suffering is deserve
d, that punishment reforms, that killing is moral, that some people are not huma
n, that sacrifice brings renewal and that violence is liberating. Indeed, most o
f what is in history books is stark, raving madthe maddest of all being the hist
orian's belief that it is sane. It is only when we begin to recognize the ubiqui
ty of these delusional historical group-fantasies that our personal responsibili
ty begins to return to usreading the newspaper, watching the nightly news and mu
ch of daily life becomes both more painful and more meaningful as empathy return
s to our social lives. For some time now, for instance, I often cry when I watch
the evening news, read newspapers or study history books, a reaction I was trai
ned to suppress in every school I attended for 25 years. In fact, it is because
we so often switch into our social alters when we try to study history that we c
annot understand it-our real emotions are dissociated and therefore unavailable
to us. Nations, the most important group-fantasy constructions of our social alt
ers, act out what seems to be a non-personal history because social events appea
r to exist in a separate reality and not to be a result of the intentions of ind
ividuals. Even when we find a leader to blame events on, we are helpless to expl
ain why anyone followed him, imagining that the leader has the power to "hypnoti
ze" his people. Hitler, for
129
instance, is often assumed to be solely responsible for World War II, just like
other wars are blamed upon single individuals-a truly preposterous assumption. S
ince the emotional connections between society and self are cut off-nations are
often said to behave sui generis-individuals can deny responsibility for what th
ey do and social events can appear to be wholly without motivation. Soldiers who
kill in wars are not personally called murderers and politicians who vote to wi
thhold food from children are not personally termed child killers because these
actions are imagined to be part of a different reality system, a dream-world tha
t is somehow not really "us." Since people "in their right minds" do not gratuit
iously kill others, it is only people "in their wrong minds"-in their other mind
s, in their social alters-that do. It is therefore important for me to deny that
there is any emotional connection between "Lloyd deMause" and "Corporal deMause
with a rifle in Korea," just as there must be no connection made between separa
te alters of a multiple personality. In both cases there exists a radical splitt
ing of the psyche. As "Lloyd deMause," I love and protect my children and all th
e children around me. As "Corporal deMause" I was prepared to kill Korean "enemi
es," even if they were children. As "a good American" today, I vote for my Presi
dent and pay my taxes that are used to pay American soldiers who enforce an Amer
ican embargo that murders a million Iraqi children, any more than I noticed Amer
ica murdered several million Vietnamese children through the poisonous effects o
f Agent Orange. I do not feel responsible for genocide, even when it is pointed
out that my country is killing the children. I have been thoroughly dissociated,
switched into my social alter, as you have been, along with hundreds of million
s of other "good Americans," just like the "good Germans" who participated in th
e Holocaust. The social alter is the carrier of our hidden motivations, but seem
s to have no motives of its own. In his book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Less
ons of Vietnam, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara blames the death of
three million innocent Asians on what he terms "the law of unintended consequenc
es;"172 i.e., it was all an inadvertent error, and no American had any motives w
hatsoever for killing them, certainly not himself, although it was once called "
McNamara's war." Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of the trial of Adolf Eichmann,
recognized this problem of massive denial when she wrote that the main problem i
n the Eichmann court was to get people to acknowledge that political actions are
personal, that "soldiers" must be "transformed back into perpetrators, that is
to say, into human beings."73 The concept of the social alter explains why guilt
does not prevent people from killing others nor leaders from ordering men to th
eir death. Getting soldiers to
130
kill others is not easy; studies have shown that eighty percent of the soldiers
in the wars of the twentieth century refused to shoot at the enemy, even when it
meant they themselves might have died because of their refusal.174 The task of
the military is to condition the process of switching into the soldier's persecu
tory social alter so that he can be cut off from his normal empathic personality
. Only when switched into his persecutory social alter can a soldier kill withou
t overwhelming guilt; rarely will he later then connect enough to this killing t
o admit, as one veteran did, "It didn't hit me all that much then, but when I th
ink of it now-I slaughtered those people. I murdered them."175 Because soldiers
in early wars fought up close so that they could more easily experience personal
guilt, rarely more than a few hundred men were usually killed during a battle,1
76 while modern wars, specializing in distancing, denial and trance induction tr
aining,177 have in this century killed over 100 million people. CHILDREARING AND
THE SOCIAL TRANCE Experimental evidence has shown that there is a direct correl
ation between traumatic childhood and the ability to go into trance.178 The depe
rsonalization made necessary by childhood trauma as a form of "hypnotic evasion"
to avoid the painful impact of early trauma gets called into use as an adult. T
hus, it is not surprising to find that a recent survey of political attitudes fi
nds that there is a clear correlation between harsh childrearing and authoritari
an political beliefs, the use of military force, belief in the death penalty, et
c.179 Those who are able to remain outside the social trance are the rare indivi
duals whose childrearing is less traumatic than that of the rest of their societ
y or whose personal insights, through psychotherapy or other means, are beyond t
hose of their neighbors. For instance, extensive interviews of people who were r
escuers of Jews during the Holocaust in comparison to a control group of people
who were either persecutors or just stood by and allowed the killing of Jews sho
ws startling differences in childrearing.180 While all other dimensions of the l
ives of the rescuers were similar to the control group religion, education, even
political opinions what distinguished the rescuers from others was their childh
ood: their parents used reasoning in bringing them up, rather than the customary
use by European parents early in the century of beating and kicking children to
force obedience. The rescuers' parents were found to have invariably showed an
unusual concern for equity, more love and respect for their children, more toler
ance for their activities, and less emphasis on obedience, all allowing rescuers
to remain in their empathic central personalities and not enter into social alt
ers and dissociate their feelings for Jews as human beings. The rescuers risked
their lives to save Jews not because they had some
131
connection with Judaism or were politically radical, but because they remained i
n their compassionate personal selves rather than switching into the social tran
ce constructed by the rest of their society. THE DREAM WORLD OF THE SOCIAL TRANC
E Relatively few people are clinically diagnosed as having dissociated personali
ties.181 Virtually all of those who are have experienced extreme early trauma: 8
5 percent were sexually abused, 75 percent were severely physically abused, 60 p
ercent had been subject to extreme neglect, 40 percent had witnessed violent dea
th, and a large number of them had been victims of extreme sadism, including tor
ture, childhood prostitution, near-death experiences, being locked in cellars an
d trunks, and so on.182 Dissociation scores in a randomized sample of the genera
l population have shown that dissociative experiences of various sorts are quite
common tens of millions of Americans have experienced dissociation during relig
ious and other rituals and that dissociation is a continuum ranging from minor t
o major forms.183 Yet most of us only massively dissociate when we are in our so
cial alters, when we participate in the dream world of the group trance. Social
alters have a developmental history for each of us. They begin their independent
existence in our earliest hours as protectors, then as persecutors and finally
develop into the organized persecutory group-fantasies of adulthood, while retai
ning elements that betray their early origins. Thus the traumatic material of ou
r earliest years, full of hellish wombs, hurt and abandoned children, terrifying
mommies and violent daddies, is organized by fairy tales, movies, TV programs a
nd schools, first into dragons and knights and eventually into Evil Empires and
American Presidents fighting Star Wars. However disguised from their infantile o
rigins, these adult political fantasies are organized into persecutory social al
ters, then made real by shared delusional visions of the world and trillion-doll
ar weapon systems, our group-fantasies made concrete. SCAPEGOATS AS POISON CONTA
INERS FOR TRAUMAS That we can switch between our central selves and our social a
lters so easily without anyone noticing it is a testimony to the dissociated sta
te of the social trance. Multiple personalities, too, existed long before they w
ere clinically recognizedmultiples were usually called "possessed" or "crazy"-an
d no one noticed that they were amnesic to the host personality. People in earli
er societies spent much of their time in their social alters-a world of spirits
and gods and magic-because they had badly damaged private selves due to their ex
traordinarily abusive and neglectful
132
upbringing. Modern nations, of course, have their own group-fantasies, the dream
world of politics, there being no psychodynamic difference between a tribal chi
ef proclaiming how women's menstrual blood pollutes the tribe and a Nazi proclai
ming how Jews pollute the German bloodstream. It is not difficult to see politic
ians switch back and forth between their central selves and their social alters,
often using the royal "We" when speaking of themselves when in their social alt
ers. For instance, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich stood on the floor of Cong
ress in 1996 and spoke with passionate intensity about the need for cutting all
kinds of government aid for children (cut nutrition assistance for 14 million ch
ildren, cut Social Security for 750,000 disabled children, cut Medicaid for 4 mi
llion children, plus slash aid to 9 million children benefiting from Aid to Fami
lies with Dependent Children, Head Start, education grants, child health care, a
id to homeless children, etc.)184 Few helpless children in America would avoid t
he sacrificial ax. Then, in a blink of an eye, Gingrich switched from his persec
utory social alter back to his real self and called for tax credits for poor chi
ldren to buy laptop computers so they could access the Internet! What had happen
ed was this: Gingrich had been inaugurated as Speaker of the House, becoming wor
ld famous and appearing on the covers of the newsweeklies, and had received a bo
ok contract for $4.5 million. All this personal success made his hidden self, ne
edy-baby Newt, son of a severely manic-depressive teenage mother and a battering
father,185 feel jealous and cry out "ME TOO! I NEED SOME LOVE!" His conscious s
elf was threatened with being overwhelmed with the memories of deprivation, desp
air and dependency that he had so long repressed. The same process was happening
to millions of other newly wealthy Americans who favored cutting welfare and ch
ild aid. Rather than Gingrich feeling his neediness, he dumped it into scapegoat
s, millions of needy American children, letting them feel his despair for him, s
aying they had to cut off their aid because it was making children "too dependen
t." What poor children had done wrong was to be dependent and helpless. Gingrich
's social alter had the task of protecting him against the repetition of his ear
ly traumas by punishing stand-ins for himself for their dependency. He felt that
his own helplessness was to blame for his being neglected by his mother; theref
ore helpless, dependent children, symbols of himself, had to be punished. Childr
en must not be dependent, he declared; their neediness makes them bad. That he p
articularly singled out stopping aid to children of teenage mothers gave away th
e inner sources of his crusade, being himself a child of a teenage mother. And w
hile Gingrich's individual traumatic history as a child of a teenage mother wasn
't shared by the other Congressmen who voted the cuts in welfare into law nor by
the
133
President who signed the legislation, they and those Americans who supported the
m shared traumas of equal severity to collude in using the children as scapegoat
s.186 Because so much of America at that time had become so prosperous the highe
st gross domestic product per person of any nation in history most of the nation
colluded in considering Gingrich's delusional actions "social," not "personal."
No one asked if his persecution of children of teenage mothers had anything to
do with his being a child of an unwed teenage mother; obviously it wasn't a meas
ure designed to reduce teenage pregnancies, the majority of which are the result
of seduction or outright rape by men much older than the teenagers.187 In fact,
only 8 percent of welfare mothers were unwed teenagers; welfare actually reduce
s teenage pregnancies.188 And two-thirds of teenage babies were made by fathers
who were over 21, essentially raping the teen mother.189 But these facts didn't
deter the nation's convictions. No one asked why during a period of unparalleled
prosperity the nation's most important agenda suddenly became to pass federal l
egislation that punished children, including one provision specifically prohibit
ing states from making any payments for baby diapers.190 Nor was Gingrich alone
in this group-fantasy of "bad children." Congressmen began calling children on w
elfare "bloodsuckers" and "alligators" and "wolves" who were preying on taxpayer
s. One even waved a sign on the floor of Congress that said, "Don't feed the all
igators."191 Presidential candidate Sen. Phil Gramm, introducing provisions into
the welfare "reform" bill dubbed the "Home Alone" bill because it forced mother
s of little children to go to work even when they had no day care 192 declared t
hat if the government paid welfare to unwed mothers the nation would soon be flo
oded with illegitimate babies, predicting that "soon there will be more illegiti
mate babies in America than legitimate."193 He seemed quite sincere in his fear
of the specter of the U.S. swamped by an explosion of dependent, sinful bastards
devouring his wealth, stating "the battle against welfare is a battle for civil
ization."194 If helpless children of the poor were seen as bad babies and voraci
ous alligators, then obviously they were all scapegoats who were "poison contain
ers" needed by the nation to feel early memories of hunger and despair at being
unloved and abused. Without poison containers, we would have to feel these feeli
ngs ourselves. Gingrich and Gramm knew that they were acting as delegates for mi
llions of other Americans who, like themselves, had been feeling successful rece
ntly (corporate profits had just soared 40 percent, the stock market was up over
50 percent) and who now unconsciously needed poor children to feel their emotio
ns for them. This psychohistorical "war on children" takes place whenever a nati
on experiences a prolonged period of peace and prosperity and turns from externa
l to
134
internal "enemies," as in the movement to cut benefits for "the undeserving poor
" in the peaceful, prosperous periods of the 1840s, the 1890s and the 1920s. Gin
grich's attack on needy children was identical, in fact, to what Ronald Reagan d
id when he became Governor of California. Reagan had received a $2 million gift
from his political backers, disguised as a payment for some barren land he owned
, and, like Gingrich, was feeling guilty about being rich and famous for the fir
st time in his life.195 To punish his greedy childhood self, Reagan cut out virt
ually all funds for the Needy Children's School Lunch Program, plus cut meal all
owances for retarded children. His goal wasn't saving money; he actually doubled
total expenses during his term. But his sacrifice of helpless children was simp
ly a magical guilt-reducing device. The scapegoating of children to silence the
hurt child inside oneself is extremely effective in reducing intrapsychic anxiet
y. Even chimpanzees scapegoat infants when tense, seizing them from their mother
s and flailing them against the ground, often killing them in "aggression-displa
ys."196 In 1996, America too was displaying aggression toward children, internal
scapegoats in order to make us feel better. Millions of Americans watched Newt
Gingrich on TV or readed about his speeches the next day in the paper had to den
y that two very different Gingriches had spoken as he cut out welfare for childr
en and in the next moment proposed giving them laptop computers. Some columnists
acknowledged that providing laptop computers for ghetto kids while cutting off
their food money was a "crazy" idea. One, whose column was headed "Newt to Poor:
Let Them Eat Laptops,"197 pointed out that ghetto children don't have much use
for tax credits since they usually don't pay taxes, but even he wasn't curious a
bout how Gingrich could simultaneously champion both starvation and free compute
rs for poor children. Like early observers of multiple personalities, he merely
labeled the idea as "crazy," but never asked how and why and when Gingrich moved
in and out of his "crazy" alternate personality. RESTAGING EARLY TRAUMAS IN THE
SOCIAL TRANCE The childhood sources for Gingrich's political program are so ove
rt they should be obvious to all, yet because we are in a social trance when we
hear him we collude to deny them. The media widely reported, for instance, that
Gingrich was a child of a teenage mother, but carefully didn't connect it with h
is speeches on how teenage mothers should be punished for having children. The t
raumatic events of his infancy had to be restaged and millions of children made
to feel his despair because in his social alter the child feels responsible for
his or her own abuse and neglect, and
135
so a scapegoat for the child self must be punished. As always in politics, the s
ocial alter's primary identification is with the abuser. That cutting out welfar
e for children was a reaction to prosperity, not really a way to save money, was
admitted by many politicians. Senator Pat Moynihan pointed out even President C
linton bore responsibility for the success of Gingrich's campaign to "dump the c
hildren on the streets, "198 since Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know i
t." "It is almost beyond imagining that we will do this," Moynihan said. "In the
middle of the Great Depression, we provided a Federal guarantee of some provisi
on for children, dependent children. In the middle of the roaring 90's, we're ta
king it away."199 But the seeming contradiction is in fact the point: it is beca
use the 90s were roaring we had to punish children, scapegoats for the "bad, nee
dy" child alter in our heads. The Congressman who told the media, "It's time to
tighten the belt on the bloated stomach of the Federal government" 200 himself h
ad a very large stomach, but no one mentioned this as he voted to cut the lunch
money for skinny little kids. When the 61-year-old federal welfare program, the
Aid to Families With Dependent Children program, the benefits for disabled child
ren and the food stamps guarantees were finally repealed with the backing of bot
h parties and of the President, the sacrifice of America's children was complete
. Many commentators and politicians said this would "prevent children from being
dependent." It was useless to point out to people who are dissociated and in a
social trance that children or other poison containers were helpless human being
s who were the victims of their actions. Nor could one have made any impression
pointing out that appearing to save a few billion dollars by depriving today's c
hildren would cost hundreds of billions in tomorrow's crimes. The children were
full of our projections; they weren't real to us. Examples of mass dissociation
of perpetrators are legion. Lifton documents how Nazi doctors "double" themselve
s and create an "Auschwitz self" to divest themselves of responsibility toward t
hose they experimented on.201 The Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hss, when a
sked if the Jews he killed had deserved their fate, replied that "there was some
thing unrealistic about such a question, because [we] had been living in an enti
rely different world," that is, the world of social alters. Jews weren't particu
larly personally hated. Their blood just had to flow in order to purify the bloo
d of Germany. And America, in the 1990s, had to conduct a genocide of over a mil
lion Iraqi children through our embargo in a trance-in fact, no one noticed we w
ere killing them! They weren't human because they weren't real. We were just pun
ishing evil Iraqis. The Nazis used to say they were just cleansing Europe of Jew
ish pollution. How could one ask if Jewish children
136
deserved to be killed? "It never even occurred to us," Hss said.202 We were just "
good Germans" and "good Americans" when we killed millions of children. The most
important psychodynamic of history is people's ability to switch deep into thei
r social alter, identify with the perpetrator and periodically persecute helples
s people who represent ones' own childhood self. It is the social alter's duty t
o remove bad, sinful children. As one German policeman ended his description of
his execution of Jewish children: ...while leaving the execution site, the other
comrades laughed at me, because pieces of the child's brains had spattered onto
my sidearm and had stuck there. I first asked, why are you laughing, whereupon
Koch, pointing to the brains on my sidearm, said: That's from mine, he has stopp
ed twitching. He said this in an obviously boastful tone...203 The psychohistori
an asks: "Did he wonder incredulously what could possibly justify his blowing a
vulnerable little girl's brains out? Do Americans wonder why they must gratuitou
sly kill a million innocent, helpless Iraqi children?" The answer is that it is
precisely because children are innocent and helpless that they must be obliterat
ed, to punish them for our own imagined sinfulness. MERGING WITH THE PERPETRATOR
Ultimately our social alters merge with the perpetrator of early traumas. In wa
rs, we initially hallucinate that children are being hurt (in the Gulf War, we i
magine them hurt by Saddam Hussein, claiming he killed babies in incubators), bu
t of course the result of the war and the embargo was for Americans to kill mill
ions of children. In group-fantasy, we merge with the aggressor in order to avoi
d feeling helpless and then inflict damage upon child-scapegoats under the guise
of "saving children." We see this merging with the perpetrator in every scapego
ating groupfantasy. When anti-Semites persecute Jews, they are merged with the a
busing parent and punishing the abused child. Jews must be persecuted, says St.
John Chrysostom, for their "lewd grossness and extremes of gluttony"-betraying t
he sexual seduction and constant hunger experienced by children of his time; Jew
s are "murderers of the Lord"-and must be punished for the murderous rage childr
en felt toward their abusers, their Lords, their caretakers.204 Adult events, po
litical and economic history, usually provide only proximate causes of scapegoat
ing group-fantasies; their ultimate cause lies in earlier traumatic events.
137
FUNCTIONS OF SOCIAL ALTERS Social alters are a product of the evolution of the h
uman brain. The evidence we will shortly examine suggests our species began with
little more private selves than chimpanzees, controlled mainly by our unconscio
us thalamo-amygdalan memory systems and living with little self-consciousness or
empathy. Humans only began being able to form more fully conscious selves as th
e acquisition of language and the evolution of childrearing produced a major epi
genetic (additional to genetic) evolution of our psyche. By splitting off and th
en sharing the feelings in our social alters, we have become able to remain "san
e" some of the time and get about the daily business of living our lives, while
walling off in a separate part of our psyches our most painful traumas and deepe
st feelings. Our social alters contain early levels of our unbearable hurts ("Wh
y didn't mommy want me?" "Why did daddy hit me?"), restaged as fairy tales ("Are
there witches?" "Will the monster kill me?") and then as social questions ("Sha
ll we take children away from teenage mothers?" "Is Saddam Hussein a new Hitler
who will blow up the world?"). The adaptive function of social alters is that th
ey allow people to go about their daily business without being overwhelmed by tr
aumatic memories and resulting despair-as "crazy" people are overwhelmed. By dis
sociating early persecutors into our social alters and then identifying with the
se persecutors in our social lives, human beings manage to live more sane daily
lives, while warding off unseen but felt dangers by "feeding" victims of society
to terrifying religious, political and economic divinities. So important to our
sanity is the social alter that when a poison container for a group-fantasy is
removed, tremendous anxiety is aroused that has to be defended against by creati
ng a replacement. For instance, the disappearance of the Evil Soviet Empire in 1
989 unexpectedly led to an outbreak of enormous shared anxieties by Russians, ot
her Europeans and Americans alike, anxieties that were then defended against by
constructing new internal enemies like immigrants, minorities, welfare mothers a
nd children to replace the missing external enemy.205 INDUCING THE SOCIAL TRANCE
Earlier societies were so deep into the social trance that although they often
had excellent intellectual knowledge about the world, based upon experience, the
y nevertheless shared the most bizarre magical beliefs imaginable while in their
social alters. Adaptationist evolutionary theories flounder on the ubiquity of
these bizarre and patently nonadaptive cultural traits. There is nothing adaptiv
e in maintaining a belief that if you put a stick into a cowrie shell and it fal
ls to the side, someone will
138
soon die,206 or the belief that wars restore the potency of men and societies. M
ost of culture consists of behaviors like these, which become explainable by dev
elopmental psychology, not by theories of adaptation to environments. Because ea
rly societies had so little development of private self in childhood, they lived
most of their lives in their social alters in a "Dreamtime" world of malevolent
witches, ghosts and other persecutory spirits. Both devouring witches and the h
elpful animal familiars of shamans, for instance, have been shown to be actual a
lters which are first constructed in childhood as imaginary companions207 i.e.,
they are first protective alters created by the child to help handle trauma and
only in adulthood do they become persecutory social alters. Whether you are a Ne
w Guinea cannibal, an ancient Greek mother, a Balinese trancer or a Nazi antisem
ite, you first form an alter in your head of a devouring, bloodthirsty demon, us
ing traumatic memories going all the way back to the poisonous placenta, and the
n you collude with others to project this image onto that of a horrible witch, a
devouring Striga, a bloodthirsty leyak spirit or a poisonous Jew in order to re
lieve your intrapsychic stress. Our political beliefs today are often no less ma
gical than the religious beliefs of earlier times. The belief that killing and b
urning Jews can cleanse German blood is based on the same kind of trance logic a
s earlier beliefs that killing and burning children in sacrifices to gods will a
ssure better crops. Both depend upon social alters to keep their real selves san
e. Only after switching into their social alters can normally peaceful people be
come persecutors, don frightful masks or swastika uniforms and chop enemy's head
s off or gas Jews. Then, their traumas restaged, they can go home, remove their
masks and alters and have dinner with their families. Every known society has tr
ance rituals designed to help switch members into their social alters, entrain t
heir group-fantasies and prepare them for social action designed to relieve emot
ional distress. Bourguignon counts 437 societies out of 488 studied that have fo
rmal trance rituals,208 but she uses a very narrow definition of what constitute
s a trance. In fact, no society lacks its trance rituals. Apparently being disso
ciated from your social alter for any length of time leaves you feeling that you
have lost an important part of your self your hurt self. As the !Kung bushman s
aid when asked why he had to join a trance dance ritual every week, "I can reall
y become myself again."209 Many cultures even have a special word for the depres
sion one feels when a social event ends,210 the "social hangover" that feels, th
ey say, as if someone has died the loss of their social alter, a vital part of t
hemselves.
139
Rysunek 21 5:3 A man in his social alter
Anthropologists often watch their subjects enter into their social alters, but a
re trained to apply the dogma of cultural relativism to what they are seeing in
order to deprive it of meaning. They regularly encounter local populations who a
re usually friendly to them and others, but who periodically go off into violent
frenzies and chop off men's heads or girl's genitals. Rather than posing a ques
tion as to why their subjects seem to have two distinctly different personalitie
s, they instead say that the violent personality was merely "learned cultural be
havior"-i.e., that it had no meaning or motivation. Historians do the same with
their subjects' behaviors during wars and genocides. The anthropology and neurob
iology of ritual trances has been extensively studied.211 The time-honored techn
iques of formal trance induction are well known: fasting, rapid breathing, inhal
ation of smoke and ingestion of drugs, infliction of pain, and the use of drummi
ng, pulsing music and dancing all "driving behaviors" designed to reproduce the
pain, hypoxia and shock of early trauma and entrain the biological rhythms of th
e group. Neurobiologically, the amygdaloid-hippocampal balance plays a pivotal r
ole in trance states, with an increase in theta-wave rhythm in the hippocampus,
indicating increased attentional activity to early amygdalancentered memories, a
llowing access to dissociated traumatic experience. 212 The motivations for goin
g into the group trance, however, have remain unstudied. The leader of any group
is a delegate for the group's trance induction needs. Freud, following LeBon, n
oticed the resemblance of group fascination to a hypnotic trance. Hitler confirm
ed his insight: I have been reproached for making the masses fanatic...But what
you tell the people in the mass, in a receptive state of fanatic devotion, will
remain like words received under an hypnotic influence, ineradicable, and imperv
ious to every reasonable explanation.213
140
That recapturing and then restaging early trauma are the goals of the social tra
nces is suggested by the discovery by Hilgard of the correlation between the sev
erity of childhood punishment and ability to go into a hypnotic trance. 214 Alth
ough many small groups admit that the goal of their trance rituals is an attempt
to heal trauma, we tend to deny this today. Yet when the rationalizations of ou
r trance rituals are stripped away and their hidden rhythms and embedded message
s are revealed to analysis, their traumatic bases are made convincingly evident.
FANTASY ANALYSIS I have developed and tested over the past two decades a techni
que I call fantasy analysis of revealing the hidden messages embedded within see
mingly bland and boring speeches and press conferences of leaders as well as oth
er verbal and non-verbal political material.215 The purpose of fantasy analysis
is to capture how it feels to be part of a nation's shared emotional life. Other
psychohistorians have confirmed that doing a fantasy analysis of political mate
rial can be a Rosetta Stone that can uncover new dimensions to our group-fantasi
es and can even be used to try to forecast future political behavior.216 Just as
experimental psychologists have shown that visual stimuli subliminally presente
d tachistoscopically for a hundredth of a second register in the unconscious and
in dreams while bypassing consciousness,217 so too subliminal messages are embe
dded in speeches and in the media by their choice of certain metaphors, similes
and emotional images rather than others. A fantasy analysis of a speech or other
historical document will remove the defensive posturing and locate the emotiona
lly powerful fantasy words that contain the embedded real message, decoding the
hidden content through the relationships of the imagery. The rules for fantasy a
nalysis are simple: 1. Record all strong feeling words, even when they occur in
innocuous contexts, such as "kill the bill in Congress or "cut the budget." Be a
bstemious; recording mild anxiety words simply clutters the analysis, although i
t rarely changes the emotional content of the hidden message. 2. 3. 4. 5. Record
all metaphors, similes and gratuitously repeated words. Record all family terms
, such as mother, father, children. Eliminate negatives, since "we don't want wa
r" still is about war and could have been phrased "we want peace." Rewrite the f
antasy words in sentences to reveal the hidden messages.
141
My books and articles over the past two decades have contained extensive fantasy
analyses of Presidential speeches and press conferences, and can be consulted a
s examples of how the process reveals the group-fantasies of the nation at speci
fic historical moments.218 The following analysis of President Ronald Reagan's A
cceptance Speech for re-election will give an example the fantasy analysis techn
ique, plus it will illustrate the process of trance induction, the search for tr
aumatic content and the leader's unconscious pact with the nation on what should
be done.
Rysunek 22 5:4 Ronald Reagan shown as trance indu cer
Most political meetings are usually held not to make decisions but to deepen the
social trance, to switch into social alters and to entrain the group's unconsci
ous emotional strategies for handling the inner emotional problems of its "hidde
n world." The following speech was given by Ronald Reagan at the 1984 Republican
Convention. Political conventions are similar to the "carnival gatherings" of c
himpanzees, where they "dash about in excited, nonaggressive display, which acts
to relieve tensions"219 or the "trance dances" of !Kung bushmen, which accompli
sh ritual cleansing of depression. Even before political speeches begin, importa
nt trance induction conditions are established. The audience is usually immobili
zed in crowded seats, recapturing the helplessness of infancy. In the 1984 Repub
lican Convention, a special film was shown to the delegates on a huge television
screen above the podium before Reagan began speaking. It was so boring-mainly h
is giant face, as though he were a huge mother and the delegates were infants-th
at the audience already began to dissociate. As hypnotherapist Milton Erickson w
rites, being very boring is one of the most powerful trance induction techniques
, since the conscious mind soon loses reality anchors.220 The only persons the a
udience could focus upon were cadres of young Republicans pumping their arms in
the air and shouting rhythmically, "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" as though they were !Kung t
rance drummers.221
142
Reagan began the trance induction part of his speech at heartbeat speed that is,
with accents at about 70 beats per minute, although normal speaking rates are u
sually above 120 beats per minute. Almost all politicians speak at this abnormal
ly slow rate of 70 beats per minute, even when microphones make their words clea
r to a large audience. This is the rate of the mother's heart beat one first hea
rd in the womb. Other trance inducers-priests and hypnotists-also instinctively
slow down to 70 beats per minute, entraining their audiences to a mother's heart
beat. To emphasize this regression to the warmth of the womb, Reagan's first fan
tasy words (put in bold type) to his audience and to the nation watching on TV a
re (read this to yourself very slowly to feel its dissociative effect): Thank yo
u very much. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Vice President, delegates to this convention, and
fellow citizens. In 75 days, I hope we enjoy a victory that is the size of the
heart of Texas. Nancy and I extend our deep thanks to the Lone Star State and th
e "Big D," the city of Dallas, for all their warmth and hospitality. After these
womb-like words, Reagan begins to speak baby language, as though he were talkin
g to an audience of three-year-olds-a technique also used by the hypnotherapist
Milton Erickson to induce trances through age regression and mind-splitting bori
ng content. Erickson usually tells parables, in baby language, often about anima
ls; Reagan does the same (again, read very slowly and watch your eyelids begin t
o feel heavy): Four years ago I didn't know precisely every duty of this office,
and not too long ago, I learned about some new ones from the first graders of C
orpus Christi School in Chambersburg, Pa. Little Leah Kline was asked by her tea
cher to describe my duties. She said: "The President goes to meetings. He helps
the animals. The President gets frustrated. He talks to other Presidents." What
is most astonishing isn't just that the leader of the most powerful nation on ea
rth-faced with soaring deficits because of his huge military buildup and threate
ning a war with a neighboring state-should begin his explanation of his plans fo
r the nation for the next four years with baby talk. What is surprising is that
no one noticed anything strange! The speech seemed "normal politics," Reagan was
called a "master speaker." We are all quite used to leaders speaking boring bab
y language to us at an exaggeratedly slow pace. We periodically ask our leaders
to put us into a trance so we can switch into our social alters and coordinate o
ur fantasies. Reality is quite beside the point.
143
Reagan repeats more "heart" words (which I will skip to save space) and then beg
ins to further dissociate the conscious mind from the unconscious with repeated
splitting words, in much the same way that a hypnotist splits your attention by
telling you to watch one of your arms rise while the other one falls: The choice
s this year are not just between two different personalities or between two diff
erent visions of the future, two fundamentally different ways of governing-their
government of pessimism, fear and limits, or ours of hope, confidence, and grow
th. Their government-their government sees people only as members of groups. Our
s serves all the people of America as individuals. Theirs lives in the past, see
king to apply the old and failed policies to an era that has passed them by. Our
s learns from the past and strives to change by boldly charting a new course for
the future. Theirs lives by promises, the bigger, the better. We offer proven,
workable answers. The final induction technique is age regression: Our opponents
began this campaign hoping that America has a poor memory. Well, let's take the
m on a little stroll down memory lane... The social trance is now becoming effec
tive, and the group has switched into their social alters. The audience has beco
me biologically entrained with the speaker and with each other; they are moving
subtly together, though no one has thought it important to measure this in polit
ical meetings other than such obvious entrainments as synchronized flag movement
s or mass Nazi salutes. This entrainment itself evokes early memories, since it
recalls how babies entrain to the voices of the adults around them within minute
s of birth (and possibly even in utero,)222 swaying and moving their head, arms,
body and fingers to the sounds of adults. After the trance induction, Reagan th
en begins what Erickson terms the unconscious search, attempting to locate what
feelings are bothering the audience and nation at this particular historical mom
ent. (I will from here on only reproduce sentences with fantasy words to save sp
ace.) Here is what Reagan says is bothering the nation at the end of 1984: Infla
tion was not some plague borne on the wind...they were devastated by a wronghead
ed grain embargo...Farmers have to fight insects, weather, and the marketplace-t
hey shouldn't have to fight their own Government...Under their policies tax rate
s have gone up three times as much for families with children as they have for e
veryone else...Some who spoke so loudly in San Francisco of fairness were among
those who brought about the biggest single individual tax increase in our histor
y...Well, they received some relief in 1983 when our across-the-board tax cut wa
s fully in place...Would that really hurt the rich?...
144
That the first fantasy word of the unconscious search for shared feelings should
be plague warns us of serious emotional disturbance, since this has been the co
de-word for paranoid fantasies of group pollution from the delusional apocalypti
c plagues of antiquity to "the Jewish plague" of modern antisemitism. What could
be the source of the feelings of a plague and of a devastated society? Perhaps
something to do with fight and children who are loudly cut and hurt? Maybe hurt
children are too loud? The search continues (I now only record the fantasy words
to save space): pushed...creep...out of control...control...control.... control
... ightening...strangling...misery...misery...misery..dropping...births...relie
f... shrinking...shrink...fell...fallen...children...controlling...children...gr
andchildren...immo ral... Feelings of strangling, being pushed and general miser
y seem to be the problem. All this misery is blamed on out of control, immoral c
hildren. As usual, we blame our own "out of control" growing childhood selves fo
r our troubles. (The immorality of children is confirmed later in the convention
by the Christian Right attack on teenage sex.) What can be done to stop these i
mmoral children? In the main section of his speech, Reagan now tells what should
be done, thus giving a posthypnotic command to the nation and concluding a "tra
nce pact" between the leader and his people: sell out...betray...fear...wars...s
trong...warlike...students... rushing...genocide...young men lost their lives...
sacrifice ..murderous...students...war...cut...cut...violence...burial...childre
n...buried... drunken...war...war...children...ridding the earth...threat... Rew
riting these fantasy words in complete sentences, we find that the audience, the
nation and Reagan have made the following trance pact: We will sell out and bet
ray to fear in wars strong warlike students. In a crushing genocide young men wi
ll have lost their lives in a sacrifice that will be murderous. Students in the
war will be cut, cut with such violence we will have a burial of children. They
will be buried in a drunken war. The war on children will accomplish ridding the
earth of the threat in our heads.
145
The central project of Reagan's second term of office-going to war against Nicar
agua-is now a posthypnotic command, a pact with that part of the nation which ha
s become entranced with him (entered the social trance). Only those Americans wh
o were not in the social trance-more recent psychoclasses whose childhoods were
better than the majority-ended up opposing Reagan's push in the next three years
toward a Central American war, which was then only narrowly avoided. The speech
ends with the audience switching out of their social alters back to their main
personalities, accomplished by images of peace, warmth and, again, "heart": peac
e...cradle...peace...torch...torch...torch...torch...torch...bloodlines...torch.
..torch...to rch...torch...lamp...children...heart The people in the audience th
en hit their hands together in order to awaken themselves from the deep social t
rance-for ten full minutes. The nation, watching, now knows what they should be
trying to do for the next four years: sacrificing young men to end the plague of
out-of-control, immoral children. Reagan went on to be re-elected by an overwhe
lming majority of the nation, who agreed it would satisfy their persecutory soci
al alters if they could sell out immoral children who could be buried in a drunk
en war. Confirmation of the group-fantasy in the leader's message can be obtaine
d by watching the political cartoons appearing at the same time showing the nati
on's hidden feelings in visual, pre-verbal form. At the end of 1984, for the fir
st time in Reagan's presidency, cartoons appeared of children being sacrificed,
supposedly to "Deficits" or "Abortions" or "Anti-Abortion Terrorism" or "Mother
Russia," but really to our needs for child sacrifice.
Rysunek 23 5:5 Fantasies of child sacrifice in Reagan's America
146
Other psychohistorians and students using the fantasy analysis technique have of
ten begun with the feeling that the choice of fantasy words and the meaning ascr
ibed to them in my books and articles seem arbitrary. But though when they tried
to analyze historical material in this manner themselves, they usually found th
at their choices and interpretations came very close to mine. Many of these fant
asy analyses have been published in The Journal of Psychohistory over the past t
hree decades.223 GROWTH PANIC AND MATERNAL ENGULFMENT One of the most thoroughly
documented results of the past three decades of study of group-fantasies is tha
t they are inexorably tied into the person of the leader. Since political feelin
gs are so much a defense against growth panic and resulting fears of abandonment
by early love-objects, groups organize and entrain their fantasies about how it
feels to be part of the group at any particular historical time more around fee
lings about the leader than any actual historical events. The central fantasy fu
nction of the leader of any group, small or large, is to defend against repetiti
ons of early trauma and abandonment, along with handling wishes for merging with
the terrifying mother. Leaders are usually imagined as male protectors against
maternal engulfment fears. Group analyst Didier Anzieu describes the small group
s he studies as follows: The group is a mouth...essentially female and maternal.
...One of the most active, or rather paralyzing, unconscious group representatio
ns is that of a Hydra: the group is felt to be a single body with a dozen arms a
t the ends of which are heads and mouths...ready to devour one another if they a
re not satisfied.224 When the leader is imagined to be strong, he can successful
ly defend against the group's engulfment fears; when the leader appears to weake
n, all growth is dangerous, and desires for merging and fears of maternal engulf
ment increase, so the leader must somehow act to defend against the growth panic
. Extensive studies by Gibbard and Hartman of fantasies of small groups have fou
nd that groups center on the largely unconscious fantasy that the group-as-a-who
le is a maternal entity, or some facet of a maternal entity....The fantasy offer
s some assurance that the more frightening, enveloping or destructive aspects of
the group-as-mother will be held in check...a major function of the group leade
r is to ward off envelopment by the groupas-mother...the group leader is imagine
d to have mastered the group-as-mother and thus to have gained some of her mana
for himself. This makes him a threat as well as a protector...225
147
The reason small groups and nations are unconsciously experienced as destructive
mothers is that group development requires an increase in independence and indi
viduation, as members grow, respond to new challenges and try to change their pa
tterns of behavior. This independence revives earlier feelings of maternal aband
onment, when the mother-herself having experienced a traumatic childhoodwas thre
atened by the child's independence, as seen in this case related by Masterson: S
he seemed to be overwhelmingly threatened by her child's emerging individuality,
which sounded as a warning that he [her child] was destined to leave her...she
was unable to support the child's efforts to separate from her and express his o
wn self through play and exploration of the world...Consequently, she was unable
to respond to the child's unfolding individuality...the child became afraid of
being taken over or engulfed [and] feared abandonment, giving up further individ
uation.226 Thus all groups from bands to nations experience growth, progress and
social development with fears of maternal engulfment and abandonment. The worse
the childrearing, the more growth panic is triggered by individuation and self
assertion. The course of cultural evolution is determined by the reduction of th
is growth panic through the evolution of more supportive childrearing. Since thi
s childhood evolution is very uneven, more advanced psychoclasses cause "too muc
h" social progress for the majority of society. Old defenses become unavailable
and people cannot dominate various scapegoats-wives, slaves, servants, minoritie
s- in quite the same way as before. These less advanced psychoclasses-the majori
ty of society-begin to experience tremendous growth panic, and new ways to handl
e their anxiety must be invented. For them, change is everywhere; things seem to
be "getting out of control." This is why growth and self assertion, whatever it
is called-hubris, chutzpah, original sin, human desire itself-are proscribed by
the religious and political systems of most societies. Societies whose institut
ions progress beyond their average childrearing mode become the most fearful and
most violent, since their growth panic depends upon both the amount of early tr
auma and the amount of social progress. Thus unaccustomed Weimar freedoms lead d
irectly to Auschwitz in a Germany formed by brutal childrearing. The violence re
sulting from the fear of maternal engulfment has, in fact, been empirically foun
d to be related to the mother's actual engulfing behavior. For instance, Ember a
nd Ebmer227 found in their cross-cultural studies that where the mother sleeps c
loser to the baby than to the father, and therefore tends to use the
148
baby as a substitute spouse, there is more homicide and assault, and there is al
so a higher frequency of war, both correlations as predicted by the psychogenic
theory. Because growth revives the fears of the earliest pre-verbal period of li
fe, the growing growth panic of groups and nations is also often felt as loss of
body parts or as loss of blood. Masterson says, "Many patients describe this in
graphic physical terms, such as losing an arm or leg, being deprived of oxygen,
or being drained of blood."228 The fears reach all the way back into the womb,
when growth could produce deprivation of oxygen and insufficient blood from the
placenta. This is why periods of peace, prosperity and social progress in nation
s with poor childrearing often lead to growing paranoia about enemies who are ab
out to invade, tear one's nation apart, deny one's Lebensraum and drain off the
national life-blood. Behind all these paranoid fears is a growth panic and resul
ting fear of engulfment, a panic and a fear that originated first in relation to
the earliest caretaker, the mother.229 Maternal engulfment fears can also be ha
ndled by merging with the engulfing mother in fantasy and then sacrificing onese
lf or a substitute for oneself to the engulfing mother. Many early religions fea
ture a female beast that is worshipped and to whom human sacrifices are made. Th
e Mayans, for instance, sacrificed human hearts torn out of a living victim's ch
est to jaguar gods and even handed over their children to living jaguars to be e
aten, while in one section of India sharks were until recently worshipped and "b
oth men and women went into a state of ecstasy and offered themselves to the sha
rks [by entering] the sea up to their breasts and are very soon seized and devou
red [by the sharks.]"230 Maternal engulfment fantasies are very often acted out
in concrete form in social rituals whether religious or military. Initiation cer
emonies usually feature men in animal masks who "devour" initiates, and battlefi
elds are often pictured as "devouring mouths" engulfing soldiers "sent into thei
r maw" to sacrifice themselves "for their motherland." If there ever were a soci
ety where parents really helped their children to individuate, it would be a soc
iety without growth panics, without engulfment fears and without delusional enem
ies. The enemy is a poison container for groups failing to grapple with the prob
lems of an emerging self. The enemy therefore inherits the imagery of their grow
th panic, so the enemy is usually described in terms of our childhood desires fo
r growth. "They" (for instance, Jews) are imagined to be guilty of the pejorativ
e form of every one of our desires: "greed" (all our wants); "lust" (our sexual
desire); "pushiness" (our striving) and so on. It isn't even necessary that the
enemy really exist. Simple societies imagine that witches, ancestors and spirits
are relentlessly persecuting enemies, and some nations-including Japan today-ca
n even
149
imagine Jews as bloodsucking national enemies when there are virtually no Jews i
n their country.231 LEADERSHIP AND DEFENSES AGAINST GROWTH PANIC Political leade
rs are intuitively aware that their main function is to provide grandiose manic
antidotes to growth panic. Every society acknowledges somehow its function as a
defense against maternal engulfment. Most Melanesian societies openly admit that
the main function of their rituals is to counter the disastrous effects of poll
uted menstrual blood.232 Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies were constr
ucted around rituals that countered their panic about succumbing to chaos, const
antly fearing female "chaos-monsters [who] drank people's blood and devoured the
ir flesh."233 Many Western political theorists, such as Machiavelli, have also s
een political authority as necessary to combat "feminine chaos." My psychogenic
theory only differs in ascribing this fear of maternal abandonment to fantasy, n
ot reality to childhood family life, not adult social life. The more primitive t
he dominant childrearing mode of a society, the more growth panic must be defend
ed against. New Guinea fathers are often so certain their boys are going to be e
ngulfed by poisonous menstrual blood and eaten up by witches that they cut thems
elves to get their own "strong" male blood and feed it to the boys to strengthen
them.234 Most sacrificial rites are performed to ward off dangerous "blood poll
ution."235 Political leaders regularly go to war over fears of the enemy's pollu
ting dangers, such as Hitler's fears of "foreign blood introduced into our peopl
e's body."236 Wars are said to be particularly useful in "scrubbing clean nation
al arteries clogged with wealth and ease."237 Indeed, poison-cleansing is a cent
ral purpose of all social rituals, whether the cleansing is accomplished by wars
, religious sacrifices or depressions, all of which have been said to cleanse th
e body politic of sinful pleasures and freedoms.238 Those leaders who, like Fran
klin Roosevelt, can reign during both a war and a depression are, of course, the
greatest leaders of all. The fears of abandonment that are triggered by social
progress are felt by nations to be dramatized in their relationship with their l
eader, who is felt to be growing more and more distant and less and less able to
provide grandiose manic projects to defend against their growing growth panic.
The increasing impotence and weakness of the leader can be seen in the much-watc
hed "ratings" he gets in his public opinion polls, which, after starting at a pe
ak, usually decline during his term, unless revived by some particularly effecti
ve defensive manic action that the leader engages in.239 This is just the opposi
te of what one would rationally expect, which is
150
that as a nation gets more and more evidence of what the leader can accomplish,
should become more confident in his capacities. But leaders instead usually are
imagined to weaken in office, because growing growth panic makes them seem more
distant, less potent. Ancient societies knew this feeling of weakening of leader
ship very well, and regularly set up some of their most important rituals to rev
italize the powers of their kings. The earliest of these rituals were held annua
lly, climaxing in rituals of purgation, whereby the community rids itself of pol
lution; rituals of mortification and sacrifice, whereby fasts and other punishme
nts were undergone to purge people of their dreaded desires; and rituals of comb
at, whereby battles were fought with projected forces of evil.240 Later, divine
kings provided defenses against maternal pollution, and were held to be intimate
ly connected with the health of the crops, animals and people. Early Greek kings
reigned for eight years, and were thought to have weakened so badly during this
time that they either were killed themselves, found a substitute (sometimes the
eldest son) or had to go through regeneration rituals. To be regenerated, the k
ing would go first through a humiliation ritual-be slapped on the face to repeat
the people's childhood humiliations-and might even go through the ritual proces
s of dying and being born again.241 Thus the phrase: "The King is dead; long liv
e the King!" Or, as Robespierre declared in 1792, "Louis must die because the pa
trie must live."242 In modern democratic nations, we usually don't actually kill
our leaders; we periodically throw them out of office and replace them with rev
italized substitutes. But the decline in potency of the leader his inexorable ab
andonment of us as we grow still is felt today. This is because the leader is le
ss a figure of authority than he is a delegate, someone who tells us to do what
we tell him we want done, someone who "takes the blame" for us. As poison contai
ner for our dissociated social alter, the leader is expected to absorb our viole
nt feelings without collapsing. Many societies actually designate "filth men" to
help the leader with this task, relatives who exchange blood with him so they c
an "intercept" the poisonous feelings of the people directed at him. In modern n
ations, cabinet members are our "filth men," and are regularly sacrificed when t
he leader is under attack. This leadership task of being the delegate of irratio
nal desires of the people makes leaders experts in masochism, rather than sadist
im, as traditional power theory requires. This explains why Janus found in his s
tudy of Washington D.C. prostitutes that powerful politicians got their sexual t
hrills by playing masochistic, not sadistic, sexual roles, finding that "By far
the most common service politicians
151
demand from call girls is to be beaten," hiring women to pretend to inflict upon
them "torture and mortification of the flesh...and mutilation of their genitals
."243 Only by being our delegates by carefully following our unconscious command
s-are leaders followed. We might follow them into war and lay down our lives to
combat an enemy they alone designated, but the moment they try to ignore the gro
up-fantasy and avoid our hidden commands, pelople simply do not hear them. For i
nstance, Kaiser Wilhelm II, when caught up by the Germans' need for an enemy in
order to justify the paranoia that accompanied their growing prosperity, sent ex
cessive demands to Serbia, hoping they would be rejected. When Serbia agreed to
virtually everything he wanted, he announced that "every reason for war drops aw
ay," and gave orders to stop military movements. His subordinates simply acted a
s though they had not heard what he said, and the war began without him. 244 As
soon as he didn't carry out the emotional needs of the nation, which required wa
r to offset progress, he was ignored. The notion that leaders really lead, not f
ollow, is as much a group-fantasy as the leader's charismatic power to command t
he sun's rise and fall. 245 A leader is a single individual sitting at a desk in
one corner of one city. The power we conditionally delegate to him resides in t
he group-fantasy, since the leader's function is to act as a poison container fo
r our group-fantasies. If he should unexpectedly die, the container disappears a
nd our fears return to us in a rush. Even if he has been a totally incompetent l
eader, we panic. Small-scale societies often erupt into a fury of witch fears fo
llowing the death of a leader;246 early societies often accompanied the death of
the king with the slaughter of hundreds of victims;247 Yugoslavia embarked on a
paroxysm of rape and killing following Tito's death. The leader is seen as omni
potent only because he must appear strong enough to contain our projections. But
this strength is purely magical and has nothing to do with real accomplishments
. The Maoris often renew their vigor by crawling through their leader's legs and
touching his powerful penis, and rich Americans have paid hundreds of thousands
of dollars to touch the President in the White House.248 But the charisma of le
aders is purely a defensive grandiosity of our own, compensating for our feeling
s of childhood helplessness. Thus a leader's strength seems inevitably to decay.
THE FOUR PHASES OF LEADERSHIP Fantasy analyses I have done of magazine covers a
nd cartoons over the past two decades249 reveal that there are four phases of gr
oup-fantasies about leaders, as they become less and less able to provide grandi
ose manic solutions to the nation's growing growth panic. Since group anxieties
are embedded in a fetal matrix, these
152
four phases of group-fantasy parallel the four phases of birth.250 The four lead
ership phases are: (1) strong, (2) cracking, (3) collapse and (4) upheaval.
Rysunek 24 5:6 Strong Phase
In the first year or so of his term of office, the leader is portrayed as grandi
ose, phallic and invincible, able to hold all forces of evil at bay and able to
contain the unconscious anxieties of the nation. Photos of the leader appearing
on magazine covers and in newspapers are mainly taken from the level of a small
child, making him seem like a strong parent. International political crises occu
rring in this strong phase are rarely seen as dangerous or as requiring an activ
e response; wars are rarely started in the first year of leadership.251 The stro
ng phase is actually as unrealistic as later phases, since people imagine that t
heir private emotional lives will be magically much better simply because yet an
other savior sits in an office somewhere, not because they plan to devote themse
lves to real change.
Rysunek 25 5:7 Cracking Phase
In the next year or more, the leader's deification begins to fail, and he is sho
wn as weakening, often appearing in cartoons with actual cracks in him as he is
seen as increasingly impotent and unable to handle the emotional burdens of the
nation. The media spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing whether this or t
hat minor
153
event might make the leader weaker. While the nation responds to solid economic
growth through more and more manic overinvestment and overproduction, fears of g
rowth are increasingly expressed, as "things seem to be about to get out of cont
rol"i.e., the nation's real progress begins to stir up abandonment fears. The na
tion engages in an increasing number of economic and political manic projects to
ward off their abandonment depression. Evil monsters are depicted in cartoons a
s starting to pursue the leader, and the group's boundaries are felt to be crack
ing, with images of leaking water and crumbling walls predominating, as though t
he nation's wombsurround is cracking. Complaints of being crowded, hungry and br
eathless begin, enemies start to proliferate and become more threatening.
Rysunek 26 5:8 Collapse Phase
The leader and various delegate-groups are expected to voice and take some grand
iose manic action to relieve those feelings, restaging the imagined threat rathe
r than remaining hypervigalent and paranoid forever. Nations react to foreign po
licy crises more belligerantly in their collapse phases than in their strong pha
ses.252 Even before an "enemy" is chosen, the government often takes some econom
ic measures to "stop things from getting out of control," making more and more "
mistakes" in economic policy that are unconsciously designed to slow progress, s
uch as deflationary monetary policies. The nation also conducts "purity crusades
" to put an end to the sexual and other liberties supposedly responsible for the
nation's moral collapse.253 Troops are often scurried around the world to meet
minor emergencies or to prepare for action. Free-floating paranoid fantasies mul
tiply of poisonous enemies, who are often pictured as envious of the nation's pr
ogress and about to strike, so that "preemptive action" against them seems neces
sary. The collapse phase ends with a hypervigilant paranoid "search for a humili
ating other"-an enemy who, in a moment of group-psychotic insight, can be identi
fied as the concrete source of the nation's distress.
154
Rysunek 27 5:9 Upheaval Phase
The leader begins the upheaval phase pictured as a wimp, overwhelmed by poisonou
s forces, impotent to ward off disaster, which is often depicted as a dangerous
water-beast (poisonous placenta) along with images of floods, whirlpools and dev
ouring mouths-media magery similar to medieval depictions of Hell as a Devouring
Demon.254 Anti-children crusades multiply, attacking people's projected inner c
hild for being spoiled, sinful, greedy and out of control. When the growth panic
is at a peak, "poison alerts" are declared and fears of maternal abandonment an
d wishes for maternal engulfment and rebirth proliferate. Political cartoons and
popular movies contain more and more apocalyptic upheaval birth fantasies, full
of vaginal tunnels and exploding pressures. Rational national progress seems to
be unimportant, group-delusions and group-trance projects are at a peak, and ac
tion becomes rresistible as the nation searches for some magical restoration of
potency. 255 This restoration, rebirth or revitalization wish turns into a group
ritual that at times can take one or more of three forms: (1) Regicidal Solutio
n If the leader fails to find an appropriate enemy, he himself can be designated
as the enemy of the nation, and a ritual slaying is enacted, either by actual r
egicide or by throwing him out of office. Should he be reelected at the end of h
is first term, a symbolic death and rebirth ritual is enacted, and the leader ha
s more time to find a solution to the growth panic. (2) Martial Solution-If an e
xternal enemy can be found who will co-operate by humiliating the nation as they
felt humiliated by their parents during childhood, this enemy can now be seen a
s the source of all their fears, and military action can be taken by the now-her
oic leader in order to clear out the pollution and produce a rebirth of national
strength and purpose. Wars are often preceded by apocalyptic growth panic movem
ents, "Great Awakenings" and other end-of-the-world groupfantasies.256 The leade
r is split into two parts, and the "poison" part is projected into the "enemy" l
eader, who agrees to engage in a mutual humiliation ritual and then fight the co
smic battle between good and evil and "flush out" the nation's fears. The nation
feels often enormous relief by the designation of the enemy, rather than being
fearful of war's destructiveness. The finding of an external enemy as a
155
poison container produces a burst of dopamine-filled euphoria. As Churchill wrot
e his wife in 1914, as England prepared for war, "Everything tends toward catast
rophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy." Similarly, on the day
President Truman decided to send U.S. troops to Korea one American wrote from W
ashington, D.C. that "Never before...have I felt such a sense of relief and unit
y pass through this city...When the President's statement was read in the House,
the entire chamber rose to cheer."257 The sending off of the nation's youth to
be killed in wars becomes a scapegoating of one's own vital self, the blood shed
is felt to be a purging of the polluted blood infecting the nation's arteries a
nd the identification with the nation's grandiose military leaders is felt to be
a magical restoration of potency. Genocidal wars are the most extreme example o
f cleansing group-fantasies. They are most often engaged in by nations with espe
cially poor childrearing compared to their neighbors, at times when they are att
empting to make a leap into modernity, so that the unaccustomed freedom creates
an intense growth panic which can only be cleansed by a sacrifice of millions of
helpless scapegoats, representatives of the nation's "polluted" aggressive and
sexual wishes. (3) Internal Sacrifice Solution-If the leader cannot find an exte
rnal enemy with whom to engage in a sacrificial war, he often turns to an intern
al sacrifice, either a violent revolution or an economic downturn. At the end of
the 1920s, for instance, as economic and social progress seemed to have gotten
"out of control," world bankerschief sacrificial priests of modern nations-pursu
ed deflationary economic policies, trade barriers were erected and many other "m
istakes" were made that were motivated to produce the Great Depression that sacr
ificed so much of the wealth of the world. As Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon s
aid in 1929 as the Federal Reserve pushed the world into the Great Depression, "
It will purge the rottenness out of the system."258 Business cycles, as William
K. Joseph has shown, are driven by the manic and depressive cycles of group-fant
asy,259 as manic defenses against growth panic are followed by depressive collap
ses into emotional despair and inaction. Indeed, most death rates car crashes, h
omicides, cancer, pneumonia, heart and liver diseases rise during prosperous, ma
nic times and are lower during depressions and recessions. 260 Only suicide inte
rnal sacrifice rises during economic declines, reacting to the prevailing group-
fantasy need for internal sacrifice. Depressions and recessions are thus not due
to "the Invisible Hand" of economics but are motivated sacrifices that often ki
ll more people than wars do, halting dangerous prosperity and social progress th
at seem to be getting "out of control." That growing wealth often produces anxie
ties rather than happiness can be
156
shown empirically. From 1957 to 1995, Americans doubled their income in real dol
lars, but the proportion of those telling pollsters that they are "very happy" d
eclined from 35 to 29 percent.261 Periodic economic downturns are the antidotes
administered by sacrificial priests for the disease of "greed." Cartoons prior t
o economic downturns often portray greedy people being sacrificed on altars or c
hildren being pushed off cliffs,262 scapegoats for "greedy" childhood selves fel
t to be responsible for the trauma once experienced. Like Aztec human sacrifices
,263 recessions and depressions are accompanied by national sermons, "cautionary
tales," about how sacrifices are necessary to purge the world of human sinfulne
ss. The choice between these different solutions to growth panic follows cyclica
l patterns, wars and depressions alternating in group-fantasy cycles of varying
lengths. The empirical historical investigation of these "long cycles" of group-
fantasy will be examined in detail in the next chapter, "War and Cycles of Viole
nce."
FOOTNOTES
1. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 195
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2 (1895), p. 110. 3. Thomas J. Scheff, Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, an
d War. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994, p. 63. Scheff's work is an exception to th
is tradition. Two earlier theories of social change that contained psychological
dimensions have been ignored by academics: Everett Hagen, On the Theory of Soci
al Change. Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1962, and David McClelland, The Achievi
ng Society. New York: Van Nostrand, 1961. 4. Michael A. Milburn and S. D. Conrad
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Murdock, "The Science of Culture." American Anthropologist, 34(1932): 200. 6. Gza
Roheim, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology: Culture, Personality, and the Unconsci
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Barre, The Human Animal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954; Eleanor Ho
llenberg Chasdi, Ed., Culture and Human Development: The Selected Papers of John
Whiting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Robert L. Munroe and Ruth
H. Munroe Cross-Cultural Human Development. Monterey, Calif.: Brooks/Cole Publi
shing Co., 1975; Melford E. Spiro, Culture and Human Nature. New Brunswick: Tran
saction, 1994.
157
7. James Horgan, The End of Science. Reading Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co
., 1996, p. 156. 8. Daniel T. Linger, "Has Culture Theory Lost Its Minds?" Ethos
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garet Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambri
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and Leda Cosmides, "The Psychological Foundations of Culture." In Jerome H. Bar
kow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psycholo
gy and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 26
. 12. Ibid., p. 114. 13. Paul Veyne, Writing History. Middletown: Wesleyan Unive
rsity Press, 1984, p. 183. 14. Hayden Shite, The Content of the Ofrm: Narrative
Discourse and Historical Interpretation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Pre
ss, 1987, p. 75. 15. T. W. Adorno, et al., The Authoritarian Personality. New Yo
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Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982. 16. Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968, p. 186. To see how little the psycho
logy of social action has changed for most social theorists, see John Sinisi, "T
he Shadow of Hobbes." Rethinking Marxism 7(1994): 87-99. 17. George P. Brockway,
The End of Economic Man: Principles of Any Future Economics. New York: HarperCo
llins, 1986, p. 16. 18. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical
Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955; Talcott Parsons, The Evolution o
f Societies. Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall, 1977; Sigmund Freud, "Civilization
and Its Discontents." Standard Edition, Vol. XXI. London: The Hogarth Press, 196
1; Gza Rheim, The Origin and Function of Culture. New York: Anchor Books, 1943. For
a massive bibliographical survey, see Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: It
s History, Theories, and Political Significance. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994.
19. Jeffrey M. Masson, The Assault on the Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Sed
uction Theory. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990.
158
20. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychyological Works of Sigm
und Freud. "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality." Vol. VII (1905). London: T
he Hogarth Press, 1955, p. 86; Vol. XVI. "Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analys
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148; Vol. XVI, "Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis," p. 370. See the full
analysis of psychoanalytic views on the reality of incest in Lloyd deMause, "The
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e Universality of Incest." The Journal of Psychohistory 19(1991): 123-164. 27. I
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, Vol. XI, p. 181. 34. Giulia Sissa, Greek Virginity. Cambridge: Harvard Univers
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159
36. Jeffrey Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction T
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161
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107. Ibid. 108. Max M. Stern, Repetition and Trauma: Toward a Teleonomic Theory
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of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society." New York: The Guilford
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121. Glenn D. Wolfner and Richard J. Gelles, "A Profile of Violence Toward Child
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166
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, 1989, p. 48. 141. Colin A. Ross, The Osiris Complex: Case-Studies in Multiple
Personality Disorder. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, p. vii. 142. B
ennett G. Braun, Ed. Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. Washington, D.C
.: American Psychiatric Press, 1986; Frank W. Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatment of
Multiple Personality Disorder. New York: Guilford Press, 1989; David Spiegel, e
t al., Dissociative Disorders: A Clinical Review. Lutherville, Maryland: The Sid
ran Press, 1993; Colin A. Ross, Multiple Personality Disorder: Diagnosis, Clinic
al Features, and Treatment. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1989; Richard P. Kluft
and Catherine G. Fine, Eds. Clinical Perspectives on Multiple Personality Disord
er. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1993; Philip M. Coons, "Psycho
physiologic Aspects of Multiple Personality Disorder: A Review." Dissociation 1(
1988): 47-53; David A. Oakley and Lesley C. Eames, "The Plurality of Consciousne
ss." In David A. Oakley, Ed., Brain and Mind. LLondon: Methuen, 1985, p.236. 143
. Colin A. Ross, The Osiris Complex, p.22. 144. Richard P. Kluft, "Basic Princip
les in Conducting the Psychotherapy of Multiple Personality Disorder." In Richar
d P. Kluft and Catherine G. Fine, Eds. Clinical Perspectives on Multiple Persona
lity Disorder, p. 39. 145. Lisa Goodman and Jay Peters, "Persecutory Alters and
Ego States: Protectors, Friends, and Allies." Dissociation 8(1995): 91. 146. Ibi
d.
167
147. Theresa K. Albini and Terri E. Pease, "Normal and Pathological Dissociation
s of Early Childhood." Dissociation 2(1989): 144. 148. J. O. Beahrs, "Co-Conscio
usness: A Common Denominator in Hypnosis, Multiple Personality, and Normalcy." A
merican Journal of Clinical Hypnosis 26(1983): 100. 149. John F. Schumaker, The
Corruption of Reality: A Unified Theory of Religion, Hypnosis, and Psychopatholo
gy. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995, pp. 82-83, 163. 150. D. W. Winnicott, "
The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications. International Journal
of Psycho-analysis 48(f1967): 87. 151. D. W. Winnicott, The Maturational Proces
ses and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International Universities Press
, 1965. 152. Richard M. Restak, "Possible Neurophysiological Correlates of Empat
hy." In Joseph Lichtenberg et al., Eds. Empathy I. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic P
ress, 1984, p. 70. 153. Siri Dulaney and Alan Page Fiske, "Cultural Rituals and
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Is There a Common Psychological Mechanism?" Ethos
22(1994): 251-2. 154. Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wes
ley Publishing Co., 1989, pp. 100-113. 155. Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psycho
history. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, p. 188; Joe Berghold, "The Social Tranc
e: Psychological Obstacles to Progress in History." The Journal of Psychohistory
19(1991): 221-243; Jerrold Atlas, "Understanding the Correlation Between Childh
ood Punishment and Adult Hypnotizability as It Impacts on the Command Power of M
odern 'Charismatic' Political Leaders." The Journal of Psychohistory 17(1990): 3
09-318. 156. Catherine G. Fine, "The Cognitive Sequelae of Incest." In Richard F
. Kluft, Ed. IncestRelated Syndromes of Adult Psychopathology. Washington, D.C.:
American Psychiatric Press, 1990, pp. 169-171. 157. W. R. Bion, Experiences in
Groups. London: Tavistock, 1961; W. R. Bion, Learning From Experience. London: H
einemann, 1962; Richard D. Mann with Graham S. Gibbard and John J. Hartman, Inte
rpersonal Styles and Group Development: An Analysis of the MemberLeader Relation
ship. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967; Graham S. Gibbard, John J. Hartman, Ric
hard D. Mann, Eds. Analysis of Groups. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 19
74; Didier Anzieu, The Group and the Unconscious. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
, 1984; Howard Stein, "Organizational Psychohistory." The Journal of Psychohisto
ry 21(1993): 97-114; C. Fred Alford, Group Psychology and Political Theory. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
168
158. Margaret Thaler Singer, Cults in our Midst: The Hidden Menace in Our Everyd
ay Lives. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995, p. 5. 159. Lloyd deMause, "Why Cults
Terrorize and Kill Children." The Journal of Psychohistory 21(1994): 505-518. 1
60. Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982,
p. 192. 161. Ben Rippa, "Of Sealed Rooms and Secrets: Groups in Israel During t
he Gulf War." In Mark F. Ettin et al., Eds. Group Process and Political Dynamics
. Madison: Conn.: International University Press, 1995, p. 33. 162. Stanley Milg
ram, Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. 163. Ibid., 152. 164.
Arthur G. Miller, The Obedience Experiments: A Case Study of Controversy in Soc
ial Science. New York: Praeger Scientific, 1986. 165. Ibid., p. 76. 166. Ibid.,
p. 78-79, 148. 167. Ibid., p. 60. 168. Irving I. Janus, Victims of Groupthink. B
oston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982, p. 70. 169 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authorit
y. New York: Harper & Row, 1974, p. 143. 170. Milgram himself only tried some cr
ude personality tests; see A. C. Elms and Stanley Milgram, "Personality Characte
ristics Associated With Obedience and Defiance Toward Authoritative Command." Jo
urnal of Experimental Research in Personality 1(1966): 282-89. 171. On the origi
n of personal and social violence in shame, see James Gilligan, Violence: Our De
adly Epidemic and Its Causes. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1996. 172. Robert S
. McNamara with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietn
am. New York: Times Books, 1995, p. 149. 173. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusal
em: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963, p. 289. For
a discussion of this and other psychological aspects of warfare see Rudolph Bini
on, "Ketzerisches zur Kriegsfrage," in "So ist der Mensch..." 80 Jahre Erster We
ltkrieg. Vienna: Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, 1994, pp. 117-124. 174. Dav
e Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and So
ciety. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1995, p. 3.
169
175. Ibid., p. 88. 176. Ibid., p. 13. 177. Ibid., pp. 99-113. 178. Josephine Hil
gard, Personality and Hypnosis: A Study of Imaginative Involvement. Chicago: Uni
versity of Chicago Press, 1970; Jerrold Atlas, "Understanding the Correlation Be
tween Childhood Punishment and Adult Hypnotizability as It Impacts on the Comman
d Power of modern 'Charismatic' Political Leaders." The Journal of Psychohistory
17(1990): 309-318. 179. Michael A. Milburn and S. D. Conrad, "The Politics of D
enial." The Journal of Psychohistory 23(1996): 238-250. 180. Samuel P. Oliner an
d Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe.
New York: The Free Press, 1988. 181. See Frank W. Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatmen
t of Multiple Personality Disorder, p. 55 for bibliography of studies on inciden
ce. 182. Ibid., pp. 47-49. 183. John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters With A
liens. New York: Scribner's, 1994; Frank W. Putnam, "Dissociative Phenomena." In
David Spiegel, Ed. Dissociative Disorders: A Clinical Review. Lutherville, Mary
land: The Sidran Press, 1993, pp. 2-4. 184. The New York Times, October 23, 1995
, p. A15. 185. Gail Sheehy, "The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich," Vanity Fair, pp.
149-151. 186. The empirical support for this general proposition is described i
n Michael A. Milburn and S. D. Conrad, "The Politics of Denial." The Journal of
Psychohistory 23(1996): 238-251. 187. Newsweek, April 29, 1996, p. 32. 188. Elle
n L. Bassuk, Angela Browne and John Buckner, "Single Mothers and Welfare." Scien
tific American October 1996, p. 67; Mike A. Males, The Scapegoat Generation: Ame
rica'sWar on Adolescents. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1996, p. 78. 189.
Mike Males, "In Defense of Teenage Mothers," The Progressive, August 1994, p. 2
2. 190. The New York Times, April 17, 1995, p. A1. 191. New York Post, March 25,
1995, p. 4.
170
192. The New York Times, September 12, 1995, p. A20. 193. CNBC-TV, September 14,
1995. 194. C-SPAN, September 1, 1995. 195. Lloyd deMause, Reagan's America. New
York: Creative Roots, 1984, p. 44. 196. Margaret Power, The Egalitarians Human
and Chimpanzee: An Anthropological View of Social Organization. Cambridge: Cambr
idge University Press, 1991, p. 91. 197. Mitchell Moss, "Newt to Poor: Let Them
Eat Laptops." New York Newsday, January 29, 1995, p. A30. 198. The New York Time
s, May 14, 1995, p. 22. 199. Ibid. 200. Prime Time, May 17, 1995. 201. Robert Ja
y Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New
York: Basic Books, 1986, pp. 417-500. 202. Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses:
Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1
989, p. 289. 203. Quoted by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioner
s: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996, p. 219.
204. Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Vio
lence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 101. 205. David Beisel, "
Looking for Enemies, 1990-1994." The Journal of Psychohistory 22(1994): 1-38. 20
6. Michele Stephen, A'aisa's Gifts: A Study of Magic and the Self. Berkeley: Uni
versity of California Press, 1995, p. 83; the tribe is the Mekeo of New Guinea,
and the fallen stick in the cowrie shell an obvious symbol of impotence. 207. Gi
lbert Herdt, "Spirit Familiars in the Religious Imagination of Sambia Shamans."
In Gilbert Herdt and Michele Stephen, Eds., The Religious Imagination in New Gui
nea. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989, pp. 99-121. 208. Erika Bourg
uignon, "Dreams and Altered States of Consciousness in Anthropological Research,
" in F. K. L Hsu, Ed., Psychological Anthropology (Second Edition). Homewood, I
ll.: The Dorsey Press, 1972, p. 418.
171
209. Robert Katz, "Education for Transcendence: !Kia-Healing with the Kalahari !
Kung." In Richard B. Lee and I. DeVore, Eds., Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers. Cambrid
ge: Harvard University Press, 1976, p. 76. 210. Jane Fajans, "The Person in Soci
al Context" In Geoffrey M. White and John Korkpatrick, Eds. Person, Self, and Ex
perience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley: University of Californi
a Press, 1985, p. 380. 211. Erika Bourguignon, "Dreams and Altered States of Con
sciousness in Anthropological Research;" Eugene G. d'Aquili et al., The Spectrum
of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis. New York: Columbia University Pres
s, 1979; Ronald C. Simnons et al., "The Psychobiology of Trance," Transcultural
Psychiatric Research Review (1988): 249-288; Ede Frecska and Zsuzsanna Kulcsar,
"Social Bonding in the Modulation of the Physiology of Ritual Trance," Ethos 17(
1989): 70-94. 212. Peter Brown, The Hypnotic Brain: Hypnotherapy and Social Comm
unication. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, pp. 115-118. 213. Quoted by M
orris Berman, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the
West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989, p. 286. 214. Josephine Hilgard, Persona
lity and Hypnosis: A Study of Imaginative Involvement. Chicago: University of Ch
icago Press, 1970; see also Jerrold Atlas, "Understanding the Correlation Betwee
n Childhood Punishment and Adult Hypnotizability as It Impacts on the Command Po
wer of Modern 'Charismatic' Political Leaders." The Journal of Psychohistory 17(
1990): 309-318 and Joe Berghold, "The Social Trance: Psychological Obstacles to
Progress in History." The Journal of Psychohistory 19(1991): 221-243. 215. Lloyd
deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, pp. 194-
217. 216. Casper Schmidt, "The Abnormally Popular George Bush." The Journal of P
sychohistory 18(1990): 123-134; Howard Stein, "Organizational Psychohistory." Th
e Journal of Psychohistory 21(1993): 97-114; David Beisel, "Thoughts Concerning
Some Objections to Group-Fantasy Analysis." The Journal of Psychohistory 9(1982)
: 237-240; Paul H. Elovitz et al., "On Doing Fantasy Analysis." The Journal of P
sychohistory 13(1985): 207-228. 217. C. Fisher, "Subliminal (Preconscious) Perce
ption: The Microgenesis of Unconscious Fantasy." In H. Blum et al., Eds. Fantasy
, Myth and REality. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1988, pp. 93-
108. 218. Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory; Reagan's America; "'Heads
and Tails': Money As a Poison Container." The Journal of Psychohistory 16(1988)
: 1-18; "America's Search for a Fighting Leader." The Journal of Psychohistory 2
0(1992): 121-134.
172
219. Margaret Power, The Egalitarians-Human and Chimpanzee: An Anthropological V
iew of Social Organization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 134.
220. For trance induction techniques, see Milton Erickson, The Nature of Hypnos
is and Suggestion. New York: Irvington Publishers, 1980; Milton Erickson and Ern
est Rossi, Hypnotherapy: An Exploratory Casebook. New York: Irvington Publishers
, 1987 and Stephen Lankton and Carol Lankton, The Answer Within: A Clinical Fram
ework of Ericksonian Hypnotherapy. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1983. 221. Jack Germ
ond and Jules Witcover, Wake Us When It's Over: Presidential Politics of 1984. N
ew York: Macxmillan Publishing, 1985, p. 430. 222. William S. Condon, "Neonatal
entrainment and enculturation." In Margaret Bullowa, Ed., Before Speech: The Beg
innings of Interpersonal Communication. New York: Cambridge University Press, 19
79, pp. 131-169. 223. Paul H. Elovitz, Henry Lawton and George Luhrmann, "On Doi
ng Fantasy Analysis." The Journal of Psychohistory 13(1985): 205-232; Casper Sch
midt, "The Abnormally Popular George Bush." The Journal of Psychohistory 18(1990
): 123-134; Howard Stein, "Organizational Psychohistory." The Journal of Psychoh
istory 21(1993): 97-114; Jerrold Atlas, Was in Deitschland Passieren Wird...das
Unbewusste der Deutschen. Dusseldorf: ECON, 1992. For the technique of fantasy a
nalysis of film, see Lloyd deMause, "How to Do a Fantasy Analysis of a Movie." T
he Journal of Psychohistory 20(1992): 31-32. 224. Didier Anzieu, The Group and t
he Unconscious. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, p. 160-161. 225. Graham S.
Gibbard and John J. Hartman, "The Significance of Utopian Fantasies in Small Gr
oups." The International Journal of Group Psychotherapy 23(1973): 125-147. 226.
James F. Masterson, The Search for the Real Self: Unmasking the Personality Diso
rders of Our Age. New York: The Free Press, 1988, p. 55. 227. Carol R. Ember and
Melvin Ember, "Issues in Cross-Cultural Studies of Interpersonal Violence." In
R. Barry Rubach and Neil Alan Weiner, Eds. Interpersonal Violent Behaviors: Soci
al and Cultural Aspects. New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1995, pp. 32-33. 228
. Ibid., p. 62. 229. Charles W. Socarides, The Preoedipal Origin and Psychoanaly
tic Therapy of Sexual Perversions. Madison, Conn.: International Universities Pr
ess, 1988. 230. Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Pass
ions of War. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997, pp. 74-75.
