How Could a Famous Author Get so Much Wrong and Still Be Right?

Few surprises are in store in this book for anyone familiar with the work of Lloyd deMause, which likely includes most readers of Clio’s Psyche. That’s both good and bad. His evocation of the horrors of childhood has lost none of its power. What deMause said over three decades ago in The History of Childhood, his great work, still stands: “The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken.”

But what is one to think about claims such as the following? “The real reason” Bush senior attacked Iraq was to “cure ourselves of our depression and flashbacks of punitive mommies by inflicting the punishment we felt we deserved as children” (The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 30). One wants to say there are lots of reasons, complex reasons, latent reasons, subtle reasons, and manifold reasons, but no “real reasons.” At least not for such a complex event as a war.

Some authors delight us with their subtlety. Donald Winnicott comes to mind. Other authors beat us over the head with a sledgehammer. After finishing deMause’s book, one wants to say, “About every particular thing he said I find something to disagree, but the cumulative effect is powerful and persuasive.” The question is whether this cumulative effect is to be welcomed or resisted. Let me give a little example, which is familiar to me from my own work, and then a big example, in order to illustrate the dilemma.

Drawing on the well-known work of Samuel Oliner and Pearl Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (1988), deMause writes that rescuers’ parents “invariably” used reason rather than violence in correcting their children. In fact, if one looks at the appendix of The Altruistic Personality, one finds that 32 percent of rescuers, compared to 39 percent of non-rescuers, received physical punishment as children. It is on tenuous distinctions like these that vast theories rest, and not just deMause’s. I’ve seen Oliner and Oliner cited in at least a dozen different works in similar contexts.

The big example, by which I mean an example with big implications, is deMause’s claim that “since England led the rest of Europe in ending swaddling and wet nursing, it is no accident that soon after it also led the world in science, political democracy, and industrialization” (p. 245). England also led the world in colonization and imperialism during this same period.

It is deMause’s thesis that over the centuries childrearing has become more humane, and with it the behavior of nations, beginning in the modern world with England and America. Acknowledging that the 20th century was the bloodiest century in world history, deMause responds that the percentage of humans killed by violence has declined steadily over the last several thousand years (pp. 220-221). Perhaps, though one might as well argue, as Norbert Elias does in The Civilizing Process (1978), that what has changed is the quality of violence, so that it has become more rational and bureaucratic, the property of states rather than individuals, such as parents. It is this transformation that accounts for the change in the quality of violence: less frequent, but more intense, organized, and destructive when it occurs. Destructive isn’t just measured by the percentage of the population killed, but who and how and where and why.

Like deMause, Elias understands that even “civilized” violence retains the quality of a blood ritual, a perverse purifying process. Consider Elias’ example of the carving of meat. Once the carving of the animal was spectacle, performed to honor guests and gods. Gradually, however, the display is felt to be distasteful, an insult to civilized sensibilities. Carving does not disappear, however. People still eat meat. Rather, the distasteful is removed to the realm of experts.

It will be seen again and again how characteristic of the whole process of civilization is this movement of segregation, the hiding “behind the scenes” of what has become distasteful. The curve running from the carving of a large part of the animal or even the whole animal at table, through the advance in the threshold of repugnance at the sight of dead animals, to the removal of carving to specialized enclaves behind the scenes, is a typical civilization curve (Elias, The Civilizing Process, p. 99). Here it is good to recall that the carving of the animal at the table was not just an act of hospitality, but an act of sacrifice, replayed every time we carve a turkey or roast for our family and friends.

If Elias is right, then deMause is not just exaggerating, but wrong. Less physically violent childrearing is not associated with a less violent society, but only with one in which violence is ra-

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tionalized, and so become the realm of experts and bureaucrats. In other words, violence is no longer reproduced in the home, but in the larger institutions of society. But reproduced it is, as there is something in men and women that loves violence, and not just because they want to punish others as mommy and daddy punished them. The Second Gulf War, before which many of us sit amazed at the awesome power and precision of our weapons, is exemplary. Fewer are killed, but this is not the only measure of the satisfaction of aggression.

DeMause’s exaggerations, his tendency to avoid qualifiers and modifiers, are not the problem. The reader sees through that easily enough. More problematic is deMause’s intentional ignorance of multiple causality, the belief that complex events have many causes working at several levels. Still, one might argue that this neglect, too, is rhetoric, and, as such, has its place. How else would he persuade us to take a troubling thesis seriously but to reiterate it relentlessly? Most troublesome is deMause’s failure to engage with a variety of authors who might strengthen his argument while making it more subtle.

Elias is one. Another is Christopher Lasch, who portrays subtleties of violence that might lead to less optimistic conclusions: not that childrearing has become less violent, but that its violence has itself changed, taking on the qualities of abandonment and engulfment at the same time, leading to what Lasch calls “the culture of narcissism.” Such a culture is not necessarily more warlike, but it is not a very attractive place to live, either. To be sure, deMause recognizes the singular pathological power of abandonment when it is coupled with engulfment (the book is filled with fascinating reproductions of cartoons, engravings, and the like, many of them illustrating this combination), but it does not lead deMause to a more subtle understanding of violence. On the contrary, the book ends with several chapters designed to demonstrate that so-called primitive societies exhibit almost none of the physical closeness between parents and children that anthropologists idealize. Debunking has its place, but it is no substitute for the full range of scholarship.

I could go on to mention the way in which Alice Miller’s work might also provide deMause with a more subtle understanding of the violence of childhood, just as the work of the group psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion might provide deMause with a more subtle understanding of the relationship between leaders and followers. For Bion, the leader is almost always the craziest member of the small group, and usually the most articulate paranoid. DeMause’s brief reference to Miller and Bion in the notes is not an indication that he has really integrated their ideas into his work.

The strength of deMause’s work is also its weakness. Not just in the exaggerations and tendentiousness, which are easy enough to spot, but in his failure to engage other minds working along related lines. The result is a powerful idea lacking the subtlety and complexity that this engagement could provide. One appreciates and admires deMause for restating this powerful idea for over 30 years. Disciplines are slow to respond, and dogged persistence is required. One wishes, however, that deMause had drawn on the theoretical work of others during this time in order to render his own theory more complex, less one-dimensional. One-dimensional isn’t always bad. The nightmare of childhood is a dimension of experience that scholars and experts have worked hard to ignore. But because the application of this idea to the life of individuals, to say nothing of the life of nations, is no simple matter, other dimensions would be welcome.

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