Response to Lloyd deMause (letter to the editor)

To The Editor:

One sometimes wonders whether a reply to a critic is worth it, especially when most readers will have read the book in question, The Emotional Life of Nations (ELN), and can decide for themselves. But in the case of a factual assertion that is simply wrong, I must reply.

Regarding my quite sympathetic review of his work (Clio’s Psyche, September 2003, pp. 36-37), Lloyd deMause says that “When Alford attacks me for saying the Oliners’ study found rescuers’ parents ‘invariably’ used reason rather than violence in correcting their children, he is misquoting what I said. I nowhere used the word ‘invariably’ in connection with the Oliners’ study” (Clio, p. 53).

DeMause is correct that he does not use the term “invariably” in the passage (ELN, pp. 202-203) he quotes in his reply. He does, however, use the term when citing the Oliners’ work on p. 110 of ELN, where he says that “rescuers’ parents were found to have invariably” used reason rather than violence in correcting their children. The footnote to this claim, number 68, p. 110 of ELN, cites Oliner and Oliner, The Altruistic Personality. Perhaps deMause missed this reference because it does not appear in the index under “Oliners.”

DeMause says that my supposed misquotation “gives a glimpse of how furious my work has made him [Alford]” (Clio, p. 54). I leave it to the reader to imagine what deMause’s false assertion that I misquoted him says about deMause. Perhaps it has something to do with his inability to distinguish reasonably sympathetic criticism from an attack.

Fred Alford

Columbia, Maryland

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