DeMause’s Psychology Is at Odds With History (symposium article)

In his well-known and useful study, What Is History? (1962), E.H. Carr tackles a perennial challenge to the historical discipline: explaining causation, or why things happen. Carr begins his discussion of causes by telling the story of Mr. Robinson who went out one dark and rainy night for cigarettes, only to be struck and killed by Mr. Jones’ car. Who was to blame? Jones for driving after one too many on a dangerous night unaware he had bad brakes, or Robinson who needed smokes? Assigning responsibility for the accident is by no means simple. This is precisely what most historians see, and most reasonable people as well: causation is a murky thing and subject to many arguments and interpretations as well as appeals to evidence.

Life’s complexities, however, are of little concern to Lloyd deMause, whose study of human history through the ages, The Emotional Life of Nations, argues that “most human violence and suffering has been a hidden children’s holocaust throughout history, whereby billions of innocent human beings have been routinely murdered, bound, starved, raped” (p. vii). He argues further that an evolution in childrearing, in which children are increasingly loved and cared for, gradually brought about new “psychoclasses,” which explains why the violence known from the beginning of time has decreased to today’s level.

These assertions I find a little hard to accept. Hardly a newscast goes by, or an issue of the daily newspaper — and this in just about every country in the world — without some sordid story of child abuse (and some of it by children on children) or kiddy porn on the Internet. These stories make a mockery of the argument that deMause attempts to sustain. In a long Chapter 8, deMause recites a long list of different forms of past child abuse: rape of girls, the ubiquity of child sex molestation, child abandonment — but their presence today surely robs his ideas of any credibility. Efforts, then, to explain events such as Mr. Robinson’s death, or the outbreak of the First World War (or any war for that matter), are rarely explained convincingly by one factor, and attempting to explain war and violence by the rearing of children is even less so.

As the above remarks show, my discussion of this work comes from the perspective of history rather than psychology. While I would decline to call myself a psychohistorian, I have, more than most historians I think, taken into account the human psyche, particularly the impact of war and violence on individuals, society, and culture. While I take some exception to deMause’s criticism of historians (“what is in most history books is stark raving mad — the maddest of all being the historians’ belief that it is sane” or “I often cry when … [I] study history books” (p. 108) — and he wonders why historians remain unenthusiastic about his work?), I would agree with him that social scientists and historians (the latter in my view are not social scientists) do not pay enough attention to psychology (p. 87). Recently, an argument made by my University of Chicago teacher Walter Kaegi about the seventh-century CE Byzantine emperor Heraclius, that his post-Persian War neuroses were perhaps war-related and symptomatic of PTSD, was pooh-poohed in the Times Literary Supplement by a reviewer who thought it so much silliness. Such criticisms (short-sighted in my view) are made because determining motivation is difficult and seldom do historians in particular and scholars generally have the information necessary to know to what extent psychological factors are involved. For this reason most historians tend to look to “concrete” factors to explain events and the reasons why people do things, not considering underlying social and psychological factors that might have a bearing.

DeMause’s major concern is to explain wars and violence, a topic in which I share not only a professional interest but a personal one: my father flew with the 8th Air Force in Europe in WWII until being shot down over Germany, an experience that certainly marked him, and I fought in Vietnam as an infantry lieutenant, something that changed me, too. The remainder of my remarks will inquire into deMause’s assessment of how war and wars come about, looking, too, at the underlying factors.