173
231. Stanley Rosenman, "Japanese Antisemitism: Conjuring Up Conspiratorial Jews.
" The Journal of Psychohistory 25(1997): 1-40. 232. Gilbert H. Herdt, Ed. Ritual
ized Homosexuality in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
233. Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apo
calyptic Faith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, pp. 22 and 54. 234. Fitz
John Porter Poole, "Coming Into Social Being: Cultural Images of Infants in Bin
imKuskusmin Folk Psychology." In Geoffrey M. White and John Kirkpatrick, Ed. Per
son, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley: Univer
sity of California Press, 1985, p. 194. 235. J. H. M. Beattie, "On Understanding
Sacrifice." In M. F. C. Bourdillon and Meyer Fortes, Sacrifice. New York: Acade
mic Press, 1980, p. 42. 236. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1971, p. 388. 237. Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and th
e Coming of World War I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, p. 51. 238
. Lloyd deMause, "'Heads and Tails': Money As a Poison Container." The Journal o
f Psychohistory 16(1988): 1-18. 239. Casper G. Schmidt, "The Use of the Gallup P
oll as a Psychohistorical Tool." Journal of Psychohistory 10(1982): 141-162. 240
. Theodore H. Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth and Drama in the Ancient Near East.
New York: Henry Schuman, 1950, pp. 4-10. 241. James George Frazer, The Golden Bo
ugh: The Dying God. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1911. 242. Susan Dunn, The Dea
ths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination. Princeton: Prin
ceton University Press, 1994, p. 15. 243. Sam Janus et al., A Sexual Profile of
Men in Power. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977, pp. 101 and 170. 244.
Max Montgelas and Walter Schcking, Eds. Outbreak of the World War: German Documen
ts Collected by Karl Kautsky. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924, pp. 250ff.
245. Rudolph Binion, Hitler Among the Germans. New York: Elsevier, 1976.
174
246. Michele Stephen, "Contrasting Images of Power." In Michele Stephen, Ed., So
rcerer and Witch in Melanesia. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987, p.
280. 247. Eli Sagan, At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Poli
tical Oppression, and the State. Santa Fe: FishDrum Magazine Press, 1993, p. 122
. 248. Bradd Shore, "Mana and Tapu." In Allan Howard and Robert Borofsky, Ed. De
velopments in Polynesian Ethnology. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989,
p. 142. 249. Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory and Reagan's America; C
asper Schmidt, "The Use of the Gallup Poll as a Psychohistorical Tool." The Jour
nal of Psychohistory 10(1982): 141-162; Casper Schmidt, "A Differential Poison I
ndex from the Gallup Poll." The Journal of Psychohistory 10(1983): 523-532; Dani
el Dervin, Enactments: American Modes and Psychohistorical Models. Madison: Fair
leigh Dickinson University Press, 1996; Lloyd deMause, "Shooting at Clinton, Pro
secuting O.J., and Other Sacrificial Rituals." The Journal of Psychohistory 22(1
995): 378-393. These have all been done for American leadership phases, and have
yet to be tested for the group-fantasies of other nations and groups. 250. Lloy
d deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, pp. 245-332. 251. Ibid., pp. 153-155. 2
52. Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, pp. 154-158. 253. Lloyd deMause
, "American Purity Crusades." The Journal of Psychohistory 14(1987): 345-348. 25
4. Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, pp. 86-88. 255. Charles W. Socar
ides, The Preoedipal Origin and Psychoanalytic Therapy of Sexual Perversions. Ma
dison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1988, p. 17. 256. Charles B. Str
ozier, Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America. Boston: Beaco
n Press, 1994. 257. Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, p. 160. 258. Wi
lliam Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987, p. 300. 259. William K. Joseph, "Prediction,
Psychology and Economics." The Journal of Psychohistory 15(1987): 101-112; Will
iam K. Joseph, "Will Peace Panic the Market?" The Journal of Psychohistory 16(19
89): 405-409. See also Lloyd deMause, Reagan's America. 260. Business Week, July
1, 1996, p. 22.
175
261. David G. Myers and Ed Diener, "The Pursuit of Happiness." Scientific Americ
an, May 1996, p. 70. 262. Lloyd deMause, Reagan's America, pp. 56-57. 263. Ptole
my Tompkins, This Tree Grows Out of Hell: Mesoamerica and the Search for the Mag
ical Body. San Francisco: HaperSanFrancisco, 1990, p. 120.
176
Chapter 6 War as Righteous Rape and Purification
"War! It meant a purification, a liberation ...and an extraordinary sense of hop
e" Thomas Mann Happy people don't start wars. They don't need "purifying" or "liber
ation," and their everyday lives are already full of hope and meaning, so they d
on't need a war to save them from anything. What sort of strange emotional disor
der is it that war cleanses, liberates and saves people from? And how can killin
g, raping and torturing people be acts that purify and restore hope in life? Obv
iously war is a serious psychopathological condition, a recurring human behavior
pattern whose motives and causes have yet to be examined on any but the most su
perficial levels of analysis. STANDARD THEORIES OF CAUSATION OF WAR All standard
theories of war deny that it is an emotional disorder at all. 1 War, unlike ind
ividual violence, is usually seen solely as a response to events outside the ind
ividual. Nations that start wars are not considered emotionally disturbed--they
are either considered as rational or they are "evil," a religious category. Alth
ough homicide and suicide are now studied as clinical disorders,2 war, unfortuna
tely, is not. Most historians of war have given up in advance any attempt to und
erstand its causes, claiming "it is simply not the historian's business to give
explanations." 3 Genocide, in particular, appears outside the universe of resear
ch into motivations, since if one tries to understand Holocaust perpetrators, on
e is said to "give up one's right to blame them." At best, historians avoid the
psychodynamics of the perpetrators of wars entirely, saying, "Leave motivation t
o the psychologists."4 The standard explanations given for war by political scie
ntists and anthropologists equally avoid clinical understanding. Instead, they b
reak down war causes into three general categories: 1.Instincts and Other Tautol
ogies: The most popular cause of war is that it is a result of a human instinct
for destruction. From Clausewitz's "instinctive hostility" 5 and Freud's "instin
ct for hatred and aggression"6 down to biologists' statements that war is "macho
male sexual selection" that "accelerates cultural evolution,"7 none of
177
them notice that simply assuming an instinct for war without any neurobiological
, genetic evidence at all is wholly tautological, saying no more than "the group
's desire for war is caused by the individual's desire for war." Since tribes an
d states spend more of their time at peace than at war, one must also then posit
an "instinct for peace," which, through group cooperation, should favor surviva
l even more. One can proliferate tautological instincts at will, but only eviden
ce counts. Unfortunately, all tests for the heritability for violence have faile
d completely. 8 The best study of instinct theories concludes: "Human warfare, a
nd indeed killing, are too rare to be the product of a drive that needs to be sa
tisfied. There is no drive or instinct that builds up, gives rise to aggression,
is satiated upon release, and then builds up again...Furthermore, humans also h
ave a genetic inheritance shared with fellow primates for peacemaking, and that
propensity must also be factored into the equation."9 Tautological explanations
proliferate in the field of war studies. Historians are particularly prone to cl
aiming that the reason a lot of people do something is because they all are just
following each other, a perfect tautology. War is often said, for instance, to
be caused by "ideology" or by "the culture of militarism" of this or that state1
0 or by "a marked tendency for the military to prepare offensive military plans.
"11 But saying war is caused by an arms race is about as meaningful as saying ho
micide is caused by someone buying a gun. What one expects when asking for the m
otivation for homicide is not how the perpetrator got the weapon but the interna
l development of his psyche plus the events leading up to the violent act. Besid
es, empirically most states start wars without an arms buildup. Germany in 1913-
1914, for instance, spent less on her military than France and Russia, 12 yet be
gan WWI because she felt insecure with a smaller army than other countries and f
elt paranoid about being attacked. Yet another common tautological reason for wa
rs is that they are "preventive." Bismarck put that reason in its place when he
was urged to start a preventive war by saying it was "as irrational as committin
g suicide because one was afraid to die." 13 America even today continues to hav
e a "first strike nuclear deterrence" preventive war policy that is based on the
causing of 600 million deaths as "acceptable." 14 Just as meaningless are all t
he theories of war being caused by "lack of collective security," or "the anarch
ic nature of the state system" or similar systems theories. The lack of instrume
nts to prevent wars is a symptom not a cause; presumably if one could discover t
he underlying causes of war and reduce their power, states would then set up int
ernational systems of settling differences and of providing collective security.
As Holsti puts it, "To argue that we have war because of systems structures is
178
analogous to an argument that we have automobile accidents because we have highw
ays."15 One must not reify groups; only individuals have motives. 2. Greed as a
Motive for War: War is usually claimed to be purely plunder by social scientists
: "War is defined as stealing en masse what other men own."16 Yet we would never
accept greed as a real motive from a man who murders his family after taking ou
t life insurance on them, nor would we accept the excuse of greed from a man who
raped and murdered women and then took some of their jewelry. Even thieves turn
out to have deeper motives than greed. As James Gilligan, a prison psychiatrist
who has spent his life analyzing the lives of criminals, puts it, "Some people
think armed robbers commit their crimes in order to get money. But when you sit
down and talk with people who repeatedly commit such crimes, what you hear is, '
I never got so much respect before in my life as I did when I first pointed a gu
n at somebody.'"17 That anyone should imagine that hundreds of millions of peopl
e can enthusiastically engage in mutual mass butchery over minor pieces of terri
tory is so patently ludicrous that it is a wonder anyone could ever have taken i
t seriously; yet this what historians and political scientists still ask us to b
elieve. The entire "rational decisions" school of war theorists, all of whom cla
im utility as the ultimate motive for war, run up against the extensive empirica
l research done on hundreds of wars in recent years that consistently shows that
wars are destructive not rational, that wars cost even winners more than they g
ain, that those who begin wars usually lose them and that leaders who go to war
historically never actually calculate before they do so whether the gains will e
xceed the costs.18 Zinnes summarizes the results of all this testing of war as a
rational activity motivated by materialistic gain as follows: "After thirty yea
rs of empirical research, in which we have devoted an enormous amount of time to
collecting, measuring and summarizing observations about nation-state behavior,
we cannot find any patterns" that show any relationship at all between war freq
uency and economics, population density or any other material condition of state
s.19 Otterbein even shows that cross-culturally there is "no influence on war of
economic or ecological factors;" even tribal warfare destroys far more than it
gains, and tribes rarely even pretend they are going to war to gain territory. 2
0 Rummel concurs, finding from his huge historical database that a country's pro
pensity to go to war is unrelated to its economic development, its technological
abilities or even its military capabilities.21 The costs of wars have repeatedl
y been demonstrated to be far in excess of any gains that could be hoped for.22
In Vietnam, it cost America hundreds of thousands of
179
dollars to kill each enemy soldier; the world even today spends trillions of dol
lars a year to fight wars and maintain military forces, far in excess of anythin
g that could be gained by war. In fact, wars are so self-destructive that when a
nation goes to war the people must at some level realize that they are engaging
on a truly suicidal venture. Often, a careful examination of the actual histori
cal decision process reveals explicitly suicidal imagery. As just one example fr
om many, when Tojo called together the Japanese leadership to decide whether or
not to attack Pearl Harbor, he went around the table and asked each minister to
tell what he thought would happen if they attacked the U.S. Each one forecast de
cisive defeat. It was so obvious that an attack would be suicidal for Japan that
Tojo ended up saying, "There are times when we must have the courage to do extr
aordinary things--like jumping, with eyes closed, off the veranda of the Kiyomiz
u Temple."23 The Kiyomizu Temple was well known to all present as the place in K
yoto where people committed suicide. 3. Stress Theories of War: Even those theor
ies of war that allow that it is wholly irrational end up blaming economic stres
s as the cause of the irrationality. "Hard times make people feel threatened and
frustrated," so they go to war from the emotional stress of economic downturns.
Most leaders who try to promote peace cite the stress theory: "By eliminating t
he economic dissatisfaction that breeds war we might have a chance for lasting p
eace" (Sumner Hull) or "Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from
want" (Franklin Roosevelt).24 Marxist theorists in particular believe wars break
out because of capitalist economic downturns. In particular, most theorists bel
ieve WWII was caused by stresses of the economic Depression. The problem with th
ese stress theories is that empirically wars usually occur during economic upswi
ngs, not during depressions. Wars not only occur far more frequently after prosp
erous periods, but are longer and bigger after prosperity, "six to twenty times
bigger as indicated by battle fatalities."25 Macfie finds "the outbreak of wars
has avoided years of heaviest unemployment...excessive expansions are required t
o germinate the seeds of war."26 In Europe since 1815, no great-power wars have
been started during a depression.27 WWI broke out after 40 years of growth of re
al incomes for workers (80 percent higher for Germans),28 and even WWII broke ou
t several years after Germany had regained and surpassed pre-Depression levels o
f production--the supposed cause, economic distress, having disappeared by 1939.
Wars are in fact prosperity-reducing rituals. They are responses to what we hav
e earlier termed growth panic--responses to progress and prosperity, not to depl
etion.
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What is depleted when nations decide to go to war is their emotional not their e
conomic resources.
By examining only the sociogenic and not the psychogenic sources of war, major t
heorists to date have been disappointed by the total lack of results of their re
search. David Singer concludes that the study of war has failed to "achieve any
significant theoretical breakthrough" and is saddened by the fact that no one ha
s found any "compelling explanation" for war.29 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita admits t
hat "we know little more about the general sources of international conflict tod
ay than was known to Thucydides...[perhaps] scientific explanations of such conf
licts are not possible."30 Such extreme pessimism is understandable. Clausewitz'
s dicta that war is an extension of political policy has been fully discredited,
and all the usual reasons for wars --for territory, for revenge, to obtain sacr
ificial prisoners, to obtain coups, as God's will, to stop dominoes from falling
--turn out to be only rationalizations.31 But the failure to find valid motives
for wars only applies to sociogenic theories, ones that carefully avoid the psyc
hological model of human violence that has proved so fruitful in the study of th
e causes of homicide and suicide. We will first turn to the results of the recen
t clinical studies of individual violence before we propose our psychogenic theo
ry of war. THE CLINICAL STUDY OF HUMAN VIOLENCE Because those societies which ha
ve the harshest child-rearing practices have been shown to produce low-esteem ad
ults who have the highest incidence of murder, suicide and war,32 the study of h
uman violence can most fruitfully begin with examining the findings of clinician
s who have closely interviewed murderers and determined their motives. Most of w
hat we usually believe about interpersonal violence is unconfirmed by statistics
. Homicide is not regularly higher in big cities; cross-cultural studies find th
ere is "no significant associations between community size and homicide or assau
lt."33 Nor do men assault their spouses more often than women do; studies in var
ious countries show "wives hit their husbands at least as often as husbands hit
their wives,"34 although men do more damage with their assaults.35 When war is c
ounted as violence, men constitute at least 75 percent of the victims of lethal
physical violence in the United States, and die from two to five times as often
from personal violence as women do world-wide.36 Mothers are not more often gent
le while fathers mainly do the hitting of children; in fact, American mothers to
day abuse their children nearly twice as much as fathers.37
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Both statistically and clinically, researchers have found violent adults have on
ly one thing in common: poor childrearing.38 Studies of homicidal youths, for in
stance, found 90 percent could be documented as coming from severely emotional,
physical or sexually abusive families.39 James Gilligan summarizes his decades o
f interviewing murderers: 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--often c
onfirmed by independent sources--of how these men were victimized during childho
od. Physical violence, neglect, abandonment, rejection, sexual exploitation and
violation occurred on a scale so extreme, so bizarre, and so frequent that one c
annot fail to see that the men who occupy the extreme end of the continuum of vi
olent 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 o
ut of windows, raped, or prostituted by mothers who were their "pimps"... The ca
use of adult violence, says Gilligan, is a "collapse of self-esteem" triggered b
y an incident in which the murderer imagines himself or herself to be humiliated
and shamed, resorting in what he calls a "logic of shame, a form of magical thi
nking that says, If I kill this person in this way, I will kill shame--I will be ab
le to protect myself from being exposed and vulnerable to and potentially overwh
elmed by the feeling of shame.'"41 Gilligan points out that shame is at the root
of mass violence too, pointing out that "Hitler came to power on the campaign p
romise to undo the shame of Versailles'--and clearly that promise, and the sensitiv
ity to shame from which it derived its power, struck a responsive chord in the G
erman people as a whole."42 Though criminologists report that in homicides "the
most common altercation was of relatively trivial origin: insult, curse, jostlin
g, etc.,"43 these shaming events turn childhood traumas into current rage, what
Katz terms "righteously enraged slaughter,"44 producing a "tremendous rush [that
is] almost orgasmic" for the murderer45 as they avenge all their past hurts and
humiliations. "All violence," says Gilligan, "is an attempt to achieve justice.
"46 As we shall shortly see, this includes mass violence as well, which also inv
olves imagining one achieves justice through violent, righteous vengeance for ea
rlier wrongs. THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE People start wars when something chan
ges in their brains, neurotransmitters, hormones and cellular neuropeptide syste
ms.47 This "something" is the result of a developmental process that begins befo
re birth and is turned into a capacity for violence during childhood. Contrary t
o the views of Freud and Piaget, children are
182
actually quite empathic toward others from birth if treated well. Neonates cry i
n response to the crying of another baby; "even 6-month-olds...responded to dist
ressed peers with actions such as leaning toward, gesturing toward, touching or
otherwise contacting the peer."48 Babies who are treated well can be quite gener
ous with their love, gently touching and patting other babies and even their mot
hers when they notice they look sad. But the majority of children throughout his
tory--particularly boys, who are physically and emotionally abused more than gir
ls--feel so helpless and afraid that they grow up in what has been called a "cul
ture of cruelty,"49 where they graduated from violent families to form gangs and
try to dominate and hurt each other in order to be perpetrators rather than vic
tims, thereby preparing themselves for cooperating in the violence of war. In on
e study, for instance, Lewis and Pincus report "a significantly greater proporti
on of very violent children demonstrated...paranoid symptomology [and] believed
that someone was going to hurt them...constantly feeling the need to carry weapo
ns such as guns and metal pipes for their own protection..."50 The more violent
children, Lewis reports, "had been physically abused by mothers, fathers, steppa
rents, other relatives and friends' of the family. The degree of abuse to which the
y were subjected was often extraordinary. One parent broke her son's legs with a
broom; another broke his fingers and his sister's arm; another chained and burn
ed his son; and yet another threw his son downstairs...Several children witnesse
d their fathers, stepfathers, or mothers' boyfriends slash their mothers with kn
ives. They saw their siblings tortured with cigarette butts, chained to beds, an
d thrown into walls."51 Severe neglect and emotional abuse have been shown to be
equivalent to and often worse than physical abuse in producing lasting traumati
c effects upon children.52 The neurobiological affects of trauma upon children h
ave been extensively studied. As we have discussed earlier, serotonin levels are
reduced by trauma, and are found in reduced levels in adult antisocial personal
ities, because the lower level of their inhibiting ability allows less control o
ver impulsivity and therefore higher rates of violence.53 External stress also i
ncreases corticosterone production, decreasing the effectiveness of the hippocam
pal system which evaluates the emotional meaning of incoming stimuli.54 Psychopa
thic personalities have been found to be "actually slower to respond emotionally
than the rest of us...Even when they're just sitting around, antisocial individ
uals are more low-key than the average person" because their noradrenergic behav
ioral inhibition systems were crippled due to excessive early neglect, traumas a
nd over control by caretakers. 55 Very early maternal neglect in particular prod
uces an undersized orbitofrontal cortex--the brain
183
region behind the eyes that allows one to reflect on one's emotions and to empat
hize with the feelings of others--resulting in such a diminished self and such a
low capacity for empathy that the baby grows up literally unable to feel guilt
about hurting others.56 Thus swaddled babies abandoned to cribs in dark rooms--a
s most children were in history--who totally miss the mother's gaze and loving i
nteraction in their early years are programmed for later impulse disorders, psyc
hopathic personalities and the need for killing in war, simply because they neve
r have developed what today we consider "normal-sized" orbitofrontal cortexes th
rough sustained eye contact and mutual play with the mother. As Shore puts it: T
he orbitofrontal cortex functionally mediates the capacity to empathize with the
feelings of others and to reflect on internal emotional states, one's own and o
thers'....The socioaffective stimulation produced by the mother's face facilitat
es the experience-dependent growth...children deprived of early visual sensory s
timulation...frequently show impairments in representational and affective funct
ions that are responsible for severe emotional problems.57 Lesions of the orbito
frontal cortex produce unregulated aggression and dramatic mood state alteration
s in both humans and other animals because "unmodulated rage represents a hypera
ctivation of the...dopaminergic system [and] impulsive acting out episodes ]of]
narcissistic rage."58 Children neglected and abused in early months "manifest pa
thological self-importance, or narcissism, displayed as...grandiosity, recklessn
ess...insecurity and emotional shallowness [plus] the inability to feel ordinary
human empathy and affection for others and the perpetrating of repeated antisoc
ial acts."59 Thus the slow evolution of childrearing results in a slow historica
l increase in size in the average orbitofrontal cortex and more balanced seroton
in, dopamine and other hormonal levels, resulting in a steady reduction of grand
iosity, paranoia and uncontrolled rage and a diminishing historical rates of inf
anticide, homicide, suicide and war deaths. DISSOCIATION OF THE TWO BRAINS One o
f the most important findings of Athens from his lifetime of interviewing of vio
lent criminals is that before they kill they consult "phantom communities" who a
pprove of their violent acts as revenges for past humiliations. 60 These phantom
communities are, of course, identical to the "social alters" I have discussed p
reviously, where dissociated violent selves and internalized harmful caretakers
are kept and engaged in dialogues that influence our deepest emotions and approv
e of our most violent behavior. Athens determined that violence didn't just foll
ow
184
trauma; it required a further "belligerency stage of violentization" during whic
h the brutalized subject resolves in consultation with his inner phantoms, his a
lters, that he or she has had enough, that violence is sometimes necessary if on
e isn't to remain a victim one's whole life and that he or she will now use phys
ical violence for those who unduly provoke or humiliate him or her. These alters
are often actual inner voices telling the criminal what to do, so that their de
cisions to act violently followed from a dialogue with their phantom communities
--the "voices" were their phantom companions coming in exceptionally loud and cl
ear....Lews...corroborated Athens's finding that the self incorporates phantom c
ompanions when she examined Arthur Shawcross, the Rochester, New York, so-called
serial killer who murdered prostitutes. "Arthur Shawcross also experienced diss
ociative states," Lewis reports. "At these times he would hear his mother in his
head, berating him and the women he was seeing. No one was good enough for Arty
. They should die."61 These dissociated social alters, it turns out, are concent
rated in only one side of the brain, in one hemisphere, a different one in each
of us. Frederic Schiffer explains how his studies of dual-brain psychology led h
im to ask his psychiatric patients to look through special glasses, one pair of
which had only the left side of the left eye uncovered (reaching only the right
hemisphere), the other only the right side of the right eye (reaching only the l
eft hemisphere), so that the patient would transmit information only to one half
of the brain at a time.62 He found that one hemisphere looked at the world with
extreme anxiety and the other saw things more maturely: One patient, a Vietnam
veteran, whom I had diagnosed with a severe posttraumatic stress disorder, looke
d out of one side and developed an expression of intense apprehension as he look
ed at a large plant in my office. "It looks like the jungle," he said with some
alarm. I asked him to look out the other side, and he said, "No, it's a nice-loo
king plant." Schiffer finds he can help patients by having them analyze the emot
ional attitudes of the traumatized hemisphere, since "the troubled side is often
like a traumatized person who hasn't been able to move beyond the trauma, even
when removed from it, because he continues to expect retraumatization."63 Schiff
er and others have done extensive work on dual-brain psychology, including putti
ng one hemisphere to sleep with sodium amytal and finding the patient well-adjus
ted and pleasant, while putting the other side to sleep made him belligerent.64
He also showed that children who were admitted to hospitals after abuse more oft
en showed abnormalities in brain waves of their left hemisphere and that PTSD pa
tients felt more distress in their left hemispheres. Schiffer concludes:
185
Traumatic memories are likely closely related to a lower brain center called the
amygdala...in each hemisphere which is inhibited by a high-level cortical cente
r, the orbital frontal lobe in that same hemisphere....Both the orbital frontal
cortex and the hippocampus tend to try to calm the amygdala...We have too little
information to do more than speculate about why the left brain may be more invo
lved in the traumatic experiences of abused patients....Patients who have strong
reactions to the glasses apparently have two distinct parts of their mind--one
that sees the world as threatening and one that sees it as much less so....frequ
ently I have asked a troubled part of a person to stop attacking the other part
of him, and suddenly the person feels remarkable relief.65 These alters which st
ill live in the past, seeing the world as threatening and abusive, constitute, a
s Schiffer says, two separate minds, one frightened and angry, the other denying
the concerns of its partner. When the more grown-up hemisphere moves into new f
reedom and new behavior, the traumatized hemisphere reexperiences the fear and h
elplessness it stores from early childhood and produces the "growth panic" I hav
e found lies at the root of war and other violence. This struggle between the he
mispheres is not always unconscious; more often it is simply dissociated, with o
ne hemisphere being unaware of the feelings with which the other hemisphere is f
illed. When Rudolph Hss, SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, says, "I have never personall
y mistreated a prisoner, or even killed one. I have also never tolerated mistrea
tment on the part of my subordinates,"66 he is not being disingenuous. The nontr
aumatized half of his brain sincerely believes he and his subordinates never mis
treated a Jew as they were beating and torturing and murdering them by the hundr
eds of thousands. His social alter in his traumatized hemisphere was fully in co
ntrol and cut off all meaning of what he was doing, which to his non-traumatized
hemisphere appeared as normal. He had two brains which he was forced to keep se
parate; as he put it, "Many a night as I stood out there on the railroad platfor
ms, at the gas chambers, or at the burnings, I was forced to think of my wife an
d children without connecting them to what was taking place."67 This dissociatio
n into traumatized alters occurs more in groups because one feels more helpless
and more depersonalized in large groups,68 particularly in the largest groups, n
ations, and therefore more fearful. When we think of acting in society or even o
f what it is like to speak in front of a large group, one feels more open to att
ack, to humiliation, and one can more easily switch into the traumatized hemisph
ere. Our first line of defense when in a social trance is to cling to a "strong"
leader or a "strong" subgroup, merge our alters with them and join in various g
roup activities, often violent ones, to defend ourselves. Thus it makes sense th
at Freud, Le Bon and others define the inevitable characteristics of a group as
invincibility,
186
grandiosity, irresponsibility, impulsiveness, suggestibility and fearfulness, 69
all qualities of the neglectful and traumatic figures stored in our social alte
rs. Without the laterality of the brain, neither politics nor religion can exist
, as they do not in other animals who do not have divided selves. (In fact, the
only other animals who do sometimes go to war and murder each other senselessly
are chimps and dolphins, both of which are large-brained, lateralized creatures
with the beginnings of the ability for self-recognition.) It is only because hum
ans have radically lateralized hemispheres with larger impulse inhibitors--orbit
alfrontal cortexes and hippocampuses--that they are able to go to war with one h
emisphere and build Leagues of Nations with the other. The lower the childrearin
g mode, the more divided are the hemispheres. New Guinea natives can be warm and
friendly while in their more mature hemisphere and suddenly switch into thier s
ocial alters in the other hemisphere and kill you because they think you are bew
itching them. The lower the childrearing mode, the more traumatic the early expe
riences, and the more divided the hemispheres. In tribal societies, switching in
to warrior alters is a simple process: "The man or boy leaves his former self be
hind and becomes something entirely different, perhaps even taking a new name...
the change usually accomplished through ritual drumming, dancing, fasting and se
xual abstinence...into a new, warriorlike mode of being, denoted by special body
paint, masks and headdresses."70 In modern societies, with a wide range of chil
drearing modes, "only 2 per cent of recruits kill easily, so the rest must be br
ought to do so by careful military training" featuring new traumatic experiences
.71 The split mind begins to form with early trauma, even perinatally. Fredrick
Leboyer, author of Birth Without Violence,72 once told me that babies born with
his non-traumatic techniques not only were far more calm and happy after birth b
ut "less one-handed," less brain-lateralized. The two halves of the brain are ev
en sometimes recognized in political imagery. Hitler, for instance, often spoke
of a strange "kinship" between the Aryan and Jew (the two sides of his brain): "
Has it not struck you how the Jew is the exact opposite of the German in every s
ingle respect, and yet is as closely akin to him as a blood brother? ...so close
ly allied and yet so utterly dissimilar."73 This split mind is responsible for w
hat is termed "the banality of evil;" one side is banal (Winnicott's "False Self
"), the other side evil (the "Bad Boy" alter). It accounts for how nations can j
oyfully choose violent leaders to take them to suicidal wars, and yet one part o
f their mind can be wholly unaware of what is happening. For example, the follow
ing is William L. Shirer's description of sitting in the Berlin Sportpalast watc
hing Hitler shouting and shrieking that "he will go to war this
187
Saturday. Curious audience, the fifteen thousand party Bonzen packed into the ha
ll. They applauded his words with the usual enthusiasm. Yet there was no war fev
er. The crowd was good-natured, as if it didn't realize what his words meant."74
The dual brain also explains how "ordinary Germans"--extremely traumatized by "
ordinary German childrearing" around 1900--could have, during the Holocaust, "hu
miliated, beat and tortured defenseless people and then shot them in the back of
the neck without the slightest hesitation [and then dissociate and] pose before
their living or dead victims, laughing into the camera {and] write home that th
ese snapshots and extermination anecdotes would someday be extremely interesting to
our children.'"75 EARLY MOTHER-CHILD INTERACTIONS AS THE SOURCE OF HUMAN VIOLEN
CE The primary sources of violent political behaviors are the concrete motherchi
ld interactions of one generation earlier--how mainly the mother responded to, c
ared for and conveyed her feelings and fears to her fetus, infant and young chil
d. We have already described in Chapter 3 how going to war is preceded by flashb
acks to intrauterine, perinatal traumas and group-fantasies of the need for nati
onal rebirth. Here we will begin to examine the sources of human violence in ear
ly mother-child interactions. Videotape recordings of children's relationships w
ith their mothers in the preverbal period "have been shown to remain essentially
the same over time and to be duplicated with other substitute' mother figures. A c
hild who has a warm, affectionate relationship with the mother will relate to ot
hers in a warm, affectionate manner, whereas a child with a guarded, distant rel
ationship will relate to others in a guarded, distant manner."76 This maternal r
elationship is eventually restaged in international relations in a concrete mann
er, being acted out in "the sandbox of history" with nations playing the emotion
al roles of the mothers and children from early life. Mothers in history who bec
ause of their own life experiences see their children as harmful and aggressive
have historically mainly treated them in ways that have made them grow up as vio
lent adults, by routinely inflicting upon them murder, abandonment, neglect, bin
ding, enemas, domination, beatings, sexual assaults and emotional abuses77 that
are later restaged in wars and political behavior. Necessity was not the main so
urce of these cruelties toward children--wealthy parents were historically even
more overtly rejecting, giving their children to others at birth for years for w
hat they expected would be abusive caretaking. Fathers have until recently usual
ly only worsened this early traumatic upbringing, since historically the
188
father has almost always been mostly absent from the child's early life --most f
athers in history spending their days in the fields or factories and their night
s in the taverns (see Chapter 7). When home, fathers have lent little support to
mothers in caretaking and emotional nurturance, requiring that his wife "mother
" him rather than his children. Growing up, Mahler found, is built upon basic ma
ternal care, since "differentiation is from the mother, not from the father."78
Therefore, women not men have until recently for better or worse been the main s
ources of care, neglect and abuse throughout history. As St. Augustine put it, "
Give me other mothers and I will give you another world." His words have been co
nfirmed by recent clinical studies. What Erikson said about girls has been found
to be true of all children: "By the time a girl developmentally turns to the fa
ther, she has normally learned the nature of an object relationship once and for
all from her mother."79 In short, mothers are major actors in childhood history
--they are perpetrators80 and not just victims, as the theory of patriarchy hold
s. Most of the extremely abusive historical childrearing practices which are det
ailed in the next three chapters of this book are routine reactions to the child
's daily needs and growth process, wherein immature mothers expect their childre
n to give them the love they missed as a child and therefore experience the chil
d's independence as rejection. As one battering mother said, "I have never felt
really loved all my life. When the baby was born, I thought he would love me, bu
t when he cried all the time, it meant he didn't love me, so I hit him."81 Surve
ys show mothers in most cultures report initial feelings of "indifference" towar
d their newborn. 82 In fact, childbirth often triggers post-partum depression an
d feelings of emptiness83 because it means the mother must give up her own hopes
to receive the care she missed from her own mother.84 The moment the infant nee
ds something or turns away from her to explore the world, it triggers her own me
mories of maternal rejection. When the infant cries, the immature mother hears h
er mother, her father, her siblings and her spouse screaming at her. She then "a
ccuses the infant of being unaffectionate, unrewarding and selfish...as not inte
rested in me."85 All growth and individuation by the child is therefore experien
ced as rejection. This is why social progress, prosperity and new political free
doms are so anxiety-producing. "When the mother cannot tolerate the child's bein
g a separate person with her own personality and needs, and demands instead that
the child mirror her, separation becomes heavily tinged with basic terror for t
he child."86 Children first experience "growth panic" anxieties because their mo
ther rejects, humiliates or punishes them for their needs and for their individu
ation. As adults, they then turn to paranoid and violent political
189
behavior during periods of growth and individuation because society threatens to
reproduce this intolerable early maternal rejection, shame or punishment. Becau
se these maternal interactions are so early, they are primarily nonverbal, which
means that politics has a dominantly nonverbal quality that can only be studied
by research into illustrations rather than words--group-fantasies shown in cart
oons, magazine covers and TV images. This is why I often watch the nightly news
on TV with the sound off.87 It is likely that the centrality of mothers in bring
ing up children is even responsible for the fact that men are more violent than
women and universally fight wars. Testosterone is not the cause, as is usually i
magined, since (1) testosterone levels are actually lower in the most aggressive
boys,88 and (2) "testosterone is present in boys and girls in roughly the same
amounts before the age of ten" and (3) although "all normal boys experience a hu
ge surge of testosterone in early adolescence, [they] do not all display increas
ed aggression...[so] testosterone does not cause aggression."89 Evidence is begi
nning to accumulate that it is differential treatment of boys, especially by mot
hers, that is responsible for their higher rates of violence in later life. Boys
in every culture are physically punished more often and with greater severity t
han girls;90 boys are more often used sexually by their mothers in their early y
ears than girls;91 boys are given less nurturance, are ignored more often, are s
poken to less and are coached to be more violent than girls;92 boys are subject
to over control by humiliation and shame more often than girls;93 and boys are m
ore harshly disciplined for the same actions by parents and teachers.94 Mothers
also see their boys as "just like his dad," and take revenge against them for th
eir husband's actions--after all, Medea killed her sons, not her daughters, to h
urt Jason for his infidelity. 95 Thus although boys begin life with no more aggr
ession than girls, they grow up to be more violent simply because they are less
trusted and more feared by their earliest caretakers. Although the battlegrounds
may change, wars--whether between mother and child or between nations--are inev
itably about the basic feelings of infancy: trust, security, approval, dominatio
n, envy, rage, threats, shame and independence. 96 Since having a child revives
in mothers long-dormant wishes for the closeness that they missed from their own
mothers, mothers often envy the child each of the needs they are asked to satis
fy, thinking, "I never got that; why should my child?" Even today psychologists
find many mothers reject their infants in many ways because they "fear bodily da
mage due to the child's aggressiveness."97 But before the nineteenth century mot
hers throughout history were so immature that they thought their infants were so
full of violence that they would "scratch their eyes out, tear their ears off,
or break
190
their legs" if they didn't tie them up in endless bandages, "so as to resemble b
illets of wood...so the flesh was compressed almost to gangrene."98 Therefore, t
hrough most of history, early mother-child interactions which most "good-enough
mothers" today are capable of--centering around mutual gazing, babbling and smil
ing99 --were all missing, because mothers tightly bound their babies up at birth
and stuck them in another room, severely neglected for their first year of thei
r lives. 100 International affairs has not throughout history been much negotiat
ed in a secure and peaceful manner because infantile life was not very secure no
r peaceful. Sociologists and historians have avoided looking for the family sour
ces of wars and social violence. Whenever a group produces murderers, the mother
-child relationship must be abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth ha
s not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor
mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous. Instead, the grossest sort of ide
alizations of historical mothering proliferate. When, for instance, studies of t
he sources of the extreme violence of the Mafia turn to depictions of Sicilian m
other-child relations they inevitably come to resemble the happy, loving familie
s out of "The Godfather." Yet it is only when an Italian psychoanalyst, Silvia d
i Lorenzo, writes a book on La Grande Madre Mafia that her descriptions of typic
al Sicilian mother-child interactions begin to give us an accurate picture of th
e maternal origins of Mafia violence: If a boy of theirs commits a slight fault,
they do not resort to simple blows, but they pursue him on a public street and
bite him on the face, the ears, and the arms until they draw blood. In those mom
ents even a beautiful woman is transformed in physiognomy, she becomes purplish-
red, with blood-shot eyes, with gnashing teeth, and trembling convulsions, and o
nly the hastening of others, who with difficulty tear away the victim, put an en
d to such savage scenes.101 Thus the conditions of early mothering have profound
affects on adult human violence. It is not surprising that Ember and Ember foun
d in their cross-cultural studies that where the mother sleeps closer to the bab
y than to the father and uses the baby as a substitute spouse--usually sexually-
-there is more homicide and war.102 Every childrearing practice in history is re
staged in adult political behavior. Children whose mothers swaddled them and wer
e "not there" emotionally could not as adults maintain object consistency and gr
ew up paranoid, imagining "enemies" everywhere. Children whose mothers regularly
did not feed them in a timely fashion experienced the world as malevolently wit
hholding. Children whose mothers rejected them with depressive silence experienc
ed peaceful international periods as threatening. Children whose mothers dominat
ed them and who were engulfing often choose
191
totalitarian political leaders. Children whose mothers were so needy they descri
be their children as "born selfish and demanding" and or who saw them as "angry
since birth" experienced other nations as demanding too much or as angry "bad ba
bies." Children whose mothers used them as antidepressants chose manic, often vi
olent leaders to counter their own depression. And mothers who ridiculed and hum
iliated their children whenever their activities didn't coincide with her own we
re experienced in the international sphere as poison containers of intolerable r
idicule and shame--as in "the shame of Versailles." It is not surprising, then,
that violent, authoritarian political behavior has been statistically correlated
with rejecting, punitive parenting.103 As Godwin puts it, society is an "exopsy
chic structure" where adults restage the "parental purification system" of child
hood by "cleansing bad, frustrating and abusive aspects of the parent-child rela
tionship" in the political arena.104 In Chapter 3 I have dealt extensively with
the evidence showing that war and social violence are preceded by rebirth group-
fantasies of cleansing and purification of "sins." It is only the elimination of
the most abusive and neglectful historical parenting practices in some nations
that have allowed them to set up trusting, non-violent rules of political intera
ctions and have permitted them to achieve more or less cooperative democratic so
cieties and to avoid fighting wars with other democracies. Obviously internation
al peace will not prevail until most parents around the world trust rather than
fear their children. THE PSYCHOGENIC THEORY OF WAR War, then, is the act of rest
aging early traumas for the purpose of maternal revenge and self purification. W
ars are clinical emotional disorders, periodic shared psychotic episodes of delu
sional organized butchery intended--like homicide--to turn a severe "collapse of
self esteem" into "a rage to achieve justice." Wars are both homicidal and suic
idal--every German in 1939 who cheered Hitler on as he promised to start an unwi
nnable world war against overwhelming opposing nations knew deep down they were
committing suicide. Like all homicides and suicides, wars are reactions to our f
ailed search for love, magical gestures designed to ensure love through projecti
on into enemies, by "knocking the Terrifying Mommy off her pedestal" and by "kil
ling the Bad Boy self." As Kernberg puts its, violence occurs only when "the wor
ld seems to be split between those who side with the traumatizing object and tho
se who support the patient's wishes for a revengeful campaign against the trauma
tizing object."105 Thus the early crisis in maternal love, which had been intern
alized during childhood in Terrifying Mommy and Bad Boy alters, is resolved
192
by acting out on the historical stage the revenge against the Terrifying Mommy a
nd by the wiping out of the Bad Boy self. 1. War as Righteous Rape--Revenge Agai
nst the Terrifying Mommy: Enemy nations in wars are often pictured as women (see
Chapter 3), witches, even placental beasts. When they are seen as women, enemie
s are there to be pushed around, not eliminated, since even when raging against
a bad mommy the hurt child knows he needs her desperately. This is why Hitler ke
pt hoping to manipulate Mother England into being friendly. And it is why he did
n't destroy Paris when he marched into La Belle France. Nations to the west of G
ermany were mainly seen as mommies to be revenged against, to be "knocked off th
eir pedestals" but not to be eliminated. "France...was not marked for subjugatio
n but rather for a secondary role in the Nazi scheme [and] Hitler was always kee
n on reaching some settlement with the British...[therefore] the German army fig
hting in the west was given strict orders to conduct itself according to the rul
es of war."106 The same group-fantasy of war as righteous rape was voiced by Ger
mans in 1914, when they imagined that "only if we are able to hurt England badly
will she really leave us unmolested, perhaps even become a friend.'"107 2. War as
Purification--Killing Off the Bad Boy Self: Enemy nations are also imagined as B
ad Boys, disobedient, disgusting, violent, sexual--everything one was accused of
as a child by one's caretakers. If the Bad Boy self can be killed off entirely,
"finally mommy will love me." This is why Hitler vowed to wipe out the "bad" na
tions to the east and settle "good Germans" in their place. Poles, Russians, Jew
s, every nation east of Germany were projected with Bad Boy imagery: "Slavs were
considered subhumans, to be either murdered...or starved to death." 108 Moscow,
Hitler promised, would be leveled and turned into a reservoir, and Jews would b
e totally eliminated. In addition, WWII would be a suicidal mission for millions
of Germans, thus killing off the "Bad Boy" part of themselves, the most vital,
growing, independent self. Then the "good German" self that remained would be pu
rified and would finally be loved by mommy, the Motherland. It is not surprising
that in early societies bloodthirsty War Goddesses ruled over battlefields, sin
ce wars are all about resolving the crisis between Terrifying Mommies and Bad Bo
ys. Leaders are delegated the task of being sacrificial priests. Even simple soc
ieties go to war to win the love of mommy; in the Yanomamo war ritual myth, the
culture hero Child of Water goes to war and slays enemies to "end
193
chaos" and "do what his mother desires and thereby win her approval."109 The rol
e of the father in war is quite different: it is to provide the violence needed
to rape and revenge the Terrifying Mommy and to punish and wipe out the Bad Baby
. Hitler carried a dog whip everywhere he went, the same whip he and millions of
German children were beaten with by their fathers.110 Oddly enough, nations don
't go to war as revenge against bad fathers--the drama is earlier than that. Eve
n though children are terribly frightened by their father's violence in the fami
ly, the goal in starting wars isn't finally to take revenge against the father,
but to "kill the shame," to purify the self and to force mother to love you--to
organize men into Fatherlands so they can conquer Motherlands. Nations switch in
to their dissociated traumatized hemispheres after periods of peace and prosperi
ty because the individuation challenges of social progress means separating from
mommy, a dangerous act in adulthood if it was not allowed by the mother in chil
dhood. Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others, noticed the growth panic that went alo
ng with prosperity and progress when he wondered in his journal why Americans fe
lt such a "strange melancholy in the midst of abundance." 111 Increases in freed
om and prosperity for people who have been abused as children lead first to fear
s of separation and then to a clinging to the early abusive mommy, even to mergi
ng with her. But to merge with a mommy means losing one's masculinity--it means
becoming a woman--therefore long periods of peace mean castration. Thus Kant's d
icta that wars are necessary because "prolonged peace favors...effeminacy" paral
lels Machiavelli's claim that war exists to purge nations of effeminato, the "da
ily accretion of poisonous matter [caused by women's] conspiracy to poison'...manho
od" and John Adams' query to Jefferson, "Will you tell me how to prevent luxury
from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly?"112 In fa
ct, in groups where they do not have effective war rituals available when people
experience severe ego disintegration, people often go amok--a dissociative stat
e where people suddenly kill people in wild, uncontrolled sprees, as often occur
s in the otherwise placid Balinese.113 Even chimpanzees "go amok" when given foo
d supplies by humans and "engage in episodes of apparently unprovoked explosive.
..behavior...as though they had entered an ASC [Alternate State of Consciousness
]...to discharge an inner state of tension...similar to human dissociative behav
iours..."114 Prosperity appears to be anxiety-producing even in non-human primat
es, switching them into their more violent, dissociated hemispheres. Chimpanzees
who are not artificially fed by anthropologists live in "peaceful, open groups
without signs of any dominance hierarchy, enforced territoriality or single lead
ers."115
194
Prosperity leads to starting wars most often in societies where the economic adv
ances of a minority, a more advanced psychoclass, outrun the childrearing evolut
ion of the majority, producing in the less advanced psychoclasses extreme anxiet
ies about changes that require individuation. Thus the most destructive wars hav
e occurred in the twentieth century when there is a rapid "leap into modernity"
by nations whose average childrearing lagged badly behind their social and econo
mic progress--so that they tried to run modern capitalist systems with crippled
human capital--while the most peaceful periods (for instance, Europe's "century
of peace" from 1815 to 1914)116 occurred while the childrearing of most Western
European nations was most rapidly evolving and could keep up with the individuat
ion challenges of modernity.117 WAR AND GROUP-FANTASY CYCLES In Chapter 4 eviden
ce was presented that wars most often occur after leaders have been in office fo
r some time and are seen as weakening in their ability to be in control of natio
nal group-fantasies. Thus, the longer the leader is in office, the more likely h
e will be to take the nation to war. This is confirmed in the case of the United
States, where no president has gone to war during his first year, his "strong"
phase; where smaller wars sometimes begin in the second and third year of office
, as the president weakens; and where its three most destructive wars--the Civil
War and the two World Wars, with their hundreds of thousands of American battle
fatalities-occurred at the end of 45, 48 and 103 months of the terms of Buchana
n, Wilson and FDR, after their group-fantasy strength had collapsed. Much empiri
cal work has been done on the historical study of war cycles.118 A cycle of abou
t 25 years in the level of violence for most nations in recent centuries has bee
n determined,119 as though each new generation must be thrown into the mouth of
Moloch as a purification sacrifice. There has also been considerable work done o
n economic cycles and their close relationship to war cycles,120 with the findin
g that "wars between great powers occur during periods of economic expansion, wh
ile stagnation hinders their outbreak [so that] after 1815 no wars have been sta
rted during a depression."121 Furthermore, "fatalities follow the pattern of [ec
onomic] upswings and downswings perfectly...the average annual fatality rate was
...21 times higher on upswings than downswings."122 Thus, although wars have bee
n confirmed to be the results of prosperity, it is because no psychological anal
ysis has ever been attempted that scholars have had to admit, "We do not underst
and the causal dynamics of the long wave...encompassing political and economic e
lements."123 In the remainder of this chapter we will present a psychogenic theo
ry of group-fantasy
195
cycles that will explain this periodic alternation between economic depressions
and wars. In the chart below, four American group-fantasy cycles have been drawn
for the past two centuries of American history, each consisting of four phases:
(1) Innovative, (2) Depressed, (3) Manic and (4) War. At the bottom of the char
t are listed the major depressions and wars, which coincide with the second and
fourth phases of group-fantasy. In the middle of the chart is drawn Klingberg's
extrovert-introvert Foreign Policy Mood Curve, which he compiled by counting suc
h foreign policy indices as the proportion of presidential speeches given over t
o positive action needed in world affairs.124 As can be seen, there is a close c
orrelation between Klingberg's mood index stages and my independently-derived gr
oup-fantasy phases.
Rysunek 28 6:1 American Group-Fantasy Cycles
An outline of the four group-fantasy phases is shown below. Empirical verificati
on follows on each point in the outline, stressing American and other national g
roup-fantasies and its resulting political and economic behavior. Then the four
phases are followed in detail at the end of the chapter for German childrearing
around 1900 and its restaging in the four phases of group-fantasy from the Weima
r Republic to World War II and the Holocaust. Group-Fantasy Phases 1. Innovative
Phase: A new psychoclass comes of age after the previous war, a minority of the
cohort born two to three decades earlier and raised with more evolved childrear
ing modes. This new psychoclass introduces new inventions, new social and econom
ic arrangements and new freedoms for women and minorities, producing an "Era of
Good Feelings," a "Gilded Age" that for a few years is tolerated even by the ear
lier psychoclasses. By the end of the Innovative Phase, however, the challenges
produced by progress and individuation begin to make everything seem to be "gett
ing out of control" as wishes surface into consciousness that threaten to revive
early maternal rejection and punishment. In addition, as women, children and mi
norities get new
196
freedoms, older psychoclasses find they cannot be used as much as they previousl
y had been as poison containers who can be punished for one's sins. Purity Crusa
des begin, anti-modernity movements demanding that new sexual and other freedoms
be ended to reduce the anxieties of the nation's growth panic and "turn back th
e clock" to more controlled times and social arrangements. 2. Depressed Phase: T
he older psychoclasses become depressed because of their new individuation chall
enges, expecting punishment for them, and produce an economic depression by with
drawing money from circulation, by raising interest rates, by reducing consumpti
on, by limiting trade and by making all the other surplus-reducing motivated "mi
stakes" in fiscal policies that are so familiar in economic history. Economic de
pressions are motivated internal sacrifices which often kill more people than wa
rs do.125 Cartoons prior to and during depressions often show sinful, greedy peo
ple being sacrificed on altars,126 and the depressed nation becomes paralyzed po
litically, unable to take action to reverse the economic downturn. Just as depre
ssed individuals experience little conscious anger--feeling they "deserve to be
punished"-so too nations in depressions are characterized by "introverted" forei
gn policy moods, start fewer military expeditions and are less concerned with fo
reign affairs. The feeling during depressions is "I should be killed" for my wis
hes rather than "I want to kill others." Depressions are economic anorexias, whe
re people starve themselves to avoid being eaten up by the Dragon Mother, the ma
ternal vulture of infancy. The nation begins to look for a Phallic Leader with w
hom they can merge and regain their failed potency and who can protect them agai
nst their growing delusional fears of a persecutory mommy. 3. Manic Phase: As ev
entual economic recovery threatens fresh anxiety, manic economic, social and mil
itary activity builds up as a defense against depressive anxieties, as the natio
n engages in speculative investment, credit explosions, foreign belligerence, mi
litary buildups and other grandiose, hypergenital attempts to demonstrate omnipo
tent control of symbolic love supplies. Apocalyptic group-fantasies of a world f
ull of evil and a God who is furious and about to end it all proliferate, produc
ing severe growth panics such as the American "Great Awakenings" that occurred i
n manic periods prior to wars. Continued prosperity leads to a search for poison
containers, both internal (minorities, criminals, children) and external (forei
gn enemies), who can be punished in national Purity Crusades as Bad Boys who emb
ody the nation's sinful greed. Maternal engulfment fears increase as grandiose d
efenses and memories of being a helpless baby return, so people imagine their na
tions as "pitiful, helpless giants," with gigantic needs, but helpless to satisf
y them. As paranoid delusional enemies seem to surround the nation, sacrificial
rebirth group-fantasies appear, complete with devouring placental sea monsters,
picturing violence as the only antidote to growing fears of disintegration of se
lf.127
197
4. War Phase: When another nation is found that agrees to provide the humiliatio
n episode needed as a casus belli, a tremendous relief is felt of "Aha! I knew t
he enemy was real and not just in my head." The group-psychotic insight that dia
bolical enemies are strangling and poisoning one's nation forces a final complet
e switch into the social trance wherein group-fantasy becomes reality, goals dis
appear and violent action becomes irresistible as early traumas are restaged.128
The neurotransmitters, hormones and neuropeptides of the nation change dramatic
ally, in the same manner as the neurochemistry of individuals changes as they mo
ve toward violence. 129 War provides the opportunity for both righteous rape and
purification. The righteous rape can be described as both maternal (Mother Engl
and) and homosexual (the soldiers)-in fact, war is overwhelmingly a homosexual p
erversion, since men leave their female partners and go abroad and stick things
into other men's bodies. The purification accomplishes the sacrifice of the Bad
Boy self, both through the suicidal part of war, killing the nation's own youth
as sacrifice of soldiers, and the homicidal part, killing the enemy, each repres
enting Bad Boy selves that must be wiped out so the mommy-nation can finally lov
e the "real" self. Thus wars and depressions can be seen as classically occurrin
g in cycles similar to individual manic-depressive cycles of violence, only stre
tched out into periods of approximately one full generation in length. Each of t
he first three American group-fantasy cycles in the chart above is approximately
50 years long and ends with two wars, first usually a "nice little war" as a so
rt of trial balloon and then a full-fledged war that produces the rebirth of nat
ional virility. This pattern was partially broken after WWII--when improving chi
ldrearing reduced the size of both economic downturns and wars--and since when t
here has been a shorter cycle of group-fantasies, wars and recessions (see discu
ssion at the end of this chapter). Although most Western nations in the past thr
ee centuries have had the same "four wars a century" pattern as the United State
s, whether they also have followed the same four-stage group-fantasy cycle has y
et to be investigated.130 THE INNOVATIVE PHASE: PROGRESS AND PURITY CRUSADES The
central force for change in economic life is the result of earlier changes in c
hildrearing among a minority of the society. The usual causal chain of moderniza
tion theory--that more prosperity means more money for improving childrearing--i
s simply backward, both because empirically childrearing change always precedes
economic change131 and because the richest families traditionally have not given
more to their children, they have routinely sent them out at birth to abusive c
aretakers. Those children whose parents actually bring them up themselves and tr
y to surpass traditional childcare practices grow up as a new, innovative
198
psychoclass that tries the new social and economic ventures which soon appear da
ngerous to the earlier psychoclasses. The innovative phases in the chart of Amer
ican group-fantasies above are familiar to every student of American history as
periods of unparalleled growth and technological invention. They contain the ear
ly growth of steamboats, railroads and telegraphs; the two phases of the ninetee
nth-century Industrial Revolution with its rapid industrialization and immigrati
on; the Second Industrial Revolution after World War I; and even the computer re
volution produced by the Spock generation. 132 These were times when not only wa
s national income soaring and work hours dropping, but "there was a tacit or exp
licit consensus between employers and labour organizations to keep labour demand
s within limits that did not eat into the profits, and the future prospects of p
rofits high enough to justify the huge investments without which the spectacular
growth of Golden Age labour productivity could not have taken place."133 Thus i
nvestment in children paid off in investment in productivity. During these innov
ative phases, governments manage to work out various formal and informal rules t
o settle international disagreements. Since peace is not just an absence of war
and involves establishing intergovernmental organizations and conferences to res
olve disputes, nations that are not in an emotional state of collapsed self-este
em have regularly found ways even without an overarching international governmen
t to break stalemates and settle their disagreements without violence.134 Whethe
r by bilateral agreement or through the restraints of peace conferences, innovat
ive psychoclasses have demonstrated that there are many ways-such as buffer stat
es, compensation and concerts of power--whereby issues can be resolved outside o
f power politics that lead to wars. Each of these innovative phases also were pe
riods of women's rights, the bestknown of which in America were the early ninete
enth-century groups pressing for women's education, jobs, new divorce laws and p
roperty rights; the post-Civil War Woman's Sufferage Movement; the post-WWI wome
n's rights movement; and the post-Vietnam War feminist movement. The earlier psy
choclasses--both men and women--reacted to these freedoms for "the new women" wi
th extreme horror. 135 Just as the economic advances of early modern Europe resu
lted in a million women killed as witches, the progress of the modern innovative
periods engendered fears of the femme fatale phallic females136 --a restaging o
f the early Terrifying Mothers--who were "strongly passionate and...endowed with
strong animal natures"137 --who produced "sexual anarchy" where "men became wom
en [and] women became men."138 Ever since Cato wailed in 195 B.C., after a few R
oman women sought to repeal a law that
199
forbade them from wearing multicolored dresses, that "women have become so power
ful that our independence has been lost in our own homes and is now being trampl
ed and stamped underfoot in public,"139 innovative periods in history have produ
ced anti-women Purity Crusades designed to reverse social progress and return to
more familiar repressive times.140 Purity Crusades have, of course, centered on
sexual morality, whether they combated Noyes' "free love" debates before the Ci
vil War or Margaret Sanger's birth control ideas in the 1920s.141 They include "
moral reform" crusades against prostitution, against pornography, against alcoho
l--against everything that represented unfulfilled wishes, including even bicycl
e seats, that "might cause women's moral downfall."142 Even the reduction of the
work week--the Saturday Half-Holiday Act of 1887-- was opposed as likely to cau
se the masses to turn to "dancing, carousing, low behavior, rioting, shooting, a
nd murder."143 Children's rights were opposed because any relaxation of punitive
childrearing would inevitably lead to "running wild, blatant disobedience...mas
turbation and insanity"144 and since children are "made monsters in life by indu
lgence in infancy" if given the slightest independence wouth would go "directly
to the grog shop, the gambling house or the brothel."145 Cars for women were opp
osed because they could be turned into "houses of prostitution on wheels."146 An
d whenever the Purity Crusade began, it usually continued right into the next wa
r, which borrowed its language and moral fervor, so that it seemed the war itsel
f was a purification of the nation. Thus purity reformers of the 1850s, reacting
to the feminism of the time, began a crusade against sex between Southern white
men and black women, objecting to slavery not so much on behalf of the rights o
f the slaves but in order "to protect the sexual purity of America." In the word
s of purity crusaders, "The Southern states are one Great Sodom...a vast brothel
" which only a war between the North and the South could clean up.147 Thus, too,
World War I was said to have been needed to be fought "to save men from moral d
ecay [from homosexuality]"148 and the Vietnam War was accompanied by a fantasy t
hat, according to Time's special issue on "SEX IN THE U.S.," found a dangerous "
demise of Puritanism" in America due to "Freudian psychology" that had made "Ame
rica one big Orgone Box [of] pornography." 149 Eventually, all Purity Crusades m
ove abroad and punish our desires in living enemies. THE DEPRESSED PHASE: THE DR
AGON MOTHER AND THE PHALLIC LEADER The task of controlling growth panic by depre
ssions is given during the modern
200
period mainly to central banks, which first flood the nation with low interest l
iquidity to encourage overinvestment, excess borrowing, inflation and stock mark
et bubbles, and then, when the expansion becomes too sinful for the national psy
che, reverse the monetary expansion by increasing interest rates and reducing li
quidity ("Taking away the punch bowl when the party gets going.")150 Depressions
come because really people become depressed, reducing their spending and invest
ment, and feel hopeless. Depressions are, as Keynes said, "a crises of sentiment
...a collapse of confidence."151 The task of government, according to Keynes, wa
s to recognize that demand (desire) is subject to irrational contractions which
had to be offset through fiscal and monetary manipulations--rather like a psychi
atrist prescribing medications to change serotonin levels. Yet neither Keynes no
r any other economist asked why people periodically become depressed and reduce
their activities. In fact, nations enter into depressions because they feel pers
ecuted for their prosperity and individuation by what Jungians have termed the "
Dragon Mother"-the needy, "devouring mother of infancy...who cannot let her chil
dren go because she needs them for her own psychic survival."152 Weston has foun
d anorexics in particular are dominated by fantasies of persecution by the Drago
n Mother, who "gives her child the impossible task of filling her limitless void'''
so the child fears being "eaten alive."153 To prevent this, when these children
grow up and try to individuate, they refuse to eat so they won't have any flesh
on them for the Dragon Mother to devour. Economic depressions evidence similar
group-fantasies of devouring mommies; they are "economic anorexias" where nation
s inflict economic wounds upon themselves to limit consumption, become "all bone
s" and not tempt the devouring Dragon Mother. Banks, in particular, are often pi
ctured as greedy dragons. For instance, President Jackson imagined the Bank of t
he United States was what he called the "Mother Bank" that by issuing paper mone
y was a "bad mother dominating her children" who had to be stopped before the na
tion was eaten up, and so conducted a "kill the Great Monster" campaign that wou
ld "strangle the manyheaded hydra" and kill it.154 Needless to say, his success
in "crushing the Mother Bank dragon" led to an economic downturn. That depressio
ns purposefully punish families is rarely acknowledged. In the depression beginn
ing in 1873, for instance, produced by "a decade of speculative excess and overi
nvestment,"155 there was "20 percent unemployed, 40 percent worked for only six
or seven months a year, and only 20 percent worked regularly." 156 Depressions h
ave killed hundreds of thousands of women and children, a sacrifice of Bad Child
ren greater than many wars. Yet depressions are still seen as "beneficial purges
" of the economic bloodstream; as the Treasury Secretary said in 1929 as the
201
Federal Reserve helped push the world into depression, "It will purge the rotten
ness out of the system."157 Depressions are indeed blood purges, only sacrificia
l, similar to the practice of the Aztecs sacrificing humans and regularly drawin
g blood from their thighs and genitals to "feed" the goddess to prevent her from
becoming angry with them for their sinful prosperity.158 Thus William K. Joseph
's study of cartoons and ads during 1929 found they were "full of strong, wealth
y women, but the men were pictured as puny, neurotic, and insignificant."159 Tha
t depressions--like anorexia and like all blood sacrifices--are self-inflicted w
ounds and not just the results of "mysteriously wrongheaded monetary policies"16
0 is still not admitted by most economists. The end of prosperity comes "with a
sense of relief."161 Even the "mistakes" by authorities that lead to a downturn
are unconsciously motivated: for instance, the "mistake" of the Federal Reserve
in 1925 in lowering interest rates and igniting the stock market bubble, followe
d by the "mistake" of their overly restrictive monetary policy after 1929 that r
educed the stock of money by a third and turned the downturn into a severe depre
ssion, plus the "mistaken" higher tariffs of the Hoover administration and the "
mistaken" budgetbalancing of the Roosevelt administration,162 all were determine
d by the nation's sacrificial group-fantasy of a devouring Dragon Mother who nee
ded to be placated. One of the best defenses against fears of maternal engulfmen
t is merging with a Phallic Leader to restore potency. Anzieu found small groups
regularly searched for a narcissistic, aggressive leader when they felt that "e
verything is crumbling" in the group.163 Parin found the Anyi tribe he studied,
where the mothering was neglectful and incestuous, produced men who feared being
"poisoned, devoured and castrated by women" and who chose exceptionally violent
leaders because they felt that "the preoedipal mother is more dangerous than th
e oedipal father," and merging with a "strong and severe father" saved them from
feeling castrated.164 And Blum found that when nations choose "hypnotic-like su
rrender to the leader," they overcome "infantile helplessness and weakness, chil
dhood traumata, child abuse and neglect and feelings of being unloved [through]
an escalation to war [whereby] the sacrifice of the sons in battle by their oedi
pal fathers and a macho' defense against femininity are powerful dynamics."165 The
initial task of the Phallic Leader is to "make real" the growing paranoia of the
nation: It is as if a therapist said to the paranoid-schizoid patient, "You rea
lly are being persecuted. Let me help you by naming your persecutors...you and y
our true friends can fight the persecutors and praise each other's righteousness
, which will help you realize that the
202
source of aggression and evil is out there, in the real world. And you thought i
t was all in your head!"166 The most effective Phallic Leaders have been found t
o be "narcissistic personalities who are characterized by intense self-involveme
nt [whose] interpersonal relations are frequently marked by a lack of empathy, [
who] oscillate between feelings of grandiosity and omnipotence...and feelings of
inferiority and low self-esteem [and who] are particularly susceptible to feeli
ngs of shame and humiliation."167 Only narcissistic leaders who from early child
hood have felt shamed and humiliated could, like Richard Nixon, lead wars that h
ad no other purpose than to avoid accepting "a national humiliation [that would]
destroy our country's confidence in itself."168 The deep well of loneliness cre
ated in them by the emotional distancing of their mothers is usually worsened by
the absence of their fathers, which has been found by Broude to result in hyper
masculinity and violence. 169 The loneliness leads them to volunteer as delegate
s to lead large masses of people out of their depression through "macho" politic
s. Conquering women and conquering nations are one for the Phallic Leader.170 It
is no coincidence that virtually all of America's wartime presidents were adult
erers or compulsive womanizers.171 Conquest is the political function of the Pha
llic Leader. As Hitler put it, "The crowd is a woman...after a speech I feel as
if I had a sexual release."172 Dominance and violence restores and purifies the
self. As Hitler said after the Rhm massacre, "So! Now I have taken a bath, and fee
l clean as a new-born babe again."173 Thus a Phallic Leader wards off the humili
ations of maternal abuse and neglect by political violence. Lyndon Johnson, for
instance, remembers his engulfing mother's withdrawal of affection whenever he f
ailed to do as she wished, "walking around the house pretending I was dead [and]
refusing to speak or even look at [me]."174 As a result, he had a recurring dre
am that a stampede of cattle--a symbol of maternal engulfment175 --was coming to
ward him while he was paralyzed in a chair, and that he cried out for his mother
, but no one came.176 His fear of helplessness and humiliation returned just bef
ore Vietnam, when, he said, "I felt that I was being chased on all sides by a gi
ant stampede coming at me...the American people were stampeding me to do somethi
ng about Vietnam...I deserved something more than being left alone in the middle
of the plain, chased by stampedes on every side." 177 According to his biograph
er, he "avoided at all costs the threat to his self-esteem that...public humilia
tion might entail"178 and started the war. The war restored his and the nation's
masculinity: "unzipping his fly, [Johnson] pulled out his penis and asked the r
eporters (according to one who was there), Has Ho Chi Minh got anything to match th
at?'"179 The war castrated the "enemy," not Johnson: "I didn't just
203
screw Ho Chi Minh. I cut his pecker off."180 Those who opposed the war were wome
n: "[They have] to squat to piss."181 Going to war meant not being a woman, not
being overwhelmed by mommy. Merging with a Phallic Leader involves switching int
o the dissociated hemisphere and entering into the social trance. Atlas has show
n that political trances derive their power not from any magical "charismatic" q
ualities of the leader but from the correlation between adult hypnotizability an
d abusive childrearing. 182 The Phallic Leader, like a shaman, is adept at enter
ing into trance states himself--Hitler often called himself "a sleepwalker." Pol
itical meetings are easily seen as altered states of consciousness. A journalist
reports getting "caught in a mob of ten thousand hysterics who jammed the moat
in front of Hitler's hotel shouting, We want our Fhrer!' I was a little shocked at th
e faces, especially those of the women...They reminded me of the crazed expressi
ons I saw once in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Roller
s...They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed."183
Switching into their social alter gave them a shot of dopaminergic power, exactl
y the same as taking amphetamines, that made them feel merged with both the Phal
lic Leader and the group, the nation, the Volk. Fichte described this merging as
he felt it take hold of him: When I thought of the Volk and saw it, and when th
e great feeling of it gripped me, ...when a great crowd moves before me, when a
band of warriors passes before me with flowing banners...I feel the indestructib
le life, the eternal spirit, and the eternal God...I am immediately freed from a
ll sins. I am no longer a single suffering man, I am one with the Volk...184 Bec
ause nations continue to live in both their hemispheres as they go to war, they
must both prepare for war by maneuvering an enemy into a pose where they can be
righteously attacked, and at the same time provide deniability that their nation
is really responsible for the war. Leaders might recognize, as Theodore Rooseve
lt wrote to a friend in 1897, that "In strict confidence...I should welcome almo
st any war, for I think this country needs one."185 But Phallic Leaders usually
find ways to invent "unprovoked attacks," from Wilson's lies about the sinking o
f the Lusitania and LBJ's lies about the attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to Hitler'
s lies about an attack by Polish forces. One of the most complex lies that caref
ully provoked an attack that was then pretended to be a surprise was that of Pre
sident Franklin Roosevelt's year-long actions to get Japan to attack Pearl Harbo
r. Stinnett's voluminously-documented book, Day of Deceit, demonstrates that in
October of 1940 FDR secretly began to carry out a series of eight actions that f
orced the hawks among
204
the Japanese government to go to war with the U.S., embargoing trade, "tightenin
g the noose" on their economy and deploying American warships on "pop-up" cruise
s within the territorial waters of Japan, then purposely leaving the U.S. fleet
unprotected at Hawaii and hiding the fact that Japanese codes had been broken so
that the attack would be a "surprise."186 If FDR hadn't provoked his unnecesary
war with Japan, American military strength would have been fully available for
fighting Germany years earlier, and the Holocaust may not have been as disastero
us. A typical case of provoking an enemy can be shown for the actions of John F.
Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis, which we earlier187 examined briefly. JFK'
s childhood was typically abusive, dominated by his mother's emotional distancin
g of him--"She was never there when we really needed her...[She] never really he
ld me and hugged me. Never."--and her brutality, battering John with "hairbrushe
s, coat hangers, belts and shoes [and] once slapping young Bobby's face so vicio
usly that she punctured his eardrum and split his lip."188 The result in JFK was
a phallicnarcissistic personality focused on conquering women in "daily assigna
tions and a lifetime of venereal disease [and] a steady diet of mood-altering dr
ugs."189 Claiming a mythical "missile gap" with the Russians, Kennedy was electe
d President to "get America moving again" after the peaceful Eisenhower Fifties,
and soon authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba over the objections of mos
t experts who said it would fail, telling his aides he "wasn't going to be chicken.
'"190 The resulting failure was taken by him as a personal humiliation, for whic
h he needed revenge. He authorized Operation Mongoose, various assassination att
empts against Castro, including using the Mafia, but success evaded him.191 By 1
962, Kennedy decided to regain his potency by invading Cuba with U.S. forces. He
told the military to prepare for a U.S. invasion of the island and asked his st
aff to formulate a pretext that would give an appearance of a Cuban attack on a
U.S. airline that would justify it.192 But war with a small neighbor would not b
e enough; Kennedy moved to make certain the Russians would be involved in the wa
r. On January 31, 1962, he asked Khrushchev's son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, to m
eet with him and, in order to humiliate the Russians as he felt humiliated, told
him he was preparing to attack Cuba like Russia attacked Hungary: "If I run for
re-election and the Cuban question remains as it is," he said, "we will have to
do something" about Cuba. Kennedy told a startled Adzhubei, "I called Allen Dul
les into my office [after the Bay of Pigs] and dressed him down. I told him: You sh
ould learn a lesson from the Russians. When they had difficulties in Hungary, th
ey liquidated the conflict in three days [by sending in troops.]'" Adzhubei repe
ated this to Khrushchev,
205
who told Soviet diplomats: "An attack on Cuba is being prepared. And the only wa
y to save Cuba is to put missiles there." In April 1962, 40,000 American troops
began practicing invading Cuba in North Carolina,193 and by October 6, 1962, tho
usands of American troops were positioned for invasion, along with plans and equ
ipment, prepared to invade on October 20, 1962, using the Bahamas as an invasion
base camp. But on October 16, 1962, the CIA took clear U-2 photos that told the
m Russian nuclear missiles were in Cuba. Kennedy told no one of his own bellicos
e actions and threats, instead declaring the Russian move wholly unprovoked. Des
pite the fact that 100 million Americans lay in the range of the Russian missile
s--and despite the opinion of his staff that they made no military difference at
all because nuclear missiles on Russian submarines had long been stationed a fe
w miles off Cuba--Kennedy instituted a naval embargo and prepared for a full-sca
le attack on Cuba, risking a nuclear World War III. Saying "If Khrushchev wants
to rub my nose in the dirt, it's all over"194 and "we must not look to the world
as if we were backing down,"195 Kennedy fully expected war. When his staff told
him there were diplomatic means which could be used to remove the missiles, he
replied, "The object is not to stop offensive weapons, because the offensive wea
pons are already there, as much as it is to have a showdown with the Russians of
one kind or another."196 Since Kennedy had already publicly declared the U.S. w
as "prepared to use nuclear weapons at the start" of any war,197 Kennedy's embar
go and invasion would mean nuclear war if the Russians didn't accept the humilia
tion and back down, "one hell of a gamble," as Kennedy put it.198 Luckily for ma
nkind, Khrushchev backed down, was removed from office because of the humiliatio
n and America was rescued from its self-inflicted humiliations. For his role in
hiding the real cause of the near-apocalyptic actions, President Kennedy remains
universally seen as one of America's greatest Presidents...because he "kept his
head" during the Cuban Missile Crisis. THE MANIC PHASE: EGO DISINTEGRATION AND
PARANOIA Nations engage in manic economic and political projects for the same re
asons newly successful rock stars go to all-night parties and take drugs--to get
a "dopamine rush" that counters the depression and guilt about their success. P
olitical paranoia and slow ego disintegration are now seen in conspiratorial gro
up-fantasies, fears of femininity and imaginary humiliations by other nations. T
hese are countered in the economic sphere by manic overinvestment, risky venture
s, excess money supply growth, soaring debt and stock market speculations, and i
n the political sphere by jingoistic nationalism, expansionist ventures, militar
y buildups and belligerent,
206
insulting foreign affair behavior. As in drug addiction, each dopamine rush leav
es a dopamine hangover that requires an even larger manic activity to overcome t
he resulting depression. Purity Crusades multiply as anti-modern and anti-child
(Bad Boy) movements. Fears of "becoming feminine" (desires to merge with mommy)
are countered by persecution of homosexuals. A search for external enemies resul
ts from the growing ego disintegration, as grandiosity fails and Poison Alerts a
nd sacrificial group-fantasies proliferate. In America, these paranoid fears of
apocalyptic punishment for success have taken the form of revivalist Great Awake
nings, which occurred at the end of long period of peace: the First after 24 yea
rs of peace (1714-38) under the Georges, the Second after 30 years of peace (181
5-45) under Madison and Monroe, and the Third after 31 years of peace (1866-97)
following the Civil War. These apocalyptic fantasies of fears of how furious God
(Mommy) was because of mankind's sinfulness merge into the war movements that f
ollow. The American Revolution has been said to have been "caused by a pandemic
of persecutory delusions" featuring "a fear of effeminacy"199 and a fantasy of "
Mother England persecuting her children."200 Similarly, beginning with the Annus
Mirabilis of 1858, daily gatherings of thousands of people in spontaneous praye
r meetings took place, where people fell down, saw visions and went out and dest
royed their goods in preparation for the end of the world.201 This apocalyptic m
ood lasted and merged with the "cleansing in the fires of war" that would "purge
the virus" of the nation in Civil War bloodshed that was "sacramental, erotic,
mystical, and strangely gratifying."202 All these apocalyptic group-fantasies we
re caused by the growth panic of a period of prosperity--exactly the opposite ca
use from Barkun's theory of millenarian movements being produced by "deprivation
" and "natural catastrophes."203 Perhaps the classic era of paranoid fears leadi
ng to apocalyptic groupfantasies as punishment for prosperity is the period befo
re World War I--when the world growth rate jumped to over five percent, and when
Europe appeared to be going clinically paranoid from "the decadence of the time
s [when] no more rank, titles, or race [meant] all is mixed, confused, and blurr
ed [and] the end of the world seemed nigh."204 Prosperity and the beginnings of
liberal reforms produced widespread growth panic that decried "the decline of re
ligiosity, the disintegration of the patriarchal family, and the decline of resp
ect for authority."205 Fears of "becoming feminine" proliferated, along with cam
paigns against homosexuals. Goethe's Werther (Goethe: "Anything in the world can
be endured, except a series of wonderful days")206 was revived during the late
nineteenth century as thousands of Germans committed suicide during their rising
prosperity, climaxed eventually by all of
207
Europe going to war and committing suicide. At the end of the nineteenth century
, books like The World's End Soon pictured the degeneration and apocalyptic demi
se of Europe and feminine blood-sucking vampires derived from representations of
the New Woman as an "oversexed wife who threatened her husband's life with her
insatiable erotic demands"207 flooded the popular literature. Artists featured v
ampires devouring helpless men,208 and invented modern art as "a pervasive visio
n of Fragmentation" showing "everything disintegrated into parts...whirlpools [t
hat] led into the void."209 H. G. Wells wrote a book in 1913, The World Set Free
, that predicted an apocalyptic war using radioactive "atomic bombs" that would
nearly destroy the world and lead to the eternal peace.210 Objective journalists
wondered if "Europe was about to become a gigantic madhouse."211 Nations felt t
hey had to defend themselves against their growing paranoid delusions. "That the
English are merely waiting for a chance to fall upon us is clear," declared the
German Chancellor.212 Only starting a "preventive war" could save the nation. 2
13 "I believe a war to be unavoidable and the sooner the better," said the Germa
n Chief of Staff.214 Europe was swept up in "a terrible readiness, indeed a thir
st, for what Yeats was to call the blood-dimmed tide'...fascinated by the prospect
of a purging fire."215 Going to war would prevent engulfment by the Terrifying M
ommy, would avoid effeminacy and restore potency, and would purge the national a
rteries with a good bloodletting that would purge the polluting prosperity,216 t
each the Terrifying Mommy enemy a lesson and sacrifice the sinful Bad Boy so mom
my would finally love the Good Boy self who remained.
