Wanted: A Book with Feeling

The historian Christine Stansell has recalled that “Lucien Febvre, the great French historian of the Annales school, … called urgently in 1941, from occupied Paris, for a new history of the emotions, without which ‘there will be no history possible’” (“The Pages of Eros,” The New Republic 222, March 6, 2000:30). The Emotional Life of Nations is not that history.

In our time at least two historians have produced works closer to Febvre’s wish than the deMause book. In his series France: 1848-1945, Theodore Zeldin published two volumes addressing the emotions broadly: Ambition and Love (1973) and Anxiety and Hypocrisy (1977). The prodigious Peter Gay has more recently completed the five-volume The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (1984-1998), which includes The Education of the Senses, The Tender Passion, The Cultivation of Hatred, The Naked Heart, and The Pleasure Wars. Both Zeldin and Gay communicate a great range and depth of feeling, a quality lacking in deMause’s massive conceptions and strident right-

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eousness. Yet he has a worthy subject and has applied ambitious thought to it.

As a historian of childhood, deMause has produced a study of good and bad childrearing practices and the related emotions, good and bad, felt by parents and children. But this is a narrow band of emotionality, which is not examined in any depth, while place and time studied are similarly restricted to scattered selections of medieval and modern European experience, American political history, and anthropologists’ views of timeless New Guinea.

While he has limited his emotional range, deMause has also effectively bypassed the “Nations” of his title. Indeed, he excludes them to the benefit of his “psychoclasses,” which displace political and economic man with homo relatens oriented to a quest for love rather than money and power (p. 98). These healthier or traumatized psychoclasses, according to deMause, originate in good or bad childrearing modes. The essence of the book is the concerns of parenting. A more accurate title would be A Selective History of Childrearing Through the Ages. It is an important subject and deMause’s emphasis on it has helped to repair much undeserved neglect.

If his investigations base themselves on childrearing, deMause’s conceptions range throughout boundless history. He begins the book with a blockbuster sentence:

This book demonstrates how the source of most human violence and suffering has been a hidden children’s holocaust throughout history, whereby millions of innocent human beings have been routinely murdered, bound, starved, raped, mutilated, battered, and tortured by their parents and other caregivers, so that they grow up as emotionally crippled adults and become vengeful time bombs who periodically restage their early traumas in sacrificial rites called wars (p. vii).

Granting the enormity in this vision, the author continues: “Much of this book is upsetting and difficult to believe…” (p. vii). I must confess that I cannot find the book upsetting because it is not only difficult to believe, it is impossible. DeMause arbitrarily pronounces: “changes in child rearing precede social change…” (p. vii). Thus his childrearing is elevated to the first cause of social events like wars. Such a statement should come only as a conclusion to an extended, reasoned study based on hard, provable fact, none of which is evident. In fact, all of his major conclusions have been reached before he began the book and presented here as established truths.

DeMause has rejected the findings of most social scientists — and anthropologists perhaps more particularly — whose data he uses against them. Similarly, in the long chapters “The Gulf War as an Emotional Disorder” and “War as Righteous Rape and Purification,” he posits war as a psychic experience and denies such motives as land, oil, water, ethnic hostility, political aims, or defense. Similarly, he rejects Freud’s “instinct for hatred and aggression” as “wholly tautological, saying no more than ‘the group’s desire for war is caused by the individual’s desire for war’” since the group is made up of individuals (p.138). In this he casually denies the existence of the individual and his Freudian id, with its potential for aggression, as a first cause. He argues paralogically that since “tribes and states spend more of their time at peace [than at war] one must also posit an instinct for peace” (p. 138). Why should the one exclude the other?

DeMause’s method, which his sources document, is to generate data shaped by his a priori conclusions. In The History of Childhood (edited) he proposed six modes of childrearing (and in the The Emotional Life of Nations, has expanded them to seven). These were then further developed in Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy (co-edited), Reagan’s America, Foundations of Psychohistory, and more than 100 articles. He wrote or edited these books and published the articles in the Journal of Psychohistory under his editorship. Similarly, he inspired studies in German childbearing through the German branch of his Institute for Psychohistory (pp. 245-246; n. 246). Since he influenced the data when he did not initiate it, this risks becoming an exercise in socially organized circular reasoning.

On another question, deMause would reject Darwin for Lamarck, while denying what he is doing and claiming: “This isn’t Lamarckian” (p. 235). Well, a bit of acknowledged Lamarckianism might be useful. Upon a few suggestions by theorists of molecular biology, he has evolved his “psychogenic theory of historical evolution,” which would have behavior changing genes. In fact, DNA sequencing has led to the observation that the effects of a few genes can be switched on and off. This can hardly lead to the deMausian-italicized conclusion: “epigenetic neuronal varia-

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tions originating in changing interpersonal relationships with caregivers are the primary source of the evolution of the psyche and society” (p. 235). He has no right to lay down the absolute law that “changing interpersonal relationships” are the “primary source” for the huge change he wants, the “epigenetic chance to rewire the psyche.”

Armed with his psychogenic theory, deMause attacks anthropologists on maternal love in primitive society. All of them report loving relations of mothers with children. By contrast, deMause collects data on infanticide, outright cruelty, incest, sexual games, and other derelictions. By expanding on them and minimizing the majority of cases, and so reversing the proportions, he triumphantly conclude that all the experts were wrong and that he was right — that there had been a steady improvement over time in the treatment of children (for example, the long, repetitive, overlapping chapters “Childhood and Cultural Evolution” and “The Evolution of Child Rearing,” pp. 229-379). Yet in another passage, he grants “perhaps half of the adults today were sexually abused as children, that most of us were physically and emotionally abused to some extent…” (p. 382). He refuses to let these contradictions inhibit his progress towards his happier conclusions.

In the book deMause is driving toward an epiphany of perfected childrearing and peace. Below is his “Table of Historical Personalities,” schematizing it (from p. 395).

According to the scheme, mankind’s childrearing practices begin with tribal “early infanticidal” action and improve with time to the contemporary post-modern “helping” phase. In tandem with each stage of childrearing are “personalities” from “schizoid” to “individuated,” while the “Mother/God” figure begins by devouring, seducing, or abandoning the child, and ends with trusting and loving it. The scheme demands that the reader believe (1) that each childrearing era and mode is associated with a unique personality, ideal, Mother/God, and sacrifice, and (2) that parallel improvements occur, which in the end produce the perfectly adjusted, perfectly socialized individuals of the post-modern era. At this point one is forced to ask: Why has this perfection not eliminated the suffering and wars so much deplored by deMause?

Indeed, the Table of Historical Personalities denies the need for the author’s hastily appended happy ending. With its post-modern, helping mode of individuated, loving activists, it comes after continual references to bad childrearing as a source of suffering and war. In the face of this, evidently not trusting his own scheme, deMause proposes a new and redundant solution in the book’s final section of one-and-a-half pages (pp. 431-432). He places his faith in the creation of physician-psychohistorian Robert McFarland. This is “The Parenting Place,” an establishment in Boulder, Colorado, where obedient parents of infants receive weekly visits for parenting instruction. DeMause trusts that this method, which seems intrusive to me in any case, will “make our world safe for the first time in our long, violent history.” He has more faith that this unreconstructed reviewer.

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