The Psychohistory of Christian Antiquity

Daniel Dervin has long been one of the most thorough and creative scholars doing and writing psychohistory. His latest essay, “Suffer the Children,” exemplifies these virtues. It shows how psychohistorical theory is nourished by historical evidence. Dervin explores the complexity— specifically the duality—of the view and treatment of the child in early Christian antiquity. This was the world of “other worldly morality” and “child-centered religion.” Dervin’s point of departure is problematic Biblical texts, their interpretations, and contexts. He demonstrates a double splitting to have occurred: (1) between demonizing “images of children as vehicles of sinfulness” and idealizing images of children as “vessels of innocence;” and (2) a kind of role-splitting between ordinary, sinful adults, and cloistering, which embodied and sought to preserve “‘childlike purity’” and perfection into adulthood.

His guides to childhood beatings, hand-offs to wet nurses and pedagogues, and idealization, are early Christian theologians and philosophers. Contra Philippe Aries, Dervin finds childhood to be not only present, but a social cynosure, to early Christians. Further, he finds continuity of the ideal of childhood into the adult institution of monasticism. He brilliantly observes that “childhood is no longer a purely time-bound period nor yet the cult of later centuries, but rather an ideal spiritual state to be preserved through celibates who embody the Gospels’ child-imagery into adulthood.”

Along the way, Dervin shows how cloistering condensed abandonment and the preservation of purity; he demonstrates that the “Children’s Limbo” of unbaptized children to be a cultural compromise formation; he argues that the Slaughter of Innocents is a psychological (symbolic) event (screen memory for maternal loss, beatings, and other traumas) rather than a necessarily historical one; he shows that “the lives of the Christ child and of the other Bethlehem babes are bound together” psychologically and literarily; he argues that “intolerable feelings of envy and resentment” were split off; and finally he brings the whole matter up to date, suggesting that ambivalence toward the Christ child is not only ancient within Christendom, but survives to this day in the form of vandalism of Nativity Scenes during the Christmas season.

In indirect support of Dervin’s argument about envy toward and resentment of the Christ child, is the late L. Bryce Boyer’s classic paper, “Christmas ‘Neurosis’” (Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 3 [3] 1955: pp. 467-488), which argues that depressions occurring around Christmas trace largely to reawakened, unresolved sibling rivalry, symbolized by the futility of competing with the unconsciously envied Christ Child.

In sum, methodologically, Dervin has demonstrated that historical reality and cultural symbols are indeed psychoanalyzable, if one is able to look in the right places that are often staring us in the face. Further, Dervin offers a taut “case study” in the origins and perpetuation of cultural beliefs and myths.

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