Rysunek 29 6:2 A Man Escapes Engulfment by Sexual Women by Going Off to War - Ma
x Slevogt, "The Knight" (1903)
WAR PHASE: RIGHTEOUS RAPE OF MOTHER SUBSTITUTES Even though wars are supposed to
be fought between men, they have equally affected women and children. In most w
ars, more civilians are killed than soldiers, and, according to UNICEF, "in the
wars fought since World War II 90 percent of all victims are found in the civili
an population, a large share of them women and children."217 In our imaginations
, however, wars are mainly about women and
208
children. Divine wars were always fought for a goddess of war, from Ishtar to Te
shub, almost always mothers of the war heroes,218 "crying to be fed...human bloo
d."219 Even the Hebrew Lord counsels Moses to "kill every male among the little
ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the vir
gin girls keep alive for yourselves [to rape]."220 Yanomamo war raids might kill
a few men in raids, but would abduct all enemy women and rape them. 221 Child m
urder and rape were the center of ancient war. The Greeks often used to rape all
virgin girls and boys in wars and often trod all children of a city to death un
der the feet of oxen or covered them with pitch and burned them alive. 222 As va
n Creveld puts it, "During most of history, the opportunity to engage in wholesa
le rape was not just among the rewards of successful war but, from the soldier's
point of view, one of the cardinal objectives for which he fought."223 Socaride
s describes the function of sexual sadism as Forces and extracts love; destroys
the threatening body of the mother rather than be destroyed by her discharges, a
ggressive impulses that threaten annihilation of the self even to the point of s
exual murder; achieves temporary freedom from fear of the engulfing mother...rea
ssures against and lessens castration fear; cancels out separation anxiety.224 C
linical studies of rapists find it a result of extreme childhood neglect and abu
se, continuous shaming and humiliation--and often even of actual sexual abuse as
a child.225 The rapist's fantasies center around control and dominance, and the
actual rape is often triggered by "flashbacks" to earlier humiliations that had
to be restaged in sexual violence, where "my life would flash in front of my mi
nd...so I went out looking for a victim."226 Rape is a "pseudosexual act," first
done for violence and revenge, then sexualized: "I wanted to knock the woman of
f her pedestal, and I felt rape was the worst thing I could do to her," said one
serial rapist. 227 Much of the time the rapist cannot even orgasm, but this doe
sn't matter because he has defiled, degraded and humiliated the woman: "After th
e assault I felt relieved. I felt I had gotten even. There was no sexual satisfa
ction; in fact, I felt a little disgusted." 228 Sex may be the weapon, but reven
ge is the motive. Rape fantasies are extremely widespread; in America, a third o
f all men regularly fantasize about raping women during masturbation or intercou
rse,229 while in a country like Yugoslavia--where earlier historical childrearin
g practices are still prevalent in the zadruga so that the rape of children is r
outine--adult male rape fantasies are so strong that rape is a common, everyday
part of life even in peacetime.230 Before wars, humiliation group-fantasies prol
iferate, as nations spend more and more time trading gratuitous insults, complai
ning about being humiliated
209
and pushed around by others, and worrying about not receiving the recognition du
e them,231 all flashbacks to early shame and neglect. The unrequited love for th
e mother is reexperienced in "rejected overtures" with other nations. Hitler, fo
r instance, clearly explained his reasons for starting WWII as arising out of re
jected maternal love: I have repeatedly offered England our friendship, and if n
ecessary closest cooperation. Love, however, is not a one-sided affair, but must
be responded to by the other side....I do not want to conquer her. I want to co
me to terms with her. I want to force her to accept my friendship...232 The war
that began as rape to win love ended as rape to win love. When the war was nearl
y over, sitting in his bunker in 1945, Hitler justified his rape of Europe as ne
cessary because, he said, It could not be conquered by charm and persuasiveness.
I had to rape it in order to have it.
233
In a world full of humiliating, rejecting, provocative motherlands, neighboring
countries seem to be "just asking to be raped." Group-fantasies of wanting to "e
xplode into her" to "penetrate her life" and avenge her for "turning down our ov
ertures" in order to "knock her off her throne" and "teach her a lesson she won'
t forget" begin to be expressed in diplomacy, political cartoons and in the medi
a. 234 Hypermasculinity begins to infect the nation's mood with the need for "st
anding tall" and "displaying our firmness" with a "stiffening of the national wi
ll." Newspapers headline rape fantasies to goad leaders into war; as the British
tabloids screamed out before the Falkland invasion, "STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA." C
artoons begin showing barbarian men in neighboring nations about to rape men's w
ives.236 Leaders begin to express projections of rape in meetings, as when Lyndo
n Johnson excitedly asked before expanding the war in Vietnam, "how many times d
o I let a fiend rape my wife?"237
Rysunek 30 6:3 Fears of Rape Were Overt in Slovenia Before Serbia Attacked Them
in 1991[235]
210
Finally, when the group-fantasies peak and action to "get some respect" is irres
istible, war begins as "righteous rape" against any enemy that can be imagined t
o be a convenient humiliating mommy. War, gang rape and degradation of women mer
ge into one. For instance, the Serbian attacks on its neighbors that followed th
e overt rape cartoons like the one above had "the degradation and molestation of
women central to the conquest...women of sixty and girls under twelve being gan
graped, often in front of their relatives [while men] pushed bottle necks into o
ur sex, even shattered, broken bottles...guns too...[as men screamed] I'll fuck you
r mother, all your mothers.'"238 Wars usually begin as group-fantasies of mother
-rape, revenges for earlier neglect and domination, righteous violence that will
"teach her a lesson." WAR PHASE: PURIFICATION OF BAD BOY SELF But while war is
seen as an way to avenge maternal mistreatment, it is also a merging with the Te
rrifying Mommy to wipe out the Bad Boy self whose fault it must be that mommy wa
sn't loving. The purification of mankind through the sacrifice of children to an
avenging goddess was, of course, the practice of ancient societies like Carthag
e, where tens of thousands of jars have been found with charred bones of sacrifi
ced children along with inscriptions saying they had been killed by their parent
s to cleanse their sinfulness.239 The symbol of the warrior in Aztec society was
a bleeding fetal war-god standing at the placental center of the city whose blo
od streamed out into the four quarters of the universe, feeding every citizens o
f the state.240 In every war, young men march off essentially to commit suicide
as heroic acts of sacrifice, "losing ourselves [in] ecstasy because we are consc
ious of a power outside us with which we can merge."241 As one soldiers wrote du
ring WWI, "Sacrificing oneself is a joy, the greatest joy...Never before has suc
h a powerful desire for death and passion for sacrifice seized mankind."242 The
Bad Boy self must die for the Good Boy self to be loved; therefore, blood must f
low to renew the sinful nation: "The souls of nations are drinking renewal from
the blood of the fallen soldiers." 243 Soldiers may sent back to their mothers d
ead, but they are wrapped in "living flags," maternal symbols, as though they ha
d been reborn into new swaddling-clothes with a new chance to be loved.244 A sol
dier "dies peacefully. He who has a Motherland dies in comfort...in her, like a
baby falling asleep..."245
211
Rysunek 31 6:4 Mother England Destroying Bad Boys
The ecstatic relief once war begins is felt because it is the revanche suprme for
early abuse and because it promises to cleanse the self of sinfulness. However c
onvinced people are as they begin wars that the "enemy" is outside themselves, t
hey are in fact fighting alters inside themselves--raping Terrifying Mommies and
killing Bad Boy selves. Nations "descend into visions of purgations and redempt
ion" in a "holy war [to] cleanse our souls of the dross of selfish pettiness."24
6 War is "the highest happiness that ordinary men can find,"247 a "purifying thu
nderstorm"248 that provides a chance to be "born again"249 a "triumph of righteo
usness"250 and a "magical restoration of potency."251 "It is a joy to be alive,"
rejoiced a German paper in 1914.252 "The heather is on fire. I never before kne
w what a popular excitement can be," wrote an American as the Civil War began, d
escribing jubilant crowds "with flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths."253
At last, one could take revenge against the Terrifying Mommy, kill the Bad Boy s
elf, be reborn and finally become pure and lovable, all in one splendid act of m
ass butchery. THE CAUSES OF WORLD WAR II AND THE HOLOCAUST Historians and politi
cal scientists have proposed any number of causes for WWII and the Holocaust.254
Unfortunately, detailed research has disproved every one of them. Goldhagen's c
laim that ordinary Germans had long held "exterminationist" antisemitic views255
has been disproved by careful historical studies that showed Germany was "a saf
e haven in late-nineteenth-century Europe [where] when German Jews looked toward
France, they saw the startling antisemitism unleashed by the Dreyfus Affair and
when they looked eastward, they saw pogroms and thousands of Jews fleeing towar
d Germany's safer political climate."256 The reason "why so many Jews failed to
leave Germany [was] they really couldn't believe that this Germany, which they l
oved [and] felt gratitude toward" would ever harm them.257 In fact, earlier anti
semitic movements in Germany were tiny, and "most historians believe that the Na
zis had no deep roots in German history and that antisemitism in Germany was not
essentially different from that of some
212
other nations..."258 Careful studies of Nazi party members have even found that
most were not antisemitic when they joined; "most people were drawn to antisemit
ism because they were drawn to Nazism, not the other way around." 259 Kershaw's
recent careful studies conclude "that antisemitism was not a major factor in att
racting support for Hitler..."260 As we shall shortly detail, what made Germans
antisemitic was the anxieties of the manic period after the Great Depression had
ended, later in the 1930s after Hitler gained power, and were not due some myst
erious German gene for eliminationist politics. All the other explanations for W
WII and the Holocaust have been similarly disproved by recent historical researc
h. Klaus Fischer's "no Hitler, no Holocaust," 261 along with all the other studi
es blaming German violence on "obedience" to Hitler's "hypnotic eyes"262 have be
en thrown out by the dozens of studies of the spontaneous, gratuitous violence e
ngaged in by average Germans even when they could have easily opted out. "Only f
ollowing orders" is simply a no longer considered a serious motivation for the w
ar and genocide. What is, however, most widely accepted is that Germans were "un
der stress," voted Nazi and then turned to violence because of the Great Depress
ion. Numerous detailed studies of Nazi membership all disprove this "economic st
ress" argument. The "model Nazi party member" joined before the Depression, "his
economic status was secure, for not once did he have to change his occupation,
job, or residence, nor was he ever unemployed."263 "The only group affected [by
the Depression] were the workers...Yet paradoxically the workers remained steadf
ast in support of the [democratic] status quo while the middle class, only margi
nally hurt by the economic constriction, turned to revolution."264 Most workers
did not vote for the Nazis and of those who did, who "believed in Hitler the mag
ician," most soon felt disappointed.265 Hitler, in fact, admitted "economics was
not very important to him [and] very few Germans had any information about what
his economic program actually was."266 Germans who became violent Nazis came pr
imarily from authoritarian middle-class backgrounds, not from poverty; indeed, "
those who grew up in poverty showed the least prejudice" in Merkl's study of Naz
i stormtroopers. 267 The "stress" that triggered the war and genocide may have b
een related to economics, but it in fact came from renewed prosperity in the lat
e 1930s, not to the economic collapse of 1929. There is one psychological study
based upon a developmental event in the early lives of Germans that is given som
e credulity by historians: the "Nazi Youth Cohort" thesis of Peter Loewenberg. T
his study claims that "the rapid political ascendance of the Nazi party (NSDAP)
in the period from 1928 to 1933 was marked
213
by a particularly strong support from youth" who were deprived of food during th
e 1917-1919 Allied embargo.268 Citing low German birth weights and excess infant
mortality during the period, Loewenberg feels this "single traumatic event" acc
ounts for "the influx of German youth to the ranks of National Socialism, the po
litical decline of the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi seizure of power."269 The p
roblem with this thesis is the figures don't add up. While Loewenberg cites the
census of 1933 as showing 31 percent of Germans were "youthful," these figures i
n fact were for those 18 to 30 years of age.270 Children born in 1917-18 were ac
tually only 11-12 years of age in 1929 when the Nazis received their most uncoer
ced votes. Even those up to 5 years of age during the embargo years would still
be from 12-17 in 1929, too young to join the Nazi party. And in fact most German
youth didn't join the Hitler Youth, which managed to attract only one percent o
f the young people belonging to religious and political youth organizations in 1
932.271 Therefore, the WWI famine, however severe, cannot be a main cause of the
Nazi takeover,272 since the average age of membership of the Nazi party was in
fact over 31 years.273 THE SOURCES OF WWII AND THE HOLOCAUST IN GERMAN CHILDREAR
ING If German childrearing practices are not considered as the cause of German m
ass violence, there is no way to avoid Goldhagen's conclusion that the war and t
he Holocaust must be due to "something monstrously Germanic...at bottom unexplai
nable [and not] a product of human decisions."274 But if German childhood around
1900 is recognized as a totalitarian nightmare of murder, neglect, battering an
d torture of innocent, helpless human beings, then the restaging of this nightma
re four decades later in the Holocaust and war can be understood as explanatory.
Historians have avoided researching German childrearing at the end of the ninet
eenth century. The few that have begun to do the research have found German chil
dhood uniformly more brutal than French and British childhood. A comparison by M
aynes of 90 German and French autobiographies of late nineteenth-century working
class childhoods found German far more brutal and unloving, with the typical me
mory of home being that "No bright moment, no sunbeam, no hint of a comfortable
home where motherly love and care could shape my childhood was ever known to me.
"275 In contrast, "French workers' autobiographies tell somewhat different child
hood tales. To be sure, there are a few French accounts of childhoods marked by
cruelty, neglect, and exploitation."276 Yet "much more common are stories of sur
prisingly sentimental home loves and warm relationships with mothers (and often
fathers), even in the face of material deprivation."277 Maynes found unrelenting
214
child labor, sexual molestation and beatings at home and at school were consiste
ntly worse in the German accounts. Most of the research into primary sources on
the history of German childrearing has been done by psychohistorians connected w
ith the Deutsche Gesellschaft fr psychohistorische Forschung, the German branch of
The Institute for Psychohistory.278 The two main studies covering nineteenth-ce
ntury German childrearing were those published in The Journal of Psychohistory b
y Aurel Ende and Raffael Scheck; both found uniform cruelty and neglect in their
detailed review of 154 German autobiographies studied. Child battering was so c
ommon in German families that Scheck concludes, "There is virtually no autobiogr
aphy which doesn't tell something about violence against children and almost no
author who has not been beaten as a child."279 And Ende's massive study conclude
s that "nowhere in Western Europe are the needs of children so fatally neglected
as in Germany," where "infant mortality, corporal punishment, cruelties against
children, the exploitation of working children and the teacher-pupil relationsh
ip" were so brutal that he feels he has to apologize "for not dealing with the brig
hter side' of German childhood because it turns out that there is no bright side.'"
280 Visitors to German homes at the end of the nineteenth century also found tha
t in general "one feels sorry for these little German children; they must work s
o hard and seem to lack that exuberance of life, spirits, and childish glee that
make American children harder to train but leave them the memory of a happy chi
ldhood."281 In particular, visitors noted the German preference for boys and the
ir maltreatment of girls. Whereas in France and England beginning in the eightee
nth century there was "an increasing appreciation of girl children," with parent
s often openly expressing their preference of having a girl,282 in Germany even
at the end of the nineteenth century girls were resented and uniformly neglected
: "From childhood on, the lives these women led were exceedingly harsh...dominat
ed by memories of paternal brutality or negligence...drunkenness and violence wa
s a routine part of life [including] a father's incestuous advances...[and] abus
e with sexual overtones at the hands of her mother...beatings and other forms of
violent punishment."283 Germany in general was historically far behind the rest
of Western Europe in the education of girls and in woman's rights, so that inno
vative mothers and hopeful daughters were found far less than in other countries
.284 German family maxims described the lack of love of mothers toward their chi
ldren, saying tenderness was "generally not part of the mother's character...Jus
t as she kept her children...short on food and clothing, she also was short on f
ondling and tenderness...[feeling] the children should...regard themselves as us
eless weeds and be
215
grateful that they were tolerated."285 Children were expected to give love to th
eir parents, not the parents to their children: "We always appeared trembling be
fore our parents, hoping that our official kiss of their hands would be accepted
..."286 One boy reported his mother once dropped a word of praise, saying to som
eone that "He is good and well-liked," so that the boy remembered it all his lif
e "because the words were totally new sounds to my ear."287 But kind words were
rare in German homes, so most Germans remembered "no tender word, no caresses, o
nly fear" 288 and childhood was "joyless," "so immeasurably sad that you could n
ot fathom it." 289 Yet this hatred of children in German families was not someth
ing that they felt guilty about. German parents endlessly impressed upon the chi
ldren their pride in their family atmosphere of hatred. "I don't want to be love
d," said one typical father, "I want to be feared!"290 Another father summed up
his feelings about family discipline as follows: It is good to hate. To hate is
strong, manly. It makes the blood flow. It makes one alert. It is necessary for
keeping up the fighting instincts. To love is feebleness. It enervates. You see
all the nations that talk of love as the keynote of life are weak, degenerate. G
ermany is the most powerful nation in the world because she hates. When you hate
, you eat well, sleep well, work well, fight well.291 GERMAN INFANTS Since Germa
n fathers at the end of the nineteenth century spent little time at home, childr
earing was overwhelmingly the job of the mother: "The care and training of the c
hildren are almost entirely in her hands for the first five years." 292 The moth
er especially ruled the nursery and kitchen, where the children spent their time
, and "she may actually exclude men from these restricted areas"293 when they we
re at home. Thus, although most studies of the treatment of infants and young ch
ildren in Germany stress the admitted brutality and authoritarianism of fathers,
the real lives of young German children in the past centered more on their murd
er, rejection, neglect, tying up and beating by their mothers and other women. I
nfanticide and infant mortality rates at the end of the nineteenth century were
much higher in Germany and Austria than in England, France, Italy and Scandinavi
a.294 Newborn were not considered in most areas as fully human since they not th
ought to have a soul until they were six weeks old, and so could be "killed in a
kind of late abortion."295 Women giving birth often "had their babies in the pr
ivy, and treated the birth as an evacuation, an everyday event, and...carried on
with their work."296 Births which were "experienced as a bowel movement made it
possible for
216
INFANTICIDE,
WETNURSING
AND
SWADDLING
OF
the women [to] kill their children in a very crude way, by smashing their heads
[like] poultry and small animals..."297 Mothers who killed their newborn babies
were observed by others as being without remorse, "full of indifference, coldnes
s and callousness [and gave] the impression of a general impoverishment of feeli
ng" toward her child.298 Even if the infant was allowed to live, it could easily
be neglected and not fed enough, and it would be made to "go straight to heaven
." Infant mortality rates in Germany ranged from 21 percent in Prussia to an ast
onishing 58 percent in Bavaria during the latter part of the nineteenth century,
299 the figures in the south--the highest in Europe--being due to their practice
of not breastfeeding,300 since hand-fed babies died at a rate three times that
of breast-fed babies.301 The best figures for overall German infanticide at the
end of the century were 20 percent, half again higher than France and England.30
2 Nineteenth-century doctors condemned the practice of German mothers refusing t
o breastfeed their babies, saying the pap made of flour and water or milk was "u
sually so thick that it has to be forced into the child and only becomes digesti
ble when mixed with saliva and stomach fluids. At its worst it is curdled and so
ur."303 Infants were so commonly hungry that "those poor worms get their mouths
stuffed with a dirty rag containing chewed bread so that they cannot scream."304
Ende reports that for centuries "One rarely encounters a German infant who is f
ully breastfed...Everywhere they got their mouths stuffed with Zulp, a small lin
en bag filled with bread...Swaddled babies could hardly get rid of these often d
irty rags."305 Mothers who could afford it sent their newborn to wetnurses--comm
only called Engelmacherin, "angelmakers," because they were so negligent toward
the children. The mothers complained, "Do you think I am a farmer's daughter, th
at I should bother myself with little children? That a woman of my age and stand
ing should allow her very strength to be sucked dry by children?"306 While Engli
sh gentry began to nurse their infants themselves during the seventeenth century
, the mothering revolution had not yet really reached Germany by the end of the
nineteenth century.307 Visitors who wrote books on German home life reported, "I
t is extremely rare for a German lady to nourish her own child,"308 and "It woul
d have been very astonishing indeed if a well-to-do mother had suggested sucklin
g her own baby."309 Almost all mothers who refused to breast-feed could have don
e so if they "seriously wanted to," according to a 1905 German medical conferenc
e.310 Those who did not gave "completely trivial reasons," such as "because it i
s messy," because they "didn't want to ruin their figures" or because breastfeed
ing was "inconvenient. 311 Even after their children returned from wetnurse, "no
ble ladies showed not the slightest interest in their offspring"312 and turned t
hem over to nursemaids, governesses and tutors.
217
The result was that parents were often strangers to their children. When one Ger
man father asked his child whom he loves the most and the child replied, "Hanne
[his nurse]," the father objected, "No! You must love your parents more." "But i
t is not true!" the child replied. The father promptly beat him.313 Mothers and
other caretakers of newborn German babies were so frightened of them that they t
ied them up tightly for from six to nine months and strapped them into a crib in
a room with curtains drawn to keep out the lurking evils. 314 Two centuries aft
er swaddling had disappeared in England and America, two British visitors descri
bed it as routine throughout Germany:
A German baby is a piteous object; it is pinioned and bound up like a mummy in y
ards of bandages...it is never bathed...Its head is never touched with soap and
water until it is eight or ten months old, when the fine skull cap of encrusted
dirt which it has by that time obtained is removed...315 In Germany, babies are
loathsome, foetid things...offensive to the last degree with the excreta that ar
e kept bound up within their swaddling clothes...the heads of the poor things ar
e never washed, and are like the rind of Stilton cheese...316 When the children
were finally removed from their swaddling bands after six to twelve months, othe
r restraint devices such as corsets with steel stays and backboards continued th
eir tied-up condition to assure the parents they were still in complete control.
317 The result of all this early restraint was the same production of later viol
ence in children as that obtained by experimenters physically restraining rats a
nd monkeys--marked by depletions of serotonin, increases in norepinephrine level
s and massive increases in terror, rage and eventually actual violence.318 The f
ear of one's own children was so widespread in German families that for centurie
s autobiographies told of a tradition of abandonment of children by their parent
s to anyone who would take them, using the most flimsy of excuses.319 Children w
ere given away and even sometimes sold320 to relatives, neighbors, courts, pries
ts, foundling homes, schools, friends, strangers, "traveling scholars" (to be us
ed as beggars)--anyone who would take them--so that for much of history only a m
inority of German children lived their entire childhoods under their family roof
. Children were reported to be sent away to others as servants or as apprentices
, "for disciplinary reasons," "to be drilled for hard work," "to keep them from
idleness," because of a "domestic quarrel," "because it cried as a baby," "becau
se his uncle was childless," etc.321 Scheck notes from his study of autobiograph
ies, "When their parents came to take them home, their children usually didn't r
ecognize them any more."322
218
Peasants gave away their children so regularly that the only ones who were guara
nteed to be kept were the first-born boys--to get the inheritance--and one of th
e daughters--who was sometimes crippled in order to prevent her from marrying an
d force her to stay permanently as a cheap helper in the parental household.323
After two children, it was said that "the parental attitude to later offspring n
oticeably deteriorated [so that] a farmer would rather lose a young child than a
calf."324 Those children who were kept by their parents were considered, in Lut
her's words, "obnoxious with their crapping, eating, and screaming," 325 beings
who "don't know anything, they aren't capable of doing anything, they don't perf
orm anything...[and are] inferior to adults"326 and are therefore are only usele
ss eaters327 until they began to work. "When little children die, it's not often
that you have a lot of grief [but] if an older child dies, who would soon be ab
le to go off to work...everybody is upset--it's already cost so much work and tr
ouble, now it's all been for nothing."328 As "useless eaters" children were main
ly resented: "...rarely could we eat a piece of bread without hearing father's c
omment that we did not merit it."329 The children grew up feeling that "my mothe
r was fond of society and did not trouble much about me" (Bismarck) or "[my moth
er] did not conduce to evolve that tender sweetness and solicitude which are usu
ally associated with motherhood. I hardly ever recollect her having fondled me.
Indeed, demonstrations of affection were not common in our family" (Wagner).330
It is not surprising, therefore, with such a drastic lack of maternal love that
historically outsiders complained that German mothers routinely abandoned their
children, "paid less attention to their children than cows,"331 and observed tha
t "mothers leave their small children or babies at home alone and go off shoppin
g; or parents go visiting in the evening, leaving the small children at home by
themselves..."332 BEATING, TERRORIZING AND SEXUALLY MOLESTING GERMAN CHILDREN Al
though little children can be made less threatening by being given away, tied up
or ignored, as they grow older they must be forced to conform to parental image
s of them as poison containers by beating and terrorizing them. German parents t
hroughout history have been known as the most violent batterers in Europe,333 pa
rticularly toward their boys,334 seconding Luther's opinion that "I would rather
have a dead son than a disobedient one."335 Since mothers continued to be the m
ain caretakers of the young children, the mother was far more often the main bea
ter than the father.336 Scheck and Ende found brutal beating in virtually all au
tobiographies at the end of the nineteenth century; Hvernick found that 89
219
percent were beaten at the beginning of the twentieth century, over half of thes
e with canes, whips or sticks.337 More recent surveys of report 75 percent of Ge
rman adults say they had suffered from violence from their parents during their
childhood, although hitting with instruments was falling from earlier periods.33
8 Battering babies sometimes begins in the womb. Violence against pregnant women
has always been prevalent throughout human history, and since even today pregna
nt women are assaulted between 21 percent to 30 percent by their partners, 339 t
his suggests that many fetuses were probably physically abused at the end of the
nineteenth century, even without considering the effects of widespread maternal
alcoholism in Germany. The physical assaults resumed as soon as the little chil
d was out of swaddling bands, whenever they cry for anything. The widely-followe
d Dr. Schreber says the earlier one begins beatings the better: "One must look a
t the moods of the little ones which are announced by screaming without reason a
nd crying...[inflicting] bodily admonishments consistently repeated until the ch
ild calms down or falls asleep. Such a procedure is necessary only once or at mo
st twice and-one is master of the child forever. From now on a glance, a word, a
single threatening gesture, is sufficient to rule the child."340 Schreber was o
verly optimistic and, like other German parents, continued to be threatened by i
magined disobedience from his children, and so the beatings continued. Every ind
ependent move of children was seen as done, says Krger, "with the intent of defyin
g you;" it is "a declaration of war against you" which you must "whip him well t
ill he cries so: Oh no, Papa, oh no!"341 These are not just spankings; they are
whippings, like Hitler's daily whippings of sometimes over 200 strokes with a ca
ne or a hippopotamus whip, which sometimes put him into a coma.342 Parents were
often described as being in a "righteous rage" during the beatings343 and the ch
ildren often lost consciousness.344 "At school we were beaten until our skin smo
ked. At home, the instrument for punishment was a dogwhip...My father, while bea
ting, more and more worked himself into a rage. I lost consciousness from his be
atings several times."345 Klden writes that the motto of German parents at the end
of the nineteenth century was simple: "Children can never get enough beatings."
346 Although few German parents from the past would today escape being thrown i
n jail for their batterings, children at the end of the nineteenth century found
little protection from society, since their own word and even physical evidence
of severe abuse counted for nothing. Ende's survey describes typical court case
s where a neighbor would alert police to "a three-year-old girl [whose] body was
covered with welts. Lips, nose and gums were open wounds. The body showed numer
ous festering sores. The child had been placed on a red-hot, iron stove--two wou
nds on the buttocks were festering,"
220
but the court let the parent go free.347 Ende describes routine beating, kicking
, strangling, making children eat excrement, etc., saying, "The cases I have pre
sented are not the most extreme; they are typical of the vast literature on Germ
an families."348 The result was that German childhood suicides were three to fiv
e times higher than in other Western European countries at the end of the ninete
enth century,349 fear of beatings by parents being the reason most often cited b
y the children for their suicide attempts.350 Few people cared about the reason
for the suicides, since "suicidal children were thought to be spineless creature
s, spoiled by indulgent parents...Newspapers wrote: A boy who commits suicide becau
se of a box on the ears has earned his fate; he deserved to be ruined.'351" Ther
e simply was no one around to sympathize with battered children in Germany. Even
the small feminist movement in Germany failed to speak out for the rights of ch
ildren, declaring motherhood "oppressive,"352 even though feminists in misogynou
s Germany in any case soon became "a symbol of disorder, decadence and physical
and psychological disease."353 Although these constant beatings quickly produced
compliant, obedient children, parental projections into them made continuous ov
ercontrol appear necessary. German children were "often locked in a dark room or
a closet or fastened to a table leg,"354 were "hardened" by washing them with i
ce-cold water before breakfast,355 and were tightly tied up in various corsets,
steel collars and torturous back-support devices with steel stays and tight lace
s to hold them in controlled positions all day long.356 Children were not only c
ontrolled by being frightened by endless ghost stories where they were threatene
d with being carried away by horrible figures.357 The parents actually "dressed
up in terrifying costumes [as] the socalled Knecht Ruprecht, made their faces bl
ack and pretended to be a messenger of God who would punish children for their s
ins." 358 At Christmas they dressed as Pelznickel, "armed with a rod and a large
chain...If they have been bad children, he will use his rod; if good, he will b
ring them nuts..." 359 Petschauer remembers being threatened by a "hairy monster
[that] chased me under the living room table, chains clanking, hoofs stomping,
appearing it wanted to drag me off in its carrying basket, the Korb."360 Scheck
sums up the effects of these terrifying devices: "Most children had been so deep
ly frightened that their demons of childhood' persecuted them at night and in fever
ish dreams for their whole lives."361 Toilet training was an early, violent batt
le-ground for parental control over the infant. Since "babies and young children
won't obey, don't want to do what grownups want them to do but instead test the
m, resist them, and tyrannize them [and since] they are impure, unclean and mess
y,"362 toilet training begins at around
221
six months of age, long before the infant has sphincter control. The training is
done by regular use of enemas and by hitting the infant: "The baby cannot walk
yet [Nana] spanks the baby. Hard. He is a dirty, dirty Hansi-baby,' she says, as sh
e spanks. He made pooh-pooh last night! Dirty Hansi!' Nana slaps the little red but
tocks." Traditional German obsession with children's feces is well known; both D
undes and von Zglinicki have written entire books on the subject.363 The enema i
n particular was used as a frightening domination device, a fetish-object often
wielded by the mother or nurse in daily rituals that resembled sexual assaults o
n the anus, sometimes including tying the child up in leather straps as though t
he mother were a dominatrix, inserting the two-foot-long enema tube over and ove
r again as punishment for "accidents."364 There were special enema stores that G
erman children would be taken to in order to be "fitted" for their proper size o
f enemas. The ritual "stab in the back" was a central fear of German children we
ll into the twentieth century, and they learned "never to speak of it, but alway
s to think about it."365
Rysunek 32 6:5 German Baby Being Assaulted With An Enema
The punitive atmosphere of the German home was so total that one can convincingl
y say that totalitarianism in the family led directly to totalitarianism in poli
tics. Children were personal slaves of their parents, catering to their every ne
ed, waiting on them, tying to fulfill their every whim, even if only to be poiso
n containers for their moods. Many accounts of the time describe a similar tense
home atmosphere:
When the father came in from work, the children were expected to be at home. Nei
ghbours...would warn...'[Your father's] coming! We ran like a flash, opened up a
nd were inside in time!' The children would bring him his slippers, help him off
with his coat, lay the table or just retreat in silence to a corner of the room
...Right away we got punished, whack, a clip round the ear or something...'You t
ake off my shoes; you go and get water; you fill my pipe for me and you fetch my
books!' And we had to jump to it, he wouldn't have stood for it if we hadn't al
l done just as we were told...we had to kneel, one by the one window, another
222
by the other...we would kneel with our heads against the wall...we had to stay t
here for two hours..."366 German children were also used by parents and servants
as sexual objects from an early age.367 German doctors often said "nursemaids a
nd other servants carry out all sorts of sexual acts on the children entrusted t
o their care, sometimes merely in order to quiet the children, sometimes for fun.'"
368 Even Freud said he was seduced by his nurse and by his father,369 and said "
nursemaids, governesses and domestic servants [were often] guilty of [grave sexu
al] abuses" and that "nurses put crying children to sleep by stroking their geni
tals."370 Children were used like a comfort blanket: "If the father goes away on
a journey, the little son can come to sleep in mother's bed. As soon as father
returns, the boy is banished to his cot" next to the parents' bed, where he will
continue to observe their intercourse.371 These incestuous assaults were regula
r enough to be remembered rather than repressed in the autobiographies of the pe
riod.372 In poorer families, of course, "it was unheard of for children to have
their own beds,"373 but even in wealthy families parents bring their children to
bed with them. After using them sexually, they then would threaten to punish th
e child for their sexuality. "Little Hans," for instance, reported he regularly
was masturbated by his mother, "coaxed [Freud's footnote: caressed'] with his Mummy
[Freud's footnote: meaning his penis.']," but then told she would "send for Dr. A.
to cut off your widdler" if he touched his penis. 374 It is no wonder that Freu
d reported that his patients "regularly charge their mothers with seducing them,
"375 but not because "they had been cleansed by their mothers" as he claimed but
because they had in fact been used sexually by them. They then impose various p
unishments and anti-masturbation devices such as penis-rings, metal cages with s
pikes and plaster casts to prevent erections while sleeping in order to punish t
he child for the incestuous acts of the parent.376 As children left their famili
es in pedophile-prone nineteenth-century Germany, they were again raped at schoo
l, as servants, on the streets and at work. The majority of prostitutes were min
ors, often starting their careers as young as age seven, with parents often livi
ng off the prostitution of their daughters. 377 Virgins were particularly valuab
le, since "a superstition prevails...that venereal diseases may be cured by mean
s of sexual intercourse with a virgin."378 Bloch thought seducing children was "
very widespread" because "timidity and impotence on the part of adult men, rende
ring intercourse with adult women difficult" led to their commonly raping childr
en.379 Rape by employers of servants was widespread, but since no one wanted ill
egitimate children, the servant girl was expected to kill any offspring. 380 Gir
ls leaving school at thirteen regularly told tales of sexual assault at the hand
s of
223
factory employers and managers or by bosses in the office.381 And both boys and
girls were open to rape in schools, by teachers as well as older students--there
were even "free schools" known for pederastic use of young boys that espoused "
pedagogical Eros" concepts that were popular in the period.382
Rysunek 33 6:6 A Typical Day in a Nineteenth-Century German School
Even the daily beatings so commonly reported at schools had overtones of sexual
assault--after all, the German schoolmaster who boasted he had given "911,527 st
rokes with the stick, 124,000 lashes with the whip, 136,715 slaps with the hand
and 1,115,800 boxes on the ear"383 was engaged in a severe sexual compulsion, no
t a disciplinary act. One can easily sense the sexual excitement behind the clai
m that teachers must "know how to love with the cane,"384 in schools that were r
eal torture-chambers for children and young people. All day long the hazel-rod,
the ruler...and the cowhide reign, or they fly around in the class-room to warn
the sluggish ones and the chatter-boxes or to call them to step out. Then, they
were given a sound thrashing. How inventive were some school tyrants concerning
their punishments...There is rarely a morning on which we do not see servants or
even parents in the streets, dragging violently to school boys who cry at the t
op of their voices.385
THE
INNOVATIVE
PHASE:
WEIMAR
GERMANY
AND
THE
FORBIDDEN LEAP INTO MODERNITY A small minority of Germans at the turn of the cen
tury, however, had more modern, less brutal childrearing, and it was these who i
n every economic class managed to provide the new psychoclass that supported the
democratic and economic reforms of the Weimar Republic. During the Weimar perio
d, these advanced Germans were able to borrow more advanced social and economic
models from other more democratic nations nearby, creating even larger a gap bet
ween the majority of Germans brought up in medieval childrearing ways and the ne
eds of
224
modern capitalism and democratic forms of government. This advanced minority did
not mainly come from the wealthier economic classes; wealthy mothers regularly
sent their newborn out to peasants who had reputations as being totally without
feeling for the infants for whom they were supposed to care. The new psychoclass
German children can be found in the historical record in exceptional autobiogra
phies and diaries, more in the north than the south--where as we have seen the m
others didn't even breastfeed--more in the middle classes than in the wealthy, m
ore urban than rural, and more in certain ethnic groups, particularly the Jews.
That German Jewish families "constituted one of the most spectacular social leap
s in European history [and] produced some of the most fiercely independent minds
" in Germany386 is a little-understood cause of their persecution during the Hol
ocaust, since a nation afraid of independence naturally chooses the most indepen
dent people in their population as scapegoats for their fear of freedom. Jews in
Germany were far more literate (even the women) than others since medieval time
s, when most populations were nearly totally illiterate. Jewish families, smalle
r and more urban than other German families and far less authoritarian,387 almos
t always nursed their own children, so that in 1907, for instance, in the south
"44 percent of the children of Christian families died, but only 8 percent of th
e Jewish children."388 Two major studies of German Jewish family life confirm th
at it was quite different from most of the other families around them, so much m
ore loving and compassionate that even after the end of WWII, after experiencing
during the Holocaust the most "severe abuse and unimaginable stress, there were
no suicides [in survivors]...the people are neither living a greedy, me-first s
tyle of life, nor are they seeking gain at the expense of others...389most of th
eir lives are marked by an active compassion for others..." As was stressed earl
ier, what produces violent restaging of early trauma isn't merely the severity o
f the trauma, but whether or not the child blames himself.390 Two similar retros
pective studies--one by Dicks of Nazis and another by the Oliners of rescuers of
Jews--clearly reveal the different family backgrounds of the more advanced psyc
hoclass represented by rescuers. Just as Dicks found brutal, domineering parents
of Nazis who had "particularly destructive mother images,"391 the Oliners inter
viewed over 406 rescuers of Jews, and compared them with 126 nonrescuers, and fo
und that their economic class, their religion, their education, jobs and other s
ocial characteristics were all similar, only their childrearing was different.39
2 Altruistic personalities, they found, had families that showed them more respe
ct, more concern for fairness, more love and had less emphasis on obedience and
more on individuality. They were almost never sent out to others to be cared for
,
225
and if they were sometimes hit by their parents, the parents often apologized. 3
93 Obviously, a new childrearing mode had penetrated to a minority of Germans at
the beginning of the twentieth century, in time to produce a new innovative pha
se and an attempted "leap to modernity" during the Weimar Republic. During this
decade of prosperity, "many Germans enjoyed a temporary triumph of eros over tha
natos, experiencing a sense of liberation hitherto unknown in a land where stron
g discipline and public conformity had held sway for generations."394 Universal
suffrage allowed women to vote, a minority of parties were even fairly democrati
c in intent, economic freedoms multiplied and produced unaccustomed prosperity,
women's rights over their children were promoted and sexual material and even co
ntraception became widely available, reducing for the first time the number of c
hildren per family to two.395 But all this political, economic and social libera
tion produced terror in the average German, terror of maternal engulfment. Democ
racy was seen as "a beast of a thousand heads [that] crushes anything it cannot
swallow or engulf."396 Weimar Purity Crusades began to call for "emancipation fr
om emancipation" and "a restoration of authoritarian rule." 397 Antipornography
laws "to protect youth against literary rubbish and dirt" began to be passed as
early as 1926.398 Even women delegates in the Reichstag opposed "the masculiniza
tion of women" that they said was the result of women's rights, which were deeme
d "un-German."399 Germany felt it needed a Phallic Leader who would give them a
national enema, a purging, a purifying of "foreign" liberalism to "unify and cle
anse"400 the body politic as their mothers and nurses had forcefully purged them
of feces and cleansed them of their desires for independence. The myth about "t
he stab in the back" (the enema) being the underlying cause of Germany's problem
s had deeper meaning than the political. It was agreed that "The stab in the bac
k [is] a crime...the cause of our general paralysis and joylessness..."401 What
was needed, it was said, was something to "remove the Verstopfung [constipation]
" that was obstructing German culture.402 Germans complained throughout the Weim
ar period about "the stab in the back" they had received at the end of WWI, and
said about the Versailles Treaty "always think about it, never speak of it," bot
h phrases really referring to their enema assaults as children. The more prosper
ous Weimar became, the more growth panic Germans experienced--as shown in the in
crease in murder and manslaughter rates during the later Weimar years.403 Thus i
t was that Germany-the nation that during the 1920s enjoyed higher standards of
living than any other in Europe --404began its search for a violent, purging dic
tator long before the Depression began, the supposed cause of the dictatorship.
226
THE DEPRESSIVE PHASE: CHOOSING THE PHALLIC LEADER Careful studies of the rise of
Nazism conclude that the Depression came after, not before, the death of Weimar
democracy and that "the decay of parliamentary government preceded the Nazi ris
e."405 Nor did the Versailles Treaty and Allied demands for reparations cause th
em, since "German borrowing from abroad always far exceeded her reparation payme
nts."406 Nor, as we have documented, was antisemitism the cause of the rise of t
he Nazis. Not only was earlier German antisemitism milder than many other Europe
an nations,407 "in the decisive electoral campaigns of 1930 and 1932...anti-Semi
tic agitation proved, if anything, more of a hindrance, so...leadership consciou
sly played it down."408 Most Germans were "relatively indifferent towards the Je
wish Question,"409 and "the vast majority of the general population did not clam
or or press for anti-Semitic measures [even by] the Kristallnacht pogrom of Nove
mber 1938..."410 The call for a dictatorship, in fact, came before it began to c
enter on Hitler, first in films and other cultural material (Kracauer calls Weim
ar culture "a procession of tyrants")411 and then in the Reichstag. The middle c
lasses--"hardly touched by the depression"412 --and the wealthy--"the richer the
precinct the higher the Nazi vote"413 -were the main sources of the over two-th
irds of all delegates who voted Hitler dictator. Women in fact voted for Hitler
in even greater proporations than men. 414 The ecstatic enthusiasm of the jubila
nt masses of people who celebrated their Phallic Leader came directly from his p
romises of a violent Purity Crusade that would end what Hitler called the "poiso
ning hothouse of sexual conceptions and stimulants [and the] suffocating perfume
of our modern eroticism [which is] the personification of incest"415 --all thre
e images suggesting flashbacks to the sexually engulfing mommy of the family bed
. Even during the Depression, Germans said, "We are somebody again!"416 only bec
ause of their delusional merger with their Phallic Leader. Economics, political
forms, antisemitism--all played second fiddle in the Nazi propaganda to Hitler's
"ranting about prostitution and moral decadence." 417 What made Germans say abo
ut Hitler's dictatorship, "The Joy inside me was impossible to describe,"418 was
his violent Purity Crusade, a dopamine rush that warded off engulfment by the T
errifying Mother--using his hatred of his own mother that can be glimpsed in his
saying about a frightening painting of Medusa he kept on his walls: "Those eyes
! They are the eyes of my mother!"419 THE MANIC PHASE: BEGINNING THE KILLING OF
"USELESS EATERS" The Depression was relatively short in Germany. Since economic
downturns are caused by motivated "mistakes" in restricting liquidity, Hitler pe
rformed what
227
was called an "economic miracle" simply by reversing the "mistakes" of late Weim
ar economic policies, so that by the end of 1936 Germany surpassed the highest l
evels of GNP achieved during the 1920s.420 It was only as the manic phase was we
ll under way that Germany really felt their growth panic and completed their mer
ger with the Fatherland and the promised violence of the Phallic Leader. Protect
ed against growing body disintegration anxieties by fetishistic Nazi leather boo
ts and uniforms, Germans could accomplish the "purification" of their nation by
"stopping the creeping poison" exuded by Terrifying Mommies and Bad Boy selves,
at home and abroad. One must say "Halt!" to freedom to be loved by mommy: after
all, the "Heil Hitler!" salute, with arm stiffly outstretched and palm out, is a
universal symbol of "Halt." Germans who as children were made to kneel silently
against the wall for hours encountered American swing music as adults, wanted t
o dance, but still were under their internal parents' injunction to "Halt!" So N
azi soldiers halted all swing dancing in Germany and sent those who danced to sw
ing music to concentration camps.421 Only if Germans could stop being individual
s living in freedom could they go back and live as "one family" in the "joyful r
apture" of one Volk, cleansed of sinfulness. Only if they were slaves to totalit
arian Nazi whims could they restage their slavery to their parents in the totali
tarian family of their childhoods; thus, even the chains of swaddling bands were
embedded in the Nazi dicta: "He who can do what he wants is not free...He who f
eels himself without chains is not free." 422 Only those who could worship the M
otherland (the swastika is an ancient symbol of Mother Goddess worship) could fe
el reborn and be loved as they always felt they deserved to be since birth. Sinc
e group-fantasies of merging with mommy proliferated, men feared they would beco
me feminine, so homosexuals began to be persecuted with a vengeance. Indeed, all
of post-Depression Europe, America and even Asia were in their manic phase in t
he late Thirties and felt the need for a cleansing world war and sacrifice of sc
apegoats. American antisemitism, for instance, was on the rise, a steady minorit
y feeling that Jews were a menace to America423 and two-thirds indicating Jewish
refugees should be kept out of the country.424 In the summer of 1939 when over
a thousand German Jews arrived in the New World, they were sent back. 425 The bi
ll to accept 20,000 Jewish children into the U.S. was received with massive oppo
sition because "20,000 children will soon turn into 20,000 ugly adults." 426 Thi
rtytwo nations assembled at a conference on Jewish emigration and voted they "re
gretted" they could not take in more Jews.427 When the British were approached t
o save Jews in exchange for goods, they replied, "What on earth are you thinking
off...What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?" 428 Nor
was
228
Hitler without his admirers in other countries before the invasion. Churchill ca
lled him "an indomitable champion [who could] restore our courage," 429 Anthony
Eden said of him "without doubt the man has charm...I rather liked him." 430 Ind
eed, Beisel's research into the group-fantasies of Western nations before the wa
r concludes that Germany was "the bad boy" of Europe who was delegated the start
ing of the war by others in "the family of nations," just as many "bad boys" are
delegated the acting out of violence felt by others in individual families.431
Before the war broke out, however, the killing of "bad boy" alters had begun in
earnest. The earliest death camps, in fact, were set up to kill children who wer
e useless eaters, the same term applied to the Germans themselves by their paren
ts when they were children at the turn of the century. Long before the Holocaust
of Jews began, medical officers sent questionnaires to parents and guardians of
children in mental hospitals and homes for delinquent children, asking them if
they would give their consent to killing them. So powerful was the unconscious g
roup-fantasy at that time that "bad" children were polluting the German nation t
hat most parents and guardians agreed to the killing of their "useless children.
"432 The doctors, including pediatricians, spontaneously set up a Reich Committe
e "to exterminate undesirable' children, which drew up standards that read exactly
like the child care manuals at the end of the nineteenth century, asking whether
the child had been "late in being toilet trained" or had used "dirty words" or
were "slow learners;" if they were, they were exterminated in gas chambers and c
rematorium ovens.433 Over 70,000 of these "useless eaters" were murdered by doct
ors to "cleanse the German national body"434 before the war began.435 So proud w
ere these doctors of their murder of "bad children" that they actually made a po
pular film of the killings, which was shown in theaters.436 At the same time, th
roughout Germany, "midwives and nurses were instructed to report births of defec
tive infants...including racially undesirable' ones...Thousands were killed by inje
ction or deliberate starvation."437 The wiping out of Bad Boy alters "out there"
in the real world to remove them from "inside here," in the traumatized hemisph
ere of the brain, had begun. Killing millions more "Bad Boys" in the Holocaust a
nd World War II soon followed. THE WAR PHASE: RAPING MOMMIES AND KILLING BAD BOY
ALTERS Killing mommies and children was the two tasks of Germans in starting WW
II. Hitler made this clear in the speech he gave before his generals ordering th
e invasion of Poland. Note the exact words he used:
229
Genghis Khan has sent millions of women and children into death knowingly and wi
th a light heart...I have put my death's head formations in place with the comma
nd relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and childre
n of Polish origin...438
After quoting these sentences, Fischer says "Hitler had exclaimed that he would
kill without pity all men, women and children."439 But men were not in fact ment
ioned in his quote. Hitler said women and children must die--women as symbolic T
errifying Mothers, and children as symbolic Bad Boys. Even all the soldiers who
must die--including the German soldiers who must die--were "youth," symbolic Bad
Boy alters, vital, growing inner selves sacrificed to Moloch. The path to war,
however, did not begin with the killing of Bad Boy "useless eaters" to the East.
Indeed, Hitler temporarily made a Nonaggression Pact with Russia and attempted
to extend it to Poland. Germany's first task was righteous rape, the knocking of
Mother England off her pedestal and, while still wooing her, teaching her a les
son of how she must stop humiliating Germans by rejecting their courtship. Nazi
diplomatic language dripped of maternal imagery for the two Western nations, as
when Goering asked, "Why should France continue to tie herself to a decayed old
nation like England--a rouged old maid trying to pretend that she is still young
and vigorous."440 Hitler believed that war would teach England a lesson and mak
e her respect Germany, predicting that "the end of the war will mark the beginni
ng of a durable friendship with England. But first we must give her the K.O.-for
only so can we live at peace with her, and the Englishman can only respect some
one who has first knocked him out."441 Mother England, after all, was a "purely
Germanic nation" who, like a good German mother, ruled over her children (coloni
es) with an iron fist.442 Germany had to rape her to dominate and really have he
r, but, Hitler said, "This doesn't prevent me from admiring [the English]. They
have a lot to teach us."443 Historians agree that during the 1936-38 period "Hit
ler assumed that Britain could be wooed or forced into an alliance."444 When Eng
land finally said they would defend Poland, Hitler responded by "abandoning his
courtship of England, which had rejected him"445 and proceeded with what was cal
led "the rape of Austria," what Hitler called "the return of German-Austria to t
he great German motherland."446 All Germans had long blamed England and France f
or the ineffective "Treaty of Shame" (Versailles)--a flashback to all their chil
dhood memories of shame and humiliation by their caretakers--and promised to fig
ht the West to "restore to each individual German his self-respect ...We are not
inferior; on the contrary, we are the complete equals of every other nation."44
7 Even those Germans who were turned over to nurses
230
by their mothers knew what Hitler meant when he declared that "Germany would not
suffer under the tutelage of governesses,"448 i.e., England. Nazi Blitzkreig an
d dive-bomber tactics were particularly loaded with righteous rape fantasies fea
turing powerful thrusts and penetration of enemy bodies, wreaking vengeance for
earlier wrongs. The war began in the East, restaging German childhood traumas ag
ainst Bad Boys in Poland, and it involved from the start suicidal intent and the
killing off of sinful Germans. Historians admit that fighting "an unlimited war
of conquest [against] a worldwide coalition of states...was in itself an insane
undertaking"449 that was suicidal and sacrificial from the beginning. As Hitler
promised nothing but death to what he called the "thousands and thousands of yo
ung Germans who have come forward with the self-sacrificial resolve freely and j
oyfully to make a sacrifice of their young lives,"450 German mothers marched thr
ough the streets chanting "We have donated a child to the Fhrer," Nazi soldiers fe
lt "politically reborn [when] filled with a pure joy I realized that what my mot
her had once said was true after all--that it was a hallowed act to give up one'
s life for Germany," and Hitler Youth sang, "We are born to die for Germany." 45
1 At no point was mere conquest of land the goal of Germany's invasions. Hitler
hated Chamberlain for making concessions and avoiding war at Munich, telling his
soldiers later, "We want war," and saying "I am only afraid that some Schweineh
und will make a proposal for mediation" like at Munich.452 "I did not organize t
he armed forces in order not to strike...The idea of getting out cheaply is dang
erous...We must burn our boats."453 He instructed his diplomats always to demand
"so much that we can never be satisfied."454 When asked about Poland, "What is
it that you want? Danzig? The Corridor?" the answer was, "We want war."455 The g
oal was to "Act Brutally! Be harsh and remorseless!"456 While Germans marched We
st with visions of raping French women and climbing the Eiffel Tower, they march
ed East with visions of smashing Jewish babies heads against walls457 and turnin
g Moscow into "an artificial lake."458 All Bad Boy alters to the East must be el
iminated. The orders were: "Complete destruction of Poland is the military aim.
Pursue until complete annihilation"459 and "Moscow must be destroyed and complet
ely wiped from the earth."460 Jewish annihilation plans only came later, actuall
y during the summer months of 1941 when, "convinced that the military campaign w
as nearly over and victory was at hand, an elated Hitler gave the signal to carr
y out [the] racial cleansing' [of the Jews.]"461 Initially, for many years, Jews we
re to be resettled, part of Hitler's "grandiose program of population transfers"
462 --90 percent of which were ethnic Germans and others and only 10 percent wer
e Jews--a "massive upheaval of
231
humanity"463 that restaged upon five million people464 the experiences of having
to leave home endured during childhood by most Germans as their parents endless
ly moved them around to wetnurses, relatives, schools and work sites. In 1940 Hi
tler and Himmler had rejected the "physical extermination of a people out of inn
er conviction as un-German and impossible."465 It was only by the summer of 1941
, in victory and afraid of running out of Bad Boys to kill in the East, that Hit
ler would approve of "the mass murder of all European Jews...in the form of depo
rtation to death camps equipped with poison gas facilities"466 like those used f
or murdering the 70,000 German children killed earlier. Christopher Browning cor
rectly points to mania and success as the source of the Holocaust when he conclu
des, "Hitler [only] opted for the Final Solution in the euphoria of victory' of mid
summer 1941." 467 Jews were the ultimate Bad Boys, symbols of liberalism, freedo
m and prosperity in the stock market, and so finally must be totally eliminated
for Germans to return to the "pure" authoritarian family atmosphere of 1900 wher
e only Good Boys survived. Even the notion that Germany had to kill Poles and Je
ws for the acquisition of Lebensraum, or living space, completely misses the mot
ive for the Holocaust. Lebensraum was a completely phony concept. It was actuall
y a code word for the desire to break free, to have room to live and grow, to th
row off swaddling bands and corsets, to get up from crouching against the wall a
s children and to have some space to live. Conquering foreign lands or annihilat
ing Jews and others to expand the actual amount of soil Germany could farm made
no sense at all, because Germany already had so much unused land that they had t
o import a steady stream of foreign workers to farm it.468 Germans ate well unde
r Hitler. The only reality behind the popular Lebensraum notion that the "German
ic mother could not feed her children adequately"469 was the inability of German
mothers and wetnurses four decades earlier to empathize with and adequately fee
d their infants and children. Jews, then, were the main poison containers for th
e restaging of traumatic German childrearing practices four decades earlier. Eve
ry one of the things done to Jews in the Holocaust can be found to have been per
petrated by parents and others to German children at the turn of the century. Th
e precise details of earlier events that were reinflicted upon Jews later are as
tonishingly minute and literal. Jews were, of course, murdered by the millions,
just as German children had watched their siblings murdered in infanticidal acts
earlier, using the exact same phrase for the genocide of Jews--"elimination of
useless eaters"--as parents had used earlier for their infants and children as t
hey murdered them at birth.470 Because infanticide rates were so high, the major
ity of German children would have witnessed the murder of newborn siblings by th
eir mothers, would have heard the murdered baby being
232
called a "useless eater," and would themselves have been called a "useless eater
" as children and so could have wondered if they might also be murdered. One can
hardly read a single Holocaust book without having to wade through endless acco
unts of children buried alive by Nazis, "children having their heads beaten in l
ike poultry and thrown into a smoking pit," "babies thrown from the fourth floor
and crushed on the pavements," "children's bodies lay around, torn in half with
the heads smashed in," "'little Jews' caught on bayonets after being thrown fro
m upper story windows," etc.471 Even the specific methods German mothers had use
d for killing their newborn--especially smashing the baby against a wall or thro
wing it into a latrine--were "a regular occurrence"472 against Jews in concentra
tion camps: When mothers succeeded in keeping their babies with them...a German
guard took the baby by its legs and smashed it against the wall of the barracks
until only a bloody mass remained in his hands. The unfortunate mother had to ta
ke this mass with her to the bath.' Only those who saw these things with their own
eyes will believe with what delight the Germans performed these operations. [Als
o] SS men used to amuse themselves by swinging Jewish children by their legs and
then flinging them to their deaths. He who threw a Jewish child farthest won.47
3 Jews were also regularly tied up and made to live in their own filth exactly a
s swaddled German infants were earlier. Rarely washed, Germans had spent their e
arly lives covered with their own excreta, addressed by their parents simply as
"little shitter."474 In the concentration camps, Jews were subject to what Des P
res calls a constant "excremental assault," in which they were forced to defecat
e and urinate upon each other, were often thrown into the cesspool if they were
too slow, lived in barracks "awash with urine and feces," walked about "knee-dee
p in excrement," were forced to eat their own feces, and finally died in gas cha
mbers "covered all over with excrement."475 In one camp, 30,000 women not only h
ad to use a single latrine, but in addition, "we were permitted to use it only a
t certain hours of the day. We stood in line to get into this tiny building, kne
e-deep in human excrement."476 Holocaust scholars, missing the childhood origins
of all these gratuitous excremental cruelties, have been puzzled by how much of
the concentration camp routine was devoted to the endless humiliations: "Why, i
f they were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation
, why the cruelty?" Gitta Sereny asked of Franz Stangl.477 But of course the hum
iliation was the point, restaging early German childhood exactly. Hitler--himsel
f swaddled and left alone in his feces by his mother-had told Germans in Mein Ka
mpf , "If the Jews were alone in this world, they would suffocate in dirt and fi
lth."478 In the Holocaust the Jews--"so much like us" (Hitler)-would suffocate i
n dirt and filth, as all little, helpless German babies did all day long
233
at the hands of their mothers. And since the "little shitter" German babies were
also covered with lice, vermin and rodents as they lay swaddled in their cradle
s, unable to move, Jews too were called "lice, vermin and rats" as they were loc
ked into the concentration camps, told "This is a death camp...You'll be eaten b
y lice; you'll rot in your own shit, you filthy shitface..."479 Some guards even
restaged the rodent attacks "by inserting a tube into the victim's anus, or int
o a woman's vagina, then letting a rat into the tube. The rodent would try to ge
t out by gnawing at the victim's internal organs."480 Later toilet training of G
erman children was also restaged, often in precise detail, as by having the ghet
to-latrine supervised by a "guard with a big clock, whom the Germans dressed com
ically as a rabbi and called the shit-master.'"481 Every extermination camp reprodu
ced elements of a typical German home. Jews were not said to be there to be murd
ered, they were there to be "housecleaned."482 Mommy hated her children's "dirti
ness," wanted them "clean," so "dirty Jews" were killed so only "clean Germans"
would be left. Jews were Untermenschen (with overtones of "little people") who w
ere forced to crawl on the floor naked like babies,483 and who were tied up, sta
rved, made to kneel for hours, doused with ice water, terrorized and beaten just
like most German children. 484 The battering of Jews in camps followed the hall
owed German child-beating pattern of "being strong" (not making the perpetrator
feel guilty by crying out):
I dropped to my knees without uttering a sound. I knew what was expected of me.
I looked at the commandant from my knees as he smiled back at me with approval.
He swung the chair at me again, striking me on the shoulder. I sprawled on the g
round, bruised and dizzy, but I still made no sound. He raised the chair and bro
ught it down on my head, shattering it...I bit my tongue to stop myself making a
sound...I knew that if I made another sound, nothing could save me. Very good, for
being strong. You shall be rewarded. Get some food. Tell them I sent you...'485
The beatings and tortures were, as is so often the case with sadism, often sexu
alized: The SS camp commander stood close to the whipping post throughout the fl
ogging...his whole face was already red with lascivious excitement. His hands we
re plunged deep in his trouser pockets, and it was quite clear that he was mastu
rbating throughout...On more than thirty occasions, I myself have witnessed SS c
amp commanders masturbating during floggings...486
234
Sexual tortures of prisoners were legion, including pushing sticks up into boys'
penises and breaking them off, brutally massaging prostates with pieces of wood
inserted into the rectum, castrating men and removing the ovaries of women, tra
ining dogs to attack their genitals, etc.487 Victims were all Bad Boys and Bad G
irls, needing to be punished for their sexuality, as the German guards' parents
had punished them. The Holocaust was one gigantic, bizarre "cautionary tale," te
aching everyone the same lessons taught to German children as they were assaulte
d, so when local civilians during the Holocaust saw Jews being clubbed to death
in the street, they cheered, "with mothers holding up their children to enjoy th
e spectacle and soldiers milling around to watch the fun like a football match."
488 THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF CHILDREARING AND THE DECREASE IN HUMAN VIOLENCE
As the next three chapters will document, childrearing has steadily improved his
torically, even if very unevenly, so if the psychogenic theory is correct then h
uman violence should have decreased steadily over the past millennia. Yet the tw
entieth century has been widely touted as the most violent in history and has of
ten been compared by anthropologists to some so-called peaceful tribes they have
claimed represent our oldest ancestors. How can childhood be the source of huma
n violence if violence has vastly increased while childrearing has improved? Tha
t twentieth century wars have been more violent seems to be an obvious fact. Tec
hnology alone allows us to be far more lethal than in earlier centuries, when wa
rs causing 250,000 or more deaths were rare,489 while World War II alone killed
15 million people in battle, and total battlefield deaths for the twentieth cent
ury have exceeded 100 million.490 What's more, if one expands the definition of
war deaths to what Rummel terms "democide"--so that the 40 million Russian death
s ordered by Stalin, for instance, are included--the number of "deaths by govern
ment" in the twentieth century jumps past 170 million.491 Surely Nordstrom is ri
ght in saying, "This past century was the bloodiest century in human existence,"
492 thus disproving the psychogenic theory of decreasing violence resulting chi
ldrearing. Yet Nordstrom's pessimistic conclusion is reversed if one measures th
e rate of violence by the likelihood of one's dying by war and democide. With se
veral billion people on earth during the twentieth century, the rate of death by
wars is in fact less than two percent of the population.493 Although individual
wars in the past have killed less in numbers, they could easily wipe out many t
imes this percentage of the population, particularly if--as is rarely done--the
battlefield deaths are increased to
235
from improving
include the democides of the past, when massacring civilians in entire cities wa
s a common practice.494 Further, what is more relevant to the childrearing compa
rison is that lumping all nations in the twentieth century together regardless o
f their childhood evolution masks the fact that advanced democratic nations like
the United States, England and France have lost only a fraction of a percentage
of their populations in wars during the century. The United States, for instanc
e, lost 120,000 soldiers in WWI, only .12 percent of the population, and 400,000
soldiers in WWII, only .34 percent of the population.495 The Korean War only lo
st .04 percent, the Vietnam War only .03 percent, and the Gulf War .0003 percent
of Americans. The facts are that the more advanced the childrearing, the more d
emocratic the society and the less percentage lost in wars. This is why no democ
ratic nation has ever gone to war with another democratic nation in history.496
Anthropologists have promulgated what Keeley calls "the myth of the peaceful sav
age" so effectively that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for prestate si
mple societies one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to be taught
to students.497 Keeley documents 22 prestate tribes with war deaths five to ten
times that of contemporary democratic nations, concluding that "what transpired
before the evolution of civilized states was often unpleasantly bellicose." 498
Death rates in areas like New Guinea and South America, where there has been les
s Western policing of war than in Africa and Asia, range from an astonishing 25
to 35 percent of all adult deaths.499 The most warlike society ever described is
the Waorani of the Amazon, which produced 60 percent of all adult deaths from w
ar raids. 500 It is likely that prestate societies 10,000 years ago had similar
astronomical death rates from wars, if the number of human bones with stone axes
and arrowheads embedded in them are counted.501 The 30 percent average of adult
deaths in prestate societies is even higher than the figures of below 10 percen
t that early modern wars tended to average out,502 although admittedly little ha
s been done to date to measure non-battlefield deaths in state wars prior to the
twentieth century. The overall historical decline from 30 percent of adult popu
lation to under one percent for war/democide adult deaths for democratic nations
has therefore been plotted in the graph below as a clear downward trend through
history, as childrearing improves through the ages and gradually reduces the in
ner need to kill others.
236
Rysunek 34 6:7 The Decline of Human Violence
Besides war and democide, the graph also shows the decline of the two other outl
ets for human violence: infanticide and homicide/suicide. Infanticide is usually
not counted as murder by demographers, since they do not consider newborn as hu
man. But most human murders in history were in fact committed by mothers killing
their newborn. The rates of infanticide in contemporary pre-state tribes are en
ormous: Australian Aborigine mothers, for instance, killed about 50 percent of a
ll newborn, and the first missionaries in Polynesia estimated the two-thirds of
the children were murdered by their parents.503 Birdsell hypothesized infanticid
e rates as high as 50 percent for prehistoric tribal societies, based on high fe
rtility rates and slow growth of populations.504 My own cross-historical study,
On the Demography of Filicide,505 is based on a large number of boy-girl ratios
that ran as high as 135 to 100, which showed that girls until modern times were
killed in sufficiently higher numbers than boys to have affected census figures
for children. Tribal societies also often infanticide enough of their newborn gi
rls at a higher rate than boys to produce childhood sex ratios of from 140 to 10
0 (Yanomam) to 159 to 100 (Polynesian),506 meaning that virtually all families kil
led at least one child and most killed several, averaging perhaps half of all ch
ildren born, especially if "late infanticide" (such as letting an infant starve
to death) are counted. Since 50 percent infanticide rates seems to be the norm a
round which all these studies of simple tribes center, it is what is shown at th
e left of the chart. The third outlet for human violence is homicide/suicide--lu
mped together because when homicide rates initially go down in modern times suic
ide rates tend for a while to climb, suicide being somewhat more "advanced" (les
s impulsive) method of personal violence than homicide. Many simple tribes had h
omicide rates of up to 50 or 60 percent, causing one anthropologist to conclude
about one group, "There was not a single grown man who had not been involved in
a killing in some way or another."507 Even so-called "peaceful" tribes like the
famous !Kung of Africa
237
actually have "twenty to fifty times" current modern homicide rates.508 Knauft's
careful study found the Gebusi homicide rate to be sixty times the current U.S.
rate, 509 with 60 percent of all males admitting to having committed one or mor
e homicides, 510 while Steadman found the Hewa--who specialize in killing witche
s--had a homicide rate of one percent of the population per year, a thousand tim
es the current U.S. rate.511 Most tribal homicide rates run around ten percent o
f the adult population over a lifetime. Suicide in small societies is usually hi
gher among the women, since they live lives of despair, often reaching 10 to 25
percent of adult women's deaths, staying high in antiquity but declining under C
hristianity, when suicide was declared to be self-murder.512 Homicide rates in m
edieval and early modern history, when almost everyone carried a knife or sword
and often used them, ran about ten times higher than today's rates of about a qu
arter of one percent--although they should be adjusted upward for the number of
unrecorded homicides in the past-while suicide rates today run about a half of o
ne percent of adult population over a lifetime.513 Thus homicide/suicide rates,
like those of war and infanticide, have decreased steadily, to less than one per
cent for most democratic nations today. Added together, then, the rate of human
violence has dropped from around a 75 percent chance of being murdered by your f
ellow human beings to around 2 percent for advanced democratic nations today, as
a result of the slow and steady improvement in childrearing over the centuries,
with the reduction of early trauma, the growth of the hippocampal-orbitofrontal
cortex network and more balanced neurotransmitters in the human population. WHA
T WILL WARS BE LIKE DURING THE NEXT CENTURY? Even just two percent of six billio
n people is a hundred twenty million people. Should we still expect violence to
kill this many people each generation during the next century? What's more, only
a part of the world today is democratic. Most of the world is still "leaping in
to modernity," just becoming more free, democratic and prosperous, but with thei
r childrearing not yet modern, thus going through the same growth panic process
that Germany went through in the middle of the twentieth century. We can therefo
re expect higher rates of democide in the coming decades in the developing count
ries. Yugoslavia, as an example, became democratic only recently, and only then
began expressing their growth panic through mass murdering and raping their neig
hbors--much like the Nazis did--since their childrearing was still thoroughly me
dieval.514 Especially with nuclear and biological weapons proliferating, might w
e expect major wars in the next century to again kill hundreds of millions of pe
ople, despite slowly improving childrearing?
238
Advanced democracies today have sufficient proportions of good parents now to be
satisfied with working off their growth panics by small wars and recessions rat
her than world wars and depressions.515 Since the end of WWII, wars have been fa
r smaller in fatalities--at least for the democracies, if not for their opponent
s--so that the sacrificial needs of nations seem to be satisfied with only thous
ands or even hundreds of deaths rather than millions, what has been termed "low-
intensity wars."516 Military spending in democratic nations has dropped from aro
und 75 percent of government spending in the late eighteenth century to somewher
e between 10 and 20 percent today.517 These smaller wars have been more frequent
and have alternated more frequently with small recessions, so the classic 50-ye
ar manic/depressive cycle of the previous centuries that we graphed above has be
en drastically shortened, and recessions and small wars seem to substitute for e
ach other as sacrificial rituals rather than alternating as in past centuries. B
ut all this has happened mainly in developed, democratic nations with better chi
ldrearing, so the answer to the question about war in the next century has to be
ambivalent. I am confident that I can trust my children and their friends on th
e West Side of Manhattan--who have loving, helping mode parents who come from ev
ery ethnic and economic strata--to make a non-violent world in the next century.
But the average Chinese or African or Russian child has still so often been bro
ught up in an atmosphere of infanticide, battering, sexual molestation and sever
e domination that they can be forecast to need to repeat their parental holocaus
t on the historical stage in the future as they experience their new freedoms, r
epeating the democides of the twentieth century but with even greater destructiv
e weapons. Just allowing the usual slow historical evolution of childrearing may
not be enough to outweigh the escalating destructiveness of our weapons. Theref
ore, the more advanced psychoclasses will have to actually intervene in the worl
d's families to help change parenting and thus childhood for everyone on earth.
Unless this can be done during the twenty-first century, it seems likely that th
e proliferating power of our weaponry could outrun the evolution of our childrea
ring and make the coming decades even more violent than the twentieth century ha
s been. A new way to change parenting, community parenting centers, has in fact
begun to be developed in a few American communities, and their surprising succes
s provides hope that they can decrease human violence around the world at afford
able costs. Parenting centers not only have free classes in parenting; they also
have a staff that visits the homes of every child born in the community weekly
during their first two years of life and helps the parents parent, teaching them
what no school has ever thought it worthwhile to teach--that you need not be af
raid of your child, that you
239
need not hit them or use them for your needs, that you can love and trust them t
o grow up and turn out better than you did by not repeating on them the abusive
parenting you once endured. Exactly how these parenting centers work will be des
cribed in detail in the final chapter of this book. They promise to be able to e
liminate child abuse and drastically reduce human violence around the globe, wit
h costs only a fraction of the $8 trillion the world has spent on warfare since
WWII.518 As an example of how global parenting centers could work to reduce worl
dwide violence, consider NATO, which was built up to "counter the Communist thre
at" at the cost of over a half trillion dollars. NATO has been actually so far u
sed only to kill a few thousand Yugoslavs. Suppose around fifty million dollars
of the half trillion had been spent on helping Eastern European nations have bet
ter families--sort of an Eastern European Marshall Plan, only including helping
parents directly with parenting centers that reached into every home, showing pa
rents that they need not swaddle, beat and torture their children as has been co
mmon in the Yugoslav zadruga.519 Yugoslav children would then not have grown up
to be violent youth raping and killing others as they are doing today, but would
instead be "new Yugoslavia youth" building their nation. This new principle of
actively changing childhood can in fact be repeated around the worldagain, at a fra
ction of the cost of the destructive arsenal the world today maintains. Removing
the causes of violence only takes empathy, foresight and will, not huge resourc
es. We are today like a group of people standing on the banks of a river trying
desperately to save people we see drowning, but refusing to go upstream and stop
them from being thrown in. The reduction of human violence involves prevention
first of allthe removal of the source of the illnessjust like the prevention of any ot
her human clinical disorder. That enough of us can summon the empathy and unders
tanding needed to change what has long been called "our violent human nature" is
our only hope for the future of our precious world.
FOOTNOTES
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240
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243
52. Adrian Raine, The Psychopathology of Crime, pp. 85, 263; Brett Kahr, "Ancien
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85. Ibid., p. 145. 86. Ibid., p. 255. 87. Stern also turns off the sound when wa
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129. Candace B. Pert, Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicin
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exual Liberation. Oxford: Berg, 1989, p. 111. 388. Aurel Ende, "Battering and Ne
glect," p. 262. 389. Sarah Moskovitz, Love Despite Hate: Child Survivors of the
Holocaust and Their Adult Lives. New York: Shocken, 1983, p. 23; Martin Gilbert,
The Boys: The Untold Story of 732 Young Concentration Camp Survivors. New York:
Henry Holt & Co., 1997. 390. Jeanne Hill, "Believing Rachel." The Journal of Ps
ychohistory 24(1996): 132-146. 391. Henry V. Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder: A Soci
opsychological Study of Some SS Killers. New York: Basic Books, 1972, p. 205. 39
2. Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of
Jews in Nazi Europe. aNew York: The Free Press, 1988. 393. Ibid., p. 181. 394.
Klaus P. Fischer, The HIstory of an Obsession: German Judeophobia and the HOloca
ust. New York: Continuum, 1998, p. 158. 395. Ute Frevert, Women in German Histor
y: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation. New York: Berg, 1989, p. 18
8. 396. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Vol. 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing th
e White Terror. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 45. 397. Cl
audia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, The Family, and Nazi Politics. Ne
w York: St. Martins Press, 1981, pp. 12-13. 398. E. J. Feuchtwanger, From Weimar to
Hitler: Germany, 1918-33. New York: St. Martins Press, 1995, p. 182. 399. Ibid., p
p. 32, 98. 400. Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Ri
se of the Germanic Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961, pp.
xi-xix.
265
401. Anton Kaes et al., Eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Berkeley: Universit
y of California Press, 1994, p. 17. 402. Peter S. Fisher, Fantasy and Politics:
Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic. Madison: The University of Wiscons
in Press, 1991, p. 95. 403. Eric A. Johnson, The Crime Rate: Longitudinal and Pe
riodic Trends in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century German Criminality, from Vormrz
to Late Weimar." In Richard J. Evans, Ed., The German Underworld: Deviants and
Outcasts in German History. London: Routledge, 1988, p. 172. 404. Claudia Koonz,
Mothers in the Fatherland, p. 41. 405. E. J. Feuchtwanger, From Weimar to Hitle
r, p. 200; Ian Kershaw, Weimar: Why Did German Democracy Fail? New York: St. Mar
tins Press, 1990, p. 22. 406. P. M. H. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War in
Europe. Second Ed. London: Longman, 1997, p. 41. 407. Klaus P. Fischer, The His
tory of an Obsession, p. 4. 408. Hans Mommsen, "The Thin Patina of Civilization:
Anti-Semitism was a necessary, But By No Means a Sufficient, Condition for the
Holocaust." InRobert R. Shandley, Ed., Unwilling Germans: The Goldhagen Debate.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, p. 191. 409. Ian Kershaw, Popu
lar Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich. Bavaria 19331945. oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1983, p. 231. 410. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reser
ve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Colli
ns, 1998, p. 200. 411. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychologi
cal History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947, p.
