Modifying deMause (response article)

Reviewing Lloyd deMause’s writing is truly rewarding intellectually; The Emotional Life of Nations is no exception. It is a brilliant work that will push the parameters of several areas within psychohistory onto new levels. Most historians will unfortunately not read this book simply because our field is such that few members of it explore beyond the so-called core of it; we do not like to be at the margins. If we did, the field would be enriched, and as a group we would enjoy a deeper understanding of the origins of war and many other political/social/economic processes. If we did, deMause’s insights and challenges would be enlivened and deepened. Unfortunately, too, no review can do justice to his erudition.

One of deMause’s major theses comes on p. 97, where he says that “…each generation of parents tortures, abuses, neglects, and dominates its children until they become emotionally crippled adults who repeat in nearly exact detail the social violence and domination that existed in previous decades.” In spite of this horror, deMause goes on with a hopeful next sentence in which he sees a decrease of abuse and neglect, and, thus, a somewhat more secure and loving environment: one that will allow history to move in surprising directions. All the same, children are still crying, and deMause’s assessment remains an accurate picture of much of what children experienced and still experience. But this is not the only assessment available.

One must ask again: Is history only about the working out of children’s experiences without significant alteration, even improvement, from other experiences in a person’s, or a nation’s, life? My answer continues to be that other experiences shape both individuals and nations. Thus, to argue that England made the industrial breakthrough in the 18th century because of its advanced childrearing ignores five major considerations: Even if England was a place for improved childrearing, it was also the one where child labor was extensively used in factories and mines. Switzerland is also now shown to have made the industrial breakthrough during the 18th century as well. The kingdom of Württemberg had a functioning parliament from the 16th to the late 18th centuries, that is, until Napoleon abolished it. The economics of France and the then Germanies, if there was such a being as a national economy, were different from that of England. Children in the Germanies may not have been treated as miserably as deMause maintains.

Allow me to stay with just two of these points. What accounts for Württemberg’s unicameral parliament? Was it the high literacy rate? Was it unusually advanced childrearing that may be implicit in its high literacy? Then, too, one must ask about England’s success. Can we really ignore its location and access to raw materials? Or, on the other hand, can we ignore the Continent’s lack of such resources and still its plethora of courts and their brilliant cultures? Said differently, are we to ignore the music and art of 18th-century France and Central Europe, and 19th-century Vienna? If childrearing was as miserable as it is purported to be in these parts of Europe, whence came this creative genius? While England was industrializing, Central Europeans and Frenchmen created the Baroque and the Rococo. Were the beautiful artifacts they created a release for childhood oppression? Maybe, but my evidence shows otherwise. Who will want to argue that the brute abuse of human beings associated with industrialization is a higher accomplishment than Beethoven’s Quartet for Piano and Strings in E-flat or Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz?

Reading the letters of composers of symphonies and operas; builders of churches, palaces, homes and cities; and literati of the time, shows men and women, German and Jewish, who were treated well in their families. Even those who were not as talented as Mozart found in art an astonishing outlet. In the more than 20 years I collected data on more than 2000 German women artists, musicians, and writers of the 18th century, one of the most significant findings is that the vast majority of them attended public schools, and that families and marriage partners supported many in their later endeavors. Central Europe had the most advanced public education system then, and one reason we can research abuses and lack thereof in families and in classrooms is that there were classrooms and literate people. By 1800 the state of Württemberg enjoyed a literacy rate of over 90 percent; that is why an ordinary farmer could write about his exploits with the Napoleonic army in Russia. Yes, that is why Schiller, Goethe, and many other men and women could flourish.

I am, in other words, unconvinced of overlap among industrialization, democracy, and other creativities. To find such an overlap violates the evidence from Athens and India; more importantly, it violates the concept that different forms of child-

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rearing are consistent with different forms of democracy, industrialization, and other forms of social/cultural expression. When we speak of abused children, and women, we think of course of Athens, Sparta, and Rome, favorites of world civilization instructors. Yet I have often wondered why the Athenians with their repressive childrearing could be the inventors of the Western form of democracy. How indeed could these very Greeks be at the forefront of every science we study today? The Romans abused their children and yet invented several forms of government, one of which the American forefathers felt free to copy in their own right. Conversely, whatever happened to the Etruscans who treated their women much better than their eastern neighbors?

One day I would like to address the issue about why Hitler and the Nazis took over Germany. I have read most of the materials that deMause has read, and I am convinced as well that they do not get at the heart of the matter. But I am equally unconvinced that we must only look to childrearing for our explanation. I am thinking of all the older Germans I have known over the course of my own life, and I continue to be surprised at how few of them had miserable childhoods. No, they were not just ignoring or suppressing this part of their lives; in their stories, they emphasize a rather mundane reality of National Socialist Germany. It is that they and their families, or households, took small steps to accede to the National Socialist order once the dictator had taken power in 1933. True, in the 1930s and early 1940s, Germans showed a different face in public than they did in private; the private face was that of love of family, worry about jobs, fear of losing respect, thinking of having to go along, not wanting to stand out, and the tradition of respect for authority. While many people acted up at parade grounds, these and many other ordinary people made very ordinary decisions that supported the regime not because they were more abused as children than the citizens of other nations. Unlike many other national leaders, the National Socialist regime was particularly adroit in using to its advantage: traditional themes, latent hatreds of the other, the media, and war.

Another concern pertains to families and households. We know that childrearing was the duty of women, with some assistance from men. This is a good approach for recent history, but a problem remains with trying to understand childhood primarily through the lens of the nuclear family. Families of the past need to be understood as being in households, even in the West, more than 90 percent of which were subsistence farms. Having grown up in such a situation, I can say with assurance that deMause’s mother- or father-centered situation does not hit the mark. Households were not nuclear families in which fathers and mothers were principal reference persons. A household often included several siblings, an older grandparent, an aunt or uncle or two, adoptees (like me), and, of course, servants.

Childrearing in a household is therefore different from childrearing in a nuclear family. The latter probably did not begin to emerge fully until the 16th century, a time to which deMause has now moved the emergence of the intrusive family. When the businessman Balthasar and his wife Magdalena brought up their son in 16th-century Nuremberg, they were not only being intrusive, they were also living in a nuclear family and away from the usual household setting of the time; they were exceptions even in their time. The personality that has emerged from households has not yet been studied sufficiently, and I suspect that the rage often expressed in pre-modern societies had at least as much to do with confused role models as with mothers.

Finally, deMause was kind enough to cite me several times in support of his arguments. It may interest readers that I wrote almost all of my articles to modify deMause’s approach to the history of childrearing.

This review indicates that I disagree with some points in deMause’s work. Indeed! But I also continue to find the full range of his arguments insightful and stimulating; hardly anyone else I know has had the courage to tackle the way we do history now. That is a good thing indeed.

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