Responding to deMause’s Examination of The Emotional Life of Nations

It is very difficult to be a pathbreaker and pacesetter, even if you clearly explain the expected destination. Lloyd deMause has long known the limited value of historical writing utilizing only commonsense theories of individual and group motivation for the cataclysm of war and social change in general. Historians may record facts, narrate

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events, and supply causation, but they seldom satisfy our hunger for reasons why events occur as they do and the possibility of avoiding similar events. Freud opened up new vistas in the theories of individual and social motivation that have induced much speculation, but there has been little work on unconscious motivation in history as sustained, thorough, and convincing as deMause’s. His latest book is The Emotional Life of Nations (New York and London: Karnac, 2002, ISBN 1892746980, i-ix, 454 pages, $45.00).

I write “convincing,” realizing that only a handful of scholars and writers, with very few professional historians among them, actually assent to deMause’s theories and their scholarly demonstrations. Those who do, however, are usually broadly based with training in the social sciences and, especially, in the psychodynamic theories of Freud and his followers. One might well ask, as Freud has recently been “cut down to size,” and much revisionist theory seems incomplete and sometimes incoherent, how can we have a workable theory of something as complicated as history?

This is the problem that The Emotional Life of Nations sets out to solve and, as some of its readers agree (with certain caveats), brilliantly accomplishes. Nevertheless, for it to have standing among students of individual and group destructiveness and in the debates among historians of political struggles and wars, it needs to be more available. Normally, scholarship as mature and accomplished as deMause’s would find a leading university press as publisher or, if not, a commercial press with social conscience to take it on. But this has not happened, as it did not with his earlier books. Will a promised sequel, specifically on why nations go to war, fare any better?

After all, most original thinkers eventually break through into awareness via their publishers, much though their ideas may be resisted or even denounced. Protestants didn’t like it when R.H. Tawney asserted in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) that modern capitalism’s individualistic aggressive form is only explicable within the history of Protestantism. People in the so-called liberal democracies were not pleased when they learned from C. Wright Mill’s Power Elite (1956) about how manipulations of power actually work. Nor did we like to learn from Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society (1964) the extent to which traditional religious and secular values have been negated by rampant technology. Yet these sobering books have worked their way into the thinking of most informed and reflective people.

Their unpleasant messages could not be held back, nor can deMause’s. But it can be delayed, with debate retarded by failure to communicate exactly what deMause is saying. His demands on the reader are much in excess of Tawney’s, Mills’, or Ellul’s, who worked within an established framework of Judeo-Christian social concern. DeMause also works within that framework but with the addition of hard research findings about traumatic childrearing that render hypocritical our moralizing. We cannot go on moralizing about the stupidity and destructiveness of war, or any manipulations of power, without knowing that there is a developmental route to their necessity, however irrational and wasteful the results. DeMause offers a science of motivations unlike any other before, and it is urgent that we give his ideas the fullest possible hearing.

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