55. 412. Peter Fritzsche, Germans Into Nazis. Cambridge: Harvard University Pres
s, 1998, p. 159. 413. Ibid., p. 206 414. Renate Bridenthal et al., Eds., When Bi
ology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany. New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1984, p.34. 415. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock,
1940, p. 346, 160. 416. Willy Schumann, Being Present: Growing Up in Hitlers Germa
ny. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1991, p. 145.
266
417. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998,
p. 46. 418. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, p. 62. 419. Robert G. L.
Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. New York: Da Capo Press, 1977, pp. 6-
7, 157; Waite reproduces the Medusa picture next to a photo of Hitlers mother, show
ing their similarity. 420. Detlev J. K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity
, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 198
2, pp. 69, 200. 421. Detlev J. K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, p. 167. 422. Geo
rge L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism. New Yo
rk: Howard Fertig, 1999, p. 34. 423. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews
. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 424. Klaus P. Fischer, The History of an Obses
sion, p. 277. 425. Ibid., p. 288. 426. "The American Experience," WNYC-TV, April
7, 1994. 427. Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, p. 70. 428. George
M. Kren and Leon Rappoport, The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior. Rev
. Ed., New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980, p. 104. 429. Anthony P. Adamthwaite, The
Making of the Second World War. New York: Routledge, 1977, p. 43. 430. Richard L
amb, The Drift to War: 1922-1939. New York: St. Martins Press, 1989, p. 85. 431. Da
vid Beisel, The Suicidal Embrace: Hitler, the Allies and the Origins of World Wa
r II, forthcoming. 432. Gtz Aly et al., Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine an
d Racial Hygiene. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, pp. 29-55
. 433. Ibid., pp. 55, 188-189; Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide:
From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: The University of North Caro
lina Press, 1995, pp. 39-61. 434. Gtz Aly, Final Solution: Nazi Population Policy and
e Murder of the European Jews. Dondon: Arnold, 1999, p. 30.
267
435. Gtz Aly et al.., Cleansing the Fatherland, p. 46. 436. Ibid., p. 27. 437. Geo
rge Victor, Hitler: The Pathology of Evil. Washington: Brasseys, 1998, p. 171. 438.
Klaus P. Fischer, Nazi Germany: A New History. New York: Continuum, 1998, p. 43
9. 439. Ibid. 440. Orville H. Bullitt, Ed., For the President: Personal and Secr
et: Correspondence Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt. London:
Andre Deutsch, 1973, p. 308. 441. H. R. Trevor-Roper, Hitlers Secret Conversations
1941-1944. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953, p. 11. 442. Ibid., p. xvii
i. 443. Ibid., p. 22. 444. Anthony P. Adamthwaite, The Making of the Second Worl
d War. New York: Routledge, 1977, p. 72. 445. Joachim C. Fest, Hitler. San Diego
: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1973, p. 578. 446. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. New York: R
eynal & Hitchcock, 1939, p. 3. 447. Thomas J. Scheff, Bloody Revenge: Emotions,
Ntionalism, and War. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994, p. 116. 448. Andrew J. Crozi
er, The Causes of the Second World War. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997, p. 1
47. 449. Jost Dlffer, Nazi Germany 1933-1945: Faith and Annihilation. London: Arno
ld, 1996, p. 61. 450. Peter Fritzsche, Germans Into Nazis. Cambridge: Harvard Un
iversity Press, 1998, p. 7. 451. Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich: A Social
History of Nazi Germany 1933-1945. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995, p. 236Theodor
e Abel, Why Hitler Came Into Power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938, p
p. 212, 236. ] 452. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p.
708. 453. Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945. New York: Oxford University Press,
1978, p. 713.
268
454. Anthony P. Adamthwaite, The Making of the Second World War, p. 77. 455. Kla
us P. Fischer, Nazi Germany, p. 439. 456. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall o
f the Third Reich, p. 709. 457. Heinz Hhne, The Order of the Deaths Head: The Story o
f Hitlers SS. New York: Ballantine, 1971, p. 409. 458. John Toland, Adolf Hitler, p
. 680. 459. John G. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War. Seventh Edition. New Yor
k: St. Martins Press, 1998, p. 29. 460. John Toland, Adolf Hitler, p. 685. 461. Chr
istopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Soluti
on. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 111. 462. Ibid., p. 9. 463. I
bid., p. 20. 464. Gtz Aly, Final Solution: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of th
European Jews. London: Arnold, 1999, p. 7. 465. Christopher R. Browning, The Pat
h to Genocide, p. 25. 466. Ibid. 467. Eberhard Jckel, "The Holocaust: Where We Are
, Where We Need to Go." In Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, Eds., The Holo
caust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined. Blo
omington: Indiana University Press, 1998, p. 25. 468. Ian Kershaw, Popular Opini
on and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, p. 58. 469. Rudolph Binion, Hitler
Among the Germans. New York: Elsevier, 1976, p. 58. 470. Gtz Aly, Final Solution, p. 2
. 471. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, pp. 155, 320, 330, 442, 687. 472. Richard
C. Lukas, Did the Children Cry? Hitlers War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 193
9-1945. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1994, p. 75.
269
473. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the S
econd World War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985, pp.457, 546. 474. S
tanley Rosenman, "The Fundament of German Character." The Journal of Psychohisto
ry 14(1986, p. 67. 475. Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in t
he Death Camps. New York: Pocket Books, 1977, p. 58; Klaus P. Fischer, Nazi Germ
any, pp. 53, 55, 338. 476. Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor, p. 58. 477. Gitta Se
reny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. New York: Random House,
1974, p. 101. 478. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 416. 479. David R. Beisel, "Euro
pes Killing Frenzy." The Journal of Psychohistory 25(1997): 207. 480. Ervin Staub,
The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 223. 481. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness,
p. 166. 482. R. J. Rummel, Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder. New brunswi
ck: Transaction Publishers, 1992, p. 70. 483. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary
Men, p. 83. 484. Henryk Grynberg, Children of Zion. Evanston, IL: Northwestern U
niversity Press, 1997, pp. 21, 23; Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor, p. 53; Nili
Keren, "The Family Camp," In Israel Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Eds., Anatomy
of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 432
. 485. Martin Gilbert, The Boys: The Untold Story of 732 Young Concentration Cam
p Survivors. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996, p. 206 486. Klaus Theweleit, Ma
le Fantasies, p. 301. 487. Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartim
e Childhood. New York: Schocken Books, 1995, p. 60; Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi
Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books,
1986, p. 282; Israel Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Eds., Anatomy of the Auschwit
z Death Camp, p. 308, Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness, p. 202.
270
488. Klaus P. Fischer, The History of an Obsession: German Judeophobia and the H
olocaust. New York: Continuum, 1998, p. 346. 489. Evan Luard, War in Internation
al Society: A Study in International Sociology. London: I. B. Tauris, & Co., 198
6, p. 394. 490. R. J. Rummel, Death By Government. New brtunswick: Transaction P
ublishers, 1997, p. 25. 491. Ibid., p. 9. 492. Kim A. McDonald, "Anthropologists
Debate Whether, and How, War Can be Wiped Out." The Chronicle of Higher Educati
on, December 3, 1999, p. A21. 493. L. F. Richardson, Statistics of Deadly Quarre
ls. Pittsburgh: Boxwood, 1960. 494. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History
and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1990, p. 33; William J. Brandt, The Shape of Medieval History: Studies i
n Modes of Perception. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, p. 133; Kalevi J.
Holsti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order 16481989. New Yo
rk: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 28; R. J. Rummel, Death By Government,
p. 69. 495. Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: T
otem Rituals and the American Flag. New York: Cambridge University Press, 199, p
. 88. 496. J. L. Ray, "Wars Between Democracies: Rare, or Nonexistent?" Internat
ional Interactions 18(1993): 251-76; R. J. Rummer, Death By Government, p. 2. 49
7. Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 498. Ibid., pp. 89, 183. 499. M. J. Me
ggitt, Blood is Their Argument: Warfare Among the Mae Enga Tribesmen of the New
Guinea Highlands. Palo Alto: Mayfield, 1977, p.110; Bruce M. Knauft, "Melanesian
Warfare: A Theoretical History." Oceania 60(1990): 286, 274; Bruce M. Knauft, "
Reconsidering Violence in Simple Human Societies." Current Anthropology 28(1987)
: 457499; F. Barth, "Tribes and Intertribal Relations in the Fly Headwaters." Oc
eania 41(1970-71): 175; D. K. Feil, The Evolution of Highland Papua New Guinea S
ocieties. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 71; N. A. Chagnon, Yano
mamo: the Fierce People. 3rd Ed. New York: Holt, Rinehard and Winston, p. 171; R
ichard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human
Violence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1996, p. 77.
271
500. J. A. Yost and P. M. Kelley, "Shotguns, Blowguns, and Spears: the Analysis
of Technological Efficiency." In R. B. Hames and W. Vickers, Eds., Adaptive Resp
onses of Native Amazonia. New York: Academic Press, 1983. 501. Lawrence H. Keele
y, War Before Civilization, p. 38; Marilyn Keys Roper, "A Survey of trhe Evidenc
e for Intrahuman Killing in the Pleistocene." Current Anthropology 10(1969): 427
-59; Irenus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, The Biology of Peace and War: Men, Animals and Aggres
sion. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979, p. 127; Harvey Hornstein, Cruelty and Kin
dness: A New Look at Aggression and Altruism. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1
976, p. 64. 502. George Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics. Seattle: Univer
sity of Washington Press, 1987, pp. 47-50. 503. Joseph B. Birdsell, An Introduct
ion to the New Physical Anthropology. New York: Rand Mcally, 1965, p. 97; W. Ell
is, Polynesian Researches, Vol. 1. Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1969, p. 251.
504. Joseph B. Birdsell, "Some Predictions for the Pleistocene Based on Equilib
rium Systems Among Recent Hunter-Gatherers." In Richard B. Lee and Irv DeVore, E
ds., Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine, 1968, pp. 229-49. 505. Lloyd deMause, Foun
dations of Psychohistory, pp. 117-123. 506. Napoleon A. Chagnon and William Iron
s, Evolutionary Biology and Human Social Behaviro: An Anthropological Perspectiv
e. North Scituate, Mass.: Dixbury Press, 1979, p. 140; Wulf Schiefenhvel, "Melanes
ian Ritualized Male Adult/Adolescent Sexual Behavior." In Jay R. Feierman, Ed.,
Pedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990, p. 417; Willi
am Tulio Divale and Marvin Harris, "Population, Warfare, and the Male Supremacis
t Complex." American Anthropologist 78(1976): 521-538; Laila Williamson, "Infant
icide: An Anthropological Analysis," in Marvin Kohl, Ed., Infanticide and the Va
lue of Life. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1978. 507. Brude M. Knauft, Good Company
and Violence: Sorcery and Social Action in a Lowland New Guinea Society. Berkel
ey: University of Californiat Press, 1985, p. 379; Bruce M. Knauft, "Reconsideri
ng Violence in Simple Human Societies." Current Anthropology28(1987): 458. 508.
Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Pantheon Books, 20
00, p. 55. 509. Bruce M. Knauft, Good Company and Violence, p. 55. 510. John Cra
ig, "Kindness and Killing." Emory Magazine, October 1988, p. 26.
272
511. Lyle B. Steadman, "The Killing of Witches." Oceania 62(1991): 110. 512. Mic
hel Tousignant, "Suicide in Small-Scale Societies." Transcultural Psychiatry 35(
1998): 291-306; Dan Jorgenson, "The Clear and the Hidden: Person, Self and Suici
de Among the Telefomen of Papua New Guinea." Omega 14(1983): 113-125; Georges Mi
nois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in the Western World. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999. 513. Fox Butterfield, "A History of Homicide Su
rprises the Experts." The New York Times, October 23, 1994, p. 16; James Buchana
n Given, Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century England. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1977; Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Mave
rick Criminologist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, p. 216; David Lester, Patte
rns of Suicide and Homicide in the World. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 199
6 514. Alenka Puhar, "Childhood Nightmares and Dreams of Revenge." The Journal o
f Psychohistory 22(1994): 131-170. 515. See Chapter 6; also see Glenn Davis, Chi
ldhood and History in America. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1976. 516. Martin
van Creveld, The Transformation of War. New York: The Free Press, 1991, p. 18. 5
17. Stephen K. Sanderson, Social Transformations: A General Theory of Historical
Development: Expanded Edition. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999, p
. 292. 518. Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures. Washingto
n, DC: World Priorities, 1998. 519. Alenka Puhar, "Childhood Nightmares and Drea
ms of Revenge." The Journal of Psychohistory 22(1944): 131-170.
273
Chapter 7 Childhood and Cultural Evolution
"The child feels the drive of the Life Force... you cannot feel it for him." ---
-George Bernard Shaw Since nearly all of the cultural evolution of Homo sapiens
sapiens has taken place during the past 100,000 years-only about 5,000 generatio
ns-and since this time span is too short to allow the human gene pool to mutate
very much, epigenetic evolution of the psyche-the evolution of the architecture
of the brain occurring during development in the womb and during early childhood
-must be the central source of cultural change, rather than genetic evolution. J
ust as one can lift a newborn out of a contemporary cannibal culture and bring i
t up in one's own culture without noticing any personality difference, one could
also, presumably, raise a CroMagnon baby in a modern family without noticing an
y differences. After decades of sociobiologists' claims that "social structures
and culture are but more elaborate vessels or survivor machines for ensuring tha
t genes can maximize their fitness," 1 there still is not a shred of evidence th
at any cultural change is due to natural selection of random variations affectin
g human gene pools during the past 100,000 years. The short stature of Pygmies m
ay have been selected for during millions of years of biological evolution as an
adaptation to the heat of the tropics, 2 but even the most ardent sociobiologis
ts have not claimed to show that beliefs in witches or divine leaders found in e
very environment have been selected for by any environmental condition,3 since t
hese cultural traits are solutions to emotional, not environmental, problems. On
e recent study of approximately 100 major genetic human traits concluded that "n
o absolute differences between populations of primitive and civilized humans are
known..."4 Unfortunately, this means that the laws of the psychological and cul
tural evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens remain a total mystery. Since neo-Darwin
ian theory of differential genetic replication requires massive extinctions for
the robust selection and retention of random mutations, the lack of evidence for
many mass extinctions during the past 100,000 years means neoDarwinian theory o
f differential reproductive rates has little value in explaining the relatively
rapid evolution of the psyche and culture of Homo sapiens sapiens. In addition,
the trillions of neural connections in the brain are simply far too numerous to
be determined by the limited number of genes in the gamete, so most brain struct
ure must be determined by epigenetic events. As Ernst Mayr puts it, "The brain
274
of 100,000 years ago is the same brain that is now able to design computers....A
ll the achievements of the human intellect were reached with brains not specific
ally selected for these tasks by the neo-Darwinian process."5 Since environmenta
l selection of random genetic variations is not the central mechanism for evolut
ion in modern human neural networks, the question is what non-Darwinian processe
s have been responsible for the enormous evolution of brain networks and culture
s in modern humans? THE FAILURE OF ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINISM OF CULTURAL EVOLUTI
ON That so many social scientists remain environmental determinists is puzzling.
It certainly is not because the method has any empirical verification environme
nt is simply assumed causal in culture change because historical advances in hum
an nature are so often a priori assumed impossible. As Leslie White once put it,
since it is assumed that human nature cannot change, "we see no reason why cult
ural systems of 50,000 B.C....could not have been capable of originating agricul
ture as well as systems in 8,000 B.C....We must look, then, to environmental [fa
ctors] for the answers to these questions."6 For instance, most social scientist
s agree with Johnson and Earle that "the primary motor for cultural evolution is
population growth" determined by environmental conditions,7 overlooking that po
pulation growth relies upon the reduction of infanticide (both from murder at bi
rth and from later neglect) and the growth of the ability to cooperate and devis
e ways to produce more food, both psychological traits dependent upon childreari
ng practices. In fact, recent empirical studies have rejected simple population
growth as the mainspring of evolution, pointing out, for instance, that many adv
anced chiefdoms form in areas of quite low population density.8 As Hallpike put
it, "there are many societies with sufficient population density but which have
nevertheless not developed the state...population density is merely an index of
the abundance of a vital raw material people and has by itself no power to deter
mine how that raw material will be used."9 Hayden summarized recent empirical st
udies testing environmental factors in evolution by saying "neither population p
ressure nor circumscription appears to have played a significant role in creatin
g inequality or complexity." 10 Hallpike rightly concluded his survey of suppose
d environmental causes of cultural evolution by stating, "The materialist belief
that the environment simply causes social adaptation is therefore quite unfound
ed...there are many different ways of accommodating to the environment...."11 En
vironments are also opportunities, not just straightjackets. As Kirch and Yen co
nclude, "men reach out to embrace and create their ecosystems,
275
rather than the reverse proposition."12 It is when early childrearing experience
s are impaired that children are forced to reduce their behavioral flexibility a
nd are therefore as adults unable to improve their environments and experience c
ultural stagnation. The psychogenic theory sees environments as presenting both
the constraints and the opportunities for cultural evolution, while the evolutio
n of psychological development during the fetal and childhood period determines
how these challenges are met. Since humans far more than other species construct
their environments, 13 their creative use to fulfill human needs is crucially d
etermined by the degree of innovation that is allowed by the level of childhood
evolution attained. This of course does not mean that environment counts for not
hing. Jared Diamond has convincingly shown how environmental differences have ra
ised and lowered the steepness of the ladder of cultural evolution, demonstratin
g that the availability of a few good plant and animal domesticates crucially de
termines the rates of evolution of cultures in different parts of the world, wit
h those areas which have domesticable grains and cattle being able to evolve fas
ter than those that did not.14 But the evolutionary problem isn't only about the
availability of environmental resources. Obviously one cannot develop much agri
culture in the Arctic, and obviously tropical regions have too many insects and
parasites and too severe floods and droughts that hinder their economic developm
ent.15 But environment is only part of the answer to evolutionary differences. E
nvironmental change cannot explain cultural evolution since culture has often ev
olved while the ecology has devolved because of soil exhaustion. The point is th
at the degree of steepness of the environmental ladder doesn't determine whether
people chose to climb it you still must want to climb and you must be innovativ
e enough to invent or adopt ways to conquer each rung, whether the base of the l
adder is planted in the snow, in a rain forest or in the milder climate of Weste
rn Europe. The secret as to why England and not France or Germany spawned the In
dustrial Revolution first goes back to England's advanced childrearing in its sm
aller medieval households, not to any ecological advantage.16 English political
freedom, religious tolerance, industry and innovation were all psychoclass achie
vements, dependent upon childrearing evolution. The most important unsolved ques
tion in cultural evolution is therefore to explain the rate of innovation and ad
option of new techniques of exploiting what resources exist-factors that depend
crucially upon the local rate of evolution of childrearing. Despite their advoca
cy of unicausal environmental determinism, anthropologists have regularly demons
trated that similar environments have
276
produced quite different psyches and cultures. Even though most follow Whiting's
paradigm that environment determines childhood, personality and culture, 17 oth
ers take great delight in describing quite different personalities and cultures
coming out of identical environments-one tribe that is gentle, loving and peacef
ul and the other composed of fierce headhunting cannibals-but then leave the cau
se of their stark differences as unexplained as if the two groups were dropped d
own on earth from two different planets.18 Obversely, others describe quite simi
lar cultures developing in wholly different environments. In Polynesia, for inst
ance, Goldman concludes that "societies can be similar in basic culture whether
they occupy atolls or high islands, relatively rich habitats or barren islands;
they cannot be regarded as having been molded by their different material enviro
nments."19 But then he is puzzled that he cannot explain how people in such diff
erent environments could have evolved such similar cultures. Deprived by their e
vidence of their theories of environmental determinism, anthropologists discover
that the sources of cultural evolution are simply inexplicable. Archeologists u
sed to accept anthropologists' theories of environmental determinism, but now mo
st admit that their best evidence has turned out to be solidly against it. Socia
l complexity and inequality used to be thought caused by the invention or adopti
on of farming and herding; but the evidence turns out to show that complexity an
d inequality preceded agriculture rather than followed it: "Permanently settled
communities of more complex hunter-gatherers appear to be the norm in many areas
in the late Pleistocene..."20 Apparently first people changed, then they manage
d to change their cultures and technologies. Price asks: "what caused the adopti
on of agriculture?" His answer is the one more and more archeologists are beginn
ing to agree with: "questions about the transition to agriculture clearly have m
ore to do with internal social relations than with external events involving cli
mate and the growth of human population." 21 The "driving force behind food prod
uction," Price says, is the appearance of new kinds of people, ones he calls "ac
cumulators," who "emerge" and engage in competitive feasts that require more foo
d production.22 Johnson and Earle agree, speaking of "a new attitude toward chan
ge" that appears in history, "though the reason for it remains obscure." 23 Disc
overing what causes these new kinds of people and new attitudes toward change to
mysteriously "emerge" throughout history (or, as often, not to "emerge") is the
refore a central task of the psychogenic theory of evolution.
277
DIFFERENCES EVOLUTION
BETWEEN
HISTORICAL
AND
NEO-DARWINIAN
Problems of explaining evolution are central to all sciences, including the soci
al sciences. Just as nothing in biology makes complete sense except in the light
of [genetic] evolution, nothing in human history makes complete sense except in
the light of epigenetic (psychogenic) evolution. Neo-Darwinian theory of biolog
ical evolution explains all behavioral change in animals as resulting from the a
ccretion of random variations produced by mutation, recombination and genetic dr
ift selected as better adaptations to changing environments. But what is usually
overlooked is that genetic evolution only provides the capacity for adult behav
ioral variations assuming a specific developmental environment.24 The road from
genotype to phenotype is a long one. What trait actually appears in the mature i
ndividual depends upon the actual course of epigentic development, beginning in
the womb and continuing throughout childhood an extraordinarily complex and vari
able journey for each individual. The most important environments are the mother
's body and behavior, and the most important competition for survival not in the
sperm or ovum but at the neural level, in the brain, with the mother acting as
the "agent of natural selection."25 What is little recognized is that recent rev
olutionary discoveries in molecular biology by Gottlieb, Lipton and others have
begun to show that early environments actually change genetic structure.26 Mater
nal prenatal environment and even early parental care can actually be passed dow
n to succeeding generations through the genes, contrary to traditional biologica
l theory. Genes cannot turn themselves on or off, they need a signal from their
environment, so genetic structure is wide open to environmental changes, rather
than being wholly immune from environmental input as has been thought to date. T
his isn't Lamarckianism; Lamarck didn't know about gene behavior. What has chang
ed is the discovery that cells contain receptors that respond and adapt to envir
onmental signals-the mother being the main controller of genetic accessing.27 In
addition, it has been discovered that only 10 percent of nuclear genes are used
to code human expression, while the remaining 90 percent-previously thought of
as useless baggage and referred to as "junk DNA"-contains extra DNA that can rew
rite genetic messages, create new gene expression and new behavior. 28 Even mate
rnal emotions can be passed to fetal genes and then to the next generation. Gott
lieb has prenatally stressed mice, who are as adults found to be more aggressive
, and then taken the male mice and mated them with other females and found that
their grandsons were also more aggressive than non-stressed males-thus showing h
ow environmental stress can be passed down genetically. Perry and others have
278
shown dramatically how stressed children "change from being victims to being vic
timizers" because of imbalanced noradrenaline and serotonin levels, which then c
an be passed down through both genetic and epigenetic changes.29 Indeed, the abi
lity of the genome to respond to its environment means evolutionary change takes
place both by environmental selection of random variations and by epigenetic in
heritance systems.30 Thus a drought that starves mothers and their fetuses or an
increase in wife-beating in a society can effect not only the first but succeed
ing generations' psyches and behavior through changes in genetic structure and g
ene accessing. The laws of historical evolution are quite different from the law
s of neoDarwinism. The central hypothesis of the psychogenic theory of historica
l evolution is that epigenetic neuronal variations originating in changing inter
personal relationships with caretakers rather than only through genetic variatio
ns originating through natural selections are the primary source of the evolutio
n of the psyche and society. "The more evolved the species is...the greater the
role of epigenetic mechanisms in the structure of the nervous system."31 The fun
damental evolutionary direction in Homo sapiens sapiens is towards better interp
ersonal relationships, not just the satisfaction of biological instincts. While
adaptation to the natural environment is the key to genetic evolution, relations
hip to the human environment is the key to psychological evolution, to the evolu
tion of "human nature." Psychogenesis is also the key to cultural evolution, sin
ce the range of evolution of childrearing in every society puts inevitable limit
s upon what it can accomplishpolitically, economically and socially. Development
al changes in the three-pound, trillion-celled human brain have completely overw
helmed purely genetic changes as causes of psychological and cultural evolution
in the past 100,000 years. The causal mechanisms for the evolution of human psyc
he and culture have more and more decoupled from the neoDarwinian causal mechani
sms that depend solely upon outbreeding success.32 The psychogenic theory of evo
lution is based not upon Spencer and Darwin's "survival of the fittest" products
of the most ruthless parents but upon the "survival of the most innovative and
cooperative" products of the most loving parents. The processes of historical ev
olution, based upon the very slow growth of love and cooperation, are therefore
the exact opposite from those of neo-Darwinian natural selection, based overwhel
mingly upon conflict and competition. They include: (1) The production of variat
ions through psychogenesis is by creating through more love different early epig
enetic environments-more advanced fetal and early
279
childhood developmental paths-not through random genetic mutations and recombina
tions-i.e., through variations in the structures of neuronal groups achieved dur
ing post-genetic development after inception, not through mutations in DNA prior
to inception; (2) the vehicles of transmission include neuronal groups in the b
rains of individual parents and children, not solely genes in the sexual organs
of parents; (3) the selection of variations is accomplished through changes in a
very narrow part of the human environment-the family, the main organizer of emo
tional symbols, particularly the mother-rather than simply through changes in th
e ecology; (4) the preservation of emergent variations in some individuals is of
ten prevented from being swamped by the less developed childrearing practices of
the rest of the culture via the psychogenic pump effects of migration; (5) the
limitations to emergent variations (psychogenic devolution) occurs either becaus
e of conditions adverse to childrearing-such as wars, plagues or droughts-or bec
ause sudden increased social freedom for adults creates excessive growth panic,
anxieties which are turned against children as poison containers, thereby produc
ing devolution in childrearing in a portion of a given society; (6) the main loc
us of epigenetic variations is the slow evolution of the individual conscious se
lf that looks forward to its future and creates its own extended present, a self
that evolves mainly through the growth of love in the parentchild relationship;
(7) the rate of innovation in cultural evolution is determined by the condition
s for parental love and therefore increase in individual self-assertion in each
society, all cultural evolutions being preceded by a childrearing evolution; and
(8) the locus of psychogenic evolution has historically been affected far more b
y maternal than paternal influence-indeed, entirely maternal in the crucial firs
t nine months of life-rather than males and females each contributing half of th
e genetic information as occurs in neo-Darwinian evolution.
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This last point will only become fully evident in the next chapter, where it wil
l be documented that the task of "fathering"-of playing a real role in forming a
child's psyche-is in fact a very late historical invention. Most fathers among
our closest ape relatives don't have much to do with their children,33 and a nur
turing role during early childhood for the human father turns out to be a far mo
re recent historical innovation than has heretofore been assumed. The major epig
enetic changes in the structures of the brain, therefore, have mainly been evolv
ed by females, not males. Fathers until recently have affected their children's
psyches mainly through family provisioning and by establishing some of the condi
tions for mothering, but it has mainly been the mothers who have produced epigen
etic novelty; so to discover the laws of cultural evolution one must "follow the
mothers" through history. This is why only the psychogenic theory posits that f
or most of history women and children are the ultimate source of historical chan
ge. THE "HOPEFUL DAUGHTER" AND THE PSYCHOGENIC CUL-DE-SAC Since for most of hist
ory mothers raise boys who then go off and hunt, farm, build things and fight wa
rs rather than directly contributing much new to the psyche of the next generati
on, the course of evolution of the psyche has overwhelmingly been dependent upon
the way mothers have treated their daughters, who become the next generation of
mothers. Since early emotional relationships organize the entire range of human
behavior, all cultural traits do not equally affect the evolution of the psyche
-those that affect the daughter's psyche represent the main narrow bottleneck th
rough which all other cultural traits must pass. The study of the evolution of t
he psyche depends more on developing a maternal ecology than on studying variati
ons in the physical environment. The evolution of the psyche and culture has bee
n crucially dependent upon turning the weak bonds between mother and daughter of
apes and early humans34 into genuine love for daughters (and sons). This means
that historical societies that create optimal conditions for improving the cruci
al mother-daughter relationship by surrounding the mother with support and love
soon begin to show psychological innovation and cultural advances in the next ge
nerations-so that history begins to move in progressive new directions. In contr
ast, societies that cripple the motherdaughter emotional relationship experience
psychogenic arrest and even psychogenic devolution. Only in modern times have f
athers, too, begun to contribute to the evolutionary task of growing the young c
hild's mind. Paralleling the term "hopeful monster" that biologists use to indic
ate speciating biological variations,35 the idea that the mother-daughter emotio
nal
281
relationship is the focal point of epigentic evolution and the main source of no
velty in the psyche can be called the "hopeful daughter" concept. When mothers l
ove and support particularly their daughters, a series of generations can develo
p new childrearing practices that grow completely new neural networks, hormonal
systems and behavioral traits. If hopeful daughters are instead emotionally crip
pled by a society, a psychogenic cul-de-sac is created, generations of mothers c
annot innovate, epigenetic arrest is experienced and meaningful cultural evoluti
on ends.36 For instance, in China before the tenth century A.D. men began to foo
tbind little girls'feet as a sexual perversion, making them into sexual fetishes
, penissubstitutes which the men would suck on and masturbate against during sex
play. 37 Chinese literature reports the screaming cries of the five-year-old gi
rl as she hobbles about the house for years to do her tasks while her feet are b
ound, because in order to make her foot tiny, her foot bones are broken and the
flesh deteriorates. She loses several toes as they are bent under her foot, to e
mphasize the big toe as a female penis. This practice was added to the many brut
al practices of what was perhaps the world's most anti-daughter culture, where o
ver half the little girls were murdered at birth without remorse and special gir
l-drowning pools were legion, where beating little girls until bloody was a comm
on parental practice, and where girl rape and sex slavery were rampant.38 This v
icious anti-daughter emotional atmosphere extreme even for a time that was gener
ally cruel and unfeeling towards daughters was obviously not conducive to mother
s producing innovations in childrearing when the little girls grew up. Therefore
China which was culturally ahead of the West in many ways at the time of the in
troduction of footbinding-became culturally and politically "frozen" until the t
wentieth century, when footbinding was stopped and boy-girl sex ratios in many a
reas dropped from 200/100 to near equality.39 The result was that whereas for mu
ch of its history China punished all novelty,40 during the twentieth century rap
id cultural, political and economic evolution could resume. Japan, which shared
much of Chinese culture but did not adopt footbinding of daughters, avoided the
psychogenic arrest of China and could therefore share in the scientific and indu
strial revolution as it occurred in the West. The same kind of epigenetic arrest
can be seen in the damage caused by genital mutilation of girls among circum-Me
diterranean peoples that began thousands of years ago and continues today. Since
"hopeful daughters" do not thrive on the chopping off of their clitorises and l
abias, the present cultural and political problems of those groups who still mut
ilate their daughters' genitals are very much a direct result of this psychogeni
c arrest.41 Much of the remainder of this chapter will
282
analyze the conditions for psychogenic arrest, when childrearing has failed to e
volve and culture remains in a psychogenic cul-de-sac, static for millennia. The
historical evolution of the psyche is a process that mainly involves removing d
evelopmental distortions, so that each psyche can develop in its own way optimal
ly. The evolution of childhood, as will be extensively documented, mainly consis
ts of parents slowly giving up killing, abandoning, mutilating, battering, terro
rizing, sexually abusing and using their children for their own emotional needs
and instead creating loving conditions for growth of the self. The evolution of
the psyche is first of all accomplished by removing terrible abuses of children
and their resulting developmental distortions, allowing the psyche to produce hi
storical novelty and achieve its own inherent human growth path. Civilization is
not, as everyone including Freud has assumed, a historical "taming of the insti
ncts." Nor does "the evolution of mankind proceed from bad to worse," as Roheim
thought, 42 with early societies being "indulgent" toward their children and mod
ern societies more often abusive. It will be the burden of the remainder of this
book to provide evidence that just the reverse is true, that culture evolves th
rough the increase of love and freedom for children, so that when they grow up t
hey can invent more adaptive and happier ways of living. Because we were all chi
ldren before we were adults, childhood evolution must precede social evolution,
psychogenesis must precede sociogenesis. LOVE AND FREEDOM-NOT COMPLEXITY-THE MEA
SURE OF
EVOLUTIONARY PROGRESS The measure of the evolution of psyche and culture is actu
ally quite different from that assumed by most social theories. Social evolution
is usually defined simply as the degree of complexity-as measured by population
or social hierarchy or technology43 with such elements as the increasing amount
s of knowledge causing cultures to grow more complex.44 But there is no evidence
that modern brains contain more knowledge than those of foragers of 100,000 yea
rs ago. What has evolved is the self-located in the hippocampal-prefrontal netwo
rks-not simply the amount of knowledge stored in the cortex.45 Contemporary fora
gers, for instance, know an enormous amount of ecological information the forage
r who knows hundreds of species of plants and animals and their characteristics
probably has as many neurons in his cortex storing knowledge as most Westerners.
Similarly, their cultural system cannot be said to be less complex, since it us
ually contains some of the most complicated kinship, belief systems and language
s extant. What is less evolved is their childhoods and the personality systems d
ependent upon this childrearing.
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Societies with poor childrearing produce historical personalities-psychoclasses-
that have too much anxiety and conflict to maintain good object relations, so th
ey tend to deny their real needs-for love, for freedom, for achievement-and thei
r cultures oppose change and do not evolve. The psychogenic theory defines progr
ess in evolution as increases in self awareness, freedom, human potential, empat
hy, love, trust, self control and a preponderance of conscious decisions-rather
than as an increase in technological, economic or political complexity. This mea
ns that some cultures on low technological levels46 could actually be further ev
olved in human terms than others that are more complex technologically and polit
ically. Because the psychogenic theory makes the individual psyche both the sour
ce of variation and the unit of selection, it posits that childhood is the centr
al focal point of social evolution. The amount of time and resources any society
devotes to its children's needs is far more likely to be an accurate index of i
ts level of civilization than any of the anthropological indices of complexity o
r energy utilization. The central direction of evolutionary progress, therefore,
of Homo sapiens sapiens is from personal neediness to personal independence, fr
om family enmeshment to family caregiving, from social dependency and violence t
o social dependability and empathy. Although this progress is extraordinarily un
even in different contemporary cultures and even in different family lines, the
general progressive direction is evident. It will be the task of the remainder o
f this book to document the hypothesis that the evolution of childhood has been
from incest to love and from abuse to empathy, and that progress in childrearing
has regularly preceded social, political and technological progress. The main t
hrust of the psychogenic theory of cultural evolution is simple: The evolution o
f culture is ultimately determined by the amount of love, understanding and free
dom experienced by its children, because only love produces the individuation ne
eded for cultural innovation. Every abandonment, every betrayal, every hateful a
ct towards children returns tenfold a few decades later upon the historical stag
e, while every empathic act that helps a child become what he or she wants to be
come, every expression of love toward children heals society and moves it in une
xpected, wondrous new directions. PSYCHOGENESIS-THE SOURCE OF EPIGENETIC VARIATI
ON Psychogenesis is the process of forming historically new brain networks that
develop the self and produce innovation. It is a "bootstrapping" evolutionary pr
ocess47 that occurs in the interpersonal relationships between generations. Babi
es
284
begin with the need to form intensely personal relationships with their caretake
rs, who in turn respond with ambivalent needs to (a) use the baby as a poison co
ntainer for their projections, and (b) go beyond their own childrearing and give
the child what it actually needs rather than what is being projected into it. T
he ability of successive generations of parents to work through their own childh
ood anxieties the second time around is a process much like that of psychotherap
y, which also involves a return to childhood anxieties and, if successful, a rew
orking of them with support of the therapist into new ways of looking at others
and at one's self. It is in this sense of the psychogenic process that history c
an be said to be a "psychotherapy of generations," producing new epigenetic, dev
elopmental variation and-because these early emotions organize the remainder of
cognitive content48 cultural evolution. Psychogenesis is not a very robust proce
ss in caretakers. Most of the time, parents simply reinflict upon their children
what had been done to them in their own childhood. The production of developmen
tal variations can occur only in the silent, mostly unrecorded decisions by pare
nts to go beyond the traumas they themselves endured. It happens each time a mot
her decides not to use her child as an erotic object, not to tie it up so long i
n swaddling bands, not to hit it when it cries. It happens each time a mother en
courages her child's explorations and independence, each time she overcomes her
own despair and neediness and gives her child a bit more of the love and empathy
she herself didn't get. These private moments are rarely recorded for historian
s, and social scientists have completely overlooked their role in the production
of cultural variation, yet they are nonetheless the ultimate sources of the evo
lution of the psyche and culture. The generational pressure for epigenetic, deve
lopmental evolution does not occur in a vacuum, of course. Every social conditio
n that impinges upon the parentchild relationship-in particular that disturbs th
e mother's ability to go beyond her own childrearing and give her child more lov
e than she received-affects psychogenesis. Yet the crucial study of what social
conditions have been responsible for the evolution, arrest or devolution of chil
drearing is a separate empirical task. One cannot simply conclude that the more
complex societies become, the better (or worse) the conditions for parenting. Pa
rticularly crucial are the conditions favoring the survival of nascent variation
s in parent-child relationship across generations without being swamped, paralle
ling the problem in neo-Darwinian theory of the swamping of mutations by a large
gene pool. The effects of other conditions upon childrearing are not all that o
bvious. Material conditions are not the most important of these; more crucial is
the attitude of the society towards women and the overcoming of maternal despai
r. The various ways that family conditions, emotional
285
attitudes, material factors, demographic factors, culture contact and a whole ra
nge of historical conditions change the ability of parents to achieve developmen
tal evolution for a series of generations will be examined in detail from the hi
storical and ethnographic record in the remainder of this book. Cultural and psy
chological evolution is neither spontaneous nor inevitable, as anthropologists a
nd historians have so often assumed.49 One cannot simply posit a priori that "va
riation in individual cultural practices and perceptions exists in every communi
ty at all times, [forming] a pool of possibilities for what people will do in th
e immediate future."50 There exist today many cultures whose members' personalit
ies have not evolved very far and whose cultures have remained extraordinarily r
esistant to change for millennia. Because their ability to give mature love to t
heir children has barely evolved in thousands of generations, their systems of c
onsciousness are developmentally arrested, and they have remained headhunters, c
annibals and fierce warriors as were our own ancestors in the Paleolithic. In fa
ct, as we will shortly see, even modern nations consist of groups of individuals
who are on all levels of psychogenic evolution-that is, each nation contains al
l psychoclassesbecause individuals are endpoints of unique family histories of c
hildrearing evolution and devolution over thousands of generations. Your next-do
or neighbors are therefore nearly as likely to be psychological fossils-because
their parents used brutal medieval childrearing practices-as they are to be the
results of loving, helping parenting. Those who are lucky enough to have had rea
lly loving, helping mode parents stand on the shoulders of thousands of individu
al emotional decisions of parents about how to care for their children. Because
childrearing evolution determines the evolution of the psyche and society, the c
ausal arrows of all other social theories are reversed by the psychogenic theory
. Rather than personal and family life being seen as dragged along in the wake o
f social, cultural, technological and economic change, society is instead viewed
as the outcome of evolutionary changes that first occur in the psyche. Because
the structure of the psyche changes from generation to generation within the nar
row funnel of childhood, childrearing practices are not just one item in a list
of cultural traits-they are the very condition for the transmission and further
development of all other cultural elements, placing limits on what can be achiev
ed in all other social areas. Indeed our social, religious and political behavio
r, like our personal life, is very much a part of our human search for love, so
necessary for the development of our self. Childhood must therefore always first
evolve before major social, cultural and economic innovation can occur. Little
by little, adults must refrain from routinely murdering, neglecting, tying up, a
bandoning, raping, battering and
286
torturing generation after generation of infinitely precious children and begin
instead to empathize with their quest to grow up into independent, productive in
dividuals. THE EVOLUTION OF PARENTING Most parents through most of history relat
e to their children most of the time as poison containers, receptacles into whic
h they project disowned parts of their psyches. In good parenting, the child use
s its caretaker as a poison container-as it earlier used its mother's placenta t
o cleanse its poisonous blood-the good mother reacting with calming behavior to
the cries of her baby, helping it "detoxify" its anxieties. But when an immature
mother's baby cries, she cannot stand it, and strikes out at the child. As one
battering mother put it, "I have never felt loved all my life. When my baby was
born, I thought it would love me. When it cried, it meant it didn't love me. So
I hit him." The child is so full of the parent's projections that it must be tig
htly tied up (swaddled in bandages) for its first year to prevent it from "teari
ng its ears off, scratching its eyes out, breaking its legs, or touching its gen
itals"51 i.e., to prevent it from acting out the violent and sexual projections
of the parents. The child historically is usually either experienced as a persec
utory parent ("When he screams he sounds just like my mother") or as a guilty se
lf ("He keeps wanting things all the time"). Either way, the child must either b
e strictly controlled, hit or rejected, usually in ways that restage the childre
aring methods of the grandparent. Since the grandmother is historically so often
present in the home, strictly controlling the childrearing, it is doubly diffic
ult to break old patterns. Psychogenesis takes place when the parent experiences
the needs of the child and, instead of restaging their own traumatic childhood,
invents new ways of handling their anxieties so the child can grow and individu
ate in their own way. When a mother regresses to be able to experience her baby'
s discomfort and determine if it is hungry or wet or just wants to crawl, she re
experiences her own infancy and her own mother's fears of starving (for love) or
wanting to explore and grow, and-given some support by her husband-the mother c
an take the enormous step of making a space for the child to crawl rather than t
ying it up in its swaddling bands. The process is much like the process of psych
otherapy: a regression to early anxieties and a working through of them the seco
nd time around in a better manner. Psychogenesis occurs at the interface between
caretaker and child. It is a private, joint process, a "psychotherapy of genera
tions" that cures parental anxiety about growth and reduces childhood traumas...
when it occurs. Psychogenesis isn't inevitable, so the psychogenic theory isn't
teleological. There are in all modern nations many parents who have not evolved
very much and who are still extremely abusive. In
287
fact, there are whole cultures that did not evolve in parenting, for reasons whi
ch we will examine. But the "generational pressure" of psychogenesis-the ability
of human parents to innovate better ways of childrearing and for children to st
rive for relationship and growth-is everywhere present, and is an independent so
urce of change in historical personality, allowing humans to "bootstrap"52 new n
eural networks that are more evolved than those of our ancestors. Because psychi
c structure must always be passed from generation to generation through the narr
ow funnel of childhood, a society's childrearing 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 traits, and place definite limits on what can be ac
hieved in any culture. This is explicitly denied by other theories of culture ch
ange, which can be summed up in Steward's dicta: "Personality is shaped by cultu
re, but it has never been shown that culture is affected by personality."53 It i
s the purpose of the remainder of this book to document that every political, re
ligious and social trait is sustained by specific childhood experiences and that
changes in personality through childrearing evolution determine the course of a
ll cultural change. Progress in childrearing evolution may be extremely uneven,
but the trends are nonetheless unmistakable. The overall direction is from proje
ction to empathy, from discipline to self-regulation, from hitting to explaining
, from incest to love, from rejection to overcontrol and then to independence. T
he result is a series of closer approaches between adult and child, producing a
healing of the splitting caused by extreme traumas-historical personalities slow
ly evolving from schizoid mechanisms54 and separate alters that are the results
of earlier childrearing modes. Thus unity of personality and individuation is an
achievement only attained at the end of history, after thousands of generations
of parents have slowly evolved better ways of helping children grow. It should
be possible to even measure quantitatively-in terms of hours per day, in terms o
f money, in terms of some more meaningful measure-the amount and even the qualit
y of parenting effort a society devotes to its children. Just the sheer cost of
raising a child in dollars has been going up so fast that it now costs a middle-
class American family $1.5 million for each child over 22 years, up 20 percent i
n the past three decades.55 The families I know in my section of Manhattan easil
y devote over half of their spare time and half their income to their children.
Compare this to the small fraction of parents' time and money given over to chil
dren in earlier centuries with children even spending most of their lives workin
g for adults in various ways and one can begin to comprehend the overall directi
on of childrearing evolution.
288
Even today, child abuse is highly correlated with income, with children in homes
with incomes below $15,000 being 22 times more likely to be physically abused,
18 times more likely to be sexually abused, and 56 times more likely to be negle
cted than those with family incomes exceeding $30,000.56 Because psychogenesis i
s such a private process, it is rarely recorded in historical documents. Most of
the documentation of what it feels like to go beyond one's own childrearing is
found in mothers' letters and diaries beginning in the early modern period. It w
as the habit of most mothers who could afford it to send their children to wetnu
rse,57 where they were left for several years: Parents of any position saw littl
e of their children, who were taken from their mother at birth and given in char
ge of a foster-mother till the age of five, when they were sent to college or to
a convent until marriage was arranged.58 It was in England and America where we
ll-to-do mothers first began to experiment with nursing their own children, bein
g well aware that most children died at nurse because of lack of care and poor c
onditions. These mothers wrote to each other letters about the joys of nursing t
hemselves, how babies during breastfeeding "kisseth her, strokes her haire, nose
and eares [causing] an affection" to grow between mother and infant.59 If the h
usband objects, saying his wife's breast belongs to him, he should be asked to h
old the baby and he'll be delighted too. By contrast, in France, as late as 1780
the police chief of Paris estimated that only 700 out of the 21,000 children bo
rn each year in his city were nursed by their mothers,60 most being sent out to
French wetnurses, termed "professional feeders and professional killers."61 Sinc
e England led the rest of Europe in ending swaddling, wetnursing and battering t
heir children, it is no accident that soon after it also led the world in scienc
e, political democracy and industrialization. THE SIX CHILDREARING MODES In The
History of Childhood,62 I proposed six modes of childrearing which societies une
venly evolve. As the graph below indicates, most modern nations today contain al
l six stages in varying proportions. Outside of moving the dates somewhat forwar
d when I found first evidence of the mode in the West, I continue to feel that t
hese modes are accurate. They have been empirically confirmed by five book-lengt
h historical studies63 in addition to the over 100 scholarly articles on the his
tory of childhood during the past 26 years in The Journal of Psychohistory. 64 T
he following chart summarizes the historical evidence on childrearing modes pres
ented in this and the next four chapters of this book.
289
1a. Early Infanticidal Mode (small kinship groups): This mode is characterized b
y high infanticide rates, maternal incest, body mutilation, child rape, tortures
and emotional abandonment by parents when the child is not useful as a an eroti
c object or as a poison container. The father is too immature to act as a real c
aretaker and is emotionally absent. Prepubertal marriage of little girls is comm
on, similar to cults like The Children of God.65 The schizoid personality struct
ure of the infanticidal mode is dominated by alters, in which adults spend much
of their time in ritual and magical projects, so they are not able to evolve bey
ond foraging and early horticultural economic levels nor beyond Big Men politica
l organization.66 1b. Late Infanticidal Mode (chiefdom to early states): Though
infanticide rates remain high and child rape is still often routine-particularly
royal and pedagogic pederasty67 the young child is not as much rejected by the
mother, and the father begins to be involved with instruction of the older child
. Child sacrifice as a guilt-reducing device for social progress is found in ear
ly states as the use of children as poison containers became more socially organ
ized. Infant restrictions devices such as swaddling and cradle boards begin, sib
ling caretakers replace child gangs and sibling incest is widespread. Various in
stitutionalized schemes for care by others become popular, such as adoption, wet
nursing, fosterage, and the use of the children of others as servants.68 Beating
is now less impulsive and used as discipline, and because the child is now clos
er emotionally and used more for farming chores, discipline becomes more control
ling and brutal, leading to complex societies whose innovations are paid for by
genocidal slaughter and the enslavement of women and children.69 2. Abandoning M
ode (beginning with early Christianity): Once the child is thought as having a s
oul at birth, routine infanticide becomes emotionally difficult. Early Christian
s were considered odd in antiquity: "they marry like everybody else, they have c
hildren, but they do not practice the exposure of new-born babes."70 These Chris
tians began Europe's two-millennia-long struggle against infanticide, replacing
it with abandonment, from oblation of young children to monasteries, a more wide
spread use of swaddling, wetnurses if one could afford them, fosterage, wanderin
g scholars and child servants. Child sacrifice was replaced by joining in the gr
oup-fantasy of the sacrifice of Christ, who was sent by his father as a poison c
ontainer to be killed for the sins of others. Pederasty continued, especially in
monasteries, and girl rape was widespread. The child was thought to be born ful
l of
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evil, the parent's projections, so was beaten early and severely. Abusive child
care was not mainly due to economics, since the rich as well as the poor during
the middle ages had high infanticide, abandonment, sexual molestation and physic
al abuse rates.71 The borderline personality structure of Christianity stresses
clinging to authority figures as defense against emotional abandonment and const
ant warfare against enemies to punish others for their own imagined sinfulness f
or deserving abandonment.72 3. Ambivalent Mode (beginning in the twelfth century
): The twelfth century ended the oblation of children to monasteries, began chil
d instruction manuals, began to punish child rape, expanded schooling, expanded
pediatrics, saw child protection laws, and began to tolerate ambivalence-both lo
ve and hate-for the child, marking the beginnings of toleration of a child's ind
ependent rights. The child was seen less as a sinful poison container and more a
s soft wax or clay that could be beaten into whatever shape the parent wished. T
he reduction of splitting defenses of the late medieval narcissistic personality
structure produced the advances in technology and the rise of cities associated
with the period and eventually the rise of the early modern state.73 4. Intrusi
ve Mode (beginning in the sixteenth century): The intrusive parent began to unsw
addle the child and even the wealthy began to bring up the infant themselves rat
her than sending it elsewhere or at least have the wetnurse come in to the home
thus allowing closer emotional bonds with parents to form. The sixteenth century
particularly in England represents a watershed in reduction of parental project
ions, when parents shifted from trying to stop childrens' growth to trying only
to control it and make it "obedient." The freedom of being allowed to crawl arou
nd rather than being swaddled and hung on a peg and the individuation of separat
e child beds and separate child regimens meant parents approached closer to thei
r children and could give them love as long as they controlled their minds, thei
r insides, their anger, their lives. The child raised by intrusive parents was n
ursed by his or her mother, not swaddled, not given regular enemas but toilet tr
ained early, prayed with but not played with, hit but not battered, punished for
masturbation but not masturbated, taught and not sent out as servants to others
and made to obey promptly with threats and guilt as often as physical means of
punishment. 74 True empathy begins with intrusive mode parents, producing a gene
ral improvement in the level of care and reduced child mortality, leading to the
early modern demographic transition to later marraige, fewer births and more in
vestment in each
291
child. The end of arranged marriages, the growth of married love and the decline
of domestic violence also contributed to the child's ability to achieve emotion
al growth.75 A healing of splitting and an increase in individuation produced th
e scientific, political and economic revolutions of the early modern period, so
much so that some British and American parents were often called "strange" by vi
sitors because they "pampered" their children so much and hit them so little. 76
Men didn't cling to their hypermasculine social alters as much and discovered t
hey had a "private self" that was emotionally involved with their family life.77
5. Socializing Mode (beginning in the eighteenth century): Obviously something
new had entered the world when society could claim that "God planted this deep,
this unquenchable love for her offspring in the mother's heart." 78 During this
period the number of children most women had dropped from seven or eight to thre
e or four, long before any medical discoveries were made in limiting reproductio
n,79 because parents now wanted to be able to give more care to each child. Thei
r aim, however, remained instilling their own goals into the child rather than p
roducing individuation: "Is there not a strange fullness of joy in watching the
reproduction of your traits, physical, mental and moral, in your child?" 80 The
use of mainly psychological manipulation, along with spanking of little children
, remains the most popular model of "socialization" of parents in Western Europe
an nations and the Americas today, training the child to assume its role in the
parents' society. 81 The socializing mode built the modern world, and its values
of nationalism and economic class-dominated representative democracy represent
the social models of most people today.82 6. Helping Mode (beginning mid-twentie
th century): The helping mode involves acknowledging that the parents' main role
is to help the child reach at each stage of its life its own goals, rather than
being socialized into adult goals. Parents for the first time consider raising
children not a chore but a joy. Both mother and father are equally involved with
the child from infancy helping him or her become a selfdirected person. Childre
n are given unconditional love, are not struck and are apologized to if yelled a
t under stress. The helping mode involves a lot of time and energy by parents an
d other helpers during the child's early years, taking their cues from the child
itself as it pursues its developmental course. Birth rates tend to drop below r
eplacement as each child is recognized as requiring a great deal of attention. T
he helping psychoclass, though few in number today, is far more empathic toward
others and less driven by material success than earlier generations. Though Dr.
292
Spock's child care book was late socializing mode,83 some of the "Spock generati
on" adolescents after the mid-century were actually products of helping mode par
ents and felt empowered to explore their own unique social roles and go beyond n
ationalism, war and economic inequality. Parents from each of the six childreari
ng modes co-exist in modern nations today. Indeed, much of political conflict oc
curs because of the vastly different value systems and vastly different toleranc
e for freedom of the six psychoclasses. Cyclical swings between liberal and reac
tionary periods are an outcome of a process whereby more evolved psychoclasses i
ntroduce more innovation into the world than less evolved psychoclasses can tole
rate. The latter try then to "turn the clock back" and reinstate less anxious so
cial conditions to reduce their growth anxiety, and when this fails, the nation
attempts to "cleanse the world of its sinfulness" through a war or depression. T
he psychogenic pump effect is how evolving parents can avoid the swamping of var
iety in childrearing. A mother who wants to try to leave her child unswaddled af
ter only a few months rather than after a full year finds her own mother and eve
ry other mother around her is vigorously opposed to her innovation. Sometimes op
position can actually be lethal. I once asked Arthur Hippler, the Editor of my J
ournal of Psychological Anthropology, if he had ever met a more evolved Athabasc
an mother than the generally infanticidal mothers he had been interviewing in Al
aska. He said he had; she was far more empathic than the other mothers. He said
the other mothers shunned her and shut her out of activities, which would in ear
lier times have been tantamount to death in such a severe environment. But most
more evolved Athabascans migrated south, with the result that those who settled
along the northeast coast of America had better childrearing and more advanced c
ultures than those that remained in Alaska.84 The effects of the psychogenic pum
p in preserving variety can be seen in a variety of similar historical migration
patterns of parents practicing more advanced childrearing modes: 1. The migrati
on of colonists into New England contained more advanced parents and more numero
us hopeful daughters than those in families who stayed behind, since the most ad
vanced childrearing -the intrusive mode-was being practiced by the Puritans who
were chased out of England or who emigrated to escape "unreasonable authority."8
5 The result was, as Condorcet put it, Americans
293
seemed to have "stepped out of history," because they had less infanticide, less
wetnursing, shorter swaddling and better parent-child relations than European p
arents at the time. The psychogenic pump, however, mainly applied to New England
parents those who migrated further south usually did not do so as intact famili
es and contained far more bachelor latter-born sons, servants and others who wer
e not escaping from religious persecution.86 Therefore, the South lagged the Nor
th in their level of childrearing, a condition that eventually led to the Americ
an Civil War. 2. The migration of more advanced parents in Europe in general too
k place from east to west, as migrating farmer populations moved from Asia to We
stern Europe,87 displaced foragers and tried innovative living arrangements comp
ared to those that stayed behind. This is the ultimate reason why Eastern Europe
even today remains far behind Western Europe and the United States in childrear
ing and in democracy and industrialization. 3. The same principle of "those who
emigrate contain the more advanced parents" applies to why Central and South Ame
rican Indians had more advanced childrearing and more evolved cultures than thos
e of North America. 4. Jews who had immigrated into Europe were more advanced in
childrearing, so much so that they had to be sacrificed in the Holocaust as rep
resentatives of too much innovation and growth. Jews since antiquity didn't just
"disperse" (diaspora), they differentially migrated, with those with more advan
ced parenting modes striking out to new homes, where their success made them sca
pegoats for the growth fears of others. 5. The psychogenic pump favors extremiti
es, peripherally isolated areas that capture late arrivals, the most innovative
parents and the most hopeful daughters. (Biological speciation, too, favors peri
pherally isolated communities.) 88 The most advanced childrearing in Europe was
in England and the most advanced in Asia was in Japan, both large islands at the
extreme western and eastern ends of the Eurasian land mass, both settled late b
y immigrant farmers. Japan, in fact, developed agriculture extremely late, only
two thousand years ago,89 when the most advanced families in Asia migrated from
Korea. "Those that stayed behind" in China, in Eastern Europe-were swamped by le
ss evolved childrearing modes and were therefore more subject to psychogenic arr
est or even devolution. In contrast, many of the world's
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most advanced cultures-such as the Hawaiians or the ancient Greeks-were products
of late-arriving migrants, more advanced parenting styles, who turned unpromisi
ng peripheral evironments into distinctive, innovative civilizations. PSYCHOGENI
C DEVOLUTION One of the hardest thing to understand in studying childhood histor
y is how parenting can stay the same for millennia or sometimes even get worse.
How can a Balkan peasant mother today as in antiquity kill their newborn or tigh
tly bind her baby to a cradle and keep it isolated in a dark room for a year or
more, oblivious of its screams?90 How can most fathers today still batter their
little kids? Is empathy for children so fragile? Why does psychogenic evolution
not take place, even devolve? Why have a portion of parents in every society rem
ained at the infanticidal and abandoning modes? What happened in previous genera
tions that extinguished the evolution of parental love so thoroughly? People thr
oughout history defend against their despair by finding poison containers to res
tage their early traumas. Men do so mainly by going to war and torturing, enslav
ing and killing sacrificial victims. But women only have their children to tortu
re, enslave and kill. One thing is clear: the cause is not merely economic since
the rich tortured and killed their children just as the poor did. Indeed, the m
ost massive genocide in the world-never recognized as such because children are
not considered human by historians-has been the parental holocaust, the killing,
binding, battering, raping, mutilating and torturing of children throughout his
tory, numbering billions not just millions of innocent, helpless human beings. I
t is this untold story of the genocide of a whole class of human beings that wil
l be fully told for the first time in this book. But just as there are few good
psychological studies of Nazis during the Jewish Holocaust-because it is so diff
icult to empathize enough with victimizers to understand their motives-so too th
ere are few good studies of parents in history who murdered, beaten and tortured
their children, since it is hard to identify enough with them to analyze their
motives. Determining the psychodynamics of parents who have stayed the same for
thousands of generations while others around them have been evolving is doubly d
ifficult, since one must deal with both the paucity of the historical record of
the parental cruelty and also the denial and anger stemming from one's own feeli
ngs. The key to understanding psychogenic arrest and devolution must lie in comp
rehending the historical relationship of mothers to their daughters-a totally un
researched area, even for feminist historians. Sometimes men who oppose all soci
al change instinctively recognize they must kill off all hopeful daughters-as to
day
295
when Islamic fundamentalists drag out of class all the girls they find in school
s and slaughter them.91 The study of the multigenerational effects of trauma is
just beginning.92 But usually the conditions that maim the psyches of hopeful da
ughters are simply part of the cultural practices of the society and go unrecogn
ized as crippling evolution. When thirty-year-old men in antiquity insisted on m
arrying prepubertal girls because they were afraid of women their own age, when
medieval mothers prostituted their daughters either to the local priest or to th
e whole community, when mothers fed their daughters less or gave them less medic
al attention than boys because girls who grew up needed dowries, when brothers i
n Eastern European zadruga routinely used each others' daughters sexually, when
Chinese men bound the feet of little girls to use as sexual objects or circumMed
iterranean mothers chopped off the genitals of their little girls, psychogenic d
evolution was the inevitable result. Using children as poison containers can rea
ch intolerable limits, either as a result of intolerable conditions such as war
or drought or even as a result of social progress, when parents react with extre
me growth panic and use their children to relieve their anxieties. Sometimes his
torical tragedies like these are evident, as when children were abandoned by the
millions in revolutionary Russia and were forced to live as prostitutes and cri
minals for decades after, many even today living abandoned in Russia's main citi
es.93 Psychogenic devolution is often a result of attempts to "leap forward," as
when China killed 30 million people as a result of the famine caused by the Gre
at Leap Forward-in fact, some areas of China devolved so far that they regressed
to cannibalism.94 But sometimes the "war on children" resulting from too much c
hange can be documented in more specific detail. When serfdom ended in Hungary i
n the 1840s, women in rural areas responded by concluding that at last they were
to be free. But, they feared, women cannot be free if they have so many childre
n, so "there was a panic reaction and a brutal, drastic reduction of family size
was put speedily into practice, first by simple infanticide and crude abortion
techniques and later by the one-child system."95 Although poverty was not a prob
lem in the area, for a full century mothers became baby killers, so that "famili
es shank into non-existence, leaving house and farm vacant" to adhere to a norm
that "became irrational and, indeed, suicidal for entire families, villages and
ethnic groups..."96 In what has been called "a Terrible Matriarchy," killing mot
hers established a "dark belt of one-child-system villages,"97 by crude abortion
techniques with sharp objects and winding ropes tightly around the mother's bod
y and soaking them in water, by strangling or freezing babies, even
296
by mothers-in-law "sleeping with the young couple to ensure they did not have in
tercourse..."98 Growth panic from progress being turned against children is an e
veryday phenomena, only no one recognizes it because no one sees children as poi
son containers for adult anxieties. Times of prosperity and progress are often t
imes when poor children are used as scapegoats. While the average income of the
wealthiest 1 percent of Americans rose 72 percent between 1977 and 1994, and whi
le the average income of the highest-earning 20 percent rose 25 percent, that of
the poorest 25 percent shrank 16 percent, throwing millions more children under
the poverty line while cutting welfare benefits.99 Yet the question remains: wh
y are some societies and some family lines so far behind in improving childreari
ng? To begin to answer this crucial question, we will first analyze what childho
od is really like in simpler societies. THE IDEALIZATION OF CHILDHOOD IN SIMPLE
SOCIETIES Unfortunately for the psychogenic theory, nearly all social scientists
currently agree that there is an inverse relationship between childrearing and
social evolution, with parents becoming less loving and more abusive as cultures
move from simple to complex societies.100 Agreeing with Rousseau and Freud, mos
t anthropologists today see civilization as being achieved at the expense of chi
ldhood freedom and nurturance, with the quality of child care going straight dow
nhill and becoming more punitive and less nurturing as societies become more com
plex. Rohner, for instance, concludes from his cross-cultural review of parentin
g from the Human Relations Area Files that virtually all mothers in simpler soci
eties are "warm and nurturant toward their children,"101 so that "The more compl
ex a sociocultural system is, the less warm parents in general tend to be..."102
Whiting analyzes the results of hundreds of anthropological studies of childhoo
d as follows: "children in simple cultures are high on nurturance and low on ego
ism, whereas children brought up in complex cultures are egoistic and not very n
urturant." 103 Stephens summarizes the current state of academic opinion: When o
ne reads an ethnographic account of child rearing in a primitive society, one wi
ll usually find some statement to the effect that the people 'love their babies'
...the ethnographer seems amazed at the amount of affection, care, attention, in
dulgence, and general 'fuss' lavished upon infants and young children...104 Now
when I first discovered, in the anthropology course I took with Margaret Mead at
Columbia University over four decades ago, that anthropologists were
297
unanimous in thinking that childhood had evolved from nurturant and loving to ne
glectful and abusive as the level of civilization increased, I was puzzled as to
how anyone could at the same time think that childhood had any effect on adult
personality, since this meant that the cannibals, headhunters and warriors I was
studying had supposedly had wonderful loving, nurturant childhoods. I soon bega
n to question the accuracy of all these cross-cultural studies of childrearing,
and asked whether those who classified techniques of parenting105 could have bee
n actually coding the degrees of distortion and denial of the anthropologists ra
ther than what was really happening to children. When I found the same unanimity
regarding loving childrearing in past times among historians, equally unsupport
ed by careful historical evidence, I began combing primary sources myself to fin
d out the truth about what it must have felt like to have been a child both in t
he past and in other cultures. With ethnological accounts, of course, I was whol
ly dependent upon the reports of the anthropologists, since I could not myself o
bserve at first hand the childrearing practices of hundreds of cultures. So rath
er than relying on selective Human Relations Area File cards, I constructed my o
wn more extensive files over the next three decades from reports of the ethnolog
ists who had said anything about childrearing, being careful to separate their g
lowing adjectives from the descriptions of events they actually saw happen. I ex
tended these files with personal contacts with many of the anthropologists in co
nnection with my Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology. When I began publishing
the results of my research into both historical and cross-cultural childhoods,
documenting how childhood both in the past and in other cultures had been massiv
ely idealized, both historians and anthropologists concluded that I surely must
have been mad. As Melvin Konner put it in his book Childhood: Lloyd deMause, the
n editor of the History of Childhood Quarterly, claimed that all past societies
treated children brutally, and that all historical change in their treatment has
been a fairly steady improvement toward the kind and gentle standards we now se
t and more or less meet. His 1974 book begins, "The history of childhood is a ni
ghtmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in hi
story one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children
are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused." Now anthr
opologists-and many historians as well-were slack-jawed and nearly speechless. S
tudies of parents, children, and the family in cultures on every inhabited conti
nent had turned up not a single case-with one or two possible
298
exceptions-of extant patterns of child care that corresponded to the brutal negl
ectful approach these historians were assigning to all the parents of the past.
On the contrary, serious students of the anthropology of childhood beginning wit
h Margaret Mead have called attention to the pervasive love and care lavished on
children in many traditional cultures. They even found much Westerners could ad
mire and possibly emulate.106 The only way to disprove this widespread opinion a
bout parenting in traditional cultures is to examine what anthropologists have w
ritten and see whether their evidence actually shows something other than "perva
sive love and care lavished on children." In order that the effects of culture c
ontact with the West may be kept to a minimum, I will concentrate on New Guinea,
with a few forays into nearby areas, because here Western contact was both late
and minimal as compared with Africa and other areas. THE INFANTICIDAL MODE OF C
HILDREARING IN NEW GUINEA I have termed107 the earliest mode of childrearing the
infanticidal mode because parents who routinely resolve their anxieties about t
aking care of their children by killing them without remorse also convey this at
titude to their other children by demonstrating throughout their lives that thei
r personal existence is not important to them except as the children satisfy the
needs of the parents. As in most simple cultures, New Guinea mothers can be con
sidered infanticidal mode because they kill a third or more of their newborn-so
that most mothers have killed one or more of their children. Though the practice
is common, it is usually downplayed by anthropologists-Margaret Mead, for insta
nce, kept infanticide out of her published reports, but wrote in her letters hom
e such observations as "we've had one corpse float by, a newborn infant; they ar
e always throwing away infants here..."108 Some sense of its dimensions can be s
een in the imbalance of males over females at birth, ratios which run from 120-1
60 to 100.109 Since both male and female newborn are killed, this ratio obviousl
y only reflects the amount of excess female infanticide, so the combined rate of
infanticide is even higher. These high rates are common to the culture area; Bi
rdsell, for instance, estimated that the Australian Aborigines destroyed as many
as 50 percent of all infants110 and the first missionaries in Polynesia estimat
ed that two-thirds of the children were murdered by their parents."111 Another s
tudy cites an average sex ratio of 159 to 100 for children 1-5 years, which mean
s most families killed at least one child.112 Anthropologists commonly pass over
these statistics quickly, since high infanticide rates do not reflect well upon
their "pervasive love" claim. For instance,
299
Herdt claims that "Sambia love children, and it is hard to imagine that infantic
ide was done except in desperate circumstances."113 He then says that "throughou
t New Guinea, males outnumber females at birth, often in high ratios...For Sambi
a, the birthrate ratio is 120 male births to 100 female births." Despite this ou
t-of-balance birthrate ratio, Herdt claims "There was no female infanticide,"114
a biological impossibility. Although anthropologists commonly excuse infanticid
e as required by "necessity" and don't count it as part of the homicide rate the
ir informants themselves report otherwise when asked why they kill their infants
, stating they killed them because "children are too much trouble,"115 because t
he mothers were angry at their husbands,116 because they are "demon children,"11
7 because the baby "might turn out to be a sorcerer,"118 "because her husband wo
uld go to another woman" for sex if she had to nurse the infant,119 because they
didn't want babies to tie them down in their sexual liaisons,120 because it was
a female and must be killed because "they leave you in a little while"121 or "t
hey don't stay to look after us in our old age." 122 Infanticide by mothers can
be thought of as an early form of post-partum depression. Siblings commonly watc
h their mothers kill their siblings and are sometimes forced to take part in the
murder. In many tribes, the newborn is "tossed to the sows, who promptly devour
it. The woman then takes one of the farrows belonging to the sow who first atta
cked her baby's corpse and nurses it at her breast."123 Pigs, by the way, are co
mmonly nursed by women at their breasts,124 then often used for sacrificial purp
oses and discarded thus disproving the notion that infanticide is made necessary
because of lack of breast milk. Even when the baby is buried, it is often found
by other children: "the mother...buries it alive in a shallow hole that the bab
y's movements may be seen in the hole as it is suffocating and panting for breat
h; schoolchildren saw the movements of such a dying baby and wanted to take it o
ut to save it. However, the mother stamped it deep in the ground and kept her fo
ot on it..."125 Anthropologists often report the infanticidal actions of New Gui
nea mothers without noticing what they are actually doing. As a typical instance
, Willey reports in his book Assignment New Guinea that a group of mothers were
gathered outside the police station to protest some government action, yelling,
"Kill our children." Willey says, "One woman in the front line hurled her baby a
t the police, shouting, "'Go on, kill my child!' When the senior officer caught
it and handed it back to the mother, she held it up and yelled, 'Kill my baby.'"
126 Invariably, these mothers are reported as very loving, not infanticidal.
300
In some parts of New Guinea and Australia, mothers are both child murderers and
cannibals, who commonly kill both their own and others' children and feed them t
o their siblings.127 The most complete description of the practice comes from Ro
heim: It had been the custom for every second child to be eaten by the preceding
child...When the Yumu, Pindupi, Ngali, or Nambutji were hungry, they ate small
children with neither ceremonial nor animistic motives. Among the southern tribe
s, the Matuntara, Mularatara, or Pitjentara, every second child was eaten in the
belief that the strength of the first child would be doubled...[My informants]
had, each of them, eaten one of their brothers....They eat the head first, then
the arms, feet, and finally the body. Jankitji, Uluru and Aldinga have all eaten
their siblings....Daisy Bates writes: 'Baby cannibalism was rife among these ce
ntral-western people...In one group...every woman who had a baby had killed and
eaten it, dividing it with her sisters, who in turn killed their children at bir
th and returned the gift of food, so that the group had not preserved a single l
iving child for some years. When the frightful hunger for baby meat overcame the
mother before or at the birth of the baby, it was killed and cooked regardless
of sex.'"128 Roheim states with great conviction though providing no evidence th
at the children who were forced to eat their siblings "are the favored ones who
started life with no oral trauma,"129 that eating one's siblings "doesn't seem t
o have affected the personality development" of these children,130 and that "the
se are good mothers who eat their own children."131 When I suggested in Foundati
ons of Psychohistory132 that it was doubtful that children remained unaffected b
y being forced to join in their mother's killing and eating of their siblings, a
reviewer, Robert Paul, editor of Ethos, the journal of psychological anthropolo
gy, was adamant that no one may question Roheim's rosy conclusions: Remember tha
t the anthropologist in question here is Roheim himself, who can hardly be accus
ed of being psychoanalytically unsophisticated, or of denying or resisting. Inde
ed, deMause readily accepts his reportage about the facts. Why does he question
his conclusion? Roheim was nobody's fool. If deMause, sitting in New York, knows
better than Roheim what is "aboriginal reality," then once again we are back in
never-never land and not in the realm of empirical science.133 Most ethnologist
s avoid describing how these children feel about participating in the killing or
eating of their siblings. Lindenbaum simply says of the Fore tribe that "cannib
alism was largely limited to adult women [and] to children of both sexes"134 but
doesn't mention that the mothers force the children to eat human flesh and does
n't say how they reacted to this. Gillison reports that Gimi mothers feed the fl
esh to their older children and say it is "the sweetest thing...'You are still a
small
301
boy,' my mother said to me, 'so let me give you this.' And she gave me some meat
....A woman might have partaken of her own son, some women allowed, but she left
the cutting to her co-wives, daughters, or daughters of her co-wives. 'His moth
er ate the penis,' one woman said..."135 Only Poole actually reported the reacti
on of one group of New Guinea children to their witnessing of their parents eati
ng some children: Having witnessed their parents' mortuary anthropophagy, many o
f these children suddenly avoided their parents, shrieked in their presence, or
expressed unusual fear of them. After such experiences, several children recount
ed dreams or constructed fantasies about animal-man beings with the faces or oth
er features of particular parents who were smeared with blood and organs.136 Sin
ce Poole's children had only witnessed their parents' cannibalism, those childre
n who are forced to actually join in and help kill and then eat their siblings c
an be expected to show even more internalization of murderous monsters and life-
long fears of devouring witches fears which, unsurprisingly, are common to most
New Guinea cultures. These infanticidal societies are in fact identical to conte
mporary cults that force children to murder and even eat the flesh of babies, wi
th profound life-long traumatic effects upon their psyches-cult rituals which in
a series of articles in The Journal of Psychohistory have been demonstrated to
be well-documented, eyewitnessed, brought to court and criminal convictions obta
ined from skeptical juries in a majority of the cases studied.137 Individuals or
groups who murder and eat babies are in fact severely schizoid personalities138
who handle their own rage, engulfment fears and devouring emotional demands by
either murdering children to wipe out the demands they project into them or by e
ating them in order to act out their identification with devouring internal alte
rs. Indeed, anthropologists are only reflecting their own denial rather than loo
king at the evidence when they conclude that the ubiquitous infanticide in New G
uinea is really a good thing for children because then "children are desired and
highly valued [because] there is no such thing as an unwanted child."139 As one
step beyond their need to murder children, infanticidal societies are commonly
found to treat children as erotic objects, again in a perverse attempt to deal w
ith their own severe anxieties, repeatedly sexually abusing them in incest, pede
rasty and rape. It is to this sexual use of babies and older children in New Gui
nea that we will now turn.
302
INCEST AND THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN IN NEW GUINEA As with infanticide, the s
exual abuse of children is widely reported by anthropologists, but in positive t
erms: maternal incest is seen as indulging the infant's sexual needs, oral and a
nal rape of boys is described as both desirable and as desired by the boys and r
ape of both girls and boys is presented as an unmotivated "cultural" artifact. I
will begin with the use by mothers of their infants as erotic objects. Anthropo
logists maintain that "the incest taboo is the very foundation of culture"140 an
d that "the taboo on incest within the immediate family is one of the few known
cultural universals."141 The culturally-approved sexual use of children, therefo
re, must be renamed wherever it is found as something other than incest. Ford an
d Beach's widely-cited Patterns of Sexual Behavior makes this false distinction
clear: incest, they say, "excludes instances in which mothers or fathers are per
mitted to masturbate or in some other sexual manner to stimulate their very youn
g children,"142 then going on to call incest rare. The authoritative Growing Up:
A CrossCultural Encyclopedia covers 87 cultures in which it says there is no in
cest, just adults playing with, stroking, masturbating and sucking their baby's
genitals: "Truk adults play with an infant's genitals...In China, Manchu mothers
tickle the genitals of their little daughters and suck the penis of a small son
...in Thailand, a Banoi mother habitually strokes her son's genitals."143 But ag
ain this isn't incest. Davenport's crosscultural study similarly concludes that
"Mother-son incest is so rare that it is insignificant and irrelevant [since] ge
nital stimulation as a means of pacifying a child may be regarded as nonsexual..