“Happy people don’t start wars,” deMause declares (p. 137), though the degree to which people are “happy” about the outbreak of wars seems distorted (see, for example, Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, 1998, pp. 174-211, which argues against any euphoria of war in Europe in 1914). What reading I have done suggests just the opposite: war is regarded as bad and something that must be accepted just like bitter medicine. De-

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Mause asserts that emotional disorders are behind all this and after dismissing social scientists’ views on the origins of war (pp. 138-142), argues that war is brought on by harsh childrearing practices (p. 142) that lead to neurological changes in the brain, which incite violence (p. 144). Similarly, sweeping statements like “although the battlegrounds may change, wars are inevitably about the basic feelings of infancy: trust, security, approval, domination, envy, rage, threats, shame, and independence” (p. 152) do not help his cause and sometimes simply ignore what really happened. His explanation, for example, that deficient forms of childrearing in the South caused the U.S. Civil War (p. 253) omits any consideration of the great debate over slavery, the catalyst that led to secession and conflict.

Such sweeping generalizations are unfortunate because the discussions about neurological changes in the brain do have validity and should be looked at by all scholars, including historians, attempting to understand why people do what they do. At a fall 2002 symposium at UCLA, specialists in a number of fields demonstrated quite clearly that the brain does change when it is subjected to stress, which certainly would include child-abuse as well as that stemming from the violence of war. DeMause’s approach, however — the dismissal of historians, the single-minded focus on child abuse, and his use of obscure (and obscuring) jargon-laden language — does not encourage receptivity.

DeMause seems also to think that soldiers are able to kill “without overwhelming guilt” (p. 109). This is so much foolishness (the sort of thing that could easily get him into trouble with combat vets) and something disproved by: Aeschylus’ play Persians and its sympathetic portrayal of the Persian “other” by the playwright who fought them; Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (Paul Baumer’s speech to the dying Frenchman he killed); and U.S. Army Captain W. Winters in Stephen Ambrose’s A Band of Brothers (his 1944 killing of a young SS soldier in Holland, troubling him still, 50 years later), among others.

Generally, deMause treats all cultures as if they were alike, not allowing for any differences, and all people as if they, too, were alike and responded to conditions in the same way. The life and acts of Timothy McVeigh are brought up (pp. 98-100), but without any thought given to others reared in similar or worse circumstances, who don’t blow up buildings. DeMause doesn’t seem to imagine that this is even possible. The reason most historians distrust arguments such as those advanced in ELN is that they are too general, based on models, and do not allow for the individual to rise above circumstances — what philosophers would call “displays of free will” (and which is not listed in the book’s index).

Other disquieting factors are to be found in questionable etymologies: p. 180, infantry from the Latin infans, or “infant,” is actually from the 15th-century Italian infante, or “boys” as in the boy-soldiers of Liberia today; p. 108, German “die Sham” for genital area, is in neither Cassell’s or the Oxford-Duden German dictionaries; p. 429, Greek damar does not mean “broken into submission,” but rather “made subject to a husband,” probably the result of a woman (more likely girl) leaving her father’s household. There are some unfounded charges, such as the genital mutilation of women in Muslim countries “from Somali … to Pakistan” (pp. 40-41, who become Arab females at p. 308), ignoring the reality that this occurs either in African nations where the practice is cultural and not religious (Islamic) or among the poorly educated. (Thanks to my Palestinian colleague Najwa al-Qattan for some relevant information here.) Civilization and culture are used interchangeably (p. 281), they ought not to be; not all children were exposed so as to kill them (p. 303); the famous Oedipus of Greek legend is just one example of a child given away to a childless couple, a reality then as today; and the frenzied women pictured by Euripides in Bacchai with their breasts swollen by milk (p. 406) is a literary allegory, not reality.

DeMause cites numerous cases of child abuse and I would accept that raising children in an era before Huggies and other disposable diapers must have been incredibly challenging, and this surely accounts for some of the things he recounts. Yet, that children were loved, too, seems to escape his notice. Human beings congregated in family groups and then settlements in order to protect their otherwise vulnerable young, and in doing so created the first towns and cities that led to the great civilizations of the world. In closing, Andromache in Euripides’ Trojan Women, epitomizes this love as she says farewell to her young son Astyanax, about to be killed by the Greeks, asking her son to embrace and kiss her (lines 757-763), but again deMause prefers to ignore evidence like this.

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