Efforts of a Daring Innovator

As someone who has been following the development of Lloyd deMause’s work on the psychogenic theory of history for the past 30 years — George Kren and I had our paper on “Clio and Psyche” published in his History of Childhood Quarterly in 1973, and on his visit to our university about that time, his challenging ideas upset most of our colleagues in history and psychology — it is very clear to me that The Emotional Life of Nations provides a wonderfully readable, comprehensive, and, thankfully, still challenging review of current psychogenic theory. In many respects, the term theory does not do it justice, because it is also an ontology and philosophy of human behavior. (I recall in this connection deMause’s saying he named his son after A.S. Neill, the British pioneer of enlightened childrearing and education practices at Summerhill.)

But rather than commenting further on the history of psychohistory, one that remains to be written and will someday make fascinating reading [see “The Making and Makers of Psychohistory and Psychological Society,” p. 33] I would like to emphasize here what I see as the three most outstanding contributions this book makes to the field: the careful, abundant documentation of how prenatal and childhood traumas translate into adult behavior tendencies; the presentation of the methods and theory of group fantasy analysis; and the discussion of parent training centers. In the first instance, I consider the citations of relevant research findings throughout the book to be particularly important partly because this stands on its own as an unusual tour de force of multi-disciplinary scholarship, and partly because it provides much of the substantive evidence needed in order to answer critics of psychohistory.

The discussions of group fantasy analysis presented in the chapters on assassinations and war are especially impressive to me because I recall being quite skeptical about the idea that one could find important indications of national moods and their likely consequences by analyzing magazine covers, cartoons, ads for films, and other media representations. I am still not entirely comfortable with the technique, but over the years since the work covered in these chapters first appeared, I have found it increasingly hard to deny the media imagery of terrifying mothers and poisonous placentas, and even occasionally see them myself. It is even harder to deny the predictive and postdictive significance of group fantasy analysis. The view that artists of one sort or another are sensitive to the feeling tones of society and consciously or unconsciously represent them in their work is in itself widely accepted. It required a very bold, innovative effort, however, to pursue the implications of this view and create the technique of fantasy analysis.

Finally, there is the relatively brief but important argument for the large-scale introduction of parent training centers in our society and others as well. If nothing else, this stands out as a major attempt to move from theory to practice, from diagnosis to remediation. While there is still only anecdotal or illustrative evidence available supporting the effectiveness of parent training, at least it offers a welcome hint of optimism about what may be possible in the future.

My own view of the future, however, remains quite dim. As much as I admire the insights and achievements presented in The Emotional Life of Nations, it seems to me that conditions in our society, and in the world at large, are such that we are still light-years away from the promised land of enlightened childrearing. All sorts of studies indicate that we are increasingly living in a two-class world system divided between haves and have-nots. More specifically, there is the familiar litany of American problems concerning the well-being of children: single parent families, child pornography and abuse, scandalous foster care systems, ineffective schools, poor health care, and other issues that are all exacerbated by the current economic downturn. In short, the question I would have liked to see discussed is whether good parenting is contingent on minimally adequate socio-economic conditions. Or are we destined to see steadily improved parenting among the educated, securely well off, while the lumpen underclass continues to “take their chances.” And what about those so-called “resilient children” who apparently emerge intact from the underclass despite the odds against them? We clearly need to learn more about such questions.

Consequently, while sincerely applauding The Emotional Life of Nations, I can’t help wondering how much it may depend on the economic life of nations. Or is this a chicken and the egg question? In any case, I heartedly agree with the laudatory blurbs on back of the book jacket, especially the richly deserved reference to deMause as “an endlessly daring innovator.”

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