."144 Konker reviews cross-cultural adult-child sexual relations and finds that
"the ethnographic record contains many...examples of normative adult/child sexua
l contact" but said this isn't a problem since experts have found there is "no r
eason to believe that sexual contact between an adult and child is inherently wr
ong or harmful."145 Korbin's Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspective
s likewise finds that mothers masturbating children is widespread in her large s
ample, but she says it is not incest since the society doesn't call it incest: I
n some societies, children's genitals are fondled to amuse and please them, calm
them or lull them to sleep...This would not constitute 'abuse' if in that socie
ty the behavior was not proscribed and was not for the purposes of adult sexual
satisfaction, even if the adult tangentially experienced some degree of pleasure
.146 Since the use of infants and children as erotic objects is so common crossc
ulturally,147 it is not surprising that New Guinea adults also commonly use thei
r
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children sexually. Babies in particular are treated as if they were breasts, to
be sucked and masturbated all day long. Whenever ethnologists mention childhood
in any detail, they often begin with such comments as, "My strongest impression
among women was created by their incessant fondling of infants"148 or "As babies
and small children their genitalia are fondled."149 As with most infanticidal m
others, this sexual fondling most often occurs when the mother is nursing the ba
by (or even older child, mothers nursing until the child is three to six years o
f age), since nursing is highly erotic, occurring over a hundred times a day or
as often as the mother needs the stimulation to overcome her depression.150 Gill
ison describes the process of masturbating infants among the Gimi: The mother in
sists upon continued contact, interrupting her toddler's play repeatedly to offe
r the breast. Masturbation...with a baby girl [occurs when] the mother or amau h
olds her hand over the vulva and shakes it vigorously. She may kiss the vagina,
working her way up the middle of the body to the lips and then inserting her nip
ple (often when the child has given no sign of discontent). With a boy, she kiss
es the penis, pulls at it with her fingers and takes it into her mouth to induce
an erection. Several women may pass a baby boy back and forth, each one holding
him over her head as she takes a turn sucking or holding the penis in her mouth
. When the child then pulls at his own organ, the women, greatly amused, offer s
queezes and pulls of their own.151 Many ethnologists in the New Guinea-Australia
n area notice the connection between nursing and the erotic use of infants, firs
t describing the mother putting her nipple into the baby's mouth whenever it cri
es, even if it is not hungry, while massaging her other breast and "caressing th
e fleshy parts of its body...and implanting breathy kisses over and over again i
n the region of its genital organs."152 Only Hippler, however, notices the inces
tuous trance the Yolngu mother goes into while nursing and masturbating her chil
d: the child is sexually stimulated by the mother...Penis and vagina are caresse
d...clearly the action arouses the mother. Many mothers develop blissful smiles
or become quite agitated (with, we assume, sexual stimulation) and their nipples
apparently harden during these events. Children...are encouraged to play with t
heir mothers' breasts, and...are obviously stimulated sexually...153 Maternal in
cest, like other sexual perversions, will often also reveal the sadism of the mo
ther as she uses the child as an erotic sadistic object to overcome her depressi
on and despair-which is rooted in her own loveless childhood. As Poole reports,
"It should be noted that these erotic acts are often somewhat rough. Mothers'
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stimulation of the penis may involve pulling, pinching, and twisting in a manner
that produces struggling and crying in infant boys. Also, I have treated many w
omen whose nipples had been bruised and lacerated by their infants."154 Similarl
y, in addition to masturbation during nursing, Roheim reports that mothers will
sometimes "lie on their sons in the [female on top] position and freely masturba
te them" at night.155 That all this masturbation of children by parents is socia
lly acceptable is shown by how often the mothers do it in front of the anthropol
ogist. 156 This helps explain why children in the area spend so much of their ti
me when playing with dolls making them repeat over and over again the cunnilingu
s, masturbation, anal penetration, intercourse and other incestuous acts which t
heir parents had inflicted on them: "their only, and certainly their supreme, ga
me was coitus."157 The incestuous use of children in New Guinea and Australia ex
tends to the other Melanesian and Polynesian islands, although as the societies
become more complex the sexual practices become more ritualized. For instance, i
n the Marquesas Islands, besides simple masturbation of infants,158 "the mons Ve
neris is massaged during infancy and girlhood...accompanied by stretching of the
labia to elongate them. This was done by the mother during the daily bath. The
child was seized by the ankles and its legs held apart while the mother manipula
ted the labia with her lips."159 In Hawaii, a "blower" is designated for each ma
le infant, ostensibly to prepare him for subincision of the foreskin, and "the p
enis was blown into daily starting from birth. The blowing was said to loosen an
d balloon the foreskin [and] continued daily...until the young male was 6 or 7."
160 For infant females in Hawaii, "milk was squirted into her vagina, and the la
bia were pressed together. The mons was rubbed with candlenut oil and pressed wi
th the palm of the hand to flatten it...the molding continued until the labia di
d not separate. This chore usually was done by the mother..."161 The Ponap islande
rs "pulled and tugged at the labia of the little girls to lengthen them, while m
en pulled on the clitoris, rubbing it and licking it with their tongues and stim
ulating it by the sting of a big ant..."162 This oral manipulation of the labia
and clitoris extends to many of the other Pacific islands.163 Mothers are not th
e only ones to use their infants as sexual objects. Although fathers in New Guin
ea are often reported avoiding their infants during the nursing years because th
ey say they get sexually aroused when they watch them nurse, 164 when they do ha
ndle their infants, they too are reported as using them erotically. In the New G
uinea Highlands, Langness reports "There was a great deal of fondling of the boy
s' penes by males. Women fondled infants but not older boys. Individuals of both
sexes would pick up infants and mouth their genitals..."165" Like all other
305
anthropologists who report the regular masturbating and sucking of children's ge
nitals, he calls this love: "Any adult is apt to love and fondle any child almos
t at random."166 Roheim, too, describes similarly widespread oral-genital contac
t by fathers: "The father...stimulates [his children] sexually at a very early p
eriod while they are still being carried. He playfully smells the vagina or touc
hes it with his mouth; with the boys he playfully bites the penis..."167 It is t
his common use of the child as a breast by the father that is mistaken by so man
y anthropologists as "close, loving fathering" in New Guinea and elsewhere. Virt
ually all anthropologists report the long maternal nursing period of from three
to six years as "nurturant" and "loving," assuming without evidence that this un
iversal incessant nursing is done to satisfy the child's needs, not the mother's
. Only one, Gilbert Herdt, interviewing the Sambia with the help of the psychoan
alyst Robert J. Stoller, asked the mothers directly about their sexual feelings
during nursing. The Sambia, like most New Guinea groups, have prolonged postpart
um taboos that prohibit couples from engaging in coitus for at least two and a h
alf years following the birth of each child.168 Anthropologists always portray t
hese postpartum prohibitions as unexplained "cultural beliefs," as though there
were no personal motive for them, but in fact they are simply practices chosen t
o express the mothers' desire to use their children rather than their spouses fo
r sexual arousal. Since a taboo this long means women choose to have sex with th
eir children rather than their husbands for much of their lives, it is obvious t
hat they are unable to achieve the level of mature love relationships, and inste
ad, like other incestuous individuals, need to have sex with children in order t
o counter deep feelings of depression. 169 Like all infanticidal mothers, New Gu
inea mothers, unloved themselves in childhood, feared as polluted by her society
, devoid of intimacy with her husband, needs her children rather than loves them
. The motive for New Guinea maternal incest is clearest in the case of the Sambi
a, for the mothers in this group report regularly having orgasms during nursing.
170 Herdt's informants told him that when they breast-fed their children they fe
lt orgasms that were "the same" as when having intercourse with a man, 171 and t
hat "all the women feel that...not just me...all of them do."172 So powerful is
this ability to orgasm during nursing that even thinking about nursing can provi
de sexual excitement for the mother: P: Then my baby thinks, "My mother doesn't
bring back my milk quickly, so I am crying and crying waiting for her." He cries
and cries and waits. And when he thinks that, then my breasts have to have an i
mbimboogu [orgasm].
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H: You're saying that at that time, that's when you're feeling imbimboogu, when
you walk about? P: Yeah...I'm hot in the nipples, inside.173 Herdt asks Stoller
what this means, saying "as she's walking back to the hamlet, she has this exper
ience she's calling an orgasm. I mean, it doesn't, can't...sound believable."174
Stoller reports that occasionally "women in our society report genuine orgasms
with suckling,"175 though this is rare compared to the mothers in New Guinea.176
Since Poole was the only New Guinea ethnologist who interviewed both mothers an
d children, he obtained the most complete reports of maternal incest. 177 Like i
nfanticidal psychoclass mothers everywhere, Bimin-Kuskusmin mothers consider the
ir babies to be part of their own bodies, "never permitting the infant to be det
ached from contact with her body" and breastfeeding the baby "not only on demand
, but also sometimes by force," whenever the mother needs the stimulation.178 Mo
thers, Poole says, constantly masturbate the penes of their baby boys, while try
ing not to let their incest get out of hand: She is expected to masturbate him p
eriodically to ensure the growth of his genitalia, but she must carefully avoid
the excessive development of erotic 'infant lust' which may injure his finiik [s
pirit]...When mothers rub the penes of their infant sons, the little boys wriggl
e on their mothers' laps and have erections. These tiny erections bring laughter
. It is play. It will make their penes big when they are older. But 'infantile l
ust' can become too strong and can damage the growing "spirit or life-force" (fi
niik) of little boys. You will see mothers and sons together in this way everywh
ere.179 Much of the ribald joking among mothers is for the purpose of denying th
at the erotic use of the child is in fact incest-it is blamed on the infant's "l
ust" only-for only "bad" mothers "are believed to stimulate their sons beyond th
e bounds of 'infantile lust' in order to satisfy their own sexual desires..."180
Those mothers who completely give in to their own "lust" are called "witches" w
ho are said to be "driven...to destroy all aspects of masculinity through jealou
sy and rage" 181 a condition all women can fall into, particularly when they are
young, inexperienced mothers or are treated harshly by their husband's family.
In order to prove that she isn't being too lustful, mothers deliberately cover t
heir breasts with bark cloth when they are stimulating the penis in a ritually p
rescribed manner. Indeed, this often highly ostentatious act of covering the bre
asts is a display to an ever-watchful public that the mother is acting properly
in tending her son. On occasion, I have witnessed
307
older women admonish a young mother for failing to cover her breasts when rubbin
g her son's genitals.182 More privacy is afforded at night, however, when mother
s can rub against their children's entire bodies because they sleep naked with t
heir them, "together in each other's arms" and when they also can "regularly rub
" the boy's penis to erection.183 That these infants and children who are used a
s erotic objects function as poison containers for the mothers' split-off and de
nied anxieties and anger is quite clear. Poole interviewed one young boy, Buukti
in, who described how when his mother was depressed or angry she often "pulled,
pinched, rubbed, or flicked a fingernail against his penis"184 until he cried, a
fraid it might break off. "When he struggled to escape, she held him tightly and
rubbed his penis even harder."185 Kiipsaak [his mother] had masturbated him ear
lier as mothers often do...[But] now she increased the tempo and roughness of th
e episodes...and he often jerked at her touch and struggled to get away, hitting
her and complaining of throbbing pain in his penis. 'It hurts inside. It goes '
koong, koong, koong' inside. I think it bleeds in there. I don't like to touch i
t anymore. It hurts when I pee."186 Like so many victims of maternal incest, Buu
ktiin constantly cuts himself, both to get the "bad maternal blood" out of himse
lf, since he feels polluted by the constant incest, and to punish himself, since
children regularly blame themselves for the mother's sexual abuse: Sometimes af
ter such [incestuous] encounters, he wounded himself slightly in the thigh and t
he abdomen with a sharp stick and with slow deliberation, drawing blood and watc
hing his penis. "Now it hurts here, outside, not in penis. Look, blood. Feels go
od...Good to be a girl, no penis...Mother twist penis, tight, tight...Hurt, hurt
, inside. Cry, she not listen. Why? She cut off father's penis? She cut off mine
? Father tell her, cut off Buuktiin's penis? Mother angry, hurt Buuktiin's penis
. Mother sad, hurt Buuktin's penis...Mother not like Buuktiin's penis, want to c
ut off."187 No better description can be imagined of the infanticidal, incestuou
s mother using her child as a poison container to handle her depression: mother
wants to annihilate her inner tormentors, she kills her child; mother needs sex
to counter her depression and deadness, she masturbates it; mother is angry or s
ad, she twists and hurts his penis.
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MATERNAL REJECTION IN NEW GUINEA The "love" of the infanticidal mode parent is m
ainly evident when the child is useful as an erotic object. When children are of
f the breast or otherwise not useful, they are rejected as emotionally meaningle
ss. The infanticidal parents' emotional bond does not really acknowledge the sep
arate existence of the child, whose main function is to provide "bodily stimulat
ion [that] helps the mother to come alive, and she seeks this from the child...c
ountering her feelings of lethargy, depression, and deadness."188 As with all pe
dophiles, the child is a "sexual object...that must show a readiness to comply,
lend itself to be manipulated, used, abused [and] discarded..."189 There is neve
r just "incest" it is always "incest/rejection." There are many ways New Guinea
parents demonstrate that when the child cannot be used erotically, it is useless
. One is that as soon as infants are not being nursed, they are paid no attentio
n, and even when in danger are ignored. Anthropologists regularly notice that li
ttle children play with knives or fire and adults ignore them. Edgerton comments
on the practice: "Parents allowed their small children to play with very sharp
knives, sometimes cutting themselves, and they permitted them to sleep unattende
d next to the fire. As a result, a number of children burned themselves seriousl
y...it was not uncommon to see children who had lost a toe to burns, and some we
re crippled by even more severe burns."190 Langness says in the Bena Bena "it wa
s not at all unusual to see even very small toddlers playing with sharp bush kni
ves with no intervention on the part of caretakers." 191 But this is good, say t
he anthropologists, since when "children as young as two or three are permitted
to play with objects that Westerners consider dangerous, such as sharp knives or
burning brands from the fire, [it] tends to produce assertive, confident, and c
ompetent children."192 Children, they explain, are allowed to "learn by observat
ions...e.g., the pain of cutting oneself when playing carelessly with a knife."1
93 As Whiting says, when he once saw a Kwoma baby "with the blade of a twelve-in
ch bush knife in his mouth and the adults present paid no attention to him," thi
s was good for the infant, since in this way "the child learns to discriminate b
etween the edible and inedible."194 Margaret Mead is particularly ecstatic about
the wisdom of mothers making infants learn to swim early by allowing them to fa
ll into the water under the hut when crawling and slipping through gaps in the f
loor or falling overboard into the sea because they were "set in the bow of the
canoe while the mother punts in the stern some ten feet away."195 Children are e
xperienced by mothers as extensions of their bodies, and any separation or indep
endence is seen as rejection of the mother, as reminders of the severe rejection
of the mothers' own childhood. Mothers do not allow others to nurse
309
their children, saying their milk is "poison," and even do not allow their one-
to twoyear-olds to visit their relatives for fear they would "poison" them. 196
When a mother dies, often the "infant would be buried with her even if perfectly
healthy,"197 and if the infant dies, "the mother remains secluded with it for d
ays, wailing, attempting to nurse it," blaming it by saying "I told you not to d
ie. But you did not hear me! You did not listen!"198 When infants begin to show
any sign of independence, they are either wholly rejected and ignored or forced
to stay still. Typical is the Wogeo child, who Hogbin describes as often being "
put in a basket, which is then hung on a convenient rafter...or tree" and "disco
uraged from walking and not allowed to crawl...[forced to] sit still for hours a
t a time [and only] make queer noises" as he or she is immobilized to avoid even
the slightest movement of independence from the mother.199 Anthropologists regu
larly see these ubiquitous New Guinea baskets and net bags in which the infants
are trapped and in which they are often hung on a tree as "comforting," even tho
ugh it means that the infants often live in their own feces and urine and can ne
ither crawl nor interact with others. Only Hippler describes them as a function
of the mothers' pattern of "near absolute neglect" of her child when it is not b
eing used erotically.200 Parental rejection in preliterate cultures is often ove
rt it is what Boyer found was called "throwing the child away." Boyer discovered
that "a great many mothers abandon or give children away; babies they have been
nursing lovingly only hours before," when he and his wife were offered their ba
bies, a practice he ascribed to the mothers' "shallow object relations."201 Few
anthropologists have seen the high adoption and fosterage rates in the New Guine
a area-some as high as 75 percent202 as rejection, but of course that is what it
is. Child rejection is widely institutionalized in various forms, usually after
weaning, when the infant has stopped being useful as an erotic object. In the T
robriands, for instance, "the transfer of children who have already been weaned
from true parents to other parents is a frequent occurrence..." 203 Anthropologi
sts usually see giving away a child as evidence of parental love. Kasprus, for i
nstance, says the Raum really "love and like children," but that "although they
love children they may readily give one away..."204 Mead describes the giving of
a child away by her parents as a "happy" event. The occasion is a family giving
a seven-year-old girl to the family of her betrothed, an older man: The little
girl is taken by her parents and left in the home of her betrothed. Here her lif
e hardly differs at all from the life that she led at home....Towards her young
husband, her attitude is one of complete trust and acceptance....He calls out to
her to light his pipe, or to feed his dog...she becomes warmly attached...I ask
ed her: "Did you cry when you first went to Liwo?" "No, I did not cry. I am very
strong."205
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Rejection of the child when off the breast is ubiquitous in New Guinea. Small ch
ildren are rarely looked at or talked to. Whereas in American families an averag
e of 28 minutes of an average hour is spent talking to and interacting with the
child (including an average of 341 utterances per hour),206 in at least one New
Guinea study mothers were found to interact with their children only one minute
out of each hour.207 The millions of looks, communications, admirations, mirrori
ng and emotional negotiations between mother and child the "emotional dialogue t
hat fosters the beginnings of a sense of self, logical communications and the be
ginnings of purposefulness"208 are simply missing for the New Guinea child. The
result is that the early self system in the orbitofrontal cortex has no chance t
o develop, and since "the orbitofrontal cortex functionally mediates the capacit
y to empathize with the feelings of others and to reflect on internal emotional
states, one's own and others," 209 when these emotionally rejected children grow
up they are unable to empathize with others or have much insight into their own
emotions. Since to the infanticidal mother, as Hippler puts it, "the child is a
n unconscious representative of [her own] mother, his autonomous actions are see
n by the mother as abandonment. The response on the part of the mother to this '
abandonment' by her infant...is anger" and rejection.210 Mothers throughout the
South Pacific are said to "hold their small infants facing away from them and to
ward other people while the mother speaks for them rather than to them."211 Obvi
ously the infant is an extension of the mother's body, not an independent human
being at all. "No one says very much to babies,"212 and when they begin to walk,
they are felt to be abandoning the parent and are emotionally rejected. As Hipp
ler puts it, I never observed a single adult Yolngu caretaker of any age or sex
walking a toddler around, showing him the world, explaining things to him and em
pathizing with his needs. While categorical statements are most risky, I am most
certain of this.213 This emotional rejection and lack of verbalization has been
widely noted among infanticidal mode parents in simple societies.214 When the b
aby stops being a breast-object, it simply doesn't exist. In my New Guinea child
hood files, for instance, I have over 1,000 photos from books and articles showi
ng adults and childrenincluding one book of over 700 photos of Fore children tak
en randomly so as to capture their daily lives.215 Virtually all the photos capt
ure the adults continuously caressing, rubbing, kissfeeding and mouthing the chi
ldren's bodies, but only two show an adult actually looking at the child. Not a
single one shows a mutual gaze between the adult and child which Schore contends
is the basis of formation of the
311
self. The photos illuminate Read's description of the "customary greeting, a sta
nding embrace in which both men and women handled each other's genitals...hands
continually reaching out to caress a thigh, arms to encircle a waist, and open,
searching mouths hung over a child's lips, nuzzled a baby's penis, or closed wit
h a smack on rounded buttocks."216 This emotional abandonment is further confirm
ed by Boram, who recorded every detail of a typical day of one six-year-old Ok g
irl. Interactions or talking to the mother were found to be rare, while the chil
d spent the day going about looking for food, hunting frogs and cooking them, "f
ondling" babies and pretending to nurse piglets from her breast. Boram concludes
that for Ok children "most of the day is spent simply in killing time..."217 It
is not surprising that he also mentions that tantrums are frequent and suicide
is high among these children, and that he observed many "episodes of insanity" i
n Ok children.218 MALNUTRITION AND THE WEANING CRISIS IN NEW GUINEA So difficult
is it for New Guinea area mothers to relate to their children as independent hu
man beings that they are unable to feed them regularly once they are off the bre
ast. Like contemporary pedophiles, they do not so much love their children as ne
ed them, so when the parents' needs end, the child can be emotionally abandoned.
When still on the breast, New Guinea children are constantly being force-fed, s
o that nursing "becomes a battle in which the mother clutches the child, shaking
it up and down with the nipple forced into its mouth until it must either suck
or choke."219 As soon as they are off the breast, however, the mothers no longer
need them as erotic objects, and they have difficulty understanding that their
children need three meals a day. Although there is almost always plenty of food
to eat for both adults and children, "several authors have stressed what appears
to be a nonchalant attitude toward infant and child feeding on the part of Papu
a New Guinea mothers,"220 so that "over 90 percent of children under five have b
een measured as having mild to moderate undernutrition."221 In one careful stati
stical study, almost all children remained underweight for years, because "none
were fed three times daily as clinic sisters encourage..."222 In the New Guinea-
Australian culture area, meat, in particular, is rarely given to children, being
eaten up by the adults first.223 Hippler reports that "parents eat all the subs
tantial food...before the child can get any. Adults...do not believe that deaths
result from anything but sorcery, they make no connection between these practic
es and childhood illness and attendant death."224 In a careful study of Kwanga c
hild malnutrition, two-year-olds who had been weaned were found to average only
two meals a day, so that child mortality was extremely high.225 Nurses in the cl
inic kept telling the mothers, "Why
312
don't you tell me the truth? You do not feed your child properly!" but the mothe
rs didn't seem to comprehend why it was necessary to feed them regularly each da
y, and so the weaned children kept losing weight and even dying.226 In her book
on child malnourishment in New Guinea, Patricia Townsend cites all the studies s
howing the majority of children are underweight between age one and four, emphas
izing that the toddler group-after weaning-are most malnourished, since the moth
ers do not feed them regularly.227 Children are constantly being described by ob
servers as throwing tantrums "for hours" trying to get food, "standing in the mi
ddle of the house floor and shrieking monotonously until someone stops work to c
ook for them."228 Anthropologists ascribe these constant hunger tantrums to chil
dren's willfulness, agreeing with a chuckle with the natives' saying that "young
children have only one thought/emotion, which is to eat,"229 unable to empathiz
e with the despair of the hungry, unloved, lonely, rejected children they see th
rowing the tantrums. Similarly, once the infant is off the breast both the paren
ts and the anthropologists seem unable to empathize with the feelings of the chi
ldren as they are subjected to all kinds of tortures which anthropologists dismi
ss as merely "cultural practices" and therefore consider as unmotivated. For ins
tance, babies in many areas have their skulls deformed, highly elongated with pa
infully tight bindings that are renewed every day for months.230 Making infants
crawl over dead bodies and terrorizing little children with frightening masks an
d threats of devouring witches is quite common.231 Children are also regularly d
escribed as "shouted at, jerked roughly, slapped, shaken" bitten and hit with st
icks 232 yet the standard study on child abuse in New Guinea claims they are "ra
rely abused" because although "it is not uncommon for adults to strike children.
..there is no such thing as a formal spanking."233 Since only formal disciplinar
y spankings as we administer them in the West seem to count as child abuse, anth
ropologists regularly conclude that "child abuse...is virtually unknown" in New
Guinea.234 INFANTICIDAL PARENTING AND PARENTING IN OTHER PRIMATES Most New Guine
a area parenting practices from infanticide and maternal incest to the inability
to feed properly-are shared with other primate parents, thus lending further cr
edence to the conclusion that they still have a childrearing mode that is rather
close to that of our earliest ancestors. The inability of most non-human primat
es to share food with their children after weaning is well established. Jane Lan
caster sums up primate post-weaning behavior:
313
...adults are not responsible for seeing that young have enough to eat...[even]
an injured or sick youngster still has to feed itself and get itself to water or
it will die virtually before the eyes of other group members. Individuals who w
ould risk their own lives in defense of the youngster are psychologically incapa
ble of seeing its need for them to bring it food and water. Once weaned, then, y
oung monkeys and apes must feed themselves...235 The primate mother nurses her i
nfant only for the erotic pleasure it affords, not for "love" of her child. Like
the New Guinea mother, she has difficulty conceiving that her child is hungry.
After the suckling period, primate mothers almost never give any kind of food to
their infants. "Even gorilla infants have never been seen being given solid foo
d by their mothers."236 In fact, primate mothers are often observed to grab food
from their offspring, who must get by on "tolerated scrounging" of leftovers.23
7 Like New Guinea mothers, chimpanzee mothers are described as losing interest i
n their children when off the breast, often rejecting and punishing them. 238 Th
e result of this severe maternal rejection is that there is a "weaning crisis" f
or primates when they abruptly must learn to find food for themselves, a deadly
rejection process that kills from one-third to three-fourths of them before they
reached adulthood.239 Primates parallel human infanticidal mode parents in othe
r ways too. They frequently give away their infants a practice called "alloparen
ting,"240 which often results in the infant being abused, abandoned or killed.24
1 Primates are also infanticidal, cannibalistic and incestuous.242 Indeed, there
appears to be only a relatively small degree of childrearing evolution between
our nearest primate ancestors and infanticidal mode parenting such as that in Ne
w Guinea. Lovejoy 243 cites the high infant mortality of primates during weaning
he places it at around 40 percent as evidence that early hominids estimated at
over 50 percent infant mortality244 had difficulty feeding their children once o
ff the breast, just as New Guinea mothers still do today. THE FUNCTION OF CHILD
GANGS IN NEW GUINEA After the mother rejects the child during weaning, he or she
must rely on peers in child gangs for much of its needs. A cross-cultural study
of this pattern among preliterate groups concludes: In one ethnography after an
other there is a description of intense mother-infant contact...until weaning, a
nd outright maternal hostility and rejection afterward...
314
Children typically eat with other children in these groups after weaning, often
in outright scramble competition when food is scarce. The description of this pa
ttern usually goes with assurances by the ethnographer that the child receives '
emotional support' from peers and from others in the group. Our bet is that any
of these kids would prefer a square meal to emotional support. The point here is
that many people in the world do not share our American middle-class view that
children need and deserve a lot of input. They treat children much as other prim
ate parents treat their children...245 Throughout the New Guinea area, children
are "not only turned loose for the daylight hours but also actively discouraged
from returning to the parents" and so are forced to join "a transient gang."246
As is usual in gangs, the older children "lord it over" the younger, often beat
them and make them their servants,247 particularly their sexual servants, since
they were used to constant sexual stimulation by their parents as studies have s
hown, "incestuous children are uncommonly erotic...easily aroused...and readily
orgasmic."248 Malinowsky was one of the first to report sexual intercourse begin
ning at age four in the Trobriand Islands, where "children are initiated by each
other, or sometimes by a slightly older companion, into the practices of sex,"
including oral stimulation, masturbation, and anal or vaginal intercourse.249 Ot
hers since then have confirmed the pattern: The boys poke sticks into each other
s' anuses...If parents see boys having sex with little girls they joke about it
and laugh. 'Good. You can do it. Your mothers and fathers did this...'"250 The y
ounger children are of course raped by the older ones, although this is never ob
vious in the language of the anthropologist, who usually says some neutral phras
e like "they are typically initiated into intercourse by older and more experien
ced children,"251 as though the older child was only a helpful teacher. The same
misleading language is used when describing young girls "subjected at about age
eight to ten to serial sexual intercourse by adult men...to procure sexual flui
ds for rubbing on the girl's groom-to-be, to help him grow,"252 as though this w
eren't simple gang rape. Some anthropologists even claim that the raping of litt
le children by child gangs is "healthy," because, as Kurtz puts it, "the group s
educes a child out of immaturity by offering and imposing on that child multiple
experiences of sexual pleasure..."253 Studies of children who have been sexuall
y abused by their parents show they were "highly eroticized"254 and often restag
ed their own seductions on other children. In New Guinea, the child gangs often
had their own houses in which to have sex, as in the Trobriand Islands, where "y
oung people usually do not sleep in their parents'
315
houses. They move to a small house next door or a few doors away...In this way,
they have the freedom of their own sleeping quarters to which they can bring the
ir lovers."255 Roheim says both boys and girls are constantly sexual, even with
their siblings: Homosexuality plays a conspicuous role in the life of a young gi
rl [using] little sticks wound around at the end so as to imitate the glans peni
s...All the virgin girls do this...One of them plays the male role and introduce
s the artificial penis into her cousin's vagina...they then rub their two clitor
ises together...At the age of eight or ten boys and girls frequently have their
own little houses...They do it first to their little sisters. Sipeta says that h
er older brothers every evening before they went to the girls would pet her this
way.256 Boys throughout the Melanesian and Polynesian areas take great pride in
"deflowering virgins," both individually and in gangs, and often "count coup" a
s to how many little girls they have deflowered."257 Parents encourage the rape;
Berndt describes how "children...are invited by a mother, older brother or sist
er, or some other person, to indulge in sexual intercourse with an adult or a ch
ild of the same age..."258 Gang raping children is often done as part of rituals
, as when Australian aborigines mutilate and rape their young girls: A most seve
re form of mutilation, introcism, was formerly practiced among Australian aborig
ines...the vagina of a pubertal girl was slit with a knife or torn open by the f
ingers of the operator, the purpose being to enlarge the vaginal opening. This p
ainful operation was immediately followed by forced intercourse with a group of
young men.259 Women, too, rape young boys; Firth describes how women would "cove
r the child and herself with a blanket and insert his penis in her genitals. She
lies on her back, holds the child on top of her and with her hand works his loi
ns."260 Anthropologists occasionally admit that child rape in New Guinea might b
e "sometimes associated with violence,"261 but usually claim it is voluntary, as
when Knauft claims rape of young girls by "between five and thirteen men" was "
willingly submitted to...in the belief that it was necessary to enhance their pe
rsonal fertility as well as that of the Marind cosmos."262 RAPE OF BOYS AS RESTA
GING OF MATERNAL INCEST When New Guinea boys begin to want to individuate at aro
und seven years of age, adult men, identifying with their desires to grow, begin
to experience severe growth panic and restage in various ways their maternal in
cest traumas. Mainly in the less-evolved South and Eastern Lowlands, this restag
ing takes the form of oral
316
and anal rape of the boys, as men force their penis into the boy's mouth or anus
the same way the mothers used them in forced erotic feeding as infants. Like pe
derasts who have been psychoanalyzed,263 New Guinea men fear women as incestuous
, engulfing mothers whose "menstrual blood could contaminate and kill them." By
raping boys, these pederasts reverse their own being passively used as erotic ob
jects and instead actively use the boys sexually. Thus the boys become sexual ob
jects devoid of the mother's frightening configurations, while restaging the mat
ernal rape of their own infancy. Both the boys and the men recognize the rape as
being like breast-feeding, rationalizing it as necessary for growth, telling th
e little boys, "You all won't grow by yourselves; if you sleep with the men you'
ll become a STRONG man...when you hold a man's penis, you must put it inside you
r mouth-he can give you semen...It's the same as your mother's breast milk."264
Among many groups, the fellatio of men by young boys occurs daily and continues
until puberty, when he then can begin raping younger boys himself. The swallowin
g of semen is so important that men often blame accidents on not drinking enough
. As one Juvu tribesman said about a man who had fallen from a tree, "He didn't
drink semen: that's why he fell." His friend agreed: "I still never stop thinkin
g about semen or eating it...[a] man who didn't [swallow semen] enough will die
quickly, like an airplane without gasoline!"265 The notion that boys must be giv
en semen to stop them from growing into females has a certain logic to New Guine
a people. Like all maternally incested children, they feel that being used sexua
lly by their mothers "pollutes their blood" and since the boys consider themselv
es responsible for the seduction they feel "full of women's pollution" and need
semen to "get mother's poison" out of them. Since as infants they were used erot
ically by always being rubbed against the mothers' bodies, they were intimately
familiar with her menstrual fluids, remaining with her in the menstrual hut,266
and so an explicit association is made between menstrual fluids and poison. Ever
yone therefore agrees that women's blood is so poisonous that sexual intercourse
at the wrong time can kill men and that wives can and do kill their husbands an
d children by giving them polluted food.267 Since attacks by witches and spirits
"follow the path of menstrual blood,"268 boys who remain "polluted" by mother's
blood are open to death by witchcraft, so during their whole lives this incestu
ous "maternal pollution" must be constantly removed through semen ingestion and
blood-letting rituals where men make incisions in the boys' bodies and rub sperm
into the cuts.269 Anthropologists often state that orally and anally raping boy
s is both chosen by and beneficial to them. Although occasionally they reveal th
at the boys "fear
317
punishment"270 and that their "first response to doing fellatio was fear that is
how most boys respond," they nevertheless conclude that the boys "do not just a
ccept fellatio: they want it."271 Like most pederasty defenders, they depict the
boys as "enthusiastically anticipating" their rape,272 and as "eager to suck" m
ens' penises and "enjoying" the rape with "fine erotic enthusiasm."273 Oral and
anal rapes are said to be "grounded in personal affection rather than obligation
" 274 and "have a positive effect on the boy's development."275 Some of the anth
ropologists are open pedophile supporters, who praise the "positive tradition of
paedophilia over the last hundred years" and term pederasty an "enormously nurt
urant relationship" in interviews in Paedika: The Journal of Paedophilia,276 one
even having been prosecuted for bringing New Guinea boys back to the U.S. and s
exually abusing them.277 Of the several hundred anthropologists whose work I hav
e researched, I found none who said pederasty was detrimental, agreeing instead
with the New Guinea natives that it was both desired by and beneficial to the vi
ctims. TORTURE AND MUTILATION AS PUNISHMENT FOR GROWTH Even in those Highland ar
eas that do not have ritualized pederasty, growth is psychologically felt to be
dangerous to adults, and so older children are everywhere tortured and mutilated
as punishment for their individuation and independence. Although these tortures
are called "initiation rituals" by anthropologists, they are less "initiations"
into anything than punishments for growing up. They dramatize a cleansing of ma
ternal poisons so boys can now be used by men for their projections. Most of the
m restage maternal traumas in one way or another. One ritual begins by blaming t
heir mothers as "evil defilers" of the boys who "have polluted and weakened thei
r sons" with their bad menstrual blood.278 Another describes how "bad polluted m
aternal blood" is purged from prepubertal Gahuka-Gama boys: The boys, placed in
the front ranks of the vast crowd, see a score of naked men standing in the rive
r exhibiting their erect penises and masturbating. Then, several of the men stri
de into the river where one takes two rolls of razor-sharp leaves and pushes the
m up and down his nostrils until blood gushes into the water...each initiate...i
s held firmly by his sponsor, while another man thrusts the leaves back and fort
h in his nostrils until the boys bleeds profusely into the river. After all of t
he initiates have been bled, [a man] doubles a length of cane and thrusts it dow
n his esophagus like a sword swallower and draws it back and forth until he vomi
ts into the water. The dangerous procedure is then carried out on the initiates
who are now weakened and slack from the bleeding.... As soon as the boys are out
of sight, the men verbally attack the women for being bad mothers and delaying
their sons' growth. A warrior holds up a bunch of
318
leaves soaked by the blood from the boys' noses, and...two men seize one of the
mothers and a warrior forces the bloody leaves down her throat while cursing her
...279 The ritual both demonstrates "we are all bleeding, polluted mothers here"
and tries to undo the feeling of being polluted by cutting the boys with the ra
zor-sharp leaves in their nostrils and the cane-sword down their throats. The bo
ys understandably "tremble, urinating and defecating in fear" during their tortu
re. 280 Yet the feeling of still being incested, polluted maternal sex-objects r
emains with them, since so many continue to bleed their noses, tongues or penise
s periodically the rest of their lives.281 Mead describes Arapesh men cutting th
eir penises to remove bad blood every time they experience growth anxiety: after
first intercourse with his wife, after erecting a new house, after initiating a
growing youth, etc.282 The cutting is clearly to remove the mother's polluted b
lood; as one informant put it, "We say [the mother's] blood and bad words enter
our skin and lodge there, so we expel it [by bleeding]."283 Boys are told: "You
[initiates] have been with your mothers...they have said 'bad words' to you, the
ir talk has entered your noses and prevented you from growing big."284 Some grou
ps additionally purge boys by such rites as penis-bleeding and the "painful proc
edure of lying with open eyes under a jet of water to cleanse the eyeballs" of f
emale pollution.285 That New Guinea teenage boys continue to cut themselves, oft
en their penises, after initiation rites shows they are self-injurious as punish
ment for the incest they have endured. Clinical studies of self-cutters show "ca
ses of self-injurious behavior are rare in...children who have not been physical
ly or sexually abused."286 Case histories of incest victims who slash themselves
sound very much like how New Guinea youth slashing their penises with crab claw
s: Leigh, now 25, had been sexually abused by her father...her mother told her t
hat only a "whore" would accuse her father of such things. "So here I was, 11 ye
ars old, standing in front of a mirror thinking, 'You filthy slut! You deserve e
verything you get!' Then I'd go into a trance almost, and cut my arms and legs w
ith a razor blade. Later I cut my breast and even my genitals because I learned
that those were the parts of my body that made me a whore."287 Although fathers
may use their girls sexually, they do not use their boys although in some areas
fathers rent out their boys to other men who do use them sexually, establishing
a "anus father" and "anus son" relationship.288 Genital mutilation, which is alw
ays punishment for growing up, also occurs in New Guinea. It is not, as Reik con
tends, "a punishment for incestuous wishes," 289 but
319
rather a self-punishment for real maternal incest for which children blame thems
elves. Genital mutilation rituals are cross-culturally correlated with exclusive
mother-infant skin-to-skin sleeping arrangements, where the father sleeps separ
ate, so the mother is likely to use the child incestuously.290 In the New Guinea
area, they are sometimes as brutal as the infamous Australian subincision, wher
e the penis is cut the length of its underside until it "splits open like a boil
ed frankfurter." 291 The long wound on the penis is then called a boy's "vagina,
"292 and the men have intercourse in it.293 In other New Guinea tribes who mutil
ate genitals, it usually involves cutting little pieces of the penis off. Girls,
too, are sometimes initiated by having their noses bled with leaves or having s
tinging nettles thrust up their vulvas before they are gang raped.294 Subincisio
n in the whole culture area is said to be accompanied by the mutilation of the g
irls' genitals; according to Montagu, it was "once widely practiced throughout A
ustralia and Oceania."295 Whether in the form of painful inch-long body incision
s, "often over a hundred,"296 or genital mutilations, New Guinea girls, too, are
cut as punishment for being sexual and for purging poisonous blood.297 Other pu
nishments during initiations for growing children include brutal beating with st
icks and stinging nettles, sometimes for months or years, being burned over a fi
re, being starved and tortured, being made to swallow lime which severely bliste
rs the boys' mouths and throats, shooting a miniature sharp-pointed arrow up gir
ls' urethras until blood is drawn, pushing barbed grass up the urethra, cutting
the glans penis with a crab claw, etc.298 Although one anthropologist mentioned
that "undoubtedly these rituals are exceedingly painful,"299 they are usually co
nsidered as neither nor as very traumatic to the children. Sometimes the "rebirt
h" of the boys by the purgings is accomplished by first crawling through the leg
s of the men and sometimes it is in the form of other death-and-rebirth rituals.
In either case, the rituals are a restaging of one of the most powerful traumas
New Guinea children must endure: watching their infanticidal mothers strangle o
r drown their newborn siblings. The ritual first restages the murder of the newb
orn and then undoes it by showing that men can bring babies back to life (while
mothers only want to kill babies.) The brutal initiation punishments are often c
ombined with gang rape by meneither, as in the Trans-Fly area, oral rape by all
villagers or visitors (combined with the pouring of lime down their throats to e
nsure the boys do not become pregnant) or as in the Marind, where anal rape is l
imited to the uncles. 300 Initiations are also often followed by war raids,301 s
ometimes a cannibalistic headhunt, to demonstrate to the boys how through group
violence they can actively identify with the infanticidal,
320
devouring mother and kill and eat people rather than being passively killed or e
aten by her. Bloch describes this transformation from victim alter to killer alt
er in his book, Prey Into Hunter: the transformation of the initiates from victi
ms into killers is a typical aspect of these rituals...men shouting that they ar
e spirits arrive as if from the forest and chase the children, maltreating them.
The intruders are terrifying: they advance biting and assaulting...and shouting
'Bite, bite, bite'. Meanwhile the parents beg the spirits not to 'kill' the chi
ldren. The reason that it is believed that the ritual may very possibly lead to
the death of the children [is] that this indeed happens not infrequently....[The
refore] from having been victims the children have become murderers...302 In add
ition to the brutality of persecutory initiation rituals, daily life with parent
s is full of physical and psychological abuse. One group of childhood memories t
ape recorded by one anthropologist regularly features "parents harshly punishing
" children, the following being typical: "She grabbed my arm, twisted it and bit
one of the small veins..." (mother); "they beat me until I was half-dead [then]
tied me to a tree and left me there for the night" (both parents); "He kicked m
e very hard and I fell over a large rock and hurt myself very badly. 'Kill her a
nd throw her away!' he said. When we return to Dandipe we will still have plenty
of other children to replace her." (father)303 Since empathy with children's fe
elings is nearly absent, gratuitous mutilation of the children is common, such a
s tightly binding newborn infants heads for months to elongate the skull or chop
ping or biting off infant's fingers while mourning.304 These kinds of brutal dai
ly abuses, added to the various types of ritual pederasty, torture and mutilatio
n, are so widespread that the conclusion in the standard anthropological work on
cross-cultural child abuse that there is a "virtual absence of child abuse in N
ew Guinea"305 appears quite inexplicable. SOCIAL ALTERS IN NEW GUINEA Like all c
hildren who experience incest, torture and severe physical abuse, New Guinea chi
ldren only manage to retain their sanity by constructing various alters as they
grow up, which contain split-off identifications and selves that are experienced
as separate from their central selves. When they are incested and raped, for in
stance, they split off the horror into a victim alter and an abuser alter-which
then abuses other children when they become teenagers. Pedophiles who are in the
rapy often reveal they switch into their abuser alters when raping children:
321
At the start of therapy, Jennifer experienced repeated flashbacks of a gang rape
at about age four...She had alters representing the rapists as well as herself
as the victim. These alters had imagined themselves to be perpetrators in order
to avoid experiencing the pain of the rape....Jennifer's abuse...included sexual
and physical abuse at home, by all family members. There was also systematic, r
itualistic abuse by a Satanic cult in which her family was involved as well as p
ornographic filmmaking...we went through her memories of abusing the little boys
she had babysat...this abuse caused pleasure to some alters and pain to others.
..Jennifer's system was able to identify that pedophilic desires belonged to alt
ers whose only pleasant life experience was that of sexually abusing younger chi
ldren. They saw the little boy in the shelter as vulnerable and neglected, and t
hey felt they cared for him. They thought their sexual abuse of him would be a c
aring act, something he would find pleasant compared to what Jennifer had been t
hrough.306 Anthropologists regularly notice that New Guinea adults regularly swi
tch into alters "It was as if someone had turned a switch in these people. We th
ought we knew them, and all of a sudden they were acting in ways we didn't under
stand at all"307 and often comment on the natives' own descriptions of what they
call their "hidden self." It is widely recognized that the "public persona one
presents to others is not only different from, but a deliberate mask of...the di
vided self..."308 But because anthropologists are unaware of the clinical litera
ture on multiple selves they do not call them "alters," saying, "In probably all
Melanesian cultures...there is not one 'true' self but rather many selves...[ho
wever] English lacks a [word for] dual or multiple self."309 Since Poole is the
only anthropologist who actually interviews children about their inner life, his
descriptions of their formation of alters during Bimin-Kuskusmin childhood are
especially valuable. This tribe recognizes that people have hidden alternate per
sonalities, called finiik and khaapkhabuurien, that "temporarily depart from the
body to wander abroad...during dreams, illnesses, trances, and other forms of m
ystical experience."310 One five-year-old child, whose mother constantly masturb
ated him and whose father beat him, learned that his twin had been killed by his
mother at birth and constructed an "imaginary unborn sibling" alter "as an adve
rsary, scapegoat, surrogate, confidant, companion, friend, and twin."311 Like al
l multiples, he used this consoling alter to reduce his anxiety that his mother
might kill him too. For instance, one day after he watched his father-who was a
renowned killer and cannibal-beating his mother bloody, he "rushed shrieking fra
ntically to his mother, and began caressing her abdomen. Then he began to press
his mouth against her navel and to call to Fuut'tiin, his imaginary unborn sibli
ng." 312 When he was
322
depressed, he took Poole into the forest and introduced him to his many alters,
including a "person-in-the-stone" and "a red bird who told him secrets," and tol
d him about being possessed by witch alters that appeared both in dreams and in
waking life.313 Switching into alters is the basis for all political and religio
us behavior. New Guinea natives recognize this when they say things like "the kh
aapkhabuurien may sometimes become detached from the body in dreams, shadows, re
flections, spirit possessions, trances, and illnesses..."314 When one becomes a
sorcerer or witch, one enters a trance state and switches into persecutory alter
s-called "familiars"-termed the "key concept" for understanding New Guinea shama
nistic religion.315 One of the main purposes of the various "initiation rituals"
is to coordinate individual persecutory and victim alters, substituting shared
group alters. When, for instance, young warriors go out on headhunting raids the
y practice switching as a group into killing alters through "special magic, whic
h places the fighters in a trance-like state of dissociation in which they becam
e capable of extreme, indiscriminate violence [which] made them capable of killi
ng even their own wives and children..." 316 They are often amnestic of being in
their alter, and "speak of the aftermath of the fighting as a kind of re-awaken
ing or recovery of their senses. They claim not even to have perceived the enemy
corpses until the magic was removed and 'our eyes became clear again, and we sa
w all the fine men and women we had killed'."317 Thus they can be friendly to an
thropologists at one moment and vicious warriors or cannibals the next, after sw
itching into their murderous, devouring alters. SOCIAL ALTERS AND CULTURAL EVOLU
TION IN NEW GUINEA New Guinea social, religious and political institutions are p
rimarily constructions by men to defend against maternal engulfment fears throug
h shared beliefs and rituals. Institutions such as war, headhunting, cannibalism
, witch scares, shamanism, and gift exchange are all made up of dream objects an
d projected alters that are experienced as ghosts, witches, shamans, warriors, e
nemies and magical leaders. They regularly speak to dream-figures, both in dream
s and afterwards, and regularly hallucinate ghosts and witches. Because so much
of their emotional life is contained in their alters, they cannot for long stay
out of them-it isn't that they are just "attached to the group" as anthropologis
ts claim. It's that only while in a group trance can they rejoin their split-off
alters, inheritors of their developmental traumas. So complete is the domain of
their social trance and so total their struggles with their projected fears tha
t little energy has been available to produce cultural innovation, so they have
remained in the infanticidal psychoclass long after most groups have
323
evolved beyond it. Male fear of and hostility toward women in New Guinea has bee
n so overpowering that routinely battered mothers have had little ability to pro
duce the "hopeful daughters" who could evolve childhood and psyche. It is no coi
ncidence that what is arguably the most anti-female culture area in the world is
also one of the least culturally evolved. Sambia men, for instance, fear that m
enstrual blood may penetrate into their urethra during intercourse, 318 and are
certain everything bad that happens to them, especially any sickness, is due to
contact with dreaded women's blood. Foods that are either red or hairy are often
avoided due to their resemblance to the vagina.319 The fear of women begins in
childhood: A mother's speech and harangues have a lethal power. A woman's airstr
eam emitted while speaking is thought to emerge from her blood-filled caverns. I
f it is directed-particularly at close range during anger-toward boys, the boys
are believed harmed: simply by inhaling those insults and air...Likewise, women
pollute boys simply by lifting their legs in proximity to them, emitting vaginal
smells that boys can breathe in: and, for this reason, men keep their noses plu
gged during coitus, avoiding incorporation of the vaginal smell they describe as
most harmfully foul...320 The resulting fear of and rage toward women lead to w
idespread wifebeating,321 the routine torture and execution of women suspected o
f poisoning men322 and the high female suicide rates so characteristic of small-
scale societies, often reaching 10-25 percent of adult women's deaths.323 Most a
nthropologists report extremely high rates of "violence toward women, including
rape, murder, and attacks upon their genitals."324 Men's constant fears of semen
depletion by women are behind the belief that boys need to swallow semen during
fellatio to become male. 325 Intercourse is often reported as brief, ending in
a minute or two, so they don't get poisoned.326 Marital fidelity is rare, one gi
rl saying to her mother: "All the men have intercourse with you and your cunt is
wide open...I've seen you dripping their semen about. I've seen them all have i
ntercourse with you."327 When a woman commits adultery, they are often severely
punished "by having burning sticks thrust into their vaginas, or they were kille
d by their husbands."328 Although infidelity is the rule, the reason is little u
nderstood, with anthropologists resorting to such rationalizations as "frequent
sexual intercourse and sexual partner change is in fact the norm, perhaps becaus
e there is so little else to do in one's spare time."329 Wars are called "the br
eath of life" and are fought to repair their fragmented self and to restore pote
ncy, mainly through ambush, with warriors spearing unarmed men, women and childr
en for wholly imagined grievances that restage
324
their own childhood traumas. Groups decide to go to war whenever they switch int
o their persecutory alters, mainly on occasions of extreme growth panic, such as
after initiations, new tasks such as building new houses or expanding gardens,
or during leadership crises, in the fourth, upheaval leadership stage, when the
leader seems weak. Anything new can trigger a raid, though it is usually blamed
on family disputes or other rationalizations-though studies of war usually avoid
any analysis of motivation, calling it a "psychological black box," since "near
ly every man nurses a grievance that can precipitate war."330 Estimates of death
s from war can top 35 percent of adult deaths, the highest rates on record.331 M
ale homicide rates also reach the highest levels anywhere in the world.332 Knauf
t, for instance, found that over 60 percent of middle-age adult Gebusi males he
interviewed had already committed one or more homicide.333 Distrust of others in
many tribes is widespread, for good reason, since most people have killed or po
isoned someone and are liable to again. 334 "Both men and women are volatile, pr
one to quarreling and quick to take offense at a suspected slight or injury."335
Shame the result of being used as an erotic object in childhood is the central
social feeling, "feeling exposed, naked before others," 336 so that in New Guine
a, as elsewhere, imaginary humiliations are involved in most social violence. Me
n cling to their various solidarity arrangements to counter engulfing, poisonous
women, because "Women represent an enemy, the enemy, and aggression is based on
opposition to them. At every stage of the developmental cycle, men have an inte
rnal, united organization as reference; women and external enemies are the targe
t of concern, they are conceptually equivalent."337 Recurrent grouppsychotic epi
sodes of witchcraft poison fears are epidemic throughout the area as maternal en
gulfment anxieties due to periodic growth panics peak. Retribution for imagined
magical sorcery attacks is "personal, immediate and uncompromisingly vicious. Th
e assailants spring on their victim from ambush, brutally overpower him, jab poi
sons directly into his body, and sometimes twist or rip out organs,"338 thereby
paying back their infanticidal and incestuous mothers for early traumatic hurts.
The "witch" is in fact simple possession, what would be diagnosed in our societ
y as an alter "inhabiting" the body along with one's "real" self: "Real people"
were wary of those suspected of witchcraft and desperately afraid of convicted a
nd confessed witches. They believed that a witch could kill simply by staring at
a person. They believed, too, that the kum inhabiting the body of a witch could
arbitrarily leave and leap into the body of a bystander forcing him or her to p
erform the actions attributed to witches. Some of the persons accused of witchcr
aft admitted that they had indeed harboured a kum but that it had left them...33
9
325
When inhabited by a violent persecutory alter, warriors join in a social trance
that acts out their need to kill, regardless of object. Harrison writes of viole
nce in New Guinea tribes: Headhunting raids required special magic, which placed
the fighters in a trance-like state of dissociation and relieved them of accoun
tability for their actions; it was supposed to make them capable of killing even
their own wives and children. ...so long as the magic was in effect, the capaci
ty to kill was quite indiscriminate and turned the fighters into a dangerous men
ace to all other people, including their own families.340 THE RESTORATION OF DIS
INTEGRATED SELVES IN CANNIBALISM That war among New Guinea natives-as among othe
rs-is not about anger but about the restoration of disintegrated selves caused b
y growth panic is most obvious in cannibalism, where the penis, tongue and muscl
es of the enemy were often eaten "to absorb the victim's strength."341 It is goo
d to have powerful enemies, they say, because they are good to kill and eat.342
At the same time, all war restages early traumas, including infanticide as the S
ambia myth says, "Numboolyu's wife, Chenchi, killed her first male child...Becau
se she killed the first male child, we now fight-war."343 Like contemporary cult
s that kill and eat babies,344 training for killing children in New Guinea begin
s early. Mead reports: "It was considered necessary that every Tchambuli should
in childhood kill a victim, and for this purpose live victims, usually infants o
r young children, were purchased from other tribes...The small boy's spearhand w
as held by his father, and the child, repelled and horrified, was initiated into
the cult of head-hunting."345 Whiting says "most Kwoma children actually experi
ence a raid in which some acquaintance or relative is killed and decapitated..."
346 Many Fore children died of kuru, because they were forced to eat the brains
of the dead.347 The genitals, too, were choice morsels of cannibals, the victim'
s penis being eaten by the women and the vagina by the men; the children are rep
orted to have had horrible nightmares after witnessing the feast. 348 The perver
se ritual was so sexualized that Berndt reports that during the cannibalistic fe
ast men sometimes copulate with the dead women's bodies they are about to eat an
d women pretend to copulate with the dead men's penis before eating it.349 This
is similar to the cannibalism of Jeffrey Dahmer, who also ritualized the killing
and eating of body parts of his homosexual partners, saying "it made me feel as
if they were even more a part of me."350 So powerful is this notion of internal
ization through cannibalism that Meigs says among the Hua "it is feared that if
a person fails to eat the corpse of his or her same-sex parent, that person...wi
ll become stunted and weak."351 Obviously,
326
eating the body of one's parent or of a friend is an extremely primitive form of
repairing emotional loss: "When a good man died our bodies ached with hunger. W
e ate him and the pain cooled."352 THE PSYCHOGENIC PUMP AND EVOLUTIONARY STAGES
IN NEW GUINEA The over 700 distinct cultures in New Guinea show a definite if co
mplex range of evolutionary stages of childrearing, psyche and society. The evol
utionary ladder ranging from early to middle infanticidal mode-generally runs fr
om the more southern and eastern "semen belt" of maternal incest and pederasty t
o the more evolved northern and western highlands "Big Man" areas.
353
Over the millennia, the
more advanced parents migrated north and west, and those who did not evolve and
who preferred the more violent, pederastic, less organized southern and eastern
areas either remained there or drifted back from more advanced groups. Childrear
ing patterns show a definite areal distribution, centering on how much the mothe
rs cling to their children: "In eastern highlands societies, where initiation is
longest and most elaborate, boys appear to remain with their mothers and sleep
in women's houses for a longer time than do boys in the western highlands where
initiation is absent...[often in the east] men had little contact with their son
s until the boys were ten years old or older [but] in some western highlands soc
ieties, boys left their mothers earlier and much more gradually...boys moved to
men's houses at about five years of age..."354 This pattern follows Richman's cr
oss-cultural findings that "as cultures evolve, the mother holds and makes physi
cal contact against their infants less and talks more to them."355 Because men i
n the less evolved areas were so sexually aroused by watching breast-feeding inf
ants356 and because contact with children was considered polluting,357 they tend
ed more either to avoid children, perhaps "only poking at it with a stick,"358 o
r just use them sexually pederasty being found in "nearly all Lowlands cultures
or groups..."359 This confirms the cross-cultural finding that fathers tend to b
e more emotionally involved with children and use them as objects less as one go
es up the evolutionary level of societies. 360 Fathers in southern areas will so
metimes be described by the anthropologist as "bestowing his attentions" on his
infant children, but then when the "attention" is described it usually turns out
to be something like sucking its face or mouth, not helping it grow: "He will t
ake it up and...mumble its face in the full-lipped manner which is an acknowledg
ed form of caress...When the child is already running about and showing its inde
pendence, however, the father's interest seems to wane."361 Fathers in the more
evolved areas, in contrast, care more for their children from infancy, as in the
327
Trobrianders, whose fathers are described by both Malinowsky and Weiner as "belo
ved, benevolent friends" to their children, "loving and tender" toward them. 362
Mothers in the western highlands are somewhat less afraid of their baby's indep
endence, so they are allowed to crawl about more often and are in slings and cra
dles less. Shame rather than sexuality or fear is the central emotion that descr
ibes the relationship between child and parent,363 evidence of the beginnings of
a stable superego. The cultures of these two areas are described as follows: "T
he production of 'men' [through pederasty and training as warriors] is seen to b
e the focus of cultural attention among Lowland groups, as is the production of
"bigmen" {leaders of status] in the Highlands."364 The former are stuck on the e
volutionary ladder between foraging and primitive horticulture, while the latter
have allowed enough innovation to develop better ways of irrigating crops and f
encing pigs. Feil describes how there is an "archetypal social structure, econom
ic pattern and social environment in which male initiations and sexual hostility
flourish...at the eastern end and are all but absent or attenuated in the weste
rn highlands."365 Since mothers are less engulfing in western highlands, fears o
f their pollution and hatred of women are less and therefore women are less expl
oited than in the east and south.366 It is also not surprising that "In the east
ern highlands, women were targets in hostile [warfare] encounters; in the wester
n highlands, they were not.'367 These more evolved western Big Man groups are ab
le to construct more organized political and economic structures that are far mo
re hierarchical than in the east and south, since they can stand more innovation
without triggering growth panic, and thus can accumulate the surpluses of pigs
and other exchange goods that their more complex societies revolve around. To ac
tually trust a Big Man in economic exchange or in ritual feasts only comes from
reducing the incestuous and pederastic use of children and replacing abandonment
with the beginnings of tolerance for individuation. Warfare is also more organi
zed and therefore more restricted in the Big Man societies, 368 sometimes occurr
ing as inoften as every decade,369 rather than having constant headhunting, cann
ibalistic and other raids as the less evolved groups do. THE EMOTIONAL MEANING O
F CEREMONIAL EXCHANGE Ceremonial exchange is centered in the more evolved Wester
n highlands area, and is usually said to be the cause of the more cooperative we
stern highlands cultural behavior, but why gifts are given with stingy self-inte
rest in the east but with dramatic pride and extensive trust in the west is neve
r explained.370 The production of valuables for exchange and the beginnings of i
nequalities that more hierarchical
328
social organization involves depends crucially on men's increasing ability to fo
rm male emotional systems that are effective in binding and reducing their fears
of engulfing women, ultimately engulfing mothers. If these fears are overwhelmi
ng, all men can do is endlessly try to restore masculinity by raids and initiati
on tortures, whereas in more evolved groups "ceremonial exchange rather than kil
ling is a way of asserting individual prowess."371 If they are reduced somewhat,
men begin to organize defense tactics, including political and religious struct
ures, marriage alliances outside the group, ceremonial feasts and complex extra-
clan trading connections, all designed to stress that men can cling together and
even innovate and create art and more advanced agricultural economies without b
eing eaten up by women. Thus they willingly endure submission to Big Men to avoi
d the worse fate of maternal engulfment and disintegration. Some of the symbolis
m of ceremonial exchange has been already been discussed, such as the slaughteri
ng of thousands of pigs in rituals that restage the infanticide of newborn babie
s. As mentioned, pigs are considered "almost children" and are even nursed by wo
men, so when pigs are slaughtered in an exchange feast people "mourn and weep fo
r their 'child' when it is killed as though it were a real child."372 The ritual
is an attempt to restage the infanticide in a more evolved way, by killing pigs
in feasts not people in war. The trading of shells under the leadership of Big
Men also restages early traumas. Shells, like all fetishes, are said to give men
a way of "undoing" the "killing of the child."373 When men launch exchanges wit
h other men, they are said to "resurrect" the newborn babies who were killed, to
"give birth" to them and send them along paths to keep them from "dying."374 Th
e shells are of course traditional vaginal symbols, reddened with ochre to indic
ate poisonous menstrual blood, but they contain individuating marks that tell th
e tragic personal history of the maker: The more "history" a pearlshell can disp
lay the more valuable it becomes...Men create pearlshells as they do the self...
giving pearlshells to matrikin is to some extent, perhaps, a sacrifice of self,
a presentation of one's own individuality to ensure a continued benevolent mater
nal influence...pearlshells allow men the illusion of producing wealth independe
ntly of women, even though, in the last analysis, it is women's reproduction whi
ch stimulates the flow of pearlshells.375 The shells sometimes have barkcloth ba
ses underlying a skirt, said to be "a child attached to it," and also said to re
present the "swallowing up" of men by women.376 Gift exchanges are said to have
the ability "to restore a man's bodily integrity from female pollution,"377 and
men fondle and gaze at their shells for hours,
329
healing their hurts. Spending much of one's life arranging the "economically sen
seless"378 circulation of various gifts cleansing poison containers (gift=poison
in German)-has always been a conundrum to anthropologists because their symboli
c basis in early childhood tragedies has been overlooked. The shells are so powe
rful a group-fantasy of the restoration of potency that they are said to be like
semen: "the amount of semen and shells in circulation remains the cause of much
male anxiety [and] they have to be kept hidden, tightly bound and wrapped, in t
he gloomy recesses of men's houses, as if their fragile and transient vitality h
as to be protected and conserved. This attribute of pearlshells compares strongl
y with male fears about semen depletion..."379 Yet ceremonial exchange systems a
re so effective in cleansing poisons and restoring potency that they dominate th
e political and economic life of the western highlands. PSYCHOGENIC ARREST IN NE
W GUINEA Although New Guinea natives have evolved somewhat in the past ten mille
nnia, they are certainly closer to the foraging and early horticultural cultures
of our ancestors than the "peaceful" (actually pacified) groups in Africa that
are so often used as models for early human groups. Yet the unanswered question
about New Guinea remains: why have they evolved so little in the past ten millen
nia? They didn't get a late start, since agriculture began in New Guinea over 6,
000 years ago, earlier than most other areas of the world that have vastly surpa
ssed them in psychological and cultural evolution.380 Indeed, the first foragers
were in New Guinea 40,000 years ago,381 and agriculture is considered to have d
eveloped independently there, so they actually had ecological conditions reasona
bly conducive to farming. It is true that they had no cereal crops nor domestica
ble large mammals (though they did have pigs and kangaroos),382 but they shared
this lack with other Pacific areas such as Hawaii and other Polynesian islands t
hat evolved far higher levels of civilization than New Guinea. Diamond asks the
crucial question: "Why did New Guineans continue to use stone tools instead of m
etal tools, remain non-literate, and fail to organize themselves into chiefdoms
and states?" Diamond's answers are: (1) too few people (1,000,000), (2) too diff
icult terrain (swamps and jungles), and (3) too much warfare (because of fragmen
ted groups.)383 Yet these are all conditions that cultural evolution conquers, s
ince innovative natives elsewhere cleared jungle areas, introduced irrigation an
d created larger populations through more advanced political institutions. If Ne
w Guinea never reached the complex chiefdom level of Hawaii, it was because chil
drearing did not evolve
330
enough to produce psychoclasses that were innovative enough to invent new cultur
al forms. Diamond a priori rules out any variation in people's capacity for inno
vation, saying "all human societies contain inventive people."384 But if, as we
have been insisting here, childrearing evolution is the clue to cultural evoluti
on and innovation, the crux of New Guinea's problems lie in their inability to e
volve good mothers and hopeful daughters. Certainly their early infanticidal mod
e parenting and the resulting depth of their hatred and fear of women confirms t
his condition currently. But how have they been able to suppress psychogenesis f
or so long and why have they had so few evolving mothers and hopeful daughters?
Unfortunately, the study of the history of childhood in New Guinea is totally la
cking, since childhood even today is considered so ideal. Archeology and ethnohi
story never mention children,385 so the basic materials needed to answer the que
stion are simply missing. A few informed guesses is the best one can do at the m
oment. To begin with, New Guinea was part of Australia when humans immigrated in
to it, so the parents were formed in one of the most arid regions in the world,
386 subject to periodic droughts that must have had some effect in devolving par
enting. This may even have been severe enough to alter the genetic makeup of par
ents, thus passing parenting down both genetically and epigenetically through th
e generations. Confirming evidence for the effects of famine on the brain wiring
of fetuses is shown in the finding that babies who had prenatal exposure to fam
ine during the Dutch Hunger Winter at the end of 1944 had higher rates of schizo
id personality disorders,387 because migration of brain cells through the neural
subplate was disrupted, causing the faulty connections that are usually found i
n schizophrenics. 388 Secondly, the small size of island New Guinea may have inh
ibited the psychogenic pump effect, limiting migration enough so that early infa
nticidal mothering swamped the emergence of innovating mothers and hopeful daugh
ters (even biologists sometimes call small islands "evolutionary traps.") And th
irdly, the least evolved parenting in New Guinea is to the south, in small peder
astic societies, while the most evolved is in the north, where the Trobrianders
even managed to approach the level of a chiefdom. Anthropologists are puzzled as
to "why the Trobriand Islanders have chiefs. They have neither exceptional popu
lation density nor agricultural productivity."389 What is relevant to this quest
ion is that while most of New Guinea came from the Australian continent and spea
k Non-Austronesian languages, the Trobrianders and some other nearby groups came
later mainly from Tiawan via other islands and speak Austronesian languages. Ta
iwan was far more
331
advanced culturally-and one can assume also in parenting-when people migrated fr
om there to New Guinea four thousand years ago, having grain crops, true weaving
, metals, the bow and arrow and even water buffaloes by 4000 B.C.390 Presumably
their descendants began with a head start in childrearing compared to the native
s further south of them. In nearby Austronesian-speaking Vanatinai, which was a
stopover for those on their way to New Guinea, women are not feared and violence
against women is rare, indicating more evolved childrearing than most of New Gu
inea.391 Yet these evolutionary speculations rest mainly on inferences that have
yet to generate real archeological field studies, so to answer questions of rel
ative rates of evolution of childhood and culture we must turn to the only area
of the world in which the history of childhood has been studied: Europe. The evi
dence which I have found over the past four decades for the evolution of childho
od and culture in Europe from its earliest days until today is contained in the
final four chapters of this book.
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llitrichids." In Jerome H. Barkow et al., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychol
ogy and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 1
32. 238. Sydney Mellen, The Evolution of Love Oxford: W. H. Freeman and Co., 198
1, p. 34. 239. Jane B. Lancaster and Chet S. Lancaster, "Parental Investment: Th
e Hominid Adaptation." In Donald J. Ortner, Ed. How Humans Adapt: A Biocultural
Odyssey. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1983, p. 38. 240. James J
. McKenna, "Parental Supplements and Surrogates Among Primates: CrossSpecies and
Cross-Cultural Comparisons." In Jane B. Lancaster, et al., Eds. Parenting Acros
s the Life Span: Biosocial Dimensions. New York: Aldine DeGruyter, 1987, pp. 143
-181.
350
241. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved. Cambridge: Harvard Univer
sity Press, 1981, p. 98. 242. See evidence in Chapter 8. 243. C. Owen Lovejoy, "
The Origin of Man." Science 211(1981): 341-350. 244. Anthony Walsh, Biosociology
: An Emerging Paradigm. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995, p. 203. 245. Henry Harpe
nding and Patricia Draper, "Selection Against Human Family Organization." In B.
J. Williams, Ed., On Evolutionary Anthropology. Malibu: Undena Publications, 198
6, p. 47. 246. Patricia Draper and Henry Harpending, "Parent Investment and the
Child's Environment." In Jane B. Lancaster et al., Eds. Parenting Across The Lif
e Span: Biosocial Dimension. New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1987, pp. 220-221. 247
. Kenneth E. Read, The High Valley. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965, p.
45. 248. Alayne Yates, "Children Eroticized by Incest." American Journal of Psyc
hiatry 139(1982): 482. 249. Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage S
ociety. Cleveland: Meridian books, 1955, p. 55; The Sexual Life of Savages in No
rthern Melanesia. Vol. I. New York: Horace Liveright, 1929. 250. James B. Watson
and Virginia Watson, Batanabura of New Guinea. New Haven: HRAF, 1972, p. 67. 25
1. Ann Chowning, "Child Rearing and Socialization." In Ian Hogbin, Anthropology
in Papua New Guinea: Readings From The Encyclopaedia of Papua and New Guinea. Me
lbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1973, p. 76. 252. Bruce M. Knauft, South Co
ast New Guinea Cultures: History, Comparison, Dialectic. Cambridge: Cambridge Un
iversity Press, 1993, p. 101. 253. Stanley N. Kurtz, "Polysexualization: A New A
pproach to Oedipus in the Trobriands." Ethos 19(1991): 72, 70. 254. Frank W. Put
nam, Dissociation in Children and Adolescents: A Developmental Perspective. New
York: The Guilford Press, 1997, p. 36.
351
255. Annette B. Weiner, The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1988, p. 67. 256. Gza Roheim, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology:
Culture, Personality and the Unconscious. New York: International Universities P
ress, 1950, pp. 141, 169. 257. Sherry B. Ortner, "Gender and Sexuality in Heirar
chical Societies: The Case of Polynesia and Some Comparative Implications." in S
herry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, Eds., Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Const
ruction of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p.
39. 258. Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt, Sexual Behavior in West Arnh
em Land. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1951, p. 21. 259. Armando R. Favazza, Bodies
Under Siege: Self-mutilation in Culture and Psychiatry. Baltimore: The Johns Ho
pkins University Press, 1987, p. 159. 260. Raymond Firth, We, The Tikopia: A Soc
iological Study of Kinship in Primitive Polynesia. London: George Allen & Unwin,
1936, p. 494. 261. Ronald M. Berndt, Excess and Restraint: Social Control Among
a New Guinea Mountain People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 16
5. 262. Bruce M. Knauft, South Coast New Guinea Cultures: History, Comparison, D
ialectice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 96. 263. Charles W. S
ocarides, The Preoedipal Origin and Psychoanalytic Therapy of Sexual Perversions
. Madison, Conn., International Universities Press, 1988, P. 464. 264. Gilbert H
. Herdt, "Fetish and Fantasy in Sambia Initiation." In Gilbert H. Herdt, Ed., Ri
tuals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea. Berkeley: University of C
alifornia Pres, 1982, p. 71. 265. Gilbert H. Herdt, Guardians of the Flutes: Idi
oms of Masculinity. New York: McGrawHill Book Co., 1981, p. 236. 266. Marilyn St
rathern, Women in Between: Female Roles in a Male World: Mount Hagen, New Guinea
. London: Seminar Press, 1972, p. 173. 267. Ibid, p. 172. 268. Fitz John Porter
Poole, "Coming Into Social Being: Cultural Images of Infants in BiminKuskusmin F
olk Psychology." In Geoffrey M. White and John Kirkpatrick, Ed., Person, Self, a
nd Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley: University of Cali
fornia
352
Press, 1985, p. 195. 269. J. Patrick Gray, "Growing Yams and Men: An Inerpretati
on of Kimam Male Ritualized Homosexual Behavior." In Evelyn Blackwood, Ed., Anth
ropology and Homosexual Behavior. New York: Hayworth Press, 1986, p. 61. 270. He
rdt, Fetish and Fantasy in Sambia Insitiation," p. 81. 271. Robert J. Stoller, O
bserving the Erotic Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985, pp. 116
, 132 272. Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, "Pederasty Among Primitives: Institutiona
lized Initiation and Cultic Prostitution." Journal of Homosexuality 20(1990): 18
. 273. Robert J. Stoller, Observing the Erotic Imagination, pp. 132 and 116. 274
. Bruce M. Knauft, "Homosexuality in Melanesia." The Journal of Psychoanalytic A
nthropology 10(1987): 173. 275. William H. Davenport, "Adult-Child Sexual Relati
ons in Cross-Cultural Perspective." In William O'Donohue and James H. Geer, Eds.
, The Sexual Abuse of Children: Theory and Research. Vol. I. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawr
ence Erlbaum Assoc., 1992, p. 78. 276. "Interview: Gilbert Herdt." Paidika: The
Journal of Paedophilia 3(1994): 14; "Interview: John De Cecco." Ibid, 1(1988): 1
0. 277. New York Times, April 28, 1998, p. A10. 278. Fitz John Porter Poole, "Th
e Ritual Forging of Identity: Aspects of Person and Self in Bimin-Kuskusmin Male
Initiation." n Gilbert H. Herdt, Ed., Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Pa
pua New Guinea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, p. 120-121. 279.
Theodore Lidz and Ruth Silmanns Lidz, Oedipus in the Stone Age: A Psychoanalyti
c Study of Masculinization in Papua New Guinea. Madison, Conn.: International Un
iversities Press, 1989, pp. 52, 91. 280. Ronald M. Berndt, Excess and Restraint:
Social Control Among a New Guinea Mountain People. Chicago: University of Chica
go Press, 1962, p. 94. 281. Ibid, p. 58. 282. Margaret Mead, "The Mountain Arape
sh. II. Supernaturalism." Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natio
nal History. New York: AMNH, 1940, p. 347.
353
283. Gilbert Herdt, "Sambia Nosebleeding Rites and Male Proximity to Women." In
James W. Stigler, Richard A. Shweder and Gilbert Herdt, Eds., Cultural Psycholog
y: Essays on Comparative Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres
s, 1984, p. 380.. 284. Gilbert Herdt, The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guine
a. Ft Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1987, p. 144. 285. Alome Kyakas and Pol
ly Wiessner, From Inside the Women's House: Enga Women's Lives and Traditions. B
uranda: Robert Brown & Assoc., 1992, p. 51. 286. Mary deYoung, "Self-Injurious B
ehavior in Incest Victims: a Research Note." Child Welfare 61(1982): 579. 287. I
bid, p. 581. 288. Wulf Schiefenhovel, "Ritualized Adult-Male/Adolescent-Male Sex
ual Behavior in Melanesia." In Jay R. Feierman, Ed., Pedophilia: Biosocial Dimen
sions. New York: SpringerVerlag, 1990, p. 414. 289. Theodor Reik, Ritual: Psycho
-Analytic Studies. New York: International Universities Press, 1946, p. 106. 290
. Michio Kitahara, "A Cross-Cultural Test of the Fruedian Theory of Circumcision
." International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 5(1976): 535-46. 291. R
osalind Miles, The Women's History of the World. Topsfield, Mass.: Salem House,
1988, p. 38. 292. Geza Roheim, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology: Culture, Persona
lity and the Unconscious. New York: International Universities Press, 1950, p. 1
17. 293. Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, "Pederasty Among Primitives: Institutionali
zed Initiation and Cultic Prostitution." Journal of Homosexuality 20(1990): 19.
