Response to Commentaries (response article)

To Paul Elovitz, whose patient editorial labors shepherded this paper to fruition, I am thoroughly grateful, and equally so to everyone’s far

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ranging commentaries. These are especially gratifying since one of my purposes was to develop bridges between other disciplines and more traditional historical scholarship. Excerpted from a longer work on the history of childhood, this paper explored anomalies and unresolved conflicts over children’s lives when a religion uniquely privileging the child encroached on preexisting parenting practices. In doing so, I drew on existing scholarship and especially Lloyd deMause’s historical parenting modes which take, as I wrote, “abandonment, mostly through exposure, was a common practice.” The question of whether religious ideals impacted on practice is entertained and not settled. David Beisel infers a “softening” in attitudes toward children, but I would not want to leave that impression since, as he and I both note, practices were most often oblivious to ideals. Similarly, I would not want to claim that “religious culture-making altered the world of child-rearing,” as Michael Britton notes, though I remain open to the possibility, and agree that the present paper is a preliminary foray.

What did emerge from various historical records was a cluster of peculiar phenomena, notably controversies over original sin and infant baptism, a trumped-up Slaughter of the Innocents by King Herod, the creation of a special spiritual space for unbaptized children, and an enduring enactment of ambivalent hostility to the infant Jesus. These topics comprise visibly conscious levels on which, it dawned on me, unconscious conflicts were being played out. Thus I relied on the inner-conflict model of psychoanalysis as an explanatory tool and found the extension of this dynamic within and between emerging religious groups to be congruent with the group-fantasy concept used in psychohistory. Both approaches are predicated on the recognition of illusion through such mechanisms as splitting and projection, which point to underlying, unconscious conflicts. I also employed a biocentric model of adaptation, grounded in survival strategies of parental investment in successful offspring, to balance off the high incidence of mortality rates through abandonment, neglect, and abuse. True, these three models present a complicated picture, but I am persuaded they do a measure of justice to the infinitely more complicated historical lives which are our ultimate database. I consider that children generally in the early Christian centuries were “abused and treated inconsistently.” Some were subjected to a modified form of abandonment known as oblation—offering a child to a monastic order— where despite avowed ideals of purity, they were “chastised” with “sharp blows.” I agree with de Mause’s reminders of pederasty and homosexuality both in the monasteries and through appointed pedagogues; and no question, my reading of historical data is far more circumspect in regard to violence toward children than his and Jerry Atlas’s, where the emphasis is on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Nonetheless, their commentaries make for serious reading. But while granting various high-percentages of infant deaths and the multiple hazards of their lives, they remain mostly peripheral to my central focus on the construction and perpetuation of illusion within mainstream Christianity. Is it necessary to say that by discrediting the Slaughter of the Innocents fantasy I am not dismissing the actual “slaughter” by other means of real children? On the other hand, it seems plausible to view the enduring Slaughter fantasy along with the reparative fantasy of Limbo as containers for the unassimilable violence dealt to children as effectively demonstrated by psychohistorical research. Given the dismaying mix of huge and diverse populations with the paucity of bankable historical data, I am content to posit certain interpretations and consign to them to a Limbo of uncertainty, as long as they can be accessed.

Although I cannot do justice to all the other engaging responses, I will expand on several. Richard Booth’s insightful discussion of St. Augustine supports my view that Christianity injected a new model of inner-conflict into cultural discourses. When Booth asks, “What was the direct object of his theological war?” he has partially answered his question with an earlier reference to “cleansing.” Saint Augustine is a central but equivocal figure in the history of childhood: both abuse’s victim and its enabler. I infer Booth is alluding to problems in the awareness of child development through the homunculus, or little man, allegedly presenting each spermatozoon. Interestingly, in a new study of scientific discovery of sexual reproduction, Matthew Cobb quotes a seventeenth century scientist as explaining the transmission of original sin via the ovum and sperm (Generation [NY: Bloomsbury, 2006], pp. 235-236). In the present context the fanciful figure may on one level suggest instant (male) self-sufficiency and denial of

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dependency on primary caregivers. I agree that Limbo is a valuable term deserving to enjoy an existence independent of its theological origins. Much of this denial of development and dependency persists in contemporary American parenting, as Harriet Fraad points out. Her implicit but creative application of Haeckel’s formula that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is suggestive. Not only is it plausible that children growing up pass through some version of deMause’s parenting modes but that, as most psychohistorians agree, several parenting modes thrive in any given society along with a dominant one. Her observation that children’s brains play a role in their learning the rules of the game of survival points to an adaptive model for understanding childhood.

David Lotto’s welcome contribution continues to explore psychohistorical positions in an evolutionary framework in order to reconcile the enduring problem of ambivalence. If I read him correctly, this hard-wired ambivalence, especially its destructive side, is directed to other measures of population control, e.g., abortion and contraceptive, as children’s lives over the centuries improve and their survival rates climb. The strategy of balancing economies by curbing populations modifies the biological imperative but does not, he suggests, resolve the underlying hostilities toward the young. Recent studies of trends toward later pregnancies, smaller families, and greater investment in the planned-for child support his more hopeful scenario (see Susan

M. Bianchi, et al, Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). Despite having difficulty following the drift of my essay and his own misgivings, Paul Salstrom does a decent job of paraphrasing its psychological reasoning. I’m surprised, though, that he finds the impact of “Christian artists [that] worked the Slaughter quite heavily” to be “no more psychologically profound than TV ratings.” Such prevalence and endurance of this subject over many centuries would indicate to me the power of a historical group fantasy wherein Christians perceive themselves as helpless victims of ruthless, uncontrollable forces. This profound identification (perhaps with the aggressor as well) may help explain why recuperative efforts arose to find a place for the pre-Christian children in a more benign afterlife, i.e., as split-off self-representations. Sander Breiner correctly notes Chrysostom’s notorious anti Semitism, but where do we take this? Should it discredit his treatises that deal with children? This is a dicey proposition. Does Martin Luther’s notorious anti-Semitism vitiate his exposé of ecclesiastical corruption?

Paul Elovitz raises questions that extend beyond this paper and with which I am still grappling. Definitely, the Church offered an array of fantasy systems to be played out and that may be one key to its survival. His sense that parenting injects a host of personal conflicts into one’s life confirms my sense of this process being historically intensified with the rise of Christianity which privileged the child on various unprecedented levels. Historically, the Church was in competition with families for primary loyalties, zealously pursuing offspring for service, while at the same time recognizing that warm bodies were needed to fill the pews and the collection plates. As noted, St. Augustine is a pivotal figure who embodies and articulates many of the Church’s early conflicts.

My appreciation to Howard Stein for hearing the themes of my paper with empathy and clarity. When he writes that the children’s Limbo functioned as “cultural compromise formation,” and the Slaughter of Innocents was a “screen memory for maternal loss, beatings, and other trauma,” he sharpens my own analysis. I confess to a certain nostalgia for the time when there was a thriving psychoanalytic anthropology. Finally, Nancy C. Unger provides a timely and thoughtful personal narrative of parenthood which serves as a reminder of how parents in all ages were faced with painful dilemmas—most not of their own making and many beyond their psychological resources. In sum, I hope to have turned these responses into an ongoing dialogue. While they articulate distinctive points of view, they also traverse the three models of childhood that underpin all my writings on the subject: the psychohistorical, the psychoanalytic, and the adaptive.

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