294. Jill E. Korbin, Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Berke
ley: University of California Press, 1981, p. 19. 295. Ashley Montagu, Coming In
to Being Among the Australian Aborigenes: A Study of the Procreative Beliefs of
the Native Tribes of Australia. 2nd Rev. Ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 197
4, p. 323. 296. Fitz John Porter Poole, "Transforming 'natural' woman: Female Ri
tual Leaders and Gender Ideology Among Bimin-Kuskusmin." In Sherry B. Ortner and
Harriet Whitehead, Eds. Sexual Meanings: the Cultural Construction of Gender an
d Sexuality. Cambridge:
354
Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 143. 297. Nancy C. Lutkehaus and Paul B. Ro
scoe, Gender Rituals: Female Initiation in Melanesia. London: Routledge, 1995. 2
98. Ibid, p. 18. 299. Ibid. 300. Gerald W. Creed, "Sexual Subordination: Institu
tionalized Homosexuality and Social Control in Melanesia." Ethnology 3(1984): 16
0. 301. Gilbert Herdt, The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea. New York: Ho
lt, Rinehart and Winston, 1987, p. 160. 302. Maurice Bloch, Prey Into Hunter: Th
e Politics of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992,
pp. 9, 10. 303. Alome Kyakas and Polly Wiessner, From Inside the Women's House,
pp. 18-20. 304. L. L. Langness, "Child Abuse and Cultural Values: The Case of N
ew Guinea." In Jill Korbin, Ed. Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspect
ives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981, pp. 16-17. 305. Ibid, p. 2
9. 306. Alison Mill, "Treatment of a Young Female Pedophilic Offender with Disso
ciative Identity Disorder." Treating Abuse Today 18(1998): 17-21. 307. Bruce Kna
uft, cited in John Craig, "Kindness and Killing." Emory Magazine October 1988, p
. 27. 308. Michele Stephen, "Dreams and Self-Knowledge among the Mekeo of Papua
New Guinea." Ethos 24(1996): 469. 309. Michele Stephen, A'aisa's Gifts: A Study
of Magic and the Self. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 134,
144. 310. Fitz John Porter Poole, "Coming Into Social Being: Cultural Images of
Infants in BiminKuskusmin Folk Psychology." In Geoffrey M. White and John Kirkpa
trick, Eds., Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, p. 200. 311. Ibid, p. 118.
355
312. Ibid, p. 119. 313. Fitz John Porter Poore, "Personal Experience and Cultura
l Representation in Children's 'Personal Symbols' among Bimin-Kuskusmin." Ethos
15(1987): 119. 314. Ibid, p. 201. 315. Gilbert Herdt, "Spirit Familiars in the R
eligious Imagination of Sambia Shamans." In Gilbert Herdt and Michele Stephen, E
ds., The Religious Imagination in New Guinea. New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1989, pp. 99-121. 316. Simon Harrison, The Mask of War: Violence, Ritual
and the Self in Melanesia. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, pp. 27
, 95. 317. Ibid. 318. Gilbert Herdt, The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea
. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 197, p. 165. 319. Anna S. Meigs, Food, S
ex, and Pollution: A New Guinea Religion. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Pres
s, 1943, p. 33. 320. Gilbert Herdt, "Sambia Nosebleeding Rites and Male Proximit
y to Women." In James W. Stigler et al., Eds., Cultural Psychology: Essays on Co
mparative Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 373
. 321. Susan Taft, Domestic Violence in Urban Papua New Guinea. Law Reform Commi
ssion of Papua New Guinea, Occasional Paper No. 19, 1986. 322. Marilyn Strathern
, Women in Between: Female Roles in a Male World: Mount Hagen, New Guinea. Londo
n: Seminar Press, 1972, p. 175; D. K. Feil, The Evolution of Highland Papua New
Guinea Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 203. 323. Mich
el Tousignant, "Suicide in Small-Scale Societies." Transcultural Psychiatry 35(1
998): 291-306; Dan Jorgenson, "The Clear and the Hidden: Person, Self and Suicid
e Among the Telefomen of Papua New Guinea."Omega 14(1983): 113-125; Ronald M. Be
rndt, Excess and Restraint: Social Control Among a New Guinea Mountain People. C
hicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, pp. 186-202. 324. Marilyn Gelber, Gen
der and Society in the New Guinea Highlands: An Anthropological Perspective on A
ntagonism Toward Women. Boulder: Westview Press, 1986, p. 12. 325. Gilbert H. He
rdt, "Semen Depletion and the Sense of Maleness." Stephen O. Murray,
356
Ed., Oceanic Homosexualities. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992, pp. 33-65. 326
. Gilbert herdt and Robert J. Stoller, Intimate Communications: Erotics and the
Study of Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 259. 327. James
B. Watson and Virginia Watson, Batanabura of New Guinea. New Haven: HRAF, 1972,
p. 538. 328. D. K. Feil, The Evolution of Highland Papua Societies, p. 203. 329.
Lawrence Hammar, "Sexual Transactions on Daru: With Some Observations on the Et
hnographic Enterprise." Research in Melanesia 16(1992): 46. 330. Bruce M. Knauft
, "Melanesian Warfare: A Theoretical History." Oceania 60(1990): 286, 274. 331.
F. Barth, "Tribes and Intertribal Relations in the Fly head-waters." Oceania 41(
1970-1, p. 175. 332. Bruce M. Knauft, "Reconsidering Violence in Simple Human So
cieties. " Current Anthropology 28(1987), pp. 457-499. 333. John Craig, "Kindnes
s and Killing." Emory Magazine, October 1988, p. 26. 334. George F. Vicedom and
Herbert Tischner, The Mbowamb: The Culture of the Mount Hagen Tribes in East Cen
tral New Guinea. Vol. I. Sydney: University of Sydney Oceania Monograph No. 25,
1983, p. 71. 335. L. L. Langness, "child Abuse and Cultural Values: The Case of
New Guinea." In Jill E. Korbin, Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspect
ives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981, p. 28. 336. Steven R. Nach
man, "Shame and Moral Aggression on a Melanesian Atoll." The Journal of Psychoan
alytic Anthropology 7(1984, pp. 335-365. 337. D. K. Feil, The Evolution of Highl
and Papua Societies, p. 203. 338. Leonard B. Glick, "Sorcery and Witchcraft." In
Ian Hogbin, Ed., Anthropology in Papua New Guinea. Melbourne: Melbourne Univers
ity Press, 1973, p. 183. 339. Marie Reay, "The Magico-Religious Foundations of N
ew Guinea Highlands Warfare." In Michele Stephen, Ed., Sorcerer and Witch in Mel
anesia. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.
357
340. Simon Harrison, Violence, Ritual and the Self in Melanesia. Manchester: Man
chester University Press, 1993, p. 27. 341. Ibid, p. 88. 342. Ibid, p. 131. 343.
Gilbert H. Herdt, Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity. New York: McG
rawHill Book Company, 1981, p. 351. 344. Jeanne Hill, "Believing Rachel." The Jo
urnal of Psychohistory 24(1996): 131-146; Michael Newton, "Written in Blood: A H
istory of Human Sacrifice." The Journal of Psychohistory 24(1996): 104-131. 345.
Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: Will
iam Morrow, 1963, p. 242. 346. John W. M. Whiting, Becoming A Kwoma: Teaching an
d Learning in a New Guinea Tribe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941, p. 61.
347. Richard Rhodes, Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Pl
ague. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997, pp. 22-23. 348. Fitz John Porter Poole,
"Cannibals, Tricksters, and Witches: Anthropophagic Images Among Bimin-Kuskusmin
," and Gillian Gillison, "Cannibalism Among Women in the Eastern Highlands of Pa
pua New Guinea." In Paula Brown and Donald Tuzin, Eds., The Ethnography of Canni
balism. Washington, D.C.: Society for Psychological Anthropology, 1983, pp. 1-50
. 349. Ronald M. Berndt, Excess and Restraint: Social Control Among a New Guinea
Mountain People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 283. 350. Brian
Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer. London: Hodder & Houghton, 1993, p. 218.
351. Ana S. Meigs, Food, Sex, and Pollution, p. 110. 352. Gillian Gillison, Bet
ween Culture and Fantasy: A New Guinea Highlands Mythology. Chicago: The Univers
ity of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 72. 353. D. K. Feil, The Evolution of Highland Pa
pua New Guinea Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; Shirley L
indenbaum, "Variations on a Sociosexual Theme in Melanesia." InGilbert H. Herdt,
Ed., Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984, pp. 337-360. Bruce M. Knauft, South Coast New Guinea
358
Cultures: History, Comparison, Dialectic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993 exempts some coastal southern groups from "Big Men" classifications. 354.
D. K. Feil, The Evolution of Highland Papua New Guinea Societies, p. 210. 355. A
my L. Richman, et al., "Maternal Behavior to Infants in Five Cultures." In Rober
t L. LeVine, Patricia M. Miller, Mary Maxwell West, Eds., Parental Behavior in D
iverse Societies. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1988, p. 86. 356. Bruce M. Knauft,
"Homosexuality in Melanesia," p. 187. 357. Gilbert Herdt, The Sambia: Ritual an
d Gender in New Guinea. Ft. Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1987, p. 89. 358.
Anna S. Meigs, Food, Sex, and Polution: A New Guinea Religion. New Brunswick: R
utgers University Press, 1943, p. 64. 359. Gilbert Herdt, "Father Presence and R
itual Homosexuality: Paternal Deprivation and Masculine Development in Melanesia
Reconsidered." Ethos 17(1989): 335. 360. Patricia Draper and Henry Harpending,
"Father Absence and Reproductive Strategy: An Evolutionary Perspective." Journal
of Anthropological Research 38(1982): 256. 361. Francis Edgar Williams, Papuans
of the Trans-Fly. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936, p. 110. 362. Annette B. Weiner
, The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Ft. Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 19
88, pp. 58-59; Malinowsky and others analyzed in Melford E. Spiro, Oedipus in th
e Trobriands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 34-35. 363. Steven
R. Nachman, "Shame and Moral Aggression on a Melanesian Atoll." The Journal of
Psychoanalytic Anthropology 7(1984): 335-365. 364. Shirley Lindenbaum, "Variatio
ns on a Sociosexual Theme in Melanesia." In Gilbert H. Herdt, Ed., Ritualized Ho
mosexuality in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 340
. 365. D. K. Feil, The Evolution of Highland Papua New Guinea Societies, p. 175.
366. Ibid, p. 231. 367. Ibid, p. 72. 368. Bruce M. Knauft, South Coast New Guin
ea Cultures: History, Comparison, Dialectic.
359
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 120 tries unsuccessfully to "de-
throne" the bigman concept, though the number of groups actually having full-fle
dged bigmen is reduced by his work. 369. Andrew P. Vayda, War In Ecological Pers
pective: Persistence, Change, and Adaptive Processes in Three Oceanian Societies
. New York: Plenum Press, 1976, p. 14. In Bruce M. Knauft, "Melanesian Warfare:
A Theoretical History," Oceania 60(1990) 250-311 attempts to disprove Feil's cla
ims that warfare is more "restrained" in western highlands, but only disproves i
t necessarily is less violent everywhere in the west. 370. Ibid, p. 233-235. 371
. Ibid, p. 70. 372. Maurice Bloch, Prey Into Hunter: The Politics of Religious E
xperience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, , pp. 11,12. 373. Gillia
n Gillison, Between Culture and Fantasy: A New Guinea Highlands Mythology. Chica
go: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. xv. 374. Annette B. Weiner, The Trobri
anders of Papua New Guinea. Ft. Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988, p. 153.
375. Jeffrey Clark, "Pearlshell Symbolism in Highlands Papua New Guinea, With Pa
rticular Reference to the Wiru People of Southern Highlands Province." Oceania 6
1(1991): 318. 376. Ibid, p. 324. 377. Marie de Lepervanche, "Social Structure."
In Ian Hogbin, Ed., Anthropology in Papua New Guinea: Readings From the Encylopa
edia of Papua and New Guinea. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1973, p. 4.
378. Paula G. Rubel and Abraham Rosman, Your Own Pigs You May Not Eat: A Compar
ative Study of New Guinea Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978,
p. 22. 379. Jeffrey Clark, "pearlshell Symbolism...," p. 335. 380. D. K. Feil,
The Evolution of Highland Papua New Guinea Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge Unive
rsity Press, 1987, p. 16. 381. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates
of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997, p. 147.
360
382. Ibid, p. 148. 383. Ibid, pp. 306-307. 384. Ibid, p. 408. 385. Ward H. Goode
nough, Ed., Prehistoric Settlement of the Pacific. Philadelphia: American Philos
ophical Society, 1996; J. Peter White and James F. O'Connell, A Prehistory of Au
stralia, New Guinea and Sahul. New York: Academic Press, 1982. 386. James Woodbu
rn, "Hunters and Gatherers Today and Reconstruction of the Past." In Ernest Gell
ner, Ed., Soviet and Western Anthropology London: Duckworth, 1980, p. 109. 387.
Hans W. Hoek, et al., "Schizoid Personality Disorder After Prenatal Exposure to
Famine." American Journal of Psychiatry 153(1996): 16371639. 388. The New York T
imes, May 28, 1996, p. C1. 389. Roy Brunton, "Why Do Trobriands Have Chiefs?" Ma
n 10(1975): 144. 390. Robert Blust, "Austronesian Culture History: The Window of
Language." In Ernest Gellner, Ed., Soviet and Western Anthropology. London: Duc
kworth, 1980. pp. 28-35. 391. Maria Lepowsky, Fruit of the Motherland: Gender in
an Egalitarian Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 110.
361
Chapter 8 The Evolution of Childrearing
"Who would not shudder if he were given the choice of eternal death or life agai
n as a child? Who would not choose to die?" ----St. Augustine Children throughou
t history have arguably been more vital, more gentle, more joyous, more trustful
, more curious, more courageous and more innovative than adults. Yet adults thro
ughout history have routinely called little children "beasts," "sinful," "greedy
," "arrogant," "lumps of flesh," "vile," "polluted," "enemies," "vipers" and "in
fant fiends."1 Although it is extraordinarily difficult to believe, parents unti
l relatively recently have been so frightened of and have so hated their newborn
infants that they have killed them by the billions, routinely sent them out to
extremely neglectful wetnurses, tied them up tightly in swaddling bandages lest
they be overpowered by them, starved, mutilated, raped, neglected and beat them
so badly that prior to modern times I have not been able to find evidence of a s
ingle parent who would not today be put in jail for child abuse. I have searched
so hard during the past three decades for any exceptions to this extremely abus
ive pattern that I have offered a prize to anyone who could find even one "good
mother" prior to the eighteenth century-the definition being one who would not t
oday be incarcerated for child abuse. No one so far has claimed the prize. Inste
ad, historians have assumed that my evidence for routinely abusive parenting mus
t be terribly exaggerated, since if it were true it "would mean parents acted in
direct opposition to their biological inheritance," and surely evolution "would
n't be so careless...as to leave us too immature to care properly for our offspr
ing."2 It is not surprising that the existence of widespread child abuse through
out history has been viewed with disbelief.
3
In this chapter, the historical evidence for
each childrearing practice will be presented, focusing on the actual statements
made by caretakers and children so that one can understand the intrapsychic reas
ons behind the abuse and neglect and show how parents have struggled against res
taging their own childhoods and have slowly evolved the more loving, empathic ch
ildrearing which has been achieved by some families in the modern world. THE MIS
SING FATHER: CHILDHOOD IN THE GYNARCHY The problem with the overly monolithic co
nception of a "patriarchy" wherein men dominate women both in society and in the
family is that while no Bachofenstyle "matriarchal" society has been found,4 th
ere is little evidence that until modern
362
times fathers have been very much present in historical families. In our promisc
uous chimpanzee ancestors, fathers were quite absent in child-rearing, so there
are no "families,"5 only grandmothers and mothers moving about with their childr
en. 6 It is also likely that "there were no Neandertal families to begin with,"7
since women and children lived in separate areas from the males in caves. Altho
ugh Bachofen's "gynocratic state" is only slightly approximated in such tribes a
s the Iroquois, the Navajo, the Ashanti, and the Dahomeans,8 the families themse
lves in preliterate cultures are usually run by women, who often live in separat
e spaces from their husbands. In some, like the Ashanti, they have a "visiting h
usband...in which the husband and wife live with their respective mothers [and]
at night the man 'visits' his wife in her house..."9 In others, men spend much o
f their time in their own cult houses, and women in separate family or menstrual
huts, "segregating themselves of their own accord."10 Even when men lived with
their wives, females took care of the children, although cross-cultural studies
conclude that "in the majority of societies mothers are not the principal careta
kers or companions of young children...older children and other female family me
mbers" mainly looking after them.11 Although in a few very simple hunting tribes
fathers are claimed to hold their infants, it turns out they are only hallucina
ting being fused with their mothers, "fondling the child as its mother does. He
takes it to his breast and holds it there,"12 or sucks its face in the tradition
al "full-lipped manner,"13 using the infant as a breast substitute but not reall
y caretaking. Even when the children are somewhat older, fathers are generally n
ot the ones that teach them skills: "Among the Hadza, as a typical example, boys
learn their bow-and-arrow hunting knowledge and techniques and their tracking s
kills mainly informally from other boys"14 not their fathers. The historical fam
ily, it turns out, cannot remotely be termed a "patriarchy" until modern times.
It is in fact a gynarchy, composed of the grandmother, mother, aunts, unmarried
daughters, female servants, midwives, neighbors called "gossips" who acted as su
bstitute mothers, plus the children.15 Fathers in traditional families may somet
imes eat and sleep within the gynarchy, but they do not determine its emotional
atmosphere, nor do they in any way attempt to raise the children. To avoid exper
iencing their own domination and abuse during childhood by females, men througho
ut history have instead set up androcentric political and religious spheres for
male-only group-fantasy activities, contributing to the family gynarchy only som
e sustenance, periodic temper tantrums and occasional sexual service. Evidence o
f fathers playing any real role in children's upbringing is simply missing until
early modern times. In antiquity, I have been unable to find a single classical
scholar who has been able to cite any instance of a father saying one word to
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his child prior to the age of seven.16 Little children were occasionally shown a
s used by fathers as sensuous objects-as when in Aristophanes' Wasps the father
says he "routinely enjoys letting his daughter fish small coins from his mouth w
ith her tongue"17-but otherwise, scholars conclude, "In antiquity, women [and ch
ildren] lived shut away [from men]. They rarely showed themselves in public [but
] stayed in apartments men did not enter; they rarely ate with their husbands...
they never spent their days together."18 In Greece, for instance, "women had a s
pecial place. Larger houses at any rate had a room or suite of rooms in which wo
men worked and otherwise spent much of their day, the women's apartments, the gy
naikonitis, which Xenophon says was "separated from the men's quarters by a bolt
ed door."19 In twostory houses, the gynaikonitis would usually be upstairs."20 T
he men's dining-room, the andron, was located downstairs near the entrance, guar
ding the women's quarters: "Here men in the family dined and entertained male gu
ests...Vase-paintings do not depict Greek couples eating together."21 This mainl
y vertical organization of most homes lasted well into the eighteenth century, w
hen a new "structure of intimacy" began to be built, with rooms connected to eac
h other on the same level.22 The women's area held the grandmother, the mother,
the concubines, the slave nurses, the aunts and the children. Thus Herodotus cou
ld assume his reader would easily recognize families where "a boy is not seen by
his father before he is five years old, but lives with the women,"23 and Aristo
tle could assume his readers' assent that "no male creatures take trouble over t
heir young."24 Ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish men had all-male eating clubs whe
re women and children were not welcome.25 Plato has Socrates suggest a possibly
better home arrangement, with "dinners at which citizens will feast in the compa
ny of their children....In general, however, children ate with their mothers, no
t their fathers...Eating and drinking, far from offering the whole family an opp
ortunity for communal activity, tended to express and reinforce cleavages within
it."26 Boys tended to remain in the gynarchy of their own or others' homes unti
l their middle teens.27 The husband is usually missing from the homes of most ea
rlier societies, and not just during their frequent military service. Evelyn Ree
d describes the early "matrifamily" as everywhere being ruled by mothers: "The f
amily in Egypt...was matriarchal...The most important person in the family was n
ot the father, but the mother. The Egyptian wife was called the 'Ruler of the Ho
use'...there is no corresponding term for the husband."28 In rural Greek village
s even today the mother owns the house, passes it on to her daughter as dowry, a
nd continues to rule the house when her daughter has children.29 Indeed, the hus
band was rarely with his family in antiquity-legislators sometimes suggest that
in order to prevent population
364
decline it would be a good idea for husbands to visit their wives occasionally a
nd not just have sex with boys, as in Solon's law "that a man should consort wit
h his wife not less than three times a month-not for pleasure surely, but as cit
ies renew their agreements from time to time."30 But for the most part, as Pluta
rch puts it, "Love has no connection whatsoever with the women's quarters;"31 it
is reserved for pederastic relations with boys. As Scroggs summarized Greco-Rom
an practice, "To enter the 'women's quarters' in search of love is to enter the
world of the feminine and therefore is effeminate for a male."32 Xenophon says "
the women's apartments [are] separated from the men's by a bolted door..."33 As
Plutarch wrote, "Genuine love has no connections whatsoever with the women's qua
rters."34 When Socrates asks, "Are there any people you talk to less than you do
to your wife?" his answer was, "Possibly. But if so, very few indeed."35 Men st
ayed in the thiasos, the men's club, with other men, and had little to do with t
heir children. Greek boys stayed in the gynarchy of their own home until they at
the age of about ten were forced to be eromenos, sexual objects, in the andron
of a much older man's home.36 Greek girls stayed in the gynarchy until they were
about twelve, when they too were raped by a much older man, a stranger chosen f
or them by their family to be their husband. The father might try to enforce an
occasional dominance of the gynarchy by beating the women and children, as Senec
a described his father doing, usually for the most "trivial actions,"37 but usua
lly it was the women of the household who wielded the family whip on their child
ren. The gynarchy ruled supreme in early homes. In Byzantium, women had separate
spheres with strict exclusion of men from the family, where "men live in light
and brightness, the palaestra; women live in the gynaecaeum, enclosed, secluded.
"38 This was even true of supposedly patriarchal Chinese families. The Chinese g
ynarchy was described by visitors as living in "women's apartments behind the hi
gh walls of their husbands' compounds," dominated by women who "are reputed to t
errorize the men of their households and their neighbors with their fierce tempe
rs, searing tongues, and indomitable wills...When father and son do work togethe
r, they have nothing to say, and even at home they speak only when there is busi
ness to discuss. [Otherwise] they mutually avoid each other."39 Likewise, in Ind
onesian families, "fathers are simply not present very much...the woman has more
authority, influence and responsibility than her husband..."40 The examples can
easily be extended around the world and into the Middle Ages: the female world
was highly structured, like a little monarchy-that monarchy wielded by the maste
r's wife, the 'lady' who dominated the other women in the house. This monarchy w
as often tyrannical. The chronicles of French families at the end of the twelfth
and the
365
beginning of the thirteenth century paint a picture of shrews reigning brutally
over servants whom they terrorized, and over their sons' wives whom they torment
ed...Indeed, a female power existed which rivaled that of men...Men were afraid
of women, especially their own wives, afraid of being incapable of satisfying a
being who was seen both as a devourer and as a bearer of death...41 Feminist his
torians have pioneered in uncovering the evidence revealing families as gynarchi
es, saying "the need to keep women in line revealed permanent high tension in me
n around a being with disquieting power."42 Men are shown as being excluded from
the traditional "gynaeceum":43 the nursery, the kitchen, the work bees, even th
e laundry: "No man would dare approach the laundry, so feared is this group of w
omen..."44 Women are depicted as ruling both their husbands and their children,
who are often shown as fearing them,45 and while husbands are hopefully told in
moralist's instruction manuals about the "Duties of a Husband" to instruct their
wives, the sections on the "Duties of a Father" to care for their children are
nowhere to be found until modern times.46 Most fathers agreed with Abelard, who,
after he got Heloise pregnant, sent her away, admitting, "Who can bear the scre
ams of children...Who can tolerate the unclean and continuous soilings of babies
?" 47 As Buchan wrote, "Men generally keep at such a distance from even the smal
lest acquaintance with the affairs of the nursery [and] is not ashamed to give d
irections concerning the management of his dogs or horses, yet would blush were
he surprised in performing the same office for [his] heir..."48 Since children o
f the upper classes were sent out to wetnurse and then to school, many adults co
uld agree with Talleyrand when he stated that he "had never slept under the same
roof with his father and mother."49 Fathers were so distant that most could agr
ee with Vandermonde, who said, "One blushes to think of loving one's children."5
0 When their children died, most fathers, like William Byrd, revealed no signs o
f grief, writing in their diaries the night of the death only that they had "goo
d thoughts and good humor."51 Should a father try to play with his child, they w
ere unable to summon the empathy needed to understand its capacities, as seen in
the following typical interaction: A gentleman was playing with his child of a
year old, who began to cry. He ordered silence; the child did not obey; the fath
er then began to whip it, but this terrified the child and increased its cries..
.The father thought the child would be ruined unless it was made to yield, and r
enewed his chastisement with increased severity....On undressing it, a pin was d
iscovered sticking into its back.52
366
By the nineteenth century, some fathers began to relate to their children with s
ome empathy, yet even they were seen as rare, as when Grigorii Belynskii was des
cribed as "the only father in the city who understood that in raising children i
t is not necessary to treat them like cattle."53 Even those who began at this ti
me to criticize "paternal neglect," like John Abbott, said it was the father's s
ole task "to teach his children to obey their mother."54 It wasn't actually unti
l late socializing mode fathers came along that they actually began some caretak
ing, pushing prams and otherwise trying to live up to the New Fatherhood proclam
ations of the twentieth century.55 Yet even though there are some fathers today
who are helping mode parents and who spend equal time with their wives caring fo
r their children,56 various time surveys in America still show that working fath
ers spend only about 12 to 18 minutes per day with their young children,57 witho
ut even counting the onethird of all babies who are born to unmarried women.58 T
he gynarchy, it appears, still reigns supreme, and fathers around the world have
yet to seriously embrace the tasks and joys of fatherhood. GIRLS HAD WORSE CHIL
DHOODS THAN BOYS The problem with having only women raising children is that par
enting is an emotionally demanding task, requiring considerable maturity, and th
roughout history girls have grown up universally despised. When a girl was born,
said the Hebrews, "the walls wept."59 Japanese lullabies sang, "If it's a girl,
stamp on her."60 In medieval Muslim cultures "a grave used to be prepared, even
before delivery, beside the woman's resting place [and] if the new-born was a f
emale she was immediately thrown by her mother into the grave."61 "Blessed is th
e door out of which goes a dead daughter" was a popular Italian proverb that was
meant quite literally. 62 Girls from birth have everywhere been considered full
of dangerous pollution-the projected hatred of adults-and were therefore more o
ften killed, exposed, abandoned, malnourished, raped and neglected than boys. Gi
rls in traditional societies spent most of their growing up years trying to avoi
d being raped by their neighbors or employers and thereby being forced into a li
ves of prostitution. To expect horribly abused girls to magically become mature,
loving caretakers when as teenagers they go to live as virtual slaves in a stra
nge family simply goes against the conclusions of every clinical study we have s
howing the disastrous effects of trauma upon the ability to mother.63 As we have
seen in Chapter 5, mothers earlier in history mainly saw their children as thei
r own screaming, needy, dominating mothers-forming what Nancy Chodorow terms a "
hypersymbiotic relationship"64 -wherein the child is expected to
367
make up for all the love missing in the mother's own life, cure her post-partum
depression and restore her vitality. Like acutely disturbed destructive mothers
in current clinical studies who "indifferently admit the desire to abuse, rape,
mutilate, or kill a child, any child,"65 mothers in the past feared their infant
s' crying so much they were determined to "never let a child have anything it cr
ies for...I think it right to withhold it steadily, however much the little crea
ture may cry...and the habit of crying would be broken."66 The need to shut up t
he mother's angry voice in babies lead to their being tied up, neglected and bea
ten. Tiny infants were experienced as being so destructive that, according to Au
gustine, "If left to do what he wants, there is no crime he will not plunge into
."67 In fact, infants were felt to be so full of badness that when they died the
y were often buried under rain gutters so the water would wash off their inborn
pollution.68 An average mother in the past was like the extremely disturbed moth
er of today, described by clinical studies, whose "death wishes she harboured un
consciously towards her [own] mother are now experienced in relation to the chil
d [so that] death pervades the relationship between mother and child [with the m
other often reporting,] 'I can remember hurling the baby down on the pillows onc
e, and just screaming, and not caring. I wanted to kill him really...I hated the
baby for constantly being there.'"69 Many mothers today admit that they must st
ruggle against feeling "dominated, exploited, humiliated, drained and criticized
by their babies," saying they sometimes "want to hurt them, get rid of them, sq
uash them like a pancake, or beat them into silence."70 Mothers in the past, unf
ortunately, less often won the maternal love/hate struggle because their own for
mative years were so much less nurturant. The baby in the past must not need any
thing, but must just give love solely to the emotionally-deprived mother: August
us Hare's account of his childhood provides an insight into such relationships..
.He could never express a wish to his mother, as she would have thought it her d
uty to refuse it. 'The will is the thing that needs to be brought into subjectio
n,' she said...[Once] his mother, finding him much attached to a household cat,
ceremoniously hanged the cat in the garden, so that he should have no object but
her to love.71 Mothers hallucinated their children as maternal breasts with suc
h intensity that they were constantly licking and sucking their faces, lips, bre
asts and genitals, 72 feeling so needy from their own loveless childhoods that t
hey expected their children to care for them emotionally as they grow up. Instea
d, mothers confessed, "children eat you up...you are sucked dry by them...my chi
ldren sucked me dry; all my vitality is gone."73 It is only when one realizes th
eir own severe neglect and abuse and the extent to which their babies are poison
containers for their feelings that one can begin
368
to understand why mothers in the past routinely killed, neglected and abused the
ir children. What is miraculous-and what is the source of most social progress-i
s that mothers throughout history have slowly and successfully struggled with th
eir fear and hatred with so little help from others and have managed to evolve t
he loving, empathic childrearing one can find in many families around the world
today. CHILD SACRIFICE AS PUNISHMENT FOR SUCCESS The act of having a child is, s
ays Rheingold, "the most forbidden act of selfrealization, the ultimate and leas
t pardonable offense," and brings with it inevitable fears of maternal retributi
on for one's success and individuation.74 Mothers in antiquity hallucinated fema
le demons-Lamia, Gorgo, Striga, Empusa-who were actually grandmother alters in t
he mothers' heads, so jealous of their having babies that they sucked out their
blood and otherwise murdered them.75 Even today peasant villages fear the outbre
ak of "angry, malevolent, dangerous" hallucinations that surround the newborn an
d threaten the mother and even keep the nursery room boarded up with the door ba
rred to prevent the intrusion of dangerous spirits. 76 All early societies inven
ted sacrificial rituals wherein babies were tortured and killed to honor materna
l goddesses, from Anit to Kali, vowing that, "although Mommy wants to kill me fo
r having sex and making a baby, if I kill the baby instead [usually the first-bo
rn was sacrificed], I can then go on having sex and other babies with less fear
of retribution." The severely immature parents of the past felt under such const
ant threat for success by malevolent forces-maternal alters-that their own child
ren were constantly being used as poison containers for their disowned feelings.
As one informant in a contemporary rural Greek community put it, "When you're a
ngry a demon gets inside of you. Only if a pure individual passes by, like a chi
ld for instance, will the bad leave you, for it will fall on the unpolluted."77
The dynamics are clear: the "demon inside you" is the alter, the "unpolluted chi
ld" is the poison container. A typical child sacrifice for parental success can
be seen in Carthage, where archeologists have found a child cemetery called The
Tophet that is filled with over 20,000 urns containing bones of children sacrifi
ced by the parents, who would make a vow to kill their next child if the gods wo
uld grant them a favor-for instance, if their shipment of goods were to arrive s
afely in a foreign port. 78 They placed their children alive in the arms of a br
onze statue of "the lady Tanit...the hands of the statue extended over a brazier
into which the child fell once the flames had caused its limbs to contract and
its mouth to open...the child was alive and conscious when burned...Philo specif
ied that the sacrificed child was best-loved."79
369
Child sacrifice was the foundation of all great religions, depicted in myths as
absolutely necessary to save the world from "chaos," that is, from terrible inne
r annihilation anxiety as punishment for success. Maccoby's book, The Sacred Exe
cutioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt, portrays the entire history o
f religion as dramas featuring a vengeful, bloodthirsty Sacred Executioner, demo
nstrating that the role of children, from Isaac to Christ, was to act as sacrifi
ces for the sins of the parents.80 Behind even male gods demanding sacrifice are
Avenging Terrible Mothers of Death, says Lederer-Belili, Inanna, Tiamat, Ishtar
, Astarte, Lilith, Hathor-Sekhmet, Izanami, Chicomecoatl-all Mother alters in th
e brains of the new parents, demanding revenge for the hubris of daring to be a
parent.81 The wealthier the family, the more children had to be sacrificed to th
e goddess, representing the infant's furious grandmother.82 Child sacrifices hav
e been found from the beginning of human history: decapitated skeletons of early
hominid children have been found, with evidence of cannibalism, as their parent
s ate them on behalf of the spirits of their life-devouring grandmothers;83 youn
g children were buried with their skulls split by an ax at Woodhenge/Stonehenge;
84 decapitated infant sacrifices to the Great Goddess were found at Jericho;85 e
arly Arabians sacrificed their daughters to "the mothers;"86 the serpent goddess
of the Aztecs demanded skull and heart sacrifice of children, including the eat
ing of the children's bodies and covering themselves with their blood;87 Mayan a
nd Incan sacrificed children are still being discovered in the South American mo
untains, along with children who have been killed by drug dealers to ward off re
venge for their successful cocaine runs.88 The need to sacrifice children to war
d off fears of success was so powerful that right through medieval times, when p
eople built new buildings, walls or bridges, little children were sealed in them
alive as "foundation sacrifices" to ward off the angry, avenging spirits, alter
s of parents who felt envious of the accomplishments of their children.89 Even w
hen children died in the past from natural causes, the sources often reveal a de
ep satisfaction by the parents. Sometimes an adult recalled their mother's death
wishes in their memoirs-a typical passage occurs when Leopardi remembers clearl
y of his mother that When she saw the death of one of her infants approaching, s
he experienced a deep happiness, which she attempted to conceal only from those
who were likely to blame her....When, as several times happened, she seemed like
ly to lose an infant child, she did not pray God that it should die, since relig
ion forbids it, but she did in fact rejoice.90
370
Over and over again death wishes are revealed in the historical sources, breakin
g out when interacting with children. Epictetus admitted, "What harm is there if
you whisper to yourself, at the very moment you are kissing your child, and say
'Tomorrow you will die?'"91 Another recalled his mother tucking him into bed ni
ghtly with the words, "Soon my son you will exchange the bed for the grave, and
your clothes for a winding sheet."92 The deaths of children were rarely mourned:
mothers were commonly reported to have "regarded the death of various daughters
at school with great equanimity" and fathers to "cheerfully remark when two of
his fifteen children died that he still had left a baker's dozen."93 Often adult
s recorded in their diaries a vow to have "the Lord" (the parent's parental alte
r) kill the child, as Cotton Mather did as each of his children died: I resigned
the Child unto the Lord; my Will was extinguished. I could say, My Father, Kill
my Child, if it be thy Pleasure to do so...I had rather have him dy in his Infa
ncy, than live in cursed and lothsome Wickedness...[my dead child is] a Family-S
acrifice...I would endeavour exceedingly to glorify God, by making a Sacrifice o
f the lovely Child...94 As we will see in the sections that follow on infanticid
e, mutilation and abandonment, parents are the child's most lethal enemy, becaus
e inside the parents' psyches lie a powerful, dangerous alter that is their own
parent's death wishes toward the child. INFANTICIDE AS CHILD SACRIFICE Mothers w
ho feel like killing their newborn children today are clinically found to be dee
ply depressed and lonely, because, according to Rheingold's study of 350 filicid
al mothers, "It is only the fear of being a woman that can create the infanticid
al impulse...having a child is the most forbidden act of self-realization...puni
shment is inescapable and punishment means annihilation...To appease the mother
she must destroy the child, but the child is a love object too. To preserve the
child she must renounce mother... She is trapped in a desperate conflict: kill m
other and preserve the baby or kill the baby and preserve the mother."95 Mothers
in the past routinely chose killing the baby, by the billions, driven to it by
her devil alter (her own destructive mother image in her head).
371
Rysunek 35 8:1 Mother commits infanticide with help of her devil alter
In my previous articles on infanticide, I have shown that boy/girl sex ratios of
preliterate tribes average 128/100, while boy/girl ratios from census and other
sources in European history ranged from as high as 400/100 to 140/100 in the mi
ddle ages.96 With Indian and Chinese boy/girl ratios in the nineteenth century r
unning at 300/100 and higher,97 and with current Asian statistics still showing
over 200 million girls "missing" in the census figures,98 I have determined that
it is likely that overall infanticide rates of both sexes exceeded 30 percent i
n antiquity and only slowly declined to the very small rate in advanced societie
s today. 99 Multiplying these infanticide rates by the 80 billion human births i
n the past 100,000 years100-80 percent of them occurring before 1750, and even m
ore of them occurring in areas with high Asian-style infanticide rates-a weighte
d average infanticide rate for the entire 80 billion births was likely at the ve
ry least 15 percent, or 12 billion children killed by their parents. Even this a
stonishing figure is not the whole story of infanticide, however. Every study of
infant death rates among children sent out to wetnurses and abandoned in foundl
ing homes shows much higher death rates, running to over 70 per cent and higher,
even in modern times.101 Doctors of every age agreed that "the most profound ca
use of the terrific waste of infant life [is] neglect...neglected by their own m
others and neglected by the nurses to whom they were abandoned..."102 Since pare
nts who sent their children to wetnurse and foundling homes knew quite well they
would likely not see them again-indeed, often they were sent to so-called "kill
ing wetnurses" with a small sum of money under the tacit assumption that they wo
uld not be returned103-these "delayed infanticide" acts must be added to the est
imated rate of child killing, increasing it by at the very least a third, or a t
otal of 16 billion children killed by parental acts over the entire historical s
pan. No wonder people in the past so often said that everywhere in their areas "
you could hear coming out of the bottom of latrines and ponds and rivers the gro
anings of the children that one had thrown there."104
372
Although poverty played some part in this holocaust of children, it is doubtful
if it was the main cause of child deaths. In the first place, the cost of bringi
ng up a girl is no more than the cost of bringing up a boy, so the differential
infanticide rates are certainly parental choices. When, for instance, Arabs dug
a grave next to the birthing place of every new mother so "if the newborn child
was a female she could be immediately thrown by her mother into the grave,"105 i
t was likely hatred of girls, not poverty, that was the motive. Secondly, if sca
rce resources were the main cause, then wealthy parents should kill less than po
or. But the historical record shows exactly the opposite: historical boy/girl ra
tios are higher among wealthy parents, 106 where economic necessity is no proble
m at all. Even in early modern England, the infant mortality rates for wealthy c
hildren were higher than the same rates for ordinary farmers, day laborers and c
raftsman.107 Thirdly, many wealthy high civilizations such as Greece, Rome, Chin
a, India, Hawaii and Tahiti are very infanticidal, especially among their elite
classes. As one visitor to Hawaii reported, there probably wasn't a single mothe
r who didn't throw one or more of her children to the sharks.108 There were even
societies where virtually all newborn were killed to satisfy their overwhemling
infanticidal needs, and infants had to be imported from adjoining groups to con
tinue the society.109 Finally, many nations-like in Japan until recently-kill th
eir children selectively in order to balance out an equal number of boys and gir
ls, a practice called mabiki, or "thinning out" the less promising ones, 110 aga
in revealing a quite different motive than the purely economic. It is most certa
inly not economics that causes so many depressed women on the delivery tables ev
en today to implore their mothers not to kill them after they have given birth.
111 Women since the beginning of time have felt that their children "really" bel
onged to God-a symbol of the grandmother, and that "the child was a gift that Go
d had every right to reclaim."112 When killing her child, therefore, the mother
was simply acting as her own mother's avenger. We are left, unfortunately, with
what one psychoanalyst calls our "universal resistance to acknowledging the moth
er's filicidal drives, undoubtedly the most dreaded and uncanny truth for us to
face."113 Our only defenses are denial and dissociation, like people in the past
, who regularly dissociated from the emotional impact of their murder of their i
nnocent little children by sayings such as, "Do we not cast away from us our spi
ttle, lice and such which are engendered out of our own selves," "mad dogs we kn
ock on the head [and] we drown even children at birth," "when children die there
is no need to get excited...one is born every year...live and let die."114 Both
mothers and fathers knew their own parents demanded a death; both struggled aga
inst the grandparents' dire threat to kill them if they dare to became
373
parents themselves. What helped the dissociation was such beliefs as denying tha
t the babies were human, so during most of history, East and West, if the mother
would kill the newborn before it took any nourishment, it wasn't considered "re
ally born," it wasn't human yet.115 Usually it was the mother or one of the othe
r women of the gynarchy who did the killing, in the past as in the present,116 u
sually violently, smashing in the baby's head, crushing it between her knees, as
phyxiating it against her breasts, sitting on it, or throwing it alive into the
privy, with the mother sometimes earning the nickname of "child-stabber" or "chi
ld-crusher."117 It helped to have gynecological writings like Soranus's on "How
to Recognize the Newborn That Is Worth Rearing" to rationalize the infanticide.1
18 It helped to share the blame for the murder with your children, who were ofte
n made to help the mother kill their newborn siblings, and who would then be mor
e likely to restage the murder upon their own newborn. 119 It helped to have dae
monic beliefs like those still held in rural Greece that Evil Spirits had turned
the newborn into a changling, a demon baby, a Striga, which had to be strangled
to protect the mother from harm.120 The mother's struggle against the urge to k
ill her children was (and is) usually a conscious one, and the role of the disso
ciated parental alter is often evident-as when mothers today tell therapists tha
t "someone keeps talking to me in my mind telling me to choke my daughter" or as
when Medea struggled against killing her children, saying, "I know what wickedn
ess I am about to do; but the thumos is stronger than my purposes, thumos, the r
oot of our mankind's worst acts."121 But the feeling of being driven by the Dest
ructive Mother alter, the struggle against killing one's baby and the severe pos
tpatrum depression were all universal for mothers in traditional societies, and
sixteen billion murdered children were the result of losing the sacrificial batt
le. Opposition by society to infanticide was negligible until modern times. Jews
considered any child who died within thirty days after birth, even by violence,
to have been a "miscarriage."122 Most ancient societies openly approved of infa
nticide, and although Roman law, in response to Christianity, made infanticide a
capital offense in 374 C.E., no cases have been found punishing it.123 Anglo-Sa
xons actually considered infanticide a virtue, not a crime, saying, "A child cri
es when he comes into the world, for he anticipates its wretchedness. It is well
for him that he should die...he was placed on a slanting roof [and] if he laugh
ed, he was reared, but if he was frightened and cried, he was thrust out to peri
sh."124 Prosecutions for infanticide before the modern period were rare.125 Even
medieval penitentials excused mothers who killed their newborn before feeding t
hem.126 By Puritan times, a few mothers began being hanged for infanticide.127 B
ut even in the nineteenth century it was still
374
"not an uncommon spectacle to see the corpses of infants lying in the streets or
on the dunghills of London and other large cities.128 The English at the end of
the century had over seven million children enrolled in "burial insurance socie
ties;" with the infant mortality rate at 50 percent, parents could easily collec
t the insurance by killing their child. As one doctor said, "sudden death in inf
ants is too common a circumstance to be brought before the attention of the coro
ner...Free medical care for children was refused...'No, thank you, he is in two
burial clubs' was a frequent reply to offers of medical assistance for a sick ch
ild. Arsenic was a favorite poison..."129
Century after century, the children in traditional societies who survived rememb
ered the cries of their murdered brothers and sisters, feared their murderous pa
rents, believed themselves unworthy of living, irredeemably bad, and grew up to
inflict the killings on their own children.
MUTILATING CHILDREN'S BODIES In the previous chapter, the propensity of preliter
ate tribes to cut, burn and otherwise mutilate the bodies of their children was
discussed, particularly the role of genital mutilation, where during initiation
rites boys' penises are sliced open under the conviction that it was necessary t
o expel the "mothers blood and bad words" that had lodged in them. The powerful
need to mutilate children's bodies is found in nearly all cultures in some form,
and reaches back to the Paleolithic caves where handprints on the walls130 show
clearly that children's fingers were cut off in the widespread belief by many c
ultures that the Devil (the destructive parental alter) demanded a child's finge
r to appease his wrath. Frazer documented these finger sacrifice rituals in many
cultures, and sanctuaries have been found as far back as the Neolithic with fin
ger bones, right up through ancient Greek times, when, Pausanias reported, finge
r sacrifice rituals were still performed to pacify pursuing demons.131 Finger am
putation was also endemic in Ocean, Polynesia and among North American Indians.1
32 But more often it is the genitals, head or feet of children which are assault
ed; as the Canadian Intuit Eskimos say, "A hurt baby is more lovable!" and mothe
rs who feel affectionate toward their infants are reported as commonly "slapping
it, squeezing it tightly, or biting it until it bursts into tears."133 Few moth
ers even today are free of dreams in which their babies are badly hurt, though m
ost are able to laugh off the impulses and perhaps only be overprotective toward
their infants. But Rheingold's clinical studies reveal many mothers ward off ma
ternal retribution for having the baby by what he terms a "mutilation impulse,"
which he finds mainly
375
directed toward the genitals of the boy and the girl and toward the "insides" of
the girl's body, producing in boys severe castration anxieties and "a fear of f
emaleness" in girls, including fears of injury to the pelvic region.134 Cutting
off parts or all of the girl's genitals is a widespread practice,135 possibly re
aching back to Paleolithic times since a stone knife is often used, and is still
practiced in preliterate tribes from Africa to Australia, where the girl's vagi
na is torn open with a stone knife and the child is then gang raped.136 Historic
al evidence dates from ancient Egypt, where mummies have been found with clitora
l excision and labial fusions,137 and Greek physicians like Soranos and Aetius r
egularly advocated the removal of a girl's clitoris if it was "overly large" so
she would not be overly lustful.138
Rysunek 36 8:2 A girl in Cairo is mutilated by her Mother
There are over 100 million Arab females today who have had their genitals choppe
d off, having been told that "if the clitoris is left alone, it will grow and dr
ag on the ground, and if left uncircumcised, they will be wild and...grow up hor
ny." 139 Often the girl's labia are cut off in addition to the clitoris, and the
remaining flesh is sewn together, leaving only a small opening for urination. T
he vagina must therefore be cut open again before intercourse, and the women hav
e great difficulty giving birth and often are further cut to allow the baby to p
ass through. During the mutilations-usually done around the age of six with rust
y knives by the women of the gynarchy-the girls undergo excruciating pain, somet
imes die of complications, usually hemorrhage, and often pass out from the shock
since no anaesthetic is used.140 The ritual-which is not a religious rite and i
s nowhere mentioned in the Koran-is accompanied by the joyful shouting and chant
ing of the women, shouting, "now you are a woman," "Bring her the groom now." "B
ring her a penis, she is ready for intercourse," etc.141 They act out in manic r
itual Rheingold's dicta that destructive mothers "seem to have the urge to destr
oy her daughter's femaleness: her external genitals, her 'insides'...her total s
exuality."142 It is not surprising that the overwhelming majority of circumcised
girls grow up to be frigid.
376
Female circumcision was practiced historically in various groups from Russia to
Latin America,143 and was even inflicted on girls "who masturbated too much" in
Europe and America in the nineteenth century, using a red hot iron to burn away
the little girl's clitoris.144 Circumcision for boys might be thought of as less
traumatic since it involves only removal of the foreskin, a far less painful an
d serious mutilation. Yet in many cultures circumcision of boys is quite painful
, as when Moslem boys are circumcised between the ages of 3 and 7 in a painful,
bloody ceremony, after which "he is placed on his mother's naked back [so] that
his bleeding penis presses against her. His mother dances along with the other w
omen until he stops crying." 145 That this ceremony is connected with the incest
uous feelings of the mother is apparent from the fact that genital mutilation is
far more likely found in societies where the little boy sleeps with his mother
while the father sleeps elsewhere.146 Circumcision of boys-practiced from Egypt
and Africa to Peru and Polynesia147-makes them into "little mothers," with the p
eeling away of the foreskin uncovering the glans so that it can act as a materna
l nipple. That circumcision of boys is still practiced so regularly in America i
s a testimony to the continuing ubiquity of parental assault on the sexuality of
children.148 But the more serious genital mutilation of boys that occurred thro
ughout history, East and West, was castration. Eunichs were found in most cultur
es, beginning as a sacrificial rite to early goddeses: "piles of freshly severed
genitals lay beneath the altars in Egyptian temples, where hundreds of virile y
ouths were initiated daily into male prostitution."149 In addition, castration w
as necessary to satisfy all the men who preferred hairless castrated boys to rap
e, plus all those used as harem keepers, palace officials, boy singers, actors a
nd many other roles thought to require castrates.150 Nero was said to enjoy the
use of eunuchs in his orgies, even marrying one of them.151 When parents sent th
eir boys to aristocratic households for sexual use, they were said to sometimes
cut off their genitals and keep them in a jar.152 Eunuchs were especially popula
r in Byzantium, while in the West Verdun was widely known as "the great eunuch f
actory." In some Italian towns, boys who were destined for the clergy were castr
ated at an early age; in Naples, signs hung above stores, "Boys castrated here."
153 Many cultures castrated boys when they are just infants, claiming they "real
ly wanted" to be girls. They are then used as women, sexually and otherwise, whe
n they grow up, as in the hijras of India or the berdaches of American Indian tr
ibes.154 The testicles of these boys were either torn from them, crushed or sear
ed off them with red-hot irons, usually between the ages of 3 and 7; in China, "
both the penis and scrotum were removed with one cut." 155 Castration of
377
boys continued until recently in the Middle East, followed by burial of the muti
lated boy in hot sand for several days to reduce hemorrhage-only one in five sur
viving the bloody operation.156 Some societies had variations of circumcision th
at approached castration, as in some Arab tribes where they performed salkh, whi
ch "consisted of flaying and removing all of the skin of the penis..."157 The an
cients' more usual assault on boys' genitals, however-called infibulation-was le
ss painful, though longer lasting. Since they were so deprived of maternal love,
ancients saw the boy's glans as an exciting nipple ("it strikes terror and wond
er in the heart of man") and felt they needed to hide it, so they drew the prepu
ce foreword, drilled two holes in it, and closed it up with a ring, pin or clamp
.158 Infibulated penises are regularly shown in drawings of Greeks and Roman ath
letes and was popular until modern times.159 The same practice in the East is ca
lled mohree, sewing or cauterizing the prepuce over the glans, preventing erecti
on; to this day some Japanese athletes use infibulation to prevent the loss of t
heir strength, which could evaporate through the glans.160 Aztec parents cut bot
h boys' and girls' genitals regularly throughout their childhood, the blood bein
g used in a sacrifice to their goddess, a ritual which was said to "cleanse one'
s heart of the guilt that could drive a person crazy."161 Indeed, one is tempted
to give the Aztecs the prize for the most sacrificial parenting, since they wer
e routinely sacrificed, cut, tied to cradleboards, holes drilled in their lips,
drugged, burned over fires, starved, stuck with spines, thrown naked into icewat
er, tortured and battered nearly every day of their lives.162 But this would be
a mistake. Aztec childhood was simply more fully described, by visitors from Eur
ope. Equally graphic were those who described the ancient Chinese habit of behea
ding or strangling children who were "guilty of addressing abusive language to h
is or her father or mother"163 or of the nineteenthcentury Yugoslav practice of
smearing infants with excrement and holding them over the fire or pushing them i
nto a bread-oven to cure "bewitchment."164 Parents in traditional societies coul
dn't keep their hands off their little babies; they simply were compelled to hur
t and torture them. The first thing most Western societies did to the newborn up
until the twentieth century was cut the ligament under their tongue with their
thumbnail, assaulting them in advance for what they experienced as maternal tong
ue-lashing.165 Then their heads and genitals would be forcibly "shaped":
Long heads would be reshaped, indeed all babies' heads would be reshaped to make
the conform to the desired shape. The nose would be corrected...the nurse would
gentle stretch the end of the foreskin every day...The scrotum would also be ma
ssaged...166
378
Severe cranial deformation can be seen in the drawings of Egyptian, Aztec, Huns,
Native American and other children, as their head was routinely put between two
boards, one of the back of the head and the other on the forehead, so as to squ
ash the head into the angle formed by the boards-a practice found as far back as
the Neanderthals and continuing "throughout much of Europe, especially in Holla
nd and France, until the middle of the nineteenth century."167 Particularly wide
spread was the impulse to burn children. Traditional Arab children had burn mark
s all over their body from being burned by their parents with red-hot irons or p
ins.168 English newspapers often reported parents "stirring up the fire with [ch
ildren's] feet so that their toes rotted off...But we don't hear that there are
any proceedings against her on this score."169 The regular use of applying burni
ng Mona to the child's body is still common in Japan.170 Pouring scalding hot wa
ter ("iron water") over children was supposed to be curative in Eastern European
therapy. 171 Similar results are ascribed to the Italian medieval practice of,
"as soon as children be born, they cauterize or burn them in the neck with a hot
iron, or else drop a burning wax candle upon the place...they think the brain i
s dried, and by pain the humour which doth flow is drawn to the hinder part of t
he head."172 Every kind of excuse is given for the torture of children. Parents
of every period force children who have soiled their bed, to consume their own e
xcrement.173 Particularly crippling were mutilations like Chinese footbinding, w
hich breaks the bones of little girls so their flesh deteriorates, all done in o
rder to make the big toe stick out (as a penis substitute) so men could masturba
te against it during the sex act.174 THE LACK OF EMPATHY TOWARD CHILDREN AND MAL
NUTRITION IN HISTORY Every childrearing practice in traditional societies around
the globe betrays a profound lack of empathy toward one's children. This should
not, however, be simply seen as a result of poverty or even "the brutality of h
uman nature." These parents are in thrall to their own mothers' alters, demandin
g the torture and sacrifice of their grandchildren. A typical example of this th
ralldom can be seen in the following observation of a visitor to Italy who descr
ibes a popular religious festival: The most striking object of the solemnities i
s a procession [in which] a colossal car is dragged by a long team of buffaloes
through the streets. Upon this are erected a great variety of objects, such as t
he sun, moon, and principal planets, set in rotary motion...The heart sickens at
sight of it [for] bound to the rays of sun and moon, to the circles forming the
spheres of the various planets, are infants yet unweaned, whose mothers, for th
e gain of a few ducats, thus expose their offspring, to represent the cherub esc
ort which is supposed to accompany the Virgin [Mary] to heaven.
379
When this huge machine has made its jolting round, these helpless creatures...ha
ving been whirled round and round for a period of seven hours, are taken down fr
om this fatal machine, already dead or dying. Then ensues a scene impossible to
describe-the mothers struggling with each other, screaming, and trampling each o
ther down. It not being possible, on account of the number, for each mother to r
ecognize her own child among the survivors, one disputes with the other the iden
tity of her infant...The less fortunate mothers, as they receive the dead bodies
of their infants, often already cold, rend the air with their fictitious lament
ations, but consoled with the certainty that Maria, enamoured of her child, has
taken it with her into Paradise.175 The Mother Mary-symbol of the infant's grand
mother-is shown as demanding possession of the child even unto death. The mother
s give up their child's life to the infanticidal grandmother happily, knowing th
ey are thereby being good little girls who obey the destructive wishes of their
mothers. This destructive grandmother-alter in every mothers' head is the missin
g factor in historians' accounts of the ubiquitous cruelty toward children in th
e past. Edward Shorter, for instance, effectively counters the "poverty" argumen
t for "the manifest callousness" with which children were treated in the past by
showing how upper- and middle-class mothers "got the money for large weddings,
dowries, and militia uniforms...yet omitted just as much as did the laborers to
breast-feed infants while alive, and to grieve for them when dead."176 Indeed, a
lmost every mother who could afford to send their newborn out to wetnurses did s
o, even when the wetnurses fed them pap, not breast milk, and even though their
child was more than likely to die from the wetnurse's callous treatment. In fact
, mothers in the past seemed unable to even empathize enough with their infants
to notice when they were hungry. Doctors throughout the centuries in all parts o
f the world routinely reported that "babies should only be fed two to three time
s in twenty-four hours."177 Hroard's diary of little Louis XIII showed that despit
e over a dozen nurses and caretakers being assigned to provide for his needs, he
was regularly malnourished, even close to death.178 Even princesses as late as
the eighteenth century were regularly reported to be "naked and dying of hunger.
"179 Mothers and nurses in the past were closer than one wishes to admit to the
mother chimpanzees whom we discussed in the previous chapter, who cannot empathi
ze with their weaned babies enough to give them food or water or even to show th
em how to get it, so that onethird starve to death during the weaning crisis.180
Human mothers, however, go far beyond this lack of empathy, and purposely starv
e their children in fasting or punishment rituals so beloved by many societies i
n the past.181 Buchan's conclusion that "almost one half of the human species pe
rish in infancy by improper management or neglect"182 is quite accurate, and by
no means restricted to the poor.
380
When babies cried, mothers heard their own mothers' demanding voices, and only w
anted to quiet them, so they would as likely feed them beer, wine or opiumavaila
ble in every store as Godfrey's Cordial, Dalby's Carminative or Syrup of Poppies
,183 which would either narcotize them enough to quiet them or would kill them.1
84 The use of opium on infants goes back to ancient Egypt, where the Ebers papyr
us tells parents: "It acts at once!"185 Physicians complained of the thousands o
f infants killed every year by nurses "forever pouring Godfrey's Cordial down th
eir little throats, which is a strong opiate and in the end as fatal as arsenic.
" 186 At all costs the baby must be quieted; Rheingold describes mothers in trea
tment who "stop producing milk every time their mothers appear" because they "fe
ar their own vengeful mothers and fear that she may destroy her child."187 There
is no conscious guilt on the part of mothers who allow their children to starve
to death, since they blame the children "for wanting to die." 188 Many mothers
and wetnurses didn't breastfeed at all, but just gave infants pap, "gruel" (boui
llie), made of water or sour milk mixed with flour,189 which has very little nou
rishment and was so thick that "soon the whole belly is clogged, convulsions set
in, and the little ones die."190 In Bavaria, for instance, mothers considered n
ursing their children "disgusting," while the fathers were totally lacking in em
pathy, telling their wives "those breasts are mine" and threatening to go on a h
unger strike if the mothers nursed their baby.191 All sort of past childrearing
practices contributed to the starvation or malnutrition of infants. Newborn babi
es were usually not fed at all for the first week or more, since the mother's co
lostrum was believed to be poisonous to the baby. Swaddled babies were hung on a
peg or put in a cradle in another room, where their hunger cries could not be h
eard; in addition, tight swaddling makes infants withdraw into themselves so the
y refrain from crying when hungry. Infants sent out to wetnurse, after not being
fed during the journey, were given to women who often attempted to nurse up to
five or more babies at a time as they worked in the fields, while "the child is
left to himself, drowning in his own excrement, bound like a criminal..."192 Par
ticularly malnourished were those babies fed on pap by nurses, sometimes taking
on as many as 40 children at a time, most dying, while mothers continued to send
them their subsequent babies. 193 These and other starvation practices made mal
nutrition for most babies a near certainty until modern times.
381
SENDING TO WETNURSE AS A DELEGATE OF THE DESTRUCTIVE GRANDMOTHER Most historians
have been as little able to feel empathy for infants sent to wetnurses as the m
others themselves were, claiming it "reflected not so much a lack of love for th
em as a deep fear of loving them,"194 or that was just "a harmless convention no
t a rejection of the child."195 Most mothers who could afford to send their babi
es out did so; for instance, from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century,
less than 5 percent of the babies born in Paris were nursed by their own mother
s, rich or poor alike.196 Six percent of eighteenth-century Parisian parents tha
t wetnursed their babies were noble, 44 percent were master artisans and tradesm
en and 24 percent were journeymen or other workers; over a third of the children
died during their time at wetnurse, a mortality rate at least double that of ma
ternal nursing, with the mortality rate of foundlings placed at wetnurse being a
deadly 92 percent.197 Parents, of course, knew these enormous infant mortality
figures when they condemned their innocent babies to wetnurse. Mothers knew thei
r own mothers would be jealous if they cared about the newborn rather than devot
ing themselves to the grandmother, so they rarely inquired about the baby at wet
nurse. One unusual mother who actually visited her baby at wetnurse was warned b
y a relative that "such exaggerated love was a crime against God [her maternal a
lter], and he [she] would surely punish it." 198 Besides, "many young mothers sa
y...'If I turn nurse, I should destroy my husband's life, and my own too.'"199 U
pper-class mothers almost never nursed their babies, saying, "Nourish an infant!
Indeed, Indeed! ...I must have my sleep o'nights...And a new gown to wear at th
e Opera...What! Must the brat have my paps too?" 200 Defoe called suckling babie
s by ladies of quality "a thing as unnatural as if God had never intended it."20
1 Newborn babies were experienced as demon alters-dragon-snakes (drkoi)-until they
were exorcized at baptism.202 Even when their babies had in-house nurses to car
e for them, the mothers wouldn't breastfeed them herself. Breast milk was suppos
ed to have been made from the mother's blood, and mothers imagined that "every t
ime the baby sucks on her breasts, she feeleth the blood come from her heart to
nourish it,"203 making her feel like the baby depleted her of her very life's bl
ood. Doctors beginning with Soranus agreed that mothers who nursed their babies
would "grow prematurely old, having spent herself through the daily suckling." 2
04 In addition, since it was believed that "sperm would spoil the milk and turn
it sour,"205 for most of history maternal breastfeeding meant no sex for the mot
her while nursing. Still others rejected breastfeeding because it felt "too sens
ual,"206 violating the anti-sexual prohibitions of their family upbringing.
382
Physicians have complained since antiquity about parents who routinely give thei
r newborn over to negligent and abusive wetnurses. "At birth our children are ha
nded over to some silly little Greek serving girl," says Tacitus; 207 Soranus wa
rns about "some wet-nurses so lacking in sympathy towards the nursling that they
not only pay no heed when it cries for a long time, but [are] angry women like
maniacs and sometimes when the newborn cries from fear and they are unable to re
strain it, they let it drop from their hands or overturn it dangerously."208 Aul
us Gellius says wetnurses are chosen at random from the most useless slaves: "th
ey take the first woman who has milk."209 Throughout history, parents were quite
casual about entrusting their babies for from two to seven years with wetnurses
. Agents would "stop the first peasant woman he might come across, without exami
ning her health or her milk [or use] a placement office [who would] get rid of h
im cheap or hand him over to the first person who comes along..."210 The child-p
eddlers who hawked their services in the streets or by newspaper ads were not ex
pected to know anything about the wetnurse, only to take the infant off the moth
er's hands. Those few parents who tried to find a good wetnurse were usually dis
appointed; one diarist wrote of his own life: "Four different wet-nurses were al
ternately turn'd out of doors on my account...The first...nearly suffocated me i
n bed...The second let me fall from her arms on the stones till my head was almo
st fractured...The third carried me under an old brick wall which fell [on me]..
.while the fourth proved to be a thief, and deprived me even of my very baby clo
thes."211 The trip to wetnurse began the infant's traumatic life experiences. "T
he infants were bundled upright in groups of four or five in pannier baskets str
apped to the backs of donkeys. Those who died on the journey were just thrown ou
t en route." 212 Once there, their parents "seldom inquired about the survival o
f their infants and were often uninformed as to their whereabouts."213 Mothers s
ent each newborn to wetnurse "despite the killing off, one by one, of their chil
dren...Neither poverty nor ignorance explains such infanticide-only indifference
...Mothers on learning of their child's death at the nurse's console themselves,
without wondering about the cause, by saying, 'Ah well, another angel in heaven
!'"214 The wetnurse herself was usually an infanticidal mother. The common pract
ice was to require that she get rid of her own baby in order to nurse the strang
er-termed "a life for a life" by parents in the past.215 Montaigne laments "Ever
y day we snatch children from the arms of their mothers and put our own in their
charge for a very small payment."216 Society thought this system fair, since "b
y the sacrifice of the infant of the poor woman, the offspring of the wealthy wi
ll be preserved."217 It is not surprising, then, that wetnurses were universally
described as
383
"vicious,
slothful
and
inclined
to
drunkenness,"218
"debauched,
indolent,
superstitious,"219 guilty of "gross negligence...leaving babies...unattended whe
n helping with the harvest...crawling or falling into the fire and being attacke
d by animals, especially pigs,"220 "hung from a nail like a bundle of old clothe
s...the unfortunate one remains thus crucified [with] a purple face and violentl
y compressed chest."221 The wetnurses' superstitions included a belief "in favor
of cradle cap and of human wastes, which were thought to have therapeutic value
," 222 so infants were rarely washed and lived in their own feces and urine for
their entire time at nurse: "Infants sat in animal and human filth, were suspend
ed on a hook in unchanged swaddling bands or were slung from the rafters in an i
mprovised hammock...their mouths crammed with rotting rags."223 Even live-in wet
nurses were described as unfeeling: When he cried she used to shake him-when she
washed him she used to stuff the sponge in his little mouth-push her finger (be
ast!) in his little throat-say she hated the child, wished he were dead-used to
let him lie on the floor screaming while she sat quietly by and said screams did
not annoy her...224 Complaints by physicians that wetnurses let infants die of
simple neglect were legion: "While the women attend to the vineyards, the infant
remains alone...swaddled to a board and suspended from a hook on the wall...cry
ing and hungry in putrid diapers. Often the child cries so hard it ends up with
a hernia...turkeys peck out the eyes of a child...or they fall into a fire, or d
rown in pails left carelessly on doorsteps."225 Children were described as being
"kept ragged and bare, sickly and starved...in terror of their nurse, who hande
d out blows and vituperation freely" or who "tied them up by the shoulders and w
rists with ragged ends of sheets...face down on the floor...to protect them from
injuring themselves while she was away...Never played with or cuddled...it is a
holiday when they are taken for a walk around the room by the nurses..."226 Inf
ants who are sent to "killing nurses" are described as being fed while the nurse
croons, "Cry no more! Soon you will go, det drago, soon...'Tis truly better that
you go, dear infant...onto the lap of Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus."227 The dest
ructive Mother of Jesus, who gave birth for him to be sacrificed, was never far
away from the child. It is no wonder that well into the nineteenth century many
areas had a two-thirds mortality rate of infants sent to wetnurse.228 Since thei
r parents seldom visited them, the children were total strangers when they were
returned to them years later. "If they returned home alive, they often came back
in a pitiable state: thin, tiny, deformed, consumed by fevers, prone to
384
convulsions."229 The mother has by then nearly forgotten her baby, since, as phy
sicians complained since antiquity, "When a child is given to another and remove
d from its mother's sight, the strength of maternal ardor is gradually and littl
e by little extinguished and it is almost as completely forgotten as if it had b
een lost by death."230 One typical report came from a woman who described her mo
ther saying when she was returned at two from wetnurse, "My God! What have you b
rought me here! This goggle-eyed, splatter-faced, gabbart-mouthed wretch is not
my child! Take her away!"231 Another is praised by Locke for beating her child w
hen she first saw her, saying she was "forced to whip her little Daughter, at he
r first coming home from Nurse, eight times successively the same Morning, befor
e she could master her Stubbornness and obtain a compliance in a very easie and
indifferent matter." 232 The return home to mother from wetnurse was often like
going from the frying pan into the fire. Wetnursing was practiced by societies a
ll over the world, from Europe to Asia, as far back as records exist.233 The Cod
e of Hammurabi even allowed the wetnurse to sell the baby if the parents couldn'
t pay her the contracted amount. 234 The first improvement did not come until th
e seventeenth century, when wetnurses began more often to be brought into the pa
rents' homes, especially in England, Holland and America.235 The next step was f
or the mother to nurse herself. The decision was made purely for psychogenic rea
sons; no new invention nor social condition caused the change. Nor was it due to
a change in the opinions of experts-the pro-nursing tracts of Rousseau and othe
rs had little affect on the near-universal wetnursing practice in France, for in
stance, while in America, even in the South where slave nurses were available, m
others usually nursed themselves by the eighteenth century.236 Advanced mothers
began by telling each other they would find new delights in nursing their own in
fants, for, "in recompence whereof, he endeavors to show her a thousand delights
...he kisseth her, strokes her hair, nose and ears, he flatters her..." 237 Rath
er than a draining of vital blood, nursing could actually be a pleasure to the m
other! The new middle class took the lead in maternal nursing, while-even in Eng
land-the upper classes gave their infants to wetnurses well into the nineteenth
century; Victoria was the first English monarch who was not put out to wetnurse.
238 All of these changes took place before the advent of sterilized bottle feedi
ng in the twentieth century. Infant mortality in these areas immediately plunged
, 239 and mothers began to work out how to face the new emotional challenges of
relating to their babies.
385
SWADDLING THE EVIL INFANT Since "infant humans are inclined in their hearts to a
dultery, fornication, impure desires, lewdness...anger, strife, gluttony, hatred
and more,"240 they had to be tightly tied up so they "be not crooked nor evil s
hapen"241 and will not "tear its ears off, scratch its eyes out, break its legs,
or touch its genitals, " 242 would undoubtedly "fall to pieces,"243 and would c
ertainly "go upon all four, as most other animals do."244 Worse, infants are alw
ays on the verge of turning into your own angry mother; there is so much "viciou
sness in all children [if you] pamper them the least little bit, at once they wi
ll rule their parents."245 Infants are so violent that even their heads must be
"firmly tied down, that they might not throw off their heads from their shoulder
s." 246 Physicians complained "mothers and nurses bind and tie their children so
hard [they] made me weep {as they] lie the children behind the hot oven, whereb
y the child may soon be stiffled or choked..."247 The swaddling process was much
the same for millennia:
[The mother] stretches the baby out on a board or straw mattress and dresses it
in a little gown or a coarse, crumpled diaper, on top of which she begins to app
ly the swaddling bands. She pins the infant's arms against its chest, then passe
s the band under the armpits, which presses the arms firmly into place. Around a
nd around she winds the band down to the buttocks, tighter and tighter...clear d
own to the feet, and...covers the baby's head with a bonnet [all of which] is fa
stened with pins.248
Rysunek 37 8:3 Mother swaddling a baby
Physicians complain that the infant "is lucky if he is not squeezed so hard that
he is unable to breathe, and if he has been placed on his side, so that the wat
er which he has to pass through his mouth can run out," or he will choke to deat
h. 249 Swaddled Albanian infants were described as follows in a 1934 study:
386
The child began immediately to passionately scream and tried to free himself...T
his seemed to be a signal for the mother to rock the cradle violently; at the sa
me time she covered the head of the baby with a white sheet. While the baby's mi
serable screaming made a strong impression to us, it seemed to be an everyday th
ing to the mother, to which she did not react except by rocking the cradle as st
rongly as possible...250 The traditional "benumbing shaking" of the baby and "vi
olent rocking" of the cradle-described over and over again by our sources251-"pu
ts the babe into a dazed condition in order that he may not trouble those that h
ave the care of him," 252 is sometimes supplemented by "a piece of linen rag stu
ffed into its mouth"253 to stop the screaming. Because straight pins were used t
o keep the swaddling bands in place,254 "nurses, blinded by passion and prejudic
e, do not hesitate to beat the helpless babe, without examining whether its crie
s are not occasioned by a pin..." 255 Because every visitor to the home represen
ts the jealous grandmother, infants are usually kept in dark rooms and their fac
es are covered by blankets to ward off the "world full of angry, malevolent, bur
ning, glaring looks, a world dominated by evil and fear...usually represented by
an older woman...Sharp objects are placed into the cradle or stuck between the
swaddling bands-knives, needles, forks, nails-to protect against incubi..."256 S
alt was rubbed into the baby's skin, irritating it terribly,257 excrement was so
metimes smeared on its nipples, infants were made to drink their own urine and n
eighbors would often spit on it, saying: "Ugh, aren't you just ugly," all to war
d off jealous "evil eye" spirits.258 Since the infants were nursed while swaddle
d, they stewed in their own excrement for days at a time, the mothers leaving th
eir babies "crying with all their might" in the cradle or "tossed in a corner" o
r "hung from a nail on the wall" while they "spend hours away from their cottage
s" during the day.259 Few traditional mothers or nurses heeded doctors' pleas "n
ot to let them lie in their filth,"260 so that during their first year of life26
1 they were usually "covered with excrement, reeking of a pestilential stench [t
heir] skin completely inflamed [and] covered with filthy ulcerations [so that] i
f touched...they let out piercing cries."262
387
Rysunek 38 8:4 Baby hanging on nail on Wall
Swaddling was a world-wide practice, undoubtedly reaching back to tribal culture
s, since so many of them have featured tying up to cradleboards for as long as t
hree years as their way of controlling the infant's supposedly aggressive tenden
cies.263 Asian parents favored techniques like wrapping it in a blanket and tyin
g it into a basket made of straw or bamboo (ejiko) until it is three or four yea
rs old.264 Eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxon physicians began to suggest doing away
with swaddling entirely, at least during the day, stressing what mothers had be
en unable so far to notice, "that particular happiness, which a child shows by a
ll its powers of expression, when it is newly undressed. How pleased! How deligh
tful! it is with this new liberty."265 Soon more and more mothers discovered "th
e extreme pleasure that all children discover when stript of their incumbrances,
the content and satisfaction with which they stretch themselves, enjoying the f
reedom of voluntary motion," 266 and by the nineteenth century swaddling was "un
heard of" in France, England and America, though continuing in Germany into the
twentieth century and in various parts of Eastern Europe even today.267 The effe
cts of swaddling upon every human born during the past ten millennia were catast
rophic. Besides having "the pressure force blood to their heads and make their l
ittle faces purple," besides "crushing his breast and ribs" and "compressing the
flesh almost to gangrene, the circulation nearly arrested," 268 swaddled infant
s were severely withdrawn, listless and physically retarded in the onset of walk
ing, which often didn't begin until from two to five years of age (see my table
of historical ages of first walking).269 The effects of swaddling on all adults'
emotional lives is even more profound. Because of the lack of warmth and holdin
g, there is a lifelong deficit in oxytocin and oversupply of cortisol, the stres
s hormone, resulting in a lifetime of rage and anxiety states.270 Even rats lose
neurons in the hippocampus and orbital frontal lobes when tied up like human in
fants were, producing depletions in serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine, exac
erbated aggressive behavior and a severe decrease in social capabilities.271 In
the next chapter
388
we will discuss the enormous transformation produced in Western science, politic
s and culture by the ending of wetnursing and swaddling and the evolution of par
ental love during the modern period. THE HISTORY OF CHILD BEATING Despite belief
to the contrary, mothers beat their children today "at a rate approaching twice
that of fathers,"272 and mothers in the past were even more likely to be the ch
ild beaters than today. The typical mother of the hundreds I have collected from
memoirs in the past was described as endlessly beating her children: She was a
curious woman, my mother. Children seemed to inspire her with a vindictive animo
sity, with a fury for beating and banging them, against walls, against, chairs,
upon the ground...273 My mother...strictly followed Solomon's advice, in never s
paring the rod; insomuch that I have frequently been whipped for looking blue on
a frosty morning; and, whether I deserved it or not, I was sure of correction e
very day of my life.274 Mama whipped us for the least thing...sometimes the chas
tisement could better be called a flogging...we kept the marks for many many day
s.275 I was often whipped. My mother said that one mustn't spoil children, and s
he whipped me every morning; if she didn't have time in the morning, she would d
o so at noon, rarely later than four o'clock.276
Rysunek 39 8:5 Mother beating her child
If the mother could not spare the time to beat her child, or if she complained "
I have a little pain in my back with whipping Susan today, who struggled so that
I have got a wrench,"277 she could always hire a "professional flagellant" who
advertised their child-beating services in newspaper ads278 or, like one mother,
she could hire a "garde-de-ville to whip her three children once a week, naught
y or not."279 After all, until just recently, all experts advised that mothers s
hould "let the child from a year old be taught to fear the rod, and cry softy...
make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to do it."280 Since
"God has given every
389
mother the power [and] placed in your hands a helpless babe...if it disobeys you
, all you have to do is to...inflict bodily pain so steadily and so invariably t
hat disobedience and suffering shall be indissolubly connected in the mind of th
e child."281 And since your child needs you so much, "he does not bear a grudge
against those who have hurt him...However much his mother whips him, he looks fo
r her and values her above all others."282 "After thou hast beat him...then he h
ath forgotten all that was done to him before and will come to thee...running...
to please thee and to kiss thee."283 Children throughout history began being bea
ten in the womb. Pregnant mothers in the past were usually beaten by their husba
nds, a practice they had a legal right to do until the twentieth century,284 and
even today over a third of pregnant women are in physically abusive relationshi
ps-physical assault escalating during pregnancy.285 "Unborn children, trapped in
their mother's wombs, are victims...from the father's blows to the abdomen."286
After birth, a half or moredepending upon the area-of mothers today begin hitti
ng their infants during their first year of life;287 in the past, nearly all wer
e beaten in their cribs. Susanna Wesleys children were typical:
[I would] break their wills...before they can speak...[Before they] turned a yea
r old they were taught to fear the rod and to cry softly...that most odious nois
e of the crying of children was rarely heard in the house, but the family usuall
y lived in as much quietness as if there had not been a child among them.288 Usu
ally the mother managed to effect what she felt was total control of the infant
early on: I have begun to govern Sally. She has been Whip'd [and] when she has d
one any thing that she suspects is wrong, will look with concern to see what Mam
a says, and if I only knit my brow she will cry till I smile, and although She i
s not quite Ten months old, yet...tis time she should be taught.289 Even when th
e infant doesn't stop crying and begin to obey the mother's merest glance, the e
arly beatings had to begin in earnest, as with this mother and her four-month-ol
d infant: I whipped him till he was actually black and blue, and until I could n
ot whip him any more, and he never gave up one single inch.290
390
Even if the crying is because the child is sick, the rod must be applied, since
the mother still hears the child's cries as critical of her: Our little daughter
...before she was quite a year old, we began to correct her for crying...It has
taught her a command over her feelings...even when she is unwell, and blurts int
o a loud cry, we generally correct her until she suppresses it...[using] a rod..
.291 Children, says Locke, must always show total "submission and ready obedienc
e...it must be early, or else it will cost pains and blows to recover it." 292 A
n Irish mother puts it more succinctly: "You've got to slash them while they're
still to young to remember it and hold it against you."293 Yet in fact the flogg
ings continued throughout the lives of children prior to the socializing mode, s
o that diaries are filled with entries of "the dog-whip over the door," "the raz
or-strap hanging on a nail on the kitchen shelf," and "the carpet-beater in the
corner. Mother didn't have to use it. If we were being naughty, we just followed
her eyes to the corner..."294 The beating process was ritualized, to relieve th
e parents' guilt and to enhance its sexualization. Children often would be force
d to "ask for God's blessing on the flogging," "the wife then bares the child's
bottom with delight for the flogging," "the child must ask to be beaten...(Batty
rhapsodizes on God's wisdom in providing children with bottoms so they can be b
eaten repeatedly without permanent damage)."
295
After the beatings, the child would often be made to kiss or thank the
beating instrument or the beater for the beating, as when Roger North recalled "
being made to stop crying and thank 'the good rail which [mother] said was to br
eak our spirits.'"296 Parents usually are described as being out of control, "fe
arce and eager upon the child, striking, flinging, kicking it, as the usual mann
er is."297 Even mothers who wrote about being nice to their children, like Anne
Bradstreet, stressed the need to flog until "the plough of correction makes long
furrows on their back." 298 Professional floggers hired by parents used more op
enly sexually sadistic equipment: Preparations consist in having ready a strong
narrow table, straps (waist-band with sliding straps, anklets and wristlets), cu
shions, and a good, long, pliable birch rod, telling her to prepare by removing
her dress...For screams increased strokes must be given. If a girl tries very ha
rd indeed to bear it bravely, then, perhaps, I give ten instead of twelve.299 Ch
ildren of wealthy parents were, if anything, more severely beaten than others, b
y both their caretakers and parents. Louis XIII was routinely "beaten mercilessl
y...On waking in the morning...he was beaten on the buttocks by his nurse with a
birch or a switch...his father whipped him himself when in a rage..." 300 On th
e day of his coronation at eight, after being whipped, he said he "would rather
do
391
without so much obeisance and honor if they wouldn't have me whipped."301 Noble
parents demanded nurses whip their children; Henri IV wrote: "I have a complaint
to make: you do not send word that you have whipped my son...when I was his age
I was often whipped. That is why I want you to whip him..."302 The beatings wer
e usually bloody: Katharine by a blow on th'ear given by her mother did bleed at
the nose very much...coming home an hour, she bled again, very sore, by gushes
and pulses, very fresh good blood, whereupon I perceived it to be the blood of t
he artery...303 Laws did not protect children against cruelty until the modern p
eriod unless they were beaten to death; as one thirteenth-century law put it, "I
f one beats a child until it bleeds, then it will remember, but if one beats it
to death, the law applies." 304 Since children were beaten with the same instrum
ents as criminals and slaves, floggings could be accomplished with whips, shovel
s, canes, iron rods, cat-o'-nine tails, bundles of sticks, shovels, whatever cam
e to hand.305 Parents could avoid killing them, said Bartholomew Batty, if they
would not "strike and buffet their children about the face and head, and lace up
on them like malt sacks with cudgels, staves, fork or fire shovel...[but instead
] hit him upon the sides with the rod, he shall not die thereof."306 When childr
en went to school, the beatings continued with increased ferocity. Beatings were
considered the basis for learning, since, as one educator said, "fear is good f
or putting the child in the mood to hear and to understand. A child cannot quick
ly forget what he has learned in fear."307 Augustine recalled the regular beatin
gs he received at school and described the use of "racks and hooks and other tor
ments."308 Children were beaten for every error, such as "being flogged for not
marking the ablative case,"309 and since sexual sadism was rampant among teacher
s throughout the centuries the floggings were often described as being administe
red to children "stripped in front of the whole community and beaten until they
bled"310 and beatings were often described as being made by teachers "with a glo
ating glance of sensual cruelty."311 Schoolmasters were often described as takin
g "the most pretty and amorous boys...into his lodgings and after a jerke or two
[a blow with a rod or a whip] to meddle with their privities..."312 Many books
and articles have been written detailing the "erotic flagellation" of British sc
hools,313 but the erotic content of school beatings was well-known everywhere si
nce early times.314 Children wondered why "We are taught during our first five o
r six years to hide our buttocks and shameful parts; then...along comes a teache
r who forces us to unbutton our trousers, push them down, life our shirt, show e
verything and receive the whip in the middle of the
392
class."315 Girls were equally flogged. Hannah Lynch's beatings in the nineteenth
century were typical: "The superioress took my head tightly under her arm, and
the brawny red-cheeked lay-sister scourged my back with a three-pointed whip til
l the blood gushed from the long strips and I fainted."316 No child in antiquity
and the middle ages can be found who escaped severe physical abuse-at home, at
school , in apprenticeship, all suffered from "battered child syndrome," from in
fancy until adolescence. The Old Testament not only demands beating children, it
says children who curse their mother or father "shall surely be put to death" a
nd of stubborn sons, "All the men of the city shall stone him to death with ston
es."317 Spartan boys were flogged in public contest to see who could endure the
longest, and ritually whipped at altars which became filled with their blood.318
Chinese parents punished children by "a hundred blows with a bamboo...strangula
tion [or] having his flesh torn from his body with red-hot pincers."319 Educatio
n was similarly full of floggings. St. Ambrose praised tutors for being "unspari
ng with the whip,"320 Augustine "lived in dread of the whip of his teacher," and
Martial "jokes about the complaints of neighbours living next to a schoolroom:
the sounds of students being beaten awakens them annoyingly early in the morning
."321 Mothers are depicted as bringing their children to school and demanding th
ey be beaten, and descriptions of beatings by the ferula, a cane with knots in i
t, tell how "children's hands were so swollen by this instrument that they could
barely hold their books."322 By the middle ages, a few reformers, like Saint An
selm, began questioning whether whipping children "day and night" was wise,323 a
nd saying that "casting them on the ground [and] kicking them like dogs [is a] m
anner of correcting I judge to be detested..."324 Still, little changed for most
children, except that by the seventeenth century sometimes if they were whipped
to death during apprenticeship the master could be convicted of manslaughter.32
5 Small infants were the first to be exempted from whippings; "a babe at six mon
ths cries when its mother gives it into the arms of another person...the child o
ught not to be whipped for this..." 326 By the eighteenth century's socializing
mode parenting, I have found the first children in history who could be said not
to have been beaten at all327-particularly in America, where European visitors
agreed "one and all that American children were badly spoiled."328 Although Plec
k's massive study of American family violence found all eighteenth-century child
ren "were hit with an object...ranging from a belt to a horsewhip,"329 she found
some in the nineteenth century who were not hit at all. Mothers discovered for
the first time in history that they could have "a deep, unquenchable love for he
r offspring,"330 and would abjure all "whipping, caning,
393
slapping, ear-pulling or hair-dragging,"331 favoring chastising words or locking
up in a room instead. By the early twentieth century, twelve percent of white A
mericans in one study claimed never to have been spanked.332 In schools, however
, most Americans agreed with the teacher who said that "moral suasion's my belie
f but lickin's my practice,"333 and Boston schools in 1850 found that it took "s
ixty-five beatings a day to operate a school of four hundred."334 Still, even th
ough twenty-three states approve of school beatings, and three million children
are still paddled in American schools yearly,335 they are nothing like the infam
ous British school floggings that continued unabated throughout the twentieth ce
ntury, where the beatings were too often inflicted by flagellomaniac teachers in
public displays of cruelty.336
Rysunek 40 8:6 Child being beaten by teacher
Polls of American parents' spanking practices show about half spanked on the bot
tom and a quarter hit with some hard object, mothers still beating more than fat
hers and toddlers being the ones most often beaten, as high as 70 percent. 337 I
n 1979 Sweden became the first country in the world to ban all corporal punishme
nt of children, so that even though there is no punishment given to parents who
hit their children, the disapproval alone plus the training of high school child
ren in alternatives to hitting has reduced the number of children hit to under 3
0 percent. 338 There are at this writing eight more European nations which have
anti-spanking statutes, and even Germany and England are considering them.339 Mo
st of the nations of Western Europe currently have hitting rates somewhat higher
than those of America, while outside of Western Europe most rates are considera
bly higher.340 FREEZING, TOSSING AND TORTURING CHILDREN The number of daily tort
ures routinely inflicted upon children in the past seem beyond comprehension. Fr
om birth, children had to endure constant freezing practices, including ice-wate
r bathing and baptism: Children were baptized by being plunged into a large hole
which had been made in the ice [on the river} Neva, then covered with five feet
of ice...the priest happened to let one of the
394
children slip through his hands. "Give me another," he cried...I saw that the fa
ther and mother of the child were in an ecstasy of joy...the babe had been carri
ed straight to heaven.341 The mother took the naked baby and a pot of hot water
into the backyard...poured the water on the snow, melting it and creating a pool
which could serve as a washing basin for several days; all she had to do the ne
xt day was to break the ice.342 Ice-water bathing was a widespread historical pr
actice from antiquity to modern times, "the colder the Bath the better...use eve
ry Day,"343 so that "the shock was dreadful, the poor child's horror of it, ever
y morning, when taken out of bed, still more so."344 The excuse given was that i
t was necessary for "hardening" the child, "to toughen their bodies by dipping t
hem into cold water like white-hot iron,"345 so that when the "little infant [is
washed] in cold water...itself in one continuous scream [the] mother covering h
er ears under the bed-clothes that she may not be distressed by its cries"346 it
can be hardened to life's cruelties. John Locke not only recommended parents wa
sh the feet of their children every day in cold water, but also make them wear "
shoes so thin that they might leak and let in water" and clothes and sleeping qu
arters that allow them to be cold all the time.347 Most societies used these Spa
rtan hardening practices: Russians complained about traditional hardening such a
s being put to bed wrapped in wet cold towels,348 and Colonial New Englanders re
gularly complained that they were made to sit with wet feet "more than half the
time."349 Alternatively, mothers are so unable to empathize with their children
that they often "take no notice what pains they cause and make baths for childre
n so hot" they are badly burned.350 Many people over the centuries complained of
parents who "customarily" tossed infants, as when the brother of Henri IV, whil
e being passed for amusement from one window to another, was dropped and killed.
"351 Children were often put to bed tied up by the hands and made to wear corset
s with bone stays, iron bodices and steel collars, forced to sit many hours a da
y in stocks, strapped to a backboard, supposedly to teach them restraint.352 Rep
orts of shutting up little children in closets for hours were legion.353 Painful
enemas were given regularly, since "it was thought that children should be purg
ed especially before eating 'for fear that the milk will be mixed with some ordu
re..."354 Children were often put to bed and told to think about their death and
the misery they will feel in Hell.355 Children were religiously taken to witnes
s public executions, then "on returning home, whipping them to make them remembe
r the example."356 Children from antiquity were not only endlessly frightened th
at they would be eaten up, abducted or cut up by ghosts, Lamia, "the black man w
ho comes for naughty children," "the goblin in the basement," "the tailor
395
with the huge sizzors," "Striga that attack children, defile their bodies and re
nd the flesh of sucklings with their beaks."357 To make the terror more real, th
eir caretakers would actually dress up dummies in order to terrorized them, or w
ould paint themselves as the werewolf or bloody monster and "roar and scream at
the child [and] make as if it would swallow the infant up."358 All this terroriz
ing for no other reason than to act out concretely the destructive mother alter
in their own heads. THE ABANDONMENT OF CHILDREN Abandonment of children may seem
less traumatic than tying up, beating and terrorizing them, but adult biographi
es rarely fail to mention the deep hurt they felt as children when they were giv
en away by their parents-as most children in history were, under one excuse or a
nother. Newborn infants who were abandoned on the side of the road, of course, a
lmost always died,359 but even the one-third to two-thirds of the babies born wh
o were abandoned to foundling homes beginning in the modern period usually died
from maltreatment in the institutions. 360 Visitors to these foundling homes reg
ularly described the children there as:
stunted creatures, neither childlike nor human...they sit close-packed against t
he wall or gathered into knots, dull and stupefied...Never played with or cuddle
d...it is a holiday when they are taken for a walk around the room...It is a roo
m of filth, filled with ceaseless crying, where their lack of decent covering, t
heir misery and consequent infirmities combine to bring about their death within
a few days.361 The congestion of the infants in narrow, cold, and humid rooms,
with no cleanliness, the lack of linens and the poor choice of wetnurses, shorte
n the painful agony before death...Often a wetnurse was forced to nurse up to fi
ve or six children, and, to ensure that the last of these did not suck on breast
s that had been entirely emptied by the first, she tore the babies from her brea
st, screaming.362 Most of the children abandoned in foundling homes were legitim
ate 363-more girls than boys364-and up to 90 percent of foundlings died either i
n the hospital or when sent to wetnurse, so it is no wonder that it was proposed
that a motto be carved over the gate of one foundling home: "Here children are
killed at public expense."365 It is unlikely that historians are correct in conc
luding that the babies being sent there "reflected not so much a lack of love fo
r them as a deep fear of loving them[sic]."366 Meladze describes his experiences
in a Communist-run foster home in Moscow recently as follows:
396
Children were regularly stripped naked and their genitals ridiculed...The foster
parents deriving sexual gratification and feelings of power from these weekly r
ituals....Psychological torture and brainwashing were interspersed with sexual a
buse. The aunt, the primary torturer, slept in a double bed with her mother. I s
lept in between the two. In the evening, before bed, the great aunt would undres
s in front of me and ask me if I wanted to suck her breasts...The aunt stripped
off my pajamas and laughed at my genitals shouting she would castrate me: "We wi
ll cut your balls off and make you into a girl."...367 Babies not abandoned to f
oundling homes could be sold by their parents as slaves during most of history;
indeed, there are still hundreds of thousands of chattel slaves around the world
today, even more in debt bondage.368 Public auctions of children were common th
roughout Europe and Asia well into modern times.369 One American colonist descri
bed the sale of children in debt bondage that took place as ships arrived in Phi
ladelphia: "Many parents must sell and trade away their children like so many he
ad of cattle; for if their children take the debt upon themselves, the parents c
an leave the ship free and unrestrained..."370 The one institution to which pare
nts could abandon their children and know they were likely to live was the relig
ious order. Parents knew monasteries and nunneries were abusive-"there is an ins
cription over the gate of hell: 'Abandon all hope, you who enter'; on the gate o
f monasteries, the same should appear"371-but they nevertheless paid good money
to them to dump their children in them permanently.372 Most oblates were childre
n of aristocrats, so there is no argument for economic necessity, and gave large
gifts to the religious orders to take their children, usually at around five ye
ars of age.373 The child became a holocaust, a sacrifice, to God, the destructiv
e grandmother in the parent's unconscious, and the cloister "became a cruel life
of hard labor, boring routine, beatings, and fear of sexual sin and assault.374
In return, the parents could expect "clerical prayer and, ultimately, salvation
"375-i.e., some peace in their heads from the punitive maternal alter. The child
ren held the legal status of slaves of the monastery, and they were endlessly wh
ipped, naked, regularly starved in severe fasts, only allowed to sleep for five
hours a night and used sexually by clerics and older boys.376 Although most monk
s were earlier oblates, oblation began to decline in the late twelfth century, a
s wealthy parents decided they preferred to hire servants to whip, starve, tortu
re and sexually abuse their children in their own home.377
397
SENDING OUT CHILDREN TO FOSTERAGE, APPRENTICESHIP AND SERVICE Another widespread
abandonment practice throughout history was fosterage: Fosterage was found main
ly among royalty and other well-to-do parents [and] was so common that the remar
k that 'all the children grew up at home' was offered as an unusual occurrence..
..sons obtained new networks of kin relations, but bonding with the mother was m
ost often precluded, and-most surprising to the modern reader-she did not seem t
o have desired her son's company.378 Children might be sent to fosterage "for af
fection or for payment" as soon as they returned from wetnurse, usually to other
family members, and not returned until adolescence.379 Since so many families s
imply traded children with each other, the custom was puzzling unless one realiz
es that adults emotionally were able to treat foster children more abusively-wor
king them like slaves, beating them, using them sexually-than if they had kept t
heir own children and not traded them to others.380 Parents who foster their chi
ldren today usually explain that they "cannot effectively discipline their own o
ffspring" if they keep them themselves.381 Fostering in archaic civilizations wa
s so common the mother's brother was often called the "upbringer" or "fostering
brother," and "among Hittites, Greeks, Romans, Celts and Germans, mother's broth
ers [would] supervise initiation and...ritually sodomize his ward..."382 Fostera
ge was practiced in all complex civilizations in every continent on earth, right
into modern times.383 Parents would simply ask the uncles or grandparents if th
ey "needed a child"384 and shipped one off to them without tears. If one sent on
e's child to royalty and it was killed by abuse, one was expected to thank the f
oster parent and bring another.385 There was little difference between fosterage
, adoption, apprenticeship and service. All involved virtual slavery without rig
hts for the children. The opinion of the Italian at the end of the fifteenth cen
tury that "the want of affection in the English is strongly manifested towards t
heir children...they put them out, both males and females, to hard service in th
e houses of other people...few are born who are exempted from this fate, for eve
ry one, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of other
s; whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own" is often quot
ed-but in fact Italians of the time equally fostered and apprenticed their child
ren.386 Everyone agreed that "It is good to remove children from the sight of th
eir father and mother and give them to friends so that they do not become quarre
lsome; also, when they are in a strange house, they are more timid and do not da
re to enjoy themselves and fear being scolded..."387 Half of all persons who
398
came to the colonies in the American South were indentured children. 388 England
continued to send hundreds of thousands of children to Canada and Australia for
fosterage well into the twentieth century; a Canadian minister complained about
England' practice using Canada as "a dumping ground for the refuse of the highw
ays...waifs, strays, and the children of vicious and criminal tendencies..."389
The practice continues in many areas of the world for tens of millions of childr
en today. 390 Apprenticeship and service were the fate of virtually all children
, rich or poor alike.391 A master "may be a tiger in cruelty, he may beat, abuse
, strip naked, starve or do what he will to the poor innocent lad, few people ta
ke much notice." 392 Mothers also beat the girls apprenticed to them. A typical
eighteenth-century description read: "Elizabeth began to beat and kick them abou
t, and would drag them up and down stairs making use of the most horrible expres
sions. She always kept a rod soaking in brine, with which she used to beat them
on their bare skin when they were undressed to go to bed...She frequently tied t
he girl up naked and beat her with a hearth broom, a horsewhip or a cane, till t
he child was absolutely speechless." 393 Rape of these children was widespread-s
ince they felt so lonely and rejected, they more easily allowed themselves to be
used sexually in return for the illusion of some feeling. Entries in diaries li
ke "my master came to my bed at 2 o'clock in the morning and violated my person"
394 were common, and relatives who sent children to be servants would assure the
new master that she "will match your cock."395 Masters frequently slept with th
eir servants and raped them, both the boys and the girls.396
Rysunek 41 8:7 Mother beating servant
The work done by even small children sent out to others was often the heaviest a
nd most dangerous needed to be done.397 Whether it was 12 hours a day of heavy l
abor in the fields398 or climbing boys who were constantly "pinned, beaten, cold
, pinched and abused,"399 even small children could not count on simple empathy
during their time with others: Little boys had to go on sweeping chimneys and ge
tting stuck in them or suffocated with soot, or even roasted...Their terror of t
he dark, and often suffocating, flues had somehow to be overcome by the pressure
of a greater terror below...masters would threaten to beat them
399
[or] would set straw on fire below or thrust pins into their feet...no wonder nu
rsemaids threatened to give naughty children to the sweep, and children shrieked
at sight of him.400 Even when schools began to be more widespread in the eighte
enth century, the children would only go for a few years, then be sent to appren
ticeship. One English girl remembered: On the day that I was eight years of age,
I left school, and began to work fourteen hours a day in the fields, with from
forty to fifty other children...We were followed all day long by an old man carr
ying a long whip in his hand which he did not forget to use.401 Beyond formal ab
andonment like fosterage and apprenticeship, mothers throughout history were con
stantly giving away their children for all kinds of rationalized reasons: "becau
se the mother was expecting another child" (Juhannes Butzbach, "to learn to spea
k" (Disraeli), "to cure timidness" (Clara Barton), for "health" (Edmund Burke),
"as pledge for a debt" (Madame d'Aubign), or simply because they were not wanted (
Richard Baxter, Richard Savage, Augustus Hare, Swift, Yeats, etc.) Hare's mother
expresses the casualness of these abandonments: "Yes, certainly, the baby shall
be sent as soon as it is weaned; and, if anyone else would like one, would you
kindly recollect that we have others." 402 If no one wanted the child, it would
most often be assigned to older children or nurses or others to care for (autobi
ographies regularly recalled "I never saw my father and mother but for an instan
t in the morning")403 so that they very often wandered off into the fire or fell
down the well.404 Even in the modern period, when mothers began to show some de
light in infants, they soon grew tired of caretaking and sent their children els
ewhere. On June 7, 1748, Madame d'Epinay got her 20-month-old son back from wetn
urse, and writes in her diary: My son is back with me...He cries when I leave hi
m. He is already afraid of me, and I am not sorry for it, for I do not want to s
poil him. I sometimes think, when he smiles as he looks at me, and shows his del
ight at seeing me by clapping his little hands, that there is no satisfaction eq
ual to that of making one's fellow-creatures happy.405 But she soon finds careta
king depressing, writes about the "apathy and indifference" she feels because he
r children "are only an occupation, a duty for me, and do not fill my heart at a
ll," and turns them over to the nurse, taking a lover for herself.
400
MATERNAL INCEST: THE CHILD AS BREAST In the previous chapter, widespread materna
l incest-with the mother using the child as an erotic breast-substitute by mastu
rbating it or sucking on its genitals-was documented for many contemporary preli
terate tribes. Although equally clear evidence is hard to come by in history bec
ause of the lack of detailed descriptions of early mothering in the past, it is
likely the sexual abuse by both mothers and wetnurses continued until modern tim
es. Primate mothers are widely reported as copulating with their children; indee
d, many cannot learn to reproduce unless they have had sex with adults when they
were children.406 Many immature primates "copulate with their mothers...explore
adult genitalia and experience manipulation of their own." 407 Our closest ance
stors, the bonobo chimps-termed "the erotic champions" of primatesspend much of
their time sucking and masturbating the genitals and "genitogenital rubbing" of
both male and female juveniles, "to reduce tensions." 408 Primate children are r
egularly observed being taught to thrust against their mothers' genitals.409 Thi
s "sexualization of the infant" was likely extended when human infants grew much
larger heads, since it meant in order to get through the narrow birth canal bef
ore the head grew too large human infants had to be "born fetal," extremely imma
ture and increasingly helpless, so that in early humans "maternal attention was
not sufficient to care for more helpless infants..."410 This in turn meant a sel
ection for those babies who could most satisfy the mother's erotic needs-for ins
tance through the extension of non-hairy, erotic skin areas-for they would be be
st nursed and cared for as an erotic, tension-reducing object. Likewise, those h
uman mothers were selected who had evolved the largest and most erotic breasts41
1 and who had genitals shifted around to the front, where they could rub them ag
ainst their children.412 The psychogenic evolution of the central motivation for
mothering from incest to empathy took millennia, and is still far more prevalen
t than is realized. As we detailed in the previous chapter, researchers have des
cribed mothers in various tribal areas and countries outside of the West as rout
inely sucking and masturbating their children, but have concluded that this was
not incest since the society didn't believe it was sexual abuse. Since both the
perpetrators and the victims of maternal incest also collude-each for their own
reasons-in denying its occurrence, current figures for sexual abuse by females-1
3 percent of girl victims and 24 percent of boys victims-are considered likely t
o be underestimates.413 (Some studies actually find girls twice as likely to be
abused by women as by men.)414 This denial is possible because women sexually ab
use children at a much younger age than men do, so the incidents are more likely
to be repressed by victims of female abuse.415 Maternal sexual abuse is
401
acknowledged
to
"remain
undetected"416
and
therefore
to
be
badly
"underreported...unless coercion was involved...[because] sexual abuse of childr
en by adult females is usually nonviolent and at times quite subtle [involving]
intercourse, cunnilingus, analingus, fellatio, genital fondling, digital penetra
tion...and direct exposure to adult sexual activity."417 Genital contact with th
e parent is even more prevalent; in America, "more than fifty percent of eight-
to ten-year-old daughters touched their mother's...genitals [and] more than fort
y percent of eight- to ten-yearold sons touched their mother's genitals..."418 S
ome clinical studies reveal widespread female masturbation of little children "t
o counter her feelings of lethargy, depression and deadness," "the only way she
could make herself go to sleep," or "painful manipulation of the genitals by mot
her [with] the wish to destroy the sexuality of the child."419 The sexual use of
children by mothers has been widely reported by outside observers in both non-l
iterate and literate nations outside the West. Childhood in much of India earlie
r in the century was said to begin with masturbation by the mother, "high caste
or low caste, the girl 'to make her sleep well,' the boy 'to make him manly.'"42
0 Like most traditional families, children rotated around the extended family as
sleeping partners rather like a comfort blanket, and one sociologist who did in
terviews modeled on the Kinsey studies reported "there is a lot of incest...It i
s hidden along with other secrets of families and rarely gets a chance to come o
ut, like seduction at the hands of trusted friends of the family...To arrive at
even a passable estimate of incest cases would be to touch the hornet's nest..."
421 Throughout Indian history, says Spencer, "Mothers stimulated the penises of
their infants and gave a 'deep massage' to their daughters as a form of affectio
nate consolation." 422 Arab mothers are said to "rub the penis long and energeti
cally to increase its size," "In China, Manchu mothers tickle the genitals of th
eir little daughters and suck the penis of a small son," "In Thailand, mothers h
abitually stroke their son's genitals," etc.423 Western observers even today oft
en notice that Japanese mothers masturbate their young children during the day i
n public and at night in the family bed-in order, they say, "to put them to slee
p."424 The average Japanese mother sleeps with her children until they are ten o
r fifteen years old, traditionally sleeping "skin-to-skin" (dakine) while embrac
ing her child because the father-as in the traditional gynarchyis usually absent
, over two-thirds of Japanese husbands being involved in extramarital intercours
e.425 Japanese mothers often teach their sons how to masturbate, helping them ac
hieve first ejaculation in much the same manner as with toilet training.426 A "m
ental health hotline" in Tokyo recently reported being flooded with calls about
incest, 29 percent of them with complaints such as that the mother
402
would offer her body for sex while telling the son, "You cannot study if you can
not have sex. You may use by body," or "I don't want you to get into trouble wit
h a girl. Have sex with me instead."427 Wagatsuma reports "Japanese mothers ofte
n exhibit an obsession with their sons' penises...[they are] usually brought in
by their mothers who fear that their sons' penises are abnormally small,"428 wit
h the result that Japanese marriage clinics find "60 percent of their patients a
re afflicted with the 'notouch syndrome,' that is, they will have no physical co
ntact with their wives for fear that it will lead to sex...[termed] the ''I love
mommy' complex."429 Adams and Hill and Rosenman have thoroughly documented the
castration anxieties resulting from Japanese maternal incest.430 Maternal incest
in history is, of course, almost impossible to document except for indirect evi
dence. Doctors told mothers and nurses to "gently stretch the end of the foreski
n every day" and to "massage the scrotum" as well as to infibulate the foreskin
later.431 Rabbinic sources deemed "a woman 'rubbing' with her minor son" common
enough to have a law concerning it.432 Myths and drama endlessly depicted matern
al incest,433 and dream-books like Artemidorus' mostly interpreted dreams of mat
ernal incest as indicating good luck.434 Sophocles has Oedipus claim that "in dr
eams...many a man has lain with his own mother,"435 a fact mainly true of actual
victims of maternal incest. Incest in antiquity was not illegal,436 nor was it
spoken of as a miasma, an impurity,437 and early civilizations from Egypt and Ir
an to Peru and Hawaii had brother-sister incestuous marriages where the parents
played out their incestuous needs by forcing their children to marry each other-
a third or more of marriages being incestuous in the case of Roman Egypt.438 Sti
ll, direct evidence of widespread maternal sexual use of children in history can
hardly be expected if even today it is everywhere denied. True, doctors from So
ranus to Fallopius counsel mothers "to take every pain in infancy to enlarge the
penis of boys (by massage and the application of stimulants)..."439 But usually
the only reference to maternal incest is in the penitentials, where the Canons
of Theodore mention that "a mother simulating sexual intercourse with her small
son is to abstain from meat for three years...,"440 or, as in Dominici and Gerso
n, the child is told not to allow the mother to touch him.441 One could also cit
e various cleric's warnings about maternal incest, the many illustrations of mot
hers and grandmothers being shown with their hands on or near their children's g
enitals, or one could detail the nearly endless accounts in autobiographies and
other direct reports of the sexual use of children by nurses and other female se
rvants who masturbated and had intercourse with their charges "to keep them quie
t," "for fun" or "to put them to sleep." 442 Alternatively, one could document v
arious other routine practices of mothers that
403
indicated they used their children erotically, such as the habit of grandmothers
and mothers to "lick it with 'the basting tongue'" all day long, sucking their
lips, faces and breasts as though the child was itself a breast,443 or one could
describe the incestuous behavior in the public baths (many of them doubling as
brothels) in which mothers and children co-bathed.444 But just how widespread th
ese incestuous maternal practices were escapes our research tools.
Rysunek 42 8:8 Christ's genitals are stroked by his grandmother
Rysunek 43 8:9 Mothers with their children in bathhouse
There is, however, one indirect measure of maternal incestuous practice that cou
ld indicate that mothers until well into the middle ages were acting out their e
rotic need to violate their daughter's genitals. Mothers in China and India have
been observed to "clean the sexual organs of the little children during daily w
ashings...so scrupulously" that the girls have no trace of a hymen...Even Chines
e doctors do not know anything about the existence of the hymen."445 Some Arab m
others also "practice 'deep cleansing' on their very young daughters, purposely
tearing the girls' hymen."446 A survey of physicians from antiquity to early mod
ern times reveals that none of them were able to discover a hymen on any of the
little girls they examined.447 Obviously the mothers and wetnurses of little gir
ls during this period were routinely rupturing the hymen during some assault on
their vaginas. Even Par in the sixteenth century found when he dissected innumerab
le little girls as young as
404
three yours old, "I was never able to perceive it."448 Occasionally a doctor lik
e Soranus would find a hymen with his probe, but considered it an aberration. 44
9 If one wanted to determine if a girl was a virgin in Greece, one resorted to m
agical virginity tests, like sending her to a cave where a poisonous snake lived
, and "if they were bitten, it was a sign that they were no longer chaste."450 B
y the fifteenth century, the existence of the hymen and the act of deflowering b
y breaking it was finally recognized,451 indicating that the practice of assault
ing girls' genitals had become less than universal.452 By the sixteenth century,
giant communal family beds, "with people packed like sardines between the blank
ets,"453 including "grandparents, parents, children, servants and visitors,"454
began to diminish, so that over the next three centuries more and more people as
ked each other nostalgically, "Do you not remember those big beds in which every
one slept together without difficulty?...in those days men did not become arouse
d at the sight of naked women [but now] each one has his own separate bed..."455
The change was completely psychogenic, as it occurred in rich and poor families
alike. Those who couldn't afford separate beds simply turned the children aroun
d so their heads were opposite to their parents, and nightclothes were used rath
er than "skin-to-skin" sleeping of previous times, so that even "workingclass ch
ildren seldom saw a naked body because most of their parents slept with their cl
othes on and changed clothing in a corner when others were not looking." 456 By
1908, incest was finally made a criminal offence; it is today a minor felony in
most nations.457 THE UBIQUITY OF CHILD SEXUAL MOLESTATION The best studies of in
cidence of sexual molestation of children are those of American adults conducted
by Wyatt and Russell,458 both based upon face-to-face interviews lasting from o
ne to eight hours, so that time is allowed for the trust necessary for accurate
recall. Russell found 38 percent and Wyatt 45 percent of women interviewed repor
ted memories of sexual abuse during their childhood. In my article "The Universa
lity of Incest," I corrected these figures to reflect the major biases in their
studies-their population does not include groups who have far higher than averag
e sexual molestation experiences, such as criminals, prostitutes, the mentally i
ll, etc.; they neither count those who refused to be interviewed; and they did n
ot count either those who might have suppressed conscious memories nor did they
allow for the possibility of unconscious memories, which most early molestation
produces. Adjusting for these factors, I posited a 60 percent rate of sexual abu
se for girls. Using Landis' figures on men, I posited a 45 percent rate of sexua
l abuse for
405
boys.459 The average age of the child molested was only 7 years old, 460 the ave
rage duration of abuse was 5 years,461 and boys were more often molested by fema
les while girls were more often molested by males.462 The only comparable studie
s from interviews were a Canadian Gallup study, a York University study and two
British surveys, all four of which conclude with incidence rates the same or hig
her than the U.S. studies.463 Non-statistical studies of sexual molestation in o
ther countries indicate the likelihood of rates being even higher.464 With over
half of the children even today being subjected to sexual abuseabout half occurr
ing between family members and most of the remainder occurring with the complici
ty if not outright collusion of one of the parents-children in the past were lik
ely to have been routinely used as sexual objects by the adults around them. Alt
hough intimate historical records of past sexual abuse within the family are obv
iously selective, a few unusual glimpses of the widespread frequency of this mol
estation can be recovered. For instance, when Beatrice Webb and others reported
in the nineteenth century that they had found that the sexual abuse of young gir
ls by their fathers and brothers was so common in the families they visited that
the girls often joked about their babies being products of incest,465 or when a
nthropologists report incest between fathers and daughters was quite common in r
ural villages from Greece to Japan,466 one can reject the reports as being perha
ps unrepresentative of whole nations. But when Karen Taylor studied 381 cases of
"Venereal Disease in Nineteenth-Century Children" and found that doctors in nin
eteenth-century Europe and America routinely treated children with venereal dise
ase, mainly on their genitals, anuses and mouths, she finds she agreed with almo
st all of them that "There is no doubt on my mind that the father of this family
was the source whence all the other received infections."467 Since the diseases
cannot spread except by intimate contact with open wounds, when doctors found f
athers with ulcerations of the penis in the same families with children who had
ulcerations on the genitals, anus or mouth, incest had to be the cause. Reports
from European hospitals showed similar patterns of venereal disease from incest
in children.468 A second method that can reveal the extent of sexual abuse of ch
ildren is to study measurable physical results of the abuse and determine their
overall patterns in past centuries. One of these physical results of sexual and
other severe childhood abuse is that girls who are abused reach puberty a few ye
ars ahead of others because of substantial increases in the stress hormone corti
sol, in testosterone and in adrenal hormones, all of which accelerate their age
of menarche.469 The age of menarche was approximately12 in antiquity, rose to ar
ound 17 in the early modern period, then dropped steadily in the past 200 years
down to the present 13 years of age in modern
406
nations.470 The cause of the overall drop recently has been demonstrated as due
to the improvement in the overall population of more protein and calories during
children's growth years.471 But since mainly wealthy children made up the measu
red population of menarche from antiquity to modern times-and these wealthy chil
dren did not eat less protein and calories than the entire population of childre
n around 1700-only a slowly diminishing rate of sexual abuse of girls can accoun
t for the rise from 12 to 17 during the earlier two millennia. Only if most girl
s in antiquity and the middle ages were sexually molested could they have such a
n early average age of menarche and age of first children. Boys do not have such
an easily identifiable mark of puberty as girls, nor do they accelerate their s
exual development as girls do when abused. In fact, boys delay their onset of pu
berty as a result of sexual and physical abuse, as John Money's work on the Kasp
ar Hauser Syndrome revealed, again connected with a deficiency of thyroid and gr
owth hormones from the pituitary.472 Was boys' sexual development delayed in ear
ly history? It turns out it was. The growth of first beard in antiquity and the
middle ages, first appeared in the boys' twenties, compared to appearing around
14 years of age today.473 The historical pattern was that beards began their red
uction in the West from the 20s down to 14 around 200 years ago, which, as we wi
ll see in the next two sections, was when most of the reduction in frequency of
sexual abuse took place. A third method of revealing the routine nature of sexua
l abuse of children is examine one child's life that is adequately recorded and
see how everyone around him casually uses him sexually. The best-documented life
of a child in past times was that of Louis XIII (born 1601), through the daily
diary of Jean Hroard, his physician.474 The assault on little Louis's erotic zones
began at birth, with daily enemas and suppositories. These had nothing to do wi
th toilet training or cleanliness-he was left filthy, and was nearly seven years
old before he had his first bath. As doctors regularly recommended for all infa
nts,475 frequent enemas or even fingers routinely put deep into the anus were fo
r the purpose of removing the evil inside contents of the child, contents projec
ted into them by the adults around them as a poison container. As David Hunt des
cribed the process: "The bowels of children were thought to harbor matter which
spoke to the adult world insolently, threateningly, with malice and insubordinat
ion...the excrement which was regularly washed out of him was regarded as the in
sulting message of an inner demon, indicating the 'bad humors' which lurked with
in."476 Thus infants must be purged of their badness before each nursing so the
"good" milk wouldn't get mixed up with the "bad" feces.
407
Fondling, sucking and kissing little Louis's penis and nipples were common pract
ices by everyone around him-his parents, his nurses, his servants-beginning in h
is infancy and continuing throughout his childhood. This was done openly, withou
t guilt, and sexual play with others became Louis's main topic of conversation,
recorded in detail by Hroard. When he was an infant, all the women around him coul
d hardly refrain from putting their hands up under his clothes, and one year old
, still unable to walk, the entire court lined up to "kiss his cock."477 At the
same time, he was made to feel guilty for his own assault, being told, "Monsieur
, never let anybody touch your nipples or your cock or they will cut it off." Hi
s parents often undressed him in the middle of the day and took him to bed with
them and "gambled about freely" while they had intercourse.478 After his father
stretches out his penis as says, "Behold what made you what you are," Louis repo
rts that "papa's penis is much longer than his, that it is this long, indicating
half the length of his arm." "The Queen, touching his cock, tells him: 'Son, I
am holding your spout.'... "He was undressed and [his sister] too and they were
placed naked in bed with the King, where they kissed and twittered and gave grea
t amusement to the King. The King asked him: 'Son, where is the Infanta's bundle
?' He showed it to him, saying: 'There is no bone in it, Papa.' Then, as it was
slightly distended, he added: 'There is now, there is sometimes.'"479 By the tim
e he was four, he was also routinely taken to bed by his ladies-in-waiting and n
urses and encouraged to explore their genitals and play sexual games like whippi
ng their buttocks, later commenting publicly, "'Mercier has a cunt as big as tha
t,' showing his two fists, and saying that 'there's a lot of water inside....the
cunt of Saint-Georges is big as this box [and] the cunt of Dubois is big as my
belly."480 His nurse, Mercier, usually slept with him and used him sexually. Whe
n asked "What have you seen of Mercier?" he answered, "I've seen her hole." "Is
it pretty then?" "No, its pretty fat." "How do you know that?" "He answers that
he has pissed on her." The constant sexual use of little children in the past ca
nnot be written off as harmless, as Aris does when he writes, "All that was involv
ed was a game whose scabrous nature we should beware of exaggerating."481 Nor wa
s it limited to poor, illiterate peasants or workers. It was universal-indeed, i
t is still the rule for most of the children on earth-and it was done solely for
psychological reasons. The final two sections of this chapter will examine more
deeply the rape first of girls and then of boys throughout history.
408
THE RAPE OF GIRLS IN HISTORY The attitude of most adults until the twentieth cen
tury toward raping girls is summed up in the comments of a British journalist in
1924 who wrote: "Cases of incest are terribly common in all classes. [Usually]
the criminal goes unpunished...Two men coming out from [a rape] trial were overh
eard saying to a woman who deplored there had been no conviction, 'What nonsense
! Men should not be punished for a thing like that. It doesn't harm the child."
482 The conviction that girls always "forget" about being raped after they grow
up reaches back to Maimonides, who assures us that the rape of a girl under thre
e was no cause for alarm for, once past three, "she will recover her virginity a
nd be like other virgins." 483 Guilt about rape was simply missing in the past b
ecause men recognized only two sexual categories: rapists and raped, dominators
or dominated. Socarides' pedophile patient tells him why he rapes little girls:
"Women are filthy. They have menstruation, blood...Kids are cleaner...I have sex
with kids so I won't die. It keeps me young, keeps me youthful. Having sex with
women means that you are grown up already. Kids don't have sex with women, only
grownups have sex with women. If I don't grow up, I don't die."484
Child rapists are so afraid of individuating that "grownup sex" with women means
leaving their neglectful/destructive mothers, which means death to them. Raping
a child means having possession of a "good breast devoid of frightening configu
rations" and overcoming an overpowering sense of emptiness, abandonment and deat
h. Rapists in history over and over again tell how "rejuvenating" raping childre
n can be. Epictetus gives this advice to those who want to help others overcome
their fear of death: "What if you offer him a little girl? And if it is in darkn
ess?"485 The traditional world was full of children-slaves, servants, sisters, s
treet urchins, child prostitutes-all available to stave off death and loneliness
and to revenge oneself upon the unloving mother. Empathy for raped girls was mi
ssing in traditional societies. Even when the rapist was punished-and this was r
are-it was only because "rape or seduction without paternal consent undermined t
he father's sovereign authority over his daughter.486 "A girl was quite unprotec
ted if she did not live under the actual supervision of her father. Moreover, th
is protection did not extend to lower class girls, and if the guilty person was
of high rank he was never prosecuted. 487 Moreover, it was the general practice
to brutally punish the girl if she was raped, so few ever told anyone about it.4
88 Vives says, "I know that many fathers have cut the throats of
409
their daughters [if raped]...Hippomenes, a great man of Athens, when he knew his
daughter debauched, shut her up in a stable with a wild horse, kept meatless, [
who] tore the young woman [apart] to feed himself..."489 Girls in the past-as in
many Arab countries still today-would often be killed if they had been raped.49
0 Even today in rural Greek communities, anthropologists report that "incest may
sometimes be practiced, with the father, or both the fathers and the brothers,
exploiting the growing girl....If the girl should become pregnant...her brothers
or her father will kill her [in] an 'honor' killing."491 Or, in antiquity, "the
father could exercise his power by putting the raped girl up for sale."492 Or t
he father would "give his daughter to the ravisher in marriage,"493 a custom sti
ll practiced in many areas of the world today.494 Men began raping girls when th
ey were extremely young. Even today, the average age of rape is 7 years, with 81
percent of sexual abuse occurring before puberty and 42 percent under age 7.495
Well into the modern period many people thought raping little girls was a good
idea because it was "instructive" for them; a woman physician wrote in 1878: Inf
ants but two and three years of age are often raped, by men of all ages, not onl
y for present gratification, but to familiarize girls of immature ages with carn
al matters and to excite, so that seduction may be easy in the future....We cann
ot too strongly impress upon the fathers of daughters their duty in seeing that
their little girls are instructed in regard to the certainty of protecting thems
elves against rapes, by grabbing the testicles.496
Not all fathers in the past were protective of their daughters' virginity. Altho
ugh only three percent of women report incest with fathers in America today, 497
Gorden found far more widespread incest in nineteenth-century American families
, with biological fathers accounting for nearly half of the cases that reached B
oston courts498 and Lowndes reported that the only reason British courts were no
t swamped by paternal incest cases was that they simply didn't believe the victi
ms and that the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children was precluded from
touching incest cases.499 "Cases were hushed up, the rapist bribed parents not
to report them, and wives might refuse to believe that the husbands were capable
of such monstrosity, and even turn on their own daughters if they tried to comp
lain." 500 Records of mothers colluding with the fathers' rape were legion, as i
n the colonial American family where the mother "forced her daughter to go to be
d with her stepfather, and, as the girl told the court, 'my mother held me by th
e hand whilst my father did abuse me and had his will of me.'"501 Many if not mo
st "delinquent" girls in the past were simply victims of incest:
410
A Chicago study of delinquent girls in 1917 included many anecdotal cases of [se
xual] abuse by relatives or neighbors, including "one girl raped by her own fath
er when she was ten years of age, one by an uncle, two by boarders." In such acc
ounts, phrases like "incest with a father" and "raped by a lodger" recur in a bl
eak litany. Jane Addams noted in 1913 that "a surprising number of little girls
have first become involved in wrongdoing through the men of their own households
,' often as a result of assaults that occurred before the victims were eight yea
rs old.502 Many societies prefer incestuous marriages-n China, for instance, som
e families would avoid marriages to strangers by adopting girls when infants and
raising them with their sons so they can marry their sisters. 503 In many poor
countries, "girls were regularly allowed to die off-through giving them less foo
d and by other neglect-if they did not appeal sexually to the men around them. E
ven though this meant very high sexual abuse rates for young girls and severe se
xual problems for them as women, the girls' flirtatious traits were adaptive..."
504 Again, the entire gynarchy often colluded in the rapes. One of Madam Du Barr
y's main duties was "to search the land for the most beautiful girls who could b
e bought or kidnapped [as] 'baby-mistresses'" for Louis XV: "And with each of th
em, it was his custom before violating them to have them kneel with him in praye
r at the edge of the bed which was to be the place of their defloration."505 Eve
n Queen Elizabeth was made to play sexual games in bed with her foster-father in
the home where she was sent as a teenager506-which could be the reason why she
never married. The fact that most girls were routinely badly beaten in the past
made rapes more easy to cover up. A typical case was reported by a Boston physic
ian: A relative began masturbating her when she was about 8. He threatened to te
ll her father about some childish error if she wouldn't let him do as he pleased
and she was afraid of her father....She has cut herself 28 or 30 times...Cuts h
erself slowly to bring out the pain...Mother whipped her with horsewhip...A Dr.
in Lynn told her she should have connections [sexual intercourse] that it would
cure her desire to cut herself...Stuck pen-knife in her vagina...Dr. Briggs [a p
revious physician she'd consulted] got a 'hard-on.[ Took her hand and put it on
his penis...Then he masturbated her breasts and genitals over an hour...[her unc
le] often used to hurt her horribly when he masturbated her.507 If the father ha
d no daughter, he could use his son's child bride: Fathers marry their sons to s
ome blooming girl in the village at a very early age, and then send the young me
n either to Moscow or St. Petersburg to seek employment...when the son returns t
o his cottage, he finds himself nominal father of several children, the off-spri
ng of his own parent...This is done all over Russia.508
411
It is not surprising that Duby reports of medieval families that they were "a ho
tbed of sexual adventure...penitentials forbid a man to know his wife's sister o
r daughter, his brother's wife...maidservants, female relatives, women still 'va
cant,' or not yet disposed of [were] an open invitation to male licentiousness.
In this small enclosed Paradise every man was an Adam: the young, the not so you
ng, and first and foremost the head of the family, all were constantly exposed t
o temptation."509 Grandfathers in particular had to be warned by early psychoana
lysts not to insert their fingers into their granddaughters' vaginas.510 The tra
ditional family of the past was similar to families in less advanced areas today
: for instance, a recent report of Middle Eastern women found four out of five r
ecalled having been forced into fellatio between the ages of 3 and 6 by older br
others and other relatives. 511 The molestation begins with masturbation or fell
atio and proceeds to intercourse: "In most cases the girl surrenders and is afra
id to complain since, if there is any punishment to be meted out, it will always
end up by being inflicted on her." 512 Sometimes, as in contemporary rural Gree
k villages, the young girl might invite the seduction in order to act out a fant
asy of conquest of the abusive male. As one anthropologist reports: To be raped
or be the victim of an incestuous attack may have the appearance of a villainous
assault upon innocence. [But while they usually] are angry at their seducers an
d exploiters, they can be very pleased by conquest [and] are not above seducing
priests, fathers, and brothers as well as the husbands of their neighbours.513 S
exual slavery-whether of actual slaves or of foster children, servants or appren
tices-was very widespread in the past. Even today there are over 100 million sex
ual slaves around the world, most of them starting their sexual services as chil
dren.514 Nor is the sale always forced by poverty: "A recent survey in Thailand
found that of the families who sold their daughters, two-thirds could afford not
to do so but instead preferred to buy color televisions and video equipment." 5
15 Rape of girl servants in the past was nearly universal: Masters seemed to bel
ieve that they had a right to their servants' or apprentices' sexual favours, a
right they would claim by force if servants did not acquiesce...In 1772, when Sa
rah Bishop, aged sixteen, claimed to her mistress that her master had raped her,
she told her "he always served all his servants so the night they came into the
house." ...Rape seems to have been almost a ritual assertion of the master's au
thority...he believed that he had committed no crime.516
412
The majority of girls raped were done so with some sort of collusion of their pa
rents. Mothers commonly rented out rooms to borders and forced their daughters t
o sleep with them.517 Throughout medieval Europe "daughters were loaned to guest
s as an act of hospitality."518 In Victorian London, "children went out onto the
streets 'with the connivance of the mother,' returned home at night, and made t
heir contribution to 'the profit of the household.'"519 Children as young as six
were openly offered for sale and sexual use by public advertisements in most ci
ties of Europe. 520 One British chaplain declared that trying to stop child pros
titution was like 'taking a spoon to empty the Mersey;"521 it was estimated in V
ictorian London one house in sixty was a brothel (6,000 in all) and one female i
n sixteen a prostitute. 522 Virtually all prostitutes began either after rape in
homes as children or because they were sold by their parents into prostitution.
523 In antiquity, either "sacred" prostitution-with as many as six thousand pros
titutes available in many temples-or profane prostitution or sex slavery was the
lot of the majority of little girls born. 524 Fathers sold and rented out their
daughters for sexual use without the least guilt. 525 If Genesis is to be belie
ved, Lot handed over his two daughters for sexual use without even a payment.526
Chinese chiefs would provide harem girls to guests to rape, and one of them, Sh
ihu, chief of the Huns, even had one of his harem girls cooked and served to his
guests as a delicacy.527 Greek plays portray the sexual use of slave-girls as r
outine.528 Greek wives were often not allowed to do farming chores lest they be
raped.529 John Chrysostome tells parents to frighten their children not to go ou
t into the streets because they "ran the risk of sexual attack by pedophiles off
ering sweets and nuts."530 Christianity changed little in the use of young girls
for raping. Convents were open brothels where "monks and confessors alike treat
ed nuns and young novitiates as wives, but their victims' mouths were sealed by
the 'dread of excommunication threatened by their spiritual fathers."531 In many
cities, "nunneries were often little more than whorehouses [providing] fornicat
ion between nuns and their gentlemen callers."532 The clergy-in the past as in t
he present-was often reported as preferring little children to rape: "At Pope Al
exander VI's celebration of Catholic Spain's victory over the Moors, children we
re passed amongst the clergy in a veritable 'sexual bacchanalia.'"533 Girls who
went into the streets alone sometimes carried knives for protection against rape
.534 Since rape was thought to be "a mere trifle (paulum quiddam)," rapists unti
l very recently were rarely prosecuted and even more rarely found guilty (since
there had to be others who witnessed the rape),535 and even if found guilty, mos
t were let off with a mild fine.536 One of the most-used excuses for raping girl
s was the widespread belief that rape of a virgin cures one of venereal disease;
if you said this
413
was your reason for rape, you were usually let go.537 The belief was the typical
"poison container" theory, that sexual intercourse with the pure was an antidot
e to the impure. Even the bubonic plague was thought to be cured by raping pure
girls. 538 Many brothels in the past and in the present specialized in providing
"virgins" to men suffering from venereal disease for supposed "treatment" for t
he disease.539 Perhaps the most popular way to rape girls in the past was in the
"raping gangs" that existed in nearly every country from antiquity to modern ti
mes. Roving gangs of "youths"-which practiced homosexual submission to the older
among them540-practiced nightly collective raping attacks on unprotected women,
"forcing the doors of a woman's house and, without concealing their identity an
d mixing brutality with blandishments, threats and insults, would rape their pre
y on the spot [and] drag the victim through the streets, eventually pulling her
into a house whose keepers were accessories to the plot, where they would do as
they pleased, all night long."541 Gang rapes made up to 80 percent of all sexual
assaults in many areas,542 and violent gang rape "constituted a veritable rite
of initiation" for youth in the past. 543 Neighbors did not intervene; indeed, t
he rapes were considered "public performances" and the gang rapes were considere
d just normal, youthful "sporting" activities by their fathers and other city of
ficials.544 Over half of the youth of the cities participated in the gang rapes,
and over the years a large minority of the young girls of the city would end up
being raped, giving credence to the conclusion that gang rape was a rite of ini
tiation for youth in traditional societies, a preparation for the violence of kn
ightly society.545 Finally, even when the girl got married, the marriage was usu
ally at a very young age and to a man who was chosen by the parents, so in fact
it would be considered child rape today. Girls were usually married off in antiq
uity between 12 and 14, to men in their 30s;546 "it was not uncommon," says Blmner
, "since Greek girls married very early, for them to play with their dolls up to
the time of their marriage, and just before their wedding to take these to some
temple...and there dedicate them as a pious offering."547 Christian canon law o
stensibly forbade child marriage, but the legal age for girls was twelve, and fo
r most of medieval times "It was not at all uncommon for a girl to be a bride at
ten [since] one of tender years [could] be married to a septuagenarian while 'c
hurch laws did not rescind the nuptials.'"548 Marriage thus was simply the final
rape for most girls throughout history until modern times.
414
THE UNIVERSALITY OF HISTORICAL PEDERASTY Pederasts past and present use boys for
sexual purposes to make up for the traumas of their own childhood, "the male ch
ild representing his ideal self, whose youthfulness protects him from annihilati
on (death anxiety)."549 The boy is the smooth, maternal breast, the penis is the
nipple, and raping the boy is an act of revenge toward the mother, showing that
the pederast is in total control, dominating the boy to overcome his sense of e
mptiness and abandonment. As one pederast put it, "I want to hold him in my arms
, control him, dominate him, make him do my bidding, that I'm all-powerful."550
The pederast's sexual targets are so interchangeable that he often seduces hundr
eds of boys in his lifetime. The sexual use of boys is not to be thought of as "
a lack of impulse controls" or even as "only a different object choice" as most
historians claim; pederasts are driven not by their sexual instincts but by thei
r overwhelming anxieties.
Rysunek 44 8:10 Greek pederast with boy
Domination rather than tender love was in fact the central aim of all sexuality
until modern times. Raping boys was by far the preferred sexual activity of men;
it was considered more "according to nature" than heterosexuality, "an ordinanc
e enacted by divine laws."551 Pythagoras, when asked when one should have sex wi
th women rather than boys, replied: "When you want to lose what strength you hav
e."552 As one historian of sexuality put it, "The world was divided into the scr
ewers-all male-and the screwed-both male and female."553 Because the boy represe
nted the ideal self with whom the rapist merged, he must be without hair: "I lik
e the smooth surface of the young boy's body, I don't like hair on it, I can't s
tand it..."554 So as soon as boys reached puberty, they were felt to be useless
for sexual purposes, and all pederastic poetry mentions the first hairs terminat
e the boy's attractiveness. According to graffiti and poetry, the boy is most of
ten raped anally.555 Lucilius compares sexual relations with boys and women: "Sh
e bloodies you, but he on the other hand beshits you."556 While the vagina is "c
astigated in invective as smelly, dirty, wet, loose, noisy, hairy, and so on...n
o such feeling seems to have been applied to the anuses of pueri."557 Boys' anus
es were called "rosebud, sometimes compared to
415
the sweetest of fruits, the fig, other times again equated with gold." 558 The o
nly precaution taken was to depilitate boys' anuses, says Martial and Suetonius.
559 Indeed, as Martial put it, men must only penetrate the anus of boys, warning
a man who was stimulating a boy's penis: "Nature has divided the male into two
parts: one was made for girls, the other for men. Use your part."560 Boys were f
ar preferred over women; Propertius vowed, "May my enemies all fall in love with
women and my friends with boys."561 It was important that the boy not experienc
e pleasure, only "pain and tears...of pleasure he has none at all."562 The painf
ul assault on the boy's anus also restaged the painful routine insertion by moth
ers and nurses of fingers, enemas and suppositories into the rectums of children
. In particular, "initiatory" pederasty was always anal, involving a fantasy of
"the intrinsic spiritual value of sperm" that-as we have seen in the previous ch
apter-was needed to ejaculate into the boy's anus in order to "make him a man."5
63 Parents taught boys in antiquity to "Put up with it: not as a pleasure, but a
s a duty."564 Physicians were regularly expected to provide ointments and other
lubricants for anal penetration of boys and they were asked to repair the rectal
tears and other injuries that were the usual results of the rapes.565 Pederasty
was widespread in preliterate tribes around the world, from the "customary pede
rasty" of Australians and the sexual use of berdaches in North and Central Ameri
can tribes-where boys were dressed as girls beginning in infancy for raping-to t
he "boy-wives" of Africa.566 All early civilizations practiced boy rape and even
had boys serve as temple prostitutes, including the ancient Hebrews, Sumerians,
Persians, Mesopotamians, Celts, Egyptians, Etruscans, Carthaginians, Chinese, J
apanese, Indians, Aztecs, Mayans, etc.567 The rape was expected to be violent; m
en were expected to take along with them when going out in the streets "scissors
, to make a hole in the trousers of the boy [and] a small pillow to put in the b
oy's mouth if he should scream..."568 Tutors and teachers often raped their pupi
ls along with beating them; as Quintilian warned, "I blush to mention the shamef
ul abuse which scoundrels sometimes make of their right to administer corporal p
unishment. Fathers in Greece chose the penetrator of his boy, often obtaining gi
fts or favors in return.569 Aristophanes shows one father in Birds complaining t
o another, "Well, this is a fine state of affairs...You meet my son just as he c
omes out of the gymnasium, all fresh from the bath, and you don't kiss him, you
don't say a word to him, you don't hug him, you don't feel his balls! And yet yo
u're supposed to be a friend of ours!"570 Pedagogues were hired to guard boys ag
ainst rape by unapproved men, but the pedagogue might assault the boy himself.57
1 Boys. in Greece were blamed if their failed to find a pederast for themselves;
every boy was expected to
416
have one.572 Greek and Roman soldiers brought boys along with them on campaigns
to use sexually.573 Slave boys were often furnished to guests for sexual use.574
Doctors prescribed sex with boys as therapy.575 Boy brothels and rent-a-boy ser
vices were widespread, and pederasts chosen by the father could even sell his ri
ghts to rape a particular boy to another man.576 With the number of boys prostit
utes worldwide still in the millions,577 it is not surprising that every city in
antiquity had its boy-brothels; in Rome, boys could be picked up at the barbers
hop or at the exit of any of the games.578 All men, even when married, were expe
cted to have sex with boys. "Almost all of the great democratic leaders of Archa
ic Athens were...pederastic."579 Wives found it hard to compete with their husba
nds' boys. Juvenal says wives were "always hot with quarrels...bitching away...a
bout his boy-friends,"580 and Martial describes a wife yelling, "Bumming a boy a
gain! Don't I have a rump as well?"581 A few early Christians began to object to
using boys sexually. John Chrysostom complained about fathers taking their boys
to banquets where they were made to perform fellatio on men "under the blankets
," recommending that boys be placed in the care of monks at the age of ten to av
oid seduction.582 But most medieval authors gave the pro-pederast advice of anti
quity, with medical books recommending sex with boys as "less harmful [than] sex
ual union with women [which] leads more quickly to old age..."583 The reason men
in medieval times waited until their 30s to get married was because they routin
ely used young boys for sex until then; in Florence, for instance, only a quarte
r of the men in the fifteenth century were married by the age of 32.584 Since ov
er a third of most households had servants or apprentices, sexual relations betw
een masters and male servants were even more common and even acceptable than bet
ween masters and female servants.585 Tutors and teachers in schools were expecte
d to use their students sexually, and those who protested that it was a "vice so
inveterate [and] so strong a custom" that it was "hardly likely to be discourag
ed" were thought odd.586 But placing boys as oblates into monasteries only made
them available for rape by monks, who could not keep their hands off them. One a
bbott wrote about an infant boy brought to the monastery by his father:
...the man turned the child over to me altogether, and I received the baby with
pleasure and joy and a clean heart. [But] when the boy got older and had reached
the age of about ten...I was tortured and overwhelmed by an obscene desire, and
the beast of impure lust and a desire for pleasure burned in my soul...I wanted
to have sex with the boy...587
417
Sex with boys was the central obsession of monks beginning with the early anchor
ites who went to the desert; Macarius saw so many monks having sex with boys in
the desert that he strongly advised monks not to take them in.588 But the need w
as too strong, and even rules such as those requiring boys to have escorts when
going to the lavatory did not prevent monks from routinely using their oblates s
exually.589 So many monks raped their novices that there was a common saying, "W
ith wine and boys around, the monks have no need of the Devil to tempt them." 59
0 Priests also commonly used confessions to solicit sex with boys, but early Chr
istian penitentials assessed penances only for the boys, since they were blamed
for their own rape. Peter Damian said in the eleventh century that sex with boys
in monasteries "rages like a bloodthirsty beast in the midst of the sheepfold o
f Christ with bold freedom" and suggested both the man and boy be punished as ac
complices for a "sin against nature."591 So acceptable was pederasty in medieval
times that parents continued handing over their boys for sexual use to friends
and others from whom they expected favors.592 Bernardino of Siena condemned pare
nts as "pimps" of their own sons, saying the fathers, pederasts themselves, were
the ones most responsible, taking money or gifts from their sons' rapists.593 B
oys were so likely to be raped in the streets-"a boy can't even pass nearby with
out having a sodomite on his tail"-that Bernardino urged mothers, "Send your gir
ls out instead, who aren't in any danger at all if you let them out among such p
eople...this is less evil."594 Mothers, too, colluded in the seduction of their
sons. "When a boy started to mature sexually...his mother gave him a bedroom to
himself on the ground floor, 'with a separate entrance and every convenience, so
that he can do whatever he pleases and bring home whomever he likes.'"595 When
beginning in the fifteenth century some more violent pederasty disputes began be
ing handled by courts, the huge number of cases prosecuted revealed that every p
lace boys were gathered-from schools and monasteries to taverns and pastry shops
-were "schools of sodomy" where pederasts gathered to violate boys.596 In Floren
ce, according to the thorough analysis of court records by Michael Rocke, "in th
e later fifteenth century, the majority of local males at least once during thei
r lifetimes were officially incriminated for engaging in homosexual relations" w
ith boys.597 Since many pederasts were never incriminated in court, since courts
were reluctant to try any but the most violent cases of boy rape, and since ped
erasts past and present usually rape dozens of boys each, these early court stat
istics reveal as nothing else the universality of pederasty in history. If the m
ajority of men were
418
hauled into court for cases in connection with their pederasty, the number of bo
ys actually being raped must have been nearly everyone. As more parents evolved
into the intrusive and socializing modes of modern times, they were more and mor
e reluctant to hand over their boys for use by pederasts. Tutors began being mon
itored to see that they were not pederasts, and reformers began to warn that ser
vants too often "take liberties with a child which they would not risk with a yo
ung man."598 Some suggested that public female brothels should be encouraged as
"the best chance of keeping men away from boys."599 The rape of boys in British
public schools, "with the full knowledge and collusion, even the approval, of th
eir elders,"600 nevertheless continued into the twentieth century, where every o
lder boy and even teachers had a younger boy as their "bitch" to use sexually.60
1 Only slowly in recent decades has it become acceptable to defend children agai
nst sexual attack, and only in the most psychogenically advanced nations has the
rate of sexual abuse of children dropped to only half of the children born. Obv
iously, despite the achievement of empathic childrearing among some parents toda
y, most of humankind still has a long way to evolve to get beyond severe abuse a
nd give their children the love and respect they deserve. The ubiquity of severe
child abuse and neglect in historical sources makes even the most horrific desc
riptions found in contemporary clinical and child advocacy reports seem limited
in comparison. It is no wonder that historians have chosen to hide, deny and whi
tewash the record here uncovered, in order to avoid confronting the parental hol
ocaust that has been the central cause of violence and misery throughout history
.
FOOTNOTES
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: Ritual, Religion and the LifeCycle in Tudor and Stuart England. New York: Oxfo
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e Lady's New-Years Gift: or, Advice to a Daughter. London, 1688, p. 80; Catherin
e M. Scholten, Childbearing in American, p. 60; Philip Greven, The Protestant Te
mperament. New York: New American Library, 1977, p. 28.
419
2. Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 51; Andrew Bard Schmookler, Out
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420
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421
32. Robin Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress P
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and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. New York: Oxford University Press, 199
6, p. 14. 585. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England. London: Gay Men'
s Press, 1982, p. 51. 586. Ibid. 587. John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern
Europe. New York: Villard Books, 1994, p. 247.
458
588. Aline Rousselle, Porneia, p. 148. 589. Patricia A. Quinn, Better Than The S
ons of Kings: Boys and Monks in the Early Middle Ages. New York: Peter Lang, 198
8, p. 165. 590. Elizabeth Abbott, A History of Celibacy, p. 101. 591. Peter Dami
an, Book of Gomorrah. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1982, pp. 27,
42. 592. Jerrold Atlas, "Pederasty, Blood Shedding and Blood Smearing: Men in Se
arch of Mommy's Feared Powers." The Journal of Psychohistory 28(2000): 116-149.
593. Michael J. Rocke, "Sodomites in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany: The Views of Ber
nardino of Siena." In Kent Gerard and Gert Hekman, Eds., The Pursuit of Sodomy:
Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe. New York: Harrington
Park Press, 1989, pp. 9, 13. 594. Ibid., pp. 15, 12. 595. Michael Rocke, Forbid
den Friendships, p. 156. 596. Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros, p. 138. 59
7. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, p. 7. 598. Richard Davenport-Hines, Sex
, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to Sex and Sexuality in Britain Since the Rena
issance. London: Collins, 1990, p. 61; Philippe Aris, Centuries of Childhood: A So
cial History of Family Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962, p. 117. 599. Richa
rd C. Trexler, Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence. Binghamton: Mediev
al and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994, p. 375. 600. Louise DeSalvo, Virgini
a Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual abuse on Her Life and Work. Boston: Beac
on Press, 1989, p. 31. 601. Alisdare Hickson, The Poisoned Bowl: Sex Repression
and the Public School System. London: Constable, 1995; Phyllis Grosskurth, Ed.,
The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1984, p. 94
459
Chapter 9 The Evolution of the Psyche and Society
"The search for meaning is the search for expression of ones real self." ---James F
. Masterson Since the further back in history one goes the lower the level of ch
ildrearing, it follows that children in the past grew up in houses of horrors th
at were like those of dissociated personalities of today. Psychiatric studies ha
ve shown that there is a direct correlation between elevated levels of dissociat
ive symptomsseparate alters, depersonalization, derealizationand the amount of early p
hysical, sexual and emotional abuse.1 That the average person before the modern
period walked streets full of spirits, demons, gods and other alters is evidence
of the dissociation that resulted from their routine abuse and neglect as child
ren. Historical evolution of the psyche, therefore, is the slow, uneven process
of integrating fragmented selves into the unified self that is the goal of moder
n upbringing.2 Biological evolution stores traits in genes that are passed down
to subsequent generations with their modifications intact; a chimp has all the g
enes necessary to make another chimp. But the self of the human psyche must evol
ve anew each generation. Contemporary newborns begin with the same psyche as pre
historic newborns; it is only better childrearing that allows them to achieve a
more unified self. That dissociated selves were an everyday part of life in anti
quity and the Middle Ages is a much-denied fact of historians, just as anthropol
ogists deny that their subjects are dissociated personalities who live in an ani
mistic world full of alters inhabiting animals, objects and dead ancestors. Thus
both personal history and human history are products of a search for a real sel
f, a search for meaning in life, an integration of separate brain networks, a de
velopment of more adaptive real selves, with the unified self being a late histo
rical achievement of only a few. HISTORY AS THE INTEGRATION OF THE SELF Most peo
ple even today have only achieved a partial integration of the "relatively indep
endent subselves" that recent studies show they begin constructing as infants.3
The most thorough recent study of dissociation using a sophisticated interview t
echnique finds that "14 percent of the general public experience substantial dissocia
tive symptoms"4 and most of the rest of us experience lesser dissociative sympto
ms when triggered by situations similar to the original abuse. This may seem exc
essive, until one remembers that perhaps half of the adults today
460
were sexually abused as children, that most of us were physically and emotionall
y abused to some extent and that helping mode parenting which respects the growt
h and individuation of children is everywhere still rare. We may be surprised to
discover that people in the past had their demon alters exorcised or had conver
sations with their various inner souls, but even today religious spirit possessi
ons are not uncommona third of Americans say they have experienced other spirits in
themselves and over 90 percent of us believe in and at times converse with (pra
y to) god alters of one sort or another. 5 Even in our day-to-day personal react
ions, we more often switch into alters than we like to admit: "Mom, dont we have any c
ornflakes? Shawn asked.Immediately the Mean alter sprang into action. Screw you, Shaw
hy are you so helpless? Find something else if we dont have any goddamn cornflakes.
Im not your fucking slave!"6 Contemporary societies with overall lower level childrea
ring regularly switch into their alters in possession states. Bourguignon found
90 percent of 488 societies reported institutionalized altered states of conscio
usness and spirit possessions 7, with the remaining 10 percent reporting other f
orms of overt dissociation. One of the beststudied is Bali, where people live in
"a world filled with gods and spiritsat the core of many activities of daily life,
including ceremonies, rituals, dances, plays, and possession [by] demons, witch
craft or black magic, and leak (spirits). Evil spirits are often present."8 The
journal Transcultural Psychiatry regularly reports on possession and other disso
ciative states in other cultures, from the "belief in spirit possession fundamen
tal to Chinese religious systems" to the possession rituals in Indonesia.9 Simpl
er cultures report more hallucinations, soul journeys and possessions by animal
spirits, while the more complex cultures report a greater variety of possession
trance roles.10 Like multiple personalities in our society, altered states in ot
her societies follow periodic cycles,11 as people experience growth panic due to
individuation, then, as memories of early traumas threaten to surface, they swi
tch into alters and restage their anger, guilt and punishment in religious ritua
ls. Even today people in most societies individuate for six days and spend the s
eventh worshiping a punishing spirit and asking for forgiveness for the hubris/c
hutzbah of the previous week. The psychology of alter formation and the acting-o
ut of alter rituals has been well studied recently by clinicians. Whether experi
enced as inside or outside oneself, alters are actually inner voices or hallucin
ations that are subnetworks of the brain, centering more in the amygdalan networ
k than the hippocampal,12 with their own organized personalities and even unique
brain-scan configurations as the person switches personalities.13 All spirits,
gods, demons, shamans, priests and political
461
leaders are alter containers, projections of these inner alters; they derive the
ir traits from the early traumas, not merely from "cultural transmission of beli
efs." Dissociative personalities usually sense at some level that their spirits
derive from their parents. As Donne put it, a separate part of ourselveswhat he ter
ms an "invisible corner" of usderives from our past (Father Adam and Mother Eve) an
d contains the "poison that corrupts us."14 People in the past used to switch in
to their alters regularly, hearing voices, having waking nightmares and flashbac
ks, experiencing loss of time, periods of unreality and deadness, hallucinating
persecutors, feeling unalterably dirty, sinful and hopeless, and acting out self
injurious episodes. All of these are evidence of dissociative identity disorders
that resulted from the routine abusive childrearing practices of the past. One
can view daily encounters with alters in such studies as those of the anthropolo
gists Richard and Eva Blum on rural Greek communities, where people todayas in anci
ent Greeceregularly switch into alternate states and either are possessed by or enc
ounter outside themselves devouring demons and bloodthirsty maternal monsters as
they go about their daily business.15 INFANTILE SOURCES OF ALTERS IN HISTORY Al
ters always contain traces of the early abusive situation, so if one knows the t
ypical kinds of traumatic childrearing practices of an age, one can use these to
decode the shared alters of that age. Goodwins studies of demon possesions in the
sixteenth century are particularly revealing, demonstrating how the demons of Je
anne Fery were both "internalized abusers" and "keepers of the secret" of her ea
rly sexual and physical abuse.16 Whether the dissociated personalities are Perpe
trator or Victim Alters, the original family situation is usually decipherable.
Demons particularly get into you, say religious authorities, when mothers are ma
d at you for enjoying yourself: "Say a child is taking a nice hot shower, he is
relaxed, enjoying himself. Suppose his mother yells at him to hurry up and get o
ut, thats forbidden.The child can get scared and the demon will get hold of him." 17 I
n Mesopotamia, each person was said to have a "personal godthe image of the parentdivi
ne father or mother" inside them, with a relationship "of master and slave," and
these contributed to making their worlds filled with "demons, evil gods and evi
l spirits."18 The gods of every land were recognized as acting just like parents
, often punishing people like noisy children, as when Enlil sent the Babylonian
flood to wipe out mankind because they were "making too much noise down there so
she could not sleep"19 or as when the Aztec lords of the underworld sacrificed
the Aztec ball players because they were "too noisy."20 Hell in Christian litera
ture was often
462
compared to living with "an angry and furious woman."21 Possession began early i
n life; in the Acts of Thomas, God himself advised Christians "to avoid having c
hildren [since] the majority of children [are] possessed by demons."22 Witches w
ere often transparently grandmothers or other women of the gynarchy (riding the
grandmothers broomstick) or prone to murder children (like real mothers killing the
ir newborn) or "dance stark naked in the night" and seduce children (like mother
s who slept with their children while both were naked and while the mother mastu
rbated them).23 Every witch, ghost and religious figure carried their family ori
gin in each of their features. God, says Julian of Eclanum, is "the persecutor o
f newborn children; he it is who sends tiny babies to eternal flames."24 The pic
tures of Hell regularly depict tormented souls as child-sized, and their torture
s are the routine tortures infants endured in the past; being in Hell meant "unb
earable thirst, the punishment of hunger, of stench, of horror, of fear, of want
, of darkness, the cruelty of tortures, punishment without end"25 The tight swaddli
ng bands were represented in Hell as "cruel fetters" with "their arms stretched
down to the feet," and the feces that the infants were left in was shown in Hell
as "being in a sewer" and as being "covered in the feces of their own obscenity
," with Hell having "a stench worse than anything in this world."26 One can find
Terrifying Mommy alters behind every Devil; even the Greek word for devil, diab
olos, means "accuser." God, says Gregory, is the "Avenger," and he compares Gods tr
eatment of man with that of a mother who "beats her child one moment as if she n
ever loved him and the next moment loves him as if she had never beaten him."27
Although gods are often male, this usually only represents a defensive clinging
to a Father to avoid worse fears of maternal abandonment and torture. 28 A cross
-cultural study of The Parental Figures and the Representation of God found that
religious people cling to their mothers far more and actually see God with more
maternal attributes than paternal.29 Demons in the past were even portrayed as
wetnurses; the Dragon of Delphi, for instance, was the wetnurse of Typhaon, Heras c
hild.30 The victims of gods and demons alike are regularly depicted as "innocent
," "like an innocent child." When Job complains to Yahweh, "I am innocent," he a
dmits this makes no difference because Yahweh "destroys innocent and guilty alik
e." Sinners were born sinful and deserved punishment simply because they tried t
o be independent. The Devil, said Gerson, "sends happy thoughts" to you of "unde
rtaking mighty works," you forget about Gods [Mommys] needs, you "relax," and you beco
me a sinner.31 You must love God [Mommy], said Meister Eckart, "for nothing." Yo
u live, said Thomas Kempis, only "to make yourself a more fit vessel for Gods
463
[Mommys] purposes."32 All religions agreed on one thing: "To assert ones self, to succ
eed, to enjoy, even to exist, is to dispossess the Father [Mother], to kill Him
[Her]."33 Switching into alters began in early childhood. Children were often pi
ctured as possessed, and historians of witchcraft often comment on "the sudden e
mergence, in a docile and amenable child, of a personality which raves, screams,
roars with laughter, utters dreadful blasphemies [which] seems like the invasio
n of an alien being."34 Children, so close in time to their traumas, could remem
ber what it felt like to be a fetus suffering because their Poisonous Placenta d
idnt provide it with fresh, oxygenated blood, so they could identify with a sufferi
ng Christ on a placental cross and could understand priests when they said they
deserved to be thrown into the "suffocations" of Hell [womb] and be tortured by
"fire coursing swiftly through their veins, bubbling through their arteries, boi
ling like liquid lead." 35 Common childrearing practiceslike "roasting" infants in
an oven to cure them of evil eye were remembered in the many burning visions of Hel
l: Let us always keep before our minds eye an overheated and glowing stove and insi
de a naked man supine, who will never be released from such pain. How lost he ap
pears to us! Just imagine how he is writhing in the stove, how he screams, cries
, lives, what dread he suffers, what sufferings pierce him, particularly when he
realizes his unbearable pain will never end!36 Demons were sometimes experience
d as "creeping things," like children, who "dance, laugh, whistle, caper, fart,
and prance." More often demons were like parents, "leaping on his back, beating
him and whipping him and leaving him unconscious on the ground."37 Demons and de
vils almost always contain traces of childhood rape, the Devil being, as one Col
onial American woman who had intercourse with the Devil confessed, "a thing all
over hairy, all the face hairy [pubic hair], and a long nose [penis]."38 As one
study of medieval rape puts it: "The main thing medieval demons and monsters do
is rape virgins."39 When hundreds of children at a time report being forced to c
opulate with the Devil,40 one need not believe in demons to see the earlier real
ity of the rape reports. Witnesses to rape confessions often report that the gir
ls speak in "two voices, one her normal voice, the other strange, coarse, unnatural
, heavy, masculine. "41 Obviously the deeper alter voice carries the memory of t
he original rapist, as it so often does in contemporary rape victims. Demons dur
ing the Middle Ages were always assaulting people as incubi and succubi that sex
ually assault people in their beds, restaging childhood family bed rapes.42 Some
female mystics even hallucinated that Christ appeared before them and had inter
course with them.43 Even the Holy Ghost contains a trace of
464
rape, since the Virgin Mary was impregnated by God with it (Yahweh in Hebrew der
iving from the Sumerian word for "sperm.")44 Religious ritual often restages the
rape scene openly: The temple in the Near East was the womb. It was divided int
o three parts; the Porch, representing the lower end of the vagina up to the hym
en, or Veil; the Hall, or vagina itself; and the inner sanctum, or Holy of Holie
s, the uterus. The priest, dressed as a penis, anointed with various saps and re
sins as representing the divine semen, enters through the doors of the Porch, th
e "labia" of the womb, past the Veil or "hymen" and so into the Hall.45 RELIGION
S AS RITUALS USING SHARED ALTER FETISHES In religions and politics, people turn
to idealized authorities to avoid the risk of depending on themselves and to res
tage the painful feelings of abandonment by parents that they had when they trie
d to individuate as children. Religions restage traumatic events encapsulated in
dangerous alters. This is why the word "sacred" (sacer) everywhere designates "
poison," "dangerous," "taboo,"46 because the sacred is where we store our most p
oisonous, dangerous early memories. Gods, demons and spirits are not just contai
ners for haphazard projections; they are highly organized and endurable, and so
must first exist as durable, organized subselves in individual brains. It is thr
ough religious questions about God that people in the past asked their most impo
rtant questions about Mommy: Why does she hate me, why did she tie me up, leave
me abandoned in my feces, let me starve, why did she beat me, why did she strang
le my baby sister, what does she want from me, what did I do wrong to deserve su
ch torture? Because preverbal infants imagine they store their painful memories
in various body parts, alters that carry early traumas are often pictured as inh
abiting internal organs: hearts, brains, the gall bladder, even intestines. Jeff
rey Dahmer used to dismember bodies, he said, because he "wanted to see what som
eone looked like inside," searching for alters in the organs of the corpses he d
ecapitated, draped on altars and thenlike Osiristried to reassemble, as though he were
reassembling his own dissociated body part alters.47 He then ate some of the bo
dy parts, like Aztecs eating the heart of their sacrificed victims, reinternaliz
ing the projected alters that were "full of vital force." Christian saints hallu
cinated both Christ and devils inhabiting their hearts, and even talked to them
regularly.48 Egyptians said their double, their ka, inhabited their hearts, and
had spells entreating the heart to "rise not up as a witness against me."49 Azte
cs believed there were three animistic souls, one in the head, one in the liver
and one in the heart, and they cut each of these organs out of victims in their
sacrificial rituals.50 To this day, childrens hearts are reported cut
465
out and thrown into the sea in Chile as sacrifices to spirits, as the child begs
, "Just let me live, Grandfather."51 Tribal people had such primitive childreari
ng that they were constantly involved with the alters inhabiting their organs. "
The first thing a shaman has to do when he has called up his helping spirits is
to withdraw the soul from his pupils eyes, brain and entrails," purifying and liber
ating them.52 Shamans "cured" others of "soul loss" by sucking out their poisono
us organ alters through their skin.53 Early religions are mainly concerned with
purifying and acting out the feelings of organ alters, usually in rituals that u
se animal spirit alters, attacking, dismembering and rebirthing initiates. Anima
l alters reveal their infantile origins in that they are projected into beings t
hat crawl and are not verbal, like infants. Thus all animal sacrifices are infan
tile alter sacrifices, even when we today go hunting. The infantile origin of an
imal alters is clearly revealed in the Ainu bear sacrifice, where a black bear c
ub is actually suckled by the mothers before being sacrificed.54 Shamans around
the world hallucinate that they remove all their internal organs and replace the
m with "incorruptible" organs, often pressing quartz crystals into their body to
accomplish this.55 Egyptians not only separately mummified their internal organ
s, addressing their ka as "my heart, my mother,"56 they also mummified animals,
reptiles, birds and fishes that were their animal alters.57 As we saw in Chapter
3, they even mummified the Royal Placenta and worshiped it, like the Baganda di
d until recently, placing it on an actual throne and addressing it as "King." 58
Christians, too, used to collect body parts as relics, worshiping the heart, pi
eces of skull, limb bones or fingers of saints dug up from their graves.59 Anima
l Perpetrator Alters were frequently the central gods of early religions, such a
s when Yahweh was represented with serpent legs or when Egyptian gods were shown
as various devouring animals.60 That gods are usually perpetrators restaging ea
rly physical abuse is the answer to Freuds question: "Why does religion seem to nee
d violence?"61 When violence against children disappears, religious and politica
l violence will disappear. Religions and politics as we know them will no doubt
disappear also. Religions work by constructing sacred spaces that contain trigge
rs for switching into trances in order to access peoples alters and obtain some rel
ief from their tortures. Looking out a Rose Window of a cathedral triggers nothi
ng so much as fetal memories of seeing light through your mothers abdomen. The entr
ainment of personal alters into a shared personal experience can be seen today m
ost clearly in groups like the Shakers, where adherents experience dissociation
states; get together in churches full of pictures of Christ as a Victim Alter to
trigger their childhood memories of being victimized; profess their total obedi
ence to Elders
466
in order to trigger the obedience demanded by their parents; and have a "mother
matron" wash their hands or face, also to parallel the early childhood state. Th
en the church leader, the "Pointer," carries out the Perpetrator Alter role by p
unishing one of the Shakers: "With a temper that flares suddenly, he takes a wid
e leather strap and pounds the table, altar, or Bible with the edge of itthen wield
s it against a woman [who] became dissociated as he held her hands and swung her
arms from side to sideremarking, Satan, he wait for you! He proceeded to strike the
ns open palms with his strap." The Pointer becomes the instrument of the Holy Ghost
, saying: "It is the Holy Spirit who gives punishment to you," and, while the cu
lprit is still in a possession trance, lashes her as she was lashed as a child,
telling her she was now forgiven for being sinful.62 The neurobiology of "God ex
periences" is well understood. They are actually temporal lobe seizures, similar
to the seizures of epileptics, explaining why so many mystics experienced clear
epileptic seizures. These "kindling" seizureswhich have been correlated with previ
ous serious child abusebegin in the hippocampus and spread to the amygdalan network
, transforming previous painful anoxic depressive rage feelings into what Mandel
l calls "ecstatic joyful rage," with a disappearance of self boundaries so that
the person is suddenly overcome with feelings of unity and love.63 The neurobiol
ogy of "God in the brain" is similar to the effects of drugs like cocaine and th
e hallucinagens, "inducing an acute loss of serotonergic regulation of temporal
lobe limbic structures and releasing the affectual and cognitive processes chara
cteristic of religious ecstasy and conversion."64 Persinger describes "the relea
se of the brains own opiates that can cause a narcotic high" during these God-merge
r experiences, producing "with a single burst in the temporal lobe, a personal c
onviction of truth and a sense of self-selection [that] shames any known therapy
."65 As Otto puts it, the mysterium tremendum of religious ecstasy "bursts in su
dden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions and lea
ds to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport and to ecst
asywild and demonicand can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering." 66 Saint T
heresa tells how it felt to experience this painful ecstasy in her organ alters:
"An angel pierced its spear several times through my heart, so that it penetrat
ed to my bowels, which were extracted when the spear was withdrawn, leaving me a
ll aflame with an immense love for God. The pain was so great that I had to groa
n, but the sweetness that came with this violent pain was such that I could not
wish to be free of it."67 Religions devise rituals to exteriorize alters and col
lude with others in the delusion that internal alters really exist outside onese
lf, providing some group relief
467
from feeling unlovable by sharing myths like "Christ died for your sins" and ask
ing for forgiveness in hopes that God, the Omnipotent Mommy Alter, will finally
love them. Each step of the shamans or priests ritual can be decoded to reveal its inf
antile origin: "In every ritual, we must do what the gods [parents] did in the b
eginning,"68 The most severely abused children today who become multiple persona
lities (Dissociated Identity Disorders) frequently join one of the many fundamen
talist religious cults in order to decrease the pains of their dissociation. Rel
igions provide alter fetishesshamans rattles, Dionysian phallic replicas, suffering Ch
rist statusthat contain the traumas of the alters and allow the worshiper to act ou
t the guilt and punishment they demand. Most gods began as fetishes, "spirits em
bodied in material objects,"70 and demon fetish figurines were plentiful in anti
quity, being made to be ritually destroyed or thrown into the river or buried in
deserted places to punish the Victim Alters that were projected into them. 71 T
hese alter fetishes were believed to have "accumulated power so intense and dang
erous" that they had to be "killed" in order to release their force. 72 All the
statues and standards worshiped by the Egyptian and Mesopotamians were so concre
tely alternate personalities that they were regularly fed and spoken to, "in ord
er to sustain the power with which they were charged."73 Most early Sacred Kings
only remained kings as long as they had possession of their fetish alters, the
Royal Crownsymbol of the maternal vaginaand the thronesymbol of the maternal chair.74
will be discussed below, the fantasy of the omnipotent Terrifying Mommy always l
ies behind even masculine gods and demons, both in religious and political group
-fantasies. THE SEVEN STAGES OF HISTORICAL PERSONALITY According to James Master
son, personality disorders are results of "false selves" that defend against pai
nful affects of early life and present-day experiences, designed to camouflage t
he real targets of emotional lifethe infantile feelings and memoriesand based not on r
eality but on organized fantasies involving partselves. Contemporary personality
disorders as described in Mastersons revisions of DSM IV75 form a series of person
ality types from schizoid to narcissistic, borderline, depressive and neurotic w
hich conform to the stages of evolution of historical personalities that result
from the childrearing modes described in the previous two chapters.
468
Childrearing Tribal: Early infanticidal Antiquity: Late Infanticidal Christian:
Abandoning Middle Ages: Ambivalent Renaissance: Intrusive Modern: Socializing Po
st-Modern: Helping
Personality Schizoid Narcissist Masochist Borderline Depressive Neurotic Individ
uated
Ideal Shaman Hero Martyr Vassal Holy Warrior Patriot Activist
Mother/God Devours, seduces, abandons child Kills, punishes evil child Forgives
hurt Selfchild Dominates, beats worshipful child
Sacrifice To animal alter spirits To human alter gods Torture Subservient clingi
ng
Disciplines obedient Obeying child Manipulates child Trusts, loves child Incompl
ete Separation No sacrifice of real self
Illustration 9-1 Table of Historical Personalities THE SCHIZOID PSYCHOCLASS OF T
RIBAL SOCIETIES The schizoid personality lusterincluding paranoid and psychopathic
personalitiesfeatures depersonalization, magical, and primary process thinking; fus
ed periods of unreality grandiosity; animistic subject/object
experiences; an inability to experience intimacy; and extreme episodes of suspic
ion and rage. Because tribal mothering (see Chapter 6) is so primitive, so lacki
ng in empathy for the child and so engulfing in overt maternal incest, the schiz
oid tribal personality has a fear of being taken over and a "profound inability
to love himself." 76 Schizoids therefore cannot stand close relationships and so
cannot form higher levels of social organization based on trust. Tribal persona
lities since the Palaeolithic formed animal and organ alters containing dissocia
ted Perpetrator and Victim Alters. Animal alters were depicted in the cave paint
ings of early times and were sacrificially stabbed over and over again in ecstat
ic rebirth rituals held deep in womb-caves covered with several inches of blood-
red ochre. The depersonalization of schizoidsthe result of severe separation stressis
so extreme that they regularly felt themselves breaking into fragmented pieces,
switching into dissociated states and going into shamanistic trances to try to p
ut themselves together. During shamanistic journeys, schizoids experience themse
lves as sliced up, their bones removed, their flesh devoured by female monsters,
and as repeating the tortures of childhood by being starved, burned, beaten, ra
ped and lacerated.77 Like schizoid
469
personalities today, much of their lives were spent in fantasy worlds that repea
ted the childhood isolation that resulted from their feeling that there was simp
ly no path to a real relationship with parents or others. Since alters are forme
d to contain and control memories of early terrors, when defenses threaten to br
eak down the schizoid is flooded with agony.78 In tribal groups, there is no hop
e for forgiveness, there is no "sin," no chance of atonement, only "eat mommy or
be eaten by her," only sadistic master-slave fears and detachment-alienation de
fenses, all restaged in endless rituals and cannibalistic feasts where organ alt
ers are eaten. Bourguignon found spirit possession rituals (where an alter total
ly takes over the host personality) only in simple hunter-gatherer societies, wh
ile possession-trance rituals (where various demon alters appear as spirits duri
ng brief ritual trances) were found in agricultural or animal herding societies.
79 Possession rituals today feature a "judgement of the soul by an old woman, th
e mother-animal, the mistress of the dead," and in the past featured "human vict
ims offered in sacrifice to propitiate the Master of the Animals."80 The animal
masks of the shaman are familiar from the various cave paintings that have survi
ved this early period, with the shamans drum said to be "the voice of the primeval
mother" and with Mistress of the Animal representations continuing as late as th
e Greek goddess Artemis.81 Yakut shamans still hallucinate self-sacrifice to "a
Bird-of-Prey-Mother, which is like a great bird with an iron beak, hooked claws,
and a long tail [who] cuts its body into bits and devours it."82 Animistic alte
r fetishes surrounded early humans. As one Chukchi put it: "All that exists live
s. The lamp walks around. The walls of the house have voices of their own, while
the deceased get up and visit the living."83 Every alter fetish contains traces
of the original trauma from when it was formedeven the shamans rattle betraying the r
outine raping of children by having a "gourd representing the womb and a penis-h
andle that inseminates it."84 Indeed, it is likely that most of the misnamed "Ve
nus figurines" found in early caves were in fact raping wands similar to those u
sed in contemporary cults that rape virgins in rituals,85 with faceless heads sh
aped like the glans of the penis, bulbous breasts looking just like testicles, a
vaginal triangle carefully indicated and covered with red ochre representing th
e bloody results of the childhood rape.86 It was no coincidence that the very fi
rst art in the Upper Palaeolithic was mainly representations of the vulva.87 "Sa
cred rape" is part of shamanistic beliefs today,88 and virgins are still cut and
raped as sacrificial offerings to gods in some areas of the world, giving as th
e reason: "Only blood satisfies the tius [avenging spirits]."89 Girls in some Af
rican tribes are still made to sit on erect penis figurines as punishment.90 Tha
t tunnels and caves were the locations of these raping rituals fits well with th
e frequent use of tunnels and caves by contemporary cults that
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rape schoolchildren.91 That the caves of the Palaeolithic are cultic sanctuaries
for trance hallucinations is further confirmed by their being covered with "ent
optic" images identical to those experienced by contemporary shamans engaged in
trance vision quests.92 Plunging into the terrifying, hallucinatory world of "Dr
eamtime" trances meant revisiting the terrifying world of childhood, where mommi
es suck infants penises and fathers have seven-year-olds fellate them. Initiates fe
lt so polluted by their early seductions that they submitted themselves at adole
scence to initiatory group-fantasies of disemboweling and washing of their entra
ils and other body parts, while endlessly cutting themselves to cleanse their bl
ood of their badness. The !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari still switch into cleans
ing trances once a week to experience their alter memories in convulsion-like tr
emors, ending in the usual temporal lobe seizures of tribal personalities, "burs
ting open, like a ripe pod" when "God killed my every thought. He wiped me clean
."93 Body parts containing projected alters collected by early headhunters and c
annibals existed with hallucinatory reality: "The Dyaks were obsessed with the n
otion that severed heads continued to exist as living beings[they were] treated for
months with deep reverence and flattering speech. Choice morsels from the table
would be thrust into its mouth, and at the end of the meal a cigar would be pla
ced between its lips."94 Alters in enemy scalps collected by warriors in many tr
ibes were so real the scalps used to be taken home, called "my child" and fed re
gularly.95 Since "enemies" were usually quite innocent of any wrongdoing until a
warriors alters were projected into them, captured enemies were often torturedto puni
sh the projected childhood altersand then eatento return the punished alter to the ori
ginal owner.96 Thus what Sagan calls "aggressive cannibalism" and ascribes to "v
engeance" is in fact a punishment of a part of the self, projected into another
body, and then returned after punishment to ones own body by eating it. Apparently
the cultural explosion at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic some 35,000 ye
ars ago was the result of early language abilities affording the capacity to pro
ject alters into others and into shared cultural alter fetishes. 97 Early humans
were schizoid personalities who did not have unified real selves, only dozens o
f subselves which they projected into other people and objects. One archeologist
suggests that the spectacular explosion of cultural developments 35,000 years a
go came from "the appearance of a very simple additional cognitive affective mec
hanisma disposition to engage in pretend play in childhood,"98 which in turn depend
s upon the ability to project parts of ones self into others and into objects. Cont
emporary tribal children have alters they play with, far more real to them than
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the "imaginary playmates" children in more complex societies have. In New Guinea
, small children have alternate personalities called finiik that "temporarily de
part from the body to wander abroadduring trances and other forms of mystical exper
ience."99 Anthropologists are often startled to be introduced by a little child
to his finiik, projected into a certain stone or bird, or be told about how witc
h alters regularly possess childrens bodies both in dreams and waking lifeall spontane
ously experienced, long before being taught in ritual. Wars, too, are fought to
cleanse internal alters of badness, repair the fragmented self and restore poten
cy. Tribal warfare against alter container "enemies" is accomplished mainly thro
ugh ambush, with warriors spearing unarmed men, women and children for wholly im
agined grievances. Tribes switch into Persecutory Alters mainly on occasions of
extreme growth panic, when new tasks such as building houses or expanding garden
s threaten too much growth and after initiations that center on adolescents grow
ing up. Homicide rates reach the highest levels anywhere in the worldup to 60 perce
ntin schizoid tribal societies, since extreme distrust of others is common: "Both m
en and women are volatile, prone to quarreling and quick to take offense at a su
spected slight,"100 restaging the distrust and rage of their infanticidal mother
s. Women are routinely viewed as secretly being witches "who can kill simply by
staring at a person" and are often killed because they are believed to poison pe
ople.101 Wife-beating is nearly universal, female suicide rates from mistreatmen
t often reaches 10-25 percent of womens deaths, and routine torture and execution o
f women suspected of poisoning men is common.102 Supreme gods in schizoidsunlike th
e more personal gods of borderlines are totally unloving and distant, reflecting th
e uncaring nature of the parents. Eliade points out that even when thought of as
"eternal, omniscient and all-powerful," creator gods in tribal cultures "withdr
aw to the sky," too remote and uncaring to be prayed to or addressed.103 What ta
kes their place is merging with guardian spirits empowerment by first torturing you
rself to cleanse your alters and then hallucinating an animal alter that might p
rotect you against being devoured by cannibalistic maternal giant alters like th
e Australian "Old Serpent Woman" or the Kwakiutl giantess Tsonoqua, who roams th
e forest searching for children to eat. 104 Even when schizoids try to incorpora
te paternal features to avoid being devoured, they end up giving their gods mate
rnal featureslike the Rainbow Serpents of Australia, described as "gods who are mal
e but have a womb or female breastswho look like snakes but also like a womanthe bad
erwho swallowed children left in her care."105
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The main content, however, of tribal rituals is constructed from fetal fantasies
, because schizoid disintegration produces deep regression to bad womb and rebir
th memories. Psychotherapists like Stan Grofwho regress their patients to fetal sta
tesreproduce their drawings in their books, and these look very much like shamanist
ic experiences.108 Possessed shamans often describe switching into trances durin
g their dances in language that closely resembles the birth experience: The loa
dance suggests water [amniotic fluid];when the drumbeat quickens [mother experie
nces contractions];the whole structure crashes like a cosmic surf over ones head [b
reaking of the amniotic waters];the terror strikes and with a supreme effort I w
rench my leg loose, I must keep moving {trapped in birth canal];My skull is a dr
um, my veins will burst my skin [bloodstream anoxic because placenta no longer d
elivers oxygenated blood];I am sucked down and exploded upward at once [birth];F
inally it is as if I lay at the far distant end of an infinitely deep-down, sunk
en well, then suddenly: surface; suddenly: air; suddenly:dazzling white [born].1
07 Rheim describes the initiation ritual of the Australian aborigines in which ini
tiates were forced to drink blood as "throwing the novice into the Old Woman who
se womb is symbolized by a semi-circular trenchthe Rainbow Serpent [Poisonous Place
nta] is represented engraved on the walls of the trench. A bullroarer, called th
e Mother and also representing her womb, her shade, is buried in the trench, his spiri
t [alter] later leaving it to return to his spirit home."108 Both initiation rit
uals and shamanistic journeys usually include going through long birth tunnels w
ith umbilical ropes attaching them to visit placental World Trees, feeling body
dismemberments like those fetuses feel during birth, performing bloody birth rit
uals in medicine wheel circles shaped like placentas and restaging the "poison b
lood" memories of birth by being covered by "the menstrual blood that can cause
you to die, called dead womb blood."109 Only after going through poison-blood rebirth
restagings could tribal men hope for a time to put their Devouring Mommy alters
at rest and go about with the daily work of living. The result of always being s
ubject to infanticidal, incestuous abandoning maternal memories is that schizoid
tribal personalities cannot tolerate separation or rejection in their daily lif
e. "Rejection is unendurablefamilies cluster together in an encampment often touching
against their neighbors [because] separation and loneliness are unendurable to them
. [They] cannot bear the sense of rejection that even mild disapproval makes the
m feel."110 What is misnamed "egalitarianism" is really mistrust and fear of bei
ng called "selfish" for owning. Hoarding and selfaggrandizement are simply not t
oleratedpeople were often killed for trying to keep more than their share of goodsambi
tion was stopped by overwhelming schizoid
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envy, change was feared and the surpluses and savings which were necessary for f
uture innovation were nowhere to be found. As Murphy found, in tribal societies
"the mother is an eternal threat to self-individuation, a frustrater of urges, a
nd a swallower of emergent identity" of men.111 The early incest was particularl
y destructive of separation and individuation. As one Maori sage put it: "That w
hich destroys man is the mana of the vagina." Men are forced to merge with their
mothers in order to appropriate the power of their vagina: "Warriors became the
symbolic equivalent of menstruating women[both] bloody warriors and menstruating w
omenwere charged with powerful destructive energy;warriors bodies and weapons were dec
orated with designs marked in red hematite [and] they expropriated the destructi
ve power of menstruating women [by] ritual nosebleeding or subincision."112 Ofte
n the bond between men was obtained by their sharing the mommy-alter in their bl
ood, cutting their veins and smearing their blood on each other to form "blood b
rotherhoods."113 But strong leaders are avoided because they might bring back me
mories of maternal domination: "Australian aborigines traditionally eliminated a
ggressive men who tried to dominate them [and] in New Guinea, they execute promi
nent individuals who overstep their prerogatives." 114 Personal loyalty to leade
rs is tentative because of their overwhelming schizoid mistrust and envy, so the
most social organization that can be achieved is "Big Men" who do not threaten
to subject others too much to maternal engulfment and despairbetter to stick to alt
er fetishes and constant gift-exchange to ward off the return of childhood memor
ies of starvation and abandonment. Every step toward personal closeness or trust
brings flashbacks to maternal distancing, since "schizoid states often lead to
acute paranoid regressions because the patients aggression becomes more threatening
to him as he allows himself to get closer to other individuals."115 Thus wars i
n tribal societies often follow disappointments in sexual affairsas men fail in ach
ieving intimacy, they become paranoid and go off to kill imagined "enemies." Onl
y when childrearing achieved the next highest mode were men able to achieve comp
lex societies that allowed dominant male leaders and trust in others sufficient
to permit ownership and complex hierarchical organizations that could permit dev
elopment of higher levels of economic production and trade. THE NARCISSISTIC PSY
CHOCLASS OF ANTIQUITY Narcissistic personalities ward off their sense of an empt
y, inadequate self by fusing with the harsh attacking parent alter and forming a
grandiose self that identifies with the omnipotent parent. Or they become a lat
ent narcissist and cling to and admire a grandiose other, a narcissistic hero wh
o can stand up to the destructive
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mother alter.116 Whereas schizoid tribal personalities tried to maintain a safe
distance to avoid engulfment, the narcissistic personalities of antiquity tried
to maintain some sense of self by arming themselves with grandiose exhibitionism
. Thus they constantly live in the state of narcissistic display, as for instanc
e early Greeks did when they spent their days displaying their bodies at gymnasi
ums and at Wight rather than going home to risk intimacy with their wives engaged in m
ale-only drinking/raping parties. The narcissistic personalities of antiquity we
re exploitative, distrustful, ruthless and lacking in empathy,117 being preoccup
ied with fantasies of the power and brilliance of a world filled with arrogant,
distant narcissistic heroes and gods and grandiose political leaders upon whom t
hey depended to validate their weak sense of self. Their pedophilia was also a r
esult of their only being able to have sex with a narcissistic double of themsel
ves stemming from when they were beautiful youths and, like Narcissus, fell in l
ove with themselves, avoiding women as "vultures" who were out to catch and devo
ur them. Early civilizations began with both gods and leaders who had maternal c
haracteristics: devouring goddesses everywhere prevailed, and even chiefs seemed
to be mommiesas the Anyi said: "When the kings breasts are full of milk, it is his pe
ople who drink."118 Parin found the Anyi clung to their kings because "their fea
r of women was greater than their fear of men" and because of "their need to fin
d a chief or master who enjoys prestige and power so that they can submit to him
and introject power" and avoid maternal engulfment.119 As Galen put it: "Each m
an trembled forever on the brink of becoming womanish"120 i.e., of switching permanen
into his mommy alter and losing his self. The ever-present fear of turning into
a woman found throughout early civilizations explains why religions and politics
were defensive arenas filled with sadistic maternal alters and why periodic war
s were desperately needed to attempt to restore mens potency. The daily life of the
narcissistic personalities of antiquity was filled with projected alters, from
the evil spirits, devils and dybbuks that Jews were constantly exorcising to the
bloodthirsty female spirits, serpents and demons that Sumerians, Egyptians, Gre
eks and Romans tried to ward off with their various religious fetishes. "At ever
y corner evil spirits were on the watch; there was also danger from the spells o
f numerous witches, in whom everyone believed implicitly."121 Even supposedly ra
tional Greeks were, as Gouldner put it, "deeply concerned about their capacity t
o go murderously berserk."122 Egyptians regularly talked to their avenging alter
s, as the "world-weary man" talked to his "double," his Ba, about suicide, makin
g "suicide so common that the crocodiles in the Nile could no longer cope with t
he corpses."123 Hippocrates confirmed that Greeks often experienced "convulsions
, fears,
475
terrors and delusions," and physicians in every country of antiquity were expect
ed to treat possessions, hallucinations, frenzies, lycanthropies and other sympt
oms of dissociated personalities (melancholy in Greek meaning "furor.")124 The a
verage Greek acknowledged that his emotional life was constantly controlled by h
is alters, which were given names like psyche, thumos, menos, kardia, kradie, et
or, noos, ate, and so on. Dodds says that Homer describes ate, for instance, as
"a temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal consciousnessa partial and tempo
rary insanity ascribed to an external daemonic agency."125 Medea says she did not kil
r children, her thumos forced her to kill them. Ones psyche looks and sounds like a
living person, Odysseus says, but it flies off "like a shadow or a dream." 126
Sometimes they were co-conscious with these alters, but often they were not, sin
ce they completely took over the self. Adkins wrote an entire book on how the Gr
eeks of antiquity kept switching into their subpersonalities, describing their "
low degree of unity and cohesion [as] one little man (so to speak) within him after an
other addresses and prompts him."127 Usually the spirits and demons of antiquity
betrayed their maternal originnot so surprising when one reads statements like tha
t of Galen who said "my mother was so very prone to anger that sometimes she bit
her handmaids"128 or that of Xenophon who said he would "rather bear a wild bea
sts brutality than that of his mother."129 The earliest civilizations uniformly wor
shipped vampire goddesses who were devouring maternal alters. All were what Jung
ians term "Dragon Mothers" 130 from Lilith, Nin-Tu, Hecate and Ishtar to Moira, Shi
va, Gorgon and Erinyes. They were usually called by their worshipers "Terrible M
others," usually had serpentine features and were called terms like "cruel, jeal
ous, unjust, her glance brings death, her will is supreme" by worshippers.131 Si
nce contemporary multiple personalities also sometimes hallucinate gigantic serp
ents as alters,132 one must believe the witnesses in early civilizations when th
ey insist they really saw these serpentgoddesses. The Dragon Mother Goddesses ac
curately embodied the infanticidal "infinitely needy mother who cannot let her c
hildren go because she needs them for her own psychic survivalgiving her child the
impossible task of filling her limitless void [and] engulfing them to prevent th
em from claiming a separate life for themselves."133 One of the earliest Vulture
Goddesses can be seen on the shrine walls of the Neolithic town of Catal Hyk, a blo
odthirsty Goddess with wings of a vulture who is shown eating headless corpses.
Corpses of people were actually thrown into the fields nearby so vultures could
eat them in sacrificial rebirth rituals.134 That vultures were maternal was show
n long ago in Freuds paper showing that the Egyptian hieroglyph for "mother" clearl
y represents a vulture and that the
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Egyptians worshipped a vulture-headed mother-goddess.135 Even early Hebrews wors
hipped a mother-goddess, Asherah,136 who, along with Lilith, the other vampire g
oddess mentioned in the Bible, "ceaselessly devoured the blood" of her worshippe
rs and "roamed the world in search of children to eat, rape and kill." Even the
Sphinx (sphinx means "throttler") was a maternal monster who devoured youth.137
Most of the male animal gods of early civilizations were pictured as slaves of g
oddesses, like "the Bull of Heaven, the ferocious monster who killed three hundr
ed men at each snort of his breath [whom] Ishtar in her rage sent down to devast
ate the land." 138 But usually the Mother Goddesses accomplished their own slaug
hters: "Kali, the Black One, breasts big with milk, adorned with the blood-dripp
ing hands and heads of her victims, devouring the entrails of a human victim or
drinking blood from a human skull."139 Statues of these bloodthirsty goddesses w
ere set up in ziggurats and temples all over the world, daily washed, dressed, f
ed, talked to, and heard to speak their commands,140 so hallucinatory was the po
wer of the alters. The statues were such bloodthirsty maternal alter fetishes th
at often priests would take the blood of the sacrificial victim and anoint the f
ace of the idol so She could drink of it.141 "Divinelyinduced madness"as in the Dio
nysian rituals of ancient Greece would sometimes even cause women to become possess
ed by their Terrible Mother alters and act out the killing of the victim, especi
ally when they were experiencing post-partum depressions. As Euripides describes
them: "Breasts swollen with milk, new mothers who had left their babies behind
at home;clawed calves to pieces with bare hands [and] snatched children from the
ir homes."142 The fetal origins of early religions were everywhere evident. Actu
al human placentas were often hung on trees, worshipped and offered human sacrif
ices.143 Goddesses like Tiamat were referred to as "poisonous wombsnakes," Sumer
ians and Babylonians worshipped "placenta-ghosts," and even the Hebrew name for
Eve (Khawwa) meant "the Serpent Lady."144 Peruvians used to place their actual p
lacentas into the womb of their religious statues,145 just as most nagual worshi
pped in ancient Meso-American religions were real placentas.146 All the "Cosmic
Trees" found in early religionsfrom the Tree of Eden to Jesus Crosswere placental in
in, and the priest was often portrayed as a fetus: "He has become a fetus. His h
ead is veiled and he is made to clench his fists, for the embryo in its bag has
its fists clenched. He walks around the hearth just as the fetus moves within th
e womb;he unclenches his fists, he unveils himself, he is born into divine exist
ence, he is a god." 147 Carthaginian and other child sacrifice religions used bo
th fetuses and newborn in their rites, 148 and cults even today often kill real
fetuses in rebirth rituals.149 Even the Deluge myths
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from Gilgamesh to that of the Hebrew Biblecontain many elements of the rush of amni
otic waters prior to birth. Every detail of the worship of Mother Goddesses has
its origins in actual traumatic childrearing experiences of antiquity. Most "Ter
rifying Mothers" had divine sons who were forced to commit incest with them,150
similar to the Japanese mothers and others described in the previous chapter,151
with "every mother goddess having their son-lovers, Inanna and Tammuz, Isis and
Osiris, Cybele and Attis, Aphrodite and Adonis."152 The religious rituals resta
ged accurately the maternal seduction: "Not only does the Mother Goddess love he
r son simply for his phallus, she castrates him, taking possession of it to make
herself fruitful." 153 In India until recently, "visitors to many ancient shrin
es used to have symbolic intercourse with stone-cut female deities by thrusting
their fingers into deep touchholes, worn by generations of finger-thrusters, at
the deities sexual centers."154 Thus it is quite mistaken to call ancient sexual se
duction rituals "Sacred Marriages." They are in fact "Sacred Maternal Incests."
When the incest is complete and the "insatiable appetite" of the Goddess assuage
d, the Mother Goddess then castrated her son155 and even, in the case of Ishtar,
"wore a necklace of testicles in depictions of her. The Great Mother was gentle
r to women than to men, who had great reason to fear her dark side as Devouring-
Mother. [She] existed not to be loved, but to be placated."156 Worshippers of th
e Magna Mater, called galli, castrated themselves for her, "wishing to be like a
child, the better to serve the goddess,"157 "running through the city with seve
red organs and throwing them into any house."158 That sacrifices of all sorts ar
e for "wiping out evil and guilt" of the community is well-established,159 but t
hat sacrifice was usually equated with childbirth ("mans childbearing") and sacrifi
cers serve inner maternal alters and often pretend to be mothers ("the priests m
asqueraded as pregnant women during the sacrifice")160 is less well known. Astar
te "massacred mankind, young and old, causing heads and hands to fly and tying h
eads to her back, hands to her girdle."161 Drawings of the goddess "show her per
petual hunger for human sacrificial victims."162 Visnu particularly favored devo
uring the victims genitals.163 The sacrificial rituals made a point of saying the v
ictim must be innocent, like a child. Ancient religions used to blurt out alter
beliefs that we today only tentatively suggest might be true. Because these godd
esses were also "The Mistresses of Battle," soldiers killed in battle were also
seen as sacrifices to her bloodthirsty appetite. "The goddess brings destruction
to enemies; she drinks the blood of the victims who were formerly her children;
she could not be halted in her slaughter of the human race."164 Since these dea
ths originated in such memories as watching his mother strangle his little siste
r
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when she was born, war goddesses particularly needed the death of their own sold
iers. As an early Ugaritic text says of the goddess Anat: "She is filled with jo
y as she plunges her knees in the blood of heroes."165 Often the sacrificer was
actually female, as was the chief priestess of the Celtic moon goddess, who cut
off the victims heads with her own hands, restaging the maternal infanticide.166 Bu
t rituals dont just repeat early trauma: they restage themrearrange them to include el
ements of both the violence of the Perpetrating Alters and the rage of the Victi
m Alters. Thus the murderous goddess Tiamat is killed by her son Marduk in a tre
mendous battle by an "arrow that tore through her belly and inner parts."167 Onl
y by defeating the infanticidal mother could sons "overcome chaos." As Halpern s
ays: "The hero is one who slays his mother [and] institutes a new order on earth
; culture is the work of the hero, the mother-killer, and represents his attempt
at selfgeneration."168 That the killing is the rage of the infantile victim alt
er against the mother is seen by the fact that the Mother Goddess, after being k
illed, is nevertheless identified with: for instance, the Aztecs beheaded women
representing their Mother Goddesses and flayed them, donning their skins so that
they can become them and acquire their dangerous powers, their mana.169 The acq
uisition of the powers of the Terrifying Mother by a male God was only slowly an
d partially accomplished in antiquity. Yahweh might conquer the primordial femal
e monster, Leviathan, symbol of chaos, and He might demand complete obedience, "
with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy might." He might even take over
sacrificial demands, as when He tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac to found Israel
in a blood-brotherhood convenant. But behind what Maccoby calls "The Sacred Exe
cutioner"170 lies the sacrificial mother alter; behind every adored Adonis lies
the cruel Astarte. Greeks may have tried to defend against maternal engulfment b
y holding annual processions where they marched with giant phalli, but the vase
illustrations of the phalli show women holding them up in the air. Even powerful
kings, like Odin or Wodan, had to be periodically sacrificed to the Mother Godd
ess, the World Ash, to assuage her blood thirst and cleanse the people.171 Only
by sacrificing together could men establish patrilineal kinship and political po
wer. Even in Greece and Rome, patrilineal kin only knew they were kin because th
ey sacrificed together: sacrifice was called "a remedy for having been born of w
oman." Even death in war strengthened the weak bonding between maleswhen an Aztec c
aptured an enemy, he called him "my beloved son" and the captive answered, "my b
eloved father," then killed him.172 That the sacrificial victim contained the Ba
d Boy Alter can be seen at the beginning of the ritual, when the victim is "inje
cted with the poison" of childhood sin, rubbed with dirt if the victim was an an
imal or given many sexual
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partners before the sacrifice if the victim was a human. That it was internal al
ters who demanded the sacrifice was indicated by the priest saying, "The gods ha
ve done this deed; I did not do it!" or, as in Athens, by holding a trial after
the sacrifice in which the full blame for the slaying was attributed to the knif
e, which, "having been found guilty, was punished by being destroyed."173 The mo
re wealthy and successful ancient societies became, the more guilty they felt, t
he more their growth panic led them to defend against their avenging maternal al
ters by clinging to a more and more powerful male leader. As Earle observes, "ch
iefdoms are states of mind [and] chiefs rule not because of their power but beca
use of their place in a sacredly chartered world order"174 the world order of alter
s and their containers. The more kings appropriated maternal alter Powerher manathe mo
re they had to go through seasonal cleansing ceremonies, including ritual abasem
ent and even "killing of the king," in order to punish themselves for their hubr
is.175 In these ceremonies, the king was ritually called "a turd [who] has come
to save us,"176 hit in the face with a sword, and only then invested with Heil,1
77 his portion of maternal mana. But everyone in antiquity knew where his power
really came from: the vaginal maternal crown, which was addressed by the king as
"O Red Crown, Let there be fear of me like the fear of thee;" the throne, calle
d the "mother" of the king; and the sceptre, "a branch from the placental Tree o
f Life."178 THE MASOCHISTIC PSYCHOCLASS OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY As mothers moved f
rom infanticidal to abandoning mode childrearing (see Chapters 6 and 7), early C
hristians could internalize a mommy who doesnt actually kill her children but only
abandons them, both through emotional abandonment and through sending them to we
tnurses, fosterage, monasteries, service with others, etc. Even profound neglect
is less devastating than watching your baby sister be strangled, so early Chris
tians could for the first time in history hope to get their mothers/Gods love (redempt
ion) if they show her their pain and get her pity. This display of pain to get t
he love of the mother is known as the masochistic personality, a lower level bor
derline condition,179 which for the first time in history enables people to imag
ine that if they debase and torture themselves, the mother/God will feel sorry f
or them and might provide salvation, eventual closeness, rather than just helple
ssness and unbearable loneliness. The gods of antiquity were distant, impersonal
gods: "The gods might often mingle with men and women, but they did not seem to
spend their time cultivating reciprocal love."180 As Aristotle said, "When one
party is removed to a great distance, as God is, the possibility of friendship c
eases."181 But the Christian God "loves and
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can be loved in return."182 For abandoning mode children, if you worship and lov
e your Mommy/God, if you take over yourself her beating and tortures of your bod
y, if you give up all personal needs and starve yourself and avoid sex, you will
through your masochistic display gain forgiveness and perhaps even be allowed e
ventually to merge with Her.183 Christ is, of course, the main Suffering Victim
Alter who has been sent to earth by God to display his wounds and ask for pity o
n behalf of mankind. While the narcissistic personalities of antiquity generally
agreed with Socrates that "no one is willfully evil,"184 the masochistic person
alities of early Christians put sin at the center of life and built up a church
of expiation and confession that for the first time allowed pardon for the sins.
The musings of early theologians about Christ sounded like the ruminations of t
he child about his or her mothers mistreatment: God abandoned him, he treated him a
s the most abominable of men; and after an infinity of disgraces, of ignominies,
and suffering, without any regard that he was His own Son, he caused him to die
by the most shameful and cruel torture there ever was; He worked his vengeance
on His Son, as if He had nothing to do with him.185 But the Christian, like the
abandoning mode child, then totally absolved the Mother/God of all blame by a si
mple trick, saying: "I am all to blame. I deserve the torture. Mommy/God will pi
ty me if I torture myself." The trick is one regularly used today by lower level
borderline masochists, who show extremely high occurrences of reported childhoo
d neglect (92 percent)186 and physical and sexual abuse (59 percent to 91 percen
t), who cut and burn and torture themselves endlessly in order to punish themsel
ves and gain pity from their mommy alters. Earlier gods in antiquity killed and
tortured children, of course, but they, like Jehovah, only "laughed at the slaug
hter of the damned."187 The Christian God loved you for torturing and sacrificin
g yourself. The masochistic display of ones wounds had already become a popular gro
up-fantasy of antiquity by early Christian times. Gladiatorial combats "to appea
se the spirits of the dead" were widespread, where warriors volunteered to be ki
lled in the arena in order to display their wounds and gain the applause of the
people. 188 Wholly gratuitous wars were fought mainly for masochistic purposes;
it was said that "warriors glory in their wounds; they rejoice to display their
flowing blond. The man who returns from battle unhurt may have fought as well, b
ut he who returns wounded is held in higher esteem."189 Christian masochism ritu
alized the absolution/penance ritual to assure adherents that when they felt unl
oved they could go to a church, relive Christs agonies, confess their sins, carry o
ut penances and
481
assure their Mommy/God that they still worshipped Her and that it was really the
childs/worshippers fault that Mommy/God was so unhappy. Confession, penance and absol
ution are, of course, endless alter propitiations: "Gregory frequently expressed
his fear that, because of Gods unknown and unpredictable severity, man could never
know if he inflicted enough suffering upon himself to propitiate Gods punishment s
hould take the form of a constant, unremitting anxiety and sorrow for ones sinsas teet
h tearing the flesh."190 Both Christians and Jews "engaged in a contest and refl
ection about the new-fangled practice of martyrdom,"191 even unto suicide. Jesus
, too, says John, really committed suicide, and Augustine spoke of "the mania fo
r self-destruction" of early Christians.192 Roman authorities tried hard to avoi
d Christians because they "goaded, chided, belittled and insulted the crowds unt
il they demanded their death."193 One man shouted to the Roman officials: "I wan
t to die! I am a Christian," leading the officials to respond: "If they wanted t
o kill themselves, there was plenty of cliffs they could jump off."194 But the C
hristians, following Tertullians dicta that "martyrdom is required by God," forced
their own martyrdom so they could die in an ecstatic trance: "Although their tor
tures were gruesome, the martyrs did not suffer, enjoying their analgesic state.
"195 Even today, about 10 per cent of masochistic borderlines complete suicide,1
96 always with a maternal "Hidden Executioner" alter present to feel pity. Short
of suicide, martyrdom and asceticism was built into every element of Christian
ritual and practice. Monasticism was an orgy of masochistic penance for the sins
of individuation, with fasts, flagellations, continence and pilgrimages routine
requirementsrestaging the starvations, bindings, beatings and expulsions to wetnur
se of childhood. Yet, unlike earlier religions, Christianity allowed their pries
ts to forgive, console and reconcile the sinner/child with Mommy/God after the p
unishment. Whereas earlier religions punished animals or others as Victim Alters
, Christianity encouraged the punishment of ones own body as a cleansing "second bi
rth." Mommy/God could be pacified by martyrdom and one could receive Her/His lov
e at last. Octavius described the pleasure God had at seeing Christians sufferin
g: "How fair a spectacle for God to see when a Christian stands face to face wit
h pain."197 As Pope Urban told the knights in order to get them to go on the Fir
st Crusade: "We hold out to you a war which contains the glorious reward of mart
yrdom,"198 with its final reward, the love of God, since "only martyrs will atta
in to Paradise before the Second Coming."199 That priests were punishers leads o
ne to wonder if they were not really concretizations of Perpetrator Alters, that
is, remnants of abusers. Although one
482
usually is used to identifying the "legions of demons and spirits" that made Chr
istians gash themselves as the perpetrators, priests themselves are usually pict
ured as helpful figures. Yet priestly alters of masochists today often turn out
to have the features of rapists,200 while psychotherapists who treat ritual abus
e survivors find that "Satan usually turns out to be a traumatized child," ragin
g over early sexual abuse.201 In fact, alters and religious fantasy figures usua
lly contain remnants of both the perpetrators and victims of childhood traumas.
The Devil might embody the rage of the raped child, but he also has attributes o
f the rapist: he is naked, he has a "long nose" (penis), he is red (flush of ere
ct penis) and he is "hairy" (pubic hair). The precise details of the image of Ch
rist on the Cross are all from childhood. Christ is shown as an infant (naked, e
xcept for swaddling-band loincloth), abandoned by Mommy (God), bound or nailed t
o a wooden Cross (the wooden board all infants were bound to during swaddling),
with a crown of thorns (the painful head-shaping devices used on infants before
swaddling) and with a bloody hole in his side (evidence of the childhood rape, v
aginal or anal). Even the details of Christs life conform to routine childhood cond
itions. For instance, Christ got the bloody wound in his side, the subject of mu
ch theological concern, because his Father sent him down to be crucifiedjust as so
many real fathers at the time sent their young children to their neighbors to be
used as sexual objectsand the bad soldier stripped Christ and stuck his phallic la
nce into himjust as the bad neighbor stripped the child and stuck his erect penis i
nto him. If sexuality meant memories of rape to most children growing up at that
time, it is no wonder that Christianity preached sexuality was shameful, "a tok
en of human bondage," and must be avoided at all costs. The ritual of the Mass,
toowith "the Lord, sacrificed, and laid upon the altar, and the priest, standing, a
nd all the people empurpled with his most precious blood" (Chrysostom)202 is equall
y a "rite of penetration," a restaging of childhood rape, as the frightening pri
est in his black robe circles slowly around the helpless, naked Christ. The deep
est feeling behind all these Christian rites was the loneliness and hunger of th
e worshipperthe abandonment depressionso it is not surprising that images of real hung
er often broke through during the Christian ritual. Priests and worshippers ofte
n reported that during Holy Communion they would see in the host "a very young b
oy; and when the priest began to break the host, they thought they saw an angel
coming down out of the sky who cut the boy up with a knife." Or else they would
fear that the worshipper might not want to bite into "the Communion wafer if the
y could see that they were actually biting off the head, hands and feet of a lit
tle child."203 Even Christ himself, the Victim Alter, was thought to be terribly
hungry: "Christs hunger is great beyond measure; he devours us; his
483
hunger is insatiable."204 The abandoning mode childs hungerfor love, food, care, supor
tis never forgotten, and it can be found at the heart of every Christian ritual thr
oughout the Middle Ages. THE BORDERLINE PSYCHOCLASS OF LATER CHRISTIANITY It mus
t be recalled that new parenting modes begin with just a few people at a time, w
hich means that ambivalent mode parenting and the resulting higher level borderl
ine personalitieswhich begin in the twelfth centurycontinued for some time to be minor
ities in European families, co-existing with earlier masochistic, narcissistic a
nd schizoid personalities in their societies. By the twelfth century, when Weste
rn Europe began to move in new directions, the empires of antiquity had collapse
d in a masochistic orgy of military self-destruction. The clinging needs of the
new borderline psychoclassa symptom of their feelings of isolation, emptiness and s
eparation anxietywere now defended against by constructing the profound personal bo
nds of feudalism. "The borderline," says Hartocollis, "is an angry individual. C
haracterized by oral demandingness, often with a paranoid flavour [and] a sense
of emptiness or depressionmaking him feel chronically lonesome, frustrated, alienat
ed."205 This emptiness was known to medieval psychoclasses as acidia, which one
twelfth-century monk says is "a disgust of the heart, an enormous loathing of yo
urselfa great bitternessYour soul is torn to pieces, confused and split up, sad and em
bittered."206 From the twelfth century on, acedia attracted much attention as a
"turning away from God," again, the fault of the person/child, not of the God/Mo
mmy. When people confessed to feelings of acedia and reported their feelings of
despair and self-hatred, they were given severe penitentials by their priests to
ward off their suicidal thoughts. The clinging of the feudal bond is paralleled
to the clinging tie to God and to Mother Mary and Jesus, who for the first time
takes on overt maternal traits, even allowing worshippers to suck his breasts a
nd wounds.207 Real ambivalent mode mothers were now nurturing enough so that one
can even find descriptions of "God as a woman nursing the soul at her breasts,
drying its tears and punishing its petty mischief-making."208 Of course, in true
borderline style, the price of some closeness with God is total devotion, the m
edieval Christian saying: "To my beloved, I will forever be His servant, His sla
ve, All for God, and nothing for me." 209 As contemporary borderlines say: "I kn
ow you will love and take care of me if I dont self-activate. Ill please you by clingi
ng and complying with your wishes, so you will take care of me, and these bad (a
bandonment) feelings will go away."210
484
The advances of borderline personalities beyond lower-level masochistic psychocl
asses were, however, profound, and soon began to carry Western Europe beyond the
accomplishments of the rest of the world. Much has been written of "the inventi
on of the self and individuality" beginning in the twelfth century. Prior to thi
s period, there was not even a word for "self," and the word "personality" meant
a mask held before an actor, i.e., a "false self."211 But "the practice of self
-examination was deeper and more widespread in twelfth-century Europe than at an
y time before [and] medieval Europe changed from a shame culture to a guilt culture
r motives and not just outer behavior became the focus of confessions and of lit
erature.212 Autobiographies began to multiply, seals indicating personal identit
y began to be used more widely and writers began to wonder if God might allow a
unique self for each person, a homo interior that was fashioned by one"in the image
of God," of course, but nevertheless made by ones real self.213 The results in soc
iety from the twelfth through the fifteenth century of these advances in self we
re astonishing: a vast expansion in agriculture and early industries, the beginn
ings of both State formation and of capitalism, an upsurge in trade and explorat
ion, a huge population growth as infanticide dropped, an enormous growth of citi
es and civil rights. Change became not only possible but preferable for the firs
t time in history. Those people in these centuries who were still masochistic an
d narcissistic decompensated from all the change, became possessed by devils, im
agined they might soon be thrown in Hell for their bold new aspirations, or flag
ellated themselves for wanting to be independent. Growth panic soon began to pro
duce periodic fears of millenarian violence, leading directly to the apocalyptic
expectations and witch-hunts of the Renaissance and Reformation. THE DEPRESSIVE
PSYCHOCLASS OF THE RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION The new childrearing mode beginn
ing around the sixteenth centurythe intrusive modewas a leap forward, when mothers sto
pped sending their children to wetnurse and stopped leaving them hungry in their
cradles, faced the tasks of caring for them boldly if uncertainly, ended swaddl
ing, beat them less and reduced their being sent out as servants. As it was desc
ribed earlier, "parents shifted from trying to stop childrens growth to trying only
to control it and make it obedient. True empathy begins with intrusive mode parent
s, producing a general improvement in the level of care and reduced mortality, l
eading to more investment in each child." The difference between borderline and
depressive personalities today has been documented to be a result of far less ov
ert sexual and physical abuse during
485
childhood, with far less impulsivity, low self-esteem and self-destructive acts
in the depressive, despite the presence of sadness as a major emotion.214 This i
s because what the depressives are doing that borderlines cannot yet do is facin
g their abandonment depression. Psychotherapists find that after treating border
lines and confronting their defenses for some time, they then become more depres
sed, having finally to face the abandonment fears of their childhood rather than
running away from them into clinging, self-destructive behavior, since "depress
ion accompanies improvementthe beginnings of identity integration, the development
of integrated self and object representations [and] conscious guilt and remorse.
"215 Ever since Huizinga analyzed the "sombre melancholy that weighed on peoples so
uls" after the close of the Middle Ages, the period has been well known for its
deep despondency, when, says Donne, God "reserved for these times an extraordina
ry sadness, a predominant melancholy."216 From sixteenth-century diaries to Burt
ons Anatomy of Melancholy, books on inner life were little more than records of the
writers depressions and how he tried to overcome them. Humanists glorified melanch
oly as the heightened self-awareness of the intellectual, the cost of individual
ism, and they were right. Melancholy had to be faced for one to be what Pico cal
led a man "restrained by no narrow bonds, according to thine own free will in th
ou, thine own maker and molder, fashioning thyself in whatever manner thou likes
t best."217 Both Jaques and Hamlet were proudly presented by Shakespeare as "mel
ancholy philosophers," wearing black with pride, "condemning abuses, but never c
ondemning earthly existence."218 Ficino speculated on "Why Melancholics Are Inte
lligent," noting that the most bold, learned people he knew were always melancho
lic,219 and philosophers gave the excellent advice that friendship was the best
antidote to "melancholy, the malaise of the age."220 Elizabethans thought melanc
holy "both a very wretched state and a very happy state; [and] melancholy was of
ten praised and sought after as a great felicity," a mark of an intellectual who
had "risen superior to the petty concerns of ordinary men and occupied with tho
ughts of worth and dignity,"221 thoughts of personal meaning and self improvemen
t. Though Mommys/Gods grace might only come after "holy desperation" for the depressiv
e personality of the Reformation, though Her forgiveness might still be "unpredi
ctable, unknowable and incomprehensible," if one obeys Her dicta then She might
be a forgiving God who cared for you.222 Luther could now hope that God would ac
tually love him because He was sometimes kind! This hope suddenly allowed an exp
ansion of the real self, and the world, and its activities suddenly became inves
ted with new vigor. For the new depressive psychoclass, Mommy/God
486
didnt need you sexually, so celibacy was not necessary. She could forgive, so one c
ould actually trust Her and cast oneself upon Her mercy. She paid attention to y
our need for food, so you didnt have to fast your whole life. She actually listened
to you, so you could individuate your self beyond clinging to religious and pol
itical authorities. Dissociation and splitting declined for these depressivesachiev
ing for the first time what Melanie Klein calls "the depressive position" which
allows merger of the good breast/bad breast splitso women were not split into virgi
ns and whores (Mary and Eve) but were for the first time seen as human beings wi
th both good and bad qualities, and marriage for the first time in history becam
e a worthy goal rather than just a way to legitimate fornication. By the sixteen
th and seventeenth centuries, the new mode of intrusive childrearing had catapul
ted Western Europe far beyond the earlier psychoclasses of the rest of the world
, giving their minority of depressives a new sense of self worth and the ideal o
f cumulative, necessary progress which led to the modern world we know today. Th
e growth of knowledge, the invention of printing, the new questioning of authori
ty, the exploration of new lands and ideas, all were evidence that "European peo
ple had altered in some fundamental way"223 a change in their psyches, not in their
environment. For the first time in history, Mommy/God "was relegated to a vague
and impenetrable heaven, somewhere up in the skies. Man and man alone was the s
tandard by which all things were measure."224 Science began its spectacular leap
into the unknown. Political systems without divine sanctions and economics that
were based on real trust became the goals of society. Joy in life need not be s
omething sinful, hope was allowed and freedom for self exploration did not need
to be disobedience to Mommy/God. These les sonsfirst learned in families at the fee
t of innovative motherssoon produced new institutions to express these new freedoms
, particularly in France and England, where childrearing was most advanced. Unfo
rtunately, while depressives could begin to try to live out their new freedoms,
they were still a minority in these centuries, and the earlier psychoclasses exp
erienced the new freedoms of the age as terribly dangerous and certain to call u
pon them the wrath of Mommy/God. These centuries of progress were therefore also
centuries of apocalyptic fears and wars, when people were certain that so much
change would unchain Satan and his swarms of demon alters and that the world was
certain to end soon. Apocalyptic prophecies, cults and religious wars prolifera
ted in Reformation Europe, particularly in areas like Germany where childrearing
had changed the least.225 What Trevor-Roper calls "the general crisis of the se
venteenth century"226 was in fact a psychoclass conflict, and the demons, witche
s and anti487
Christs that roamed Europe at that time were all really the Persecutory Alters t
hat inhabited the schizoid, narcissistic, masochistic and borderline psychoclass
es that still represented the majority of Europe. These earlier psychoclasses re
sponded with violence to all the progress of the period, "acting out with fierce
energy a shared [millenarian] phantasy which, though delusional, yet brought th
em such intense emotional relief that they were willing both to kill and to die
for it."227 The new religious services of the Reformation were felt to be "full
of wild liberty," and "beastlike carnal liberty" was reported seen at anabaptist
prayer meetings, where services were said to be conducted in the nude.228 All t
he individuation would certainly bring punishment upon mankind, and pamphlets we
re circulated describing how clouds were raining blood and flocks of birds were
holding cosmic battles in the sky "as auguries of some impending disaster."229 A
placental "Many-Headed Monster" was hallucinated as savaging Europe, carrying o
ut the Day of Judgement because "by now seven-year-old children demonstrated mor
e wickedness than had previously been possible by evil old men; the world had be
come so wicked that things could hardly get worse."230 Religious wars broke out
all over Europe, as "God was unable to bear it any longer and decided to cleanse
his Church with a great scourge."231 Historians have long been puzzled by why t
he witchcraft epidemic took place in the centuries that were most progressive, b
ut if the craze is seen as a reaction to growth panic it becomes explainable. Te
ns of thousands of women responded to their new freedoms by becoming possessed b
y their alters and falling into trances: "Observers spoke of the possessed as choke
d, subjected to thousands of cruel pinches, stuck [with] innumerable pins, and
struck with blows that they could not bear,"232 as they restaged the memories o
f swaddling pins, parental blows and other childhood traumas. Those who persecut
ed witches were obviously taking vengeance upon their mommies; indeed, most witc
hes were either mothers or wetnurses.233 A witch was transparently a mommy, sinc
e she rode on a maternal broom, had special teats where "imps" sucked on her bod
y, smothered babies in their cradles and came into your bedroom uninvited and se
duced you.234 As Roper puts it: "Relations between mothers, those occupying mate
rnal roles and children, formed the stuff of most witchcraft accusations."235 "O
ver and over again in the trial records, the accused women are addressed as Motherthe
ch is a monstrous mother"236 The rape of children formed a central focus for witchc
raft group-fantasies. Descriptions of the sexual orgies that went on at sabbats
clearly reveal their origins in childhood rape attacks, and young girls who had
"convulsive fits" in court "as the Devil entered them"237 restaged each detail o
f their earlier rapes before their startled
488
audiences. Nuns in particular were afflicted with demonic possession, going into
trances and accusing priests of seducing them, which they often had really done
.238 The extreme youth of those raped can be seen in their complaint that "the g
enital organs of their Demons are so huge and so excessively rigid that they can
not be admitted without the greatest pain."239 Entire villages would sometimes p
eriodically go into trances together, call themselves "Benandanti," and fight De
vils together, all while fully dissociated, "as if I was both sleeping and not s
leeping."240 By the time the witch-craze had disappeared by the beginning of the
eighteenth century, a million innocent people had died in an orgy of alter pers
ecution caused by too much progress during the Reformationjust as six million would
later die in the alter persecution caused by too much progress in Weimar German
y. THE NEUROTIC PSYCHOCLASS OF MODERN TIMES The socializing mode of childrearing
that began in the eighteenth century and that continues to be the ideal of most
nations today replaced the absolute obedience of the intrusive psychoclass with
parental manipulation and psychological punishments, in order to make the child
"fit into the world" as a replica of the parent.241 Individuation was still lim
ited, since the needs and goals of the parent superceded those of the child as i
t attempted to separate, but empathy was now available to parents to ensure that
basic care was provided. It was the socializing psychoclass that built the mode
rn world, with its ideal of the competent self and the quest for a real self as
a life-long existential quest.242 As Masterson puts it: "The psychoneurotic pers
onality has the capacity for whole self- and whole objectrelations, and repressi
on has replaced splitting. From the perspective of the personality disorder, to
be psychoneurotic is an achievement."243 Rather than switching into full possess
ion trances and demon alters, the neurotic psychoclass of modern times switches
into their social alters, their social roles (see Chapter 4), as organized by th
e group-fantasies of nations rather than by religious groups. Sacrifice for the
Mommy-Nationdying for the Motherland replaces dying for Christ: "We are to die so that
the motherland may live; for while we live the motherland is dying. A nation ca
n only regenerate itself in a bath of blood."244 It was the nation as a master g
roup-fantasy that organized and contained both the new faith in progress and its
sacrificial wars, acted out in periodic cycles of innovative, depressive, manic
and war stages (see Chapter 5). In each stage, nations follow a different psych
oclass style. In the innovative stage, the neurotic psychoclass provides new soc
ial, political and economic progress; in the depressive stage, the depressive ps
ychoclass is followed into economic depression; in the manic stage,
489
narcissists take over with their grandiose projects; and in the war stage nation
s follow self-destructive masochists and paranoid schizoids into violence. Choos
ing earlier psychoclassespsychological fossilsas leaders has become a constant practic
e in modern nations, only masked by the idealization of the public switched into
their social alters. To realize that we willingly delegate to a handful of men
sitting in a deep trance in the Oval Office the power to blow up much of the wor
ld depending upon whether they think they feel "humiliated"as in the Cuban Missile
Crisisis to realize the bizarre extent of the dissociation between fantasy and real
ity that continues to pervade our modern psyches. All the other aspects of moder
n industrial society are equally results of the new socializing psychoclass chil
drearing, causing a greater increase in material prosperity in the past two cent
uries than in all the rest of human history. The reason for this astonishing pro
gress is that science, technology and economic development depend more on invest
ments in parenting than investments in equipment, since they crucially require a
n "exploring self" constructed from childhood. A few economists realize that the
wealth of nations lies in the development of psyches more than in the investmen
t of capital. Everett Hagan and Lawrence Harrison, for instance, have demonstrat
ed that those nations furthest behind today in economic development suffer from
a severe underinvestment in families and children, not in capital equipment.245
The historical record is clear: early pioneers in science and technology first h
ad to overcome their alter projections before they could discover how the world
worked. As Keith Thomas puts it: "It was the abandonment of magic which made pos
sible the upsurge of technology, not the other way round."246 Newton had to stop
seeing falling objects "longing to return to Mother Earth" before he could posi
t a force of gravity. Chemists had to give up "alchemical visions of womb-battle
s between good and evil" inside their flasks before they could observe the real
causes of chemical change.247 Farmers had to be able to empathize with their hor
ses in order to invent the harness collar that moved the pressure down from thei
r throats to their flanks so they wouldnt be choked in order to increase the loads
they could pull.248 Farmers also had to stop thinking of plowing as "tearing at
the breast of Mother Earth" in order to invent the deep plow and change the face
of European agriculture. Men had to begin to value their families in order to b
uild wooden floors in their homes rather than leaving them clay as was the pract
ice for millennia. 249 Every invention had its origin in the evolution of the ps
yche; every exploration of nature was a dimension of the exploration of the self
. Economic life, too, only evolved as childrearing and the psyche evolved. Triba
l societies both in the past and in the present could not trust, because parents
490
were untrustworthy, so they could not allow much wealth or surplus out of which
they could create economic progress. Ownership was felt to be dangerous selfishn
ess, envy ran rampant and ambition was feared: "The anthropologist may see peopl
e behaving with generosity, but this is the result of fear."250 Those who acquir
ed too much were expected to either engage in gift-exchange251 and other redistr
ibutive rituals252 or else to periodically destroy their surplus in cleansing sa
crificial ceremonies.253 Even the invention of money came from the sacred object
s used for sacrifice to deities.254 "Money is condensed wealth; condensed wealth
is condensed guilt; money is filthy because it remains guilt."255 What held bac
k economic development for so many millennia was that early civilizations were s
o abusively brought up that they spent most of their energies chasing "ghosts fr
om the nursery"religious, political and economic domination group-fantasiesrather than
joining in together to solve the real tasks of life. The appalling poverty of m
ost people throughout history has been simply an extension of the emotional pove
rty of the historical family, making real cooperation in society impossible. For
instance, slavery was one of the most wasteful, uneconomical systems ever inven
ted, since denying autonomy to ones fellow workers simply wasted both the slaves and t
he owners productivity and inventiveness. Running the world like a prison, with one
half occupied with guarding the other half, has always been extremely unproduct
ive. That unfree labor is always unproductive labor has long been acknowledged b
y economists.256 Slaves were kept "as expressions of their owners status and presti
ge"257 even when they could barely manage to pick grapes because of their shackl
es. Owning slaves may have been very dangerous to you and to your family, and th
ey may have often run away. But everyone still wanted to have them so they could
be used to restage the tortures of ones childhood: "Galen remarked how common it w
as for slaves to be punched with the fists, to be kicked, to have their eyes put
out, and how his own mother had had the habit of biting her maidservants."258 E
quipment for torturing slaves was widespread, including special whips and racks
for beatings, special knives for facial mutilation and castration and metal plat
es and flaming torches for burnings. "There was even a torture and execution ser
vice operated by a company of undertakers. Flogging and crucifixion were standar
d options at a flat rate to the user."259 With a third or more of ancient societ
ies being slaves, an unending supply of bodies to flog was assured, even though
this meant remaining mired in lowproductivity economies.260 Throughout the Roman
classical period, Finley says, improvements in economic techniques were "margin
al [because] patterns of land use and methods of tillage remained unchanged."261
It was more important to restage
491
early trumatic beatings and domination fantasies than to improve the abysmal squ
alor in which nearly everyone lived. Even with the disappearance of slavery duri
ng the Middle Ageswhich Marc Bloch called "one of the most profound transformations
mankind has known"262 the serfdom and other kinds of bondage that replaced it kept
Europe for centuries in a rate of per capita product of only a tiny fraction of
a percent per year.263 It was only by the early modern period when the need to
restage family slavery began to decline that trust began to replace domination a
nd the "take-off" phase in economics could begin. "The ultimate explanation of e
conomic development lies not in purely economic factors, such as land, labor and
capitalthese will [occur] when people learn that it is good business to be just an
d considerate toward ones neighbors; to solve quarrels peacefully; [and] to be held
accountable for the efficient use of resources." Purely economic theories that
cannot concieve of psychogenic causes are reduced to statements such as: "No one
planned Progress as a whole. It simply erupted."265 In addition to a take-off i
n economic progress, the modern psychoneurotic personality began to achieve leve
ls of intimacy between men and women that were simply unknown to previous psycho
classes. When mothers were incestuous, it was not surprising that women were fea
red as sexually insatiable by men, and pederasty and rape were preferred to inti
mate, married love. All women were in danger of turning into dominating mothers
and therefore had to be beaten; Homers word for wife, damar, means "broken into submi
n." In addition, that women throughout so much of history were accused of being
unable to restrain their sexual appetites was not just a patriarchal mythit was mor
e the result of the widespread rape of young girls being restaged later in life,
just as so many raped girls today grow up to repeat their sexual assaults later
on in prostitution or adultery. That human sexuality through antiquity was conf
lated with violence and domination and that Christianity was the most anti-sexua
l religion known to mankind are only understandable as normal reactions to sever
e childhood seductions, not as inexplicable religious teachings. That "conjugal
love between husband and wife was considered ridiculous and impossible"266 in an
tiquity is better understood as a consequence of the narcissistic personalitys need
to have perfection in their partner, fearing to risk attaching themselves to so
meone who was imperfect and whom they might lose like they lost their mothers an
d fathers earlier. Only through effective polegamyeither formal or through having c
oncubines and slaves as alternatives to wivescould depending upon one woman be avoi
ded. Indeed, the jealous mothers of the gynarchies of the past would often step
in between their sons and their wives in order to keep them
492
tied to themselvesas, for instance, Augustines mother did when she made him dismiss hi
s concubine, who had lived faithfully with him for years. Even Christian marriag
es were supposed to be passionless between the spouses. God stood in for the gra
ndmother and demanded that all love and passion be reserved for Himself. It was
not really until the depressive psychoclass began to face their abandonment depr
ession in the sixteenth century that Erasmus could startle his readers with the
view that marriage was superior to virginity and Puritan wives could be able to
write passionate love poems to their husbands.267 And it was only by the eightee
nth centurys socializing psychoclass that "husbands and wives who cherished each ot
her were begun to be held in the greatest esteem [as] conjugal love attracted no
t sarcasm, but the most fervent admiration, thus giving rise to a sort of contes
t to see who could love his or her beloved spouse the most, who could best prove
to the world the unshakable fidelity felt toward ones life partner."268 THE INDIVI
DUATED PSYCHOCLASS OF POST-MODERN TIMES It is difficult to describe what kind of
world might be made by individuated personalities, as the first helping mode pa
rentswhere both mother and father unconditionally love their children and help them
achieve their own goals and own real selves from birthhave only been around for a
few decades in the most advanced societies. As I watch my own children and some
of their helping psychoclass friends grow up and establish their productive live
s, I see them as very different from my own socializing psychoclass peers. They
are far more empathic and therefore more concerned about others than we ever wer
e, and this has made them far more activist in their lives in trying to make a d
ifference and change the world for the better, mostly involving themselves in lo
cal activities rather than global political changes. They lack all need for nati
onalism, wars and other grandiose projects, and in the organizations they start
are genuinely non-authoritarian. There is no question that if the world could tr
eat children with helping mode parenting, wars and all the other self-destructiv
e social conditions we still suffer from in the twentyfirst century will be cure
d, simply because the world will be filled with individuated personalities who a
re empathic toward others and who are not self-destructive. A world that loves a
nd trusts its children and encourages them to develop their unique selves will b
e a world of very different institutions, a world without wars, jails and other
domination group-fantasies. The main problem is that the evolution of childreari
ng has so far been a slow, uneven historical process, depending greatly upon inc
reasing the support given innovative mothers and their hopeful daughters. Unfort
unately, in a world where
493
our destructive technology has far outrun our childrearing progresswhere a single s
ubmarine can now carry a sufficient number nuclear warheads to destroy most of t
he world with the push of a buttonwe do not have the luxury of just waiting for chi
ldrearing to evolve. If we do, we will certainly blow ourselves up long before c
hild abuse disappears enough to make us want to disarm. What we need now is some
way for the more advanced psychoclasses to teach childrearing to the less evolv
ed parents, a way to end child abuse and neglect quickly enough to avoid the glo
bal holocaust that is awaiting us. ENDING CHILD ABUSE BY INVESTING IN THE REAL W
EALTH OF NATIONS Ever since the earliest psychohistorical studies were published
linking child abuse to war and social violence, one physician-psychohistorian,
Robert McFarland, concluded that it must be possible to end child abuse in his c
ommunity by starting a new institution, Community Parenting Centers, and with ev
ery means possible teach good parenting to every new baby born in his city, Boul
der, Colorado. It seemed ridiculous to McFarland that the entire world depends u
pon good parenting, while parenting was the only subject never taught in schools
or anywhere else in the world. For the past two decades, therefore, McFarland h
as run The Parenting Place in several counties of Boulder, reaching out to visit
every baby born in the areas and giving substantial support to all mothers and
fathersholding parenting discussion groups, baby massage courses, single mothers as
sistance, showing them how to bring up children without hitting them, how to fos
ter their independence, etc. The wide range of activities of The Parenting Place
can be seen in two articles in The Journal of Psychohistory.269 Over half the f
amilies choose to be visited weekly in their homes for parenting instructions. S
ince no new mother or father wants to reject and abuse their babies, what McFarl
and found was that providing this help and hope for parents allowed their underl
ying affection to replace the abuse and neglect that comes from fear and despairso
that his statistics from local police and hospital records now show a real decre
ase in child abuse reports. What is most astonishing is that McFarland found tha
t Parenting Centers costs are far lower than what is saved in the later costs of
abuse to the community. That the small budget for the Centers is offset many ti
mes over by the costs to the communities of later social services and criminal b
ehavior is a not unexpected finding, given that sociologists have calculated tha
t "the costs to society of career criminal behavior, drug use, and high-school d
ropouts for a single youth is $1.7 to $2.3 million."270 With the world spending
trillions of dollars a year preparing for war
494
and additional trillions for jails, establishing Parenting Centers in every comm
unity on earth for just a small part of this cost would soon provide an enormous
saving to mankindan immediate saving, even before the actual savings from the huge
destructiveness of wars is realized. McFarland calculates that every community
on earth (he is even starting a Parenting Center in Tajikistan in a sister city
to Boulder) can be supported by a small "childrens tax" of one-tenth of one percent
increase in the sales tax. Only by starting now on a vast world-wide program to
end child neglect and abuse and raise all of our precious children with respect
can we avoid the likely coming global holocaust. Only by reducing dissociation
to a minimum through empathic parenting can we avoid inflicting the self-destruc
tive power we now have available to us. This is the single most important findin
g of the new science of psychohistory. Free universal training centers for paren
ts may be a radical new notion, but so once was the idea of free universal schoo
ls for children. Our task is clear and our resources sufficient to make our worl
d safe for the first time in our long, violent history. All it takes now is the
will to begin.
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511